The Poison Tide (8 page)

One of the names on the distribution list was a Count Rudolf Nadolny, Section P of the General Staff.

It was of some importance, but how much Wolff couldn’t say; nor was he confident that Christensen would be able to help. He made a note of the German cipher, the names, and other important details, in his own code and buried them in the text of a report he’d begun writing on his business meetings in Berlin. Then he destroyed Christensen’s papers. When an opportunity presented itself he would send his coded report to Westinghouse by their office in Amsterdam. An agent would pick it up and forward it to the Bureau.

Christensen arrived at the café before him on the Wednesday. He said he knew nothing of ‘special work’ in America or a ‘von Rintelen’. Wolff bought him
Bratkartoffeln
and bacon and he gobbled it down as if he was fighting for his share in the stokers’ mess.

‘Is that it?’ he asked, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his wool suit. ‘My payment?’

‘Not necessarily. It depends what else you have for me,’ Wolff declared. ‘Let’s walk.’

That became the pattern: first a plate of food for Christensen, then a stroll through a park. Thoughts came quicker to Wolff on the move. When he tried to explain this, Christensen just shrugged his square shoulders: ‘Wherever you like, Mr de Witt – so long as you pay.’ But after only a short time he was bored with questions. ‘Why do you need to know that?’ he complained. ‘It doesn’t matter why,’ Wolff told him curtly. He wanted everything, not just Casement’s contacts and his correspondence, but his routine, what he liked to eat and drink, the newspapers he bought, when he went to bed and who he went to bed with – ‘No one,’ said Christensen with another sly smile, ‘only cares about his cause.’ Of Sir Roger’s personal habits he spoke with authority but he knew little of his mind and nothing of his plans for a rising in Ireland. Casement called him ‘friend’ but plainly treated him as something less than his equal and certainly not as a gentleman. A nasty word here and there, a certain resentful tone, the narrowing of his light-blue eyes, and it wasn’t long before Wolff understood that Christensen’s betrayal wasn’t just about money: Christensen was a disappointed young man. Why didn’t his ‘friend’ do more to help him? More than an old green suit. His pride was hurt. Doors opened for Sir Roger but he shut them in poor Adler’s face. Perhaps he had begun to realise that they would always be closed to someone of his class and blamed Casement for that too.

‘He’s let me down, you know,’ he said at their fourth meeting. ‘You can see that, can’t you?’ Wolff said he could.

Most of the lies Christensen told were to himself but was he any different in that way from anyone else? Wolff did all he could to nourish his grievance. The more he understood the man, the more important it became. For all the childish slights, the bitter words, the pleasure he took in passing on confidences, he was plainly attached to ‘Sir Raj-er’.

‘He’s a great man, an honest man,’ he observed, only minutes after railing at Casement’s vanity.

The portrait he painted of Casement was of someone naïve, impulsive, and with an exaggerated sense of his own importance, but principled and generous to a fault. Wolff could see that Adler was as fond of the man he was betraying as he was capable of being of anyone, and that made him even less trustworthy. So Wolff didn’t mention the note he left for Casement at the Eden or the visit he received from the security police the following day.

T
HEY MUST HAVE
been waiting at the hotel but Wolff didn’t notice them until he stopped to watch a column of soldiers march by. It was part of his daily routine: faces in a crowd, reflections in shop windows, skipping on and off trams. It was an exchange of glances only but his heart missed a beat. Two powerfully built men in their forties who walked like
Unteroffiziere
and wore their cheap blue suits like uniforms. They followed him into Wilhelmstrasse, working the pavements in tandem and with a professionalism that suggested they were of a different calibre to the state gendarmes he’d encountered so far.

After the note he had sent to Casement, he was expecting something of the sort, but not quite so quickly. He was very relieved to reach the sanctuary of his new country’s embassy. ‘That’s Turkey,’ he thought as he climbed the stairs to the trade section on the first floor.

Secretary Boyd was dictating a letter to a clerk. He didn’t look pleased to see Wolff.

‘I’ve been instructed not to talk to you,’ he said brusquely. ‘From Ambassador Gerard himself. No assistance. No contact. Persona non grata.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s best you leave.’

