by William Boyd
Is this how it begins? I thought. Is this how your life as a spy begins?
“Sure,” I said. “If I ever heard anything. But they’re fairly innocuous and ordinary—all trying to learn English.”
“I know. Ninety-nine point nine per cent. But you’ve seen the graffiti,” he said. “We’re talking Italian far right, German far left. They must be here if they’re writing that stuff on the walls.” It was true: Oxford was more and more spattered with meaningless Euro-agitprop slogans—Ordine Nuevo, das Volk wird dich rachen, Caca-pipi-talisme —meaningless to the English, that is.
“I understand,” I said. “If I hear anything I’ll give you a call. No problem: I’ve got your number.”
He thanked me again, said he’d be in touch, told me to ‘take care’, shook my hand and climbed back into his car, which did a swift U-turn and headed back down the road towards the city centre.
I rejoined the waiting trio.
“Why did that policeman want you, Mummy?”
“He said he was looking for a boy who threw an egg.” The adults all laughed but Jochen wasn’t amused.
“You’ve used that joke before. It’s still not funny.”
As we headed off, I drew Ilse back a pace or two.
“They think you’re back in London, for some reason. So I suppose you’re safe here.”
“Thank you for this, Ruth. I’m very grateful.”
“Why are you begging? They said you were begging aggressively—with threats.”
She sighed. “Only at the beginning I was begging. Yeah. But not anymore.” She shrugged. “On the streets there is much indifference, you know. It was making me angry.”
“What were you doing in London, anyway?”
“I left my home—in Dusseldorf. My best friend from school started to fuck my father. It was impossible, I had to leave.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes, I can see how you might have had to…What’re you going to do now?”
Ilse thought for a while, made a vague gesture with her hand. “I think Ludger and I will find a flat in Oxford. We can squat, maybe. I like Oxford. Ludger says maybe we can do some porno.”
“In Oxford?”
“No, in Amsterdam. Ludger says he knows a guy who’s making videos.”
I glanced at the skinny blonde girl walking along beside me as she rummaged in her bag for a cigarette—almost pretty, just something blunt and rounded about her features keeping her ordinary. An ordinary girl.
“I wouldn’t do porno, Ilse,” I said. “It’s just to help sad men wank.”
“Yeah…” She thought a bit. “You’re right. I rather selling drugs.”
We caught up with Ludger and Jochen and wandered homewards, chatting about the demo and Jochen’s bull’s-eye with the egg, first throw. But I found I was thinking of Frobisher’s offer, for some reason: anything you hear, even a hunch—we’d really appreciate it.
THE STORY OF EVA DELECTORSKAYA
Ottawa, Canada. 1941
EVA DELECTORSKAYA LOOKED OUT of the bus window at the coloured lights and the Christmas decorations in the windows of Ottawa’s department stores. She was on her way to work and had managed to find a seat close to the front, as usual, not far from the driver, so she could more easily monitor who stepped aboard and who stepped off. She opened her novel and pretended to read. She was headed for Somerset Street in downtown Ottawa but she tended to get off either a few stops before her destination or a few stops after and, wherever she chose to disembark, she would take a different, roundabout route before she arrived at the Ministry of Supply. Such precautions added about twenty minutes to her journey to work but she felt calmer and more at ease during the day, knowing she had carried them out.
She was sure, almost 100 per cent sure, as sure as anyone could be, that no one had ever followed her during these few days she’d been living and working in Ottawa, but the constant routine checks were a part of her life now: it was almost two weeks since she had flown from New York—two weeks tomorrow, she realised—but she could still take nothing for granted.
