Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Storm clouds were rolling in from the Atlantic, towering grey and shifting in an awkward image of the city. Different faces in the windows of the restaurant, a police officer strolling along the sidewalk, more cars, more people moving with purpose. There would be rain. Hard rain.

‘Prickly customer,’ Thwaites declared. ‘Thinks we’re taking over his patch.’

‘Aren’t we?’

‘I suppose we are. But it’s time to get on the front foot here.’

Thwaites had friends in America. He’d spent ten years in New York, most of them as a foreign affairs adviser for a newspaper. Charming, self-deprecating, the sort of upper-middle-class Englishman who went down well with everyone from millionaire steel magnates to State Department secretaries; a cocktail-party regular, a particular favourite on the Long Island summer circuit, a guest and special companion of the celebrated beauty, Edna May Lewisohn. How special was a matter of speculation because Thwaites’ American friends knew him to be the soul of discretion — and in affairs of the heart at least he could be. Wolff had met him in Washington before the war and was so impressed by the ease with which he worked the room that he’d mentioned his name to the Bureau. If that meant he was responsible for drawing him into C’s web, he was heartily sorry.

‘I think we should work with the people here,’ Thwaites continued. ‘Get them onside. Sir William feels the same. Your Captain Gaunt seems to wants to do it alone…’

‘He isn’t my captain, Norman.’

‘No, of course not, sorry old boy.’ He waved his cigarette at Wolff apologetically. ‘Damn fool nonsense. Look, there’s a chap called Tunney in charge of the Police Department Bomb Squad; might have a word with him. Keep your name out of it, of course. Any objections?’

‘Koenig…’ Wolff had forgotten. ‘I think the police are watching him already.’

‘I’ll ask old Tunney, he’ll know.’ Rising with the help of his stick, Thwaites limped across the room to a drinks tray. ‘I’m having one, you? Know it’s a little early but, well… whisky all right?’ He was perspiring with the effort.

Wolff said that whisky was fine. For a while neither of them spoke. Thwaites was taking his time with the drinks. Across the street a storekeeper was rolling his awning, the wind had taken a little girl’s hat and it tumbled along the sidewalk with her mother bent almost double in pursuit. Sharp splashes on the window.

‘They let you down rather,’ Thwaites said at last, his back still turned. ‘Turkey, I mean. We all thought so.’

He glanced over his shoulder at Wolff, then hobbled back to his chair with both glasses, his stick hanging from his arm.

‘Leaving you in the hands of those savages all that time. Here…’ he placed Wolff’s whisky on an occasional table, almost obliging him to take the seat opposite.

Wolff didn’t want his sympathy, he wanted to forget — at least, he wanted to try.

Thwaites persisted. ‘Made all of us angry,’ he observed with a shake of the head. ‘There but for the grace — what? Didn’t think they’d leave you high and dry — not the old man, not Cumming.’

‘Drop it, would you.’

‘It’s just — but if you say—’

‘Yes,’ he interrupted emphatically. ‘Yes, I do. Yes, please.’

Thwaites nodded slightly. ‘All right.’

Wolff stared at him for a few seconds longer, then walked to the chair and sat down. ‘What was Gallipoli like?’ he asked to fill the silence.

‘Well, you know Johnny Turk.’ Thwaites frowned and studied his glass for a few seconds before taking a long pull of whisky. ‘Don’t care for your Mussulman. Never have.’ Thwaites didn’t ‘care for’ anyone with a skin darker than his own and assumed other gentlemen felt the same way. ‘A shambles, a bloody shambles,’ he muttered disconsolately; ‘the Dardanelles. Damn fool idea. I was lucky to escape with this in May,’ he said, slapping the stick against his boot. ‘The boys in my battalion say it was worse in the summer — hot as hell…’ He took a little more whisky and swallowed hard. ‘It isn’t any better in France, is it?

The front had settled on the city and gusts of rain were rattling the window like bursts of gunfire. They sat in silence, Thwaites twisting his glass distractedly on the arm of his chair. The memory of that fly-blown foreign field where bits of Englishmen were left jigging on the wire had drawn the light from him.

