The Poison Tide Page 3

  ‘No. Thank you. No, Mrs Curtis.’ The lieutenant took a deep shaky breath. He was preparing to step off his precipice.

  Violet must have sensed it too because she began to chatter like a small child before an angry parent. ‘When did you last see him? My husband, I mean. It’s been so long . . .’ Her right hand strayed to her lip. ‘This is my brother, Adam . . .’

  ‘Out of respect for your husband, I must say, your behaviour, well, he deserves better,’ Barrett stammered.

  Violet’s face began to crumple.

  ‘It isn’t my place—’ he continued.

  ‘You’re right. It isn’t,’ interrupted Wolff. ‘Your place is over there.’ He nodded to the lieutenant’s table. ‘I suggest you rejoin your companions at once.’

  Barrett’s jaw dropped like a marionette’s at rest. ‘Who the devil –’ he said at last. ‘Who the devil are you, sir? My business—’

  ‘Sit down before you make a fool of yourself, why don’t you?’

  ‘Please, Sebastian.’ Violet gave him a desperate look. Her eyes were shining with tears. ‘Please, let him just say what he wants to say and go.’

  ‘Are you the fellow?’ Barrett’s dander was up, flushed with wine and a righteous resolve to have it out, his right hand in a fist at his side. ‘What are you smiling at? Not in uniform, I see,’ and he snapped his fingers theatrically in front of Wolff’s face.

  ‘Look, steady, old chap . . .’ This from Violet’s brother. He had dumped his napkin on the table and was rising. Wolff was conscious of a hush in the restaurant, broken only by the tinkle of knives and forks on china and the mumble of waiters serving the tables. The manager was moving swiftly towards them.

  ‘Leave now, Lieutenant,’ said Wolff quietly. But Barrett wasn’t going to surrender an inch of polished floor to someone in white tie and tails. ‘What is your name, sir?’ he demanded loudly. ‘It is my intention to write to Major Curtis . . .’

  ‘Please, sir.’ The manager touched Barrett’s elbow and he began to turn towards him. ‘I must ask—’

  But his words were drowned by a clatter of plates.

  ‘No, Sebastian,’ Violet squealed.

  It was too late. Wolff was on his feet and lunging for the lieutenant’s wrist. Grasping it in his left hand, he thrust at Barrett’s head with his right, as if trying to jerk it from his shoulders. The lieutenant whimpered with pain and bent double as Wolff twisted his arm and locked it at right angles to his body, the pressure on the elbow. Then, with a deft turn, Wolff forced Barrett’s arm behind his back, pulling him upright by the collar. No one had moved. There had been no time to cry out in protest. It was over in the blink of an eye, accomplished with a sleight of hand worthy of Houdini the handcuff king.

  Violet buried her face in a lace handkerchief. Her brother was still hovering over the table with an expression of complete astonishment on his face. Wolff caught his eye. ‘Settle our bill, will you?’

  ‘Let me go at once, do you hear.’ Barrett had found his voice.

  There was a rumble of disapproval as the restaurant began to stir at last.

  ‘Really, I say,’ one man shouted.

  ‘This is Rules,’ ventured another. ‘Let the fellow go.’

  Wolff didn’t reply. Eyes front, he frog-marched Barrett across the floor, weaving between tables with the rough confidence of an East End landlord at closing time. Manager and waiters fussed about him, a young army officer made a half-hearted attempt to block his way – Wolff brushed him aside – but no one was willing to lift a finger to prevent him reaching the door.

  Rain was beating on the restaurant’s awning, gusting down Maiden Lane and chasing couples on their way home from the theatre into the shelter of shopfronts. Within seconds Wolff’s trousers were clinging to his legs. A passing car sloshed into the gutter and a sheet of dirty water swept across the pavement on to Lieutenant Barrett’s perfectly polished boots. The button had come off one of his shoulder boards and it was flapping like a broken wing.

  ‘Let me go, do you hear?’ He was almost weeping. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this, you coward.’

  Wolff twisted his arm tighter until he gasped with pain. It would be a simple thing to break it, Wolff thought, and for a moment he wanted to. Why shouldn’t Barrett be made to pay?

