Emerald Decision

bite the jugular where it was exposed, far out in the Atlantic — not around the North Channel where the convoys turned for the Mersey and the Clyde. Why here? For God's sake, he told himself sternly, as if lecturing the general staff of the Kriegsmarine, it's like keeping old silver in a pillow-case under the bed. He smiled, shifted to test the weariness of his arms, then continued his surveillance. His hands were beginning to go dead.

The damaged submarine in front of him carried no deck-gun. He could not see a single torpedo-trolley, not even the necessary hoists to lower the torpedoes on board. They were going out unarmed? His arms weakened with the shock, he felt as if struck. The mysteriousness of what he had found assailed him like a punch that simply went on happening, almost for a minute. He could find no answer, and his ignorance was like an impotence. What else, what else? he prompted himself. Concentrate.

At the stern of the submarine — and the one beyond it — he saw the strange, out-of-place pillars, curved and jointed like insect mandibles. The men working at the bow of the undamaged boat were erecting stanchions, and he assumed that the missing bow-section of the other sub had borne a similar, inexplicable mounting.

There was nothing else, nothing he could take in as clearly as before. Fact had been deadened by speculation. He was wasting his time now, it might come back later, just as if he had caught it on film, when he was debriefed. Once the resolve had gone, it was hard to hang on for sufficient time to take in the scene once more, repressing the selectivity of speculation. He wondered whether he could haul himself up with the frozen hands and aching arms.

One thing more — his angle of vision had precluded sight of them before, but now they moved nearer the stern of the damaged sub, as if to inspect the mountings. Two senior officers — one wearing a Wehrmacht greatcoat, the other in naval uniform. His weariness, the aching muscles in his arms, seemed to go away to a great distance. He was a spectator of some adult drama he could not comprehend. There was a familiarity, a common cause between the two senior officers, so unlike the Intelligence proclamations of intense and unceasing rivalry between the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine; all the way up to the General Staff and the Fuhrer. What in hell were they doing?

Their conversation went on for minutes, then the two men shook hands, there was much self-congratulation, and, as they walked out of his view, he groaned with the return of awareness to his arms and shoulders. He didn't think he could pull himself back up—

The voice from below him settled the matter. 'You — drop to the ground, at once!' McBride did not look down, nor did he pretend not to understand German.

October 198-

Thomas Sean McBride parked the mud-stained Audi in the hotel car park, collected his room key and mail from the stiffly-polite clerk, whose words he brushed off as if they came between him and the indulgence of his weary disappointment, then took the lift to his third-floor room with its view across the Moselstrasse to the river and the suburb of Lutzel on the opposite bank.

When he had closed the door behind him, draped his raincoat over a chair, and slipped off his shoes, he poured whisky from an almost empty bottle into a toothmug, and stood at the window looking across the darkening river, occasionally shifting his half-seeing gaze to his right, where the Deutsches Eck promontory marked the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine. His eyes were gritty with a bad night's sleep in the gasthaus in Norden, after the evening ferry journey back from the island, and aching from the whole day's driving back to Koblenz. His mind creaked through the grooves of disappointment and frustrated rage the blind Menschler's words had worn.

A barge passed slowly across his vision towards the confluence of the rivers, from his vantage hardly seeming to move. It possessed an apt, facile symbolism. A woman collected washing at its stern — that didn't fit the symbolism, and he smiled, sipped again at the whisky, almost shrugged off his mood. The first street lamps were coming on along the Moselstrasse, and the brake lights of the cars sprang out as red globes as the cars pulled up at traffic signals. Behind him in the unlit room his scattered — now useless, fatuous — papers, which he had enjoined the maid not to dust or tidy, and the leaning heaps of reference books subsided into gloom. Even so, his mind could not ignore them; an inward eye focused on them more clearly than his retinae registered the passage of the barge.

He had had it in the palm of his hand—

He'd blown it, crapped out on a blind man. The Woodstein of World War Two had gone down without throwing a punch!

He knew he was easing himself into a better mood — the bitterness was gone from the self-mockery, which might have been an effect of the whisky. Still, a blind man! His innate self-confidence, the blooming ego under the sun of his best-selling status, his greater potential, combined to prevent him from long periods of self- condemnation, self-awareness. He no longer had anything to fear from the less-clever men who eased past him into the grandly titled chairs of study or into the plush administrative grades. Menschler, therefore, was not an interview board of one, turning him down; without enemies, real or presumed, McBride was unable to categorize Menschler with them, and thereby retain an anger towards him. He was the dead, keeping the grave's secrets.

There'd be others—

He turned away from the window, put down his glass on the writing-table, ignored the open notebooks, the last pages of his trace of Menschler through army pension records and the telephone exchange, and fanned out instead the letters he had collected from the desk.

His eye was caught by the smallest notebook, but only momentarily, in which on three neat pages he had summarized his knowledge of Emerald Necklace. Little more than the faintest trace of an old perfume. He picked up the bulkiest letter, feeling through the envelope another, enclosed letter.

Gaps in Wehrmacht records, in the Fuhrer Directives, in the papers of the General Staff. And a tight-lipped silence—

He shrugged off a returning investigative mood, and ripped open the outer envelope, from his university and presumably forwarding the other letter. He was seized — perhaps in compensation for disappointment — with a childish mood, with the eagerness of discovery of a child from a home where mail seldom came.

Excitement became self-mockery until he had carried the letter to the window. An air mail letter. And he recognized the handwriting? Yes, strong, small, neat. Gilliatt's hand. Peter Gilliatt, who had helped his mother out of Ireland in '41, and got her to America, had written to her in New Jersey, but whose mail had lost the cold trail after his mother had moved them west, to Oregon. Gilliatt must be an old man by now—

McBride savoured not opening the letter, the little childish excitement warm as the drink in his stomach. An old, familiar world was coming back with that handwriting, the red-blue edging of the envelope. The handwriting retained the secret of Gillian's age. He'd found out that McBride was in Portland, and written to the faculty — McBride nodded in self-compliment. Gates of Hell — Gilliatt had read it. Had he written about that? After all, his mother had been dead for nearly four years, and he'd never even met Gilliatt—

He'd entertained the fantasy, when the letters used to come to Jersey and his mother never seemed to tire of talking about Gilliatt, that the Englishman was his real father, despite the disparity of name. At first, the fantasy possessed romance — until his accidental consultation of a dictionary for the meaning of the word bastard in a book he was reading under the bedclothes with a torch. Then the fantasy had become shameful and secret, and he'd gone back to believing in the fact of Michael McBride, dead and buried in Ireland.

A long preamble, compliments on Gates of Hell, references to Michael, an invitation to visit him — and, certain as signposts, the change of tone. The hushed, secretive tone, and the sudden temptation to look over his shoulder communicated to the reader. The wrist adopting a nervous twitch as if to turn the letter's contents away from eyes that might be watching behind the double-glazing.

My visitor told me you were in Europe, but not where, hence my writing to you at your university. He seemed inordinately interested in your current field of study, and to smile as if he possessed prior information. He suggested — in a very oblique manner — that your work might have a bearing on the events of 1940 in which your father and I were together involved. I should welcome an opportunity of talking to you on this subject — your mother knew little, and I have no doubt would have told you nothing. I, too, have felt bound by certain security restrictions. Until now. I have been bluntly warned not to help you, without being told why. I am irritated by the presumption of it all!