Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  The sound of running feet pulled his eyes from the river, and he barely had time to shift his body before the man was upon him. A knife glittered in the yellow light as it arced toward him, and his outthrust fist smashed across the side of his assailant’s head at exactly the moment the blade cut agonizingly into his abdomen. McColl was briefly aware of the man falling, picking himself up, and running away, and of shouts from several directions. He was, he realized, on his knees, the knife still buried in his body, the blood seeping through his questing fingers. He resisted the temptation to pull the knife out, and his last thought was self-congratulatory, that he had at least learned something from Gandhi and his fellow medics on the long slog down from Spion Kop.

  Stateroom 302

  McColl could feel and just about hear the low throb of the engines—the ship was under way. Jed and Mac would be leaning over the rail and waving China good-bye, but he was flat on his back in an upper-deck cabin, and all he could see of the outside world was a circle of gray sky.

  He had spent a good portion of the last few days either asleep or deep in drug-induced unconsciousness, so that much of what he knew of recent events was hearsay. He did remember the jolting rickshaw ride to the General Hospital, but all he could recall of his arrival there was a bewildering kaleidoscope of anxious faces. The next thing he knew, he was coming to in a private room, with an anxious brother looking on. As Jed had later admitted, he hadn’t relished telling their mother where he’d been while his brother was getting murdered.

  McColl was, it seemed, out of danger but confined to bed for at least a week. The knife had pierced his liver, which was better news than it sounded—apparently, as organs went, this one healed quicker than most. He had spent the first day staring at the ceiling, occasionally dozing off despite the pain. Whenever the door to his private room opened, he hoped it would be her, but it never was. Perhaps she hadn’t heard, though that was hard to believe—the story of the Englishman almost killed by a Chinese person had made the front page of the North China Daily News. There was a small, extremely blurred picture of him, along with a bigger and clearer one of the Maia, which had to be good for business.

  Even Cumming had heard the news from someone and sent a get-well cable.

  The hospital doctor had reluctantly agreed to his joining the Manchuria and that morning a horse-drawn ambulance had transported him down to the steam-tender quay. He had been looking forward to the trip downriver, but all he saw from his stretcher were chimney tops, upper masts, and an occasional seagull. And after that there was the final indignity of being winched ashore by one of the liner’s derricks.

  McColl and his brother had planned to share a cabin, but Jed and Mac had decided to bunk together while he convalesced. Which was something of a relief—Jed was exhausting at the best of times, and he felt utterly drained of energy.

  He couldn’t even summon up what seemed an appropriate level of anger. His assailant had not been caught, and the man’s motives remained a mystery. Perhaps he’d seen McColl in the street and taken an instant dislike to his face. Perhaps he hated all foreign devils and had picked him out at random. Or maybe the man was off his head. The only other possibility was that someone had hired him to kill McColl, which seemed ludicrous. Who would want him dead? His only current enemies were the Germans, and they would know that the intelligence gleaned in Tsingtau had already been dispatched. As far as McColl was aware, spying in peacetime was not considered a capital crime by any of the great powers.

  Over the next two days, the Manchuria steamed slowly eastward across the East China Sea toward its next port of call, the Japanese city of Nagasaki. After working his way through Mac’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Jed’s Riders of the Purple Sage he was forced back on the sundry newspapers the two of them had collected for him in an hour’s scouring of the ship. Some were several months old, but most of the stories were still news to him. There were the usual disasters—an early-November storm over the American Great Lakes had killed more than 250 people—but also a cheering series of debuts. A ship had traversed the Panama Canal; the first transcontinental US highway had been dedicated; the Ford Motor Company had introduced something called an assembly line, which put automobiles together in a fifth of the time and would of course make them cheaper. More welcome still, peace had been declared in the Balkans, and the prospect of a wider war seemed to have receded. There was even good news for suffragettes everywhere—Norway was the latest country to give women the vote, following New Zealand, Australia, and Finland. Caitlin would be pleased.

  He knew she was on board. Jed and Mac came by at regular intervals to regale him with news—the sighting of a whale, the consistency of the plum pudding, a rundown of their fellow passengers. She turned up in the last of these, among the women they considered attractive. McColl had said nothing about meeting her in Shanghai, but the two of them had recognized her from Peking. “Remember that American journalist you fancied?” Jed asked. “She keeps staring at us, and I’ve no idea why. She smokes in public, and I think she’s one of those radical women. She is a looker, though.”

  His brother and Mac were having the time of their lives, McColl thought. Jed had a job waiting for him at home—his school career had been less than distinguished, and college had never been an option—and McColl wondered how small the boy would find a Glasgow insurance office after having circled the globe.

  The ship’s physician and surgeon both came to see him, the one to check his general state, the other to admire his Shanghai colleague’s stitchwork. Neither had anything other than rest to suggest—time, it seemed, would work a cure. And by the time they docked in Nagasaki, McColl was making trips to the toilet and able to dispense with the bedpan. That morning, after Jed and Mac had gone ashore in search of a samurai sword, his steward arrived with a short note from her—she hoped he was feeling better and would soon be up and about. Her handwriting seemed wholly in character, somehow both bold and controlled, but he found the whole thing strange. There was obviously no way she could come to his cabin, but why had she waited three days to send the message? He wondered whether to send a reply, and what he would say if he did. “Thank you for your note” seemed somewhat ludicrous after those hours in the candlelit room.

