by Joel N. Ross
She stood over the fresh-planted bulbs and bowed her head. Let them live. Please, Lord, let them live. Her girls were too young to be sacrificed, too young to serve and too young to die. They were too willing, but please, Lord, do not allow them to die without cause and without gain. Amen.
The kettle was whistling in the kitchen. She went inside and made a cup of tea but could not abide the idleness. The house was cold and drafty. She sat at the table and realized she’d not prayed for Earl. She hadn’t expected him. She ought to ring Highcastle again, inform him they hadn’t found Earl. Of course they hadn’t. If he chose to hide, he would remain hidden.
And the microphotograph? It had to be a ruse. There was no reason for a loyal German agent like Sondegger to betray the Japanese to the Americans. Why tell the United States that a surprise attack was coming? Why bring the microphotograph to—
“Oh,” she said, softly. “My.”
It was so simple, so obvious. She hadn’t taken the time to sit and think. She knew what Sondegger wanted, realized what he planned.
She reached for the phone and in two minutes was connected. “I need to speak with Mr. Highcastle immediately. It’s a matter of critical importance.”
“He’s not in the office at the moment, ma’am. Perhaps I could—”
“Where is he?”
“I couldn’t say, ma’am.”
“Tell him he must return my call immediately. My name is Harriet Wall and I can be reached at—”
“Mrs. Wall,” the man said. “I see. From where are you speaking?”
“My home.”
“I’ll ring back in one moment.”
They hung up and Harriet stared at the phone for two minutes before it rang. Highcastle’s voice came over the line: “With a gray shirt, Mrs. Wall—what sort of man wears gold cuff links?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Gray with gold—not the done thing, is it?”
“Mr. Highcastle, I have information that won’t wait upon you learning how to dress.”
“But it’s not, is it?”
She sighed. “Gray with gold is perfectly appropriate, and has been since Beau Brummel passed away. What is this about?”
“We found a cuff—”
“No—I retract the question. I don’t want to hear it. I know what Sondegger is doing with the microfilm.”
Silence on the phone.
“Mr. Highcastle?”
“Continue.”
“It’s simple. Too simple to see. Why would a Nazi warn the Americans about a Japanese attack?”
“Because it ain’t true. The Hun has more angles than a wrought-iron fence. He’s trying to infiltrate the COI, with or against your husband. Have you found him?”
“We haven’t,” she said. “But that’s not—”
“Tom with you?”
“He’s still searching.”
“Is he well?”
“Do you care?”
Highcastle snorted. “The ghost of Davies-Frank cares.”
“The microfilm information is true, Mr. Highcastle. I can prove it’s true without the second microdot. Why would Sondegger give the microdot to a private American? Why not use official diplomatic channels? Because Japan would learn what he’d done, of course. Tom said Sondegger was acting on behalf of a small and semiofficial group, correct? This group believes, and I think rightly, that an attack on Pearl Harbor would—”
“Other phone. One moment.” His voice faded, but she could still hear him faintly. He was saying, “You found him? Keep him there. Well bloody done. Tell Nichols and Filterma—”
There was a click and the phone went dead. Harriet rang back immediately. The man who answered apologized and told her Highcastle had left the office.
She used a phrase that Tom had taught her, then said, “Have you located Sondegger?”
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the name.”
“You bloody well are.”
“Well,” he finally allowed, “I suppose I am, at that.”
“Has he been located?”
“Not that I’m aware.”
“Tell Highcastle this: The Hun is the key to America entering the war. This second microdot—it’s the key to everything.”
She hung up and paced the kitchen. She needed Tom. Was he still at the park? No, probably the East End. She’d have to—
A draft pricked the back of her neck. There was a hush of sound upstairs. A footstep? Yes. And another. She lifted the phone to ring for help. The phone was dead.
HIGHCASTLE PUT A STEADYING HAND on the dashboard as his driver took a corner at speed. The cuff link was gold. He remembered Davies-Frank rabbiting on about wearing silver with gray. Some rule of fashion he’d inherited from his mother, who was old enough to know better.
The gold cuff link found on the body hadn’t been Rupert’s, hadn’t been found on his body, either, but in the young lad’s pocket. There were any number of ways a child could end up with a gold cuff link—a memento, a gift, a bit of scavenging. Could mean nothing. Could mean everything. Could be the answer to Highcastle’s prayers.
The cuff link was custom-made, gold, with diagonal black enamel bars. The maker’s mark was visible under a microscope, praise all heaven’s hosts. Highcastle had sent his man Abrams to track the jeweler down, and—wonder of the world—it had been easily done.
The jeweler was a burly, bespectacled man. “That’s my design, yes.” He nodded, setting the loupe around his neck bobbing. “Prettily done, if I say it myself.”
“Who ordered it?”
“Years ago, it must have been.” He pulled a ledger from the lowest drawer of a glass-fronted cabinet. “Office retirement, unless I misremember.” He ran a finger along pages of sketches and scribbles. “I’ve a notion it was spring. . . .” He pulled another ledger, and another after that.
Highcastle didn’t breathe.
