The Poison Tide

by Andrew Williams

  ‘He’s in hospital!’

  ‘I said so.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Dilger leant forward with his elbows on the table, his forehead in his hands as if in prayer. ‘I don’t know, perhaps a week – less if he inhaled spores.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Doctor,’ Hilken whispered. He turned his head deliberately to check the café.

  ‘There’s no one. I’ve seen to that.’

  ‘It seems as if you’ve seen to rather a lot, Captain,’ Hilken remarked sharply.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he replied indignantly. ‘I told the fool, “No mistakes or you’re done for.”’ The sick man’s wife had contacted one of Hinsch’s lieutenants at about half past eight, just as the Queen of the Night was making her first curtain call. ‘He’s in a ward at the Bellevue.’

  Hilken stroked the end of his trim little moustache thoughtfully. ‘Has he spoken to the police?’

  ‘I don’t know. The wife says he’s a mess.’

  ‘Has she spoken to the police?’

  ‘She doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘Are you sure? By God, you better be sure,’ Hilken declared fiercely.

  ‘This is the end.’ Dilger dragged his elbows back across the table as if the conversation was over and he was ready to rise. If it was the end, most of him didn’t care.

  ‘You give up too easily, Doctor,’ Hinsch observed sourly. ‘He knows nothing of you.’

  ‘He knows you.’

  ‘Not for much longer, Doctor,’ Hilken interjected; ‘not if your diagnosis is correct. But . . .’ he paused, anxiously smoothing the end of his moustache again, his cuff retreating to reveal an expensive-looking wristwatch, ‘. . . we can’t take a chance. Someone must visit him.’ He sighed heavily and sat back from the table. ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘That’s madness,’ Dilger exclaimed hotly.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s the only way.’

  ‘Why? What possible . . .’ But the answer was written plainly in the determined lines of Hilken’s face. Not money or flowers or a word of comfort; ‘You’re going to kill him.’

  ‘You’ve done that already, Doctor.’

  ‘He’ll be in an isolation ward, but that might make it easier,’ Hinsch remarked, scratching his beetle brow with a crooked forefinger. ‘We need to finish him without a mark. How? What do you say, Doctor?’

  He tossed the question with a gallows sneer – doctor and opera lover, what do you say? – and the doctor flinched but said nothing because there was nothing he could say.

  ‘I’m sure your people can manage it without any help from us, Captain,’ Hilken replied coolly.

  They sat in strained silence in the taxicab to their hotel but in the lobby Hilken took his arm and drew him into a corner. ‘Difficult times. We serve the best way we can,’ he said, thrusting his face close to Dilger in an effort to communicate his sincerity. ‘You mustn’t let it upset you.’

  Dilger wanted to laugh but he felt a little sick. ‘You know what upsets me most? That it doesn’t upset me anywhere near enough.’

  ‘Oh? Well, it’s war,’ Hilken offered tentatively. ‘Look, I know it’s early but let’s have a drink.’

  ‘You know we swear never to harm others.’ Dilger closed his eyes for a moment, gathering the image of a brightly lit lecture room, a small dark painting of his great-grandfather Tiedemann high on the wall behind the professor. ‘Before today, I still thought of myself as a doctor.’

  ‘You are a doctor. Come on,’ Hilken shook his arm. ‘He’s just another casualty, one more casualty.’

  Over the next few hours Dilger’s doubt and guilt reached fever pitch. But in the afternoon a bellboy delivered a second pink envelope from the opera. Dinner at the Hofbräuhaus on Broadway with Mencken, the newspaper man, and some German bankers whose names she couldn’t remember, and darling, collect me at a little before eight.

  Of the dying stevedore there was no mention in the cable to Berlin. It was sent in Agent Delmar’s name, although he knew nothing of its content. An enciphered message slipped across the counter on Broadway and Dr Albert and his people saw to the rest. Dilger was fastening his shirt studs and the hotel valet was brushing his top hat by the time the signal began its journey up the stone stairs of the General Staff Building and along one of the many broad corridors the midday sun never managed to penetrate. The chief clerk in Section P presented it to Nadolny in a thin red leather file the size and shape of a fine restaurant menu, and the Count stood at the window behind his desk to consider its contents, turning his red intaglio ring and gazing out distractedly at the Reichstag.

