by Joel N. Ross
Tom stretched his legs through the deep weight of fatigue. Let Earl handle it: “So the answer is no, you don’t like swing.”
“Want to know what scares me?” Highcastle asked. “There’s a man named Simon Tipcoe. He was to be reckoned with, in his day—thirty years ago. He’s bone-skinny now, rheumy eyes.” Highcastle’s forehead furrowed. “We put him in overalls, had him push a broom in the safe houses. Sharp mind, good ears. Nothing threatening about old Simon Tipcoe.”
“You dressed him as a janitor to check the after-hours gossip? The agents didn’t suspect he was reporting in?”
“Even if they did.” Highcastle shrugged a burly shoulder. “They talked.”
“Then you set him on Sondegger, rheumy eyes and all.”
“Late in the Blitz,” Highcastle said, “an air raid sent Tipcoe’s wife and daughter down to the public shelter. They’d been shopping. Ended in the Balham Underground when the bombs struck.”
Tom knew the rest of the story—they were allowed newspapers at the Rowansea. A bomb had landed in Balham, dug a hole into the earth, and exploded with a muffled thump. It caused so little damage on the surface that rescue workers thought it was a dud. Until two hours later, when the road caved and the water mains exploded and flooded the station below. Seventy people drowned in the thick London silt, buried by the rush of water and the slow creep of sludge.
“Balham,” Tom said. “So you took him on?”
“He moved to a boardinghouse. A sociable man, Mr. Tipcoe, he adjusted as well as can be expected. Not one to complain. Not like some, find themselves on the front and realize for the first time the Huns shoot back. Run home pissing they can’t sleep.”
Tom raised his bandaged hand. Fuck Highcastle. It wasn’t shell shock. It was shrapnel. He’d caught lead, and maybe he had trouble sleeping, maybe they put him with the head cases, but it wasn’t shell shock. Lots of men had trouble sleeping once they started hauling bits of metal inside their skin.
“No, Tipcoe’s not one to complain,” Highcastle said. “Only thing that bothered him, the landlady didn’t manage like Mrs. Tipcoe used to do. You think we can excuse the man that one complaint?”
“I don’t judge what I don’t understand,” Tom said.
Highcastle grunted. “Don’t judge much, then, do you? The Hun got Tipcoe talking, or the other way around. Tipcoe would spend a few extra minutes with him, then a few minutes more. Hun speaks English perfectly—Russian, French, Latin, Greek. Hun has a way with words.”
Finally, the answer. They were afraid of Sondegger’s words.
“Four days ago,” Highcastle said. “The Hun starts on about Raskolnikov. Familiar name?”
“Crime and Punishment. The man who—” Tom stopped. The man who kills his landlady.
“The call came this morning. Tipcoe listened to the Hun too closely—he was talked into bloody murder.”
TOM FOLLOWED HIGHCASTLE upstairs, into a hallway that smelled of mildew and bacon fat. The green-and-white wallpaper was dull and curling at the seams. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and sand buckets lined the walls. Two paneled doors faced each other across the worn brown runner creeping down the middle of the hall, and there was a narrower door toward the end, imperfectly camouflaged by the wallpaper—a broom closet, maybe access to the attic. A fourth door faced the stairs. It was painted bright white.
A bulky desk blocked most of the hall, leaving an aisle two feet wide. Nothing on top but a cup of coffee and a bell button. A skinny young man stood behind the desk, wearing a blue jacket and a sidearm.
Highcastle glared at him. “News?”
“Nothing, sir. He’s kept on all morning.”
“About the key?”
“And everything else.”
Highcastle puffed air through his nose. He opened the door on the right and Tom stepped inside. At a cluttered desk, Davies-Frank looked up from a stenography notebook and asked Highcastle, “You’ll be joining us inside?”
“Your decision.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” Davies-Frank took a fat manila envelope from the top drawer and explained: “Sondegger doesn’t enjoy Highcastle’s company, if you can imagine.”
“You’ve dealt with Tipcoe?” Highcastle asked.
