William Boyd - Restless

But there was no sign of Morris at the office the next morning – even by lunchtime he still hadn't put in an appearance. Eva was working on a follow-up story to the Mexican map, all about a new generation of four-engined German passenger planes – based on the Condor Fw 200 submarine hunter – that had a non-stop range of 2,000 miles, more than enough to cross the Atlantic to South America from West Africa. She thought that if she could place the story with a Spanish newspaper – El Diario or Independiente - that an Argentine airline had ordered six, then it might have some legs.

She drafted it out and took it through to Angus, who seemed to be more and more a presence at Transoceanic, these days, and less and less at OBA.

He read it quickly.

'What do you think?' she said.

Angus seemed distracted – not particularly friendly – and she noticed the ashtray in front of him was dense with buckled cigarette butts.

'Why Spain?'

'Better to start it there so Argentina can deny it. We get more mileage if it starts in Spain and then is picked up in South America. Then maybe we can try it here in the US.'

'Do these planes exist?'

'Condors exist.'

'Right. Seems fine. Good luck.' He reached for his cigarette case again – he clearly couldn't care less.

'Have you seen Morris, by any chance?' she asked.

'He said he had to spend the day at Rockefeller – following something up.'

'Is something wrong, Angus? Is something going on?'

'No, no,' he said, just about managing a convincing a smile. 'Rather too many Martinis last night.'

She left him, feeling slightly disturbed: so Morris was at BSC – interesting that Angus knew that. Had Morris told Angus anything? Could this explain Angus's untypical brusqueness? She pondered these issues as she typed up her Condor story and took it to one of the Spanish translators.

She had a late lunch at an automat on Seventh Avenue, where she bought a tuna sandwich, a slice of cheesecake and a glass of milk. She wondered what Morris could possibly glean at Rockefeller. The Las Cruces job had originated at BSC, of course… She ate her sandwich and for about the hundredth time ran through the events that had led to her encounter with de Baca, looking for something she might have missed. What had Morris seen that she hadn't? So: de Baca shoots her and makes sure that her body is quickly found. The map is discovered and some $5,000. What does this say to anybody? A young female British agent is discovered murdered in New Mexico with a suspect map. All eyes – all FBI eyes – would turn to BSC and wonder what they had been planning here. It would be highly, damagingly embarrassing – a nice Abwehr counter-plot, she could see. A British agent exposed distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. But we did nothing else, she said to herself, given the chance, and everybody at the FBI must be aware of this state of affairs – what would be so sensational about that?

But various rogue details tugged at her sleeve. Nobody had ever suggested that the Abwehr could run such an operation in the United States. A whole shadowing brigade from New York to Las Cruces – moreover, one with such resources and such refinements that she couldn't spot it and its members somewhere along the way. She had been highly suspicious – which is how she had snared the local crows. How big would the team have had to be? Six, eight? Changing over all the time, maybe with one or two women? She would have spotted them, she kept saying to herself, or would she: the whole time in Las Cruces she had been suspicious. It's very hard to follow a suspicious target, but she had to say she had never thought about women. But then again, she thought: why was I suspicious? Was I semi-consciously aware of the rings being run around me. She stopped thinking and decided to go early to the cartoon theatre. A laugh or two might be just what she needed.

She waited two hours for Morris at the theatre, sitting in the back row of the near-empty cinema, watching a succession of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry cartoons interspersed with newsreels that occasionally contained news of the war in Europe. 'Germany's war machine falters at the gates of Moscow,' the announcer intoned with massive, hectoring insistence, 'General Winter takes command of the battlefield.' She saw horses floundering up to their withers in mud as fluid and gluey as melted chocolate; she saw exhausted, gaunt German soldiers with sheets tied around them as camouflage, numbly running from house to house; frozen bodies in the snow taking on the properties of shattered trees or outcrops of rock: iron-hard, wind-lashed, unmovable; burning villages lighting the thousands of Russian soldiers scurrying forward across the icy fields in counter-attack. She tried to imagine what was happening there in the countryside around Moscow – Moscow, where she had been born, and which she couldn't remember at all – and found that her brain refused to supply her with any answers. Donald Duck took over, to her relief. People began to laugh.

When it was apparent Morris was not going to show up, and the theatre began slowly but surely to fill up as offices closed, she made her way back to the apartment. She was not that bothered – three out of four of these prearranged meetings never took place – it was too complex and too risky to try to alert people of a postponement or a delay, but worries still nagged at her. Or were they genuine worries? Perhaps her own curiosity about what Morris would have had to say made her more edgy and concerned. He would call in the fullness of time, she told herself; they would meet again; she would discover what he had discovered. Back in the apartment she checked the snares in her room – Sylvia had not been poking around, she was glad, almost stupidly happy, to note. Sometimes she grew tired of this endless, vigilant suspicion – how can you live like that, she thought? Always watching, always checking, always fearful that you were being betrayed and undone. She made herself a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette and waited for Morris to call.

Sylvia came home and Eva asked her – very by the way – had she seen Morris at the Center today? Sylvia said no, reminding her of just how many hundreds of people worked there now, how huge BSC had grown – like a giant business enterprise, two entire floors of the skyscraper filled, crammed, overflow offices on other floors – Morris could have been there for a week and she'd have still not seen him.

At about eight o'clock a slight but poisonous unease began to afflict Eva. She telephoned Transoceanic and was told by a duty clerk that Mr Devereux had not been in all day. She telephoned Angus Woolf at his apartment but his phone just rang and rang.

At nine Sylvia went out to see a movie – The Maltese Falcon - with a friend, leaving Eva alone in the apartment. She sat and watched the phone – a stupid thing to do, she knew, but she felt better for doing it, all the same. She tried to recall her last conversation with Morris. She could hear in her mind his quiet 'Jesus Christ' as something profound had struck him, some missing piece in the puzzle had fitted into place. It had been more shock in his voice, she decided, than alarm, as if this potential solution was so… so unexpected, so drastic, that it had drawn this exclamation from him spontaneously. He had fully intended to tell her, otherwise he wouldn't have set up the cartoon-theatre meeting and, more importantly, he had wanted to tell her face to face. Face to face, she thought: why couldn't he have told me in plain-code? I would have got the message. Too shocking for plain-code, perhaps. Too earth-shattering.

She decided to ignore procedure and call his apartment.

'Yes,' a man's voice answered. American accent.

'Could I speak with Elizabeth Wesley, please?' she said, instantly Americanising her own voice.