  ‘Let him go,’ screamed Violet, and she tugged at his arm. ‘For God’s sake, are you mad?’

  ‘How could you?’ she asked Wolff repeatedly. She cried and shouted – he had humiliated her in front of ‘everyone’ – but she refused to go home with her brother. She sat in smouldering silence in the taxicab to his apartment, and fell on him with her tiny fists as soon as he had closed the door, biting, scratching, then kissing – the desperate passion of those who wish to forget. Later, in crumpled sheets, her small round face pressed in sleep to his shoulder, he wondered if it was the darkness she’d glimpsed in him at the restaurant that had aroused her so.

  He’d had many affairs. Short, intense, unrestrained and blinding for a time. He had told two women that he loved them but when it was over he couldn’t be sure. He cared for his mother. The thought made him smile: the spy and his mother. His father had died when he was five and his mother and paternal grandfather had brought him up, a little foreign boy, an only child in a lonely place – always running.

  Violet stirred beside him and he craned forward to kiss her hair. It was damp with perspiration and smelt of her perfume and their sex. He traced the graceful curves of her body beneath the sheet with his fingertips. Would it be different if they were in love? He was sorry he’d upset her at the restaurant. He had wanted to protect her from scandal but all he’d succeeded in doing was inviting more. One day soon the post would travel up the line and there would be a letter for Major Curtis.

  ‘Letter for Major Curtis.’

  Wolff could see him there, knee deep in Flanders mud, preparing to lead a raiding party, or in a funk hole under shellfire. There’d be a big smile on his face – there was always a smile on Reggie Curtis’s face. He’d tear the letter open with a dirty fingernail.

  I feel it my duty to inform you, Sir, that your wife is fucking your old Cambridge chum, Sebastian Wolff. Yours respectfully, et cetera, et cetera.

  Overcome with grief, he would lead a suicidal charge into no-man’s-land and be blown to small pieces by a Jack Johnson. Reggie could be the most obliging of fellows.

  Wolff shuffled down the bed until his face was close to Violet’s, then leant forward to kiss her lightly on the lips. She smiled but didn’t open her eyes, and he felt a surge of tenderness for her. ‘Shameless hussy, I’ll miss you.’ He’d drunk deeply of her, intoxicated by her beguiling smile, the scent of her and the way she seemed to glide through life with effortless grace – those things and more. But it wasn’t enough. It was an illusion. He leant forward to kiss Violet again. He would go to Germany and, for as long as he could stay alive, he’d pretend to be someone else, someone who hadn’t broken and screamed in agony and begged them to stop. Wasn’t that his patriotic duty? Didn’t he owe his country that much? C had blown his whistle and he would go over the top with the rest.

  2

  Cover

  THE TEMPERATURE FELL to freezing at dusk and by the time the ship was close to Christiania the mooring ropes were stiff with ice. Wolff watched from the promenade deck as the pricks of light on the banks of the fjord closed into the solid band of the city. The port was quieter than he’d known it before the war, with fewer vessels in passage or waiting at anchor for a berth. The enemy had been pinched out of Norwegian waters. The Helig Olav came alongside the pier beneath the curtain wall of the medieval fortress. Although it was late, there was a crowd at the Scandinavian America Line’s office to meet her and taxicabs and tradesmen’s vehicles were idling on the dockside road, their lamps winking a secret signal as people scurried between them on to the quay. Ropes made fast, stevedores began to swing gangways in place along her side. Wolff peeled his glove from the frozen rail and joined the queue of
passengers shuffling towards the companionway.

  ‘You’re Mr Jan de Witt,’ C had informed him the day he accepted his assignment. ‘A Dutchman with a grudge.’

  ‘An Afrikaner?’

  ‘The same thing,’ he joked. ‘You crossed the Atlantic on an American passport – one of our chaps made the journey for you.’

  ‘You were certain I’d do as I was told then?’

  ‘You’re a naval officer, yes,’ he’d replied matter-of-factly. Rank and the service he dropped and raised with the incontinence of a tart’s knickers. ‘Our Mr de Witt works for New England Westinghouse and poses as an American, an engineer adventurer if you like, but on the wrong side. You’ll spend a week in Amsterdam visiting business partners – meetings have been arranged for you – then you’ll travel to Norway.’

