My passage was in darkness now but I moved as fast as I dared. Along the back of the shop to the Friends Meeting House. Through the Quakers’ back rooms. I paused only before I entered the Meeting Room.
It was dark. The candle was out. The old man was gone. Matches lit my way past the empty benches and through another door, and before me, in the windows of the front entrance, was the street, almost bright by contrast, with its taint of electric light.
The handle did not yield to my turn. Of course. The old man had locked up on his way out. I turned the bolt key and I opened the door slowly, quietly. Voices were coming from nearby to the right. My German spies scattered from under their rock.
I took a step back and pulled the sling from my pocket and reset my left arm in it. I tapped my cane to the floor. I touched the gauze on my cheek to make sure it was there. I could cross the street. But I was still hungry for any scrap of information. For a closer look at Squarebeard. For a glimpse of Selene. I had to be bold now and trust my disguise. I would pass before their very eyes. I figured at the very worst there’d be a delay for them to realize who I was. I could handle any of them in a scrap and could simply outrun them if need be. They’d soon know I’d been around anyway when the dead body in the doorway made his appearance in their little drama.
I took a quick initial look in their direction before stepping out. It would help if they didn’t realize I’d entered the scene from just next door.
Squarebeard was disappearing into a taxi.
“Damn,” I said, almost aloud. Almost.
The others were distracted.
It was too late for the boss man, but I stepped out quickly, dragging my putative bad leg — overacting terribly — and the taxi containing Squarebeard slipped past me, his shadowed face flashing by in the tonneau.
He did not look my way.
Ahead were agitated voices. Hushed, not rendering themselves into words, but the contentious intensity was clear.
Selene and Brauer had moved a ways down the street, toward the corner, and they were face to face at the edge of the sidewalk, Brauer with his back to me. He raised his left arm, signaling for a taxi.
I limped slowly their way.
Selene’s voice rose, lost its hush: “Mr. Brauer, the next taxi is yours or it is mine. You will not escort me. Is that clear?”
I was passing the front window of the bookstore. In my periphery I saw shadows moving behind the front desk lamplight.
Brauer’s voice rose to match hers. “I am following my orders.”
Selene said, “You will take me to my final destination but not to my hotel.”
I slowed to keep as much of the conversation before me as I could, lowering my face and turning a little to the right, showing my bandaged cheek, which would arrest any brief glance.
Brauer said. “I will fetch Herr Metzger. He will tell you.”
“You go do that,” she said.
“Taxi,” Brauer cried.
I glanced their way. Brauer had taken a step into the street. An earlier model Unic, a 1908 12/14, tall and sputtery, with a foreshortened tonneau, approached. Selene turned to watch the taxi.
And then a whistle cried sharply from across the street — the garbled, trilling sound of a bobby, like two differently pitched whistles blowing at the same time, not quite blending but not quite separating themselves. The cop blew three short, sharp times in a row, a call for other bobbies in the area.
My handiwork had been discovered.
Brauer jerked his head in the direction of the sound. Selene didn’t look at all but stepped forward and flung open the back door of the taxi and vanished inside, and before Brauer could turn back, she’d slammed the door.
I realized I had to follow her. She certainly didn’t think Brauer was putting the mash on her and this wasn’t about proving her independence. She had somewhere to go.
I wanted to sprint away back to my own taxi, but that could draw the attention of the bobby, and so I walked briskly instead.
I glanced into her tonneau and Selene was giving her driver instructions.
I pushed on more quickly.
My driver was alert. He’d turned his Unic around to face this way, so he could watch for me, and he started up now, even as another taxi cut me off, turning from New Street into St. Martin’s.
I heard Brauer cry, “Taxi!”
I figured he was going to follow her as well.
I glanced back and I caught a glimpse of her old Unic puttering off as Brauer’s taxi, a British Napier Landaulet, slid into its place. The Napier’s cloth rear top was down, but Bauer opened the door into the forward hard cabin and he began to climb in.
I took the last few strides to my Unic and leaped into the back. I grabbed the speaking tube and told my man to follow the taxi in front of us, which was following the taxi I was primarily interested in, and he said “Yessir” as if he actually knew what I wanted, and we were all off.
28
We went south on St. Martin’s and then swung east into the Strand and almost at once were passing the massive, rusticated stone, Edwardian-Baroque Cecil Hotel. The Savoy was next door. Maybe I was wrong about Selene.
But the driver hailed me on the speaking tube and said, “The taxi of interest has turned in. Would tha like me to stop?”
“What’s the taxi just ahead doing?”
“He has gone by but is stopping now.”
“Turn in,” I said, “and park like you did earlier, facing the Strand.”
And we did. I leaned forward to watch for the ’08 Unic to emerge from the covered front court. It came out almost at once. Too quick to have dropped Selene and gotten a new fare. She played this smart but assumed Brauer would have gone off at once when he saw her turn in at her hotel. And sure enough, as the taxi puttered past, I caught a brief glimpse of her turban hat and veil in silhouette.
I told my man to follow. Selene’s taxi turned right, onto the Strand, and I told him to pause long enough to see if the other taxi was going to follow as well.
Brauer did. He was as suspicious as I was, and he was going to check this out.
We three wagon-trained along the Strand, passing the neoclassical facade of Somerset House, which was full of the quotidian, no-spies-necessary government — taxes and probate and the records of birth and death and marriage — and then, in exactly the same architectural style, the Strand campus of Brauer’s own King’s College drifted past.
I settled back in my seat and stopped watching the city for now. We trekked on into Fleet Street. I wondered how far east Selene would go.
I turned my thoughts back to Squarebeard. A voice heard briefly or distantly or long ago sticks in your head, it seemed to me, not just from the sound of it but from the circumstance, the location, the face of the speaker when you hear it. I tried one last time to recognize Squarebeard’s voice, but since I’d seen his face, none of this was coming together. He used his voice well. My hands flexed at his softly sneaky masher-pitch about late-harvest grapes. That voice was familiar but perhaps because it sounded similar to somebody from my own past. Probably some actor I’d met along the circuit with my mother. Someone, after all this time, I would never be able to identify. Nor did I need to.
And I thought of Selene’s mission. To spy for the Germans, apparently. In Istanbul. On the Turks? They were Germany’s ally, but I only had to look at my own mission — sneaking into Britain’s war — to find that possibility plausible. In the old Chinese military axiom that you kept your friends close and your enemies closer, you had two challenges. Keeping the enemy closer was the obvious one. But you still might have to work hard and secretly to keep those friends close. The military best interests of a Turk-invoked international jihad would not necessarily fit with the Germans’ best interests.