by M. L. Huie
The address on the card said Turnpin Lane, which was a narrow street tucked in behind the church. Number 110 stood off the road slightly. The house looked a typical English-style cottage. Asymmetrical with narrow windows—curtains drawn, of course—and a gabled entranceway. It was small but beautifully maintained, fronted by a well-kept garden with the right amount of green, a concrete bench, and a statue of Cupid with honest-to-God water draining from the cherub’s stone mouth into an ornate basin on a pedestal.
So posh.
Livy stepped up to the door. She reached for the knocker. It was one of those brass jobs with a low ring and some bloke’s face in the center. It reminded her of the ghost of Jacob Marley. She hesitated.
The door opened.
A tall, very thin, blonde woman stood on the other side. She wore an off the shoulder summer frock that seemed a bit youthful for someone who looked to be on the downside of forty. A gold watch hung loose on her right wrist, just above a bracelet with some sort of inscription. The whole thing smelled like the vault of the Bank of England.
The woman saw Livy and plastered the most insincere smile across her pinched face.
“May I help you?” Her accent sounded vaguely Austrian with a thick coating of the BBC. She also didn’t sound in the mood to help anyone.
“Mr. Fleming sent me.”
“Of course, of course. Well, don’t just stand there.”
Livy stepped into the foyer, which, although dimly lit, looked like the outside. Old money and lots of it.
The blonde woman closed the door behind her. Somehow she’d managed to produce a Walther P38 from inside her cute little summer dress. Livy’d seen enough of those in the war, usually on the belts of Wehrmacht soldiers.
The woman smiled at the gun, as if surprised it had somehow ended up in her hand. “You must excuse me. I live alone and tend to be a very cautious woman. You have identification of some sort?”
Livy opened her unfashionably large handbag and fumbled for her Kemsley News card. The woman kept the gun on her the whole time. Finally Livy found it, handed it to her, and waited. The woman seemed satisfied and lowered the Walther.
“Please, come into the parlor, Miss Nash.”
Said the spider to the bloody fly. But Livy flew on regardless.
The parlor looked every bit as elegant and tasteful as the foyer. Livy didn’t know much about furniture, but the loveseat in the corner seemed older than her grandmother, as did the two armchairs facing it. The servants must have recently beaten the rug. Pictures of rolling hills and landscapes dotted the walls, so the overall effect led Livy to believe that anyone in England with money would feel right at home here.
“Please, sit down,” the woman said, making the pleasantry sound like a command. Placing the Walther on the sofa cushion, she made herself at home in the center of the loveseat.
“You brought something, yes?” the woman asked.
“Right,” Livy said, digging into her purse. She leaned forward with the package stamped “Morland’s.”
The woman took the box and unwrapped it hungrily. Once the brown paper had been torn off and tossed to the floor Livy recognized one of the special-blend cigarette boxes Fleming always had on his desk. The woman opened it and removed one of the cigarettes with three gold bands, sniffing it luxuriously. She then produced a gold Ronson lighter from the side table and flicked the flame to the tip. She drew the first smoke deep into her lungs and exhaled with a rapturous smile on her face.
Engulfed by a haze of smoke, the woman opened a decanter of something very dark and poured a shot’s worth into a cut-glass tumbler. Straight. No mixer. She swirled it in the glass and took two dainty sips.
“It’s piss,” she said, swallowing, “but what can you expect.” She took another long draw on the cigarette, and her eyes wandered over Livy from head to toe. Not in a sexual way. More like a boxer sizing up a sparring partner.
“How long have you known dear Ian?”
Livy felt the beginnings of a headache. The tension of the day had caught up with her, and she lacked patience for an interrogation.
“You’re Anka, then?”
The blonde woman’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Of course I am. Don’t be silly. Now, answer my question.”
“He hired me last year.”
Anka scoffed. “I met him during the war. So, five years for me. He is a very charming man, of course. And also a cad. I must say you don’t exactly look his type.”
