“Our new friends have found us again,” Christina said, squeezing the words out of one corner of her mouth, while she continued to retain the cigarette pinched between her lips on the other side. “Don’t look,” she said quickly, as he automatically began to lower his paper. “They’re sitting behind me to the left, at a place halfway down the block on the other side of the street.”
She had originally spotted the two men following them in Rome, four days earlier. When she later told Swing about the tail in his hotel room, she added that she felt reasonably certain that whoever they were working for did not consider the reporter a very high-priority target.
“You’re saying that the fact that two foreign agents are following me means that whoever sent them doesn’t think I’m doing anything important?” he demanded. “Explain that, if you will.”
“If somebody actually thought you were engaged in a significant mission, they would have sent competent operatives out to follow you,” she said. “But if it was just a routine job, to keep you under observation and see where you go, I suppose their boss might think that these two…” she paused, searching for an appropriately scathing term, then shook her head as if she was unable to come up with one, and finished “…men would be good enough.”
“What exactly leads you to believe that they’re following me, anyway?” Swing asked skeptically.
“Oh, that was easy enough to see,” she said. “I spotted them right away in that trattoria where we had dinner. They stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs.”
“I didn’t notice them,” Swing said. “What was so obvious about them?”
“A lot of little things,” she began. “First of all…” she stopped. “It doesn’t really matter. Once I suspected them, I confirmed it then and there. Do you remember when I asked you to go up to the register to buy me a pack of cigarettes?”
“Yeah, I remember. So what?” he replied.
“As soon as you left the table, I got up and went to le signore, and they showed themselves,” she said.
“How? Did they hold up their ‘foreign spy’ cards for you?” Swing asked sarcastically.
“Almost,” she answered. “I walked very slowly across the room, and every man in that restaurant stared at me, even the ones having dinner with their wives or girlfriends. Every man but those two: they never took their eyes off you. They probably were watching in case the counter-man slipped you a secret message along with the packet of cigarettes.”
The Austrian agent was obviously more than competent at her work, but by the time they reached Paris after a solid week of being made to feel like a bumbling amateur, Swing was growing weary of her routine displays of professional expertise. He was beginning to feel as if he was playing the part of the slow-witted Watson to her brilliant Sherlock Holmes, and he did not particularly care for it. “Well, how do you know where they are, if they’re behind you?” he grumbled.
She made a tiny motion of her head over her left shoulder. There was a large mirror in the display window of a dress shop located next to the café. “I saw their reflections when they sat down a few minutes ago. I think I may have to do something about those two. I have a feeling that they are not happy with what they are learning from just following you, and are preparing to investigate more…” she paused, “…energetically, shall we say?”
Swing had learned not to challenge Christina on her hunches and thereby run the risk of being handed another “elementary, my dear Watson.” Instead, he asked, “What did you have in mind?”
“There are any number of ways that I could easily kill both of them, and dispose of the bodies so that it could never be connected to us,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing the train schedule.
Swing suppressed a shudder at the cold-blooded way she talked about murdering two strangers, men that she only suspected were foreign agents. “I’m sure you could, but don’t you think that might be a little counter-productive?”
She frowned. “How do you mean?”
“It’s just possible that their bosses would get suspicious if the two men assigned to follow me suddenly turned up dead or suddenly stopped reporting in, don’t you think?” Swing asked. “The idea is to remain inconspicuous, and your plan may not be the best way doing that,” he said with considerable understatement.
Christina thought about it, and then nodded. “You have a point,” she admitted.
“What we really want to do is satisfy them that I am exactly what I appear to be: a reporter going about his business,” Swing said. “Then they should lose interest in me and go off to follow some other unfortunate soul around Europe.”
“Agreed,” she said. “You have a plan, I suppose?”
He removed his glasses, and held them up in front of his face to polish them with his handkerchief, and not coincidently hiding a smile of satisfaction. He replaced his glasses and leaned forward across the table. “As a matter of fact, I do. After the interview with Herriot…” he began.
* * * * *
The meeting with the French Premier went well, once M. Herriot had satisfied himself that the Austrian feeler was genuine and not some kind of trick. He took his time studying the letter introducing Swing, which was written in the Emperor’s own hand and which explained the true purpose of the meeting. After that, he spent the next hour looking over Karl’s treaty proposal, grilling Swing about the details and asking the American his opinion of the sincerity of the Austrians.
“ ‘The purpose of the alliance will be to maintain peace by forming a common front of like-minded Powers against any aggressor nations, and will be open to any nation who wishes to join for this purpose’,” Herriot read aloud. “Each member shall be obligated to declare war on any aggressor state in the event of an attack on any member state by an non-member state’.”
He looked up. “Do you think Wilhelm will want to sign on?” Herriot asked ironically. “According to him, all Germany wants is peace.”
“Yes, a piece of Poland, a piece of Galicia, and a piece of the Ukraine,” the journalist said. Both men had read the statement that afternoon out of Berlin, announcing that units of the German Army would be occupying southern Poland, Ruthenia, and parts of the Ukraine belonging to Austria-Hungary to “protect lives and property of German citizens”, “suppress dangerous rioting by radicals and Bolsheviks”, and to “maintain order until such time as the Government of Austria-Hungary is able to restore effective administration” over the troubled areas.
