Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Wolff folded the newspaper carefully and slipped it back on the attaché’s desk. ‘No, they’re fighting for a homeland, Boyd — freedom from the British.’

‘A homeland, I see.’ Quite plainly he didn’t. The trade attaché was an incurious young man. Berlin was his first posting and he was still struggling with what he referred to in his Bostonian drawl as ‘the ways of the old world’. Wolff had met him on his first visit to the American Embassy and every day since.

‘Happy to be of assistance to a great company like Westinghouse, Mr de Witt,’ he had said, accepting Wolff’s credentials without question — and he was proving as good as his word. ‘There are twenty-five thousand of us here. Do you speak German? If you do risk speakin’ English, be sure to wear this,’ and he’d pushed a stars-and-stripes lapel badge across his desk. ‘They’re mad at us for sellin’ the British ammunition, so expect some abuse. Oh, and don’t speak it on the telephone unless you want the police at your door.’

The city was in the grip of a fever. Suspicion. Exhortations to be watchful for ‘the enemy within’ were papered on every station wall, to lampposts and kiosks. Symptoms were as uncertain as those ascribed to the medieval plague. Who is he? Where is he? Hiding in the bread queue or behind a newspaper in the works canteen, swinging from a tram strap, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker who betrayed himself with a careless word, just a suggestion of doubt about the conduct of the war?

Englishmen generally considered Berlin dreary and compared it unfavourably with London or Paris. Too modern, they liked to say, its buildings too pompous, or functional, like factories, the streets and parks too well ordered; a city without a soul. They were patronising in a way that only Englishmen know how to be. It wasn’t Berlin they disliked but the new German Empire. They were afraid. In the years before the war it was brash, confident and, if you knew where to look, colourful. But within hours of stepping from the train, Wolff had sensed a sadder and a stiffer city.

Files of soldiers passed his hotel every day with ‘London’ chalked on their gun carriages and Berliners still cheered and sang ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, but only because they felt they ought to. On his second day Wolff had visited a department store and queued at a counter behind an old man buying a black armband for his coat.

‘My grandson,’ he’d explained to the shop assistant.

Everyone blamed the British. War with France was almost the natural order of things but no one Wolff spoke to — businessmen, waiters, cab drivers, the old Baron who lived in rooms at the Minerva and spent his evenings talking to strangers in the saloon — no one understood why the British were at war with Germany.

‘Why do they want to destroy us?’ the policemen who visited his hotel wanted to know, ‘and why are you Americans helping them?’

‘Because they’re frightened of you,’ Wolff told them. ‘Frightened of losing their Empire.’

The police wanted to know his business. Two solid representatives of the city constabulary carrying out their routine check. Wolff was used to fear. It was a thick band about his chest that loosened and tightened according to circumstance: like the old torture Peine forte et dure . Since Turkey, Wolff understood better than anyone that there was only so much a man could bear before he was suffocated by the weight pressing upon him. This time his legend was a good one but would he be able to look them in the eye and, if he did, would it be a hunted look?

In the event, he was calm enough to arouse no more than the curiosity that was his object. De Witt’s past was waiting to be teased from him by someone in authority — at the right time.

‘The British are decadent,’ he told the policemen. ‘Germany will win this war,’ and they were satisfied with the sincerity of his loathing. After their visit he was ready to make contact with the informer.

It was a fifty-pfennigs-a-day sort of place in a quiet residential street. An elderly man with an unruly shock of grey hair was planting spring flowers in the window boxes on either side of the front door. It was the sort of risk Wolff had revelled in taking once, but as he opened the guest-house gate he was conscious only of being afraid. The outcome was more incalculable than a spinning chamber in a game of Russian roulette. He nodded to the gardener, knocked at the door and handed over to the landlady a note for Christensen. No need to cross the threshold, no need for more than a few words, no police. He felt foolish when it was over, and it was over in less than two minutes. Click. He’d pulled the trigger and heard the hammer fall on an empty chamber.

A reply was delivered to the Minerva the following day. Christensen would meet him beside the fountain in the Spittelmarkt at six o’clock in the afternoon. He was to carry a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt. The bellboy brought him the paper and he glanced through it at breakfast: stories of derring-do from the Front, bellicose commentaries exhorting the people to more sacrifices, German soldiers repelling British soldiers in France, Russian soldiers retreating before German ones in Poland. Who could be sure that any of it was true? But there were a few more column inches on the rifles captured before they could reach the Boer rebels in South Africa. The paper’s source could reveal that these were manufactured by Westinghouse in America.

‘We’re seeking clarification from Washington,’ Boyd told him when he visited the embassy later that morning. ‘If it’s proved, I’m afraid it might make your position here difficult.’ Wolff agreed that it might.

By six o’clock the junior employees of the state bank and business houses of the Spittelmarkt were streaming across the small square to the U-bahn and home. Christensen stood out like a sore thumb. Wolff watched him from the tram stop as he rolled round the fountain in search of a man holding the Tageblatt . He was a big fellow with large hands and stoker’s shoulders that shifted in his jacket like a crab adjusting to a new shell. Plain enough he wasn’t a gentleman, but there was something studied in his gestures, his expression, in the trouble he’d taken with his appearance, that suggested he wanted to be. The Spittelmarkt was too busy to be sure that he’d come alone. Wolff watched him saunter over to the newspaper kiosk, glance at the headlines, then turn back to the fountain. He didn’t notice a prosperous-looking businessman who was hurrying across the square with his arm raised for a cab. They cannoned into each other and the businessman was thrown sideways and on to one knee. Christensen bent at once to offer a helping hand but the man brushed it angrily aside and shouted something abusive. A documents case he’d been carrying under his arm had burst open and his papers were flapping about him like fish on the deck of a trawler. It was perfect. Crossing behind a tram, Wolff began weaving quickly through the crowd towards them, newspaper under his arm.

‘Not like that, you oaf,’ the businessman shouted, his face puce with rage. Christensen was trying to catch some of the papers beneath his boot.

A young clerk stopped to pick up one or two sheets and a hotel porter in the livery of the Continental was scrambling about the stones too.

‘Hold this, would you,’ Wolff commanded, pointedly thrusting the end of the Tageblatt into Christensen’s side. He obeyed without question, as he would have done on his last ship. Wolff took a few steps and bent to scoop up two of the businessman’s documents. He could sense that Christensen was watching him closely and turning back he caught his eye at once. There was an enquiring expression on his face and he lifted the newspaper a little in acknowledgement.