The Poison Tide (22 page)

But wasn’t that who he should try to be – if that was who she wanted him to be?

‘Is everything all right?’ It was the plump keeper of the flame in his green uniform. Perfectly all right, thank you. Goodbye, they said.

‘It isn’t attractive, is it? I mean, an old cynic.’ He plunged his hands into his pockets, drawing his coat tightly round himself like a rueful schoolboy. ‘Is it the world or me? Don’t you protect yourself from disappointment by expecting the worst?’

She smiled and stretched out her hand, checking the impulse before she touched his arm. ‘As long as there are, well, right-thinking people in the world, things will change – you’ll see. We have to take risks, don’t we?’ She paused, biting her lip for a second; ‘haven’t you ever been in love?’

He laughed. ‘What a question.’

‘Well, haven’t you? That’s a risk, giving so much.’

‘Have you?’

She shook her head. ‘Not yet, but you’re . . .’

‘Older?’

She blushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why?’ He frowned intently. ‘You know, I don’t know if I’ve been in love.’

‘You don’t know?’ She sounded a little shocked.

‘I’ve forgotten,’ he said with a fresh laugh. ‘Yes. Forgotten. Come on . . .’

They wandered round the balcony once more and this time she drew his attention to a finger of land on the Jersey shore.

‘That’s the Black Tom yard. Do you see? Yes, there. All of it for the British.’

Piers protruded at right angles from a main dock like flanges on a mace. Wolff counted eight, nine, ten ships alongside, cranes swinging boxes of shells aboard in rope slings. Look, she said, a freight train crawling on to the wharf with ammunition from the factories upstate, and millions more pounds of explosives in the yard’s sheds awaiting shipment. ‘Guns, bullets, oh, I don’t know, horses, food . . .’ Arms open wide as if she were ready to embrace him; ‘. . . whatever they need to fight their war. The docks along the river, in Boston, Baltimore, Newport News, Norfolk . . .’ she shook her head angrily; ‘that’s one way to change the world for the better.’

‘Stopping it?’

‘Yes. Look, can we go?’ She was struggling to hold down her hat. ‘I do believe it’s getting worse.’

Wolff didn’t move. He was still gazing across the narrow stretch of water.

‘We might have time for the next ferry,’ she prompted.

‘Do you think they’ll try to stop this?’ He nodded in the direction of the yard.

‘Stop it? Who? No. This is the land of the free, remember, free capital, free enterprise. A lot of people are becoming very rich. Our friends in . . .’

‘I don’t mean government . . .’ He glanced round to be sure no one was in earshot. ‘The Clan
.
Won’t Clan na Gael
try?’

‘No,’ she bridled at the suggestion, ‘no’ – and shook her head angrily. ‘Don’t ask me about the Clan. Not here or anywhere – oh, now look what you’ve made me . . .’ she was tugging on the rim of her hat so hard it looked like a circus bowler, auburn curls breaking free and dancing in front of her face.

‘Come on, let’s find some shelter.’ He tried to take her arm, but she shook it free, ‘No . . .’, and stamped her foot in frustration. Hat pulled down over her eyes, head bent, she began to shake, and it was a moment before he realised she wasn’t crying but laughing heartily.

‘Very . . . unladylike,’ she managed to gasp.

He laughed too. ‘Nonsense, really.’ Yes, it was nonsense. He thought she was very fine. ‘And what kind of gentleman takes a lady on the water in a gale?’

‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘just what kind of gentleman?’

Only when she was in the cabin of the ferry, pinning up her hair, did she mention the Clan to him again. If there was something he wanted to know, she said as quietly as she could over the throbbing of the engine, he must speak to Mr Devoy, because the British have so many spies, Jan, you know how careful everyone must be. Wolff leant forward to gaze out of a port at nothing in particular.

‘I’m the girl who takes the notes, that’s all – you do understand, don’t you?’

He turned and bent his head to look sideways at her. She returned his gaze but with a hesitant smile.

‘I met a Mr Emile Gaché, do you know him?’ he asked, leaning closer. ‘His real name is von Rintelen. He’s a German spy.’

She frowned and looked away. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘But you do, don’t you?’

She gathered her skirts to rise. ‘Excuse me, Mr de Witt . . .’

‘A minute, please,’ and he reached across to her arm.

Her jaw dropped in amazement, staring down at his hand holding her discreetly but firmly in her seat.

