“That is an outline of your duties, Captain. I will now, more specifically, give you detailed orders. . . .”
“And that,” said Otto, “I think is all.” He had given, carefully and with a slow, deliberate brevity, a recountal of all he had been told. The small room was very quiet, and the smoke from another of her cigarettes hung blue in the silence.
“All right,” she said. “Excellent!” Her voice was freer, softer.
He waited. She was not looking at him now, but he had a curious certainty that, when she did, her eyes would seem yet again to be changed in colour.
She stood up and moved away from the desk.
“Don’t you think,” she said, “that you’ve stood like that long enough?”
She walked past him to a small, deep settee against the wall. She sat back in its softness and pulled a cushion behind her head. Otto moved uncertainly, turning with his back to the desk so that he faced her. He put his hands behind him and leaned upon the desk. He felt oddly conscious of every movement he was making, like a schoolboy among unexpected adults.
She was playing with a bracelet upon her arm and the soft light struck from it flashing little darts of multicoloured flame.
“Open the wine,” she said—and watched him as he took the bottle from the ice-pail and stripped off wire and foil and eased out deftly the swollen, reluctant cork.
With a task to perform the feeling of awkwardness had left him and he moved freely and without thought and set a glass for her down upon the table by the couch and filled it carefully and turned to his own.
A faint smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Nils Jorgensen!” she said, and raised her glass towards him and drank from it.
Otto sat upon the arm of a chair to face her. A fresh wave of uncertainty swept uncomfortably over him. After a moment he raised his glass to her and drank without speaking. She did not seem to be looking at him. He sought desperately for words—any words—but none would come.
“You’re very silent, Otto Falken,” she said suddenly—and the voice was neither the one nor the other of the two extremes he had learned to know, but something which was somewhere in between these two so distant poles.
“I am sorry,” he said carefully, “perhaps I am confused. But the word ‘confused’ is wrong a little.”
“I probably understand.” Again the faint smile at the corners of her mouth. “There’s a lot for you to think about, isn’t there?” She turned more fully towards him, resting upon one elbow and with the other hand holding out her glass. “Refill that,” she said. “And then perhaps I’ll help you.”
He brought the bottle and poured from it.
“And your own,” she said, watching him while he obeyed. “You want to ask questions—a lot of questions—about all manner of different things. Don’t you? Well, you may. I will do my best to answer. I suggest that, first of all, you get the duty ones out of the way.” The smile was not touching her mouth now—but was it in her voice?
“Ask!” she said. “Don’t be afraid . . . Captain. This is unofficial discussion of matters already communicated to you officially: it’s what they would call here ‘off the record.’ It is your duty to seek full enlightenment, and mine to give it.”
“I understand,” said Otto. “First then, please: the journalist Etter?” He did not look at her eyes as he spoke. “Is he . . .”
She cut him short. “Absolutely not. But I thought you might be thinking so. I saw you writing for him with the pencil.” Her tone suddenly changed. “You said nothing, of course?”
The tone brought Otto to his feet again. He said, woodenly:
“No. I spoke nothing.”
“Of course not.” She sank back upon the cushions and her voice was soft again. “And you were doing your duty in trying to make contact.”
Otto remained upon his feet. “And the Consul?” he said slowly. “The Swedish Consul?”
She shook her head. “I wish he were. But he isn’t. You were naturally enough misled by the quota number gesture: it was such a stroke of luck!”
The idiom was too much for Otto. He said:
“I am sorry . . .”
“A piece of good fortune, a gift of Fate, a lucky chance. Because he thought you were a Swede and had done something heroic he gave you the best thing at his command—or what he thinks the best thing.” She was smiling at him now.
“Thank you,” Otto said. “I understand. That is one part over of my questions.” He realized for the first time that he was still standing. With a momentary return of the schoolboy self-consciousness, he sat down again upon the chair-arm. He said:
“The next perhaps I should not ask. I am not sure.” He saw that her glass was empty and rose again and fetched the wine and refilled it, looking carefully at what he was doing and not at her face. She said:
“You had better try. There’s no penalty.”
“It is this then,” Otto said: “the . . . the sabotages—the attacks to be made by my . . . my unit—you said that they had already been started?”
“Yes,” She sipped at the wine. “There have already been four, spread over the past ten weeks. They will increase, as the chain develops, in two ways: they will happen more frequently—and they will be of progressive importance.”
A startling thought came to Otto’s mind. He said:
“The big dam—in Ne . . . Neb . . . a State to the west? Was that . . . ?”
She did not speak; but she slowly nodded in answer, watching his face.
For a flicker of time, Otto’s eyes were wide: three days ago, the whole face of his newspaper had been given to this disaster—and still, even to-day, its repercussions were upon the front page, cheek by jowl with Churchill’s latest speech.
“That is big work,” he said slowly.
“It was good enough,” she said. “For only the fourth in the chain, it was excellent.”
“It was indeed clever,” Otto said. “Because everyone has written in my newspapers that it was not possibly sabotage.”
She swung her feet to the floor and was suddenly standing near to him. He had forgotten that she was so tall. She moved towards the desk and he stepped back quickly, out of her way. A tenuous, barely perceptible waft of the perfume came to him.
She went around the desk and opened an unlocked drawer. “Altinger is brilliant,” she said. “As I’ve explained, it isn’t his work which you are to watch.” She took a thick folder from the drawer and laid it upon the desk top and flipped it open to reveal a tidy mass of newspaper clippings.
“Come here, Captain,” she said—and, as Otto stood beside her, separated some dozen of the clippings from the bulk and thrust them into his hands.
He stood awkwardly, looking down at the mess of paper. She was very close to him now, and on his right sleeve, above the elbow, was a fine white dusting of powder from her shoulder. She said:
“Keep those: they’re reports on various aspects of what they call the Nazi menace.” She smiled. “And don’t be afraid of anyone knowing you have them: you can even say that I gave them to you. You see, you and I are enthusiastic enemies of the New Germany. Carolyn Van Teller and Nils Jorgensen, each in their own way, are such virulent anti-Nazis that they see the fifth column in everything—so much so, in fact, that their friends laugh at them about it!”
He thrust the clippings into an inner pocket, and as he withdrew his hand she surprisingly caught it with her own. She said: