Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

5. In return, Irish American leaders undertake to provide men and assistance for a sabotage campaign against British interests in the United States and Canada, the sabotage to cover all kinds of factories for war materials, in particular ammunition, railroads, dams, bridges, banks and other buildings. The German Embassy in Washington is not to be compromised by direct contact with those involved in sabotage plans, which are to be handled by Captain von Rintelen.

6. Following the decree of 5 November 1914 Nr. 8525 IIIb, I herewith order that Captain of the Reserve, Nadolny of Section P, will take over the handling of this matter.

‘It’s word for word?’ Wolff asked again. His voice cracked a little. ‘Word for word?’

‘Yes, didn’t I say so? From Falkenhayn.’

‘Yes.’ Wolff folded it carefully into his pocket.

‘It’s good — isn’t it?’ prompted Christensen.

Wolff smiled at him. A few minutes earlier he had wanted to finish their arrangement. Now he was hungry for approbation. Knowing how to please was his living.

‘It’s good, Adler, yes. It’s very good. First rate.’

It was worth the forty. More. Much more. Even a tight bastard like C would say so.

SHE’D TAKEN HABER’S army revolver from the desk, stepped into the garden and shot herself in the chest. The boy had found her by the light of an almost full moon. His face was still covered in her blood three hours later, eyes wide, uncomprehending, ignored by everyone.

They had carried his mother into the house but she’d died before the doctor could arrive. Nadolny was dining with the Foreign Minister and Count Blücher when the police rang to notify him. He made an excuse and left at once. He didn’t care a fig for Frau Haber. In so far as he’d formed an opinion of her, it was of a clever but hysterical woman whose outbursts were distracting the professor from his work. She had solved that problem.

It was a little before midnight when he arrived at the house. No one had thought to clean her blood from the steps or the porch, and it trailed along the hall into the drawing room. Haber was in his study with a police inspector, ashen faced, chewing on his cigar, puzzled and a little shocked but in control of his emotions. One of the desk drawers was open and he was showing the inspector where he had kept the revolver.

‘My dear Professor, I’m so very sorry,’ Nadolny said, advancing across the carpet to greet him.

‘Count…’

‘No, please don’t get up.’

He pulled a chair closer to the desk and listened as the inspector asked his questions. ‘She said she couldn’t bear it — I’d betrayed her, and I’d betrayed science.’ Haber gave a heavy sigh, pressing the ball of his thumb to his forehead. There were more angry words, it seemed; a nightly occurrence in the week since Haber’s return from Ypres.

‘Shouting in front of the servants. I was at my wits’ end. “Gas is a perversion and you’re a criminal,” she screamed at me when Baron Kiehlmann came to dinner. He must have thought she was mad.’

‘My dear fellow, she was unwell, that much is obvious,’ replied Nadolny carefully.

‘Then, tonight, she begged me to stop. Begged me. “Stop this madness,” she said. I was leaving for the Russian Front in the morning, you see, our first release in the east. But the tears, the threats…’

There was nothing for the inspector to discover. Nadolny impressed upon him the need for total secrecy: nothing in writing, his men to speak to no one, the servants to receive the same instructions. Frau Haber was very ill, he said; the war was having a terrible effect on people; another casualty, a tragic business.

‘There’s the funeral to arrange. Can you send a message to my unit?’ Haber asked when the policeman had gone. He was slumped in his chair as if the stuffing had been pulled from him, his uniform jacket crumpled, ash on his sleeve.

‘My dear fellow, I’ll make the arrangements.’ Nadolny patted his arm. ‘When is your train?’

Haber looked at him for a moment, then away. ‘No, Count, I have to stay. Hermann, my son, he found her, you know. He’s only twelve.’

Nadolny stood up and walked slowly about the room, stopping to gaze at the thick green spines on the shelves. The only work of literature was a copy of Heine’s Buch der Lieder . There wasn’t much poetry in the professor and he guessed the book must have belonged to his wife. Yes, her name was on the flyleaf and the inscription: To Fritz on his birthday, with the hope that these songs will touch his heart.

‘Captain Haber, it’s your duty as a German officer,’ he said, slipping the book back on the shelf. ‘The Field Marshal won’t attempt to break the line without a gas attack. After Ypres, it’s only a matter of time before the Russians start issuing their soldiers with respirators.’

Nadolny walked back to stand above Haber, his hand on the back of the chair.

‘It’s a question of the maximum tactical advantage.’

‘And Hermann?’ Haber asked, looking up at him uncertainly.

‘You have family? Then I will arrange for Hermann to visit them. Now when is your train?’

The boy was sitting alone in a corner of the drawing room, his gaze fixed on the revolver. The police had left the weapon on a table just out of his reach. At least they’d had the sense to unload it, Nadolny thought, picking it up and wrapping it in his coat.

‘You must go to bed, Hermann.’ Haber held out his hand. ‘Come.’

Was it the first time they had spoken since the death of the boy’s mother? Nadolny wondered.

He watched Haber lead his son upstairs, then instructed the servants to have the car ready at six o’clock. A maid was on her knees scrubbing the steps in the moonlight when he left: everything would be in order by the morning.

Clara Haber’s death wasn’t reported in the newspapers. Her neighbours were instructed to forget the crack of the shot and the policemen at her door in the night. Her husband’s colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute knew better than to ask questions, and there was no need for an autopsy. So Frau Dr Haber was buried without fuss in a quiet corner of the cemetery at Dahlem. The small congregation of family and a few friends heard the pastor speak of her role as the wife of a great chemist and as a mother. It was just as the professor would have wished it to be. It was a pity that important duties kept him at the Front: ‘a noble sacrifice,’ the pastor remarked in his sermon. Nor was Count Nadolny able to pay his respects. As the final prayer was recited, a clerk was escorting him along a corridor at the Military Veterinary Academy.

Professor Troester was sitting in silhouette with his back to a long window, sunlight pouring across his desk, dappling the polished floor and the glass cabinets that lined two sides of his office.

‘Does Doctor Dilger know?’ Nadolny asked, dispensing with pleasantries.

‘I haven’t told him,’ Troester replied defensively. ‘Does it matter? The woman was mad.’

‘I think it would be wise to say nothing. I hope the good doctor will be in America by the end of the month.’

‘He’s grown his first cultures,’ Troester picked a handbell from the edge of his desk and rang it; ‘but it isn’t difficult in a laboratory environment.’

With a tinkle of china cups a clerk came into the room and placed the tray on a bureau.

‘How much equipment will he need?’ Nadolny enquired.

‘Nothing out of the ordinary — nothing an American doctor won’t be able to acquire. Coffee?’ He nodded to the clerk.

‘Setting up a laboratory won’t be difficult, but he will have to carry phials of the bacilli to America — that is troubling. If his luggage is searched and they’re discovered, well, you can imagine the consequences…’