“All right.”
It didn’t sound all that different from how Evelyn had behaved at Raheen—hiding who she really was and what she really thought, and adopting the manners and attitudes of those around her. It was a performance, nothing more complicated than that, and she had an instinct for this kind of disguise.
“The thing to remember about Nina Ivanov is that during the reign of Nicholas II, her family was one of the most influential in Russia,” White continued. “And I mean influential. The mother was a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, and Nina’s father, the admiral, was once the naval attaché at the Russian embassy in London. After the revolution, they had no choice but to remain here in exile. So while they might appear content with their little restaurant, they’re extremely bitter about everything they’ve lost.”
Evelyn nodded. “And once I’m friendly with Nina, I’m to then make her believe I have something useful to the Lion Society, like access?”
“Yes,” said White. “You must encourage her to believe that you can use your position at the War Office to assist her activities. She might ask for anything. Files, telephone numbers, names. Whatever she wants, we will give it to her.” He began digging around in the top drawer, finally pulling out a small piece of card. He scribbled something on the back of it before pushing it across the desk to Evelyn. She turned it over to see another portrait photograph, this time of a rather glamorous-looking young woman with fair hair and pert lips.
“That’s Christine Bakker, an attaché with the Romanian Legation. She’s worked with me for years. I’ve given you her telephone number. She may come in handy in this investigation. If the chance ever arises, you can tell the group you have a diplomatic contact. Christine could be useful for a range of things, including liaising with other embassies and even smuggling material out of Britain. The Lion Society will know we’re watching the Allied embassies, so Christine has good cover with the Romanians, who are still neutral. Please memorize that number and destroy the photograph.”
“Thanks.” Evelyn tucked the photograph inside her purse. “I will.”
White pressed his fingertips together. “And now to your transformation.”
Ted Young came over and dumped a pile of documents on the desk. Evelyn peered at the old newspaper on the top, Völkischer Beobachter, the daily for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
“Today you read,” White said. “Because before you can gain this group’s trust, you must start thinking like them and sounding like them. You must, essentially, become like them.”
Evelyn raised her eyebrows and White smiled. “You know, I once believed in fascism myself,” he murmured. “It’s no secret, but there you have it, the folly of youth. However, the more I look back on it, the more I realize it wasn’t a folly, not really. I was driven by an entirely rational desire to destroy communism—I would have done anything. I think that’s why I’ve always found the love of one’s country has its limits; we need to see our love reflected in something, or someone. In my experience, the most zealous patriot has had no one else to love. An absent father, a dead wife . . .” He smiled again, his bright eyes alert. “That’s why in war, and in death, that love can be immortalized. It’s a powerful urge.”
“It reminds me of a Wallace Stevens poem I read as a child,” Evelyn said. “Death’s nobility again; Beautified the simplest men; Fallen Winkle felt the pride—”
“—Of Agamemnon; When he died . . .” White nodded. “Yes, I like that. War is one of the few opportunities for men to become equal.”
But not for you, thought Evelyn, as he sucked away on his cigarette. You’re not immortal. You’re all flesh. Thick, blood-red lips, hooded eyes, flabby jowls. It was almost impossible to imagine that any foreign agent could trust him—surely one so fond of indulgence could never be dependable? Still, unlike Chadwick, there was something magnetic about White. His manner was mercurial, and she could see how deftly he steered, convinced, manipulated; how easy it was to talk with him. But pressing behind this feeling was another, sharper sensation, like a sudden fleck of boiling water on her skin. If he was this kaleidoscope of different people, how could she ever be certain of his loyalty to her?
