The Poison Tide Read online

  ‘You see, no one has been able to explain to my satisfaction, Doctor, why dying of asphyxiation . . .’ he paused to puff on his cigar, ‘. . . asphyxiation, is any worse than having your leg blown off and bleeding to death. Is there a moral difference?’ he asked, turning first to Troester and then to Nadolny.

  ‘No, of course not,’ replied Troester, shaking his head vigorously.

  ‘Morality?’ Nadolny dismissed the question with a casual wave of his hand. ‘War gives a biologically just decision.’

  ‘No, Count. Victory in the shortest possible time is the correct moral position,’ said Haber, shifting earnestly on the edge of his chair. ‘Gas warfare will help us win this war quickly. There will be fewer casualties. Battles are not won by the physical destruction of the enemy but by undermining his will to resist – forcing him to imagine defeat. You see . . .’ Unable to contain himself any longer, the professor rose and began to pace the length of the drawing room, stooping a little, the black cigar burning between his fingers, ‘. . . you see, the psychological power of bullets and shells is nothing in modern warfare to the threat of chemicals. There are hundreds of lethal chemicals, each with its own taste and smell, and these poisons are unsettling to the soul. Victory can be won by frightening the enemy, not by destroying him.’

  ‘Professor Haber is correct,’ said Troester, turning a little in his chair to address Dilger in his precise laboratory voice. ‘The knight on horseback feared the soldier with the gun. In this modern age, the soldier feels the same when confronted by the scientist. It’s the scientist who’ll bring this war to a speedy end.’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said Haber, waving the stub of his cigar triumphantly at Dilger. ‘The German scientist.’ A trail of ash marked his passage across the rug. ‘And our work is the same, Doctor, your work, my work, there is no difference between us. It is a heavy responsibility but we are the only ones who can carry out this task.’

  ‘Gentlemen, Dr Dilger is still considering our proposition,’ said Nadolny quietly and with the suggestion of a reproach.

  ‘Oh?’ Haber looked surprised.

  ‘I’m grateful for your guidance, Professor,’ said Dilger defensively. He had listened to them with the professional detachment of a doctor at a bedside case conference even though he knew they viewed him as the patient. They had flattered him, confided in him, spoken to him as an equal, and he aspired to be one, but not this way, with this sort of work, not in America. ‘It would be an honour to play a part,’ he ventured; ‘it’s just, I feel my duty . . .’ He hesitated, aware that his ‘gut feeling’ was not an explanation the professors would respect. He was spared the immediate trouble of articulating another by a sharp rap at the door.

  It would have been easy to have mistaken the woman who entered for a servant but it was clear from Haber’s manner that she was his wife and that he was not pleased to see her. They rose to greet her and she offered her hand, but without warmth. Clara Haber was in her forties, short, trim, with a round face that must have been pretty once, tired-looking eyes and a mouth that turned down sadly at the corners. Her faded black dress and the severity with which she had dragged her hair into a bun suggested that she cared no more for her appearance than for the order of her house.

  ‘You’ve visited my husband’s laboratories?’ she enquired, settling on a Kanapee.

  ‘Professor Haber has shown us some of the work he’s carrying out at the Institute, yes,’ Troester replied cautiously. ‘Remarkable. Fascinating.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ There was no mistaking the chill in her voice.

  Haber frowned angrily at her but she refused to let him catch her eye. For a few uncomfortable seconds no one spoke.

  ‘Doctor Dilger is a great-grandson of the physiologist, Tiedemann,’ Haber remarked at last. ‘An American but from a German family . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ she cut across him. ‘Tiedemann was a great man. You must be proud.’

  ‘Yes, I am, Frau Haber.’

  ‘A great scientist.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She leant forward, her gaze fixed intently upon him. ‘Are you going to work for my husband, Doctor? If you’re an American you can refuse.’

  There was another long silence. Haber was squirming in his chair but she paid him no attention. She was watching Dilger with the patient fervour of a mystic at prayer, her dark eyes pleading with him – to do what? The clock in the hall chimed the half-hour.