‘If you explain . . .’

‘I can’t.’

‘Then I will have to see the Ambassador.’

The trade attaché looked horrified. ‘All right, Adams, we’ll finish this later.’ He dismissed the clerk with a wave and rose quickly from his desk, catching his thigh against its edge. Wolff watched him hobble to the door and shut it firmly.

‘The Ambassador won’t see you.’ He was still gripping the handle, his eyes locked on the floor. ‘He’s got more pressing concerns.’

‘He will see me. I’m an American.’

‘Oh?’ he snorted sceptically. ‘Look, it’s somethin’ to do with your business, that’s all I can tell you.’

‘Westinghouse?’

‘Yes. No. Instructions from the State Department. Look, I want you to leave at once.’

‘But it was a matter concerning Westinghouse?’

‘I’ve said too much already.’

‘You haven’t said anything.’

‘That’s not what the Ambassador thinks,’ Boyd said, lifting his eyes to Wolff’s face at last. ‘Unprofessional. Damn stupid,’ he barked in the straight-talking manner of Ambassador Gerard, flushing at the recollection. ‘There you have it, Mr de Witt. Too much charity.’ He frowned unhappily. ‘It’s that business in the papers, the Boers and their rifles. Made a bit of a fool of me, didn’t you?’

Mr James W. Gerard was otherwise engaged and his secretary was unable to find a time in his diary when he wouldn’t be. Wolff made his protest to a second counsellor who had no idea what he was talking about and urged him to ‘come back tomorrow’.

There was a telegram from Westinghouse at the hotel. The concierge at the desk handed it to him with a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression that suggested it had passed through the security police’s hands already. They had trailed him from the embassy and watched him take lunch at a restaurant near the Potsdamer Brücke. They’d caught the same tram to the Tiergarten, then wandered with him in the rain, and now they were dripping on the marble floor in the entrance hall of the Minerva.

In his rooms, Wolff hung up his hat and coat, lit a cigarette and stood at the window gazing down at the traffic in the Unter den Linden. He felt calm. The police were in no hurry. There would be time for a bath and perhaps dinner. Only when he’d finished his cigarette did he reach for the telegram. It was from a Mr J. P. Foote of New England Westinghouse, not in the customary commercial code but in hard telegraph capitals that communicated so much more than the two lines of type. ‘Look, reader,’ they screamed; ‘look how angry we are with you. We’re very angry.’

There was virtue in brevity. ‘Let your enemy embroider the rest,’ C liked to say. Wolff folded the telegram back into the envelope. It was funny how often C’s little expressions forced their way to the front of his mind.

By the time Wolff entered the hotel dining room it was almost full. There was no sign of the policemen who had followed him so doggedly. He asked for, and was shown to, a table against the wall. The waiter took his order of fish in a simple hollandaise and a small glass of wine but he had no appetite when it came. He sipped at the wine and smoked a cigarette and watched the other tables. Business sorts in white tie and tails for the most part, laughing, eating, drinking fine wine, two – perhaps three – of the diners bold enough to cock a snook at the new moral fervour of the nation and entertain expensive prostitutes. War was kind to a few.

At nine o’clock, Wolff wandered into the entrance hall and spoke briefly to the concierge about the weather and the latest news from the Front. He expected to see the policemen lounging on the leather benches between the pillars but they had gone. It looked as if they were going to leave him for another day. Damn, he cursed them under his breath; damn, damn, damn, why didn’t they get on with it? Once they had you, your senses and every thought were bent on the story and staying alive. Waiting was the worst thing by far. It was fear, not the pain, that had broken him in Turkey.

He considered taking the air, perhaps a walk to the river and the museum island, but it was bucketing down, and the concierge was sure the rain wouldn’t stop before morning. He would have to return to his room, to another cigarette, old newspapers, memories, and a small brandy at bedtime.

That the evening was going to end differently was plain the second the attendant slid the lift cage open on the fourth floor: the police
Unteroffiziere
were standing in the corridor and the door of his room was ajar.

