by William Boyd
She was going to say it, she didn’t care. ‘I think I’m in love with you, Lucas, that’s why.’
He didn’t say anything, just took this in with a slight pursing of the lips. He squeezed her hand again and then let go.
‘Bon voyage,’ he said. ‘Be careful.’
‘I’m always careful. You know that.’
He stood up, turned and walked away, striding down the path. Eva watched him go, saying to herself: I command you to turn, I insist you turn and look at me again. And sure enough he did – he turned and walked backwards for a few paces and smiled and gave her his familiar half-wave, half-salute.
The next morning Eva went to Penn Station and bought a ticket to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
9
Don Carlos
‘PEOPLE WILL THINK WE’RE having an affair,’ Bobbie York said. ‘All these impromptu visits. I’m not complaining. I’ll be very discreet.’
‘Thank you, Bobbie,’ I said, refusing to participate in his banter. ‘You are my supervisor, after all. I’m supposed to come to you for advice.’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Of course you are. But how can I advise someone as capable as you?’
I had postponed Berangere’s tutorial so I could see Bobbie in the morning. I didn’t want to sit in his rooms as he plied me with whisky again.
‘I need to talk to somebody who can tell me about the British Security Services in World War Two. MI5, MI6 – that sort of thing. SIS, SOE, BSC – you know.’
‘Yeeesss,’ Bobbie said. ‘Not my strong point. I sense Lord Mansfield has bitten.’
Bobbie was no fool, however hard he strove to seem like an amiable one.
‘He has,’ I said. ‘I’m to meet him on Friday – at his club. I just feel I need to be a bit more clued-up.’
‘My, what drama. You’ve got to tell me all about this one day, Ruth, I insist. It seems splendidly cloak-and-dagger.’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘I promise. I’m a bit in the dark myself, to tell the truth. As soon as I know I’ll fill you in.’
Bobbie went to his desk and searched through some papers.
‘One of the very few advantages of living in Oxford,’ he said, ‘is that there is an expert on just about every subject in the world, sitting on your doorstep. From medieval astrolabes to particle accelerators – we can usually serve one up. Ah, here’s the man. Fellow of All Souls called Timothy Thoms.’
‘Timothy Thoms?’
‘Yes. Thoms spelt with an “h”. I know he sounds like a character in a children’s book or some harassed clerk in Dickens but he’s actually a hundred times cleverer than I am. Mind you – so are you. So you and Timothy Thoms should get along like the proverbial conflagrating house. There: Dr T.C.L. Thoms. I’ve met him a couple of times. Agreeable fellow. I shall procure you a meeting.’ He reached for his telephone.
Bobbie arranged for me to see Dr Thoms two days later at the end of the afternoon. I deposited Jochen with Veronica and Avril and I went into All Souls and was directed to Dr Thoms’s staircase. The afternoon was sultry, oppressive and threatening, the sun seemed sulphurously hazed, producing an odd yellow light in the air that amplified the yellow in the stones of the college walls and I wondered for a moment – prayed for a moment – that it would storm. The grass in the quadrangle was the colour of desert sand.
I knocked on Dr Thoms’s door and it was opened by a burly young man in jeans and a T-shirt – in his late twenties, I would have said – who had a shock of curly brown hair tumbling to his shoulders and an almost painfully neatly trimmed beard, all angles and hard edges.
‘Ruth Gilmartin,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to meet Dr Thoms.’
‘You’ve found him. Come in.’ He had a strong Yorkshire or Lancashire accent – I couldn’t tell them apart – ‘Coom in’ he had said.
We sat down in his study and I refused his offer of tea or coffee. I noticed he had a computer with a screen like a television on his desk. Bobbie had told me that Thoms had written his doctorate on Admiral Canaris and MI5 penetration of the Abwehr in World War Two. He was now writing a ‘vast book’ for ‘vast sums of money’ on the history of the British Secret Service from 1909 to the present day. ‘I think he’s your man,’ Bobbie had said, rather pleased with his efficiency.