“He’ll be remanded to our custody.” Davies-Frank turned to Tom. “Need anything before the security brief?”
“What could I possibly need?” Tom asked.
“This.” Davies-Frank tossed Tom the overstuffed envelope. “We couldn’t match your brother’s diplomatic passport, but the rest is good.”
Inside the envelope were a watch, wallet, and wedding ring. There were a few bills in the wallet, and an ID card in Earl’s name. Tom slipped the wallet in his breast pocket, laid the watch across his left wrist but couldn’t buckle it.
“You’ll have to explain that.” Davies-Frank took Tom by the elbow, turned his arm over, and strapped the watch on his wrist. “Your hand.”
“Earl doesn’t explain.” He dropped the wedding ring back in the envelope. “Or wear a ring.”
Highcastle grunted and Davies-Frank nodded, and Tom figured that was as close to a pep talk as he’d get.
“Security is in a constant state of flux,” Davies-Frank said, handing Tom a pack of Capstans and a lighter. “We begin with class one, a new agent, usually in prison, treated as hostile. We end—it is our fondest hope—with class five, an agent entirely loyal. We send fives to neutral countries under no supervision but their own conscience.”
“What’s Sondegger?”
“Zero,” Davies-Frank said. “And there’s a perimeter in his room, which we are strict about enforcing. One must stay beyond the—”
“Not Earl,” Highcastle said.
“Yes, of course.” Davies-Frank shook his head. “Sondegger demanded proximity and privacy with Earl. We’ll start with proximity, ignoring the perimeter. Work toward privacy.”
“No time,” Highcastle said. “Give the Hun privacy, too.”
“Too dangerous,” Davies-Frank said. “Speed cannot be—”
“Highcastle’s right,” Tom said. “Some things can’t wait.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 1, 1941
THE STAGE UPON which Sondegger performed was not measured by a length of iron chain. The sweep of his emotion was not arrested by the shackle on his ankle. These things were props: the chain and the ankle it bound, the wooden chair and the desk, the microphone expertly concealed in the lighting fixture above.
They were porous and penetrable. He ranged through and beyond them, with his mind, with his will, with his words. He was speaking. Seducing a man whose presence he had only recently confirmed. A tentative tapping on the wall yesterday night, and he knew the object of his attentions was succumbing. The content of his monologue didn’t matter—the words were only hosts for the warmth of his tone. “Let us examine this notion, the ‘duration of time,’ shall we? The author said that if a critic resolved to take a pendulum—”
During the fluid pauses between his words, he heard footsteps in the corridor. He recognized the distinctive clumping of Highcastle, bred like a hound for loyalty and tenacity by a class both softer and stupider than he. The second man’s footsteps were unknown to Sondegger. A new warder? A janitor, a replacement for Tipcoe?
“—and measure the true distance between the ringing of the bell and the rap at the door, and upon finding it to be two minutes and thirteen seconds—”
Poor Mr. Tipcoe, with his bucket of tepid water, deserted by wife and daughter, his moist eyes reflecting his shame at the past and his dread of the future. Sondegger had breathed life into Tipcoe’s insipid performance. Should a man live and die without once taking destiny into his own hands, wrapped in homicidal ardor around the haft of an ax?
“—more than two minutes and thirteen seconds, perhaps .
. . but come now!” A disembodied chuckle arose. “Surely that is close enough for our purposes!”
Could the second set of footsteps be Wall, the one man whose presence was essential? Wall, the carrier. Wall, the catalyst, waiting in the wings. Sondegger considered the corridor outside his door. Painted white, so that he would provide a silhouette if he escaped during a blackout. But if he slipped his chain, he would not be shot so anticlimactically upon his own threshold.
Should he slip his chain?
“Let us agree two minutes and thirteen seconds exactly had elapsed according to our pendulum, twixt ring and rap—”
Not yet. Highcastle was too cautious. Within the bounds of his apocopated half-world, he was proficient. Davies-Frank was far more promising, quick and contained, a lick of flame inside the scalloped glass of a lantern. Davies-Frank was afraid. He had children, discerned from a smudge of treacle on his sleeve and the quickening of his pulse when subjected to Sondegger’s extemporaneous fiction regarding his imagined family, an inspired recitation of revenge tragedy.
