Restless (29 page)

As the evening drew in she listened to some music on the radio and in her mind went back over the events in Las Cruces. 'The Events in Las Cruces' – the euphemism was rather comforting: as if her hotel room had been double-booked or her car had broken down on Highway 80. She felt no guilt, no compunction about what she had done to de Baca. If she hadn't killed him she knew he would have killed her in the next minute or two. Her plan had been only to stab him in the eye and run. She only had a sharpened pencil, after all – one of his eyes was the only possible target if he was to be immobilised. But thinking back over those few seconds in the car, remembering de Baca's reactions, his total, shocking incapacity followed by his immediate death, she realised that the force of her blow must have driven the pencil point through the eyeball and the eye-hole in his skull, deep into his brain puncturing, in the process, the carotid artery – or perhaps hit the brain-stem, causing instant cardiac arrest. There could be no other explanation for his almost instant death. Even if she had missed the artery and the pencil had penetrated his brain de Baca might not have died. But she would have been able to make her escape, though. However, her luck – her luck – her aim and the sharpness of the pencil point had killed him as swiftly and as surely as if he had taken prussic acid or had been strapped to an electric chair. She went to bed early and dreamt that Raul was trying to sell her a small speedy red coupe.

She called Sylvia's number at BSC exactly at 4.01 p.m. She was standing at a pay phone outside the entrance of the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue with a good view of the main doors. Sylvia's phone rang three times and then was picked up.

'Hello, Eva,' Romer said, his voice level, unsurprised. 'We want you to come in.'

'Listen carefully,' she said. 'Leave the building now and walk south down Fifth. I'll give you two minutes, otherwise there won't be any meeting.'

She hung up and waited. After about three and a half minutes, Romer emerged – fast enough, she thought: he would have had no time to set up any team. He turned right down Fifth Avenue. She shadowed him from across the street and behind, watching his back, watching his manner, letting him walk some six blocks before she was sure there was no one on his tail. She was wearing a headscarf and spectacles, flat shoes and a camel coat she'd bought in a thrift shop that morning. She crossed the street at an intersection and began to follow him closely herself for another block or two. He was wearing a trench coat, an old one with a few repaired tears, and a navy-blue scarf. He was bareheaded. He seemed very at ease, strolling southwards, not looking around, waiting for contact to be made. They had reached 39th Street before she walked up beside him and said, 'Follow me.'

She turned east and on Park Avenue turned north again, heading towards 42nd Street and Grand Central Station, going in by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance and walking up the ramp to the main concourse. Thousands of commuters criss-crossed the vast space, swarming, jostling, hurrying: it was rush hour – probably as secure a place to meet as any in the city, Eva reasoned: hard to jump her, easy to cause confusion and escape. She didn't look behind her but made for the central information booth. When she reached it only then did she turn, taking off her spectacles.

He was right behind her, face expressionless.

'Relax,' he said. 'I'm alone. I'm not that stupid.' He paused, moving closer to her, lowering his voice. 'How are you, Eva?'

To her intense irritation the genuine concern in his voice made her suddenly want to cry. She had only to think of Luis de Baca to go hard and resilient again. She took off her headscarf, shook her hair loose.

'I was sold,' she said. 'Somebody sold me.'

'Not any one of us. I don't know what went wrong but Transoceanic is tight.'

'I think you're wrong.'

'Of course you think that. I would think that. But I would know, Eva. I'd figure it out. We're tight.'

'What about BSC?'

'BSC would give you a medal if they could,' he said. 'You did a brilliant job.'

This threw her and she looked around at the hundreds of people hurrying by and then, as if for inspiration, up at the immense vaulted ceiling with its constellations winking out of the blue. She felt weak: the pressure of the last days overcoming her now, all of a sudden. She wanted nothing more than for Romer to put his arms around her.

'Let's go downstairs,' he said. 'We can't talk properly here. I've got a lot to tell you.'

They went down a ramp to the lower concourse and found a place at the counter of a milk bar. She ordered a cherry milkshake with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, suddenly craving sweetness. She checked the room as the order was prepared.

