Angels in the Gloom wwi-3

by Anne Perry

  “I forget all my responsibilities when I’m with you,” he answered, allowing both honesty and laughter into his voice. He saw the pleasure in her, too real to be hidden immediately. “Until I look at the faces of the soldiers on leave,” he added. “Then I remember I’m part of it all, whether I want to be or not.” He had to remember there was a war on, to prevent his feelings for her from sweeping him away. The price of forgetting could be their lives.

  She swung around to face him, eyes wide as if he had slapped her. But there was admiration as well as the sudden loss of happiness. “Of course you are,” she said quietly. “You’ve come to work, even if it has its pleasures. If I weren’t Irish, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “If you weren’t Irish, you wouldn’t be here, either,” he pointed out.

  “And do you imagine I know who is sabotaging your bullets and shells?” she asked, turning away so he could see only her profile.

  “Possibly,” he replied. “But it hardly matters. I’m quite sure you wouldn’t tell me. But I think it’s far more likely you simply know that it’s being done, and probably how. But I don’t really need you to tell me that because I already know.”

  “Then why are you here?” She still did not look at him. Her voice was light and very soft. He had to lean closer to her to be sure of catching every word. He could smell the perfume of her hair and see the shadow of her lashes on her cheek.

  The orchestra started to tune up in the pit. People were still busy settling in their seats, waving to friends they recognized, calling out greetings. Girls were laughing and flirting. There was a hectic pleasure in the air. No comedian could fail to amuse them, nor on the other hand, could they totally block out the shadow of knowledge of world events just beyond the edge of the lights.

  “I’m here deceiving everybody,” Matthew replied in a whisper. “I tell myself I’m here to gain confirmation from you, but that’s not true, because I don’t need it. We turned the spy in New York. We got all the information from him that we wanted, even the name of their man in the German bank, and the account numbers. But he paid for it with his life.”

  She was silent for several minutes.

  He waited. What she really wanted was to know if they had broken the code, but what would she pretend to want? In that instant he longed for her to be like the people around them, here just for fun, to flirt, perhaps even to love and lose, but without deceit. He longed for it so fiercely it was a hollow, physical ache inside him.

  She turned and met his eyes. In a glance she understood, and allowed it to show in her own face. Then deliberately, like smashing a glass into a hundred shards of light, she broke it. “Did your people kill him?” she asked.

  He was cold in the heat of the theater. “No,” he replied. “I imagine his own people did.”

  “Then they knew he had betrayed them,” she pointed out. “They’ll change their routine. Your intelligence will be no good to you.”

  He smiled bleakly. “We’ll act before then, if we haven’t already.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “The Germans won’t risk angering the Americans by doing it again. They’ll have to think of something else, and no doubt they will. But Wilson has this grand idea of stepping in to be the arbiter of peace in Europe. It seems to matter intensely to him. His place in history. Neither we nor Germany can afford to destroy that illusion, especially with presidential elections in November. Far more of this is about internal American politics than you might think.”

  “There are a lot of Germans in America,” she said, looking at the stage where the tempo of the music had quickened.

  “And Irish,” he added. “But plenty of British, too, and even a few French, and Italians. Don’t forget the Italians. God knows how many of them have been slaughtered on the Austrian border.”

  She did not answer. Her face was bleak with misery, as if she had suddenly remembered a vast, ancient grief.

  The music swept over them. All around them, young people were living in the moment, refusing to think of yesterday or tomorrow. Some sat close, arms around each other.

  Detta said no more until the interval and they went to the foyer and bar. Matthew bought her a drink and some chocolates. A few yards away a group of young men in uniform were repeating one of the jokes and laughing too loudly, too long. The undertones of despair in their voices caught his ear like a cry.

  He glanced at Detta. There was a naked pity in her eyes so powerful he put his hand on her arm without thinking what he was doing.