She had walked into Sainte-Justine as the village was beginning to wake and stir and had ordered a coffee and doughnut with the first customers at the drugstore before catching the early bus to Montreal. There, she had had her long hair cut short and dyed a chestnut brown and spent that night in a small hotel near the station. She had taken to her bed at eight and slept through twelve hours. It wasn’t until the next morning, the Monday, that she bought a newspaper and read about Sunday’s attack on Pearl Harbor. She skimmed the story quickly, incredulously, and then reread it more slowly: eight battleships sunk, hundreds dead and missing, a date which will live in infamy, war declared on Japan. And she thought, buoyantly, simply: we’ve won. This is what we had wanted and now we will win—not next week, not next year, but we will win. She became almost tearful because she knew how important it was, trying to imagine how the news was being received at BSC, and had a sudden crazy urge—immediately rejected—to telephone Sylvia. What would Lucas Romer be feeling, she wondered? Was she more secure now? Would they call off the search?
Somehow she doubted it, she said to herself, as she walked up the steps to the new annexe of the Ministry of Supply and took the elevator to the typing pool on the third floor. She was early, the first of the four women who acted as shorthand typists for the half-dozen civil servants who occupied this floor of this division of the ministry. She began to relax, somewhat: she always felt safer at work because of the anonymity provided by the number of people in the building and because she could cover herself journeying there and homeward. It was during her time off that the caution and the constant suspicion re-established itself—as if she became an individual once she left the office, an individual who might attract attention. Here on the third floor she was just a member of a typing pool amongst innumerable typing pools.
She took the cover off her typewriter and leafed through the documents in her in-tray. She was quite happy with her work: it made no demands on her and it was going to provide her with a ticket home, or so she hoped.
Eva knew there were only two ways for a single woman to obtain passage to England from Canada: either in uniform—the Red Cross, nursing, or signals—or in government. She considered government the swiftest route and so had travelled to Ottawa from Montreal on Monday 8 December and had registered with a secretarial agency specialising in providing secretaries for government departments and Parliament. Her shorthand, her fluent French and her typing speed were more than adequate qualifications and within twenty-four hours she had been sent for interview at the new annexe of the Ministry of Supply on Somerset Street, a solid unadorned office block of grey stone, the colour of old snow.
On her first night in Montreal, in her hotel, she had spent an hour with a powerful magnifying glass, a needle and some black Indian ink diluted with a little milk, painstakingly altering her passport name from ‘Allerdice’ to ‘Atterdine’. There was nothing she could do about ‘Margery’ but decided to call herself ‘Mary’ as if it were a preferred diminutive. The passport would not survive inspection by an expert with a microscope but it would certainly pass muster beneath the hurried glance of an immigration official. Eva Delectorskaya became Eve Dalton became Margery Allerdice became Mary Atterdine—her tracks, she hoped, were slowly being erased.
After a few days at her job she began asking around the women and girls in the ministry’s canteen what the chances were of being posted to the London embassy. She discovered there was a fairly regular traffic of staff to and fro: every month or two some went out, some came back. She had to go to personnel and fill in a form; the fact that she was British might make the whole process easier. The story she grudgingly, shyly, told to any who asked was that she had come to Canada to be married and had been grievously let down by her Canadian fiancé. She had moved to Vancouver to be with him but as the marriage plans remained suspiciously vague she realised she had been cruelly misled and misused. Alone and adrift in Vancouver, she had tr
avelled east to seek passage home, one way or another. Anyone who asked her more precise questions—Who was the man? Where had she lived?—prompted sniffles or genuine tears: she was still raw and humiliated, it was all too upsetting to talk about. Sympathetic questioners understood and tended not to probe further.
She had found a boarding-house on a quiet street—Bradley Street—in the bourgeois suburb of Westboro, run by Mr and Mrs Maddox Richmond, all of whose clients were young ladies. Bed and breakfast was offered at ten dollars a week; half board at fifteen, rates by the week or the month. “Open fires on chilly days” it said on the small sign attached to the gatepost. Most of their ‘paying guests’ were immigrants: two Czech sisters, a Swedish woman, a country girl from Alberta, and Eva. Family prayers were held in the downstairs parlour at 6.00 a.m. for those who wished to attend and from time to time Eva duly and with unostentatious piety did. She ate out, choosing diners and restaurants near the ministry, anonymous places, busy, where the turnover of hungry clients was swift. She found a public library that opened late where some nights she could read undisturbed until 9.00 a.m. and, on her first weekend off, travelled to Quebec City, simply to be away. She really only used the Richmond Guest House to sleep in and she never came to know the other paying guests better than as nodding acquaintances.
