CHAPTER TEN
Ministerial Responsibility
Professor Thomas Sean McBride of the University of Oregon in Portland walked through the communicating door between his hotel room and that of Claire Drummond, where they had spent the night, and created for himself the conceit that he was moving between the sensual and the intellectual life. His nakedness prevented him from sustaining or elaborating the image.
His notebooks were missing. He had tidied them the previous night, before making love and after returning from the restaurant — he had dwelt on them for a few moments of self-satisfaction, a vicarious and cerebral excitement deliberately indulged. Now, realization spread through his frame as slowly as that excitement had done. Passion was a sharp, shuddering, instantaneous reaction of skin and muscle to Claire's lightly brushing fingertips. This was different, but he began to shake with it, with anger and fear. Then he moved to the wardrobe, and found that the deposition of Campbell had been taken from his wallet. He tugged open his briefcase, and found it empty of the photocopying done in Berlin and Koblenz, the notes he had made of his interviews with Menschler and Kohl.
Furiously, hands almost out of his control, he switched on his cassette recorder. A hiss of empty tape. He played back, and again the hiss of a clean tape. His prognostications of the previous evening had been removed. Every particle of evidence concerning Smaragdenhalskette and the minefield and the German invasion of Ireland had been stolen.
Why?
He was still shaking, as if cold water poured from some shower-rose just above his head. He could not stop asking the question, again and again, and being frightened of the answer. He kept looking back at the communicating door as if Claire, still sleeping, might have an answer or might provide something to take away the subtly, insidiously growing sense of insecurity. Corridors, silent reading rooms, dusty files, unshaded cellar lights, small, insignificant librarians and clerks, shadows — all now possessed a patina of menace. He had been watched, followed, robbed—
Of something that had happened over forty years ago, and could have little significance for anyone except a popular historian with an eye on the New York Times bestseller lists.
And then he was angry, very angry. They'd stolen a million dollars, maybe more. Hackney. The evidence still at Hackney — maybe more of it, waiting. He'd steal it this time.
Who? Why?
The questions now became tossed and overturned by his rising anger. Someone was trying to screw him. Some bastard. Hackney.
"I'm sorry, Professor, those files have been requisitioned for reclassification." The naval officer with the damaged leg and the sour disposition seemed to take pleasure from McBride's shock and surprise.
"What in hell?"
"Sorry, Professor. Collected this morning by Admiralty messenger. They might end up at Kew, if you'd like to wait ten or twenty years."
"They've been transferred somewhere else, right?"
"Sorry, Professor. Reclassified." He leaned confidentially over his desk. "You weren't working on anything sensitive, were you, Professor?"
"Sensitive — no. Forty years old, dead as the dodo. Look, you're sure about this, uh?" McBride's anger was still there — he'd nursed it on the train like a secret passion for an unattainable woman — but he was winded now, confused and again the fear was bubbling under his heart, acid and sharp. Official interference, he kept repeating to himself in a bemused, unenlightened way.
"Sorry, Professor. I know it's annoying for you, but they treat us here as nothing more than clerks." His thin face twisted, it seemed, from hair to chin to adopt the bitter line of his lips. "Stuff lies here for years, collecting dust — when it's being of use at last, or we're just about to get round to refiling and properly documenting, they come and remove it." McBride saw that he presumed the sudden requisition to be a comment on the running of the records repository and nothing more. A creeping, invidious sense of danger gradually assailed McBride as he sat in the man's office, the electric fire which warmed it seeming not to radiate in his direction. He felt alone, cut off by thick, almost soundproof glass from the other man.
"I see — they do it often, then?" A straw. The navy man, usually insensitive to any but his own responses, was puzzled by the thick, clogged voice that issued from McBride. McBride looked pale, too—
"You all right, Professor?"
McBride nodded. "Yes, yes I'm OK. Just — infuriating, them taking all the stuff away just when I was working on it." He stood up. "Well, I guess you can't do anything, neither can I. I'll keep on looking—"
"If you could tell us what you want—"
McBride shook his head. "I'll know it when I see it. Thanks."
When he was back in the cold staff room that was now a reading room, he could no longer control the shake that had developed like a palsy in his hands and spread through his frame. He felt very cold, and very, very alone. He clasped his hands together, to still them, but his body went on shivering beneath his topcoat. He sat down, cold perspiration down his back when he felt his shirt pressed against him by the chair, and cold patches under his arms. He rubbed his face with his hands.
Everything was gone. Someone wanted to stop him, right there. Someone with official contacts, official powers. That was it. There was something he shouldn't find. The past had to stay underground, nice and buried like radioactivity. Who was going to get burned if he dug it up — apart from himself?
For a long time he sat there unmoving, his body gradually growing warmer, the shaking subsiding. And, as with a storm that has passed, there was damage and the topography of his mind and body was not quite the same, but the violence of the storm itself could no longer impinge so forcibly. The weak sun of his curiosity came out from the clouds. He wanted to know what there was to know. He wanted to know what might be left here in Hackney, overlooked in the rush to remove the evidence.
He didn't know where the bodies were buried, but he knew they hadn't died by accident. The epithet amused, calmed him. The sense of menace began to evaporate like floodwater.
Walsingham indicated McBride's notebooks and papers with his hand. Exton, his senior aide in the Executive Branch of MI5, adopted a more attentive look and sat slightly straighter in his chair in Walsingham's office.
"He was close, Exton, very close." Exton nodded, as if silence was all that was required. "These German papers and interviews on the one side, then our own records. He had most of it—" Exton tried to look interested, but the old man had not put him fully in the picture, just issued orders to Clarke the previous night and had the stuff delivered direct to him. Exton, the perfect functionary, was not insulted or offended by the lack of a briefing or Walsingham's failure to consult him before they lifted this American's notebooks and raided the dust-heap at Hackney, but neither could he take the matter seriously. Which, he supposed, was what came of being only ten when the war ended. 1940 was the year he was five, and not significant for much other than that fact.
"Sir," he murmured.
Walsingham always treated Exton, whom he disliked, with excessive formality. Noting the stiffly returned politesse now, he remembered Michael McBride, and a spasm passed across his mouth, lifting one corner into a crooked, ironical smile. Exton was puzzled.
"Exton, I want this German historian, Goessler, checked out. And all the other names in his notebooks. And I want Hackney gone over with a fine-tooth comb after he's got tired of mooching around there. This isn't going to happen again. And, while you're at it, get rid of all references to Guthrie in anything connected with 1940."