“Well, fancy that!” the jeweler said, tapping a sketch. “It wasn’t retirement at all. The customer bought it as a gift for himself. Friendly old chap.”
“His name? Hurry up, man.”
“One Mr. Pentham. Have his address right here.”
TOM GLANCED AT THE CLOCK: almost 4:00 P.M. In Hawaii, it was 5:00 A.M. December fifth. There was no time. He had to find the stables, find Earl, find proof. He cut through queues and interrupted conversations as Audrey left apologies in his wake. The seventh person he asked knew of the stables. An old man with a cap and a cane said, “Stables? Don’t reckon there’s three buildings inside a mile I couldn’t name.”
“And these stables?”
“Used to be a warehouse for goods barged up the canal—back in my day.”
“It’s near the canal, then?”
“Any nearer, it’d be afloat. Ain’t a stable, though,” the man said, a glint in his eye. “Still, they offer a man a good working mount.”
A whorehouse. Swell. “Where is the bloody place?”
The man pushed his cap back on his head and pointed with his cane. Five minutes later, Tom and Audrey found it: a sturdy stone building divided into half a dozen shops along the canal. Stables & Co. Automobile Repair was at the far end, with clean windows, a neat pile of sandbags, and a shaggy black mutt drowsing on the step.
Tom shook his head. Sondegger broke into an auto-repair shop before turning himself in? It didn’t follow. He walked around back to the canal towpath. There was an overgrown bramble and a small brick structure twice the size of a telephone booth, built to house a canal winch. Its thick wooden door creaked open on sturdy iron hinges when Tom worked the handle. It was empty but for desiccated weeds struggling from the packed-dirt floor, a fire pit surrounded by a circle of stones, and a cobbler’s bench overturned in the corner. Gray light trickled in through a rusty metal grating facing the towpath.
Audrey peeked aroun
d his shoulder. “Have we found it?”
“Might have.”
“Oh, good! What is it, then?”
He crouched next to the fire pit and stirred the soggy ashes with a twig. “Could be nothing. But say Earl met Sondegger here—it’s private enough.”
“Who’s Sondegger? And what’s her first name?”
It was a light switching on inside a dark room. He’d never told her why he needed Earl. He’d told her nothing, given nothing, shared nothing. He looked at her face—eager and pleased, her black hair falling messily, wrecked by the rain. She was fearless and beautiful, and he’d treated her like a kid sister he didn’t much like. She deserved better.
“I haven’t thanked you,” he said. “I haven’t told you—”
“Oh no!” she said. “Don’t you thank me. That’s the first step, isn’t it? Thanks very much, and fare thee well. You said you needed me.”
“I do.”
She bit her lower lip, looking ready to say something he’d regret.
“Get out of the door,” he said, his voice thick. “You’re in my light.”
He finished stirring the ashes. Checked the floor, the walls. There was no cigar stub, no telltale bloodstains, nothing but an insignificant scratch on the grating, a stripe where the rust had been scraped smooth. He ran a fingertip along the metal as he looked through the grating to the canal beyond.
He went outside. The embankment was muddy and steep, a five-foot drop to the water. There were marks in the dirt. “You see those?”
“Which?” she asked.
“The marks, there and there.”
“Where the rainwater dripped down?”
“Yeah.” So maybe they weren’t scrape marks. He removed his hat and flicked his finger against the brim. Put his hat back on, looked at the small brick building. A coat of paint had peeled from one wall, leaving a dirty beige crust. There were two struggling trees and half a dozen pilings along the narrow towpath.
A woman came around the main building. Blond and plain, ten years older than he, with a hawkish face. “Find what you’re looking for, then?”
“Give me a minute,” he said, “maybe I’ll get lucky. You live nearby?”
The blonde glanced from Tom to Audrey in disbelief.
“He grows on you,” Audrey said, woman-to-woman. “And he really does want to know if you live nearby.”
The blonde half-smiled. “I live over the shop.”
“Stables and Co.?” he asked.
“It’s as good a place as any, and better than most. My father is Bert Stables.”
“There was an incident, almost two weeks ago,” Tom said. “A couple fellows from the AFS found a man and—”
“Oh-ho! AFS fellows, was it?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“I’m no beauty,” the woman said. “But I’m not often mistaken for a gentleman.”
“I could say the same,” Tom said. Audrey’s laugh echoed off the canal, and the woman smiled. “You found him?” he asked.
“Auxiliary Fire Service,” she said in disgust. “Four thousand women, assigned to cook and wash and scrub. If I want to do the washing up, I’ll stay home. The AFS wouldn’t even let me drive.” She looked to Audrey. “You’re employed?”
“I’m an ecdysiast.”
“And make a better job of it than any man, I don’t doubt.”
“Two weeks ago?” Tom said.
The blonde said there’d been a commotion. “Some yelling out back. Well, we’ve had trouble on the path, so I took up a bottle and the boys crowded out after me. Heard a man singing, pretty as a songbird. Some rummy who’d managed to lock himself in the—”
“What? It was locked?”
The blonde jiggled the latch on the wooden door. “Tight as a drum.”
“He was locked inside?”
“People’d been using it as a WC before we had the lock installed.”