  She turned to him in surprise, and the pity vanished, although hiding it cost her an effort. Then she read in his face that it had stirred a softness in him, no sense of victory over her because she had yielded a moment. For this instant her grace and her compulsive loyalty to her cause tugged at his emotions. It made him ache for her, made him long to break through the barrier of lies and games so that for a moment they could cling to each other in the passions of the mind and heart that hold people together. They had the understanding of the same beauty, the same gentleness, pity for hurt and loss, the infinite treasuring of life’s sweetness, and above all the hunger not to be alone in it.

  But he was alone. She was watching young lovers in front of them; in profile, she was unreadable to him. Their separate loyalties held them both too hard. To yield anything would be betrayal, and if they gave up that much of themselves, what had they left to give to anyone, let alone to each other?

  Did the loneliness cut her as deeply to the bone as it did him? Or was that unreadable part of her, the Celtic dream with its plaintive music on the half note, its myths that stretched back through history to the fantastic, enough to feed her hunger?

  He looked at the vitality in her face, the delicate curve of her neck, her shoulders a little too thin for perfection, and felt as if the impenetrable glass between them could never be broken.

  Then she turned and he blanked his expression just in time to stop her reading his hurt. At least he thought it was in time.

  “Don’t you feel for them, Matthew?” she asked, a pucker between her brows. “They have this moment, and they know that could be all. They’ve been snatched from hell for a few hours, and tomorrow or the day after, they go back. Perhaps they’ll never come home again. Can’t you see it on their faces, hear it on the edge of their laughter? It’s in the air, like the smell of a storm coming.”

  He looked at her. She was beautiful, so alone, chasing a dream. What would happen if she ever caught it? Would she stop and hold it close, taste its sweetness and be happy? Or would she then create another dream to pursue, her heart as elusive, as unsettled as it was now? He feared the answer to that. Not that it mattered! The pursuit itself would always stand between them.

  She reached out her hand and touched his cheek. She was smiling, but the pain behind her eyes was real. “I don’t understand you English,” she said huskily. “I’m sure there’s somebody fierce and wonderful behind that throw-away calm, I just can’t crack the shell. I want the curtain to go up on the play for a while, so I can laugh, or the pain inside me is going to burst.” And she turned and walked away across the foyer, as graceful as a reed in the wind.

  He followed her, knowing irrefutably that they were already on the brink of a betrayal—of each other or themselves. If she won the battle of wits, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young soldiers might pay with their lives. He did not want to think what his victory would cost. The Irish were not kind to those who failed them.

  Richard Mason found the streets of Paris surprisingly empty. Though it was late April, just after Easter, when he turned into the narrow Rue Oudry where he knew Trotsky lived, there seemed nothing of spring in the air. A breeze blew old newspapers and pamphlets along the pavement. There was no one sitting in the cafés and too many of the women he had seen were wearing black, even young ones who at any other time would have had a smile and a word for him.

  Walking toward his destination he had noticed how many of the street clocks had stopp
ed, and the statue of the Lion de Belfort had dirty straw sticking out of its mouth. All anyone could think of was the news from Verdun.

  It was early evening as he approached Trotsky’s home. The Russian journalist worked on an émigré newspaper, scratching out a living, and as always pursuing his dreams for a revolution of social justice, a world where workers overthrew oppression and there was food and warmth for all.

  Mason’s hands were sweating, and he found it hard to catch his breath. In the days since he had left London the Peacemaker’s words had beaten in his brain: “Kill him! If he will continue the war, kill him!”

  Of course he could not do that tonight! All he had to do now was meet Trotsky again and make some evaluation of the man. But he would not have changed, would he? People like Trotsky never changed! There was a fire in him nothing would quench. He had been sentenced to exile to Siberia, escaped from Russia to Sèvres and then Paris. He had been poor to starvation, and a stranger in a foreign land. Still he wrote with the same passion as of old, greater if anything.