  ‘Send this by courier to headquarters, for the eyes of the Chief of the General Staff only,’ he said, turning to his clerk. ‘Actually, no. That is not necessary.’ And placing the file on his desk he bent to write a line that stated simply the first phase of Delmar’s operation had begun. ‘Encipher and telegraph this to General von Falkenhayn – and you can show in Sir Roger.’

  The two months since their last meeting had not been kind to Casement. He was thinner, his eyes more deeply set and the Count was struck by how slowly he walked down the room.

  ‘You have not been well,’ he said, shaking Casement’s hand and directing him to a chair.

  Casement dropped into it with a sigh of frustration. ‘I’m kept idle and useless, Count. The men of my brigade are still treated as prisoners – I’m not much more than a prisoner myself. Is it any wonder it has brought me low?’

  ‘But I understand you have barely enough of your countrymen for a company, Sir Roger,’ Nadolny observed.

  ‘There were assurances of arms and men for a rising in Ireland but I’ve been here more than a year and—’

  The Count cut him off. ‘I’m sorry, Sir Roger, I asked you to visit me to discuss a more pressing matter.’

  Casement seemed startled. ‘Is there something . . .’

  ‘Your courier, Christensen – he has just returned from America?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did your Irish friends write to you?’

  Casement said they had.

  ‘Then perhaps you know your servant was caught spending the money they intended for you on a common showgirl he pretended was his wife.’

  Casement’s forehead creased with concern. He knew and it was plainly a source of pain. ‘A misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘Christensen has spoken to me about it and I believe—’

  Nadolny interrupted again. ‘You can explain it to your comrades in New York, Sir Roger – it is of no interest to me.’ He paused, leaning forward, his hands clasped in a fist on the desk. ‘There is a much more serious matter, one that touches on the security of Germany. Your valet passed through Christiania on his way back to Berlin?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Our people in the city say he tried to make contact with the Head of the British Legation there – a man called Findlay.’

  Casement’s face was white with shock, his hands gripping the wooden arms of his chair tightly. ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation. I trust Adler completely – with my life. There will – there is an explanation, Count. Your spies may be—’

  ‘Wrong? No,’ Nadolny replied shortly. ‘I have told you this as a courtesy, Sir Roger. We will question him.’ Then, with a wry smile, ‘but for now it would be wise to make other domestic arrangements.’

  ‘Arrangements?’ Casement seemed close to tears.

  ‘Another valet.’

  ‘You’re not keeping him?’ He began to rise.

  ‘That depends on whether he is a spy.’ Nadolny rose, too. The meeting was over. ‘Captain Maguerre and his men will escort you to your hotel. Your valet is there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Casement stared catatonically at the floor to the right of the desk.

  ‘Sir Roger,’ Nadolny prompted, stepping forward to touch his elbow. A few seconds more and he jogged it again. ‘Sir Roger.’

  Casement’s gaze lifted to his face. ‘Adler is a weak man, but he has a good heart and he’s ver
y fond of me. You won’t hurt him will you, Count?’

  ’But a weak man could put our operation in America in danger,’ Nadolny said, guiding him firmly to the door. ‘You can be sure Captain Maguerre’s men will have the truth from him.’

  22

  Black Tom

  THE RENDEZVOUS WAS the Hoboken ferry terminal, as before, the black Ford parked in the same place, Hans the sour-faced driver reading his German newspaper. Written on the red card in the windscreen, the code word Rossbach. They drove through downtown Jersey City, round the canal basin and marshalling yards, then to the waterfront, Liberty in shadow a mile from the shore. A ribbon of light ran into the bay towards her and with a jolt Wolff realised it was the isthmus to the Black Tom yard along which the matériel of war travelled night and day on its journey to the battlefields in the east. ‘The busiest munitions wharf in the country,’ Laura had remarked as they’d gazed from Liberty across the narrow water.

