by William Boyd
Eva took her seat, still warm from Sylvia’s generous buttocks, and pulled a pile of Russian and French newspapers towards her. She assumed that someone high up in the British Secret Service had seen the merit in Romer’s idea and that this explained the strange autonomy he seemed to possess. It was the British taxpayer, she surmised, who had bought the Agence d’Information Nadal (and thereby ensured Pierre-Henri Nadal a very comfortable retirement) and was now funding its development as part of its Political Warfare department. Romer and his ‘unit’ were involved in feeding careful and clever false information out into the world—through the bona-fide medium of a small Belgian press agency—and nobody really knew what the effect might be. No one could tell if the German high command was taking note, but the unit always counted it a success if their stories were picked up (and paid for) by other newspapers and radio stations. However, Romer seemed to want the stories they sent out to conform to some kind of plan to which only he had the key. In conference, he would sometimes demand stories about rumours of potential resignations of this or that minister, or scandals undermining this or that government; or he would say, suddenly: we need something on Spanish neutrality; or else call immediately for statistics about the increase in sheet-metal production in French foundries. The lies had to be constructed with all the scrupulousness of truth. Instant plausibility was the key concern—and the team laboured to supply it. But it was all somewhat vague and all—to tell the truth as Eva saw it—something of a parlour game. They never knew the consequences of their clever little fibs: it was as if the individual members of the unit were players in an orchestra, sequestered in soundproof rooms—only Romer was able to make out the harmonies of the tune they were playing.
Sylvia came back to the desk, her coat on and a smart felt hat with a feather jammed on her head.
“Supper in tonight?” she said. “Let’s have steak and red wine.”
“Fraid not,” a man’s voice said.
They both turned to see Morris Devereux standing there. He was a lean, acerbic, sharp-featured young man with prematurely grey hair which he brushed sleekly back from his brow without a parting. He took care over his clothes: today he was wearing a dark navy suit and an azure bow tie. Some days he wore brilliant scarlet shirts.
“We’re off to Brussels,” he said to Eva. “Press conference, foreign ministry.”
“What about this lot?” Eva said pointing to her pile of newspapers.
“You can relax,” Morris said. “Your dead sailors have been picked up by Associated Press. Nice cheque for us and you’ll be all over America tomorrow.”
Sylvia grunted, said goodbye and left. Morris fetched Eva’s coat and hat.
“We have our master’s motor,” he said. “He’s been summoned to London. I think a rather nice luncheon is on the cards.”
They drove to Brussels, passing swiftly through Bruges with no delay but at Ghent they were obliged to detour on to minor roads to Audenarde as their way was blocked by a convoy of military vehicles, lorries filled with soldiers and small tanks on low-loaders and, strangely, what seemed to be an entire division of cavalry, horses and riders milling about the road and its verges for all the world as if preparing to advance on a nineteenth-century battlefield.
In Brussels they parked near the Gare du Nord and, as they were late for lunch, they took a taxi direct to the restaurant Morris had already booked, the Filet de Boeuf in the rue Grétry. The press conference was at the hôtel de ville at 3.30. They had plenty of time, Morris thought, though perhaps they should pass on dessert.
They were shown to their table and ordered an aperitif as they scanned the menus. Eva looked about her at the other clients: the businessmen, the lawyers, the politicians, she supposed—eating, smoking, drinking, talking—and at the elderly waiters bustling importantly to and fro with the orders and she realised she was the only woman in the room. It was a Wednesday: perhaps Belgian women didn’t go out to eat until the weekend, she suggested to Morris—who was summoning the sommelier.
“Who knows? But your refulgent femininity more than compensates for the preponderance of males, my dear.”
She ordered museau de porc and turbot.
“It’s very strange, this war,” she said. “I keep having to remind myself it’s going on.”
“Ah, but we’re in a neutral country,” Morris said. “Don’t forget.”
“What’s Romer doing in London?”
“Ours not to reason why. Probably talking to Mr X.”
“Who’s Mr X?”
“Mr X is Romer’s…what? Romer’s Cardinal Richelieu. A very powerful man who allows Lucas Romer to do pretty much what he wants.”
Eva looked at Morris as he cut his foie gras into neat little squares.
“Why isn’t the Agence in Brussels?” she asked. “Why are we in Ostend?”
“So it’ll be easier for us to flee when the Germans invade.”
“Oh yes? And when will that be?”
“Spring of next year, according to our boss. He doesn’t want to be trapped in Brussels.”
Their main courses arrived and a bottle of claret. Eva watched Morris do the whole sniffing, glass held to the light, wine rolled around the mouth performance with aplomb.
“We’d eat and drink better in Brussels,” Eva said. “Anyway, why am I on this trip? You’re the Belgian expert.”
“Romer insisted. You do have your identification with you, I hope.”