Thoms asked me how he could help me and so I started to tell him, in the most circumspect and vague terms I could manage, given my limited knowledge of the subject. I said I was going to interview a man who had been fairly high up in the Secret Intelligence Service during the war. I just needed some background information, particularly about what was going on in America in 1940–1, before Pearl Harbor.
Thoms made no effort to conceal his quickening interest.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘So he was high up in the British Security Coordination.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I get the impression he was something of a freelance – had his own small operation.’
Thoms looked more intrigued. ‘There were a few of them – irregulars – but they were all reeled in as the war went on.’
‘I have a source who worked for this man.’
‘Reliable?’
‘Yes. This source worked for him in Belgium and then in America.’
‘I see,’ Thoms said, impressed, looking at me with some fascination. ‘This source of yours could be sitting on a goldmine.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He could make a fortune if he told his story.’ He. Interesting, I thought – let’s keep him a he. And I had never thought of money, either.
‘Do you know about the Prenslo Incident?’ I asked. ‘Yes. It was a disaster, blew everything wide open.’
‘This source was there.’
Thoms said nothing – only nodded several times. His excitement was palpable.
‘Have you heard of an organisation called AAS Ltd?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Does the name “Mr X” help you identify anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Transoceanic Press?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know who “C” was in 1941?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘These names are beginning to come out now – now the whole Enigma/Bletchley Park secret is exposed. Old agents are talking – or talking so you can read between the lines. But,’ he leant forward, ‘this is what is fascinating – and it makes me sweat a little, to be completely honest – as to what SIS was really doing in the United States in the early days – what the BSC was doing in their name – is the greyest of grey areas. Nobody wants to talk about that. Your source is the first one I’ve ever heard of – from an agent in the field.’
‘It’s a stroke of luck,’ I said carefully.
‘Can I meet your source?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Because I have about a million questions, as you can imagine.’ There was a strange light in his eye – the light of the scholar-hunter who has smelt fresh spoor, who knows there is an unblazed trail out there.
‘What I might do,’ I offered, cautiously, ‘is write some of it down, in broad outline, see if it made any sense to you.’
‘Great. Happy to oblige,’ he said, and leant back in his seat as if, for the first time, he were just taking in the fact that I was, for example, a member of the female sex, and not simply a new mine of exclusive information.
‘Fancy going to the pub for a drink?’ he said.
We crossed the High and went to a small pub in a lane near Oriel and he gave me a potted synopsis of SIS and BSC and the pre-Pearl Harbor operations as far as he understood them and I began to understand something of the context for my mother’s particular adventure. Thoms spoke fluently and with some passion about this covert world with its interconnecting lines of duplicity – effectively a whole British security and intelligence apparatus right in the middle of Manhattan, hundreds of agents all striving to persuade America to join the war in Europe despite the express and steadfast objections of the majority of the population of
the United States.
‘Astonishing, really, when you come to think of it. Unparalleled …’ He stopped suddenly. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked, a bit discomfited.
‘Do you want an honest answer?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘I can’t decide whether the hair doesn’t go with the beard or the beard doesn’t go with the hair.’
He laughed: he seemed almost pleased by my bluntness.
‘I don’t usually have a beard, actually. But I’ve grown it for a role.’
‘A role?’
‘In Don Carlos. I’m playing a Spanish nobleman called Rodrigo. It’s an opera.’
‘Yeah. That Verdi bloke, innit? You can obviously sing, then.’
‘It’s an amateur company,’ he explained. ‘We’re doing three performances at the Playhouse. Want to come and see it?’
‘As long as I can get a baby-sitter,’ I said. That usually scared them off. Not Thoms, though, and I began to sense Thoms’s interest in me might extend further than any secrets I possessed about the British Security Coordination.
‘I take it you’re not married,’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘How old’s the kid?’
