Taking a chair by the window, Salinger sat in the dark. Below, he heard laughter from the streets as people walked by. When their voices had drifted away, he allowed himself to think about how closely Goli had come to succeeding.
-Thirty-Eight-
Tehran. Three days later.
When Salinger arrived back in the city Julia met him at the airport and had cried when they hugged. He had wanted to tell her everything right there, but Julia had insisted he wait. Instead, at her house, they sat silently in the room for a long time before he told her everything he knew. When he began to speak it come out as a flowing of words that he couldn’t stop. Goli. Traveler. Leni, the committed spy. Mayfield. Salinger told Julia how he was convinced on the last night when Goli’s attack played out before the Sphinx that Churchill had set himself up as a decoy.
‘What could have been as important as that?” she had asked.
But Salinger knew he couldn’t tell her. Ever.
When he told Julia how tired he was she insisted he go upstairs take a nap and shower and she would wait for him.
----
Later Salinger awoke and felt refreshed. He showered and dressed in slacks and a cotton shirt and went downstairs finding the light dwindling, and a chill had fallen over the room because there was no fire. There was the strong aroma of furniture polish. At first Salinger thought she’d gone, but then he heard her in the kitchen. He sat and waited. The pleasant clatter of dishes, the gradual growing whistle of the teapot came to him. The gentle opening and closing of cabinet door. All of which were small things, but the rhythm of someone doing something for him was calming.
Julia walked back into the room sitting at the far end of the couch, her hands in her lap like a schoolgirl. “I’ve been thinking about poor Mayfield,” she whispered, “and how he was obsessed with his spy—Traveler.”
“In the end it obscured his judgment, and one can’t allow that in our business,” Salinger said. “I would have never thought he would have allowed that.”
“He had no idea Goli was the German spy?”
“Nobody knew until the end, Julia, but I’ll suspect Mayfield had an idea” he said. “Now, we’ll never know, will we? But Goli almost killed Churchill, and she almost escaped with a secret that would have delayed the war, if not worse.”
“But you can’t tell me about that, can you?”
“It wouldn’t serve any purpose. Not now.”
“That’s okay.” Julia turned away. “It’s Goli I want you to talk about, Booth,” she said softly. “I suppose she still loved you.”
“Julia, you have to understand something—I believe everything she said and lived was a lie.”
“You would call it a lie, but if she were a soldier or one of your spies, then you would have thought she was cunning. She was dedicated to finding out who killed her husband, didn’t you say? Is that so bad? Is it possible she started out with the purpose of revenge, and then it turned into something else?”
“She was bad for us, Julia. That’s all I’m saying.”
He walked back to the bar. Julia sat up. Her features smooth, vague in the flickering half-light.
“We should discuss something,” Salinger said as the night in the mountains came to him.
Julia shook her head. “No, there’s nothing else to discuss, Booth, nothing at all, nothing to confess for either of us. Promise me we’ll never discuss any of this—ever again. If I know anything about you, Booth, it’s that any moral judgment you betrayed—then you did it for a reason. For a cause. A purpose. No explanations. No excuses.”
“If that’s the way you want it.”
“It is. It absolutely is,” she said. “Let’s imagine today is our first day on this planet and that everything else before never really happened.”
“If that’s the way you want it,” he said.
“It is,” Julia said, standing. “Would you bring me tea later? I have a headache suddenly.”
She hesitated, and then opened a drawer from a round end table at the side of the chair. She took out an envelope and placed it gently on top of the table, and slowly removed her hand. Then she went upstairs. A door closed.
----
Later, Salinger finally stood from the chair and went into the kitchen. He turned on the light and began preparing the pot of tea on the stove. In a way he had long ago learned to live with the past. It was the future he dreaded now.
Going back into the living room, he sat at the chair and held the envelope from the end table up to the light. ‘SALINGER’ was written out neatly across the front. The initials ‘CH’ penciled in the top left corner. A ticking in the back of his mind warned him that opening it would somehow break the magic surrounding the happenings over the last weeks. Churchill had sacrificed so much even offering himself as the decoy to protect the greatest secret of the war—Ultra—to guarantee final victory for the free world.
He slipped his finger along the top tearing the envelope open.
Inside was a newspaper article cut out from an issue of a Cairo newspaper, ironically one of the publications held within Goli’s vast financial empire. It reported on the minister’s holiday, complete with photographs showing Churchill wearing his broad hat, sheltered from the hot Egyptian sun beneath tamarind and eucalyptus trees as he painted.
‘The exhausting toll of attending the Tehran Conference had finally weakened Prime Minister Winston Churchill. A press release from Whitehall stated that he was on, at long last, a well-earned rest, if only for several days, in Cairo before returning to duties. Later he would travel to Tunisia.’
Another photograph showed Churchill sitting at a table on the villa patio reading over a collection of papers . . . ‘diplomatic dispatches from Italy’, the newspaper caption read beneath.
Salinger paused, taking a moment to grasp what it meant . . . papers from Italy? It was where he had sent Bredow with his papers that night outside Isfahan.
The last paragraph struck a nerve in Salinger.
‘On a bleak morning two days after his arrival back in Cairo, the Minister was seen standing stoically by a low fire in the rear yard of the villa, the famous cigar clinched defiantly between the teeth, methodically casting documents into the flames.’
Salinger finished reading the article and sat it down, staring out the window.
He knew now that Julia had left the envelope for him so he could be let in on a greater secret . . . because at the bottom of the article, the careful hand of the Prime Minister had circled the words ‘casting documents’ and drawn a line down to the margin . . . and there had written ‘Isfahan. W.C. Repaid.’
The truth rushed at him.
The papers Churchill burned that morning behind the desert villa were the documents Bredow had taken with him when Salinger let him live.
And that explained why Julia had never opened the letter.
There was no need.
Julia’s role had been much more than she admitted. She had lived the story also, as much as he had. She had been in on all of his movements, probably since his arrival in Tehran. She could have possibly even known why Tehran was so important, Mayfield making certain of that. Julia had permitted his going with Goli into the mountains, even with all that had happened in their past.
He folded the letter and stared down at the envelope. The simple word handwritten across . . .
Salinger.
. . . He smiled finally understanding how much he had been deceived in the plot unfolding in Persia . . .
The Prime Minister’s burning of the papers behind the villa had made certain that Churchill completed the cycle of secrets, neatly tying together the sheltering of all of the diversions, all the ruses to protect Ultra.
The envelope delivered was to let Julia know all deceptions had been concealed.
When there was nothing else to remember, Salinger stood wearily and went into the kitchen. He poured tea into a porcelain pot adding two cups and the sugar bowl onto the tray. Then he walked to the hallway and up
stairs.
Julia would be sitting in the lingering darkness of the bedroom, expecting her late tea.
All sins hidden and washed away.
-0-
A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) Page 26