Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘Damn good thing your beard, you know,’ C had teased. ‘Traitors have beards.’

‘Oh? I thought it was a monocle?’

C had chuckled like a fat schoolboy. ‘Makes you look a little like Casement.’

The following morning, Wolff took breakfast at the Grand Café with an old copy of the New York Times . At a little before nine he visited the front desk to ask for directions to Paulsen Shipping. It was his intention to walk the short distance to the harbour, he said, and when his business was over he hoped to walk a little further. Taking Baedeker from the pocket of his overcoat, he let the porter trace a route on a map to the city’s notable sights. A stiff north-easterly was shaking the hotel’s broad awning like the mainsail of a ship, force 6 fresh to rock the steamers anchored in the bay but bright enough for Wolff to step out with his coat over his arm. He walked briskly along Karl Johans gate towards the parliament, then on to the East Station, stopping from time to time to glance in shop windows, and even dashing between trams to a newspaper kiosk on the pavement opposite.

Paulsen Shipping occupied a modest two-storey building of the sort that was being pulled down all over the city to meet the requirements of the brash new century. Its granite-faced neighbours had been built in the ten years since independence and were indistinguishable from many of a similar age in the City of London. A clerk led Wolff from its tiled hall to a large office on the first floor and asked him to wait, with the assurance that Mr Paulsen would be pleased to welcome him soon. It was a large mahogany-panelled room, smoke-filled and gloomy, with only two small windows overlooking the narrow street. A dozen or so brokers and clerks — young men in their twenties for the most part — sat facing their managing director’s door like children in a Victorian schoolroom. On the wall behind them, the severe grey countenance of the man Wolff took to be the company’s founding father.

‘Jacob the First. My grandfather.’ The managing director had slipped out of his office and was standing above Wolff with a broad smile on his face.

‘I’m the third. Jacob Paulsen the Third,’ and he offered Wolff his hand. ‘Isn’t that how you Americans style it, Mr de Witt? As if you were kings. This is my kingdom,’ he said, opening his arms to the room like a music-hall doxy, ‘until I’m swallowed up by Olsen or Knutsen Shipping or one of the others. Please…’ and with a flamboyant sweep of his hand he invited Wolff to step into his office.

‘My grandfather was a friend of Henrik Ibsen’s, you know,’ he said, pulling the door to behind them. ‘Helped him with a little money. Sit down, please.’ He pulled a red leather armchair away from his desk. A log fire was spitting in the hearth and dancing warmly on the polished panelled walls.

‘Peculiar, really, he didn’t care for the theatre. All my grandfather cared about was ships and money — we were quite a company in his day.’

His English was perfect but drawled in the languid manner of an undergraduate aesthete. Early fifties, tall and thin, his straw-blond hair streaked with white, the same light-blue eyes as his grandfather, the same thin, almost colourless lips, a smile hovering constantly at the corners. Mr Jacob Paulsen the Third was an easy fellow but not a foolish one. There was a wariness in his glance, in the deliberate way he walked to the drinks cabinet in the corner of the room.

‘A celebration,’ he said, lifting two small glasses. ‘Have you tried our akevitt?’

‘Is there something to celebrate?’

‘Of course. Always. But our arrangement in particular,’ and he placed the glasses and a bottle on a tray and carried them back to his desk. The bottle in his left hand, he opened a drawer with his right, took out an envelope and slid it across the desk to Wolff. ‘It’s from the minister at your Legation, Mr Findlay…’

‘Do you know what’s in it?’

‘Arrangements for your meeting.’

‘Do you know where?’

‘No.’

Wolff ran the tip of his forefinger along the flap to check the seal. Satisfied, he tore it open and unfolded the note. There were just two lines.

‘Have you been to our country before, Mr de Witt?’ Paulsen had poured the akevitt and was settling into his chair with a glass.

‘Are you sure you know your part?’ Wolff asked impatiently.

He frowned. ‘Perfectly. Unlike my grandfather I love theatre and I’m a consummate liar. Your people in London must have spoken to you about me? I have been of service in the past. Now, your very good health.’ He raised his glass in salute, then drained it in a gulp. ‘Please,’ he said, a little hoarsely, and gestured with his glass to the one he’d poured for Wolff. ‘Please.’

‘They’ll send someone to you. He won’t be German. One of your own countrymen, probably someone you know. A businessman, perhaps a family friend or a policeman…’

‘I have everything,’ and Paulsen rested the palm of his right hand on a large leather-bound ledger, ‘correspondence, invoices. My staff know your name and that you work for Westinghouse but I’ve handled everything and that will have made them curious, even a little suspicious.’

Wolff nodded approvingly.

‘Look to your own part, Mr de Witt; rest assured I know what I’m doing. Now another…’ and, half rising, he reached across the desk for the bottle. ‘And this time I hope you’ll join me.’

‘Are there references to the rifles in the paperwork?’

‘Do you read Norwegian? No, well…’ Paulsen put down the bottle and picked up the ledger. ‘Let me put your mind at rest.’ He flicked through it lazily in search of a suitable page. ‘Here’s something: The shipment will be hidden in a large consignment of electrical equipment and stamped by the Westinghouse Company … And here:… the client’s agent will board in Darwin… he will make his own arrangements for unloading … You see. Clues. Only clues. But lots of them.’

‘Good. To our arrangement then,’ Wolff replied, leaning forward to pick up his glass. ‘To the success of your performance, Mr Paulsen. Skoal.’ He drank the spirit in one and banged the glass down emphatically on the edge of the desk.

Paulsen smiled: ‘And to yours, Mr de Witt.’

Medium height, slight build, brown hair, young — perhaps twenty-five — dressed like a clerk. He was waiting in a doorway a little way along the street from Paulsen’s and moved into the cover of the building too quickly. Wolff pretended to consult his Baedeker. Was the tip-off from the hotel or one of Paulsen’s people? he wondered. It didn’t matter. He had begun leaving a trail a child could follow the moment he stepped from the ship. But make the fellow work a little, he thought. He’d expect that. He closed the guidebook and adjusted his hat. It was only a pity Christiania was such a dull city.

Shuffling too close one minute, racing to catch up the next, bumping into passers-by, spinning round to gaze in shop windows. For a time he made Wolff smile. But what he lacked in craft he made up for in persistence. He was very young. Wolff caught a glimpse of his face in a mirror at the Continental as he was being shown to a table for luncheon. Younger than twenty-five. Twenty. A runner for someone else, that’s all. Did he have any idea what he was getting into? Wolff toyed whimsically with the thought of calling him over, sitting him down with a glass of wine and saying, ‘Whatever they pay you, my boy, it will never be enough.’ But after lunch he took a tram from outside the parliament to the palace and in the course of a stroll through the royal park gave him the slip. To be sure, he caught a second tram in the direction of the smart coastal district of Bygdoy but got off after only a few stops and hopped on to another heading back into the city. It was not until he’d changed twice more that he felt ready to catch one to the St Hanshaugen Park. At the entrance, he consulted his guidebook until he was satisfied that he was still alone, then began to climb through the formal gardens to the reservoir and viewpoint. He’d walked the same route on a summer day fourteen years earlier — a young naval officer enjoying a furlough from his ship. The hill was popular with locals and visitors in the late afternoon. The elderly came to sit and listen to the military band in the pavilion by the lower pond; mothers ambled through the arboretum on its slopes while their children played hide and seek, and courting couples strolled to the top to gaze over the city. It wasn’t the sort of place Wolff would have chosen for a clandestine meeting at any time of the year.