* * *
Evelyn’s new desk in the alcove overlooked St. George’s Square and she glimpsed a hint of river off to the right. Fat black clouds hung over Embankment. She didn’t mind the quiet, but she missed the companionable noises of the Scrubs, and she missed Vincent poking his head around her door to invite her outside for a smoke; she couldn’t hear anything from White’s study on the other side of the flat. She imagined Chadwick alone in his cell. He’d barely raised an eyebrow when she packed up her desk. He’d known all along why White had wanted to have lunch with her, of course. “You’ll do very well with Bennett as a mentor,” was all he said, though Evelyn had sensed admonishment in his tone, as if she could have chosen to stay, which was unfair, because when she looked back on that strange meal at the Ritz there had never really been a question about her joining counterintelligence, no real decision to be made at all. Bennett White, Evelyn had since learned, was not a man to whom many people said no.
After Evelyn had read some of the German newspapers, she listened to the recordings of the propaganda broadcasts from Berlin, which began with the preening greeting ‘Jar-many calling’ and did little else but urge the British people to surrender to Hitler. When she’d had enough of that, she pored over notes made by an agent called “Dove” planted at one of Oswald Mosley’s London rallies. This had turned violent, with a few men hospitalized and a woman raped in a West End lane. Evelyn glanced at the remaining reading piled up on her desk—White planned to test her on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Nuremberg Laws, and Volksdeutsche in the morning.
She leaned back and rubbed at her sore eyes. It was ghastly stuff, and being immersed in it was like being lowered into a pit of molten tar and ordered to swim. It didn’t seem possible that ordinary men and women thought this way. White had suggested she draw on things she may have heard at Oxford to give authenticity to her new persona, yet it wasn’t anyone from college she thought about as she sat at the desk but her own mother. All this preparation must have dredged up a forgotten memory, because she recalled an afternoon the previous year when, flicking through the local newspaper, her mother had raised a hand to her mouth and made a small noise of astonishment. Evelyn had gone to her, afraid to hear of a death or some new disaster abroad. But her mother had only folded over the newspaper and with a great sigh put it to one side.
“Do you remember Harriet Graham from number twelve?” she said. “The publican’s daughter?”
Evelyn nodded. She and Harriet had been in the same class at primary school.
“She’s engaged . . . to a Jew.”
Evelyn hadn’t known what to say. She had never heard her mother speak like this. She looked to her father, expecting some rebuke, but he only cleared his throat and continued reading by the fireplace.
“But what does it matter if he’s Jewish?” Evelyn asked, following her mother into the kitchen. “Isn’t their happiness what’s important?”
“Yes, dear,” said her mother patiently. “Only, it’s a pity she’s chosen that path. It will make her life so much more difficult.”
“But why?” Evelyn still didn’t understand. It had always been her belief that men and women should love whomever they pleased. Wasn’t that freedom what made them all human?
“Well, dear, you know why. It’s just not the done thing, is it? This intermarrying.”
Afterward, Evelyn had gone upstairs to her bedroom with a greasy feeling sliding around in her stomach. She knew her mother didn’t mean to be unkind—perhaps it was only ignorance, though this didn’t sit well either. Despite her lack of education, her mother was an intuitive woman, and liked to be on the right side of public opinion on moral matters. But that couldn’t be right either, could it? The more Evelyn pondered it now as she sat there at the desk, the more confused she became, and na
gging at her behind this feeling was the concern that her father hadn’t said anything. Did his silence mean that he agreed? And what of her own complicity? As the sky turned grayer at the window, Evelyn remembered how she had never challenged her mother or tried to find out what had made her think like that and, perhaps worst of all, had forgotten the incident by the next day.
* * *
By midday the flat had grown cold and damp. Evelyn wandered through to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. There was no milk, and she opened the tin for a biscuit, though all that remained were a few stale crumbs. She went to the sitting room and drank her tea overlooking the satiny river.
Another hour passed, and Evelyn was immersed in yet more reading when she heard a key in the front door. Assuming it was White, she didn’t immediately turn at the creak in the hallway or the flop of a hat when it landed on the stand.
“So, you’re Bennett’s new girl, then?”
Evelyn twisted in her seat, the grin already stretched across her face. “Vincent!”