This quiet life, this regular routine suited her and she found she came to enjoy living in Ottawa almost without effort: its wide boulevards, its well-kept parks, its solid, Gothically grandiose public buildings, its tranquil streets and civic cleanliness were exactly what she needed, she realised, as she pondered her next move.
But all the while she was there she covered herself. In a notebook she logged the registration of every car parked in the street and learned to which household they belonged. She noted down the names of the owners of the twenty-three houses on Bradley Street, opposite and on either side of the Richmonds, and kept track of the comings and goings in casual chats with Mrs Richmond: Valerie Kominski had a new boyfriend, Mr and Mrs Doubleday were on vacation, Fielding Bauer had just been ‘let go’ from the building firm he worked for. She wrote everything down, adding new facts, crossing out redundant or outdated ones, looking all the time for the anomaly that would alert her. With her first weekly salary check she had purchased some sensible items of clothing and dipped into her dollar supply to buy a bulky beaver coat against the cold that was growing as Christmas approached.
She tried to analyse and second-guess what might be going on at BSC. Despite the euphoria of Pearl Harbor and the arrival of the USA as the long-awaited ally, she imagined that they would still be investigating, digging deep, following up leads. Morris Devereux dies and Eve Dalton disappears that very night—not events that can be casually ignored. She was sure that everything that Morris had suspected of Romer would now be laid at his door: if there were Abwehr ghosts in BSC did anyone need to look any further than Devereux and Dalton? But she also knew—and this gave her satisfaction, made her more determined—that her continued disappearance, her invisibility, would be a persistent, annoying worry and goad to Romer. If anyone would be urging that the search be maintained at its highest level it would be he. She would never be complacent or relax, she told herself: Margery—“call me Mary”—Atterdine would continue to lead her life as unobtrusively and as cautiously as she could.
“Miss Atterdine?”
She looked up from her typewriter. It was Mr Comeau, one of the under-secretaries in the ministry, a neat middle-aged man with a trimmed moustache and a nervous manner that was at once shy and punctilious. He asked her to come into his office.
He sat at his desk and searched through his papers.
“Please sit.”
She did so. He was a proper man, Mr Comeau, never acting in a superior or dismissive manner—as some of the other undersecretaries did as they thrust their documents at the typists and issued their instructions as if they were talking to automata—but there was something melancholy about him, too, about his neatness, his propriety, as if it were his guard against a hostile world.
“We have your application for the London posting here. It’s been approved.”
“Oh, good.” She felt a heart-thud of pleasure: something would happen now, she sensed her life taking a new direction again, but she kept her face expressionless.
Comeau told her there was a new draft of five ‘young women’ from the Ottawa ministries leaving St John on 18 January for Gourock in Scotland.
“I’m very pleased,” she said, thinking she must make some comment. “It’s very important to me—”
“Unless…” he interrupted, trying for a playful smile and failed.
“Unless what?” Her voice was more sharp and abrupt than she meant it to be.
“Unless we can persuade you to stay. You’ve fitted in very well here. We’re very pleased with your diligence and ability. We’re talking about promotion, Miss Atterdine.”
She was flattered, she said, indeed she was surprised and overwhelmed, but nothing could persuade her otherwise. She alluded, discreetly, to the unhappy experiences in British Columbia, how all that was behind her and she wished simply to go back home now, home to her widowed father, she added, throwing in this new biographical information spontaneously.