‘You need to know that I know.’ He took his hand away. ‘Friends must be honest and open with each other,’ he said earnestly. ‘Please don’t be offended but, well, I want us to be friends – it’s important.’

Biting her lip uncertainly, avoiding his gaze, she wasn’t used to being touched, that much was clear, but he sensed that she liked him, was intrigued, excited; she wasn’t going to waltz off in high dudgeon. He watched her struggling for something to say, her body turned stiffly away, loose strands of auburn hair at the nape of her long neck, eyes to the front and rows of polished benches. Before she could make up her mind the ferry drew alongside the pier, passengers crowding into the gangway between the seats.

‘I must be going,’ she said the moment she stepped on to the quay.

‘But you’re my guide.’

‘It has been interesting;’ her eyes were twinkling with amusement.

‘I’m glad.’ He hesitated. ‘Have I spoken out of turn?’

‘Yes, you have. Don’t pretend to be sorry, I won’t believe you.’

He offered to escort her home. She said she wasn’t going home, and no, she didn’t need a taxicab.

‘Will you be my guide again?’ he asked.

She looked at him coyly. ‘I don’t think you need a guide.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Perhaps, if I bring a chaperone.’ Turning to walk away, she checked and glanced back as if there was something she’d forgotten to say: ‘I’m sure we
will
be friends,’ and with a shy wave, ‘
Slán go fóill
.’

‘And what, pray . . .’

‘Ask an Irishman.’

‘Until the next time,’ said the man from Cork in the grocer’s store a block up from Wolff’s apartment. The next time was only three days later. By then he’d kept his promise and caught the train to Brooklyn to see Casement’s sister. She was restless, the house too small to contain her anxiety and a litany of woe. ‘He’s in hospital, Mr de Witt,’ she confided. ‘It’s too much for him, he’s so sensitive. He has these black moods, you see – he was the same as a boy.’

They walked to the park and she told him of a new ‘unpleasantness’. The Clan
had caught Christensen frittering away the funds they’d entrusted to him on a wife he’d kept a secret from everyone. ‘He came to see me. I could tell he was no good,’ she said in a strained and unhappy voice. ‘I’m like that, you know. I look at people and I know at once. I see who they really are.’ She wiped away a tear and gave Wolff a shaky smile. ‘Dear Roddy’s done so much for that young man. He’s going to be dreadfully hurt.’ Yes, he would be, thought Wolff, and he regretted it deeply. ‘Does he need to know?’ he asked. ‘Of course,’ she replied emphatically and with the conviction of the biblical stone-thrower for whom truth is always pure and simply an end in itself.

The summons from the Germans was delivered to him the following day. The author had stolen an idea from a dime-store novel and signed it ‘The Dark Invader’:

Wolff telephoned Mr Ponting with the news.

‘Sure it’s Rintelen?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Dark Invader? It’s too ludicrously vainglorious to be anyone else.’

‘My people followed him to a trade-union office on the New Jersey side yesterday. Stirring up the Irish on the docks to strike, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Another of his “enterprises”.’

‘Best go armed,’ he advised.

But Wolff was glad he’d left the revolver nailed beneath the floorboards; it was too cumbersome for a light coat on a warm autumn evening, pressed between the worsted shoulders of longshoremen on the tram from the ferry, a sharp smell of stale sweat and beer. Everyone was going the same way, rumbling and cussin’ like a crowd before a football game, with Billy the barrack-room lawyer from Belfast – a true son of the city – threatening to kick anyone ‘up the arse’ who didn’t join the strike, and a fella from ‘
Jerzee
’ who was booed and thumped for complaining that it wasn’t his war and who was going to feed his family if he joined a walk-out? ‘Who the hell are you?’ someone asked Wolff as they approached the Norddeutscher terminal. ‘NYPD?’

‘Dressed too smart for the police,’ growled Billy. ‘Look at that suit there; from Paris, I wouldn’t wonder.’

‘Berlin,’ he replied, and it didn’t seem to be necessary to explain more.

In their tackety boots they clattered from the tram in front of the terminal, and hurried across the street into the park. Beyond the first belt of trees, a crowd of several hundred longshoremen was gathered about a small dais; on the sidewalk close by, a dozen bored-looking police officers. No sign of a ‘Dark Invader’. Turning his back on the park, Wolff walked towards the long, low red-brick terminal building where many thousands of passengers had set foot in the New World for the first time, eerily empty now the Atlantic was closed to German shipping lines. Beyond the terminal, the topmasts of the steamers laid up at the piers for the rest of what was going to be a long war. A small car appeared at the angle of the building and accelerated across the parade towards Wolff, but the driver swung left through the gate without giving him a second glance. From the park, a murmur of recognition and applause as the speakers stepped on to the platform. Facing the crowd alone on the sidewalk, Wolff felt like a hooker touting for business. The attention wasn’t healthy. He walked across the street and through the trees, drifting at the edge of the gathering until he could see the booming Irishman who’d just begun to address it.