'There's no need to look around,' Romer said. 'I'm on my own. You've got to come in, Eva – not now, not today, or tomorrow. Take your time. You deserve it.' He reached over and took her hand. 'What you managed to do was astonishing,' he said. 'Tell me what happened. Start from when you left New York.' He let her hand go.

So she told him: she talked him through every hour of the entire trip from New York to Las Cruces and Romer listened, still, without saying a word, only asking her when she had finished to repeat the period of time from her saying farewell to Raul to the encounter with de Baca.

'What's happened in the days you've been out is this,' he told her when she had finished. 'The sheriff of Dona Ana County was called to the crash after you reported it. They found the corner of the map and the money and called in the local FBI agent from Santa Fe. The map went to Hoover in Washington and Hoover himself put it on the President's desk.' He paused. 'Nobody can quite figure it out – so they called us in, naturally enough, as it seemed to have a connection with the Brazilian map. How do you explain it? The death of a Mexican detective in a road crash near the border. There's a sizeable amount of cash and what appears to be a portion of a map, in German, detailing potential air routes within Mexico and the United States. Foul play? Or an unlucky accident? Did he buy the map? Was he selling it and the sale went wrong? Did someone try to steal it from him and was spooked and ran?' He spread his hands. 'Who knows? The investigation continues. The key thing from our point of view – BSC's – is that it confirms the validity of the Brazilian map. Unequivocally.' He chuckled. 'You could never have foreseen this, Eva, but the sheer exceptional beauty of this episode is that the map reached Roosevelt and Hopkins without a trace, without a hint of a smell, of BSC on it. From county sheriff to FBI operative to Hoover to the White House. What's going on south of the border? What are these Nazis planning with their airlines and their Gaus? Couldn't have worked out better.'

Eva thought. 'But the material was inferior.'

'They thought it was good enough. Raul was simply going to plant it, send it to a local newspaper. That was the plan. Until your plan superseded.'

'But I didn't have a plan.'

'All right. Your… improvisation. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.' He paused, looked at her, almost checking her out, she felt, to see if she had changed, somehow. 'The key thing,' he continued, 'the amazing thing, is that it's all worked out about a hundred times better than anyone could have hoped. They can't point a finger at the British and BSC and say: look, another of your dirty tricks to hoodwink us into your European war. They turned this up themselves in a forgotten corner of their own backyard. What can the Bund say? Or America First? It's as clear as day: the Nazis are planning flights from Mexico City to San Antonio and Miami. They're already on your doorstep, USA, it's not something happening across the Atlantic Ocean – wake up.' He didn't need to say anything more: Eva could see how it fitted only one interpretation.

'London's very happy,' he said. 'I can tell you that – very. It might have made the crucial difference.'

She felt the tiredness gather on her again as if she were carrying a heavy rucksack. Maybe it was relief, she thought: she didn't have to fly, didn't have to run, everything had turned out all right – somehow, mystifyingly.

'All right. I'll come in,' she said. 'I'll be back in the office on Monday.'

'Good. There's lots to do. Transoceanic has to follow this up in various ways.'

She climbed down from her stool as Romer paid for her milkshake.

'It was a very close-run thing, you know,' she said, a little residual silt of bitterness in her voice. 'Very.'

'I know. Life's a close-run thing.'

'See you on Monday,' she said. 'Bye.' She turned away, craving her bed.

'Eva,' Romer said and caught her elbow. 'Mr and Mrs Sage. Room 340. The Algonquin Hotel.'

'Tell me exactly what happened,' Morris Devereux said, 'from the minute you left New York.'

They were sitting in his office at Transoceanic on Monday morning. Outside it was a cold late-November day, snow-flurries were threatened. Eva had spent Saturday and Sunday at the Algonquin with Romer. She had slept all day Saturday, Romer being sweet and considerate. On Sunday they went for a walk in Central Park and had a brunch at the Plaza, then they went back to the hotel and made love. She had gone home to her apartment in the evening. Sylvia had been waiting, forewarned – don't tell me anything, she said, take your time, I'm here if you want me. She had felt restored again and, for a while, all the nagging questions in her head had receded until Morris Devereux's request brought them charging back. She told him everything that she had told Romer, leaving nothing out. Devereux listened intently and made brief notes on a pad in front of him – dates, times.

