‘No,’ he lied.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, guiltily. ‘Perhaps I’ve said too much.’ Her sea-green eyes were earnest and beautiful. ‘But you knew Christensen – is he a traitor? Did he know about . . . well, all those things in the newspaper?’
‘You don’t approve of sabotage?’ He raised his brow quizzically. ‘At Liberty Island you pointed to the Black Tom yard and said—’
‘I remember. But has Mr Gaché’s adventure helped us – Ireland, I mean? I don’t think so.’
Wolff gave a small shrug. ‘If you get your guns, and if—’
He was interrupted by the chink of china, and the conversation belonged to Nina again. She had read the stories of German sabotage too – fussing with their cups – and she was sure her Roddy wouldn’t approve. Wolff caught Laura’s eye but she frowned and looked away, her hands clasped in her lap, pulling her skirt tighter over her thighs than she might have wished if she’d known.
‘The Germans are going to give us a bad name,’ Nina exclaimed.
‘She doesn’t know Roger as well as she thinks,’ Wolff remarked later, as he walked with Laura to the station. With the last of the light the snow was turning to ice, the sidewalk treacherous, and she accepted the offer of his arm.
‘Perhaps in this one thing,’ she said defensively.
In more than this, Laura, he thought with a wry smile.
‘Gaché, I mean von Rintelen, has gone, but I expect you know,’ she continued.
‘I guessed.’
‘But you’re still here . . .’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Have the police spoken to you?’
He’d been expecting her to ask: ‘Tell the Clan “no”.’
‘That’s unfair.’ She shook her arm free.
‘But your friends in Clan na Gael think there’s a spy?’ He turned to face her.
‘Mr Devoy and the rest of the committee say so.’
‘And they think it’s me,’ he prompted.
‘No,’ she said too quickly, avoiding his gaze. ‘Everyone is under suspicion.’
‘I proved my worth.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s horrible,’ and she began to walk on alone.
‘Hey,’ he followed her, offering his arm again. ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think there is a spy. Rintelen was careless, that’s all.’
‘Can we talk about something else,’ she pleaded; ‘please.’
So Wolff asked her to join him for dinner – ‘the day after tomorrow,’ she said. Then he told her he’d moved to the Plaza – ‘Please say nothing to your friends’– and he could see she was uncomfortable with their first secret, this small conspiracy of silence, but not enough to refuse. Even in this I’m a spy, he reflected, sipping whisky in the solitude of his hotel room. What can she see in this fellow, de Witt? Perhaps some principle – he was anointed by Casement – perhaps danger and the pull a woman feels for a certain sort of man, an Antonio with his ice-cream cart.
Dinner at the Café Francis; Laura in a white evening gown from Paris, a gift from her father, she said, because he was ready to pay a king’s ransom for her to look like a ‘proper’ lady. They were easy together and de Witt spoke as much truth about the past as he dared, but for the most part he listened as she talked with passion of her hopes. ‘I admire you,’ he declared, ‘you’re so full of life;’ and she blushed with embarrassment and pleasure at the warmth in his voice.
The following day, they went shopping on Broadway, and the day after, Wolff heard her speak at a women’s suffrage meeting and lost his temper when a couple of Christmas drunks had the temerity to heckle.
‘We’re having dinner with Laura’s father – the Catholic Club of all places,’ he confided to Thwaites when they met at the safe apartment. ‘New territory for me.’
‘Oh? Business or pleasure?’ Thwaites enquired slyly.
‘I’m fond of her,’ he said, rising to pour another drink; ‘so, yes – pleasure and a little business. I’m enjoying New York. Don’t you think I deserve that?’ He brandished the bottle. ‘For you?’
Thwaites shook his head. ‘She may be spying on you.’
Head bent, forefinger to his lip, he grappled with this thought for a moment: ‘She’s not duplicitous. But indirectly – yes, it’s possible. Who knows what her Clan comrades ask about me? I expect they’re like us.’ He smiled and raised his drink in an ironic salute.
‘Won’t give you C’s lecture, because you gave it to me,’ Thwaites replied, contemplating Wolff over the rim of his glass. ‘Just hope you know what you’re doing.’
