Restless (22 page)

'Boring.'

'I thought you'd be gone for a couple of weeks.'

'There was nothing doing. Endless round of insignificant press conferences.'

'Meet any nice men?' Sylvia said, putting on a grotesque leer.

'I wish. Just a fat under-secretary of state at Agriculture, or something, who tried to feel me up.'

'I might just settle for that,' Sylvia said, heading for her bedroom, taking off her coat.

Sometimes it amazed Eva how fluently and spontaneously she could lie. Think that everybody is lying to you all the time, Romer said, it's probably the safest way to proceed.

Sylvia came back in and opened the ice-box and took out a small pitcher of Martini.

'We're celebrating,' she said, then made an apologetic face. 'Sorry. Wrong word. The Germans have sunk another Yank destroyer – the
Reuben Jones.
One hundred and fifteen dead. Hardly a cause for rejoicing, I know. But…'

'My God… One hundred and fifteen-'

'Exactly. This has got to change everything. They can't stand on the sidelines now.'

So much for Mason Harding, Eva thought. She had a sudden image of Mason, slipping out of his underwear, his thickening cock jutting beneath the eave of his young man's belly, coming to sit on the bed, fumbling with the foil on the condom. She found she could think about it with dispassion, coldly, objectively. Romer would have been pleased with her.

As she poured their Martinis, Sylvia told her that Roosevelt had made a fine, stirringly belligerent speech – his most belligerent since 1939, talking of how the 'shooting war' had begun.

'Oh yes,' she said, sipping her drink. 'And he has this wonderful map – some map of South America. How the Germans plan to divide it up into five huge new countries.'

Eva was half listening but Sylvia's enthusiasm provoked in her a small surge of confidence – a strange feeling of temporary elation. Similar spasms had come and gone in the two years since she'd joined Romer's team. Although she tried to tell herself to treat such instinctive reactions with suspicion she couldn't prevent them from blossoming in herself – as if wishful thinking were an innate attribute of being human: the thought that things were bound to improve being stitched into our human consciousness. She sipped her cold drink – maybe that's just the definition of an optimist, she thought. Maybe that's all I am: an optimist.

'So maybe we're getting there,' she said, drinking her chilled Martini, yielding to her optimism, thinking that if the Americans join us we must win. America, Britain and the Empire, and Russia – then it could only be a matter of time.

'Let's eat out tomorrow,' she said to Sylvia as they went to their bedrooms. 'We owe ourselves a little party.'

'Don't forget we're saying goodbye to Alfie.'

Eva remembered that Blytheswood was leaving the radio station and was going back to London, to Electra House, the GC amp;CS's radio interception station in the basement of Cable amp; Wireless's Embankment office.

'Then we can go dancing afterwards,' she said. She felt like dancing, she thought as she undressed and tried to empty her mind of Mason Harding and his hands on her body.

The next day in the office Morris Devereux showed her a transcript of the Roosevelt speech. She took it from him and flicked through the pages until she came to the relevant passage:

'I have in my possession a secret map,' she read, 'made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a map of South America as Hitler proposes to reorganise it. The geographical experts of Berlin have divided South America into five vassal states… They have also arranged that one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great lifeline, the Panama Canal… This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.'

'Well,' she said to Devereux, 'pretty strong stuff, don't you think? If I were an American I'd be beginning to feel just a little uneasy. A tiny bit worried, no?'

'Let's hope they share your sentiments – and what with the
Rueben Jones's
sinking… I don't know: you'd think they wouldn't sleep quite so securely.' He smiled at her. 'How was Washington?'

'Fine. I think I've made a good contact in Hopkins's office,' she said offhandedly. 'A press attaché. I think we can feed him our stuff.'

'Interesting. Did he drop any hints?'

'No, not really,' she said carefully. 'He was actually very discouraging, if anything. Congress ranged against war. FDR's hands tied, and so forth. But I'm going to give him translations of all our Spanish stories.'

'Good idea,' he said vaguely and drifted away.