‘Five.’
‘Bring him along. You’re never too young to start going to the opera.’
‘Maybe I will,’ I said.
We chatted a bit more and I said I’d call him when I had my summary complete – I was still waiting for more information. I left him in the pub and wandered down the High Street to where I’d parked my car. Some students, wearing gowns and carrying champagne bottles, burst out of University College, singing a song with a nonsensical refrain. They capered off down the street, whooping and laughing. Exams over, I thought, term nearly finished and a hot summer of freedom ahead. Suddenly I felt ridiculously old, remembering my own post-exam euphoria and celebrations – an aeon ago, it seemed – and the thought depressed me for the usual reasons. When I took my final exams and celebrated their conclusion my father had been alive; he died three days before I had my results – and so he never learned that his daughter had got a first. As I made for my car, I found myself thinking about him in that last month of his life, that summer – six years ago, already. He had looked well, my unchanging Dad, he wasn’t unwell, he wasn’t old, but in those final weeks of his life he had started behaving oddly. One afternoon he dug up a whole row of new potatoes, five yards’ worth, tens and tens of pounds. Why did you do that, Sean? I remember my mother asking. I just wanted to see if they were ready, he said. Then he cut down and burned on a bonfire a ten-foot lime sapling he’d planted the year before. Why, Dad? I just couldn’t bear the thought of it growing, was his simple, baffling reply. Most strange, though, was a compulsion he developed in what was to be his last week on earth, for switching out electric lights in the house. He would patrol the rooms, upstairs and down, looking for a burning light bulb and extinguish it. I’d leave the library to make a cup of tea and come back to find it in darkness. I caught him waiting to slip into rooms we were about to vacate, poised to make sure the lights went off within seconds of their being no longer required. It began to drive me and my mother mad. I remember shouting at him once: what the hell’s going on? And he replied with unusual meekness – it just seems a terrible waste, Ruth, an awful waste of precious electricity.
I now think he knew that he was soon going to die but the message had somehow become scrambled or unintelligible to him. We are animals, after all, and I believe our old animal instincts lurk deep inside us. Animals seem to be able to read the signals – perhaps our big, super-intelligent brains can’t bear to decipher them. I’m sure now my father’s body was somehow subtly alerting him to the impending shutdown, the final systems malfunction, but he was confused. Two days after I had shouted at him about the lights he collapsed and died in the garden after lunch. He was deadheading roses – nothing strenuous – and died immediately, we were informed, a fact that consoled me, but I still hated to dwell on his few, bewildered, frightened weeks of timor mortis.
I unlocked my car and sat down behind the wheel, feeling blue, missing him badly all of a sudden, wondering what he would have made of my mother’s, his wife’s, astounding revelations. Of course, it would have all been different if he’d been alive – a pointless hypothesis, then – and so, to move my mind away from this depressing subject I tried to imagine Timothy Thoms without his hidalgo’s beard. ‘Rodrigo’ Thoms. I liked that better. Perhaps I would call him Rodrigo.
The Story of Eva Delectorskaya
New Mexico. 1941
EVA DELECTORSKAYA STEPPED QUICKLY off the train at Albuquerque’s Santa Fe station. It was eight o’clock in the evening and she was arriving a day later than she had planned – but better to be sure and safe. She watched the passengers disembark – a dozen or so – and then waited until the train pulled out, heading for El Paso. There was no sign of the two crows she had lost in Denver. All the same, she walked a couple of blocks around the station, checking, and, being shadow-free, went into the first hotel she found – The Commercial – and paid six dollars in advance for a single room, three nights. Her room was small, could have been cleaner, had a fine view of an air shaft, but it would do. She left her suitcase there, walked back to the station and told a taxi driver to take her to the Hotel de Vargas, her original destination and where she was due to meet her first contact. The de Vargas proved to be ten minutes away in the business district but after the scare in Denver she needed a bolt-hole. One town: two hotels – standard Lyne training.