‘Well?’ Wolff asked, walking purposefully towards them. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

They gazed at him blankly as if it wasn’t their place to say, and before he could repeat the question a young man with the hauteur of a recently commissioned officer stepped out of his room to stand beside them.

‘Who the devil are you?’

‘Herr de Witt?’ he asked, looking Wolff up and down very deliberately. ‘We are policemen.’ Then, after a pause, ‘But you know that. Passport, please.’

‘Don’t you have it?’

‘Find it for me.’

Wolff brushed past him into the sitting room. His passport was still in a drawer of the escritoire but not in quite the same place.

‘Here.’

The young officer pretended to scrutinise it but his eyes kept flitting to Wolff’s face. They were large and almost colourless, an unnervingly light shade of blue. Very like the eyes of a submariner Wolff knew who’d cracked and run amok at three hundred feet.

‘You must come with me,’ he said, slipping the passport into his overcoat.

‘At this hour?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you arresting me?’ Wolff sounded incredulous. ‘You’ve seen my passport.’

‘Some questions, that’s all,’ he ventured. ‘If you wouldn’t mind . . .’

He was struggling to be polite. It wasn’t expected of secret policemen. Wolff guessed he had been instructed not to break the head of a neutral.

‘I do mind,’ he said impatiently. They – whoever they turned out to be – would expect him to mind.

‘My orders are to fetch you,’ the officer glanced over his shoulder to his men, ‘whether you wish to co-operate or not . . .’

At the front of the hotel, an Opel with curtains across the windows, the driver in a uniform he didn’t recognise. The rain was bouncing off the pavement and dripping through the hotel awning on to Wolff’s hat and coat. It reminded him of the evening at Rules and the morning at the safe house in south London – the morning he’d caved like a wet paper bag. C had rubbed his hands and chuckled like Bunter with a cake. ‘They’ll be intrigued by Mr de Witt, we’ll make sure of that,’ he’d promised.

They escorted Wolff to the car in the rain and he sat in the back between their damp shoulders, trousers clinging to his legs. When they turned right along the canal and passed the palace he knew they were taking him to the Alexanderplatz Police Headquarters.

‘Make them tease it from you,’ C had observed. Wolff had listened to his plan at the window of the safe house, gazing across acres of wet slate. He remembered reaching for his handkerchief and catching the scent of Violet’s perfume.

‘Did you hear me?’ C had upbraided him. ‘Do you want to stay alive? Concentrate, for God’s sake.’ Concentrate.

The police driver cursed as he braked for a man scuttling across the road beneath an umbrella. It was almost ten o’clock but the lights were still on at Tietz’s on the north-west side of the square. In front of the department store, a banner with the slogan ‘God Punish England’ was wrapped around the statue of the city’s protector, the wind lifting it immodestly from her full figure. They turned and Wolff glimpsed the dome of the Police Headquarters over the driver’s shoulder. In the course of one of his operations he’d passed it on foot, resisting the urge to walk faster and walk away. He remembered wondering if there was a country in the world with a larger police station: 19,000 square yards of neo-Gothic brick, according to Baedeker – all you needed to know about the new German order. He had stepped from its shadow into the square confident that he would never be obliged to visit the place. In his early twenties he was sure of a lot of things.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, as the car drew up to the security barrier. The officer didn’t reply. A brief exchange with the guard and they were moving again, passing beneath a high arch into a courtyard, then on into another. ‘This is all part of the scheme,’ he told himself. ‘Keep your faith,’ C had said at their last meeting. But he’d said the same thing before the Turkish operation.

The car stopped at the bottom of broad steps and guards stepped forward to open the doors.

‘Out, out, out,’ the young officer shouted, a little hysterically.

Wolff smiled. Poor fellow’s wound even tighter than me, he thought. The anxiety and anger of others always made him feel calmer. Sliding across the seat, he stood in the rain with his hand on the door and with a sergeant at his back, grinding his cigarette into the gravel of the immaculately swept yard.

‘All right, let’s get on.’

‘Y
OU’RE NOT AN
American, Herr de Witt. Who are you, I wonder?’