He wore a stand collar and a dark coat; his head was bare and his hair was white. He spoke without looking at me. “Are you a friend of the truth?” he asked.
I understood this to be a thing some Quakers called each other. But it was also a fundamental question of philosophy and intent. So I said, “Yes.”
“We must not fight,” he said. “The world must not fight. The Lord put that on my heart and I am glad to have said it aloud in your presence.”
I had to move by him now.
With this man, in this room — and the feeling would pass, I knew — but at that moment, I felt suddenly heavy-limbed, felt suddenly empty in the place in my own body where the knife had plunged into the Hun. I felt remorseful. Remorseful at lying to this man, letting him think I was a fellow Quaker, remorseful at what I had just done in the street. I’d killed before, in the past year. Killed, as tonight, in self-defense: after all, I’d let the Hun draw his knife first. But as I stepped even with the old man, and he lifted his face to me, I felt remorseful at how much easier it was to kill than it had been only a year ago, remorseful at how quickly all this remorse would pass.
And the old man looked at me, the candlelight flickering in his dark eyes. He would never lift his hand against anyone. He would sit alone in this place of quiet, and he would meditate with God about how we all should never lift a hand against anyone. And he would be dead wrong about that, as far as the practical world of governments and of modern weapons and of the vast, institutionalized wickedness of humankind was concerned. But he was also right.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He nodded at me. And he turned his face away and he bowed his head and I beat it out the back door.
26
The courtyard was very dark and it stank of garbage and waste and it rustled with rats. My remorse was gone and I shuffled my feet not to trip on unseen things, and then I was at the rear door of Metzger & Strauss.
The window I’d passed and the window in the door were painted black.
I expected that trying to pick the lock in the impenetrable dark of this doorway within this courtyard surrounded by these multistoried buildings on this moonless London night would be a tricky business, but I was getting used to my job, and once I found the opening of the keyway with my fingertip and got my pick and torque wrench inside, it was good doing this in the dark. The darkness made it entirely about the feel of things unseen in the keyway, and that was how it should have been anyway. And when the last pin yielded and I felt the shear line go clear and I was ready to rotate the plug, I paused. I focused on being quiet. I eased the plug around and opened the door with the meekest of clicks.
And I froze.
Voices and light.
But not in this room, I quickly realized. And the voices murmured on without a hitch even now, even after the sound of my entry. They were distant, from another room.
Which is what I should have expected. This was the back room I was entering. I’d seen through to it in the rear wall of the bookshop office this morning. I realized that door must still be open.
This was dangerous but it was also an opportunity.
I stepped inside.
Across the rear storage room was the open door to the office, and framed brightly there in modernist composition was a center cut of the refectory table and Brauer’s brown tweedy back overlaid with the curves of a bentwood chair. No eyes were visible.
I closed the door softly behind me. I turned and waited where I was standing for a moment. The voices were pretty low and I couldn’t pick up the words clearly. The floor was stacked on both sides of me with boxes in irregular rows, and I ducked down and circled behind them to the left, out of sight of the door, moving along the nearest row.
I gave a brief thought to the contents of these boxes. Books. This was an ongoing plausible bookstore, after all. But what else could be delivered here as if they were books? If the Germans wanted to mount a sabotage campaign in England, the explosives could well pass through here. But that was not my business tonight.
I was treading softly now in a severe crouch behind the chest-high row of boxes nearest the office.
As I drew near the open door, I was concentrating fully on being quiet and not yet trying to render the murmuring into words.
But an abrupt silence caught my attention.
I froze again.
Had they heard me?
I’d move no more if I hadn’t already given myself away.
But now a man’s voice spoke in German: “You are all right? You are making sounds again.” The voice was soft-edged in timbre but hard-edged in tone.
Another man answered, also in German, “I will be all right when he is dead.” German can transform a voice, and I’d heard his only briefly in English, but from the context I figured this was Metzger, attending the meeting with his broken foot and not taking it real well. I was certainly on the other side of the wall from my meditating Quaker: I had a sharp little twist of pleasure at the present state of Metzger’s murderous pal in the doorway across the street.
“You expect word on that shortly?” the first man said.
“If he is what we think he is,” Metzger said, “he’ll come and we’ll have him.”
“Can we get on with this?” a third person said. I went rigidly silent inside once more, though I’d expected to hear this voice. It was Selene.
“Of course,” a man said in English. This was the first German speaker, I surmised. His overtly impatient tone with Metzger and his stepping in as the commander of the agenda to reassure Selene suggested he was the one in charge. Perhaps Herr Strauss? “Herr Metzger,” he said, with an intonation as if prompting him to do a prearranged thing.
In the brief silence that followed, I heard a rustling of papers, perhaps pulled from a pocket and pushed across the tabletop.
Metzger said in English, “Herr Brauer, if you would be so kind as to keep the envelope with your name upon it and hand the other to the lady.”
“Of course,” Brauer said.
Metzger said, “They canceled the daylight passage. I’ve rebooked you on the boat train to Flushing, night after tomorrow. You’ll cross over to German territory at Baarle. Everything you need is in the envelopes.”
“My apologies to Herr Brauer,” Selene said, “but is the escort necessary?”
Metzger said, “Constantinople is a long way.”
“But it’s by your vaunted Baghdad Express, yes?”
Metzger began clumsily to explain. “Most of the way but. .”
The man I figured to be Strauss cut him off. “We have arranged all of this so far, Miss Bourgani. Please trust us further. Herr Brauer will handle what remains to be done in Istanbul.”
He stressed the Turks’ preferred name for the city, no doubt shooting Metzger a critical look. Their kaiser was the self-avowed brother to Islam. Istanbul, not Constantinople. This was an important detail.
I made this quick assessment while the sound of the man’s voice buzzed in my head like subtext. Until this moment I’d heard him speak fewer than half a dozen words in English. Now he sounded familiar.
“The Pasha’s people and ours must meet to arrange the first contact.”
I strained at placing the voice but felt blocked in some odd, undefinable way.
New sounds now: an opening of a door — the door from the front of the shop — and a slight scraping of chairs.
The man I took to be Strauss said, “Herr Strauss. These are Miss Selene Bourgani and Herr Brauer, whom I think you’ve met.”
The actual Strauss had a voice raspy from a lifetime of heavy smoking. His manner was old-school courtly. “Miss Bourgani,” he said in British-inflected English. “I am enchanted. Your face fills the dreams of millions.”