Chapter 9: The Arithmetic

Eldridge sent for me on the third day after Sintra, which I had spent not planning the thing I had gone up the hill to learn how to do, because the splinter Stahl had put in me under the dead king’s portrait would not let me hold a thought in a straight line. I would sit down to map the approach — the lane, the forty-one steps, the terrace door — and somewhere around the second step the German’s voice would come back, mild and ruinous, you keep what you keep by reasons, by the thing a person cannot bear to lose, and the map would go to pieces in my hands, and I would get up and pour a drink I did not want and tell myself it was nerves. It was not nerves. I knew by then it was not nerves. I simply had not yet been made to say what it was, and a man can carry a thing a long way on not yet, right up until someone takes the not yet away from him, which is what Eldridge did, on a bench, in a garden, on an ordinary grey morning, without ever knowing he was doing it.

He liked the Jardim da Estrela for the things that needed saying out of doors. The basilica sat white and enormous above the trees, the nursemaids pushed their prams in slow ovals, and you could see anyone coming for thirty yards in any direction, which suited the kind of conversation where the content is a knife and the setting has to be a picnic. He was on the bench when I came, feeding the pigeons from a paper twist of something, looking like a tired uncle, which was the whole of his cover and most of his genius. He did not look up when I sat.

“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “I sent you to be quiet, so I shan’t complain. But there’s quiet that’s a man keeping his head down, and there’s quiet that’s a man holding his breath, and I’ve known you long enough to hear the difference.” He threw a little arc of crumbs. “I’m going to talk for a while. You’re going to feed the birds and let me.”

So I fed the birds.

“We closed the convoy business,” he said. “Finally. It’s been a long pull and an ugly one, and I won’t pretend the answer’s a happy one, because it isn’t, and because I think on some level you already know it, which is part of why you’ve been holding your breath.” A pause, the crumbs, the patient ovals of the prams. “The leak’s hers. Your woman. The Polish one.” He said it the way he said everything that mattered, flatly, with the weight taken out, because the weight was the listener’s to carry, not the speaker’s. “I’m sorry. I know what she’s been to you, or near enough. But the picture’s complete now and it’s not ambiguous. She had the access. The pattern of what reached the other side maps to what passed through her. And we have her, twice now, in direct contact with Stahl’s people — once on a beach at Estoril that I believe you know something about, because you went grey for a week in August and never filed a word as to why.” He let that sit, not unkindly. “I didn’t push it then. I’m pushing it now, because the time for letting you keep your reasons is over. She’s an Abwehr asset, Cal. She has been from before you met her. The casino wasn’t where you found her. It’s where she found you.”

It was, near enough word for word, the very good story. The one I had built on a barstool the night of the Tamariz and refined in the dark of my own rooms for two months and carried folded in my breast pocket in five clean telegraphic lines. He was reading me my own cable. He had arrived, by honest professional work, at the exact verdict I had reached by jealousy and brandy, and there is no experience on earth quite like hearing your worst private conviction recited back to you in the flat fair voice of a reasonable man who has no stake in it but the truth. I had expected, if this moment ever came, to feel vindicated. The clerk in me, who had built the case, expected the small clean click of being right.