“The idea of duration is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas. There is a true pendulum, which abjures the jurisdiction of all other pendula.” The room filled with the rich baritone of his laughter. “If you’ll excuse the word. Pendula. But the point, my friend, is—”
The third man in the office must be Wall. Excellent. Sondegger had demanded he arrive today, and they’d delivered. He prized obedience when directing such an intricate show. However, how to proceed? The intelligence he carried was not secure with the British. The British were infiltrated by the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet “Red Orchestra,” and crippled by their ridiculous schoolboy sense of fair play. He needed Wall. But he could not yet trust Wall with the delivery of his parcel. A new script was required. He’d had to improvise; the circumstances of his mission had, in an instant, irrevocably altered.
“—that our perception of time, of what is commonly considered the inflexible and given duration of time, depends upon the rapidity of our train of ideas. Thus . . .”
Fortunately, he enjoyed improvisation. Despite the paucity of information, the blow to his face, and the footsteps approaching, the third act was clear: Use Wall. Wall must learn his part, must suffer for his art. How to direct him? How to force him to struggle—and, finally, to succeed? It was upon Wall’s performance that the success of Sondegger’s production depended—his primary production. He now had a secondary: exposing this sham of a Funkspiel, this radio game in which captured German agents were turned to traitors.
How deeply compromised was the Abwehr network? Sondegger had been given the cover names of three agents to investigate: Digby, Gerring, and Kruh. If they’d turned, the bankrupt Abwehr network would be replaced with one loyal to the party, the Führer, and Amter VI of the SD.
“—through the employment of much and multifarious thought, we can travel across Flanders into England in the moment between footsteps; we can—”
A muted conversation sounded in the hallway. The door opened. There was no fluctuation in his voice. His lidded gaze did not waver from the ceiling. He smelled a Capstan cigarette and Bardil sticky plaster. He felt the brush of air on his neck and heard the nervous stutter of Davies-Frank’s steps.
“—lengthen the duration of our days.”
Two performances, then.
The lesser: Inform the SD if the Abwehr network had been subverted.
The greater: Thomas Stuart Wall.
CHAPTER
NINE
AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 1, 1941
TOM IMAGINED THE white door brightening as they approached, glowing white-hot. Sure, he was steady. He was swell. He shook his head, and the door dimmed.
Davies-Frank reached for the knob, and Tom said, “No lock?”
“He’s chained.”
“Then why the door?”
“So his voice won’t carry to the sentry. Do you know what spread the Black Death?”
“The plague? Rats.”
“Fleas. Insignificant pests, annoying but harmless. Listen.”
Tom listened. A conversation sounded inside the room, a deep baritone rumble. “He’s being interrogated?”
“He’s alone.”
“He talks to himself?”
“If you call it that.”
“What do you call it? Tap dancing?”
“I call it annoying but harmless. He speaks hours without pause. Reminds me of nothing so much as the Odyssey.”
“Never read James Joyce.”
“The other Odyssey,” Davies-Frank said almost apologetically. “Odysseus wanted to hear the song of the Sirens, who lured sailors to their death with their singing, lying in the flower-strewn fields, surrounded by corpses. He packed his crew’s ears with wax so they couldn’t hear, and sailed past. He was the only man to hear their song and live.”
“How’d he work it?”
“He lashed himself to the mast. Shall we?”
Davies-Frank opened the door and Tom stepped inside.
It was a long, narrow room set perpendicular to the hallway. To the right were two upholstered armchairs and a hard-backed chair, with a low coffee table on a threadbare carpet between them. A bare bulb hung over the table and a barred window was at the far right. Beyond the bars were pine planks, assembled into a screen to allow light while still blocking the view.
On the left side of the room, there was a mattress on the floor, and a tidily folded blanket. A chamber pot sat in one corner and a bucket of water in the other, under a shelf with a ceramic jug. A chair and plain wooden desk were bolted to the floor against the far wall. There was a stack of paper on the table, and a waxy wooden plate and cup.
