He circled back down Sixth Avenue. He stopped at the Horn amp; Hardart automat at Fortieth Street and pleasurably took in forty-five minutes of young secretaries on their lunch hour. Watching them, appreciating a snug skirt, a flattering blouse, a nicely shaped calf, put him in the mood to visit his call girl, Charlotte. But Siegfried kept the impulse in check.
Today he was working.
He made a final shopping visit to a kitchen supply store in the East Thirties. There he purchased a small mortar and pestle, the sort used for pulverizing herbs. Then Siegfried retrieved his car and drove to Newark. He checked into a modest hotel. He was still Mr. Andrew Glover, the schoolteacher from Wilmington.
He informed the desk clerk that he was representing a textbook firm over the summer. He would not be there every night, as he had relatives in Westchester and Connecticut, but would, of course, always be returning ultimately. Then Siegfried paid for two weeks in advance, which went a long way toward allaying any suspicions.
Siegfried carried his own bag to his room. He arranged his few toiletries above the sink. Then he took from his suitcase the mortar, pestle, and chalk and laid all three on the dresser. He sat down at the room's writing table and opened the two boxes of pencils. With a butcher knife, he cut open a dozen pencils and extracted the soft graphite.
The spy worked very carefully, avoiding mixing even the smallest chip of pencil wood with the graphite. The process took more than half an hour.
Next Siegfried walked to the dresser. He poured the graphite into the mortar. He broke off a piece of chalk and added it. Then he began to grind them together, standing before the mirror above the dresser as he worked. He studied his face very carefully, from cheekbone to hairline, from the bridge of his nose downward to his jaw. He wore a slight grin. Satisfaction, he assumed, from knowing that everything was on course.
As he worked, he considered scenarios for the next few days. He knew he would have to take chances not paralleled by any he had taken previously. He firmly pulverized the graphite and the chalk, every so often looking up at the mirror and noticing a new intricacy to the space below his eyes or around his nose and mouth.
He thought of the Reich. He thought of the feeble governments in London, Paris, and Washington. The Western democracies were unable, unwilling, and unprepared to rise to the real threats of the twentieth century.
He thought of the HMS Adriana. What was it doing at a United States Navy shipyard at Red Bank, New Jersey? Soon, at least, he would have that answer.
He thought of the dozens of sleek new U-boats that Hitler had christened and launched over the last few years. He thought of the Adriana 's crew of predictably dim-witted English seamen. He grinned again.
Killing them all would be so disgracefully easy.
TWELVE
In the county of Wiltshire, it was the coldest, rainiest summer since 1912. The rain was implacable when Laura arrived at the Salisbury railway terminal and it only heightened when she boarded the public omnibus that took her out to Friars Lane, where her father still resided.
With the rain there was the dense creeping, crawling smoky ground fog that engulfed lorries and automobiles, pedestrians, dogs in the street, the spire of the cathedral, entire sections of the town, and, for that matter, most of Salisbury itself. July of 1939 set hardly an auspicious mood for Laura's homecoming.
She disembarked from the bus at the end of its line. She felt the swamp beneath her feet as she walked past the modest detached houses, each with its own small garden before it, until she came to Friars Lane. She passed a small thatched cottage in which two sisters, Joelle and Pauline Markham, had resided alone since Laura's girlhood. The doddering Markham sisters were elderly when Laura was young and, as she spotted them through their paned windows, seemed equally elderly now. Minutes later Laura arrived before the iron gate that she had envisioned so many times over the last year. Oddly, it was ajar. There was no sign and no name: the occupant had a penchant for both privacy and anonymity. Then Laura was before the large front door. The dark blue paint was peeling. Soaking, she sounded the bell.
Nigel Worthington came to the door himself, opened it, and asked, 'Yes?' Then recognition was upon him. He gave a start and almost jumped, seeing a ghost of his late Victoria.
'Papa!' Laura said, her beautiful face radiant with a smile.
'Oh, my God! My angel!' he exclaimed, holding open his seventy-year-old arms.
They embraced and he lifted her off the ground. It was only moments later when he felt her tremble slightly with what seemed to be a sob, and when he did not see her husband, that he knew something was very wrong.
The lines in Nigel Worthington's face had furrowed more deeply since Laura had last seen him, and he made his way around the house and his office with a mildly arthritic limp.
But the three-story house was rich with memories, almost all of them of youth and happiness; so Laura's spirits were greatly buoyed in her first days home. She saw an old friend or two and wore a brave face in public. She visited the antiquarian bookshops-Stennett's and Forsythe's-in Greencroft Street near the cathedral and she spent countless nostalgic hours rummaging through the print and map shops in High Street.
In the afternoons, when the heavens abated the downpour for a few hours, she often stopped by Lumly's Tea Room, a shop with the eternally steamy front window facing Gravesend Place, and consumed jasmine or Irish tea. Very occasionally, she indulged her lingering girlhood passion for Mrs. Lumly's very own home-baked shortbread. From time to time, she thought of her collapsed marriage.
But as the days passed, the specter of Stephen Fowler haunted her. Was his coldness his way of telling her that he did not-could not-love her anymore? What had happened to the joyous life of the young newlyweds in New Haven, the divinity student and his wife who had entertained mirthfully, explored the celebration of foliage in the autumn, and attended at least one new musical and one new drama each season in New York?
Where did it fail? And why? The answers were in neither the jasmine nor the Irish tea leaves.
It was all cruelly unjust, yet bitterly ironic. Laura had turned down a man, Edward Shawcross, whom she surely could have learned to love, for a man who from all evidence already did. Where one love could have flourished and grown, the other had asphyxiated itself. It was confounding.
Once Laura went to a public call box, pumped a king's ransom in six-pence and shilling pieces into the machine, and dialed the number of Edward Shawcross in Bristol. She heard him answer. She heard Edward say 'Hello' and 'Are you there?' three times in his brisk, highly expectant manner. But something caught in Laura's throat. She hung up and did not call back.
She walked home from the center of town and the rains momentarily had mercy upon her. At home, she cheerfully did her father's laundry and mended the pipe burns in two of his favorite cashmere pullovers. She sorted out his sock drawer, stitched some upholstery that had worn thin, and, in effect, mastered all the simple household tasks that escape the humble capabilities of any man living alone. In the evenings, Laura read or played the piano and her father smoked his pipe and contemplated the evening's programming on the BBC. For ten full days, they stayed carefully away from any serious discussions.
Then Nigel Worthington confronted his daughter's moods. When she pulled the cover over the piano keyboard one evening, having done reasonable justice to a brooding sonata by Franz Liszt, she saw that her father stood in the doorway to the music room. He had probably been there for several minutes, she realized, inclined against the doorframe, puffing his pipe, and watching her with unconcealed affection and admiration.
'I didn't know you were there,' she said.
He gently exhaled a long, disintegrating cloud of smoke. 'Whenever you're ready to talk about it,' he suggested, 'I'm ready to listen.'
Laura's gaze traveled slowly through the room. 'Stephen doesn't love me anymore,' she said. Her voice was unwavering. She had rehearsed the line for many days. 'In certain respects,' she added, 'I suspect he never did.'
'I cannot believe that, Laura,' Nigel Worthington answered.
'Neither can I,' she said soberly. And then, over port from 11 P.M. until two in the morning, she went through
