Jack of Spies (31 page)

His colleagues were sitting in one of the Model T’s, with the roof thrown back. He climbed into the empty front seat beside Kensley. “Success,” he announced. “He met up with Seán Tiernan on the Staten Island Ferry.”

“Yes!” Kensley exclaimed, slapping both palms on the steering wheel. “What did they talk about?”

“God only knows. They both know me, for Christ’s sake, and there was no way I could get close enough to hear anything without being seen.”

Kensley raised both hands in mock surrender. “Fine. It doesn’t matter. We have the connection. Now we just have to be patient and watch them hang each other.” He turned to McColl. “But not you. Cumming has other plans for you,” he added, reaching for the door handle. “Let’s walk.”

He led the way off the busy City Plaza and down the sidewalk by the end of the basin beside White Star’s Pier 61. There was no liner at the quay, but enough rubbish in the water to keep the gulls happy. Kensley removed an envelope from his inside pocket, handed it over to McColl, and leaned up against the parapet with the apparent intention of studying the view. “It’s been decrypted,” he said as McColl opened up the message.

Cumming was ordering him to Mexico. Or, more precisely, to the Tampico oil fields, where German agents were using the chaos wrought by civil war to threaten the Royal Navy’s newest ships’ principal source of fuel. “I’m sure you can understand the seriousness of this threat,” Cumming wrote, somewhat portentously, but McColl could see his point.

Von Schön, he suddenly remembered, had been on his way to Mexico.

“You do speak Spanish?” Kensley asked without turning around. “Cumming’s lost his list of your languages.”

“Yes,” McColl muttered. He was expected to “assess the seriousness of the threat” and take “whatever steps deemed necessary to counter it.” He would have access to Britain’s diplomatic representatives in the area, but, regretfully, “no recourse to military assistance will be possible.” A briefing paper covering both the wider Mexican situation and that pertaining to the oil fields was being prepared by the Foreign Office and would be forwarded as quickly as possible, along with the necessary funds.

Well, he supposed this was what he had asked for.

“Sorry to lose you,” Kensley was saying, “but less sorry than I was an hour ago. Now that we know Tiernan’s involved, you’d be no use to me here.”

“You don’t really trust me around the Hanleys, do you?”

“As much as you trust yourself. It’s Rieber and Tiernan knowing you by sight that disqualifies you.”

“And we don’t know for certain that Colm is involved,” McColl said, although both of them knew that he had to be. Suddenly
the prospect of Mexico came as a relief, as a chance to put some distance between his work and her. She would never accept his working against her family—who could?—but at his most optimistic he could sometimes imagine her accepting his work for his country. “He doesn’t say when he wants me to leave,” he told Kensley.

“Yesterday, I expect, but let’s say Monday. The money might be here by then—if not, I’ll send it on.”

“How do I get there?”

“Someone at the consulate is researching boats and trains, and they’ve also asked the embassy in Mexico City for advice—we don’t want you pitching up in a war zone. The moment I get anything, I’ll have it sent to your hotel.”

“Okay.”

“At least it’ll be hot down there,” Kensley told him. “Most likely in more ways than one.”

McColl went back to his hotel and soaked in the bath for almost half an hour, pondering the sudden change in his situation. How was he going to explain an abrupt departure for Mexico? Business, he supposed, and once he thought about it, the fictional details came readily enough to mind. Sometimes he couldn’t help wondering why Caitlin hadn’t seen through him, but that, he knew, was only because he was so guiltily aware of the deception. She was focused on her own affairs, and he had given her no obvious reason to doubt him.

She arrived soon after six, her eyes shining with excitement. “I’ve got a new job,” she burst out after they’d kissed and embraced. “On the
Times
no less. I’m the new editor for women’s issues. The very first one, come to that.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said, and kissed her again. He knew how much this meant to her. “When do you start?”

“Monday, eight
A.M
. Let’s go out and celebrate!”

“Let’s.”

They walked to a swanky restaurant she knew a few blocks north on Fifth. After eating a ridiculously expensive meal and drinking far too much, they took a cab back to the hotel, negotiated the elevator with what felt like great aplomb, and somehow ended up making love on the floor of his room. It was only after room service had provided the coffee to sober them both that he felt able to broach the matter of his imminent departure.

She looked stunned. “But why Mexico?”

“Our rep there has been taken ill, and right in the middle of sewing up some deals. So Tim wants me to go down there and tie things up.”

“To Mexico City?”

“Yep,” McColl lied, thinking Tampico might sound suspicious.

“Will you be coming back here or going straight on to England?”

“I don’t know that yet. But I’ll be back here eventually. You haven’t seen the last of me.”

“No,” she said, and put her head on his shoulder. “And there’s no hurry, is there? For us, I mean.”

“None at all.”

“And we can have this weekend.”

“Can you stay?”

She smiled but shook her head. “Not tonight. They’re expecting me home, and I want to tell Aunt Orla about my job. She’s waited a long time for something like this.”

“Of course.”

“But Saturday and Sunday—I’ll make up some sort of story. Look,” she said, putting him at arm’s length and looking him straight in the face. “Come to Brooklyn in the morning—there are places I want to show you, places that mean a lot to me.”

“I’d love to,” he said. “I love
you
,” he added, the words just slipping out, like light through carelessly drawn drapes.

“And I love you,” she replied, with a smile that seemed almost
sorrowful. “And that’s usually the end of the story, isn’t it? Not the beginning.”

Next morning a package arrived from Kensley. The wad of dollars seemed more generous when McColl also found a railroad ticket to Galveston—the US government was apparently sending ships down to Tampico from the Texas port to pick up American citizens threatened by a rebel advance. It seemed less beneficent when he realized he still had the hotel bill to pay.

