Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

She folded his clothes and placed them neatly on a chair. Then she took off her silk dress and put it carefully on a hanger on the back of the door. Naked on the threadbare rug before him, a little spindly, a little knock-kneed, with gooseflesh on her arms and thighs, and an uncertain, almost innocent smile. Perhaps that was his imagination.

‘I’m to look after you,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘There’s more wine — if you want it…’

‘No. No. Thank you.’ Someone should protect her, comfort her, offer her some tenderness.

‘Lie back.’

Her burgundy bedspread smelt of cheap cologne, but not enough to mask the stale sweat.

‘No. Lie beside me,’ he said softly. ‘Here. Just here.’

But she didn’t lie beside him because it wasn’t part of her routine. Instead she fucked him, bumping him like a German horse.

‘Good?’ she asked, collapsing beside him at last.

He brushed a strand of hair from her small face. ‘Fine. Thank you.’

He didn’t need to pay, she said — unless he wanted to offer more. His friend Gaché had settled everything.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING he woke with a wooden mouth and an agonising sense of self-disgust. He was still nursing it and a strong coffee in his spartan sitting room when the telephone rang.

It was Laura. ‘Mr Devoy has taken you at your word.’ Her warmth made him feel worse. Of course he betrayed her every day, that was his job, but going with one of Martha’s tarts, well, he felt terrible.

‘The leaflets, silly,’ she prompted. ‘I can meet you at the Hoboken ferry terminal at ten.’ The line crackled expectantly. ‘It’s to be our largest meeting so far.’ She was willing him to say, ‘See you there,’ but he was glad he wasn’t obliged to. Something out of the blue, a business meeting, he explained, not Gaché, no, ordinary work of the sort he might mention to the neighbours. It wasn’t his best performance because he found it harder lying to women he admired, although he had had plenty of practice. Laura didn’t disguise her disappointment and he admired her even more for it and felt another intense pang of regret.

Tired brown eyes in the mirror, struggling with a tie, it was a morning for reflection, a morning when the heart didn’t seem quite tough enough. Men learn to live with suffering and adversity until it breaks them, often suddenly. Sometimes it is the same with lies. Judgement is swift, his mother used to say with her scrawny forefinger raised, and he’d almost come to believe her in the impenetrable darkness of a Turkish cell. Every new lie a stone in a sack — like the one he’d carried on to the ship the night before. Sometimes he wasn’t conscious of its weight, sometimes he staggered beneath it — one day it would crush him. This morning his burden was a heavy one, and he was sure that was how it should be.

‘For God’s sake, man, you’re doing your duty. If you can’t love yourself more, learn at least to forgive yourself,’ C had chided him once. Pro Patria . Behind his desk, C was able to draw a thick straight line between the man and the lie. In the field it was easy to lose the line. The soldier stares down the barrel of his gun at a nameless face but the spy laughs, calls his enemy ‘friend’, makes love to, then betrays, his enemy . Wolff was glad there was enough left of who he used to be to feel sick about it, or was that simply the drink and the image he couldn’t shake off — of Clara counting her gratuity?

At a little before ten o’clock he caught a taxicab as far as Madison and, thankful for the clear air, walked the last few blocks to the Prince George. Satisfied he didn’t have company, he crossed the lobby to the elevators and took one to the fifth. The doors opened on a bellhop balancing half a dozen pieces of luggage. Wolff nodded to him, stepped from the elevator, stopped, patted his jacket for a key, sighed heavily, then turned on to the stairs as if intent on returning to the first floor. On the third, he set off along the corridor to Mr Ponting’s suite.

‘You’re late,’ growled Gaunt. The room was full of tobacco smoke and for no obvious reason the curtains were drawn conspiratorially. Rising from the couch, a dapper young man he didn’t recognise, and from the seat opposite, an old Secret Service Bureau lag he did.

Wolff looked Gaunt up and down pointedly. ‘Mr Ponting is a businessman.’ The damn fool had come to their meeting dressed in his naval attaché’s uniform, medal ribbons, all the trimmings.

Gaunt flushed angrily. ‘Clearing the mess you left us last night… Impertinent,’ he blustered. ‘There wasn’t time to change.’

‘There would be if it was your life at stake,’ replied Wolff coldly.

‘Lieutenant Wolff, isn’t it?’ interjected the young man, stepping forward sprightly to offer his hand. ‘William Wiseman. Expecting me, I hope.’ He smiled engagingly, his thick brown moustache bristling like a squirrel’s tail. ‘Cambridge, wasn’t it? Before my time; I was up at Jesus in ’03.’ Excepting his moustache, he didn’t look old enough to have been at university in ’03. Very English country house but with the quiet authority of one familiar with the world beyond its gates. He must have paid a good deal for his clothes. ‘You weren’t a boxer, were you?’ he enquired, with just the suggestion in his inflection of time spent in America.

‘A runner.’

‘I’m a boxer.’ Small and plump, he was no more than a hopeful bantam weight, but with a certain swagger. ‘Well, I used to be,’ he added with a regretful smile, the moustache twitching again. ‘Just a scrapper now.’

‘Yes, well…’ Gaunt wriggled his shoulders as if he could hear the echo of the same ringside bell, ready to square up to all-comers. ‘Sir William’s setting up shop here, Wolff. Reporting…’ he paused for particular emphasis ‘…to me.’

Wiseman raised his right eyebrow a little but said nothing.

‘Officially, Sir William will be our man from the Ministry of Munitions,’ Gaunt continued.

‘Unofficially, we’re Section V of MI 1(c). That’s what the War Office chaps are calling our bit of the Bureau. Everything has to be a number or letter, don’t it?’ observed Wiseman smoothly. ‘You, me, old Thwaites here,’ he turned to his companion; ‘we’ve become a traditional two-finger salute to the Hun.’

‘Glad you’re still alive, Wolff.’ Thwaites limped a few steps to greet him with a handshake and a slap on the back. ‘My leg?’ he asked, following Wolff’s gaze. ‘Gallipoli. Lucky they left me with it.’ He looked ten years older, thinner, his skin yellow like a smoke stain.

‘A couple of crocks,’ Wiseman joked, hand to his chest. ‘Touch of gas at Ypres. But the brain still works, eh, Thwaites?’

‘Can we get down to business?’ Gaunt grumbled.

First Wolff wanted to open the curtains, and yes, it was possible, perhaps because he asked so humbly. It was a dreary November day and cold on the street, the hotel doorman blowing vapour into his balled hands, a baker unloading warm rolls in front of the restaurant opposite, the faces of passers-by bent into their scarves; no parked motor cars, no one loitering, no one where they shouldn’t be.

‘Your ship, the Blackness — she sailed this morning,’ Gaunt called to him from a chair.

‘Christ!’ Wolff spun away from the window to face him. ‘Rintelen said she was leaving tomorrow.’ His heart fluttered like a tiny bird.

‘Then he lied,’ replied Gaunt, with something very like relish. ‘I got your message but it was too late. Late again…’; even this opportunity to score points he took without shame. ‘I couldn’t get my people aboard her.’