  The Norwegians were ‘our neutral allies’, C had said. It was possible to ‘arrange things’ in Christiania.

  From the second-class crowd at the top of the gangway, Wolff watched an officer in the Norwegian border police examining the papers of passengers disembarking at the bottom. The elderly constable beside him had shrunk inside his greatcoat, his face frozen in an expression of complete indifference. Wolff paused to allow a young woman with two small girls to step in front of him, then followed them closely down the gangway. By some small miracle, the steward he’d entrusted with his case had fought his way off the ship and was negotiating with a cab driver.

  The police officer demanded Wolff’s passport in perfect English, and turned its pages deliberately, holding the red State Department stamp to his eye. He was older than Wolff, with an intelligent face but the complexion, the small broken veins, of a heavy drinker.

  ‘Your name is de Witt?’ he asked at last.

  ‘That’s what it says.’

  ‘What is your business here?’

  ‘I’m visiting a client. Paulsen Shipping.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then a meeting in Copenhagen.’

  ‘I see.’ The police officer folded the leaf with the stapled photograph of Wolff carefully into the passport and offered it back to him: ‘It seems in order.’

  But when Wolff tried to take it he wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Where will you be staying in Christiania, Mr de Witt?’ There was something in the way he spoke the name de Witt that suggested he had heard it before, something in his frown and in his little bloodshot eyes, a crack in the veneer of cool indifference that is the part of the experienced minor official everywhere.

  ‘I have a reservation at the Grand Hotel,’ Wolff replied curtly. ‘So, if you’ve finished . . .’

  The policeman stared at him suspiciously for a few seconds more, then released his passport: ‘Thank you, Mr de Witt.’ And the mask slipped back into place.

  The Grand Hotel was the place to be noticed in Christiania. It wasn’t handsome or especially grand but it was on the city’s main thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the parliament, palace, National Theatre and university. The hotel of choice for well-heeled travellers and businessmen, and now Europe was at war – for the gentleman spy. Its façade was in the French style and reminded Wolff a little of the Bureau’s offices in Whitehall Court. A letter on Westinghouse headed paper was waiting in reception with instructions for his meetings in Christiania and Copenhagen and promising a further communication in Berlin, and Wolff noted that the reservation had been made for him by someone at the company in America. The Bureau hadn’t cut any corners. The porter carried his bags to the room and was rewarded with a gratuity generous enough to be memorable. Wolff unpacked his own clothes. They had been bought for him in America but were too crisp and new to risk handing over to a valet. It was just the sort of small thing that might arouse suspicion. There was always someone happy to sell information in a grand hotel: perhaps the maid who emptied the wastepaper baskets of well-to-do guests for only a few krone a week, or the pageboy who delivered their correspondence for even less, or the concierge who summoned the taxicabs and spoke to their drivers later. Policeman or spy, British or German – there was money to be made from everyone in a neutral country. Wolff poured himself a whisky from the bottle he’d brought with him, ran a hot bath and lay sipping and soaking in a cloud of steam.

  He’d spent six weeks growing into Mr Jan de Witt’s skin.

  ‘I know it isn’t long,’ C had observed. ‘But I’m confident we’ve thought of everything. You’ll need a legend the enemy can follow. Mansfeldt Findlay at the Legation in Christiania can help you with footprints. He’s a good fellow. Done this sort of thing for us before. We have him to thank for the informer.’

  Wolff lifted a soapy hand to his beard. Jan de Witt’s little Dutch beard. It took time to get used to. A beard always changed his appearance markedly; it made his thin face fuller and intensely serious, like the photograph of his father that hung in a thick black frame above the fireplace in the parlour at his mother’s farm.

  ‘Damn good thing your beard, you know,’ C had teased. ‘Traitors have beards.’

  ‘Oh? I thought it was a monocle?’

  C had chuckled like a fat schoolboy. ‘Makes you look a little like Casement.’