She assured him she had and they ate on, chatting about their colleagues and the deficiencies and disadvantages of life in Ostend, but Eva found herself wondering as they talked, and not for the first time, about what tiny part she was playing in an invisible grander plan that only Romer really understood. Her recruitment, her training, her posting all seemed to betoken some form of logical progression—but she could not discern where it was leading. She could not see the Eva Delectorskaya cog in the big machine—she could not even see the big machine, she realised. Ours not to reason why, Morris had said, and she ruefully conceded that he was right, as she carved off a square inch of turbot and popped it in her mouth—delicious. It was a pleasure to be in Brussels, away from her French and Russian newspapers, lunching with a cultured and amusing young man—don’t rock the boat looking for answers; don’t make waves.
The press conference was held by a junior minister and was designed to outline the Belgian government’s position with regard to Russia’s recent invasion of Finland. Eva’s name and details were taken at the door and she and Morris joined about forty other journalists and listened to the junior minister’s speech for a minute or two before her mind began to wander. She found herself thinking of her father, whom she had last seen in Paris in August for a few days while she was on leave and before she moved to Ostend. He had looked much frailer, thinner, the wattles under his chin more pronounced and she noticed also how both his hands trembled in repose. The most disturbing tic was his constant licking of his lips. She asked him if he was thirsty and he said, no, not at all, why? She wondered if it were a side-effect of the drugs he had been given to stimulate his heart but she could not lie to herself any more: her father had embarked on a slow form of terminal decline—doughty old age was behind him, now he was entering the final fraught struggle of his time on earth. She thought he had aged ten years in the few months she had been away.
Irene was cool and incurious about her new life in England and said, when Eva asked about her father’s health, that he was doing very nicely, thank you, all the doctors were very pleased. When her father asked her about her job she said she was working in ‘signals’ and that she was now an expert in Morse code. “Who would have thought it?” he exclaimed, something of his old vigour returning for a moment or two, putting his trembling hand on her arm and adding, in a low voice so Irene couldn’t hear, “You did the right thing, my dear. Good girl.”
Morris tapped on her elbow, jerking her out of her reverie, and passed her a piece of paper. It was a question in French. She looked at it inc
omprehensibly.
“Romer wants you to ask it,” Morris said.
“Why?”
“I think it’s meant to confer respectability on us.”
Therefore, when the junior minister had finished his speech and the moderator of the press conference asked for questions, Eva allowed four or five to take place before she raised her hand. She was spotted, pointed at—La Mademoiselle, là— and stood up.
“Eve Dalton,” she said, “Agence d’Information Nadal.” She saw the moderator write her name in a ledger in front of him and then, at his nod, she asked her question—she had no real idea of its import—something to do with a minority party in parliament, the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond, and their policy of ‘La neutralité rigoureuse’. It caused some consternation: the junior minister’s reply was brusque and dismissive but she noticed another half-dozen hands being raised for follow-up questions. She sat down and Morris gave her a covert smile of congratulation. After five more minutes he signalled that they should leave and they crept out, leaving by a side entrance and crossing the Grand Place at a half-run through an angled, spitting rain towards a café. They sat indoors and smoked a cigarette and drank tea, looking out through the windows at the ornate cliff faces of the buildings round the massive square, their sense of absolute confidence and prosperity still ringing out across the centuries. The rain was growing heavier and the flower sellers were packing up their stalls when they caught a taxi to the station and then drove back steadily and without delays or diversions towards Ostend.
There were no military convoys on the road at Ghent and they made good time, reaching Ostend by seven o’clock in the evening. On the journey back they talked casually but guardedly—as did all Romer’s employees, Eva now realised. There was a sense of solidarity that they shared, of being in a small elite team—that was undeniable—but it was really only a veneer: no one was ever truly open or candid; they tried to restrict their conversation to frivolous observations, bland generalities—specific times and places in their past, pre-Romer lives were never identified.
Morris said to her: “Your French is excellent. First class.”
And Eva said: “Yes, I lived in Paris for a while.”
In her turn she asked Morris how long he had known Romer. “Oh, a good few years now,” he said and she knew from the tone of his voice that it would not only be wrong to ask for a more precise answer but that it would also be suspicious. Morris called her ‘Eve’ and the thought came to her suddenly that perhaps ‘Morris Devereux’ was no more his real name than ‘Eve Dalton’ was hers. She glanced over at him as they motored towards the coast and saw his fine features lit from below by the dashboard lights and felt, not for the first time, a dull pang of regret: how this curious job they were doing—regardless of how they were working towards the same end—consistently managed to leave them essentially divided and solitary.
Morris dropped her at her flat; she said good-night and climbed the stairs to her landing. There she saw Sylvia’s blue square of card protruding just beyond the doorjamb. She slipped her key into the lock and was just about to turn it when it was opened from the inside. Romer stood there, smiling at her somewhat frostily, she thought, and at the same time she noticed Sylvia standing in the hall behind him, making vague panic gestures that Eva couldn’t quite decipher.
“You’ve been a while,” he said. “Didn’t you take the car?”
“Yes, we did,” Eva said, moving through to their small sitting-room. “It was raining on the way back. I thought you were meant to be in London.”
“I was. And what I learned there has brought me immediately back. Air travel, wonderful invention.” He moved to the window where he had left his bag.