Highcastle never mentioned a lock. If Sondegger had been locked inside, maybe his surrender wasn’t as voluntary as Tom had assumed. “So you unlocked it and . . .”
“We never did,” the woman said. “The key turned up missing, months ago. But the latch here locks on closing, if you jiggle it.” She closed the door and fiddled a metal bar into place.
“And the man locked inside?”
“The rummy? He had no papers and a shiner on his eye, like he’d been hit with a brick. Ned said he’d have to wait for the Yard.”
“He didn’t try to get away?”
“Couldn’t have made it to the door. He wobbled fierce, just standing when they came for him. Whoever blacked his eye did a job.”
Tom could almost see it. The sudden noise from the brick building, the motley procession led by Joan of Arc wielding a bottle. Sondegger hurt . . .
Tom entered the small brick structure and rattled the grating. It was solid. He went back out and considered. It was five feet to the embankment. He checked the grating from the outside. It didn’t tell him anything. He went inside for the cobbler’s bench and brought it into the London half-light. There was a smudge of rust along one edge.
Yeah. He looked at the canal, shallow water, running smooth. He patted his jacket for the picture of Earl and showed it to the woman. “Look familiar?”
She flushed and lowered her head. Yeah, Earl looked familiar. He stole her key, bruised her heart, and disappeared.
Tom stared beyond Audrey at the sluggish water. “We found Earl.”
HARRIET GRABBED AN iron frying pan from the hook. Heard the creak of a stair. She slipped her shoes off and started running water in the kitchen sink. She crept into the hall. There was a misshapen silhouette descending the stairs.
Her breath was ragged. She pressed her back into the nook between the stairs and the tallboy and held the pan in both hands. Her arms were shaking.
The shadow hesitated. Listened. The water in the kitchen splashed with merry unconcern, and the shadow descended. If it turned toward her, she’d swing and race for the garden. If it turned away, toward the front door, she’d remain cowering in the nook and pray the intruder would slip away entirely.
The shadow turned toward the door.
She didn’t allow herself to exhale in relief. She peeked around the tallboy and saw the intruder was wearing a suit and walking boots. He pawed at the cloth of her coat on the stand, and something twisted in her stomach—it was a violation, his hands on her coat. She stepped from her hiding place and swung the frying pan; with all her fear and anger, she swung it too fast and missed the man by inches.
Tennis, Harriet—backswing. The man half-turned and lifted his hands to ward off her second blow. It was Father. He had Renard’s plaid jacket folded over his arm. The frying pan fell to the floor with a clang.
“I’d intended to tell you,” he said conversationally, “if something of this nature occurred, that I’d found myself in town without a room. That the club is renovating, and I’d used your key to let myself in, to rest before returning to the country.”
“You bastard,” she said. “You come into my—you slink like a coward into my house, to find what?”
His face closed. His bones and his blue blood—she despised them. Everything of his that she shared, she despised.
“You used me,” she said. “My position, my trust, my husband. For what?” She snapped off each word as she spoke it: “Why did you steal into my house?”
He drew himself straighter; perfectly bloodless, perfectly patrician.
“The coat?” she said. “For your creature’s coat? No—you were upstairs. You’ve been watching, listening. You have no interest in me, only in what I might reveal. You’ve never seen me, as you never saw Mother. Oh, you foul thing.”
“You will speak of your mother with respect.”
“Don’t use that word. You have no right to it. Tell me you
haven’t been using my position to further your own.” She looked into his eyes, so like her own, and saw the insufferable self-satisfaction. “You’ve caused me to betray everything I hold dear.”
“Pap and pabulum, Harriet, is what you hold dear. I am your father, and I have—”
“An accident of birth.”
“I have never shirked my duty. I supported you even in your fatuity—Mrs. Wall.”
“Sneaking like a thief into my home—”
“Your home. If it weren’t for that accident of birth, you would be shelling peas in Covent Garden Market.”
“Worse than a thief.” She raised her hand to him, the first time in her life. “If you’ve betrayed any trust I was given, so help me God, on the grave of my mother, I will see you pay.”
“I betrayed nothing. I know what I am; I know whence I come.”
She pushed past him up the stairs.
“The strong rule the weak,” he said, putting a hand on her elbow. “It is in your blood.”
“No, Father. My blood is in me.” She pulled her arm away. “I will be placing a call. Defence Regulation Eighteen is still in force. If you wish to—” She suddenly realized what he’d done: “The phone upstairs—you listened.”
What had she said to Highcastle? That Sondegger was in London, that Tom was searching for Earl. Something about the Japanese, about keeping the United States from the war? Father could not have understood. Yet there was a triumphant light in his eyes. . . .
“Ring who you will,” he said with imperial disdain.
What did Father know, and why had he come? “Renard’s coat,” she said. “Kind of you to fetch for him.”
“So you know his name. I was assured he was discreet.” But he wasn’t concerned with the coat, nor with concealing his employment of Renard. “Do not pin your hopes on the Americans, Harriet. They are unwilling to die for your crusade. They’ll not send their boys to be slaughtered in a foreign war. Not without cause.”