“Just so,” agreed the French Premier. “The Emperor desires to convene this conference at the beginning of October. But will he still be ruling a Great Power by then, or will there be nothing remaining but bits and pieces of his Empire a month from now?”
Swing had signed on as Karl’s messenger, not his salesman, but he had gradually come to take a strong personal interest in the successful outcome of his mission. He therefore came to the Karl’s defense. “I think, Monsieur Herriot, that at the very least the Austrian part of the Empire will remain intact. The Emperor’s internal reforms have strengthened it enough to withstand the current stress. As a matter of fact, I wonder if Austria would not be better off without the dead weight of Hungary blocking every attempt at reform, every effort to modernize the country and put it on a more stable basis.”
“That remains to be seen,” Herriot said noncommittally. “In any event, you may assure the Emperor that France will not hesitate to ally herself with anyone who desires to restrain…” he hesitated for a fraction of a second, almost saying “Germany”, before finishing “…aggressor nations.”
Swing completed the meeting by interviewing the Premier about the current political situation in France and the prospects for his National Radical Party in the coming elections for his Inquirer piece, and then brought Christina in to take a few pictures.
“How did it go?” she asked as they descended the steps of the Assemblée Nationale into the Place de la Concorde.
Swing glanced at his companion in surprise at he
r apparent newly developed interest in politics, then saw from her expression that this was a mere politeness. “Oh, about as expected, I guess,” he answered. “It’s not as if the French have any better offers, after all.”
She nodded absently, her attention having already moved on. “There they are,” she said, shifting her eyes slightly to indicate the direction of their two shadows.
“Yeah, I saw them as soon as we came outside,” Swing answered. “Are you ready?”
“As soon as they come into earshot,” she said.
The agents were lounging on adjoining benches, pretending to read newspapers as they approached. Suddenly, Christina stopped in her tracks and seized the arm of Swing’s jacket.
“No, Raymond, no!” she exclaimed. “You can’t go to bed early again tonight. We’re in Paris, Paris, for God’s sake, and you just have to take me out tonight. We’ve both been working so hard, and we deserve to have a little fun.”
All in all, she did a very credible imitation of a whining, empty-headed American flapper. Swing, who up until that moment had not been altogether confident that her thespian skills were up to the demands of the part, was impressed. He concentrated on his role, as an all-work, no-play journalist. (In fact, he had never met such a specimen, and he seriously doubted if one existed.)
“We are in Paris on an assignment, Miss Collins, in case you have forgotten,” he said sternly. “The Inquirer didn’t send us here to have fun,” he said, lending derisive emphasis to the word. “They sent us to do a job.”
“But we completed the assignment, Raymond,” she wheedled authentically, “and we’re on our own time now. Would it kill you to take me out for a few drinks just one night?”
Swing rolled his eyes in exasperation, then, with apparent bad grace, gave in. “All right. After I finish writing up the Herriot interview, there’s no harm in going out for a few hours, I suppose,” he said.
Christina shouted, “Oh, thank you, Raymond!” She wrapped both arms around his neck and planted an enthusiastic-seeming kiss on the surprised reporter’s lips. They went off together, doing their best to give the impression that they had not even seen the two men who sat a few feet away, their heads buried in their newspapers.
After they had left the Place de la Concorde far behind, Swing asked, “Do you think they suspected anything?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Not a chance. The only thing I’m afraid of is that they’re not smart enough to pick up the hint. Maybe I should have said…” here she began speaking again in her silly flapper voice “… ‘But Raymond, we’ll be out of our hotel rooms for hours. Do you think our things will be safe?’ just to be sure.”
Swing could not restrain a snort of laughter. “Let’s hope it wasn’t necessary to make it quite so obvious,” he said.
Two hours later, an American reporter and his escort stepped out of the Hotel D’Aubusson into the Rue Dauphine, evidently beginning a night in the City of Light. A hundred feet away, pretending to study a menu posted in the window of a café, was a man they had last seen in the afternoon, sitting on a park bench in the Place de la Concorde. The couple turned to walk down the narrow street in the opposite direction of the menu-reader, and strolled along at an unhurried pace until they turned right on the Rue de Buci.
“How long do you think they’ll need?” Swing asked.
They were passing a jewelry store, which had an illuminated clock over the entrance. She looked up at it. “It’s 8:30 now. Let’s give them until midnight, to be sure,” she said. She smiled at Swing. “That will give us plenty of time to have fun.” She pulled his arm closer against her hip.
This was a side of the Austrian agent that he had not seen before. He shrugged. “Whatever the sacrifice may be, we must perform our sworn duty. We owe it to the Emperor.”
It was after midnight, long after midnight, when they staggered back into the lobby of the hotel. Swing could not remember the last time he had been so plastered. Actually, he could not remember very much of what he and his companion had done over the past few hours.