‘What a pair we are,’ he said at last, lifting his glass and his chin. ‘Another?’

‘No, thank you, Norman.’

‘I think I will,’ he said, struggling to his feet again. ‘Sure? No, well…’ He poured himself another stiff one, his hand a little unsteady, then hobbled back to his chair. ‘We’ll win the war — with the Empire, with our friends here in America. Salute,’ he said, raising his glass to Wolff. ‘Trouble is, a lot of chaps are going to die before we do. We’re too good at it, aren’t we?’ He slumped heavily into his chair and settled his leg in front of him. ‘Killing, I mean.’

Wolff took another cigarette, tapping it lightly on his case. ‘I don’t know if we’ll win,’ he said, bending over the flame from his lighter, ‘and I can’t remember why it’s important, can you?’

Thwaites may have said something about little countries like Belgium and international law. He may have said something of democracy and an end to autocracy. Then he said nothing for a while, sipping the question in the gathering gloom of the room.

‘Why?’ he muttered at last. ‘Why?’ Bent forward, elbows on his knees, holding his head and his gaze to the carpet somewhere between his boots. ‘Why? For a boy called Roberts out there in no-man’s-land who will always be crying for his mother; and for Lowe, the little Durham miner whom I brush from my jacket every morning; and the baker’s son, Rees, who gives me a startled smile if I jostle a stranger on a train. Yes, Private Brown — he was so very sorry for the trouble he put me to, dying in the piss and the mud far from home. Yes…’ he raised his eyes to Wolff. ‘That’s why it’s important to me.’

Wolff gave a little nod and drew deeply on his cigarette.

‘A thinking chap should wonder, yes,’ Thwaites continued, settling back in his chair. ‘Bound to have a few doubts, and you’ve been ploughing a lonely furrow here,’ he smiled weakly. ‘Still, have to avoid self-pity.’

Wolff leant forward to grind the end of his cigarette in an ashtray. ‘I probably deserve that rebuke.’

They spoke for a time of the new arrangements: Thwaites was to take over the contact, run things the Bureau’s way, with dead drops, a postbox, a safe apartment, and new names. ‘I thought Mr Rogers would suit you. I’ll be something German — Schmidt.’ From time to time, his man would make deliveries. ‘Not a good valet but a stout fellow and very discreet. With me at Gallipoli,’ he explained. Gaunt and the Service politics they would leave to Wiseman.

‘And I almost forgot this,’ he said, as they were standing at the door. Bending awkwardly, he removed a large envelope from the bag at his feet and offered it to Wolff. ‘Letters from home, courtesy of our chief,’ he smiled sardonically. ‘You see, he has your best interests at heart.’

Wolff paid off the cab a few blocks short, conscious that someone watching his apartment might find and question the driver. The rain bounced on the sidewalk and seeped insidiously through his mackintosh, running round the brim of his hat into his face, the rumble and flash of the storm loosed like that black tide on a distant shore. Kinder. Splashing softly on his neck and hands. Thank God I’m alive and in New York, he thought. He felt an urge to run, sploshing with abandon through puddles, but he didn’t because he was a spy and even small steps he took with care. The East Street gutters were washing across the sidewalk and the stallholders had abandoned their barrows for the shelter of doorways and the tables at Mr Romeo’s Diner. From time to time a motor car crawled by with its driver hunched over the wheel, and a sad-looking shire horse was shivering between the shafts of a cart at the grocer’s. As Wolff approached his apartment building he took in the opposite side of the street with the ease of one who has learnt to see everything but look at nothing. Five workmen were standing beneath the eaves of the library, their backs pressed to the wall as the rain cascaded from the roof in a curtain. Twenty yards further on, a short man in a derby hat and smart overcoat was conspicuously failing to make himself inconspicuous. Back half turned, peering furtively at the name above a tenement bell, blind or inept or both, he was breaking the first dark commandment: The good spy will hide among the ordinary brethren.