Eva started thinking: Morris seemed more and more interested in her movements and her work. But why hadn't he asked her the name of the press attaché she had lassoed? That
was
odd… Did he know who it was already?

She went to her office and checked her in-tray. A newspaper in Buenos Aires,
Critica,
had picked up her story about German naval manoeuvres off the South American Atlantic coast. She had her opening, now: she re-transcribed the story but gave it a Buenos Aires date-line and put it out to all of Transoceanic's subscribers. She called Blytheswood at WRUL and, using their verbal priority code – 'Mr Blytheswood, this is Miss Dalton here' – said she had an intriguing story out of Argentina. Blytheswood said they might indeed be interested but it would have to have an American date-line before it could be broadcast around the world. So she sent a cablegram to Johnson in Meadowville, and Witoldski in Franklin Forks, signed simply Transoceanic, plus a transcript of the key lines from Roosevelt's speech. She suspected they would guess it was from her. If either Johnson or Witoldski broadcast the
Critica
report she could reconfigure it once more as a story from an independent US radio station. And so the fiction would move on steadily through the news media, accumulating weight and significance – more date-lines, more sources somehow confirming its emerging status as a fact and nowhere revealing it origins in the mind of Eva Delectorskaya. Eventually one of the big American newspapers would pick it up (perhaps with a little help from Angus Woolf) and the German Embassy would cable it back home to Berlin. Then denials would be issued, ambassadors would be called in to deliver explanations and rebuttals and this would provide yet another story, or a series of stories, for Transoceanic to distribute over its wire services. Eva felt a small sense of power and pride as she contemplated the future life of her falsehood – thinking of herself as a tiny spider at the centre of her spreading, complex web of innuendo, half-truth and invention. But then she felt a hot flush of embarrassed remembrance, recalling suddenly her night with Mason Harding, and its fumbling inadequacies. It was always going to be a dirty war, Romer repeatedly said, nothing should be discounted in the waging of it.

She was walking homewards along Central Park South, looking out at the trees in the park, already yellow and orange with the advancing fall, when she became aware of a set of footsteps maintaining the exact same cadence as hers. This was one of the tricks she had learned at Lyne – it was almost as effective as someone tapping you on the shoulder. She stopped to adjust the strap on her shoe and, looking casually round, saw Romer three or four paces behind her, staring intently into the window of a jeweller's shop. He turned on his heel and, after a brief pause, she followed him back along Sixth Avenue, where she saw him go into a large delicatessen. She joined the queue at the counter further down from him and watched him order a sandwich and a beer and go to sit in a busy corner. She bought a coffee and walked over to him.

'Hello,' she said. 'May I join you?'

She sat down.

'All very clandestine,' she said.

'We all have to take more precautions,' he said. 'Double-check, triple-check. To tell the truth, we're a little worried that some of our American friends have become too intrigued by what we're up to. I think we've grown too large – impossible to ignore the scale of the thing, anymore. So: extra effort, more snares, watch for shadows, friendly crows, strange noises on the telephone. Just a hunch – but we've all been getting a bit complacent.'

'Right,' she said, watching him bite into his vast sandwich. Nothing that size had ever been seen in the British Isles, she thought. He chewed and swallowed for a while before speaking.

'I wanted to tell you that everyone's very pleased about Washington. I've been taking all the compliments but I wanted to say that you did well, Eva. Very well. Don't think that I take it for granted. Don't think that we take it for granted.'

'Thank you.' She didn't exactly feel a warm glow of self-satisfaction.

'"Gold" is going to be our golden boy.'

'Good,' she said, then thought. 'Is he already-'

'He was activated yesterday.'

'Oh.' Eva thought about Mason: she had an image of somebody spreading photos on a table before his appalled face. She could see him weeping, even. I wonder what he thinks about me now? She thought, uncomfortably. 'What if he calls me?' she asked.

'He won't call you.' Romer paused. 'We've never been so close to the chief before. Thanks to you.'

'Maybe we won't need him for long,' she suggested vaguely, as if to assuage her mounting guilt, to keep the tarnish to a minimum for a while.

