Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Violet stirred beside him and he craned forward to kiss her hair. It was damp with perspiration and smelt of her perfume and their sex. He traced the graceful curves of her body beneath the sheet with his fingertips. Would it be different if they were in love? He was sorry he’d upset her at the restaurant. He had wanted to protect her from scandal but all he’d succeeded in doing was inviting more. One day soon the post would travel up the line and there would be a letter for Major Curtis.

‘Letter for Major Curtis.’

Wolff could see him there, knee deep in Flanders mud, preparing to lead a raiding party, or in a funk hole under shellfire. There’d be a big smile on his face — there was always a smile on Reggie Curtis’s face. He’d tear the letter open with a dirty fingernail.

I feel it my duty to inform you, Sir, that your wife is fucking your old Cambridge chum, Sebastian Wolff. Yours respectfully, et cetera, et cetera.

Overcome with grief, he would lead a suicidal charge into no-man’s-land and be blown to small pieces by a Jack Johnson. Reggie could be the most obliging of fellows.

Wolff shuffled down the bed until his face was close to Violet’s, then leant forward to kiss her lightly on the lips. She smiled but didn’t open her eyes, and he felt a surge of tenderness for her. ‘Shameless hussy, I’ll miss you.’ He’d drunk deeply of her, intoxicated by her beguiling smile, the scent of her and the way she seemed to glide through life with effortless grace — those things and more. But it wasn’t enough. It was an illusion. He leant forward to kiss Violet again. He would go to Germany and, for as long as he could stay alive, he’d pretend to be someone else, someone who hadn’t broken and screamed in agony and begged them to stop. Wasn’t that his patriotic duty? Didn’t he owe his country that much? C had blown his whistle and he would go over the top with the rest.

THE TEMPERATURE FELL to freezing at dusk and by the time the ship was close to Christiania the mooring ropes were stiff with ice. Wolff watched from the promenade deck as the pricks of light on the banks of the fjord closed into the solid band of the city. The port was quieter than he’d known it before the war, with fewer vessels in passage or waiting at anchor for a berth. The enemy had been pinched out of Norwegian waters. The Helig Olav came alongside the pier beneath the curtain wall of the medieval fortress. Although it was late, there was a crowd at the Scandinavian America Line’s office to meet her and taxicabs and tradesmen’s vehicles were idling on the dockside road, their lamps winking a secret signal as people scurried between them on to the quay. Ropes made fast, stevedores began to swing gangways in place along her side. Wolff peeled his glove from the frozen rail and joined the queue of passengers shuffling towards the companionway.

‘You’re Mr Jan de Witt,’ C had informed him the day he accepted his assignment. ‘A Dutchman with a grudge.’

‘An Afrikaner?’

‘The same thing,’ he joked. ‘You crossed the Atlantic on an American passport — one of our chaps made the journey for you.’

‘You were certain I’d do as I was told then?’

‘You’re a naval officer, yes,’ he’d replied matter-of-factly. Rank and the service he dropped and raised with the incontinence of a tart’s knickers. ‘Our Mr de Witt works for New England Westinghouse and poses as an American, an engineer adventurer if you like, but on the wrong side. You’ll spend a week in Amsterdam visiting business partners — meetings have been arranged for you — then you’ll travel to Norway.’

The Norwegians were ‘our neutral allies’, C had said. It was possible to ‘arrange things’ in Christiania.

From the second-class crowd at the top of the gangway, Wolff watched an officer in the Norwegian border police examining the papers of passengers disembarking at the bottom. The elderly constable beside him had shrunk inside his greatcoat, his face frozen in an expression of complete indifference. Wolff paused to allow a young woman with two small girls to step in front of him, then followed them closely down the gangway. By some small miracle, the steward he’d entrusted with his case had fought his way off the ship and was negotiating with a cab driver.

The police officer demanded Wolff’s passport in perfect English, and turned its pages deliberately, holding the red State Department stamp to his eye. He was older than Wolff, with an intelligent face but the complexion, the small broken veins, of a heavy drinker.

‘Your name is de Witt?’ he asked at last.

‘That’s what it says.’

‘What is your business here?’

‘I’m visiting a client. Paulsen Shipping.’

‘And then?’

‘And then a meeting in Copenhagen.’

‘I see.’ The police officer folded the leaf with the stapled photograph of Wolff carefully into the passport and offered it back to him: ‘It seems in order.’

But when Wolff tried to take it he wouldn’t let go.

‘Where will you be staying in Christiania, Mr de Witt?’ There was something in the way he spoke the name de Witt that suggested he had heard it before, something in his frown and in his little bloodshot eyes, a crack in the veneer of cool indifference that is the part of the experienced minor official everywhere.

‘I have a reservation at the Grand Hotel,’ Wolff replied curtly. ‘So, if you’ve finished…’

The policeman stared at him suspiciously for a few seconds more, then released his passport: ‘Thank you, Mr de Witt.’ And the mask slipped back into place.

The Grand Hotel was the place to be noticed in Christiania. It wasn’t handsome or especially grand but it was on the city’s main thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the parliament, palace, National Theatre and university. The hotel of choice for well-heeled travellers and businessmen, and now Europe was at war — for the gentleman spy. Its façade was in the French style and reminded Wolff a little of the Bureau’s offices in Whitehall Court. A letter on Westinghouse headed paper was waiting in reception with instructions for his meetings in Christiania and Copenhagen and promising a further communication in Berlin, and Wolff noted that the reservation had been made for him by someone at the company in America. The Bureau hadn’t cut any corners. The porter carried his bags to the room and was rewarded with a gratuity generous enough to be memorable. Wolff unpacked his own clothes. They had been bought for him in America but were too crisp and new to risk handing over to a valet. It was just the sort of small thing that might arouse suspicion. There was always someone happy to sell information in a grand hotel: perhaps the maid who emptied the wastepaper baskets of well-to-do guests for only a few krone a week, or the pageboy who delivered their correspondence for even less, or the concierge who summoned the taxicabs and spoke to their drivers later. Policeman or spy, British or German — there was money to be made from everyone in a neutral country. Wolff poured himself a whisky from the bottle he’d brought with him, ran a hot bath and lay sipping and soaking in a cloud of steam.

He’d spent six weeks growing into Mr Jan de Witt’s skin.

‘I know it isn’t long,’ C had observed. ‘But I’m confident we’ve thought of everything. You’ll need a legend the enemy can follow. Mansfeldt Findlay at the Legation in Christiania can help you with footprints. He’s a good fellow. Done this sort of thing for us before. We have him to thank for the informer.’

Wolff lifted a soapy hand to his beard. Jan de Witt’s little Dutch beard. It took time to get used to. A beard always changed his appearance markedly; it made his thin face fuller and intensely serious, like the photograph of his father that hung in a thick black frame above the fireplace in the parlour at his mother’s farm.