William Boyd - Restless

They both drank too much, from different motives, she supposed, but as they went up to their room she felt her head whirl with the alcohol. Mason kissed her in the elevator, using his tongue. In the room, he called room service and ordered up a pint of whisky, and once it was delivered, began almost immediately to undress her. Eva switched on a smile, drank some more and thought, at least he isn't ugly or nasty – he was just a kind foolish man who wanted to betray his wife. To her surprise she found she was able to switch her feelings off. It's a job, she said to herself, one only I can do.

In bed, he tried but was unable to control himself and was ashamed at how quickly he came, blaming it on the condoms – 'Damn Trojans!' Eva soothed him, said it was more important just being together. He drank more whisky and tried again later but with no success.

She consoled him again, letting him hold her and caress her, huddling in his arms, feeling the room tilt and sway from all the booze she had drunk.

'It's always crap the first time,' he said. 'Don't you find that?'

'Always,' she said, not hating him – indeed feeling a little sorry for him and wondering what he would think in a day or so when someone – not Romer – approached him and said, Hello, Mr Harding, we have some photographs that I think your wife and father-in-law would be most interested in viewing.

He fell asleep quickly and she eased herself across the bed from him. She managed to sleep, herself, but woke early and ran a deep bath, soaked in it, and then ordered up a room-service breakfast before Mason awoke to pre-empt any early-morning amorousness, but he was crapulous and out of sorts – guilty, perhaps – and had turned moody and monosyllabic. She let him kiss her again in the room before they went down to the lobby.

He paid the bill and she stood close to him, picking some lint off his jacket as he paid the clerk in cash. Click. She could practically hear Bradley's camera. Outside at the taxi rank he seemed self-conscious and stiff all of a sudden.

'I've got meetings,' he said. 'What about you?'

'I'll get back to town,' she said. 'I'll call you. It'll be better next time, don't worry.'

This promise seemed to revive him and he smiled warmly.

'Thanks, Eve,' he said. 'You were great. You're beautiful. Call me next week. I got to take the kids…' he stopped. 'Call me next week. Wednesday.'

He kissed her on the cheek and in her head she heard another Bradley 'click' go off.

When she returned to London Hall there was a message – a note shoved under her door.

'ELDORADO is over,' it read.

'Oh, you're back,' Sylvia said when she came home from work and found Eva in the apartment, sitting in the kitchen. 'How was Washington?'

'Boring.'

'I thought you'd be gone for a couple of weeks.'

'There was nothing doing. Endless round of insignificant press conferences.'

'Meet any nice men?' Sylvia said, putting on a grotesque leer.

'I wish. Just a fat under-secretary of state at Agriculture, or something, who tried to feel me up.'

'I might just settle for that,' Sylvia said, heading for her bedroom, taking off her coat.

Sometimes it amazed Eva how fluently and spontaneously she could lie. Think that everybody is lying to you all the time, Romer said, it's probably the safest way to proceed.

Sylvia came back in and opened the ice-box and took out a small pitcher of Martini.

'We're celebrating,' she said, then made an apologetic face. 'Sorry. Wrong word. The Germans have sunk another Yank destroyer – the Reuben Jones. One hundred and fifteen dead. Hardly a cause for rejoicing, I know. But…'

'My God… One hundred and fifteen-'

'Exactly. This has got to change everything. They can't stand on the sidelines now.'

So much for Mason Harding, Eva thought. She had a sudden image of Mason, slipping out of his underwear, his thickening cock jutting beneath the eave of his young man's belly, coming to sit on the bed, fumbling with the foil on the condom. She found she could think about it with dispassion, coldly, objectively. Romer would have been pleased with her.

As she poured their Martinis, Sylvia told her that Roosevelt had made a fine, stirringly belligerent speech – his most belligerent since 1939, talking of how the 'shooting war' had begun.

'Oh yes,' she said, sipping her drink. 'And he has this wonderful map – some map of South America. How the Germans plan to divide it up into five huge new countries.'