‘Oh, I do,’ he lied. Then, as a sop, ‘She’s my only way into Irish circles here, and if the Germans kick off another campaign . . .’
But as soon as he floated the thought he was angry with himself – it wasn’t how he wanted their friendship to be.
‘I say, are you listening?’ Thwaites pushed his leg playfully with the end of his stick. ‘I’m telling you about your old friend, Hinsch.’ He ignored Wolff’s sigh. ‘He’s back in Baltimore. Hilken too. Missing Martha’s tarts, I dare say. Oh, Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘Fucking Turks.’ He was struggling to rise from his chair – ‘Sorry about the language, old boy’ – perspiring with the effort and pain.
‘And you want me to make the contact.’
‘I think my leg’s worse today,’ he muttered, leaning heavily on his stick. ‘We’re pulling out of Gallipoli, you know. Such a mess. Awful bloody mess.’
‘What do you want, Norman?’ Wolff stood up and walked over to the drinks tray.
‘Another gin.’ He slumped back in his armchair. ‘I’m so damn stiff. Must be the cold.’
‘I mean, Hinsch,’ said Wolff, thrusting a glass at him.
‘Sir William wants to know what you think.’
‘What I think?’ Gazing down at Thwaites, his hands in his trouser pockets, easy because for once no one else’s opinion mattered: ‘I think – wait. It’s too soon to do anything – they’re still looking for a spy. The Irish know I’m here so the Germans will know too.’ Reflecting for a moment: ‘Dr Albert’s still in New York?’
‘Pretending to be the perfect guest.’
‘He would be my first contact again.’
‘When will you try? The thing is, Sir William has to tell London.’
‘I’m sure C’s first thought will be for my safety,’ Wolff observed with mordant sarcasm. ‘Tell him what you like.’
Thwaites shook his head disapprovingly, pulled at his ear, shifted restlessly, sipped his drink, then smiled brightly, like a burst of winter sunshine: ‘After Christmas then.’
Wolff was guilty of a small injustice. As C pushed his Rolls from village to village his thoughts often turned to Wolff and his business in America, in particular the troubling text of a signal intercept in the briefcase beside him.
The officer prisoners at Donington called their camp ‘the zoo’, but to Cumming’s eye it was something closer to a palace. He didn’t hold with the mollycoddling of the enemy’s young gentlemen. The commandant was a fusspot called Picot, no longer fit for active duty. But after bitter coffee and the usual conversation about the war, he had the decency to surrender his office and a roaring fire. Cumming waited with his back to it, pondering whether he should attempt the interview in his indifferent German. From the lawn in front of the hall, excited English and German voices and the thump of a football reminded him of the ceasefire in no-man’s-land the previous Christmas. By order there would be no fraternisation with the enemy this year and, after so many thousands more casualties, who would wish to attempt it?
There was a sharp knock at the door and it was opened unbidden by the prisoner. Captain von Rintelen cut a less imposing figure than Cumming had imagined from the descriptions he’d been given, but his smug smile suggested he was quite as self-regarding.
‘My name is Smith – Captain Smith,’ Cumming declared in English.
‘Like the captain of the Titanic?’ Rintelen remarked. His handshake was limp an
d careless, and Cumming was startled by the strangled pitch of his voice. Taken with the spirit of the house perhaps he was dressed in a brown wool suit like a country squire. ‘You have come from Admiral Hall?’ he asked, settling in a chair at the desk. ‘How is the Admiral? I enjoyed our conversations. There is a bond between naval officers, the sea, don’t you think? It is always the same. After the war we will be friends.’
‘Yes, I’m sure. As you say, the camaraderie of the sea.’ Cumming smiled benignly. ‘And I want to take a little of your time – a few small points I’m hoping to clear up.’
‘But you understand my position?’ Rintelen opened his arms and his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I’m an officer of His Majesty’s navy, there is nothing . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ Cumming interrupted. ‘Delmar, Captain, who is he?’ and dipping into the pocket of his uniform jacket he produced the square of signal paper. ‘This was sent from your embassy in Washington two days ago. It says,’ he paused, lifting it a little so he could observe Rintelen above its edge; ‘it says, “For Count Nadolny, General Staff, Section P. The Irish advise that the New York police are satisfied they have broken network. Delmar now ready to resume operations New York, New Jersey, Boston, Baltimore, Newport News. Require start date for Phase 2. Hilken estimates a cost of 25,000 dollars. Answer immediate. Hinsch.”’