“He’s been here two hours,” Sylvia whispered, making a gruesome face, as Romer crouched down and rummaged in his grip and then belted it closed. He stood up.
“Pack an overnight bag,” he said. “You and I are going to Holland.”
Prenslo was a nondescript small village on the frontier between Holland and Germany. Eva and Romer had found the journey there surprisingly tiring and taxing. They took a train from Ostend to Brussels, where they changed and caught another train to The Hague. At the main station in The Hague a man from the British Embassy was waiting with a car. Romer then drove them east towards the German border, except that he lost his way twice when he had to leave the main road to head crosscountry for Prenslo, and they spent half an hour or so doubling back before they found their way. They arrived in Prenslo at 4.00 a.m. to discover that the hotel that Romer had booked—the Hotel Willems—was locked shut and completely dark with no one prepared to respond to their bell-ringing, their shouts or peremptory knocking. So they sat in their car in the car-park until seven when a sleepy lad in a dressing gown unlocked the hotel’s front door and they were finally, grumpily, admitted.
Eva had spoken little during the journey to Prenslo, deliberately, and Romer had seemed more than usually self-absorbed and taciturn. She felt there was something about Romer’s attitude that irked her—as if she was being indulged, spoilt, that she should feel unusually privileged to be on this mysterious night journey with the ‘boss’—and so she behaved dutifully and uncomplainingly. But the three-hour wait in the Hotel Willems’s car-park and their enforced proximity had made Romer more relaxed and he had told her in more detail what they were doing in Prenslo.
On his brief trip to London Romer had learned that there was an SIS mission due to take place the next day in Prenslo. A senior German general in the Wehrmacht high command wanted to sound out the British position and response in the event of an army-led coup against Hitler. Apparently there was no question of deposing Hitler—he would maintain his role as chancellor—but he would be under the absolute control of the mutinous generals. After several preliminary encounters—to check security, to verify details—a unit of the British Secret Service based in The Hague had set up this first meeting with the general himself in a café at Prenslo. Prenslo was chosen because of the ease with which the general and his collaborators could slip to and fro across the border unremarked. The café in question was a hundred yards from the frontier.
Eva listened to all this attentively, with about three dozen questions clustering in her head. She knew she probably shouldn’t air them but she didn’t really care: she was both tired and mystified.
“Why do you need me for this?” she asked.
“Because my face is known to the SIS men. One of them is Head of Station in Holland—I’ve met him half a dozen times.” Romer stretched, his elbow bumping Eva’s shoulder. “Sorry—you’ll be my eyes and ears, Eva. I need to know exactly what’s going on.” He smiled tiredly, having to explain. “It would look very odd to this fellow if he spotted me poking around.”
Another question had to be asked: “But why are we poking around? Aren’t we all ‘Secret Intelligence Service’ people, at the end of the day?” She found the whole thing faintly ridiculous, obviously the result of some inter-departmental squabble—all of which meant she was wasting her time sitting in a car in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
Romer suggested they take a turn around the car-park, stretch their legs—they did so. Romer lit a cigarette, not offering her one, and they walked in silence a full circuit before returning to their car.
“We are not really SIS, to be precise,” he said. “My team—AAS—is officially part of GC&GS.” He explained. “The Government Code and Cipher School. GC ampersand GS. We have a…a somewhat different role to play.”
“Though we’re all on the same side.”
“Are you trying to be clever?”
They sat in silence for a while before he spoke again. “You’ve seen the stories we’ve been putting out through the Agence about disaffection in the upper ranks of the German army.”
Eva said yes: she remembered items about the threatened resignation of this or that high-ranking officer; denials that this or that high-ranking officer was being posted to a provincial command and so on.
Romer continued: “I think this Prenslo encounter is all as a result of our stories from the Agence. It’s only right that I should see what happens. I should have been informed from the outset.” In a gesture of his irritation he flicked away his cigarette into the bushes—a bit foolhardily, Eva thought, then remembered that at this time of the year the bushes would be damp and incombustible. He was angry, Eva realised, somebody was going to steal his credit.
“Does SIS know we’re here in Prenslo?”
“I very much assume and hope not.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Good.”
Once the sleepy lad had shown them to their rooms Eva was called into Romer’s. He was on the top floor and had a good view down Prenslo’s only significant street. Romer handed her a pair of binoculars and pointed out the key details in the panorama: there was the German border crossing with its striped black and white barrier; there was the railway line; there, a hundred yards back, was the Dutch custom-house, occupied only in summer months. Opposite was the café, the Cafe Backus, a large two-storey modern building with two petrol pumps and a glassed-in veranda with distinctive striped awnings—chocolate brown and orange—to cast shade. A new hedge and some tethered saplings had been planted around the gravelled forecourt; behind the café was a larger unpaved car-park, with swings and a see-saw at one side, and beyond it a pinewood into which the railway line ran and disappeared. The Cafe Backus effectively marked the end of Prenslo before Germany began. The rest of the village stretched back from it—houses and shops, a post office, a small town hall with a large clock and, of course, the Hotel Willems.