She waited two hours for Morris at the theatre, sitting in the back row of the near-empty cinema, watching a succession of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry cartoons interspersed with newsreels that occasionally contained news of the war in Europe. 'Germany's war machine falters at the gates of Moscow,' the announcer intoned with massive, hectoring insistence, 'General Winter takes command of the battlefield.' She saw horses floundering up to their withers in mud as fluid and gluey as melted chocolate; she saw exhausted, gaunt German soldiers with sheets tied around them as camouflage, numbly running from house to house; frozen bodies in the snow taking on the properties of shattered trees or outcrops of rock: iron-hard, wind-lashed, unmovable; burning villages lighting the thousands of Russian soldiers scurrying forward across the icy fields in counter-attack. She tried to imagine what was happening there in the countryside around Moscow – Moscow, where she had been born, and which she couldn't remember at all – and found that her brain refused to supply her with any answers. Donald Duck took over, to her relief. People began to laugh.
When it was apparent Morris was not going to show up, and the theatre began slowly but surely to fill up as offices closed, she made her way back to the apartment. She was not that bothered – three out of four of these prearranged meetings never took place – it was too complex and too risky to try to alert people of a postponement or a delay, but worries still nagged at her. Or were they genuine worries? Perhaps her own curiosity about what Morris would have had to say made her more edgy and concerned. He would call in the fullness of time, she told herself; they would meet again; she would discover what he had discovered. Back in the apartment she checked the snares in her room – Sylvia had not been poking around, she was glad, almost stupidly happy, to note. Sometimes she grew tired of this endless, vigilant suspicion – how can you live like that, she thought? Always watching, always checking, always fearful that you were being betrayed and undone. She made herself a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette and waited for Morris to call.
Sylvia came home and Eva asked her – very by the way – had she seen Morris at the Center today? Sylvia said no, reminding her of just how many hundreds of people worked there now, how huge BSC had grown – like a giant business enterprise, two entire floors of the skyscraper filled, crammed, overflow offices on other floors – Morris could have been there for a week and she'd have still not seen him.
At about eight o'clock a slight but poisonous unease began to afflict Eva. She telephoned Transoceanic and was told by a duty clerk that Mr Devereux had not been in all day. She telephoned Angus Woolf at his apartment but his phone just rang and rang.
At nine Sylvia went out to see a movie – The Maltese Falcon - with a friend, leaving Eva alone in the apartment. She sat and watched the phone – a stupid thing to do, she knew, but she felt better for doing it, all the same. She tried to recall her last conversation with Morris. She could hear in her mind his quiet 'Jesus Christ' as something profound had struck him, some missing piece in the puzzle had fitted into place. It had been more shock in his voice, she decided, than alarm, as if this potential solution was so… so unexpected, so drastic, that it had drawn this exclamation from him spontaneously. He had fully intended to tell her, otherwise he wouldn't have set up the cartoon-theatre meeting and, more importantly, he had wanted to tell her face to face. Face to face, she thought: why couldn't he have told me in plain-code? I would have got the message. Too shocking for plain-code, perhaps. Too earth-shattering.
She decided to ignore procedure and call his apartment.
'Yes,' a man's voice answered. American accent.
'Could I speak with Elizabeth Wesley, please?' she said, instantly Americanising her own voice.
'I think you have the wrong number.'
'So sorry.'
She hung up and ran to fetch her coat. In the street she found a taxi quickly and told it to go to Murray Hill. Morris lived there in a tall block of anonymous service apartments, as they all did. She made the taxi stop a couple of streets away and walked the rest of the distance. Two police patrol cars were parked outside the lobby entrance. She walked past and saw the doorman sitting behind his lectern, reading a newspaper. She hovered for five minutes, waiting for someone to go in and eventually a couple appeared who had their own key and she followed them quickly through the door, chatting – 'Hi. Excuse me, you don't happen to know if Linda and Mary Weiss are on the sixteenth or the seventeenth floor? I just left them and left my purse there. Five A – sixteen or seventeen. Just running out to a club. Can you believe it?' – the man waved at the doorman, who looked up from his newspaper at the animated trio and looked down again. The couple didn't happen to know the Weiss sisters but Eva rode up to the tenth floor with her new friends – where they exited – and then went on up to thirteen and came down the fire stairs to twelve, where Morris lived.
She saw two policemen and Angus Woolf standing outside the door to Morris's apartment. Angus Woolf? What's he doing here, she thought? And a nausea hit her stomach as she realised, almost immediately, that Morris must be dead.
'Angus,' she called quietly, walking down the corridor towards him, 'what's happened?'
Angus signalled to the cops that she was admissible and swung quickly toward her on his sticks.
'You'd better get out, Eve,' he said, his face pale, 'this is System Blue, here.'
System Blue was as bad as it could get.
'Where's Morris?' she asked, trying to keep her head, trying to seem calm and normal, knowing the answer.
'Morris is dead,' Angus said. 'He killed himself.' He was shocked and upset, she could telclass="underline" she remembered they had been colleagues, friends, for a long time, long before she'd arrived at AAS.
Eva felt her mouth go dry as if some small vacuum inside her was siphoning off all her saliva. 'Oh my God,' she said.
'You'd better go, Eve,' Angus repeated. 'All kinds of shit are hitting the fan.'
And then Romer came out of Morris's apartment to have a word with the policemen, turned, glanced down the passageway, and saw her. He strode towards her.
'What're you doing here?'
'I'd arranged to meet Morris for a drink,' she said. 'He was late so I came over.'
Romer's face was immobile, almost vacant, as if he were still taking in and computing the fact of Eva's presence.
'What happened?' Eva said.
'Pills and whisky. Doors locked, windows locked. A note that makes no sense. Something about some boy.'
'Why?' Eva said, unthinkingly, spontaneously.
'Who knows? How well do we know anyone?' Romer turned to Angus. 'Call head office again. We need a big-wig on this one.' Angus limped off and Romer turned back to her. Somehow she felt his whole attention was on her now.
'How did you get in here?' he asked her, his voice unfriendly. 'Why didn't the doorman ring up?'
Eva realised she had made a mistake: she should have gone to the doorman, not used her little subterfuge. That would have been normaclass="underline" the normal, innocent thing a friend would do if another friend was late for a drink.
'He was busy. I just came up.'
'Or maybe you were looking for Elizabeth Wesley.'
'Who?'
Romer chuckled. Eva realised he was too clever – and he knew her too well, anyway.
Romer looked at her, his eyes were cold: 'Never underestimate the scrupulous resourcefulness of our Miss Dalton, eh?'