Rintelen was still smiling but the corners of his mouth looked a little tighter.
‘What do you think of that, Captain?’ prompted Cumming. ‘Nadolny’s running another operation – you knew of course?’ He waited for Rintelen to speak, resuming after a few seconds when he showed no inclination to do so. ‘You’re surprised, I can see that,’ he guessed, ‘Hinsch didn’t tell you. I thought Hinsch was your man.’ He paused again. ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars. A lot of money. What do you think Delmar is going to do with it?’
Rintelen shrugged. ‘I cannot say.’
‘Guess.’
‘Go shopping on Fifth Avenue?’ Rintelen gave a yelp of laughter, but it sounded brittle.
‘I think Delmar’s network in America was more important to Berlin than yours,’ Cumming observed. Perhaps Rintelen agreed because he was uncharacteristically silent. Impossible to shut the fellow up, Admiral Hall had said, but too clever to let something of consequence slip.
‘Come on, come on.’ Cumming banged his stick down sharply on the brightly polished parquet floor. ‘Do you know Delmar or don’t you?’
‘Surely you would not expect me to say so if I did,’ he replied stiffly.
Cumming glared at him for a moment, then shuffling awkwardly through the narrow gap between the wall and the desk, lowered himself into the commandant’s chair. The football match was over and the prisoners were being summoned to lunch by handbell like the pupils at a preparatory school. Rintelen pointedly took out his pocket watch: ‘If there’s nothing more?’
‘You don’t understand your situation, Rintelen,’ Cumming snapped at him. ‘You came ashore as Emile Gaché, as a spy.’
‘You are threatening me, Captain Smith?’ Rintelen laughed, grimly. ‘I was taken from the ship by your boarding party.’
‘That’s as may be. You were travelling on false papers. Your army shot Miss Cavell for less.’ Cumming lifted his chin pugnaciously. ‘You must have read about her case in the New York papers.’
Rintelen didn’t reply but returned his gaze without flinching.
‘You know you were sacrificed by your Count Nadolny – yes, you smile, but this –’ Cumming tapped the signal in his jacket pocket – ‘this is proof enough. You were making too many waves in New York, things were becoming difficult for the other network – Delmar was more important than you. It was simple enough to shut you down: a word to the newspapers and the police and . . .’
‘Real-ly, Captain Cumming.’ The patient smile slipped, the faultless English too and he leant forward to smack the palm of his right hand on the desk. ‘Yes, I know who you are, and your Secret Service – I know who is responsible for putting me here. Was he working for you or for Admiral Hall? It does not matter. But now we are finished,’ and he began to rise.
But Cumming wasn’t finished. Threatening, scowling like a playground bully, then coaxing with more bitter coffee and some sympathy. He pressed hard because Rintelen expected him to. He learned nothing more of importance but he had learned enough, and when the prisoner was taken away he placed a call to the director of Naval Intelligence to tell him so. ‘As we feared, Admiral.’ He knew he was betrayed and he knew it was by a British spy, and although Cumming hadn’t probed deeper for fear of giving something more away, he thought it likely Rintelen would have named his chief suspect ‘de Witt’.
‘Do you think he’s informed anyone?’ Hall enquired, pensively. ‘We may have picked him up before he was able to.’ But it was impossible to say and because they couldn’t, they would have to take a chance.
‘It was always going to happen like this,’ Hall observed, ‘Rintelen doesn’t know Delmar . . .’
‘. . . We’re pushing Wolff’s luck.’
‘No alternative,’ Hall said, and reluctantly Cumming agreed – no alternative. And yet, waiting beneath the great Gothic entrance arch for his motor car to be delivered to the steps, he was troubled by the recollection of almost the same risk taken two years before. Wolff had spent nine punishing months in a Turkish jail and it had almost broken him. Hadn’t they said ‘no alternative’ then?
