Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Mr James W. Gerard was otherwise engaged and his secretary was unable to find a time in his diary when he wouldn’t be. Wolff made his protest to a second counsellor who had no idea what he was talking about and urged him to ‘come back tomorrow’.

There was a telegram from Westinghouse at the hotel. The concierge at the desk handed it to him with a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression that suggested it had passed through the security police’s hands already. They had trailed him from the embassy and watched him take lunch at a restaurant near the Potsdamer Brücke. They’d caught the same tram to the Tiergarten, then wandered with him in the rain, and now they were dripping on the marble floor in the entrance hall of the Minerva.

In his rooms, Wolff hung up his hat and coat, lit a cigarette and stood at the window gazing down at the traffic in the Unter den Linden. He felt calm. The police were in no hurry. There would be time for a bath and perhaps dinner. Only when he’d finished his cigarette did he reach for the telegram. It was from a Mr J. P. Foote of New England Westinghouse, not in the customary commercial code but in hard telegraph capitals that communicated so much more than the two lines of type. ‘Look, reader,’ they screamed; ‘look how angry we are with you. We’re very angry.’

There was virtue in brevity. ‘Let your enemy embroider the rest,’ C liked to say. Wolff folded the telegram back into the envelope. It was funny how often C’s little expressions forced their way to the front of his mind.

By the time Wolff entered the hotel dining room it was almost full. There was no sign of the policemen who had followed him so doggedly. He asked for, and was shown to, a table against the wall. The waiter took his order of fish in a simple hollandaise and a small glass of wine but he had no appetite when it came. He sipped at the wine and smoked a cigarette and watched the other tables. Business sorts in white tie and tails for the most part, laughing, eating, drinking fine wine, two — perhaps three — of the diners bold enough to cock a snook at the new moral fervour of the nation and entertain expensive prostitutes. War was kind to a few.

At nine o’clock, Wolff wandered into the entrance hall and spoke briefly to the concierge about the weather and the latest news from the Front. He expected to see the policemen lounging on the leather benches between the pillars but they had gone. It looked as if they were going to leave him for another day. Damn, he cursed them under his breath; damn, damn, damn, why didn’t they get on with it? Once they had you, your senses and every thought were bent on the story and staying alive. Waiting was the worst thing by far. It was fear, not the pain, that had broken him in Turkey.

He considered taking the air, perhaps a walk to the river and the museum island, but it was bucketing down, and the concierge was sure the rain wouldn’t stop before morning. He would have to return to his room, to another cigarette, old newspapers, memories, and a small brandy at bedtime.

That the evening was going to end differently was plain the second the attendant slid the lift cage open on the fourth floor: the police Unteroffiziere were standing in the corridor and the door of his room was ajar.

‘Well?’ Wolff asked, walking purposefully towards them. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

They gazed at him blankly as if it wasn’t their place to say, and before he could repeat the question a young man with the hauteur of a recently commissioned officer stepped out of his room to stand beside them.

‘Who the devil are you?’

‘Herr de Witt?’ he asked, looking Wolff up and down very deliberately. ‘We are policemen.’ Then, after a pause, ‘But you know that. Passport, please.’

‘Don’t you have it?’

‘Find it for me.’

Wolff brushed past him into the sitting room. His passport was still in a drawer of the escritoire but not in quite the same place.

‘Here.’

The young officer pretended to scrutinise it but his eyes kept flitting to Wolff’s face. They were large and almost colourless, an unnervingly light shade of blue. Very like the eyes of a submariner Wolff knew who’d cracked and run amok at three hundred feet.

‘You must come with me,’ he said, slipping the passport into his overcoat.

‘At this hour?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you arresting me?’ Wolff sounded incredulous. ‘You’ve seen my passport.’

‘Some questions, that’s all,’ he ventured. ‘If you wouldn’t mind…’

He was struggling to be polite. It wasn’t expected of secret policemen. Wolff guessed he had been instructed not to break the head of a neutral.

‘I do mind,’ he said impatiently. They — whoever they turned out to be — would expect him to mind.

‘My orders are to fetch you,’ the officer glanced over his shoulder to his men, ‘whether you wish to co-operate or not…’

At the front of the hotel, an Opel with curtains across the windows, the driver in a uniform he didn’t recognise. The rain was bouncing off the pavement and dripping through the hotel awning on to Wolff’s hat and coat. It reminded him of the evening at Rules and the morning at the safe house in south London — the morning he’d caved like a wet paper bag. C had rubbed his hands and chuckled like Bunter with a cake. ‘They’ll be intrigued by Mr de Witt, we’ll make sure of that,’ he’d promised.

They escorted Wolff to the car in the rain and he sat in the back between their damp shoulders, trousers clinging to his legs. When they turned right along the canal and passed the palace he knew they were taking him to the Alexanderplatz Police Headquarters.

‘Make them tease it from you,’ C had observed. Wolff had listened to his plan at the window of the safe house, gazing across acres of wet slate. He remembered reaching for his handkerchief and catching the scent of Violet’s perfume.

‘Did you hear me?’ C had upbraided him. ‘Do you want to stay alive? Concentrate, for God’s sake.’ Concentrate.

The police driver cursed as he braked for a man scuttling across the road beneath an umbrella. It was almost ten o’clock but the lights were still on at Tietz’s on the north-west side of the square. In front of the department store, a banner with the slogan ‘God Punish England’ was wrapped around the statue of the city’s protector, the wind lifting it immodestly from her full figure. They turned and Wolff glimpsed the dome of the Police Headquarters over the driver’s shoulder. In the course of one of his operations he’d passed it on foot, resisting the urge to walk faster and walk away. He remembered wondering if there was a country in the world with a larger police station: 19,000 square yards of neo-Gothic brick, according to Baedeker — all you needed to know about the new German order. He had stepped from its shadow into the square confident that he would never be obliged to visit the place. In his early twenties he was sure of a lot of things.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, as the car drew up to the security barrier. The officer didn’t reply. A brief exchange with the guard and they were moving again, passing beneath a high arch into a courtyard, then on into another. ‘This is all part of the scheme,’ he told himself. ‘Keep your faith,’ C had said at their last meeting. But he’d said the same thing before the Turkish operation.

The car stopped at the bottom of broad steps and guards stepped forward to open the doors.

‘Out, out, out,’ the young officer shouted, a little hysterically.

Wolff smiled. Poor fellow’s wound even tighter than me, he thought. The anxiety and anger of others always made him feel calmer. Sliding across the seat, he stood in the rain with his hand on the door and with a sergeant at his back, grinding his cigarette into the gravel of the immaculately swept yard.