Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

As the girl served Hinsch his beer, his eyes wandered proprietorially from her face, down her long neck to her chest — daringly décolleté, of course — and he tipped her like a regular.

‘An engineer, you say?’ He paused to wipe froth from his mouth with the back of his chubby hand. ‘Know about ships?’

‘I’ve worked my passage a few times,’ Wolff replied coolly, ‘when things were difficult. Know my way about an engine room, know why the Titanic sank.’

‘Ah, very good.’ Rintelen picked up the champagne and leant forward to fill his glass. ‘But would you have been able to sink her?’

‘A little thought, a lot of explosive.’ He shrugged. ‘No such thing as unsinkable, is there? Some of us never forgot that.’

‘Easy for the right man, perhaps,’ Rintelen sucked his teeth, ‘sadly, there are too many of the wrong sort.’

‘Too many stupid buggers,’ barked Hinsch.

‘Good people are not easy to find,’ Rintelen observed with a weariness that suggested he’d tried.

With that, they seemed to have said all they wanted to say about ships and explosives and began to crawl through de Witt’s life again, family, war, his work — ‘the Dutch East Indies, you say, and after that?’ He’d told the story so often that it was his own; like flicking a switch in the brain, his memories now, every taste, every smell, the dust of the Highveld scouring his face, engrained in his pores.

‘But now you must enjoy yourself,’ Rintelen said when he had finished scribbling in his pocketbook. Meet Clara. Clara would be his friend for the rest of the evening. ‘She’s a good girl,’ Hinsch whispered like a beery pimp. Poor Clara. Slender, twenties, small breasts, sweet round face, tired combat eyes. Too bored and drunk to be their spy. What would Martha Held say about the drink? It wasn’t good for business. But Clara could still manage it, sweating and groaning, faking it for a few dollars; it just took practice. The lie was all part of the service, that’s why it was a profession. Wolff knew the routine, knew the tricks, goodness, wasn’t it the same? Didn’t the Bible say so somewhere? Clara could probably perform in her sleep. But not with him, not this time.

‘Brought up by a God-fearing mother,’ he whispered to her, removing her fingers. ‘Here,’ and he offered her a few dollars.

‘No, no,’ she protested, placing her hand firmly back on his thigh.

‘Yes, yes, take it. And, Clara…’ His gaze drew her attention to Hinsch. ‘Stay away from him. He isn’t a nice man.’

She didn’t understand but smiled weakly and took his money.

The clock in the lobby at the Algonquin struck two while he was collecting his key at the desk. In the corridor, a shine was placing the shoes he’d cleaned at their owners’ doors. Cowboy boots for a country boy; a young couple at 903, small feet, perhaps Italian or Spanish; and Wolff’s neighbour was an Englishman, his shoes from a Jermyn Street shop. At his own door he bent and ran fingertips over the carpet: the grit he’d sown was trodden deeply into the pile and the hair he’d fixed across the lock was on the step.

The following morning he sent a coded message to Mr Ponting at the Consulate office in Whitehall Street. They met in the dark corner of a downtown restaurant a few hours later, and he told the naval attaché the little he’d learnt at Martha’s.

‘I suppose Rintelen is checking your story,’ Gaunt observed, stirring a third spoonful of sugar into his coffee.

‘Most likely.’

‘It’s watertight, don’t worry.’

Wolff frowned. C had used the same words before the fiasco in Turkey.

‘Something the matter?’ Gaunt asked.

‘He has a monstrously high opinion of himself, but he isn’t a fool. Perfect English. Energetic. Can’t keep still. Likes everything to be “correct”. Let’s hope he’s in a hurry.’ Picking up his coffee spoon, Wolff peered at his reflection in the back of it. ‘If he is, I’ll get the job. If he isn’t, he’ll kill me.’

‘You sound a little windy,’ Gaunt scoffed. ‘Don’t overdo it. Look, got an address? I’ll put someone on to him, Hinsch too.’

Wolff smiled. ‘He’s your neighbour — staying at the Yacht Club.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Gaunt choked on his coffee. ‘He’s a German.’

Wolff decided to prepare for the job by moving somewhere more discreet. He settled on a comfortable first-floor apartment in a red-brick house on the Lower East Side, at the edge of Kleindeutschland . The landlord was a Jew from Lvov, his neighbour a voluble Italian; there was a Russian family upstairs and a bent old lady from Posen lived on the ground floor with her cats. Not a patch on the Algonquin but the sort of place an out-of-work engineer counting his coin might wish to rent for a while. Shabby but respectable, furnished with dark old-world pieces his landlord had accepted as rent from the previous tenants. Terms included a maid and a kosher meal if he wanted it, typically lokshen , gefilte fish, or something made with chopped liver. His sitting-room window looked over East 5th, one broad stone stair to the front of the house, fire escape into a dark courtyard at the rear, private telephone in the hall, sturdy locks and a bolt.

Before he left the hotel, he sent notes to Ponting and Gaché. The first telephone call he made from the apartment was to Miss Laura McDonnell.

‘I thought you would choose somewhere…’

‘Smarter?’

‘Downtown.’

‘Yes.’

The line crackled for a few seconds, then they began to speak at once.

‘I interrupted, please,’ he said.

‘Only that Nina, Mrs Newman, thought — thinks you’ve forgotten her.’

He smiled with secret pleasure. ‘Sorry. You know, looking for the apartment, making contact with business people…’

‘I’m sure she understands… when you have the time.’

He said he would write to her at once, and he hoped Miss McDonnell remembered her promise to act as his guide to the city. She said her name was still Laura and it wasn’t a promise — but she agreed to meet him nonetheless.

Coats and scarves already, a breezy blue September day with white horses in the bay, struggling to hold the Tribune open, the front page full of the first British gas attack in France.

‘It isn’t the city,’ she said, when he proposed they catch the ferry to Coney Island. ‘I thought you wanted a guide to the city. What about Liberty Island? Have you been?’

‘No,’ he lied.

They caught the ferry from Battery Park pier.

‘Oh dear, if only I’d known we would be on the river,’ she declared, trying to hold her hair beneath her hat.

‘You’re regretting it already.’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a teasing frown.

She made him climb to the top of the green lady so she could number the buildings on the Manhattan skyline from the balcony. He was happy to listen, prompting her with a question from time to time even when he knew the answer. She was conscious that he was gazing at her and tried not to catch his eye. Why have you come, Laura? he wondered; did they tell you to? But his instinct told him ‘no’, that she was smart but guileless, and intrigued by Mr Jan de Witt.

‘The first of the New World,’ she said as they strolled round the platform, their heads bent into the wind. ‘You know, my father says he cried when he saw this statue from his ship. Ah, you smile. Sentimental Irishman, is that it? Doing what he was supposed to do? My father doesn’t cry.’

‘Look.’ He pointed to the flame above their heads. ‘A bit battered and tarnished, isn’t it?’

‘You’re joking, I see,’ she observed tartly. ‘Bit of an old cynic. Does Roger know?’