Chapter 13: The Inspection

There is a particular education in being the one who waits outside, and I took the whole course of it in the days after Vera went back in, and I will tell you it is the loneliest schooling the trade offers, because everything you learn you learn by not being able to do anything about it. The active man, the one in the room, at least has his hands full; terror, for him, is a thing you work through with your body. The watcher has only his eyes and the long ache of his own uselessness, and he stands across the street and reads the danger coming the way a man on a headland reads a squall, and he cannot reach the boat, and the boat does not know to look up.

I had thought, going in, that the worst of it would be the not-knowing. I had it backwards, the way I had most things in that year. The worst of it was the knowing, and the channel.

The channel was the cruel joke at the center of the new arrangement, and I must explain it or none of what follows makes sense. Vera had gone back to Stahl warm; she was letting him believe the courtesy had finally done its work and squeezed a frightened woman over to his side. But the thing she had ostensibly been squeezed into doing was the thing she had been doing all along — reporting on the American, on me — only now with a convert’s zeal. Which meant that the warmer she got with Stahl, the more reason she had to go on meeting me, openly, in the daylight, because a woman busy betraying an American to the German service has every professional excuse to keep that American close. Our love had become her cover for her treason which was her cover for our love, folded over on itself so many times that some mornings I genuinely could not have told you, asked under oath, which layer was the lie, except that there was one true thing at the middle of it that I held onto and she held onto and the war could not get its fingers into, and we had agreed in a cold room exactly which one it was.

So we could meet. That was the joke. We could sit in a café in the open and hold hands across the table and any watcher of Stahl’s would report it up as the asset being worked, the American being reeled in, all according to plan — and we would be, under the table and over it, debriefing a burglary. The catch, the thing that made it the loneliest schooling and not a reprieve, was that every word had to survive being overheard, every touch had to be the touch a German service would want to see and not one degree more, and the true one, the thing in the middle, had to go entirely unspoken and unshown in the only hours we now got to spend in the same air. We had traded the roof and the iron stairs, where we could be ourselves in the dark, for the café table, where we could be everything but ourselves in the light. I would not have believed, a year before, that a man could be lonelier holding a woman’s hand in public than standing in a doorway alone. The trade is full of education like that. I have not found a use for most of them since.

Eldridge wanted his meeting and I gave it to him in the back room of a chandler’s near the docks that smelled of tar and old rope, and I went in knowing I was going to lie to my own side, and I did, and I have made a kind of uneasy peace with it on the grounds that a man who will not lie to his own service to protect an agent has no business being given an agent to protect.

I gave Eldridge the leak, or the shape of it, which was real and which I had earned: that the convoy schedules were walking into Stahl’s station and being kept, with the rest of the station’s product, in a safe on the third floor of the legation, and that I had developed — I used the word developed, which is a fine bloodless word that covers a multitude — a line into the building that I expected, given time, to put the source of the leak beyond doubt. All true. Every word of it true. And I left out the whole living heart of it: that the line into the building was a woman I loved, who had been coerced by the man we were discussing, who had a sister in a box and a knife behind her warmth and a private war that had nothing to do with Washington’s convoys; and that I was running her myself, off my own bat, on no authority but the one we’d given each other on the edge of a bed. Eldridge did not need that and could not have left it alone if he’d had it. He’d have wanted it written down and run properly and brought under control, and the first thing control would have done is decide that Vera’s sister was a regrettable but acceptable price, and the second thing it would have done is get Vera killed by tidying her, and I had promised her, with my eyes on hers, that I would not let her be tidied. So I lied to Eldridge with a steady face, the way she’d taught me a steady face was sometimes the most honest thing going, and he watched me do it.

He was no fool, Eldridge. That was always the trouble with him; he was a decent dull-seeming man with a mind like a customs officer, and he tapped his pipe out and looked at me a moment too long and said, ‘You’ve gone quiet on the personal front lately, Brennan. The Polish girl. Your reports on her have got very——’ he hunted for it ‘——professional.’ And I felt the floor tilt, because professional in Eldridge’s mouth was not a compliment, it was a man noticing that a thing which used to have texture had been sanded smooth, and a sanded-smooth report is the report of a man with something under it. I gave him a tired correspondent’s shrug and said the bloom was off, that she was a sad case and I’d stopped enjoying the work of her, which was the one sentence in the whole meeting that cost me something to say even as a lie, and he let it go. He let it go. But he wrote something on his little customs-officer pad before he did, and I have wondered since whether the second watcher I am coming to was his, and have never been able to decide, and the not-deciding is its own small permanent splinter.