'Why do you say that?'

'The
Rueben Jones
going down.'

'It doesn't seem to have made any material difference to public opinion,' Romer said, with some sarcasm. 'People seem more interested in the result of the Army – Notre Dame match.'

She couldn't understand this. 'Why? There's a hundred dead young sailors, for God's sake.'

'U-boats sinking US ships got them into the last war,' he said, putting two-thirds of his sandwich down, admitting defeat. 'They've got long memories.' He smiled at her unpleasantly. His mood was odd that evening, she thought, almost angry in some way. 'They don't want to be in this war, Eva, whatever their president or Harry Hopkins or Gale Winant thinks.' He gestured at the crowded deli: the men and women, the working day over, the children, laughing, chatting, buying their enormous sandwiches and their fizzy drinks. 'Life's good here. They're happy. Why mess it up going to war 3,000 miles away? Would you?'

She had no ready, convincing answer.

'Yes, but what about this map?' she said, sensing herself losing the argument. 'Doesn't that change things?' She thought further, as if she were trying to persuade herself. 'And Roosevelt's speech. They can't deny it's getting closer. Panama – it's their back yard.'

Romer, she saw, allowed himself a slight smile at her earnest ardour.

'Yes, well, I have to admit we're quite pleased with that,' he said. 'We never expected it to work so efficiently or so quickly.'

She waited a second before asking her question, trying to seem as unconcerned as possible.

'It's ours, you mean? The map is ours – is that what you're saying?'

Romer looked at her with mild rebuke in his eyes, as if she were being too slow, lagging behind the class. 'Of course. Here's the story: German courier crashed his car in Rio de Janiero. Careless fellow. He was taken to hospital. In his briefcase was this fascinating map. Rather too convenient, don't you think? I was very reluctant to go down that road but our friends seem to have bought it wholesale.' He paused. 'By the way, I want you to get all this out on Transoceanic tomorrow. Everywhere – date-line US government, Washington DC. Have you pen and paper?'

Eva rummaged in her handbag for notebook and pencil and took down in shorthand everything that Romer listed: five new countries in the South American continent as displayed on Roosevelt's secret map. 'Argentina' now included Uruguay and Paraguay and half of Bolivia; 'Chile' took in the other half of Bolivia and the whole of Peru. 'New Spain' was composed of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador and, crucially, the Panama Canal. Only 'Brazil' remained substantially as it was.

'I must say it was a rather beautiful document:
"Argentinien, Brasilien, Neu Spanien"
– all criss-crossed by proposed Lufthansa routes.' He chuckled to himself.

Eva put her notebook away and used the excuse to sit quiet for a while, taking this in and realising that her gullibility, her susceptibility was still an issue – was she too easy to deceive, perhaps? Never believe anything, Romer said, never, never. Always look for the other explanations, the other options, the other side.

When she raised her eyes she found he was looking at her differently. Fondly, she would have said, with an undercurrent of carnal interest.

'I miss you, Eva.'

'I miss you, too, Lucas. But what can we do about it?'

'I'm going to send you on a course to Canada. You know, care of documents, filing, that sort of thing.'

She knew this meant Station M – a BSC forging laboratory run under cover of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Station M produced all their fake documentation – she assumed the map had come from them, also.

'For how long?'

'A few days – but you can have a bit of leave before you go, as reward for all your good work. I suggest Long Island.'

'Long Island? Oh, yes?'

'Yes. I can recommend the Narragansett Inn in St James. A Mr and Mrs Washington have a room booked there this weekend.'

She felt an instinctive sexual quickening within her. A slackening, then a tightening of her bowels.

'Sounds nice,' she said, her eyes steady on his. 'Lucky Mr and Mrs Washington.' She stood up. 'I'd better go. Sylvia and I are going out on the town.'

'Well, be careful, be watchful,' he said, seriously, suddenly like an anxious parent. 'Triple-check.'

At that moment Eva wondered if she was in love with Lucas Romer. She wanted to kiss him, more than anything, wanted to touch his face.