“Guten Tag, darling.” After depositing his briefcase on the dining table, he strolled over to the desk and bent down to kiss Evelyn’s cheek. The tips of his hair were flecked with rain. “Can’t get enough of me, can you?”
“You’re working with White too?”
“Poached as the best egg. All this drama at the Home Office with enemy aliens has meant there’s decryption coming out of Bennett’s ears. I’ve been coming over from White City every other day this week, but now it’s permanent. Chaddy’s none too pleased.”
“Poor Chaddy.”
“Yes.” Vincent walked to the old leather armchair by the empty fireplace in the sitting room. “Still, it’s much jollier here than at the Scrubs, don’t you think?”
“Working out the front of Parliament would be jollier than the Scrubs. And it’s quiet. You can actually hear yourself think!”
“Don’t get too cozy,” Vincent warned her. “You do know Mosley lives in the building? Somewhere on the ground floor, goosestepping about. Not that he’s much in residence.”
Evelyn fetched the corned beef sandwich she had packed for lunch and rejoined Vincent in the sitting room, pulling out the chair paired with the Louis XVI desk. She handed him half the sandwich. “And the other agent, what’s he like?” she asked.
“Jack? That’s Jack Littleproud—I can’t really say. He’s on a case, I believe, and has not been in much. Nor Bennett, come to think of it.” He looked her way, winking, as his lean jaw worked away at the day-old bread. “You must have made an impression.”
* * *
At the end of the following week, after three tests, much berating, and some play-acting in front of Vincent and Ted, Evelyn was called into White’s study and told she was ready to be introduced to Nina Ivanov. The meeting had been arranged for Thursday morning at the Arbat Tea House; Mrs. Armstrong would collect her from the front of South Kensington station at ten o’clock.
White had been standing by the window as he explained all this, hands linked behind his back, his gaze shifting southward. Perhaps he had seen something on the Thames, and after a fortnight confined indoors, Evelyn suddenly longed to be out there in the cold, breathing in great lungfuls of fresh air far away from Chemley Court. But then he did something strange. Setting his pipe on the window ledge, he bent down to his shrew’s cage, opened the latch, and reached inside. Evelyn watched as the tiny thing, no bigger than a powder compact, scurried into his palm. White brought a fingertip to the creature’s back for a gentle stroke, all the while making gravelly soothing sounds. Evelyn took a quick breath. The truth was that she didn’t much like any animal, let alone those with a long pointed snout, and fancying she could hear the swish of his scaly tail made her queasy. White walked back to his desk, the shrew cupped in his hand.
“This morning I read about the farmers in Norfolk,” he said. “They’ve started shooting birds on the migration to Europe. Thousands have been slaughtered.”
Evelyn glanced at the newspaper spread across the desk, making out the headline: SKYLARKS THAT SING TO NAZIS WILL GET NO MERCY HERE. She looked at the shrew. He sat placid and unassuming in White’s hand, but Evelyn could see how those small eyes were wide and shining. There was a readiness in the span of his minute pink feet, as if at any moment he would launch himself across the desk.
“Surely they don’t believe the birds have somehow betrayed them?”
“That’s exactly what they think,” said White. “You and me, we’re students of history, and students of history always make good spies. We’re interested in the small eruptions of change, always with an eye to avoiding the next catastrophe. But these farmers, they only understand the land, the sky, what’s right there in front of them. It’s not so eccentric—I’ve known men who went to war because they wanted to defend the mallards and teal nesting in the reeds along the Devon coast.”
The shrew snuffled, his eyes trained on Evelyn. How strange it was to see White like this, so caring and so delicate; she wondered if Posey had had the same induction.
“Huxley said something on the wireless the other day that has stuck with me,” White continued. “That the yellowhammer song is the best possible expression of a hot English country road in July. Isn’t that marvelous?”
“Yes,” said Evelyn. “I’ve never quite thought of it that way.”