‘. . . you have the power to strike a blow for freedom,’
he told them, his ‘freedom’ echoing effortlessly across the park. John Devoy was standing at his back.

‘You know me. Big Jim Larkin cares no more for kaisers than for British kings. But Germany’s cause is now our cause – this is for Ireland.’

More cheering. ‘You men are the ones who load British guns and shells, the horses, the food they need for their war . . . and you are the ones who can say, “No, enough, we’ll not serve your bloody purpose any more. Leave our country.”’

Some men near Wolff began to chant, ‘Strike, strike, strike.’

‘That’s right,’
Larkin pointed in their direction. ‘Those men there have it – strike for auld Ireland, here in New Jersey.’

The cry was taken up: ‘Strike, strike, strike,’
and Wolff was clapping with the rest, or trying to, only someone was tugging at his sleeve. Half turning to look, he discovered Laura smiling up at him.

‘What on earth . . .’

She shrugged and put her hands over her ears, then she shouted something but it was lost in the noise of the crowd.

‘To meet an associate,’ he said – or did she know already?

She shook her head blankly. The man beside her was bellowing inarticulately, like a punter cheering home the favourite: Big Jim was heady stuff. They were all drunk with excitement at the prospect of breaking strike laws in the service of auld Ireland.

‘Strike, strike, strike.’

Wolff touched her elbow and with a tilt of the head suggested they move away. She smiled weakly and nodded.

‘Those who come out can draw from a strike fund for their families,’
Larkin told them. ‘Mr John Devoy from Clan na Gael is here to tell you how . . .’

They walked just far enough for conversation to be possible.

‘Is it like this at your suffragette rallies?’

She laughed lightly. ‘Noisier.’

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

She shook her head.

‘You don’t seem surprised to see me,’ he observed, tapping a cigarette on the back of his case.

She looked away, the colour rising to her neck and face. ‘Mr Devoy thought you might be here.’

‘I wonder how he knew.’

‘From his German friends, I expect.’ Her gaze led him discreetly to where three, perhaps four men were standing beneath the canopy of a weeping cherry. They were twenty yards away, their faces hidden by the tree, but Wolff recognised one of them at once. Shifting awkwardly as large men do, his back turned towards them and his right arm raised to a branch above his head – the master of the
Neckar
. He was listening to someone in his shadow, nodding vigorously. Then he turned towards the meeting and Wolff caught a glimpse of the Dark Invader behind him.

‘Your Mr Gaché?’ she asked.

‘And some of his business associates, yes.’

‘I thought so.’ She bit the corner of her bottom lip, something she did when she was uneasy. ‘It’s a good turnout; quite a few men here,’ she said, catching his eye.

‘But only one woman.’

She laughed and looked down, self-consciously sweeping a loose strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m perfectly safe. Sir Roger says the only true gentlemen are Irishmen; they are gentlemen by instinct, not by an accident of birth.’

‘Then there’s no hope for me.’

‘There might be exceptions,’ she said with another light laugh, the tinkle of fine crystal. ‘After all, you are Roger’s friend.’

‘An honorary Irishman, then.’

‘That must be right.’

They stood for a few seconds in silence, she with half an eye to the meeting; he to Hinsch and Rintelen and their companions.

‘You’ll have to excuse me, Jan,’ she said at last. ‘There’s something I must do.’

He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

‘I’m taking the names of men who will need strike pay.’

‘From their Swiss banker?’

She frowned and bit her lip. ‘If you mean your Mr Gaché, I don’t know.’

A burst of applause and cheering. Devoy was shaking hands with the platform party, slapping ‘Big Jim’ on the back, celebrating their little victory, an unholy alliance of Irish muscle and German money, an unofficial walk-out, a few days lost, some bullets, some shells. The goddamn price of famine, C would say. But no one at the Front would notice, the killing would go on as before, and sooner or later big American business would speak, no, shout, ‘Enough’, and the strike would be broken by a bribe or by policemen enforcing the free traffic of goods and services with the hard round end of a ‘paddy-whacker’.