Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

‘Who are you?’

‘Please sit down.’

She didn’t move.

‘Sit down,’ he repeated firmly, and this time she did.

‘Where is Dr Dilger?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘I saw him myself only a few days ago,’ he lied.

‘He sailed from New York yesterday.’

‘The ship?’

‘The Rotterdam .’

Wolff nodded. ‘Did you know?’ Their eyes met, the colour rising in her cheeks. Then she looked down at her hands. ‘Know?’

‘Know what your brother was doing?’ He leant closer, forcing her to look up.

‘My brother’s a doctor. I don’t know who you are — but a doctor visiting his family — he’s on — was on — vacation, that’s all.’

‘Your brother was a cheap poisoner,’ Thwaites interjected harshly. ‘Instead of treating the sick he’s been culturing disease. Where? — here?’

She shook her head. ‘My brother’s a doctor.’

She denied it, refused to even countenance the possibility, but he read shame in her face, heard it in her voice. Not the details perhaps, but she’d guessed and turned a blind eye. It wasn’t so unusual, even among the God-fearing. Wolff touched Thwaites’ sleeve. ‘I’m going to look around.’

The main rooms of the house were empty of the past, just as he’d expected them to be. He found a photograph of the doctor on his sister’s bedside table and took it from its silver frame, and in the sitting room a family group with young Anton at the feet of the soldier-patriarch. Finally, he clomped down the stairs to the basement and was reaching for the door when he suddenly froze, his fingers just touching the handle. In the kitchen above, Thwaites’ abrasive German, then a sullen silence punctuated by the scraping of a chair leg and the rain at the window. But it wasn’t a voice, a noise, that had startled him; it was a smell — the faint but sharp odour of the slaughterhouse — or so he imagined it to be. This is the place, he thought, here beneath Miss Dilger’s kitchen. He pushed open the door and turned on the lights. White walls, sink, trelliswork bench, home-made shelves; just as he’d seen it through the window. Everything had been scrubbed with bleach and yet the sickly-sweet smell of decaying blood lingered like a bad spirit. Inspecting the room carefully, he found only shards of glass which he wanted to call a Petri dish, but it was impossible to be sure.

‘What did he use, Miss Dilger?’ he asked her at the kitchen table. ‘An animal of some sort — blood?’

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t look him in the eye but kept twisting, twisting her lace handkerchief tighter.

‘Whatever it was — it smelt awful,’ he explained to Thwaites. ‘Here in this basement.’

‘Culturing disease in the house?’ Thwaites exclaimed, incredulous. ‘You must have known,’ Wolff said to her. ‘What about your neighbours — did you think of their safety?’

She began to rise — ‘Leave my house.’ Her lower lip was quivering, the first tear on her cheek — ‘Leave, leave, leave’ — then she bolted for the door.

Wolff held Thwaites’ arm — ‘No, let her’– and flinging it open she ran out into the rain.

‘Don’t you feel sorry for her?’ he asked.

Thwaites scoffed. ‘No, I damn well don’t.’

‘Don’t you see? She’s been betrayed by someone she loves.’

‘Left her things,’ Thwaites joked, lifting her coat from the back of a chair. Her clasp bag was on the table, just large enough for powder, a handkerchief, some money.

‘Rummage through the coat, would you?’ Wolff reached for the bag and emptied it on to the table. Just a respectable middle-aged lady’s essentials, although he was surprised to find a Levy lipstick. He opened her pocketbook and thumbed through the pages.

‘Nothing,’ Thwaites declared, dropping her coat back. ‘Bills from a grocery store and her key.’

Wolff looked up at him blankly, her pocketbook still open in his hands.

‘Come on — what is it?’ Thwaites prompted him.

‘Notes, some telephone numbers — just…’ he hesitated, swallowing hard, ‘…numbers — probably family,’ then closed it deliberately and slipped it into his breast pocket. ‘Let’s go.’

They pulled the back door to behind them and scuttled across the street. The motor car had sprung some more leaks. Thwaites uttered a profanity and ran his sleeve over the driver’s seat. ‘We’re sinking.’

‘There’s something I have to do,’ Wolff said, sliding on to the passenger seat. ‘I’ll need your revolver. Can you drop me at Union Station?’

Thwaites stared at him intently. ‘This thing you have to do…?’ He paused, waiting for Wolff to accept his invitation to explain. But Wolff just looked away. ‘Look, whatever it is, you should tell me, it might be—’

‘It isn’t — not to you or Wiseman.’

Silence but for the rain beating on the canopy. A motor car sploshed by with its lamps blazing. Wolff was gazing impassively at the windscreen, misted with their breath. ‘Is it her?’ Thwaites whistled softly. ‘It is.’ He slapped his palm on the steering column in frustration. ‘Remember C’s rules, I said.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Wolff dipped into his jacket for the pocketbook. ‘Last entry.’

Thwaites flicked through to the page. ‘This number?’

‘Zero, three, six, five, six. It’s Miss McDonnell’s.’

‘And you think…’

‘I don’t know. I’m going to find out.’

WOLFF TOOK UP his post before dawn, loitering in doorways as New York began to rise. A clear cold city day in March, a day for thick socks, gloves and a muffler, walking at a brisk pace, and coffee and eggs in a smoky café. But Laura’s apartment wasn’t on that sort of street. He tried to keep on the move, shifting his position, drifting between blocks, brushing shoulders and smiling at businessmen fixing their hats on the doorstep or striding the sidewalk to the subway. He was exchanging short words with a man who had charged him with malicious intent when a motor car came to a stop close by and flashed its lamps once. A moment later Masek’s pinched face appeared at the driver’s window.

‘Have breakfast,’ he said, as Wolff climbed in beside him. ‘I watch apartment. Café three blocks,’ and he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.

Wiseman had sent Masek in a Consulate car. ‘She not know Masek,’ he explained. ‘I follow — no trouble.’ There was no denying it would be simpler. Slight of frame, penetrating gaze, Masek had the air of a poor scholar at a provincial university, threadbare but respectable, fingers stained yellow by tobacco, the sort of man you might pass on a New York street without a second glance. They didn’t say much because it was business, but shared cigarettes and took it in turns to doze. Then, at nine o’clock, Laura appeared at the door, sifting through the morning mail, placing it in a portfolio she was carrying, adjusting her hat and tidying strands of hair. As Wolff watched her pass he felt a desperate urge to leap out of the motor car and ask her outright: ‘Have you seen Dilger? Do you know what he does?’

Masek glanced across. ‘Don’t worry. I look after her.’ He reached for the door handle.

Wolff nodded. ‘Leave me the car keys.’

He didn’t see them again for six hours. Only once did he risk leaving the motor car to stretch his legs. At one o’clock he moved the Ford to a small lot further from her apartment but with a view of its third-floor windows. There was a lamp on in the drawing room where they’d danced and he thought he saw a figure fleetingly at the curtains, although he couldn’t be sure. He wondered if it was Laura’s aunt until a taxicab dropped her at the door a short time later. Then Laura appeared, head bent, a frown on her brow as if she were pondering the shape of her next suffrage speech or the rising in Ireland or just the sound of her footfall on the sidewalk. ‘She caught train to Chambers Street, number 51,’ Masek said, settling in the seat beside Wolff. ‘A bank — something to do with church — took lift to tenth floor. She was there a long time. Masek very bored, tired, hungry, think British should pay him more.’