The Poison Tide

Gaunt hesitated, then offered his hand. ‘I say, sorry, Wolff.’

Wolff didn’t care much for his apology. He didn’t care very much for anything. The pain in his leg was worse, throbbing bone-deep; it was almost impossible to think of anything else. Their conversation he heard in snatches as if at a distance, barely marking his consciousness, the page blank, his eyes wandering from hands to faces — Gaunt fidgeting with a pen, Wiseman’s enigmatic smile — as if through the frosted bottom of a bottle.

Thwaites bent to his ear: ‘You’re coming with me. We need to get you to a doctor.’

‘I’m fine. I’ll stay in bed,’ he muttered thickly. ‘Honestly — fine. Can White arrange a taxicab?’

‘Norman’s right,’ said Wiseman firmly. ‘Must keep you safe. We need you, the work’s not over yet;’ this with a teasing smile. ‘You can afford to disappear for a few days. Goodness, by tomorrow all Captain von Rintelen’s friends will be doing the same.’

25. The News in the World

‘CAREFUL WHAT YOU say, Doctor,’ Hilken cautioned. Albert’s fear seemed to crackle down the telephone line. A mistake to trust so many secrets to an inflexible and guileless man. Breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows. When he found his voice, it was thin and querulous.

‘Have you seen it? They have it all — almost all…’

‘Pull yourself together, please,’ Hilken bristled angrily. ‘Tell me — carefully, mind — who has what?’

‘In this morning’s New York World, my name, and payments linking me…’

‘I’ll read the newspaper.’ What was he thinking? ‘A time for cool heads, Doctor.’

But the second Hilken hung up the receiver his own thoughts clouded with the worst possibilities, and by the time his driver fetched the motor car to the front of the house he was on the point of ordering his wife to pack their cases. He felt trapped behind the glass in the back and insisted on sitting beside his chauffeur. Gazing out on streets he’d known since he was a child, he trembled with resentment at the thought that he might have to leave. Life was good in Baltimore, business was good, a fine house in a streetcar suburb, the country club, a pillar of the German community: the name Hilken meant something in the city. I shouldn’t have become involved, he told himself. But what choice did I have? He was an American and a German but not, like Dilger, he was ‘an American first’.

The Hansa Haus was a brick-and-timber folly in the high renaissance style, with gable windows set in a red- tiled roof, the shields of the Hanseatic cities painted on its walls. It had opened just before the war, the new home to German interests in the city, just a few streets from the port. Norddeutscher Lloyd was on the first floor, across the corridor from the Consulate. It was half past seven in the morning and the New York papers were delivered at a quarter to eight. Hilken counted the minutes in yards, pacing the length of his office until his assistant knocked lightly and entered with a copy of the World. ‘Sabotage’ and ‘German’ jumped out from the front page and a picture of the spy ‘Mr Gache’.

‘That’s it then,’ he muttered, spreading it open on his desk. But glancing through the story he found no mention of his name, and when he took the trouble to read it properly he felt a fool. It was the end for von Rintelen’s network, all right. There were details of attacks and of the bomb maker — a Dr Scheele of Hoboken — some Irish names, a reference to the military attache, von Papen — it wasn’t clear why — and beneath an unflattering picture of Albert, the caption: ‘German commercial attache bankrolls destruction’. The investigation into the sabotage ring was being led by a Captain Tunney of the New York Police Department Bomb Squad, ‘an officer of great experience and tenacity’.

An editorial called for robust action to stop Germany waging war in America. ‘The time may come when this country will be forced to take sides,’ warned its writer. ‘This illegal campaign has only succeeded in bringing the point of decision closer. It has cost British and American lives but no one has lost more than Germany.’

‘So says the World,’ Hilken muttered in disgust; the newspaper was in the British camp — most of them were. He’d been expecting something like this to happen — too many people seemed to know the Dark Invader’s business. It might have been a great deal worse. If that was all they had, he was safe. There were no references to the only man who tied the networks: Hinsch. Berlin would expect them to batten the hatches for a few weeks, then resume their operation in the New Year. But a salutary lesson, he reflected, wiping newsprint from his damp hands; someone had signed one of those damn contracts of Albert’s, taken his money, then squealed to the press and the police.

Sitting at the desk, Hilken wrote two short letters, the first to Albert advising him to go to ground for a while, to avoid the Broadway office, the embassy and anyone named in the story, and under no circumstances speak of their arrangements by telephone; the second to Hinsch, suggesting the same. Then he instructed his assistant to send a man to New York with both letters: ‘but take this telegram yourself.’ He scribbled Dr Dilger’s name and address in Chevy Chase on an envelope. ‘The message is simply: Laurel 1700. Do you have that?’

For a while, he tried to settle to the business of the shipping line. He took lunch at a downtown restaurant with his father and they spoke of the war in Europe and the rise in shipping stocks. In the afternoon he telephoned his wife to say he would be late home and lost his temper with a junior clerk who had paid too much for repairs to one of the line’s ships. But churning always in his thoughts, the glass phials locked in the safe on the floor above, the newspaper picture of Gache startled in a hotel lobby, and for the first time a nagging fear of exposure. At three o’clock he locked his desk and door and, dispensing for once with the services of his driver, set out in the motor car for the Washington highway.

New York police headquarters was an extravagant beaux arts cathedral of a building in the heart of Little Italy, the city fathers hoping to impress the divine majesty of the law on the criminal class. Come unto me, Norman Thwaites reflected, gazing up at its new copper dome from the corner of Center and Broome; come, and I will throw you into jail. It reminded him of the basilica they were building in Paris to atone for old socialist sins. He didn’t care for the French. He didn’t care for Bolsheviks, Jews, gypsies, or Negroes, and there were a lot more of them in New York than there used to be. Some were joining the Police Department, Tunney had told him, but not as many as the Irish. He’d met the captain of the Bomb Squad before the war at the old headquarters on Mulberry Street where Teddy Roosevelt had made his name as a commissioner. In those days the World had paid all his bills and on its behalf he had wasted hours in cheap cop saloons trying to wring stories from Tunney. It was not — as the editor-in-chief had remarked caustically — ‘a productive relationship’. Things were different now, new times, new headquarters, and he limped into its white marble lobby not as a supplicant but at the invitation of the captain and the deputy commissioner.

‘Sit yourself down here, Norman. Coffee?’ Tunney pulled a chair away from his desk. ‘No, let’s have something stronger?’

‘Coffee.’

‘Coffee, yes.’ Tunney stepped over to the door and spoke to a clerk in the outer office. Thickset, early forties, but already struggling to contain his neck in his high-buttoned uniform, he had a square no-nonsense face and shopkeeper moustache. He moved and spoke like a man who was proud to have begun on the street and wanted you to know it.

‘Was the paper grateful?’ he asked, pulling his chair closer.

‘Most grateful. Did you like the reference to “an officer of great experience and tenacity”?’

‘I’m afraid that officer has lost your “Mr Gache”. He sailed yesterday — I was mad about it, ready to knock heads…’ Tunney leant forward a little, gazing intently at Thwaites, ‘…but you don’t seem very surprised — or upset.’

‘No.’

‘Well, Norman, I was,’ Tunney said hotly, ‘until I read this.’ He nudged a black loose-leaf memorandum book