Ever since university she had waited for a moment like this, this intensity of self-congratulation. Ever since university and her timorous involvement with, then later recruitment by the IRA, then the transfer to the Provisional; the Marxism almost preceded university, gathered first from the French industrialist's daughter — Claudine — at-finishing school in Switzerland. What was Tom McBride doing then? she wondered. Screwing his first girl student? She wanted to giggle, to outwardly express her pleasure.
She wanted to outwit Goessler not for the Provisionals but for her own standing inside the organization. Her Marxism — which she supposed Goessler might share — required less obedience and loyalty than her ambition and her intellect. She was brilliant, and her talents had been wasted up to that moment. But, no longer. She remembered the summer and the Alpine meadows where Marx and Trotsky and Marcuse and hatred and impotent, passionate revulsion at class-inequalities and exploitation had not seemed out of place, but as natural and right as reading Wordsworth or Shelley in those surroundings. Vividly she remembered Claudine, and the hot days and the hotter nights of talk and feeling and growing determination.
Claudine had died in a Paris riot, beaten to death by the flics in some dark sidestreet. She'd heard that from a fellow-student in the Sorbonne on a student exchange to Belfast. And she'd wanted, if not the death, certainly some of the scars, the halo of violent light.
McBride looked round the door. He appeared completely sober now, and was grinning, intruding crassly on her memories. "I have an appointment this afternoon with the attache," he said.
She nodded. "Good," she answered abstractedly. "Good."
Captain Brooks Gillis, USN, the Naval Attache at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, was mildly puzzled by the historian, Thomas McBride, who had made and kept an appointment to consult him on some matters of naval history. McBride, seated facing the light through the open Venetian blinds, appeared intense, tightly within himself as if afraid of spilling some secret from his pockets, but capable of being reduced in importance by the fact that he was an academic. Gillis had done his share of lecturing, and he felt he understood the American academic, the almost Wall Street hustling, the secretiveness applied to academic papers and researches that would not have been out of place in Standard Oil or the CIA. However, he had an easy day before a cocktail party for a Russian trade delegation at the embassy, where he would fulfill his function of psyching out any possible recruits for the Company, and so he did not resent giving his time to McBride.
"1940?" he said, standing at the window, half his attention on Blackburnes Mews below him. A girl got out of a Ferrari, and he studied her with the detachment of a connoisseur. The fur coat was a little ostentatious on a fine October day, but striking nonetheless. He wished his father, who'd seen action in the Pacific and the North Atlantic in that long-ago war, had been there with McBride. The old man would have loosened his tongue, and they'd have been rolling all night. The girl disappeared into Upper Grosvenor Street. "A long time ago, Professor. How can I help?"
"British records are very sketchy for the period, and very disorganized." Gillis smiled at the attempt to ingratiate. "I thought you might have access to records of convoys that sailed during November of that year. Just the sailing dates and arrival dates in this country would be enough for the moment."
Gillis turned to him. He preferred American cars, American girls. That one had looked Arabic, maybe. "I guess there are records — maybe even here." He smiled. He'd had one of his junior staff hunt them down. A lot of the records from Eisenhower's headquarters across at no. 20 on the square had been dumped in the cellars of the embassy after it was completed in 1960. A lot of it had never got passage across to the States and lay still mouldering down there. Andrews had got dirty, but he seemed to have had fun.
"Have you had a chance to check—" McBride let the question hang.
"This is just local colour, right?" Gillis asked sharply. McBride appeared confused, impatient even, then nodded. "OK — we'll get credit, naturally?" Again, McBride nodded. "Man, but there's some stuff down there. Eisenhower had as much material as he could stored in his headquarters after 1943. Maybe he was going to write a book?" He grinned. "All the paperwork from the clearing-houses, a lot of OSS stuff, early intelligence reports, you know the kind of thing." He paused. "I had one of my men go over some of the material after you called. I'll have him bring it in." McBride's eyes blazed. Gillis spoke into the intercom, and a navy lieutenant came in, deposited some still grimy files on the desk, and left.
Gillis saw McBride's anxiety, and dismissed it as merely professional. He had a dismissive respect for college teachers, and an anxiety to be an intelligent man of action. He considered himself superior to most of the graduate kids the CIA sent to liaise with him in London, and disliked the new rapprochement with the CIA embarked upon by the Office of Navy Intelligence.
"I have to stay here, naturally," he said, "and you can't take any of this away. But you can quote from it, take notes. Help yourself, Professor. It's called open government."
McBride shunted his chair closer to Gillis's desk, picked up the top file fastidiously as if nervous of its grime, and opened it. Gillis walked to the percolator, poured two cups of coffee and, placing one for the unnoticing McBride, returned to the window. He was never bored with his own thoughts.
McBride read through the files as swiftly as his concentration allowed, but not so quickly that Gillis would think he was searching for just one item of information. It took him an hour or more, and the coffee cooled undrunk and Gillis occasionally scratched his head or shuffled over by the window but remained silent and somehow completely composed — like machinery switched off until again required. There was some arbitrary documentation of convoys, mostly of the invoice kind for goods received. A check-list of shipping lost, more detail regarding their cargoes than their crews. He sensed Britain hanging by a thread three thousand miles long and the Germans trying to cut it in a dozen places. Especially the North Channel, around the coast of Northern Ireland. All the convoys went that way round, because of the minefield.
Eventually, he found what he was seeking. An invoice which checked off what had been lost — precise tonnages — when a three-ship convoy went down late in November, together with its cruiser escort. It was clipped to a report from the Admiralty that stated the convoy was sunk still two days out from Liverpool. At the bottom of the Admiralty note, someone with an illegible signature had scribbled "Fitzgerald lost — inform eyes only R." Roosevelt? he wondered.
"Captain Gillis?" Gillis turned slowly from the window as if coming to life.
"Yes?"
"Could you explain this?" He held out the two clipped-together sheets. He tapped the bottom of the page. Gillis mused silently.
"No. R. was the President, of course. Fitzgerald? Not a name I know. British convoy, British warship escort — no, I don't know Fitzgerald's name. Is it important?" McBride tried to appear ingenuous.