  The Peacemaker might not know Trotsky, but Mason did. He knocked on the door. Then he wanted to run, but his feet were like lead and his knees weak. Whatever Trotsky said, Mason could not murder him, although that was what the Peacemaker wanted.

  A woman in black passed him, her face masklike in grief. How many loved ones had she lost? Mason had seen the corpses piled in Verdun too deep to count, too many to bury. They would be there until the rats ate them and the earth itself subsided in the rain and mud covered them over. His stomach clenched. Yes, of course, he could kill one Russian exile, if it brought peace even a day nearer.

  The door swung open and another woman in black looked at him without interest.

  He asked in French if Monsieur Trotsky was at home.

  She said that he was, and showed him up to the apartment where Trotsky lived with his wife and two sons.

  Trotsky himself opened the door. He was a small man, stocky with a wealth of black curling hair so thick it added inches to his height. Intelligence lit his square face with its full lips and powerful chin, so utterly different from the sparer, more ascetic Lenin. He stared at the tall man on his doorstep in bewilderment, then as Mason spoke, memory and pleasure lit his eyes.

  “Mason!” he said incredulously. “Come in! Come in!” He stepped back, making way for Mason to follow him inside the small room. “It’s been an age! How are you?” He waved at a chair and indicated a bottle of Pernod. “Drink?”

  Trotsky introduced his wife, who gave a quick smile and excused herself, saying she was just going to put their two young sons to bed. Mason greeted her with circumspection, uncomfortably aware of Trotsky’s other family in St. Petersburg.

  Mason then recounted his experiences as a war correspondent, allowing Trotsky to assume that his journalism background had brought him to Paris. However, he was obliged to be economical with the truth, omitting anything to do with the Peacemaker, his recent visit to Ypres, and Judith Reavley. He was acutely conscious of the small room, and its contrasts. All over the table papers were covered with scribbled political arguments. But also scattered around the room were the details of family life: children’s toys, handmade and well used; a piece of mending with the needle still in it, thread hanging; a small bowl with half a dozen leaves and flowers; a plate with a chip on one side; a book with a paper marking the place.

  Trotsky was talking about Jean Jaurès, the French socialist who had been murdered just before the outbreak of war.

  “He might have stopped all this!” Trotsky said savagely, watching Mason’s face. “I went to the Café Croissant, where he was killed, you know. I thought I might still feel something of him there. I did not agree with him politically, of course, but I admired him. How he could speak! Like a great waterfall, elemental! And yet he could be gentleness itself, endlessly patient in explaining.”

  Mason watched him as he went on about Jaurès, and then Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks in Paris, a man of towering intellect but irresolute will. He spoke of a dozen others, his own enthusiasm flooding through it all.

  But did he want peace? If he returned to Russia to overthrow the tsar and the whole rotten edifice of oppression surrounding the old government, would he then take Russia out of the war? Or remain with the Allies, for whatever reason, and pursue it to the end through more seas of blood?

  It was ludicrous! Mason was sitting in Trotsky’s home talking of a world revolution of social order and justice, all the while having been commissioned to murder him!

  But men who had never met each other were crushed in the mud only a few score miles away, killing by the thousands. Surely the only sanity left was to stop it—any way at all?

  The conversation had come around to Trotsky’s plans of returning to Russia.

  “When you go back to Russia, when you get rid of the tsar, what then?” Mason asked him. “What will you do? What about the war?”

  “We can’t help the rest of Europe,” Trotsky said with resignation. “We’ll make peace, of course, as soon as we have a voice at all!”

  Mason felt relief well up inside him, but then he wondered if he was being hasty in accepting this answer. “You don’t feel that if you withdrew from the war, the rest of Europe might not support the revolution?” he asked aloud.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Trotsky demanded. “With the losses we’re sustaining, we can’t keep fighting. And we’ve got so much to do, to put our country to rights. The last thing we need is more death. It is the ordinary men—the soldiers, the workers—who will bring about the new order. This is an unjust war—proletarian against proletarian. It must come to an end as soon as possible.” He frowned, puzzled by Mason’s apparent stupidity.

