The Poison Tide

to — businessmen, waiters, cab drivers, the old Baron who lived in rooms at the Minerva and spent his evenings talking to strangers in the saloon — no one understood why the British were at war with Germany.

‘Why do they want to destroy us?’ the policemen who visited his hotel wanted to know, ‘and why are you Americans helping them?’

‘Because they’re frightened of you,’ Wolff told them. ‘Frightened of losing their Empire.’

The police wanted to know his business. Two solid representatives of the city constabulary carrying out their routine check. Wolff was used to fear. It was a thick band about his chest that loosened and tightened according to circumstance: like the old torture Peine forte et dure. Since Turkey, Wolff understood better than anyone that there was only so much a man could bear before he was suffocated by the weight pressing upon him. This time his legend was a good one but would he be able to look them in the eye and, if he did, would it be a hunted look?

In the event, he was calm enough to arouse no more than the curiosity that was his object. De Witt’s past was waiting to be teased from him by someone in authority — at the right time.

‘The British are decadent,’ he told the policemen. ‘Germany will win this war,’ and they were satisfied with the sincerity of his loathing. After their visit he was ready to make contact with the informer.

It was a fifty-pfennigs-a-day sort of place in a quiet residential street. An elderly man with an unruly shock of grey hair was planting spring flowers in the window boxes on either side of the front door. It was the sort of risk Wolff had revelled in taking once, but as he opened the guest-house gate he was conscious only of being afraid. The outcome was more incalculable than a spinning chamber in a game of Russian roulette. He nodded to the gardener, knocked at the door and handed over to the landlady a note for Christensen. No need to cross the threshold, no need for more than a few words, no police. He felt foolish when it was over, and it was over in less than two minutes. Click. He’d pulled the trigger and heard the hammer fall on an empty chamber.

A reply was delivered to the Minerva the following day. Christensen would meet him beside the fountain in the Spittelmarkt at six o’clock in the afternoon. He was to carry a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt. The bellboy brought him the paper and he glanced through it at breakfast: stories of derring-do from the Front, bellicose commentaries exhorting the people to more sacrifices, German soldiers repelling British soldiers in France, Russian soldiers retreating before German ones in Poland. Who could be sure that any of it was true? But there were a few more column inches on the rifles captured before they could reach the Boer rebels in South Africa. The paper’s source could reveal that these were manufactured by Westinghouse in America.

‘We’re seeking clarification from Washington,’ Boyd told him when he visited the embassy later that morning. ‘If it’s proved, I’m afraid it might make your position here difficult.’ Wolff agreed that it might.

By six o’clock the junior employees of the state bank and business houses of the Spittelmarkt were streaming across the small square to the U-bahn and home. Christensen stood out like a sore thumb. Wolff watched him from the tram stop as he rolled round the fountain in search of a man holding the Tageblatt. He was a big fellow with large hands and stoker’s shoulders that shifted in his jacket like a crab adjusting to a new shell. Plain enough he wasn’t a gentleman, but there was something studied in his gestures, his expression, in the trouble he’d taken with his appearance, that suggested he wanted to be. The Spittelmarkt was too busy to be sure that he’d come alone. Wolff watched him saunter over to the newspaper kiosk, glance at the headlines, then turn back to the fountain. He didn’t notice a prosperous-looking businessman who was hurrying across the square with his arm raised for a cab. They cannoned into each other and the businessman was thrown sideways and on to one knee. Christensen bent at once to offer a helping hand but the man brushed it angrily aside and shouted something abusive. A documents case he’d been carrying under his arm had burst open and his papers were flapping about him like fish on the deck of a trawler. It was perfect. Crossing behind a tram, Wolff began weaving quickly through the crowd towards them, newspaper under his arm.

‘Not like that, you oaf,’ the businessman shouted, his face puce with rage. Christensen was trying to catch some of the papers beneath his boot.

A young clerk stopped to pick up one or two sheets and a hotel porter in the livery of the Continental was scrambling about the stones too.

‘Hold this, would you,’ Wolff commanded, pointedly thrusting the end of the Tageblatt into Christensen’s side. He obeyed without question, as he would have done on his last ship. Wolff took a few steps and bent to scoop up two of the businessman’s documents. He could sense that Christensen was watching him closely and turning back he caught his eye at once. There was an enquiring expression on his face and he lifted the newspaper a little in acknowledgement.

‘Take these, why don’t you,’ said Wolff, holding his gaze. ‘Do you know the U-bahn stop I will need for the east side of the Tiergarten?’

‘The Tiergarten? But I thought…’ Christensen looked confused.

‘Yes. The Tiergarten,’ Wolff replied with careful emphasis.

‘Leipziger Platz, then you’ll have to walk. Are you meeting someone there?’

‘Yes, in front of the statue of Gotthold Lessing…’

‘I’ll take those,’ interjected the businessman, snatching the papers from Christensen. ‘Damn fool. Look where you’re going next time.’

Christensen wasn’t a fool. He was careful. Wolff waited at a shop window and watched him cross from the square and file down the steps to the station. He was an easy man to follow, more than six feet tall, with blond hair, those broad shoulders, and dressed in the sort of green wool suit that was fashionable at country-house shooting parties before the war. Wolff wondered if it had belonged to Casement. By the time he reached the edge of the park it was dusk. Christensen was stalking impatiently to and fro beneath the statue, a streetlamp casting his enormous shadow on its marble plinth.

‘Why did we have to come here?’ he asked, angrily slapping the newspaper against his thigh.

‘So I could be sure you weren’t being followed.’

‘No one’s going to follow me.’ He shook his head in disbelief.

‘Look, Adler — may I call you that?’ Wolff stepped a little closer. ‘Let me be quite clear. We’re only going to stay alive in this country if we’re careful. Very careful. Do you understand?’ He paused to look him directly in the eye. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘A silly mistake and we’ll wind up in a cell at the Alex.’ Then to be sure: ‘Both of us.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ he snapped.

But Wolff didn’t believe him. He was too young — only twenty-four — and too mechanical. The file said he had run away to sea as a boy. He’d have learnt some tricks and no doubt thought he could slip any obligation. They were all like that — informers.

‘Let’s walk, we’ll be less conspicuous. No, not in the Tiergarten at this hour,’ he said, touching Christensen’s sleeve. ‘At its edge.’

They ambled away from the Brandenburg Gate and the government district to the broad victory avenue, lined with statues, that cut through the heart of the park.

‘Is your real name de Witt?’ Christensen asked. Wolff said it was.

‘And you’ve spoken to Mr Findlay?’ Wolff said that he had.

Casement was staying at the Eden on the Kurfurstendamm, Christensen said, ‘but we’ll move soon. He can’t afford it.’

‘Aren’t the Germans paying him?’

‘He won’t take anything for himself,’ he grumbled. ‘Only people like him who are used to having money refuse when it’s offered.’

‘So who’s paying?’

‘Didn’t you hear me? No one. He says he’s expecting some from his Irish friends in America.’

‘Do you know their names?’

‘A man called Devoy, and his sister in New York, I think. He has friends here too.’

‘Who?’

Christensen shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t met them.’