Eva was half listening but Sylvia's enthusiasm provoked in her a small surge of confidence – a strange feeling of temporary elation. Similar spasms had come and gone in the two years since she'd joined Romer's team. Although she tried to tell herself to treat such instinctive reactions with suspicion she couldn't prevent them from blossoming in herself – as if wishful thinking were an innate attribute of being human: the thought that things were bound to improve being stitched into our human consciousness. She sipped her cold drink – maybe that's just the definition of an optimist, she thought. Maybe that's all I am: an optimist.

'So maybe we're getting there,' she said, drinking her chilled Martini, yielding to her optimism, thinking that if the Americans join us we must win. America, Britain and the Empire, and Russia – then it could only be a matter of time.

'Let's eat out tomorrow,' she said to Sylvia as they went to their bedrooms. 'We owe ourselves a little party.'

'Don't forget we're saying goodbye to Alfie.'

Eva remembered that Blytheswood was leaving the radio station and was going back to London, to Electra House, the GC amp;CS's radio interception station in the basement of Cable amp; Wireless's Embankment office.

'Then we can go dancing afterwards,' she said. She felt like dancing, she thought as she undressed and tried to empty her mind of Mason Harding and his hands on her body.

The next day in the office Morris Devereux showed her a transcript of the Roosevelt speech. She took it from him and flicked through the pages until she came to the relevant passage:

'I have in my possession a secret map,' she read, 'made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganise it. The geographical experts of Berlin have divided South America into five vassal states… They have also arranged that one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great lifeline, the Panama Canal… This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.'

'Well,' she said to Devereux, 'pretty strong stuff, don't you think? If I were an American I'd be beginning to feel just a little uneasy. A tiny bit worried, no?'

'Let's hope they share your sentiments – and what with the Rueben Jones's sinking… I don't know: you'd think they wouldn't sleep quite so securely.' He smiled at her. 'How was Washington?'

'Fine. I think I've made a good contact in Hopkins's office,' she said offhandedly. 'A press attaché. I think we can feed him our stuff.'

'Interesting. Did he drop any hints?'

'No, not really,' she said carefully. 'He was actually very discouraging, if anything. Congress ranged against war. FDR's hands tied, and so forth. But I'm going to give him translations of all our Spanish stories.'

'Good idea,' he said vaguely and drifted away.

Eva started thinking: Morris seemed more and more interested in her movements and her work. But why hadn't he asked her the name of the press attaché she had lassoed? That was odd… Did he know who it was already?

She went to her office and checked her in-tray. A newspaper in Buenos Aires, Critica, had picked up her story about German naval manoeuvres off the South American Atlantic coast. She had her opening, now: she re-transcribed the story but gave it a Buenos Aires date-line and put it out to all of Transoceanic's subscribers. She called Blytheswood at WRUL and, using their verbal priority code – 'Mr Blytheswood, this is Miss Dalton here' – said she had an intriguing story out of Argentina. Blytheswood said they might indeed be interested but it would have to have an American date-line before it could be broadcast around the world. So she sent a cablegram to Johnson in Meadowville, and Witoldski in Franklin Forks, signed simply Transoceanic, plus a transcript of the key lines from Roosevelt's speech. She suspected they would guess it was from her. If either Johnson or Witoldski broadcast the Critica report she could reconfigure it once more as a story from an independent US radio station. And so the fiction would move on steadily through the news media, accumulating weight and significance – more date-lines, more sources somehow confirming its emerging status as a fact and nowhere revealing it origins in the mind of Eva Delectorskaya. Eventually one of the big American newspapers would pick it up (perhaps with a little help from Angus Woolf) and the German Embassy would cable it back home to Berlin. Then denials would be issued, ambassadors would be called in to deliver explanations and rebuttals and this would provide yet another story, or a series of stories, for Transoceanic to distribute over its wire services. Eva felt a small sense of power and pride as she contemplated the future life of her falsehood – thinking of herself as a tiny spider at the centre of her spreading, complex web of innuendo, half-truth and invention. But then she felt a hot flush of embarrassed remembrance, recalling suddenly her night with Mason Harding, and its fumbling inadequacies. It was always going to be a dirty war, Romer repeatedly said, nothing should be discounted in the waging of it.