Under normal circumstances Livy would’ve walked out. She hated this pretentious little nook of a house, and its mistress even more. She decided to give it two more minutes. Then, gun or no gun, she’d leave.
“I work for Mr. Fleming. That’s all.”
“He has never asked you for a drink or flirted with you?” Anka’s blue eyes fairly twinkled.
“As I said, it’s just about work, he and I.”
“Of course it is.”
It had been a while since Livy had taken an aversion to anyone this quickly.
“So, why did he send me here? You have something to tell me?”
Anka shrugged and lit another one of Fleming’s cigarettes.
Livy’s eyes shifted to the gun. She had the impulse to reach for it. Anka didn’t look particularly agile, but with the Walther beside her, she held the upper hand.
“I’m not here to be evaluated,” Livy said. “You have your cigarettes, and frankly, I’m a little tired of being given the once-over.”
The woman just stared and smoked.
Livy stood. If Anka cared, she didn’t show it. So, throwing a bit of caution to the wind, Livy turned and headed to the door. She wondered if the gun might now be aimed at her back.
“He wants you to be a double.”
Livy looked over her shoulder. No gun.
“A double?”
Anka laughed, deep and sneering. “A double?” she repeated, mocking Livy’s voice. “Where exactly is it you’re from?”
Livy ignored the insult. A double agent, she meant. Her mind raced back to Barnard. She remembered the fear and anxiety that he wore like his baggy overcoat the last time she saw him. A servant of two masters. Caught between them both.
A double.
Livy answered. “I’m from England. The side that won the war.”
No laugh this time. Anka crushed her cigarette in the ashtray and grabbed another.
“I worked for Ian. For England. During the war.” The flame sparked the tobacco, and Anka’s hand shook ever so slightly.
“Yes? And?”
“Miss Nash, if Ian asked you to visit me, then it means he is considering you for the type of work I did for him. I’m one of its few survivors, you might say.”
“You were a double agent for our side?”
“For Ian, to be precise. I passed false information to the Germans in Vienna. For almost two years.”
The smoke haze that now covered the chintzy sitting room seemed to clear ever so slightly. Two years undercover behind the lines. Livy’s stint with the SOE had lasted just over a year. At times she had pretended to be someone else in confrontations with the Germans, but many days had consisted of playing cards in an abandoned shop, waiting for signals from back home.
“And you were never captured?” Livy asked.
Anka shook her head. She picked tobacco from her thin bottom lip and flicked it across the room. “No, I was very good. The best, Ian said.”
“Two years is a long time for that sort of work.”
“One week is a long time for that sort of work. But I didn’t have a choice. It was the war.”
Livy took a hesitant step back into the room. “We all did things then we’d rather not remember.”
Another husky laugh. “You’re right, Miss Nash. Remembering is the problem.” She reached for the decanter and poured another two fingers in the tumbler. “And forgetting is the only tonic.”
Livy watched her down another glass. She didn’t say so, but Anka could have been speaking for her. I
t felt a bit like looking at a version of herself just after the war, when all she could do was drink away the pain. Livy wondered if this was how she would have turned out if she’d continued.
“This gun was not meant for you, but I tend to be a little more nervous these days.”
“Even now?”
“Two years is a long time, and it doesn’t leave you so quickly.” Anka picked up the Walther and placed it on the side table with the liquor. Livy wondered if one day she might use the gun on herself. Her heart broke for this woman who survived on cigarettes and booze. She considered how many other Ankas there might be out there all across Europe.
“Do you enjoy the theatre, Miss Nash?”
The question surprised Livy and brought her back to the moment. “I do.”
“Then, perhaps you know something about how a great actress submerges herself in a role. It’s a facade, of course, but when it’s done well, it appears the part consumes her. Replaces who she is with someone else entirely.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but yes.”