  Soon after dark the ship weighed anchor and headed north and east up the Kyushu coastline; by midmorning it had passed through the narrow Kanmon Straits and was beginning its two-day passage of the Inland Sea. On the second of these, the weather changed for the better and McColl finally felt well enough to sit outside on the promenade deck. He had been enjoying the play of sun on sea for almost an hour when her silhouette loomed above him. “You must be better,” she said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Can I join you for a minute?”

  “Of course.” She was wearing the same black coat, with a rose-colored hat and matching scarf.

  She settled herself in the adjoining chair. “It was terrible, what happened to you in Shanghai.”

  “I’ve had better days.” He smiled. “It was the shock more than anything else—one moment I’m standing there looking at the river, the next I’m on my knees with a knife in my gut. It happened so fast.”

  “And you’ve no idea why the man attacked you?”

  “None at all. I hadn’t made any enemies in Shanghai, or at least none I was aware of.”

  “I only found out the morning we left—I saw a copy of the day before’s paper. I would have come to the hospital if I’d known.”

  There was a hint of appeal in her eyes, but he didn’t know what for.

  “So what’s in the Times?” she asked eventually, nodding toward the paper in his lap. “I’ve been shutting the world out since we boarded.”

  “Oh, it’s all old news.”

  “Anything new on Irish Home Rule?”

  “Nothing, but there wouldn’t be. The bill doesn’t get its third reading until the spring, but it’ll pass. And the Ulstermen will opt out if the Nationalists let them, fight them if they d
on’t.”

  “How do you feel about that?” she asked, looking him straight in the eye.

  “Home Rule? I’m all for it.” The cheer from farther down the deck was for an accurate punt on the shuffleboard court, not his political opinion.

  “And Ulster opting out?” she pressed him.

  He considered. “Well, I suppose if the Irish are justified in throwing off English rule, then they can hardly insist on ruling Ulster from Dublin.”

  She bridled at that. “You could say that we’ve put up with minority status for eight hundred years and now it’s Ulster’s turn.”

  “You could,” he conceded. “So are you one of those Irish-Americans who give money for fighting the English?”

  “I agree the English should leave,” she retorted. “But there are other battles that interest me more.”

  “Women’s battles?”

  “Yes, but not only. Working people’s battles. The poverty’s better hidden at home, but it’s still there. And there’s so much less excuse.”

  He said nothing. Inside the ship the Filipino band had started serenading those enjoying an early lunch. “Don’t you agree?” she asked.

  “I agree that it’s there. How quickly anything can be done about it is another matter.”

  She shook her head slightly, loosing a few stray locks. “We have to try.”

  “I suppose so. But how?” He wondered if she wanted to kiss him as much as he wanted to kiss her.

  “Well, by writing and by organizing. Writing so that people know what the situation is, then organizing them politically, so that the bosses have to listen to them.”

  “You think people don’t already know? All those Europeans back in Shanghai know perfectly well what sort of life the Chinese have.”

  “Perhaps. Look, I don’t know enough about China to argue with you—if my friend Ch’ing-ling were here … but she isn’t. So let’s talk about the States or England. I don’t think most people in our countries have any idea what their rulers are up to, either at home or abroad. For instance, I don’t think many English people would be happy if they knew how Indians are treated by the authorities there.”

  McColl was unconvinced. “I don’t think many would care if you presented them with the facts.”

  “You have a very low opinion of people.”

  “No, I think you overestimate the power of the written word. Just knowing that people are badly treated isn’t enough.” McColl smiled to himself. “A couple of years ago a friend of mine was in New York, waiting for the ship that was supposed to take him home. It was the Titanic. When the news reached his hotel that the ship had sunk, other residents booked on the return voyage held a meeting in the lounge. And spent the whole time complaining about how hard it would be to make fresh arrangements.”

  “So people are just rotten through and through.”

  “Not at all. I’m sure most of those people are kind to their children and servants and pets. But they weren’t actually on the ship, and unless they were close to someone who went down with it … well, it wasn’t real enough for them to actually feel any empathy. For most people, just knowing isn’t enough.”

  “Of course. That’s why the best writers are the ones who stir the heart as well as feed the mind.”

  “Touché. And are you one of those?”

  “Not yet.” She smiled and stood up. “Will you be here again tomorrow?”

  “If I’m not racing round the deck.” He couldn’t read her expression. He had, he realized, no clue at all as to what she was feeling.

  Jed was sitting with him the following day but quickly gave up his seat when she appeared. McColl introduced them and noticed a new ease in his brother’s manner with the opposite sex. Whatever else the Lotus Flower had given him, it seemed to have cured his chronic shyness with women.

  “Is he your only sibling?” she asked once Jed had left.

  “Yes,” he said, offering her a cigarette.