When she finished he shook his head in some amazement. 'And it's all turned out so well. Fantastically well. Bigger than the Belmonte Letter, bigger than the Brazil Map.'

'You make it sound like some Machiavellian superscheme,' she said. 'But there was no plan. Everything was spontaneous, on the spur of the moment. I was only trying to cover tracks – to muddy water, to give me some time. Confuse people. I had no plan,' she reiterated.

'Maybe all great schemes are like that,' he said. 'Happenstance intersecting with received wisdom produces something entirely new and significant.'

'Perhaps. But I was
sold,
Morris,' she said, with some harshness, some provocativeness. 'Wouldn't you say so?'

He made an uncomfortable face. 'I would have to say it looks like it.'

'I keep thinking of
their
plan,' she said. 'And that's what bothers me, not the fact that I somehow, by luck and accident, foiled it and turned it into our so-called triumph. I'm not interested in that. I was meant to be found dead in the desert with a dodgy map of Mexico on me and 5,000 dollars. That was the real plan. Why? What's it all about?'

He looked baffled, as he thought through the logic of what she had said. 'Let's go over it again,' he said. 'When did you first spot the two crows at Denver?'

They ran through the sequence of events again. She could see that now there was something further troubling Morris, something that he wasn't prepared to tell her – yet.

'Who was running me, Morris?'

'I was. I was running you.'

'And Angus and Sylvia.'

'But under my instructions. It was my party.'

She looked shrewdly at him. 'So, I should probably be very suspicious of you.'

'Yes,' he said, thoughtfully, 'so it would seem.' He sat back and locked his fingers behind his head. 'I would be suspicious of me, too. You lost the crows in Denver. Hundred per cent sure?'

'Hundred per cent.'

'But they were waiting for you in Las Cruces.'

'I didn't even know I was going to Las Cruces until the man in Albuquerque told me. I could have been going anywhere.'

'So he must have set you up.'

'He was an envoy. A fetch-and-carry man.'

'The crows in Denver were local.'

'I'm pretty sure. Standard FBI.'

'Which suggests to me,' Morris said, sitting up, 'that the crows in Las Cruces weren't.'

'What do you mean?' Now she was interested.

'They were bloody good. Too bloody good for you.'

This was something she hadn't thought of. Neither had Romer. Denver and Las Cruces had always seemed like two ends of the same operation. Devereux's suggestion implied that there were two parties running – simultaneously, unconnected.

'Two sets of crows? Makes no sense – one inept, one good.'

Devereux held up his hand. 'Let's proceed with the assumption and ignore the solution. Didn't they teach you that at Lyne?'

'They needn't have been waiting for me,' she said, thinking fast. 'They could have been with me all the way from New York if they were that good.'

'Possibly. Exactly.'

'So who were the second lot if they weren't FBI?' Eva said: her mind was beginning that old mad clamour again – questions, questions, questions and no answers. 'The Bund? America First? Private hire?'

'You're looking for a solution. Let's play it through first. They wanted you dead with the map on you. You would be identified as a British crow because the FBI were following you out of New York even though you lost them.'

'But what's the point? One dead British agent.'

She noticed Morris now had a worried expression on his face. 'You're right: it doesn't add up. There's something we're missing…' he looked like a man faced with half a dozen urgent options, all of them unsavoury.

'Who knew I was in Las Cruces?' Eva prompted, trying to get the momentum going again.

'Me, Angus, Sylvia.'

'Romer?'

'No. He was in England. He only knew about Albuquerque.'

'Raul knew,' Eva said. 'And the fellow in Albuquerque. So other people knew apart from you three…' Something struck her. 'How come de Baca knew I was in the Motor Lodge? Nobody knew I was going to the Motor Lodge except me – you didn't know, Angus and Sylvia didn't know. I jinked, I weaved, I backtracked. I had no shadows, I swear.'