Mr Comeau listened, nodded sympathetically, said he understood, and told her that he too was a widow, that Mrs Comeau had died two years ago and that he also knew that loneliness her father must be experiencing. She realised now where his air of melancholia originated.
“But think again, Miss Atterdine,” he said. “These Atlantic crossings are dangerous, there’s risk involved. They’re still bombing London. Wouldn’t you rather be here in Ottawa?”
“I think my father wants me back,” Eva said. “But thank you for your concern.”
Comeau raised himself from his chair and went to look out of the window. A small rain was spitting on the glass and he traced the squirming fall of a raindrop on the pane with his forefinger. And Eva was instantly back in Ostend, in Romer’s office, the day after Prenslo, and she felt a giddiness overcome her. How many times a day did she think of Lucas Romer? She thought of him deliberately, wilfully all the time, thought of him organising the search for her, thought of him thinking about her, wondering where she was and how to find her, but these inadvertent moments when memories pounced on her took her unawares and were overwhelming.
Comeau was saying something.
“I’m sorry?”
“I was wondering if you had plans for the Christmas holiday,” he said, a little shyly.
“Yes, I’m staying with friends,” she said, instantly.
“I go to my brother’s, you see,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “He has a house near North Bay, on the lake.”
“Sounds wonderful, unfortunately—”
Comeau was determined to make this invitation, overriding all interruptions. “He has three sons, one of them married, a very nice family, eager, friendly young people. I wondered if you’d like to join us for a night or two, as my guest. It’s very relaxed and informal—log fires, fishing on the lake, home cooking.”
“You’re very kind, Mr Comeau,” she said, “but I’ve already made all the arrangements with my friends. It wouldn’t be fair on them to cancel at such short notice.” She put on a frustrated smile to console him a little, sorry to let him down.
The sadness crossed his face again—he had had his hopes high, she realised. The lonely young English woman who worked in the typing pool—so attractive, leading such a drab, quiet life. The London transfer would have galvanised him, she knew, made him act.
“Yes, well, of course,” Comeau said. “Perhaps I should’ve asked you earlier.” He spread his hands abjectly and Eva felt sorry for him. “But I had no idea you would be leaving us so soon.”
It was three days later when Eva saw the car for the second time, a moss-green ‘38 Ford parked outside the Pepperdines’ house. Before that it had been outside Miss Knox’s and Eva knew the car belong
ed to neither Miss Knox (an elderly spinster with three terriers) nor the Pepperdines. She walked quickly past it, glancing inside. There was a newspaper and a map on the passenger seat and what looked like a thermos flask in the door pocket on the driver’s side. A thermos flask, she thought: someone spends a lot of time in that car.
Two hours later she went out ‘for a stroll’ and it was gone.
She thought long and hard that night, telling herself initially that if she saw the car a third time she would move out. But she knew that was wrong, remembering her Lyne training: when the anomaly appears react to it immediately was the rule—a Romer rule. If she saw it for a third time it would almost definitely be sinister and by then perhaps too late, as far as she was concerned. That night she packed her small grip and looked out of her dormer window at the houses opposite and wondered if there was a BSC team already installed there waiting for her. She put her grip by the door, thinking how light it weighs, how few possessions I have. She did not sleep that night.
In the morning she told Mr and Mrs Richmond that she had to leave urgently—a family matter—and was going back to Vancouver. They were sorry to see her go, they said, but she had to understand that at such short notice they couldn’t possibly reimburse the residue of her month’s rent paid in advance. Eva said she understood, completely, and apologised for any inconvenience.
“By the way,” she asked, pausing at the door, “has anyone left any messages for me?”
The Richmonds looked at each other, consulting silently, before Mrs Richmond said, “No, I don’t think so. No, dear.”
“No one’s called round to see me?”
Mr Richmond chuckled. “We had a young man drop by yesterday asking to rent a room. We told him it was ladies only—he seemed very surprised.”