  “And your parents are still alive?” she asked after they’d both lit up.

  “Oh, yes. My father’s an official in the NUR—that’s the main railway union. A dyed-in-the-wool socialist. You and he would find a lot to agree about. Though you’d find his attitude to women something of a problem.”

  “And your mother?” she asked, not rising to the bait.

  “She used to work part-time. Since they moved to Glasgow, she’s been keeping house for my father and Jed, but sooner or later Jed will move out.”

  “What will she do?”

  McColl shrugged. “She has friends.”

  “That helps.”

  “Tell me about your family.”

  “Okay. My mother died when I was small, and my Aunt Orla—my father’s sister—more or less took her place. My older brother, Fergus, is a lawyer—he’s very conventional but very kind. My younger brother, Colm, is not much older than yours, and he’s a bit of a rebel. My sister, Finola—she’s two years older than me—she got married last year, and I expect there’s a baby on the way by now. All she’s ever wanted is a family of her own.”

  Unlike you, McColl thought. “And your father?”

  “He owns a construction business, but other people run it now. They do a lot of work for the city—Brooklyn, that is.”

  Her face clouded, and McColl had a glimpse of the girl she’d been.

  “He’s … from the old school, I suppose. He likes the old songs, the old ways. The old attitudes to women. If he’d made the family decisions, I’d never have finished high school, let alone gone to Wesleyan. But being from the old school, he went out to earn the money and left Aunt Orla in charge of the home.”

  “She never married?”

  “Oh, yes. But he died young, younger even than my mother. He left her a little money, and I sometimes wonder what Orla would have done if my mother hadn’t died a few weeks later. The world would have been her oyster, and she was only thirty. But my father asked her to care for his children, and she couldn’t refuse. I don’t think she’s had a bad life—my father made a lot of money, too, and we children all love her. But sometimes I see a particular look in her eyes, and I know she’s wondering what could have been.” She regarded McColl. “I don’t ever want to have that feeling,” she said. And she said it with such quiet force that he bit back the obvious retort, that regrets for roads not taken were the fate of anyone with the least imagination.

  By the time the ship left Kobe, he was able to complete a circuit of the deck, albeit with some pain and difficulty. Caitlin had been using most of her waking hours to write up her impressions of China for several magazines back home, but that afternoon she announced herself almost finished and suggested an evening drink in the oak-paneled smoking room and bar.

  The two of them never seemed short of subjects for conversation—or indeed subjects for good-natured argument—and the first time he looked at his watch, he was surprised to find it was almost midnight. They had, he realized, been drinking for several hours.

  She had never brought up their evening in Shanghai, which seemed strange only until he realized that he hadn’t either. Perhaps it had been unimportant to her, a brief fling soon forgotten, but he couldn’t really believe that. The more he knew her, the more conflicted she seemed, but he had no idea why. Had she been hurt by someone?

  Studying her face through the bar’s haze of smoke, he didn’t think he could stand another three weeks of holding back his feelings, and now seemed as good a time as any for crashing through the ice. “That evening we spent in Shanghai,” he began. “At your friend’s house. I …” He was going to say “enjoyed it,” but that was ridiculous. “It meant something to me,” he managed, which sounded every bit as feeble.

  She lowered her eyes for a moment, as if in search of inspiration, and the silence seemed almost tangible. “I like you,” she said eventually. “And I … I liked having sex with you.”

  He wanted to ask if that was all, and it must have shown in his face.

  “If that were all, I wou
ld be wanting more. But I don’t want to fall in love with you. Or with anyone.”

  “Why not?” he asked, his heart beating faster at the possibility.

  She smiled ruefully. “Where would it go? You’ll be returning to England, or traveling the world selling automobiles. I’ll be in New York City trying to tell people what’s happening to their fellow citizens. We lead such different lives, but even if we didn’t … I don’t want a marriage and a home and a family, not for a long while, if ever.”

  She was right, he thought. For herself, she was right.

  “Or we could live for the moment,” she murmured. “Enjoy the time we have.”

  “We could do that.”

  “And when the time comes, part like friends. With no regrets.”

  “We could do that, too,” he said, although it was much harder to imagine.

  “Are you …?” She searched for the word.

  “Firing on all cylinders?”

  She laughed. “Something like that. My stateroom’s on this deck. So …”

  They walked there arm in arm, stopping to kiss several times on the way. After putting out the Do Not Disturb sign, she helped him undress and winced at the sight of his wound. “I’ll be gentle,” she promised, letting loose her hair.

  They spent most of the next two days in her stateroom, emerging only for fresh air and meals. Jed and Mac seemed shocked, envious, and happy for him, and they treated Caitlin with the exaggerated courtesy of characters in a Victorian romance. What they actually thought of her, McColl dreaded to imagine.

  Eight days after leaving Shanghai, they docked at Yokohama for a thirty-six-hour layover. Caitlin was staying the night with the exiled Ch’ing-ling, so McColl explored the imperial capital with Jed and Mac, returning early to the ship when he grew tired. They intended to visit the red-light district and sample whatever was to be had.