“Right, Leila?” Wilhelm said in French. “Time for tea.”
“Is it always poured like that?” DeHaan said.
“It cools the water,” Leila said. “So you don’t break the glass.” She was beautiful, strangely so, and though she’d covered herself modestly with the blanket, Wilhelm’s easel revealed what lay beneath it. In heavy pencil shaded with scribbles, her hip curved as she reached for an orange in a bowl beside the divan. DeHaan looked for the bowl, but there was only a stack of books.
“We wondered when we would see you again,” Wilhelm said, now in Dutch. DeHaan turned his head as she spoke-only some of his hearing had returned on one side.
“You almost didn’t see me at all,” he said. “She doesn’t understand Dutch, does she?”
“No.” The idea was faintly amusing. “I wouldn’t think so.” She finished pouring the tea and left it to steep, an oily cloud rising from the leaves in each glass. From the pocket of her faded cotton shirt she took a cigarette. “Care for one?”
It was a Gauloise-what British seamen called a golliwog — and DeHaan lit it with particular pleasure. “And life here?” he said.
“We are, how to say, fully engaged — is that the military term?”
“Yes.”
“Leila dear,” Wilhelm said, “I think there’s hot water now.”
Leila put out her cigarette, gave Wilhelm a complicit smile- very well, I’ll leave you alone with him — and padded off into the other room. A moment later, the sound of a shower.
“Anyhow, it’s good to see you,” Wilhelm said.
“I had to get away from that damn ship,” DeHaan said. “We’re ordered to anchor here, for the moment, but I expect we’ll be off again soon enough.”
“Was it terrible?”
DeHaan was surprised, but apparently it showed. “We were in the war,” he said. “A few close calls. Other people had it much worse, but it was bad enough. We had a tank, deck cargo, catch fire-we weren’t sure how that happened, maybe an antiaircraft round-and we had two hoses on it, a lot of water, but every time we stopped it glowed red. The people in Alexandria had loaded it fully armed, a crazy thing to do, and the ammunition kept going off. It should’ve gone over the side, but we couldn’t get near it, and it was too heavy anyhow. The deck got very hot, and we had bombs under there.”
“Was anybody hurt?”
“Earlier, we lost a man.”
“I’m sorry, Eric.”
“Yes, I am too, but we were lucky not to lose more.” He believed in the modern idea that it was good to talk about bad experiences but now he saw that it wasn’t really so, not for him. “What do you mean, ‘fully engaged’?”
“Oh, something big’s going on here, we’re only a small part of it, but we’ve bribed half the clerks at the electric company.” She paused, then said “Who knows” in a dark, ironic voice, as though she were telling a ghost story.
“This is coming from Leiden’s office?”
“No, it’s the British now. We’ve either been promoted, or demoted, or maybe just under new management, it’s hard to know. Whatever it is, it’s grown, and they ask all the time, in that crusty way they have, if we can get help. Which isn’t so easy, but we’ve tried. And been turned down, more than once, which makes poor Hoek furious.”
“Can I do something?”
“I doubt they’d like that. Maybe lucky for you, because the police have been around. Someone’s not happy.”
“Moroccan police?”
“Spanish. Anyhow, they say they’re police, show you a badge, but..”
“What do they want?”
“They ask about so-and-so, who you’ve never heard of. I get the feeling they just want to get in the house and have a look, and maybe scare you a little.”
“Does it work?”
“Of course it does, these men in their suits, very serious, it makes you wonder what they know.” She shrugged.
In the other room, the shower was turned off. “So, then,” Wilhelm said, “the price of cheese.”
30 May. Baden-Baden.
For S. Kolb, the nightmare continued.
Now in a nightmare spa town, amid crowds of SS officers dripping hideous insignia-skulls, axes, god-awful stuff-chins held high, girlfriends hanging on their arms. Their left arms-the right was reserved for saluting, for heilhitlering each other, every thirty seconds. Nazi heaven, he thought.
Three weeks earlier, he’d been marooned in Hamburg, waiting for his case officer, the Englishman who called himself Mr. Brown, to find him a way out of nightmare Germany, as the ship he was to take to Lisbon had been inconveniently sunk. There he’d moldered, in a sad room on a sad street near the docks, waiting for the agent Frulein Lena to return, and, alone for days with only newspapers for company, had been overwhelmed by fantasies about this woman-stern, middle-aged, corset-bound, but more wildly desirable lonely hour by lonely hour. She only seemed to be a stuffy doughmaiden of the Mittelbourgeoisie, he decided. Beneath that whalebone-clad exterior, banked fires smoldered, secret depravities lurked.
And, lo and behold, they did!
Dangling helplessly between caution and lust, he’d broken to the latter, and, when Frulein Lena finally knocked at his door, long after midnight, he had invited her to share his bottle of apricot brandy. So thick, so sweet, so lethal. And, she agreed. It was quite some time before anything happened, but, when they reached the last quarter of the bottle, a polite conversation between strangers was ended by a big apricot kiss. God, she was as lonely as he was, soon enough strutting around the room in those very corsets-pink, however, not black-that had set his imagination alight. And, he did not have to dismantle them, as he’d feared, she did that herself and took her sweet time doing it as he watched with hungry eyes. And, soon enough, he was to learn that secret depravities did lurk-the same ones shared by humanity the world over but never mind, they were new and pink that night, and slowly but thoroughly explored. Even, at last, that final depravity, the most secret of them all, which lay hidden beneath the seventh veil, so-called, which is archetypically never dropped.
Well, she dropped it.
And betrayed him.
She’d met him, a few days after their night together, in a tearoom-bright yellow, with doilies and frilly curtains and everything too small, and she’d brought good news from Brown. This involved former Comintern operatives on a Latvian fishing trawler that would make an unscheduled call at the city on the twenty-seventh. He was to be spirited away by these men, ethnic Russians from the Latvian minority, and left at an Italian port-Nice, formerly French, lately Italian, and reputedly flexible for suspicious passengers, coming or going, who traveled with money. And, she was eager to report, she had a fresh, new identity for him, that old S. Kolb was getting a little shopworn, nicht wahr? These papers she would present to him, in his room. And this would take place tomorrow afternoon. At which time, her look said it all, unspeakable delights awaited him.
And, then, he knew. She’d sold him, or was about to, or was thinking about it. What, exactly, was he reading? Her eyes? Voice? Soul? He couldn’t say, but his antennae blazed, and that was all it took. And, an experienced operative, he’d learned that in the matter of flight sooner was always better. So he took her hand above the bundt cake, told her he could barely wait, might they go somewhere right away, and be, together? It took a fraction of a second before she reacted, and in that instant he shivered as though the Gestapo had stepped on his grave. “Tomorrow, my sweet,” she said.
He said he would be right back, then it was off to the toilet, lock the door, out the window, and up the alley. Maybe they were waiting for him but he didn’t think so. They would be at the hotel, tomorrow afternoon, or when he got back. Why? But he had no time for that-he scuttled up the street and ducked into an office building, where he hid in the office of an insurance brokerage-a potential client concerned that his heirs should not suffer penury. Thirty minutes later he was on his way out of town, possessions easily abandoned, as they had been in countless other