  Mason leaned across the table. “When?” he asked with more urgency in his voice than he had intended. “You cannot afford to wait until Germany has beaten you, or you will merely exchange the tsar for the kaiser. And if America comes into the war, that will not help you. Then the Allies will win, and that means the tsar again. You will be back where you started, but with God knows how many of your people dead.”

  “I know,” Trotsky said with pain marked deep in his face. “It must be soon. But we are persecuted on every side, even here in Paris. Martov is brilliant, but cannot make up his mind on anything. Lenin is in Zurich, and afraid to move. Believe me, I am doing everything I can. If I had not friends here I would be in danger of being driven out of France myself. But never give up hope, my friend, we will overcome in the end, and it is not far—another year, perhaps less.”

  “Less,” Mason said quietly. “It needs to be less.” There was a kind of peace inside him, a freedom from a terrible weight that had crushed the breath out of his lungs.

  It was not until he had at last taken leave of Trotsky and was walking along the quiet street in the dark that he even considered how many people might be slaughtered, starved, or dispossessed in the peace that Trotsky dreamed of.

  The evening light was fading in a high, pale blue arc across the sky, like washed silk, and the color was lost beneath the trees where Joseph and Corcoran had been walking on the edge of the fields.

  “It’s so mild I forget it isn’t summer yet,” Corcoran said with a smile.

  Joseph stared across the wind-rippled grass toward Hadingly and the west. It had been a brief interlude of escape from the present, the dilemmas of grief and decision, even awareness of the terrible losses in Verdun and the uprising in Ireland. That had now been quelled with a savagery that had forfeited all the goodwill the Dubliners had originally felt toward the British troops.

  Then he turned to Shanley and saw in the yellow sunset light the haggard planes of his face, the sunken skin around his eyes, the lines etched deep in the flesh from nose to mouth. He looked like an old man, beaten and worn out. It touched Joseph with unexpected fear. The confidence of a few moments before vanished. It had been an illusion created by courage and force of will, the need to believe the impossible because it wa
s all that lay between them and defeat.

  The instant passed. Joseph replaced his own mask of ease, as if he had not noticed anything. Since his decision to remain in St. Giles it had become easier. There was nothing in the future to dread except the burdens of the village, the familiar pains of confusion and bereavement.

  Corcoran smiled, a sad, weary look. Joseph had blanked the understanding from his face too late. “You know this man, Perth, don’t you.” It was an observation, not a question.

  “A little,” Joseph conceded. “He might have changed in a couple of years. Is he making things difficult for you?”

  Corcoran did not answer immediately. He seemed to be weighing his words. A plowman leading two shire horses passed along the lane at the bottom of the field, harness clinking gently. He must have been harrowing up on the slope beyond the woods.

  They had not spoken of the murder. Now it lay between them like a third presence.

  “Gwen Neave saw him,” Joseph said aloud. “A man in a light coat, on a woman’s bicycle, coming out of the path through the trees shortly after Blaine must have been killed. That would be why the tracks were deeper than if it had been a woman—a greater weight.”

  Corcoran was stiff, as if the idea froze him in horror.

  Joseph felt a moment’s guilt for having mentioned it. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  Corcoran did not move and when he spoke his voice was hoarse. “Not your fault, my dear fellow. Did you say Mrs. Neave saw a man coming out of the woods? Was it light enough to tell?”

  Joseph was aware of his own clumsiness. “No, she said not. But he was in a state of considerable distress. He was sick, and then he relieved himself. That was the point at which she realized that he was without question a man. Until then she had assumed it was a woman, perhaps because it was a woman’s bicycle.”

  Corcoran’s face was almost blank. It seemed the idea was too ugly for him to grasp it.

  “Shanley?” Joseph moved closer to him, suddenly anxious.