1916
27
Inconvenient Truths
THE CHILDREN RETURNED with their nanny at dusk, then Frau Albert in the motor car, the chauffeur following her up the steps with an armful of parcels. A few minutes later Wolff glimpsed the silhouette of her full figure at a second-floor window before a maid drew the curtains. White stone house in the neo-classical style, six storeys, quiet tree-lined street in a fashionable part of the Upper East Side: the man the papers had dubbed an architect of terror lived well. Have the neighbours forgiven you? Wolff mused, as he waited at the wheel of the motor car. Well-to-do people have short memories. The worst crime a gentleman might commit in what the real-estate sharks were calling the Gold Coast streets was to lose one’s money. The sabotage story was already last year’s news; the headlines of that morning’s World were of a rise in the country’s gold reserves, and shipyards too busy to handle new orders, the President ready to embark on his ‘America First’ tour of the Midwest. Besides, the German gentleman in the bowler hat who walked briskly home with cane and case every evening did not cut a dangerous figure – or even a memorable one.
Gaunt’s runners had logged his routine, his contacts, and the traffic in and out of his Broadway office. ‘Just as you’d expect,’ the naval attaché reported. ‘Leaves home at seven thirty, spends all day at his desk, home again at eighteen thirty sharp. No mistresses, no trips to the theatre, no restaurants. No fun. He might be keeping his head down, but you know, I think he’s just a dull man.’ Distant father and husband, grumpy with the servants, a Polish maid had confided to one of the runners. ‘A real bringer of joy,’ Gaunt had observed drily.
Wolff glanced at his watch, extinguished his cigarette, then stepped down from the motor car. I’ll shake my chains at him, he thought with a smile; an unpleasant smell too close to home. The street was wreathed in threads of a freezing mist that put him in mind of the afternoon he had wandered in Hyde Park with his first confused thoughts of Casement and the operation. It was almost twelve months to the day. Had the smog cleared? He hardly knew.
Once in a while a taxicab ground down to a hotel on the corner, and there was a trickle of commuters from the omnibus stops on Madison and Park, collars up, hats down, gazes fixed on the sidewalk: ordinary men with tan leather cases, well-pressed suits and regular office hours. Wolff watched them without envy. Bowler and cane, straight back and steady gait, Albert was easy to spot even in the mist, almost gliding from one puddle of yellow lamplight to the next.
All right, give him a few more yards. Moving with the
precision of a Patek timepiece, two, three, four, and Wolff was away, stalking across the street, into his path.
‘Dr Albert.’
‘I am sorry, I don’t know you . . .’ But then his expression changed from puzzlement to alarm, like a cat’s paw ruffling the surface of a calm sea. ‘De Witt!’
‘Mr de Witt, if you please,’ Wolff replied in German. ‘I would like a brief word . . .’ and he took Albert’s arm. ‘There’s a car across the street, Doctor.’
‘What are you doing here?’ He shook himself free. ‘Our business is over. I’ve nothing to say.’
‘Let’s not draw attention to ourselves. I suppose you know your office is watched?’
‘I’ve nothing to say,’ he repeated icily and he tried to push past, lifting his stick in a half-hearted threat.
‘I wouldn’t, Doctor. Please stay calm. Goodness, a contract is a contract – you of all people should understand that!’ Wolff grasped his arm tightly this time. ‘Just here, Doctor.’
‘I’ve nothing to say to you,’ he protested again, but he permitted Wolff to guide him to the car. They sat side by side in the front, Albert’s thin face in shadow, his eyes sickly in the light of a streetlamp.
‘Your contract was terminated when our associate was obliged to return to Germany,’ he declared flatly.
‘Oh? Has Germany surrendered?’ Wolff asked sarcastically.
‘What do you want, Herr de Witt?’
‘I wish to continue serving His Imperial Majesty on the same terms.’
‘I told you, your contract is terminated. Captain von Rintelen has gone. Detained at sea by the British . . .’ he paused to consider his words carefully; ‘. . . his former associates are of the view he was betrayed.’
‘Not by me. My record speaks for itself.’
‘That’s as may be. I have no part to play in those kinds of—’
Wolff interrupted: ‘Save it for the police, Albert. We both know the war here in America isn’t going to end with this small setback – only to be expected, in my view. Your Rintelen was a man of vision, no doubt, but careless. Who’s in charge of things now – Hinsch?’
The Poison Tide Page 29