  ‘We’re to meet him there?’ Wolff nodded towards the strip. Surely it was madness to attempt such a thing. Hans wouldn’t say but pushed on a little faster and after a few minutes it was plain that the road led to Black Tom and nowhere else. At the perimeter fence it bent away from the shore through marshland and along a stretch of abandoned railroad track, petering out at last at an iron gate. Beyond it the gable end of a warehouse and in the sooty yellow of the wharf lamps a loading gantry and the triangular points of dockside cranes like broken teeth in an old man’s mouth. Opposite the gate, a siding choked with weeds and a dozen old boxcars, the black flag of the Lehigh Valley Railroad peeling from their sides. As Hans cut the engine, the door of the nearest slid open and the silhouette of a slight figure was caught for a second in the light of a shrouded lamp. Wolff stepped down from the Ford and pushed the door shut gently. Rintelen was picking his way across rough ground towards him, with Hinsch and two associates in tow. The smaller man tripped and cursed and Wolff recognised the voice of McKee, the Clan’s fixer on the docks and his guide on the night he planted the bombs on the Blackness. Rolling like a ship in a storm beside him, the Bavarian butcher, Koenig, summoned no doubt to effect an entry. But this wasn’t an ordinary yard, this was Black Tom.

  ‘You know where you are?’ Rintelen asked, offering his hand.

  ‘This place must be a fortress.’ Wolff sounded quite as concerned as he felt. What the hell were they proposing to do if they did get inside?

  ‘I thought you liked an adventure, Mr de Witt,’ Rintelen replied.

  ‘Eleven. It’s time.’ Hinsch brandished his pocket watch. Koenig was already lumbering to the gate. Pushing a flashlight through the railings to the left of it, he directed the beam at the ground, flicking it on and off three times. His signal was answered immediately from the corner of the warehouse and after a few seconds the light began to approach the gate.

  ‘That will be our man.’ McKee’s hands were thrust in his coat pockets, pulling it tight for comfort. ‘The guards on the trains carry rifles – and on the dock for loading – but there’s only a couple of fellas on the sheds at night.’

  Their contact stepped up to the gate, his stevedore cap pulled low over a thin face and grizzled moustache. Koenig slipped him a packet, then turned to beckon them over.

  ‘That’s it, he’s paid.’ McKee’s voice shook a little. ‘We’ve an hour until the shift changes and a new watchman. No more.’

  ‘For what?’ No one was carrying a case like the one they’d given Wolff the evening he’d placed the detonators on the Blackness.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ Rintelen replied disapprovingly.

  ‘I am calm,’ he lied. ‘I don’t like surprises and this . . .’

  ‘We are paying enough for your patience, I think,’ Rintelen interjected.

  ‘Have it your own way.’ You bastard, he thought.

  From the gate, the watchman led them round the warehouse and between sheds to the flat yard at the neck of the dock. A small works engine was shunting empty wagons into a siding, a railroad man at the switches, his face bent into his coat. To their right, a boiler house and chimneys and a windowless wharf building, a single dim lamp above its door, three men in its light, rifles slung on their shoulders. The watchman waved his flashlight and one of them raised his hand in acknowledgement.

  ‘The main explosives store?’ Rintelen enquired.

  ‘One of them,’ the watchman replied, a hint of Irish in his voice. ‘There are more on the island. Most of the stuff is held in barges at the piers, so they can turn it round quick.’

  ‘And that is the only door?’ Rintelen took a small pocketbook and pen from his coat. ‘How much explosive is kept in there?’

  ‘It changes, Jim, don’t it?’ said McKee. ‘Fifty, maybe a hundred thousand pounds. Crates mostly.’

  Rintelen made a note in his book. ‘In the yard at one time – the island too?’

  McKee lifted his cap and scratched his head. ‘A million,’ he ventured. ‘Maybe more.’

  That went into the book too, and Wolff began to feel more easy. Rintelen wasn’t there to plant detonators, merely to explore and plan. There would be time to raise the alarm.

  They left Koenig and Hinsch and walked along the track towards the island, stopping from time to time so Rintelen could make notes of the distance between a pierhead and a storage shed, the ‘correct’ position of the pontoons and the places that were too well lit by the wharf lamps. Ahead of them always, and closer, the shadow of Liberty, glimpsed here through a cloud of steam, there between buildings or below the steel hook of a crane. Nobody challenged Rintelen, nobody asked why a man in a well-tailored wool coat and a homburg from Hermès was striding yards out on the dock; no one enquired because no one gave a damn. It was quiet because they were waiting for British ships, the watchman explained; there were barges of the ‘stuff’ at pier 4 and crates the length of a small city block on the wharf.

  ‘Show me,’ Rintelen commanded.

