‘Are they always invented? I don’t know how a novelist works, Mr Wormold. I have never known one before you.’
‘There was no drunk pilot in the Cubana air line.’
‘Oh, I agree, you must have invented that detail. I don’t know why.’ ‘If you were breaking my cables you must have realized there was no truth in them, you know the city. A pilot dismissed for drunkenness, a friend with a plane, they were all invention.’
‘I don’t know your motive, Mr Wormold. Perhaps you wanted to disguise his identity in case we broke your code. Perhaps if your friends had known he had private means and a plane of his own, they wouldn’t have paid him so much. How much of it all got into his pocket, I wonder, and how much into yours?’
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’
‘You read the papers, Mr Wormold. You know he had his flying-licence taken away a month ago when he landed drunk in a child’s playground.’ ‘I don’t read the local papers.’
‘Never? Of course he denied working for you. They offered him a lot of money if he would work for them instead. They too want photographs, Mr Wormold, of those platforms you discovered in the Oriente hills.’ ‘There are no platforms.’
‘Don’t expect me to believe too much, Mr Wormold. You referred in one cable to plans you had sent to London. They needed photographs too.’ ‘You must know who They are.’
‘Gui bono?’
‘And what do they plan for me?’
‘At first they promised me they were planning nothing. You have been useful to them. They knew about you from the very beginning, Mr Wormold, but they didn’t take you seriously. They even thought you might be inventing your reports. But then you changed your codes and your staff increased. The British Secret Service would not be so easily deceived as all that, would it?’ A kind of loyalty to Hawthorne kept Wormold silent. ‘Mr Wormold, Mr Wormold, why did you ever begin?’
‘You know why. I needed the money.’ He found himself taking to truth like a tranquillizer.
‘I would have lent you money. I offered to.’
‘I needed more than you could lend me.’
‘For Milly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Take good care of her, Mr Wormold. You are in a trade where it is unsafe to love anybody or anything. They strike at that. You remember the culture I was making?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps if they hadn’t destroyed my will to live, they wouldn’t have persuaded me so easily.’
‘Do you really think…
?’
‘I only ask you to be careful.’
‘Can I use your telephone?’
‘Yes.’
Wormold rang up his house. Did he only imagine that slight click which indicated that the tapper was at work? Beatrice answered. He said, ‘Is everything quiet?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait till I come. Is Milly all right?’
‘Fast asleep.’
‘I’m coming back.’
Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘You shouldn’t have shown love in your voice. Who knows who was listening?’ He walked with difficulty to the door because of his tight breeches. ‘Good night, Mr Wormold. Here is the Lamb.’ ‘I won’t need it any more.’
‘Milly may want it. Would you mind saying nothing to anyone about this -this costume? I know that I am absurd, but I loved those days. Once the Kaiser spoke to me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “I remember you. You are Captain Muller.”
When the Chief had guests he dined at home and cooked his own dinner, for no restaurant satisfied his meticulous and romantic standard. There was a story that once when he was ill he refused to cancel an invitation to an old friend, but cooked the meal from his bed by telephone. With a watch before him on the bed-table he would interrupt the conversation at the correct interval, to give directions to his valet. ‘Hallo, hallo, Brewer, hallo, you should take that chicken out now and baste it again.’
It was also said that once when he had been kept late at the office he had tried to cook the meal from there, dinner had been ruined because from force of habit he had used his red telephone, the scrambler, and only strange noises resembling rapid Japanese had reached the valet’s ears. The meal which he served to the Permanent Under-Secretary was simple and excellent: a roast with a touch of garlic. A Wensleydale cheese stood on the sideboard and the quiet of Albany lay deeply around them like snow. After his exertions in the kitchen the Chief himself smelt faintly of gravy. ‘It’s really excellent. Excellent.’
‘An old Norfolk recipe. Granny Brown’s Ipswich Roast.’
‘And the meat itself… it really melts…’
‘I’ve trained Brewer to do the marketing, but he’ll never make a cook.
He needs constant supervision.’
They ate for a while reverently in silence; the clink of a woman’s shoes along the Rope Walk was the only distraction.
‘A good wine,’ the Permanent Under Secretary said at last.
‘55 is coming along nicely. Still a little young?’
‘Hardly.’
With the cheese the Chief spoke again. ‘The Russian note -what does the F. O. think?’
‘We are a little puzzled by the reference to the Caribbean bases.’ There was a crackling of Romary biscuits. ‘They can hardly refer to the Bahamas. They are worth about what the Yankees paid us, a few old destroyers. Yet we’ve always assumed that those constructions in Cuba had a Communist origin. You don’t think they could have an American origin after all?’
‘Wouldn’t we have been informed?’
‘Not necessarily, I’m afraid. Since the Fuchs case. They say we keep a good deal under our own hat too. What does your man in Havana say?’ ‘I’ll ask him for a full assessment. How’s the Wensleydale?’
‘Perfect.’
Help yourself to the port.’
‘Cockburn ‘35, isn’t it?’
‘27.’
‘Do you believe they intend war eventually?’ the Chief asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘They’ve become very active in Cuba -apparently with the help of the police. Our man in Havana has had a difficult time. His best agent, as you know, was killed, accidentally of course, on his way to take aerial photographs of the constructions a very great loss to us. But I would give much more than a man’s life for those photographs. As it was, we had given fifteen hundred dollars. They shot at another of our agents in the street and he’s taken fright. A third’s gone underground. There’s a woman too, they interrogated her, in spite of her being the mistress of the Director of Posts and Telegraphs. They have left our man alone so far, perhaps to watch. Anyway he’s a canny bird.’ ‘Surely he must have been a bit careless to lose all those agents?’ ‘At the beginning we have to expect casualties. They broke his book-code. I’m never happy with these book-codes. There’s a German out there who seems to be their biggest operator and an expert at cryptography. Hawthorne warned our man, but you know what these old merchants are like; they have an obstinate loyalty. Perhaps it was worth a few casualties to open his eyes. Cigar?’
‘Thanks. Will he be able to start again if he’s blown?’ ‘He has a trick worth two of that. Struck right home into the enemy-camp. Recruited a double agent in the police-headquarters itself.’ ‘Aren’t double agents always a bit -tricky? You never know whether you’re getting the fat or the lean.’
‘I trust our man to huff him every time,’ the Chief said. ‘I say huff because they are both great draughts players. Checkers they call it there. As a matter of fact, that’s their excuse for contacting each other.’ ‘I can’t exaggerate how worried we are about the constructions, C. If only you had got the photographs before they killed your man. The P. M. is pressing us to inform the Yankees and ask their help.’ ‘You mustn’t let him. You can’t depend on their security.’
‘Huff,’ said Captain Segura. They had met at the Havana Club. At the Havana Club, which was not a club at all and was owned by Baccardi’s rival, all rum-drinks were free, and this enabled Wormold to increase his savings, for naturally he continued to charge for the drinks in his expenses the fact that the drinks were free would have been tedious, if not impossible, to explain to London. The bar was on the first floor of a seventeenth-century house and the windows faced the Cathedral where the body of Christopher Columbus had once lain. A grey stone statue of Columbus stood outside the Cathedral and looked as though it had been formed through the centuries under water, like a coral reef, by the action of insects.