“But it is not a question of thinking, my dear. It is a question of feeling. Don’t you see? You must understand the emotions of others if you’re to seek their trust. After all, any old landscape can be made to look like an English one. But it is the birds, first and foremost, that will make you believe this is home.”
As he stood there, blinking at her, willing a sign of apprehension, Evelyn began to wonder what he saw in her. Was she a small, insubstantial thing like his shrew? Was she something to be tamed?
“To train a wild animal, you must first build up its confidence,” he said quietly, as though he had divined her thoughts. “Without it there can be no trust, and the animal will never be gentle or tractable; he will never feed as you want him to, or stop biting or trying to escape. But when he becomes compliant, you know he has accepted you as his own.”
He extended his hand toward her, and Evelyn raised her own palm to his fingertips. Still the shrew stared at her, unmoving, and she felt a tremble work its way along the length of her arm. White watched her with a crooked smile and resumed his seat.
“Deep breath,” he said.
And so she inhaled and exhaled slowly, and her hand grew steady. They sat like that, on opposite sides of the large oak desk, their fingers almost touching, a tiny mammal the subject of their urgent fascination. At last the shrew took a sniff of the air and edged toward Evelyn. He stood on the tips of White’s long fingers, his whiskers twitching. Then he scurried into Evelyn’s palm, where he remained still but for the steady thrill of his tiny heartbeat pulsing against her skin, the almost imperceptible quiver along his flanks with each surreptitious breath.
“What a dear little thing!” Evelyn’s throat felt tight.
White leaned back, admiring his work, and as he folded his arms across his broad chest Evelyn wondered if she had misjudged him too.
“See?” he said. “See how easily you can do it?”
Eleven
WITH HER TWEED suit, white ringlets, and horn-rimmed spectacles hanging loose around her neck, Mrs. Armstrong looked more like a school dinner lady than one of White’s agents. But while they sat at a window table overlooking Harrington Road sharing a brass samovar of tea, which Mrs. Armstrong had been drinking through a cube of sugar set between her front teeth—it was the Russian way, she explained with some enthusiasm—Evelyn recognized the flintiness in the old woman’s eyes as they surveilled the dining room, the doddering spinster disguising an incisive operative.
The restaurant was empty apart from another couple in front of the fire who spoke now and then to a distinguished-looking man with a thick white beard wearing a dark jacket and a naval
cap. This must be Admiral Ivanov, Evelyn thought. When his brooding gaze strayed their way he called out something in Russian and a tiny old woman in black stockings and an apron materialized with a bottle on a tray. Mrs. Armstrong had been talking amiably about her dog, an Irish wolfhound named Jessie. It was only the illusion of chatter, of course, but there in the snug dining room, the gramophone playing a Vertinsky arietta, the smell of goulash cooking in the kitchen, a cup of sweet tea thawing her chilblained fingers, Evelyn found herself so drawn into the story that she almost didn’t notice Nina Ivanov emerge from the kitchen to join her father by the fireplace.
“Look,” Mrs. Armstrong whispered.
Amid the preparation in advance of the meeting, Evelyn had not given much thought to what Nina might actually look like. She had supposed her to be a tall, athletic sort of woman, someone who wouldn’t look out of place throwing a javelin, for instance, but when Nina came out from behind the bar Evelyn was surprised to discover she was no more than five feet tall, dressed in a black crepe dress and polished heels, her severe face softening as she recognized Mrs. Armstrong from across the room.
“I’ve been promising my friend Evelyn for some time that I would bring her to your delightful restaurant,” Mrs. Armstrong explained after the introductions had been made. “And now here we are!”
“Have you had Russian food before, Evelyn?” Nina’s voice was cool, clipped, with only a faint trace of an accent.
“I’m ashamed to say I haven’t,” Evelyn said with a smile. “I’ll have to come back and hold Mrs. Armstrong to her word. She says you make the best rassolnik in London.”
An Unlikely Spy Page 15