  ‘Please, Frau Haber.’ Count Nadolny was on his feet. ‘Gentlemen, I think we should leave. Frau Haber is not herself.’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she said quietly. ‘You must, Doctor. Someone must say “no”.’ She leant forward, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were pushing white through her skin. ‘You’re American, you must see how mad . . .’

  ‘I’m a German.’ Dilger was angry at her presumption. Was she trying to humiliate him in front of her husband? ‘I am a German,’ he repeated, raising his voice. ‘As a German it would be an honour to serve alongside Professor Haber.’

  ‘An honour!’ She spat the word back at him. ‘An honour to serve. You’re a scientist.’ Her eyes were sparkling with fury now. ‘It’s a crime, a perversion of science. Professor Haber . . . my husband . . . is a criminal.’

  ‘Enough,’ Haber shouted, ‘enough,’ and he tried to grab her arm.

  ‘Gentlemen, really, we must go.’ Nadolny was at the door.

  ‘No. I’m leaving,’ and she rose quickly from the Kanapee. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said again and this time it sounded like a threat. There were tears on her cheeks but she stared at them defiantly, even with contempt. Then, turning her back, she walked out of the room, her rebuke heavy in the air.

  Professor Haber begged them to excuse his wife. She was suffering from a nervous disorder, he said. She had been a fine chemist before their marriage; too clever to settle. She believed the scientist should work for the good of mankind in general, a notion Haber dismissed with a wave of his bony hand as hopelessly naïve. ‘Where is the general good in wartime?’ he asked them on the doorstep.

  Troester patted his arm reassuringly. ‘There is nothing beyond victory, my friend.’

  As they turned from the house to the waiting cars, Dilger glanced sideways at Nadolny. He was smiling. I’m a German. Was that leap of faith ringing in the Count’s ears too?

  Dilger thought about the visit and their conversation constantly over the next few days. He thought about it on the tram to the Red Cross Hospital and in the director’s office as he slid his letter of resignation across the table. He thought about it at dinner with his sister, and even at the Club Noir, eyes fixed on a troupe of scantily clad girls dancing on its brightly lit stage; his mind at the bottom of the professor’s bell jar. But most of all he thought about his father in his old cavalry uniform and his cousin Peter’s mud-stained scarf, a visit one summer to family graves in Baden and evenings singing old songs with university friends in Heidelberg; a line of Heinrich Heine whispered to lovers in the dark, language, Kultur, memory – German, German, German in every fibre of his being. Something he could be sure of and something deeper than his sense of whether it was right or wrong.

  Then, one morning, he caught the tram to the Charité Hospital but instead of turning inside he walked further down Luisenstrasse to the low building, like a stable block, that served as the experimental laboratory facility of the Military Veterinary Academy.

  4

  Wolff in Berlin

  ‘BOERS FIGHT ON against the British,’ Boyd intoned. ‘Seen this?’ He thrust the Morgenpost at Wolff. ‘Are they fightin’ for Germany? You know these people, Mr de Witt . . .’

  The story was at the bottom of page eight. The British had seized rifles from a ship bound for their colony in the Cape. According to the unnamed source, it was the first of a large consignment purchased for the Afrikaner rebels.

  Wolff folded the newspaper carefully and slipped it back on the attaché’s desk. ‘No, they’re fight
ing for a homeland, Boyd – freedom from the British.’

  ‘A homeland, I see.’ Quite plainly he didn’t. The trade attaché was an incurious young man. Berlin was his first posting and he was still struggling with what he referred to in his Bostonian drawl as ‘the ways of the old world’. Wolff had met him on his first visit to the American Embassy and every day since.

  ‘Happy to be of assistance to a great company like Westinghouse, Mr de Witt,’ he had said, accepting Wolff’s credentials without question – and he was proving as good as his word. ‘There are twenty-five thousand of us here. Do you speak German? If you do risk speakin’ English, be sure to wear this,’ and he’d pushed a stars-and-stripes lapel badge across his desk. ‘They’re mad at us for sellin’ the British ammunition, so expect some abuse. Oh, and don’t speak it on the telephone unless you want the police at your door.’