The man in the chair was in his fifties and plump, with a pleasant moon face and thatch of unruly blond hair. He was staring at the ceiling, his hands clasped on his stomach, a pencil held loosely between his fingers. There was a shackle around his ankle, and the chain was secured to a bolt embedded in a wooden beam. His feet rested on a coil of the iron chain as if it were an ottoman.
He was speaking. His voice hung in the air, still and sweet and thick. It was butter yellow and butter pure. It was Tom’s father’s voice, tucking him into bed the night before Christmas.
“Mr. Sondegger,” Davies-Frank said.
Sondegger sat straighter in the chair, and Tom saw a purple bruise on his temple. “My wife and I had four daughters, Rupert,” he said. He had blue eyes. They were nothing special. “Have I mentioned that?”
“You haven’t,” Davies-Frank said.
“And not a single son.”
Davies-Frank sat in one of the upholstered armchairs. “What are their names?”
“Only one survived childhood,” Sondegger said. “Hannalore.”
Tom strolled forward, rested a hip on Sondegger’s table. Took the pack of Capstans from his jacket and opened it with his thumb. “Cigarette?”
“Earl Wall, I presume?” Sondegger extended his hand to shake. It was pink and smooth, and Tom ignored it.
“I’m Wall.”
“Finally we meet.” Sondegger waved away the cigarettes. “I don’t smoke. Did I never mention that?”
Tom’s first slip. He covered with Earl’s sarcasm: “You want me to check my diary?”
Sondegger’s blue eyes rested briefly on Tom’s face. “Still, I thank you for the offer, though I can’t return the kindness.” He gestured to the wooden cup. “Unless you’d like a sip of what they call rum?”
“I’m a lager man.” Tom lifted the pack to his mouth, took a butt between his lips. “I ever mention that?”
“They drown me in overproof rum in the hopes of provoking drunken confidences.” He lifted a wooden pitcher from the floor to the desktop. “Despite knowing I prefer brandy.”
“Brandy and opera.”
“Opera is a balm upon the min
d, Mr. Wall. If you permit a crude metaphor, it is oil in the crankcase of consciousness.”
“I permit the metaphor, and the pun.”
“The pun?” Sondegger’s eyes drifted beyond Tom, and he chuckled. “Crude oil. Very good, Mr. Wall, though of course the pun is the lowest form of wordplay.”
Tom returned the cigarettes to his pocket. The man’s voice was a bass saxophone blowing a low oleaginous note, but there was no time to let the words wash over him; he needed the rendezvous schedule with the wireless operator, Duckblind. Get the information, get Earl, and . . . And what? He was fogged by fatigue and memory and Sondegger’s opium-den voice.
“You think because I am a National Socialist, I must appreciate Wagner?” A twinkle appeared in Sondegger’s eyes. “I hope my tastes aren’t so parochial as that. Though I do regret I was unable to attend the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth. Born too late to see Wagner conduct—in January of the year of his death. However, I have seen his work performed at the Magdeburg and the Festival. I admire poor Siegfried’s ambition, but genius is so rarely passed in a direct line.”
Tom turned a sheet of paper on the desk toward himself. It was a pencil sketch of a young girl, four or five years old. A pretty child.
“My youngest daughter, Cosima—she died of blood poisoning. Siegfried was Liszt’s grandson, you know, as well as being Wagner’s son. His bloodlines are impeccable. But Der Bärenhäuter? It is too hard and too soft, like a mussel that has been cracked underfoot. Are you familiar with Der Bärenhäuter?”
Tom didn’t answer, the drone of Sondegger’s voice smothering him.
“I imagine,” Sondegger said, “you would find Tristan und Isolde more to your taste, Mr. Wall. Poison becomes love potion; agony transmutes to bliss—it is the third most intensely erotic opera ever written.” He deepened his voice and sang: “Was ist? Isolde?”
“I prefer,” said Davies-Frank, “I prefer Das Liebesverbot.”