“That’s what it was like. What Ian had me do. Play a part. Always onstage. Always in the spotlight. But never quite sure if I’d got the lines right and how they might play for my audience. Do you understand me?”
“I think so.”
“But even in this play, this long play, you must find time to be offstage, you see. Somewhere you can relax. Otherwise you lose yourself entirely. And that is very frightening, Miss Nash. I had a book that I read when I was alone, and as I read it, I remembered my own thoughts, and the part left me, yes? It was my favorite book, of course. A book from my childhood. It was my talisman, you might say.”
Livy listened as Anka smoked and talked, the words spilling out of her almost automatically. She dared not interrupt, nor move even. This was a test, she decided. Fleming wanted her to hear Anka’s story. To carefully consider what he had in store for her. He’d said the next assignment was “quite a serious one at that.” So Livy took it all in, and tried to picture herself in the lonely, dangerous world Anka described.
“Because they won’t believe you at first, you see,” Anka continued. “Why would they? You offer them information or secrets and they suspect you. They think, ‘Oh, she’s a spy, of course.’ So before you even start, they don’t trust you. You have to win them over, and that takes time and patience. But even once you have it, you are always so close to catastrophe. Like you are dancing on a precipice. You can’t slip up. You can never allow yourself to relax. It’s actually quite thrilling at times. Exhilarating. The energy is almost sexual. It makes you feel you can do no wrong, and that—that is the moment when you are the most vulnerable. A part of me wanted to confess it all, Miss Nash. To the Germans. My contact. We had developed an intimacy, you see. I wanted to tell him the whole thing. Who I really was. It was such a great weight to carry, the burden of the deception.”
Her cigarette burned down to her finger. The ash fell on her summer frock, bringing Anka back to the present. “Goddamit! Why didn’t you warn me? This dress wasn’t cheap, you know.”
Livy held still. Drink and recalling the past had made Anka volatile. Never a good thing when a gun was within reach.
Anka snatched another cigarette and held it between her fingers, as if waiting for a light. “You might think I am very silly, talking all this nonsense, but you don’t understand. They—the men who sent me—never understood. Of course they were all full of praise and congratulations, but they don’t really know how it feels to be someone else entirely.”
Livy didn’t want to ask the obvious question. She knew the answer might terrify her. Anxiety crept up her neck like a spider. No choice. She had to know.
“Well, how does it feel, then?”
Anka’s eyes half-closed and her voice became very soft. “It feels like you are a small child walking into the shadows. Alone. No one there to hold your hand. But that’s not the hardest part. No, the hard part is walking back out. If you’re not careful, you might lose yourself in there.”
Livy saw it quite clearly, what the spy game had done to this woman. She looked years older and acted a bloody wreck. Nervous. Paranoid. Chain-smoking. Livy gritted her teeth and told herself that no matter what Fleming had in store, she wouldn’t end up like this.
“But you did get out,” Livy said.
Anka’s lips curled into a snarl.
“A part of me remained. A part of me will always be there. You can’t change who you are with the flip of a switch. Hah. But they didn’t care—the men. I only did it for Ian.”
Livy knew no clean way to extricate herself from this smoky pity parade that could go on well into the evening. Trickier still since the pitiable had an automatic on the cushion next to her. She stood. “Well, I should probably be off.”
“You’re all wrong for it, you know.” Anka stabbed her cigarette out and crossed her long, thin legs, kicking her foot nervously.
“Beg your pardon,” Livy said. She tried to keep her eyes away from the gun.
“For what Ian wants. You’re wrong. That country voice of yours, the way you walk. You lack—subtlety.”
Livy pivoted and turned toward the door, trying to ignore the challenge. “Thanks again for your time,” she said. This sideshow had just gotten stranger. Anka’s voice pitched higher, demanding to be heard. “You have too many weak spots. I’ve seen them all in fifteen minutes. The Russians won’t need that long.”