  The city was in the grip of a fever. Suspicion. Exhortations to be watchful for ‘the enemy within’ were papered on every station wall, to lampposts and kiosks. Symptoms were as uncertain as those ascribed to the medieval plague. Who is he? Where is he? Hiding in the bread queue or behind a newspaper in the works canteen, swinging from a tram strap, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker who betrayed himself with a careless word, just a suggestion of doubt about the conduct of the war?

  Englishmen generally considered Berlin dreary and compared it unfavourably with London or Paris. Too modern, they liked to say, its buildings too pompous, or functional, like factories, the streets and parks too well ordered; a city without a soul. They were patronising in a way that only Englishmen know how to be. It wasn’t Berlin they disliked but the new German Empire. They were afraid. In the years before the war it was brash, confident and, if you knew where to look, colourful. But within hours of stepping from the train, Wolff had sensed a sadder and a stiffer city.

  Files of soldiers passed his hotel every day with ‘London’ chalked on their gun carriages and Berliners still cheered and sang ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, but only because they felt they ought to. On his second day Wolff had visited a department store and queued at a counter behind an old man buying a black armband for his coat.

  ‘My grandson,’ he’d explained to the shop assistant.

  Everyone blamed the British. War with France was almost the natural order of things but no one Wolff spoke to – businessmen, waiters, cab drivers, the old Baron who lived in rooms at the Minerva and spent his evenings talking to strangers in the saloon – no one understood why the British were at war with Germany.

  ‘Why do they want to destroy us?’ the policemen who visited his hotel wanted to know, ‘and why are you Americans helping them?’

  ‘Because they’re frightened of you,’ Wolff told them. ‘Frightened of losing their Empire.’

  The police wanted to know his business. Two solid representatives of the city constabulary carrying out their routine check. Wolff was used to fear. It was a thick band about his chest that loosened and tightened according to circumstance: like the old torture Peine forte et dure. Since Turkey, Wolff understood better than anyone that there was only so much a man could bear before he was suffocated by the weight pressing upon him. This time his legend was a good one but would he be able to look them in the eye and, if he did, would it be a hunted look?

  In the event, he was calm enough to arouse no more than the curiosity that was his object. De Witt’s past was waiting to be teased from him by someone in authority – at the right time.

  ‘The British are decadent,’ he told the policemen. ‘Germany will win this war,’ and they were satisfied with the sincerity of his loathing. After their visit he was ready to make contact with the informer.

  It was a fifty-pfennigs-a-day sort of place in a quiet residential street. An elderly man with an unruly shock of grey hair was planting spring flowers in the window boxes on either side of the front door. It was the sort of risk Wolff had revelled in taking once, but as he opened the guest-house gate he was conscious only of being afraid. The outcome was more incalculable than a spinning chamber in a game of Russian roulette. He nodded to the gardener, knocked at the door and handed over to the landlady a note for Christensen. No need to cross the threshold, no need for more than a few words, no police. He felt foolish when it was over, and it was over in less than two minutes. Click. He’d pulled the trigger and heard the hammer fall on an empty chamber.

  A reply was delivered to the Minerva the following day. Christensen would meet him beside the fountain in the Spittelmarkt at six o’clock in the afternoon. He was to carry a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt. The bellboy brought him the paper and he glanced through it at breakfast: stories of derring-do from the Front, bellicose commentaries exhorting the people to more sacrifices, German soldiers repelling British soldiers in France, Russian soldiers retreating before German ones in Poland. Who could be sure that any of it was true? But there were a few more column inches on the rifles captured before they could reach the Boer rebels in South Africa. The paper’s source could reveal that these were manufactured by Westinghouse in America.