He was expected to travel under the name John Bradley. The vice-consul in Tampico knew that someone with that name was coming, and would brief him on the local situation when he arrived. If Tampico fell to the rebels—a possibility, McColl noticed, that Kensley had previously neglected to mention—communication would be through the embassy in Mexico City.

His journey would begin with a train to Washington, D.C., leaving from the New Jersey terminus of the Pennsylvania Railroad at ten on Monday morning.

After breakfast on Saturday, he took the subway down to City Hall and the el from Park Row across the Brooklyn Bridge to the other Fifth Avenue. She was waiting at the Sixteenth Street exit, looking as gorgeous as ever and drawing admiring glances from every male who passed her. After taking McColl’s arm and steering him eastward, she told him how happy she’d made her aunt and how even her father had offered his congratulations. Neither had objected to her spending two nights in Manhattan with Eleanor, even though her fictional friend lacked a telephone. “My aunt might have her suspicions,” Caitlin admitted, “but I think she’s realized that either I’m still a virgin—in which case there’s no need to worry—or I’m already far beyond saving. Either way …”

For the next couple of hours, they toured her childhood haunts—her first school, the family church, the store where
she and Colm had bought their Saturday candy. They crossed Prospect Park, stopping to look at the menagerie—“I was crazy about animals when I was little”—and the swan boats on the lake in the Long Meadow, before riding the carousel with a host of noisy children. The last place on Caitlin’s list was Green-Wood Cemetery, a Gothic-gated enclave of forested hills, ponds, and mausoleums in the heart of the city. She added flowers to those already adorning her mother’s grave. “Finola comes every week,” she explained. “She remembers our mother. I don’t, not really. And sometimes I wonder how different my life would have been if she had lived. She wasn’t a strong woman like Aunt Orla. So I expect my loss would have been Colm’s gain.” She looked down at the gravestone. “But she was my mother,” she said after a few moments.

Neither said much on the train back to Manhattan. He’d felt touched that she wanted to show him her past, but the tour had served to emphasize the reality of their imminent separation. He couldn’t stop counting hours now, imagining the world without her while she was still on his arm.

She seemed to feel it, too, and her insistence on visiting friends that evening seemed designed to distract them both. The gathering, when they reached it, was part party, part political meeting, with animated discussions under way in every nook and cranny of several smoke-filled rooms. McColl was able to put faces to several of the names Caitlin had mentioned: the anarchist Margaret Sanger, who was vigorously lecturing two much younger men on the political significance of birth control; the author Sinclair Lewis, holding court with a pair of younger women; the journalist Jack Reed, who moved from group to group, wineglass in one hand, cigarette in the other, dropping off ideas like an intellectual postman.

And there was also the famous Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who, much to McColl’s surprise, looked even younger than Caitlin. She had missed the rally in Paterson but had been there for
much of the strike and seemed heartened and dismayed in equal measure by Caitlin’s report on the wives and McColl’s account of the mayhem on Market Street.

He could see that Caitlin was in her element and found himself wondering if he’d ever fit in. He had hoped Oxford would be something like this but had soon realized his mistake. The crushing burden of hierarchy and tradition, the breathtaking prejudice, the remarkable stupidity of so many fellow students, who were only there because Daddy had money or breeding—all combined to thwart any real adventures of the intellect. Perhaps he was being naïve and Harvard and Yale were every bit as bad, but in these rooms, in this city, America did feel like the land of the free. These people were using their brains, and they seemed to enjoy the process no end.

The party moved on soon after ten, when Reed announced he was keen to go dancing. Almost everyone came along, though some could barely keep to the sidewalk, let alone move to music. The dance hall around the corner was already full, the Negro orchestra louder than any that McColl had ever heard. He and Caitlin managed two dances before agreeing it must be bedtime.

Sunday was the third bright day in a row, ready-made for a walk around Central Park. They were sitting by the lake when Caitlin suddenly announced that Colm was going back to Ireland that summer.

“With Tiernan?” McColl asked.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Are you worried about him?”

She laughed. “Of course. I spent most of my childhood looking after him. It’s hard to lose the habit.” She sighed. “But he’s a grown man now, and I’m the last person who should object to anyone chasing after his own star.”

“But?”

“I don’t like Seán very much. He’s one of those people with a deep sense of injustice but no sense of love.”

“Yes,” he agreed. She had described Tiernan perfectly. And his friend Brady.

That evening, lying in bed after making love, she asked him if he was tired of her.

“God, no. How can you ask?”

She took a moment before replying. “Do you remember me saying, on the ship, that one day we could part like friends, with no regrets?

McColl felt a literal pain in his heart. “Yes.”

“In case you hadn’t realized, I’ve changed my mind. So how about you? Do you think we have a future together?”

“I thought you were about to say that this is good-bye.”

She reached out a hand to caress his cheek. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“There’s nothing I want more.”

“I have to take this job.”

“I know.”

“Will you think about coming to live here?”

“If you’ll think about living in England. We have newspapers, too, you know.”

She smiled. “All right. Anything’s possible.”

Monday morning he was awake before her, and lying there studying her sleeping face, he had a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to make a full confession. But after waking she went straight to the bathroom and on returning snuggled into his arms, scattering all semblance of resolve.

He had packed the previous evening, and after breakfasting downstairs they took a taxi together to the railroad ferry. One long last embrace and he was walking aboard, hardly able to credit the fact of their parting. As the ferry set off, his eyes
sought and found her, standing by the open cab door, waving and blowing him a kiss. He waved back, and she stood there for what seemed a long time before finally turning and climbing inside. The cab pulled out behind a passing streetcar and was swallowed by the city.

Hotel México