Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘Drink?’ Wolff asked. ‘Only whisky, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ve got everything sewn up here.’ Even after twenty years in the Navy there was the trace of a colonial accent. ‘I need to be kept informed — clear lines of sight — understand?’

‘Perfectly.’ Wolff offered him a tumbler. ‘I’m anxious not to bugger things up — I’m anxious to stay alive.’

‘Too anxious, I hear…’ he interjected maliciously; ‘at least, if that business in Turkey is anything to go by.’

Wolff settled in the only armchair, casually balancing his glass on his knee. ‘Trying to put me in my place?’

‘They say you gave them Chambers and some of the Turks.’

Wolff sipped his whisky and swallowed hard. Was that how they boiled it down? Bureau chap squealed: a poor show. ‘I think we should talk about why I’m here,’ he said.

‘I know why you’re here,’ Gaunt snapped at him. ‘Who do you think sorted out your cover, squared the people at Westinghouse, the leaks to the newspapers…’

‘It was an excellent story,’ Wolff raised his glass in salute, ‘worked a treat. It’s kept me alive — so far. Thank you.’

He gazed at Wolff, trying to decide if this small peace offering was enough to satisfy his injured pride. ‘All right, what do you need?’ he asked, pulling his chair closer.

Wolff took the letter from his jacket and offered it between thumb and forefinger. ‘Recognise the name?’

‘No. But West 15th, that’s Martha Held’s place — for Germans with the money to spend on parties and pretty girls. Their military attaché, von Papen, uses the place when he’s here. If you’re thinking of going, watch your step.’

Not everyone who could afford to pay for the good time Martha promised her guests was a gentleman, Gaunt said. Some of the regulars were merchant captains, their ships bottled up in East Coast ports by the British naval blockade. ‘Met Dr Albert?’

Wolff said he hadn’t had the pleasure.

‘He’s their purser. Once a week, a procession of these captains visits his office on Broadway. I wager they’ll have something to do with your sabotage campaign.’

Albert paid the bills; the orders came from someone else. Gaunt’s people were hearing whispers of a new ‘fellow on the block’. ‘Perhaps this Rintelen or Delmar,’ he observed; ‘anyway, the new man seems to have put old Papen’s nose out.’

‘The military attaché?’

‘Queer bird. Gave me a present when I arrived in Washington. Got to have some sympathy…’

Wolff looked at him quizzically.

‘Fellow from Berlin pushing him aside,’ Gaunt explained with a rueful smile. ‘The enemy and his friends in Congress are doing all they can to keep America out of the war, sucking up to anyone with an axe to grind against the Empire; every bloody tribesman between here and Timbuktu,’ he remarked with a disparaging grunt. An attempt had been made to stir up the ‘bloody’ Irish on the docks; there had been a few suspicious fires on ships carrying rifles and shells to the Allies, an explosion at an ordnance factory in New Jersey. Gaunt had recruited a network of runners to keep an eye on the docks: ‘The enemy have got our Irish; we’ve got their Czechs and Poles.’ Wolff could call on them for assistance, ‘but you come to me first, old boy. They’ll do the job for you, trained them myself — if you need someone followed or frightened, drop a fellow in a hole, and here…’ he got up and stepped over to the table ‘…your chaps asked me to find one…’ — lifting the trigger guard of the revolver with his forefinger and swinging it back and forth like a steel cradle. ‘American, I’m afraid. A little clumsy. Careful who you point it at, we don’t want to upset our hosts.’ He placed it back on the table. ‘You’ll have a job hiding that in a jacket.’

‘I won’t take it to dinner.’

‘You have the telephone number at Whitehall Street?’

‘Not on the telephone.’

‘Then a coded note to Mr Ponting , ’ he said, reaching for his overcoat. ‘I’ll leave by the fire escape. Can jump back when I reach the first floor.’

For a few seconds, he listened at the door. Satisfied, he turned the handle and was opening it carefully when Wolff reached forward to close it again.

‘One last thing,’ he whispered, looking Gaunt in the eye. ‘Your gypsy, the fellow who picked me up this afternoon…’

He offered a taut smile. ‘Careless of him — just to be sure you come to no harm, you understand.’

‘Well, call him off. It isn’t easy judging friends from enemies in this business… sir. ’

HIS SISTER JOSEPHINE found the house in Chevy Chase. Nothing grand; two-storey brick colonial, a living room, parlour, small backyard — and the basement for a laboratory. An unremarkable house in an ordinary street, in a neighbourhood they were still building, where no one had lived long enough to be nosy. Strangers pretending they were friends, fresh faces, fixed American smiles, shallow backyard conversations: Chevy Chase was perfect. A stone’s throw from downtown Washington, six miles from Mr Wilson in the White House, but he may as well have been on the moon. Affairs of state troubled no one on 33rd Street, where life in August was lived at the plodding pace of the milkman’s horse. Nor did the neighbours care about the war; wasn’t Wilson promising to keep them out of it? Dilger might have hidden from it too — best Berlin suits hanging in the wardrobe — if he hadn’t brought it with him in a hard leather bag.

It troubled him less because America didn’t feel like ‘home’. He had belonged to her aboard the ship, sleeping, waking, worrying if he was doing his duty or committing a crime. Symptoms he diagnosed later as cabin fever. He’d drunk too much, gambled too much because he was a German and he was an American.

‘Welcome home,’ one of the officers said to him as they steamed into New York.

‘Good to be home,’ he replied, although he was simmering quietly with anger.

From the Rotterdam ’s rail, he counted a dozen enemy freighters in the bay, a dozen more along the waterfront, and as he drew closer he heard, then saw, the cranes swinging boxes of matériel aboard, and a column of lorries from the ordnance factories upstate, tankers, colliers, a bulker loaded with grain, longshoremen driving cattle from a train into the gaping side of a White Star steamer. The spirit of free enterprise, he told himself, but he resented it nonetheless. It wasn’t just a question of money. The newspapers were still full of the Lusitania , the sympathies of most with the Allies. There was barely a mention of the blockade to starve Germans into submission — women and children too. Dilger felt like an alien, and perhaps he wanted to feel like one, reducing America to childhood memories, the past to a foreign country, everything simple, everything clear, free to execute his mission with purpose. By the time he reached Washington he was cured of his cabin fever and able to ask his sister, with the passion he’d felt in Frau Haber’s drawing room, ‘So what do you think of your German brother?’

‘So proud,’ Josephine whispered as she hugged him, so clever, so handsome, such beautiful old-world manners. She spoke German like an American these days. It was six years since his last visit — the summer he’d spent studying at Johns Hopkins — but she had written to him every few months. ‘I’m here to see you all,’ he told her because the less she knew, the safer she would be. On his second day they visited the cemetery and held hands before their father’s stone. ‘Oh Anton, he would have been so proud,’ she said again, wiping away tears with a tiny lace handkerchief that was not up to the task. ‘Oh, how hateful America is becoming — someone spat at Mrs König last week…’ and she told him she was pleased the old Civil War hero hadn’t lived to see the country he served with distinction turn its back on their Fatherland.