  Most of the matériel was stacked at the railhead on the north side of the island. Hundreds of howitzer shells were standing on their base plates in the open as if in readiness for a push on Wall Street. Rintelen muttered something uncharacteristically profane: someone at the works with a little education had chalked ‘Gott strafe Deutschland’ on one of the crates. A couple of guards were stamping and blowing into their hands. McKee shuffled over to say his piece and very obligingly they turned and walked away. ‘From Green’s,’ he muttered on his return. ‘They say they’re expecting three ships at dawn.’

  ‘How much would you need for something like this, and those . . .’ Rintelen nodded to the water between piers 3 and 4, ‘. . . those barges, Mr de Witt?’

  ‘That depends on what’s inside them,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Shine your flashlight here.’ McKee reached up to one of the crates. ‘Can you read that?’

  ‘Don’t need to, Billy,’ the watchman replied. ‘They’re Canadian Car from Kingsland. Three-inch shells. This lot’s on its way to Russia. The big stuff’s from Bethlehem Steel, that’s on its way to France.’

  ‘Well?’ Rintelen prompted.

  ‘Not very much,’ Wolff declared bullishly. ‘A fire would be enough.’

  ‘And those?’

  ‘Ha.’ He rapped his knuckles against a crate. ‘Don’t concern yourself with the rest of this stuff. They’ll be picking up the pieces in Bronx County.’

  Rintelen pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded, ‘Enough.’

  They walked back along the causeway swiftly and in silence. At the gate, a hearty pat on the back and more money for the watchman. ‘For the love of old Ireland,’ he remarked without irony as he slipped it into his breast pocket. They pressed Wolff to join them at Martha’s. ‘What better place to be at this hour?’ Rintelen enquired with a disingenuous little smile. ‘My own bed,’ he replied curtly, and for once the German wasn’t inclined to argue. ‘But you must come to the ship tomorrow at eight.’

  ‘Oh, must I?’

  ‘If you
want to work, yes,’ he retorted in a clipped no-nonsense voice that implied he was happy to dispense with Wolff’s services. Wolff promised to be there.

  It was after midnight when he paid off the cab close to his apartment. The diminutive spy in the derby hat was loitering in a doorway down the street. To be sure I’m as good as my word, Wolff reflected, as he closed the sitting-room curtains. A mistake to appear flustered in front of Rintelen; a poor performance. An old ham with stage fright. He poured a whisky and sat with his eyes closed, breathing deeply. Just a few minutes, then he would leave a coded message for Thwaites. Tonight. No more blunders like the Blackness. The glass was at his lips when the sudden trilling of the telephone in the hall made him start. At that hour, it could only be the man he was preparing to call.

  ‘Sorry to telephone so late, sir.’ The flat unflappable voice of Thwaites’ man, White. ‘I’m ringing on behalf of Royal, sir. Mr Schmidt’s compliments, he’s anxious to speak to you. An offer of employment.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll visit Mr Schmidt . . .’

  ‘At the office, sir.’

  ‘The office, yes, of course.’ To insist on the Consulate, well, it had to be urgent. ‘I’m obliged to Mr Schmidt. I’ll visit the first opportunity I have.’

  He put the receiver down gently. First opportunity was their code for right away. Was his cover compromised? But Rintelen’s cronies would have finished him and dumped his body in a boxcar. He didn’t know, couldn’t, and that was unnerving, so he put it from his mind and bent his thoughts to avoiding the spy in the derby hat. Off all lights except the lamp in the bedroom, change of hat and coat, revolver in pocket, stocking feet from the apartment, fire escape into the foul-smelling back court, the spare key to the building opposite hanging in the coalhole where he’d watched the drunken janitor leave it one evening.

  It was a while before he found a taxicab and he was obliged to walk most of the way. The British Consulate was at 44 Whitehall Street in a brutal sandstone-and-brick building close to the elevated railway and an army recruitment office. Wolff walked along the street, then back, before slipping through the door. White was in the lobby and greeted him with a broad grin that suggested he was enjoying this new adventure as valet and spy. Why not? The last one had taken him on Mr Churchill’s bloody goose chase to Gallipoli. The Bureau’s new rooms were on the first floor, Sir William Wiseman, Munitions handwritten on a card at the door of his outer office. Perhaps Gaunt was resisting anything more permanent.