Halfway to the door, Livy stopped and turned back. Her head felt light. She hadn’t eaten the whole day. Maybe her wobbliness contributed to it all, but somehow she felt like her future seemed to teeter in this moment. She’d woken up thinking she was done with Fleming and Kemsley News. Did she ever want “the quiet life,” or did she just want out of running Barnard and the chance to put herself back in control of things? Honestly, Anka’s words chilled her. Livy could go back to Fleming and tell him no. Maybe she should.
Her eyes flicked over to the gun that still lay on the sofa. Anka’s lithe foot kicked like a metronome.
She felt the danger in the air, and it made her tingle. Livy Nash hadn’t sat on the sidelines when the whole world was fighting, and she’d be damned if she’d let this woman scare her into that now.
Anka looked to be spoiling for a fight, and Livy wanted to give it to her. She wanted to refute everything Anka’d said and then slap her thin little mouth with the back of her hand. But she broke the stare; spun on the heel of her cheap, serviceable shoe; and went back out into the night.
She didn’t go to the train station immediately. She spent much of the next two hours walking London. Now that she was away from Anka, that gun, and her vitriol, Livy could think more clearly. She found the emptiest streets and strolled with no particular direction, trying to see the path forward. Fleming wanted her to be a double. He sent her to a wreck like Anka to show her the consequences of such an assignment. It was a warning. And a damned good one at that. Part of Livy wanted to hand in her resignation again rather than run the risk of ending up as another Anka.
But why had Fleming warned her? The question nagged. When had he ever flinched from giving her a tough assignment? Fine, he’d said this one was more dangerous, but why give her the opportunity to say no? Had her bad judgment at the Louvre caused Fleming to lose faith in her, to doubt her ability? No, that didn’t make sense. He’d had this planned. He thought several steps ahead. Of course he did.
Livy stopped, looked around. She didn’t recognize this block. Pubs were closed, lights out everywhere. No tube stop in sight. How long had she been walking? And where the hell was she? She might be lost, but she’d managed to get clearer about what this all meant. Fleming wanted to warn her because he knew there was a reason Livy would leap to take this job. That reason had to be very compelling. And the stakes higher than she imagined.
She walked down the block, trying to find a street sign in the dim light. Really had no bloody idea where she was.
Eventually she found a tax
i and took it back to her flat in Camden Town. The events of the last few days—from the Louvre to the surreal encounter with Anka—swirled in her head like the haze of cigarette smoke in that Greenwich cottage.
By the time Livy reached her own bed, she felt more exhausted than she could remember. Her stomach ached from hunger. So she fell asleep, fully dressed, knowing that what she learned tomorrow in Fleming’s office might change the rest of her life.
Chapter Five
Livy went right back to Fleming’s office on the Gray’s Inn Road the next morning. As usual, she sat in the armchair across from Pen Baker’s desk and waited for the summons.
Finally, the seal around the big inner office door opened with a whoosh, and Fleming stood in the doorway, cigarette holder between the first and second fingers of his right hand. Livy stood up, smoothed her skirt, and considered the ten feet between her and the door. Once inside, there would be no turning back. “The quiet life” would have to wait.
“Olivia, I’m glad you’re here,” Fleming said, pivoting to allow her inside.
Livy stepped in and hoped she knew what she was doing.
Fleming sat at his desk, the lights on his map of correspondents glowing behind him. He fumbled lighting one of his special-blend cigarettes with three gold bands around the tip. His usual practiced air of nonchalance now seemed to mask a trace of nerves. She’d never seen the man so anxious.
“You saw Anka?” Fleming said. His steel blue eyes twitched slightly.
Livy nodded. “Why are you trying to scare me off this one?”
Fleming picked up a black folder on his desk, considered it, and carefully placed it on a stack of books.
“Because what I am asking you to do—what I need you to do—comes with considerable risk. And despite your reservations, if I show you what’s in this folder, you’ll agree to do anything. Despite the danger.”
Livy figured as much, but she had to know.