They claimed their room keys from the desk clerk and rode the creaking, old open-cage elevator to the fourth floor. They tottered together down the hall to Swing’s room. Christina put a restraining hand on his shoulder, and knelt to examine the door handle. Suddenly, she did not look particularly drunk. In fact, as far as he could see, she appeared to be her usual, hyper-efficient self.
“This door has been forced,” she whispered. She put an ear to the keyhole, and then pulled her silver automatic from a fold in her dress. “I better make sure they’re gone.” She said.
Her foot lashed into the door, flinging it open. Before it was completely open, she dove inside, performed a shoulder roll, and came up to one knee, gun in hand, ready to fire. The room was empty.
“It’s all right, Ray,” she said. “Come on in.”
Swing’s room looked as if some natural disaster had occurred there, a tornado, or perhaps an earthquake. The search had been conducted with brutal efficiency. Every drawer in the dresser had been pulled out and flung to the floor, the mattress had been cut open, then lifted from the bedframe and dropped to lean on the floor. The locks on his bags had been broken open, and the contents dumped out. The pockets of his suit jacket and pants had been turned out, and the lining of the jacket had been ripped away from the shell. Pages from his notebook lay scattered thickly on the floor. They stared at each other.
Swing broke into a happy grin. “That should be enough to satisfy them that I’m not carrying any secret papers, don’t you think?” he asked. “I have to think we’ve seen the last of our two friends.”
She smiled, and nodded. “I would be surprised if we see them again. Let’s go see if they went into my room.”
They went across the hall, where Christina paused briefly to examine the lock. “This one doesn’t appear to have been opened,” she said. She produced her key, unlocked the door, and they entered without taking any precautions. The room was exactly as she had left it.
“Apparently they believe I’m such a complete idiot that nobody would trust me with a burnt-out match, let alone state secrets,” she commented. Her expression was compounded in equal parts of anger and amusement. “They didn’t even bother to look in here.”
“You kind of expected that, didn’t you?” Swing asked. “I thought that was the whole point of assigning you, instead of a male agent. Which reminds me, where did you hide the papers?”
By way of an answer, Christina began to draw up her skirt. As Swing watched, the hem traveled north of her mid-thigh, then above her hip, until finally she held the garment just above her waist. Looped around the very tops of her thighs, taped in place just above the rolled tops of her silk stockings, was a pair of business envelopes.
“I thought they would be enough safe in here,” she told him. “They were a little uncomfortable when we were dancing, though.” She continued to hold her skirt on high, out of politeness perhaps, as he was still inspecting her hiding place with wide eyes.
“Ah, yes… very safe… I imagine…” Swing agreed. He had seen a not few thighs in his day, but these were far and away the shapeliest in his experience. He licked his lips, which seemed to have suddenly gone dry. “Yes,” he repeated absently, “very safe.”
She sidled closer. “I suppose I don’t need to hold on to them any longer,” Christina said. “Why don’t you take them back, Ray?” she suggested. She raised her left leg up against his hip, so that the taped envelope brushed his hand.
“Oh, yeah… I guess… I should,” he agreed, gingerly surrounding the papers wrapped around her thigh with his hands.
He was not aware of it as it happened, but at some point he noticed that her arms were wrapped around his neck. “You know, Ray, you can’t stay in your room tonight,” she whispered in his ear. “They wrecked the room and destroyed your bed, and it’s too late to get another room. The simplest thing would be for you to just stay here tonight.”
“Here?�
� he asked nervously, his hands still wrapped around her leg.
Christina hooked the leg Swing was still holding around behind his back, trapping him in place, and at the same time pressed her body close against his, backing him up until he was half-sitting on the bed.
“Yes, Ray,” she breathed. Her lips were less than an inch away from his, and closing the range. “Here with me.” They were the last words either of them spoke for a very long time.
Paris Café in the 1920s
Chapter Ten
Berlin, August 27, 1923
The Kaiser was in his very best mood. Indeed, he was in such excellent spirits that he was able to tolerate the report to the Cabinet by his Foreign Minister, Franz von Papen, a man who normally had the same effect on Wilhelm as fingernails scraped across a blackboard, without interruption. Papen was wrapping up his presentation with a summary of the Note from Emperor Charles handed in at his ministry earlier that day by the Austrian Ambassador.
“…he suggests that Germany is somehow implicit in the recent disturbances in Lublin, Cracow, Pinsk, Kiev and other cities where Your Majesty was forced to intervene to restore order, all without a shred of real proof, I must add…” Papen said, making a show of outrage. “There was also a not very carefully veiled accusation that Germany was involved in the formation of the new Magyar Republic, again a charge without the slightest basis in reality. The Emperor has therefore ordered his Ambassador home to protest to what he has the temerity to call ‘intolerable German provocation and interference’, and further states that normal diplomatic relations will not be restored until ‘the illegal German incursion into the Empire territory is ended, and the areas under illegal occupation are returned to Imperial administration.’ Both the language and content of this Note are intolerable, and go far beyond any acceptable diplomatic usage, Your Majesty. It is tantamount to a declaration of war.”
Tidal Effects (Gray Tide In The East Book 2) Page 16