Nothing here suggested an identity other than war correspondent. The incriminating documents were inside the money belt strapped around my waist beneath my clothes. But I needed to know if someone had been looking. It felt likely, though my first surge of readiness for physical struggle was receding.
This let me slow down, let me realize that I smelled a faint trace of something. Vanishing perhaps even as I smelled it. Something vaguely familiar. I grasped at it as it dissipated, or as I became accustomed to it. Smells could be like that, even odd ones, even bad ones; they could be there and then vanish from your nose even though someone else just arriving would notice it anew.
This was what? Something of alcohol, ether even, a little resiny, none of these and all of these and something else and my nose just quit on me with this scent.
I tried to place it, but it was gone.
Okay. What else?
A car honked distantly somewhere down Aldwych. The clock ticked on the nightstand.
I turned back to the wardrobe. He was too quiet to actually be there. But if he was indeed hiding this quietly, he was too much a coward and probably unarmed.
I set the chair aside, and I yanked open the doors.
Before me were my clothes and my stashed Gladstone bag. Just that.
Was anyone here at all? A punctilious maid could simply have freed the sign on my door in passing.
I looked more closely at the objects in the closet. I was always pretty careful in how I put things away, and I felt certain the bag had been clasped when I left this morning. It wasn’t now. But I couldn’t be sure.
I closed the wardrobe and moved to the desk.
I liked to square the edges of the foolscap I’d written on. This I did with something like a compulsion. For my own sake, but also, of course, for this very purpose, to detect a prying eye. The eight pages of the follow-up Lusitania story I’d been writing were carefully stacked beside the Corona, the bottom of the pages even with the bottom of the machine, as they should have been. But I looked more closely. The paper edges were squared up, all right. Someone was careful. But the stack had not been tapped on the tabletop until even and then gently fingertip squared. There was a minutely visible layering of the pages at the bottom edge. Someone certainly had been here.
Neither Brauer nor Selene knew I would be at the Waldorf. I myself didn’t know until Saturday morning, well after the last time I saw either of them.
Something else was wrong and I didn’t know what.
The Germans had their own mystery to figure out. How did Cobb know to go to the bookstore? Brauer would swear up and down that the coded message had safely been destroyed.
We none us would get very far in our figuring.
I had a few hours till their meeting with Selene.
In the meantime, I needed to find myself another hotel.
23
I stepped from the Waldorf with my bags and put them down and took a careful inventory of all the men and automobiles in the vicinity. I hailed a taxi — one of the ubiquitous French-made Unic Landaulettes — and instructed the driver to just weave around the streets off the Strand till I told him to do otherwise.
I kept a watch on anyone who might be following till I was confident there was no one, and then I directed my driver to the Arundel Hotel, not far away, on the Embankment. It was a Tudor-style building faced with red brick, with rooms about my age, which was okay. Not done in Louis XVI, the furniture sliding all the way up to the rule of Victoria, particularly to the styles of that recent era that drew on dark, heavy Tudor carving, all of which was absolutely not sinkably neoclassical, so I actually felt I’d improved on my lodgings.
As soon as I’d unpacked, I stood before the mirror hanging over my washbasin and I confronted my face, which was now recognizable to my adversaries. When I looked at men’s faces, tried to assess them as men, the first thing I often noticed was whether they’d been seriously struck by some other guy. I’d been struck. There were some old fighting scuffs here and there. But I’d been lucky never to have my nose rearranged. It was still on the straight and narrow, my nose. And my eyes were pretty clear. Dark as Chicago street tar but clear and steady. Over the left one was a white wisp of a scar the length of the last joint on my thumb, from a bit of tumbling shrapnel in my first real war, in Nicaragua, and mighty lucky I was for it to have just grazed on past.
As I took stock of my own mug, the principle of disguise that was running in my head was Keep it simple. Still, the change needed to be striking. If I was to learn anything else in London, I’d have to risk being seen, at least from afar, by people who knew me.
The beard was clearly the thing to change. I kept it pretty tightly cropped, but it definitely registered to the eye. So the beard I’d taken a shine to at breakfast wouldn’t work; it wouldn’t be enough. Especially from a distance, I’d pretty much be the same man. This one had to go.
I stropped my new razor — bought this morning, and I was glad it was at its sharpest — and I lathered up heavily and I shaved. I did my right cheek first, the easy one, the one I’d always known. Then I did my left cheek, carefully working my way down and up and around until all that remained, traced vividly white by the last of the lather, was the thing that prompted the beard in the first place.
I bent to the basin and rinsed away the heavily stubble-freighted shaving cream from the sink and I silently thanked the Arundel, as it had hot running water even at this hour. I soaked a hand towel in water as hot as I could stand it and wrapped my face from the eyes down. I soaked up the warmth and rubbed both cheeks clean and brought the towel down.
I was prepared for this, but it had been months since I’d faced this man, and I admit my breath clamped tight shut, from chest to throat.
I confronted my familiar, hairless face, but on one cheek was that long Turkish scimitar of a scar, a thing that I knew was there but saw now with a shock, like visiting a childhood memory I’d previously thought was pleasant and now realized had been full of pain.
But this hadn’t been child’s play, the crossing of swords with another German out to do no good.
And this benefit had come from it: the thing looked exactly like a German collegiate dueling scar. Intentionally so, as a matter of fact. And it was real, my own personal Schmiss.
The riots in the East End suggested the danger of assuming this identity in London. But I had a solution for that.
I used the room telephone to call for a bellhop to run an errand to a nearby chemist shop and I soon had a roll of gauze and a cloth arm sling, and he was a good boy, this cockney bellhop, as he had to go to another shop to find me the fritz-handled cane I’d asked for, with a hardwood shaft and an iron tip. He also brought a jar of cold cream and a bottle of alcohol and a bottle of spirit gum, which I knew from my theater days would be easier than straight collodion to put the dressing on my cheek and to take it off.
I stood once again before the mirror, having cut some thick squares of gauze to cover the scar. With the cane and the arm sling I would look like the sort of man who was beginning to appear in the streets of London: a wounded soldier, bad enough off to be mustered out. That would be conveyed with the limp and the arm.
I opened the bottle of spirit gum.
And instantly I understood that trace of a smell in my room at the Waldorf. Spirit gum. Of course. It had been a decade since I’d used it. That last time was to affix a stage mustache and muttonchops. The smell in the room was spirit gum.
I could not imagine why.
Someone himself in disguise. With fake facial hair.