The de Vargas lived up to its pretentious name. It was over-decorated, had a hundred rooms and a cocktail lounge. She put a wedding ring on her finger before she checked in and explained to the receptionist that her luggage was lost in Chicago and the railway would be sending it on. No problem, Mrs Dalton, the receptionist said, we’ll be sure to let you know the moment it arrives. Her room looked out over a small faux-Pueblo courtyard with a pattering fountain. She freshened up and went down to the cocktail lounge, dark and virtually empty, and ordered a Tom Collins from a plump waitress in a short orange dress. Eva wasn’t happy, her brain was working too hard. She nibbled peanuts and drank her liquor and wondered what was the best thing to do.
She had left New York and travelled to Chicago, where she spent a night, deliberately not making her connecting train to Kansas City. She saw the trajectory of her journey across America as a thrown stone, heading westwards, slowly falling on New Mexico. The next day she travelled to Kansas City, missed another connection to Denver and waited three hours in the station for the next. She bought a newspaper and found some items on the war on page nine. The Germans were closing in on Moscow but winter was impeding their advance – as for what might be going on in England she could find nothing. On the next section of her journey, as the train was approaching Denver, she did a routine walk through the coaches. She spotted the crows in the observation platform. They were sitting together, a silly, slack mistake: if they’d been apart she might not have noticed them but she had seen those two charcoal-grey suits in Chicago as well as the two ties, one burnt-amber, one maroon. The maroon tie had a diamond-patterned weave to it that reminded her of a tie she had once given to Kolia as a Christmas present – he wore it with a pale blue shirt, she remembered. She had made him promise that it would be his ‘favourite’ tie and he had solemnly promised – the tie of ties, he had said, how can I ever thank you? trying to keep his face serious. That’s how she had remembered the crows. There was a young man with an undershot lantern-jaw and an older man with greying hair and a moustache. She walked by them and sat down looking out at the prairies rolling by. In the window’s reflection she saw them separate immediately: Lantern-Jaw went downstairs, Moustache pretended to read his newspaper.
From Denver she had planned to go straight on to Santa Fe and Albuquerque but clearly now she had shadows she had to lose them. Not for the first time she was grateful for what she had learned in Lyne: br
oken journeys always make it easier to spot the shadow. Nobody would ever travel as she had done – so coincidence was ruled out. It wouldn’t be difficult to get rid of them, she thought – they were either inept or complacent, or both.
At Denver Station she bought a locker, left her suitcase in it, and then walked out into the city and went into the first multi-storey department store she encountered. She looked around, browsing, moving up through the floors until she found what she wanted: an elevator close to a stairway on the third floor. She made her way slowly back to the first floor, buying a lipstick and compact on the way. At the elevator she dithered, letting others go by her as she scrutinised the store directory, then slipped in at the last minute. Moustache had been hovering but was too far away. ‘Five, please,’ she said to the operator but stepped out on three. She waited behind a rack of dresses by the doorway. Seconds later Moustache and Lantern-Jaw thundered up the stairs, quickly scanned the floor, and, not seeing her, and spotting that the lift was still going up, bolted out again. Eva was down the stairs and out on the street a minute later. She doubled back and jinked around but they were gone. She collected her suitcase and took a bus to Colorado Springs, four stops down the line to Santa Fe and spent a night there in a hotel opposite the station.
That evening she called in from a pay phone in the lobby. She let it ring three times, hung up, called again, hung up after the first ring and called once more. She suddenly wanted to hear Romer’s voice.
‘Transoceanic. How can I help you?’ It was Morris Devereux. She checked her disappointment, angry with herself at being disappointed it wasn’t Romer.
‘You know the party I went to.’
‘Yes.’
‘There were two uninvited guests.’
‘Unusual. Any idea who they were?’
‘Local crows, I would say.’
‘Even more unusual. Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. I’ve lost them anyway. Can I speak to the boss?’