  The following morning, Wolff took breakfast at the Grand Café with an old copy of the New York Times. At a little before nine he visited the front desk to ask for directions to Paulsen Shipping. It was his intention to walk the short distance to the harbour, he said, and when his business was over he hoped to walk a little further. Taking Baedeker from the pocket of his overcoat, he let the porter trace a route on a map to the city’s notable sights. A stiff north-easterly was shaking the hotel’s broad awning like the mainsail of a ship, force 6 fresh to rock the steamers anchored in the bay but bright enough for Wolff to step out with his coat over his arm. He walked briskly along Karl Johans gate towards the parliament, then on to the East Station, stopping from time to time to glance in shop windows, and even dashing between trams to a newspaper kiosk on the pavement opposite.

  Paulsen Shipping occupied a modest two-storey building of the sort that was being pulled down all over the city to meet the requirements of the brash new century. Its granite-faced neighbours had been built in the ten years since independence and were indistinguishable from many of a similar age in the City of London. A clerk led Wolff from its tiled hall to a large office on the first floor and asked him to wait, with the assurance that Mr Paulsen would be pleased to welcome him soon. It was a large mahogany-panelled room, smoke-filled and gloomy, with only two small windows overlooking the narrow street. A dozen or so brokers and clerks – young men in their twenties for the most part – sat facing their managing director’s door like children in a Victorian schoolroom. On the wall behind them, the severe grey countenance of the man Wolff took to be the company’s founding father.

  ‘Jacob the First. My grandfather.’ The managing director had slipped out of his office and was standing above Wolff with a broad smile on his face.

  ‘I’m the third. Jacob Paulsen the Third,’ and he offered Wolff his hand. ‘Isn’t that how you Americans style it, Mr de Witt? As if you were kings. This is my kingdom,’ he said, opening his arms to the room like a music-hall doxy, ‘until I’m swallowed up by Olsen or Knutsen Shipping or one of the others. Please . . .’ and with a flamboyant sweep of his hand he invited Wolff to step into his office.

  ‘My grandfather was a friend of Henrik Ibsen’s, you know,’ he said, pulling the door to behind them. ‘Helped him with a little money. Sit down, please.’ He pulled a red leather armchair away from his desk. A log fire was spitting in the hearth and dancing warmly on the polished panelled walls.

  ‘Peculiar, really, he didn’t care for the theatre. All my grandfather cared about was ships and money – we were quite a company in his day.’

  His English was perfect but drawled in the languid manner of an undergraduate aesthete. Early fifties, tall and thin, his straw-blond hair streaked with white, the same light-blue eyes as his grandfather, the same thin, almost colourle
ss lips, a smile hovering constantly at the corners. Mr Jacob Paulsen the Third was an easy fellow but not a foolish one. There was a wariness in his glance, in the deliberate way he walked to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room.

  ‘A celebration,’ he said, lifting two small glasses. ‘Have you tried our akevitt?’

  ‘Is there something to celebrate?’

  ‘Of course. Always. But our arrangement in particular,’ and he placed the glasses and a bottle on a tray and carried them back to his desk. The bottle in his left hand, he opened a drawer with his right, took out an envelope and slid it across the desk to Wolff. ‘It’s from the minister at your Legation, Mr Findlay . . .’

  ‘Do you know what’s in it?’

  ‘Arrangements for your meeting.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘No.’

  Wolff ran the tip of his forefinger along the flap to check the seal. Satisfied, he tore it open and unfolded the note. There were just two lines.

  ‘Have you been to our country before, Mr de Witt?’ Paulsen had poured the akevitt and was settling into his chair with a glass.

  ‘Are you sure you know your part?’ Wolff asked impatiently.

  He frowned. ‘Perfectly. Unlike my grandfather I love theatre and I’m a consummate liar. Your people in London must have spoken to you about me? I have been of service in the past. Now, your very good health.’ He raised his glass in salute, then drained it in a gulp. ‘Please,’ he said, a little hoarsely, and gestured with his glass to the one he’d poured for Wolff. ‘Please.’

  ‘They’ll send someone to you. He won’t be German. One of your own countrymen, probably someone you know. A businessman, perhaps a family friend or a policeman . . .’

  ‘I have everything,’ and Paulsen rested the palm of his right hand on a large leather-bound ledger, ‘correspondence, invoices. My staff know your name and that you work for Westinghouse but I’ve handled everything and that will have made them curious, even a little suspicious.’