  ‘We’re seeking clarification from Washington,’ Boyd told him when he visited the embassy later that morning. ‘If it’s proved, I’m afraid it might make your position here difficult.’ Wolff agreed that it might.

  By six o’clock the junior employees of the state bank and business houses of the Spittelmarkt were streaming across the small square to the U-bahn and home. Christensen stood out like a sore thumb. Wolff watched him from the tram stop as he rolled round the fountain in search of a man holding the Tageblatt. He was a big fellow with large hands and stoker’s shoulders that shifted in his jacket like a crab adjusting to a new shell. Plain enough he wasn’t a gentleman, but there was something studied in his gestures, his expression, in the trouble he’d taken with his appearance, that suggested he wanted to be. The Spittelmarkt was too busy to be sure that he’d come alone. Wolff watched him saunter over to the newspaper kiosk, glance at the headlines, then turn back to the fountain. He didn’t notice a prosperous-looking businessman who was hurrying across the square with his arm raised for a cab. They cannoned into each other and the businessman was thrown sideways and on to one knee. Christensen bent at once to offer a helping hand but the man brushed it angrily aside and shouted something abusive. A documents case he’d been carrying under his arm had burst open and his papers were flapping about him like fish on the deck of a trawler. It was perfect. Crossing behind a tram, Wolff began weaving quickly through the crowd towards them, newspaper under his arm.

  ‘Not like that, you oaf,’ the businessman shouted, his face puce with rage. Christensen was trying to catch some of the papers beneath his boot.

  A young clerk stopped to pick up one or two sheets and a hotel porter in the livery of the Continental was scrambling about the stones too.

  ‘Hold this, would you,’ Wolff commanded, pointedly thrusting the end of the Tageblatt into Christensen’s side. He obeyed without question, as he would have done on his last ship. Wolff took a few steps and bent to scoop up two of the businessman’s documents. He could sense that Christensen was watching him closely and turning back he caught his eye at once. There was an enquiring expression on his face and he lifted the newspaper a little in acknowledgement.

  ‘Take these, why don’t you,’ said Wolff, holding his gaze. ‘Do you know the U-bahn stop I will need for the east side of the Tiergarten?’

  ‘The Tiergarten? But I thought . . .’ Christensen looked confused.

  ‘Yes. The Tiergarten,’ Wolff replied with careful emphasis.

  ‘Leipziger Platz, then you’ll have to walk. Are you meeting someone there?’

  ‘Yes, in front of the statue of Gotthold Lessing . . .’

  ‘I’ll take those,’ interjected the businessman, snatching the papers from Christensen. ‘Damn fool. Look where you’re going next time.’

  Christensen wasn’t a fool. He was careful. Wolff waited at a shop window and watched him cross from the square a
nd file down the steps to the station. He was an easy man to follow, more than six feet tall, with blond hair, those broad shoulders, and dressed in the sort of green wool suit that was fashionable at country-house shooting parties before the war. Wolff wondered if it had belonged to Casement. By the time he reached the edge of the park it was dusk. Christensen was stalking impatiently to and fro beneath the statue, a streetlamp casting his enormous shadow on its marble plinth.

  ‘Why did we have to come here?’ he asked, angrily slapping the newspaper against his thigh.

  ‘So I could be sure you weren’t being followed.’

  ‘No one’s going to follow me.’ He shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Look, Adler – may I call you that?’ Wolff stepped a little closer. ‘Let me be quite clear. We’re only going to stay alive in this country if we’re careful. Very careful. Do you understand?’ He paused to look him directly in the eye. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘A silly mistake and we’ll wind up in a cell at the Alex.’ Then to be sure: ‘Both of us.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ he snapped.

  But Wolff didn’t believe him. He was too young – only twenty-four – and too mechanical. The file said he had run away to sea as a boy. He’d have learnt some tricks and no doubt thought he could slip any obligation. They were all like that – informers.

  ‘Let’s walk, we’ll be less conspicuous. No, not in the Tiergarten at this hour,’ he said, touching Christensen’s sleeve. ‘At its edge.’