Текст книги "Eye of the Needle"
Автор книги: Ken Follett
Соавторы: Ken Follett
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“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Huh—when?”
“So how do you know for sure?”
“Oh, David, don’t be so boring. I know for sure because my periods have stopped and my nipples hurt and I throw up in the mornings and my waist is four inches bigger than it used to be. If you ever looked at me you would know for sure.”
“All right.”
“What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be thrilled!”
“Oh, sure. Perhaps we’ll have a son, and then I can take him for walks and play football with him, and he’ll grow up wanting to be like his father the war hero, a legless fucking joke!”
“Oh, David, David,” she whispered. She knelt in front of his wheelchair. “David, don’t think like that. He will respect you. He’ll look up to you because you put your life together again, and because you can do the work of two men from your wheelchair, and because you carried your disability with courage and cheerfulness and—”
“Don’t be so damned condescending,” he snapped. “You sound like a sanctimonious priest.”
She stood up. “Well, don’t act as if it’s my fault. Men can take precautions too, you know.”
“Not against invisible trucks in the blackout!”
It was a silly exchange and they both knew it, so Lucy said nothing. The whole idea of Christmas seemed utterly trite now: the bits of colored paper on the walls, and the tree in the corner, and the remains of a goose in the kitchen waiting to be thrown away—none of it had anything to do with her life. She began to wonder what she was doing on this bleak island with a man who seemed not to love her, having a baby he didn’t want. Why shouldn’t she—why not—well, she could…. Then she realized she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do with her life, nobody else to be other than Mrs. David Rose.
Eventually David said, “Well, I’m going to bed.” He wheeled himself to the hall and dragged himself out of the chair and up the stairs backwards. She heard him scrape across the floor, heard the bed creak as he hauled himself on to it, heard his clothes hit the corner of the room as he undressed, then heard the final groaning of the springs as he lay down and pulled the blankets up over him.
And still she would not cry.
She looked at the brandy bottle and thought, If I drink all of this now, and have a bath, perhaps I won’t be pregnant in the morning.
She thought about it for a long time, until she came to the conclusion that life without David and the island and the baby would be even worse because it would be empty.
So she did not cry, and she did not drink the brandy, and she did not leave the island; but instead she went upstairs and got into bed, and lay awake beside her sleeping husband, listening to the wind and trying not to think, until the gulls began to call, and a grey rainy dawn crept over the North Sea and filled the little bedroom with a cold pale light, and at last she went to sleep.
A kind of peace settled over her in the spring, as if all threats were postponed until after the baby was born. When the February snow had thawed she planted flowers and vegetables in the patch of ground between the kitchen door and the barn, not really believing they would grow. She cleaned the house thoroughly and told David that if he wanted it done again before August he would have to do it himself. She wrote to her mother and did a lot of knitting and ordered diapers by mail. They suggested she go home to have the baby, but she knew, was afraid, that if she went she would never come back. She went for long walks over the moors, with a bird book under her arm, until her weight became too much for her to carry very far. She kept the bottle of brandy in a cupboard David never used, and whenever she felt depressed she went to look at it and remind herself of what she had almost lost.
Three weeks before the baby was due, she got the boat into Aberdeen. David and Tom waved from the jetty. The sea was so rough that both she and the skipper were terrified she might give birth before they reached the mainland. She went into the hospital in Aberdeen, and four weeks later brought the baby home on the same boat.
David knew none of it. He probably thought that women gave birth as easily as ewes, she decided. He was oblivious to the pain of contractions, and that awful, impossible stretching, and the soreness afterward, and the bossy, know-it-all nurses who didn’t want you to touch your baby because you weren’t brisk and efficient and trained and sterile like they were; he just saw you go away pregnant and come back with a beautiful, white-wrapped, healthy baby boy and said, “We’ll call him Jonathan.”
They added Alfred for David’s father, and Malcolm for Lucy’s, and Thomas for old Tom, but they called the boy Jo, because he was too tiny for Jonathan, let alone Jonathan Alfred Malcolm Thomas Rose. David learned to give him his bottle and burp him and change his diaper, and he even dangled him in his lap occasionally, but his interest seemed distant, uninvolved; he had a problem-solving approach, like the nurses; it was not for him as it was for Lucy. Tom was closer to the baby than David. Lucy would not let him smoke in the room where the baby was, and the old boy would put his great briar pipe with the lid in his pocket for hours and gurgle at little Jo, or watch him kick his feet, or help Lucy bathe him. Lucy suggested mildly that he might be neglecting the sheep. Tom said they did not need him to watch them feed—he would rather watch Jo feed. He carved a rattle out of driftwood and filled it with small round pebbles, and was overjoyed when Jo grabbed it and shook it, first time, without having to be shown how.
David and Lucy still did not make love.
First there had been his injuries, and then she had been pregnant, and then she had been recovering from childbirth; but now the reasons had run out.
One night she said, “I’m back to normal now.”
“How do you mean?”
“After the baby. My body is normal. I’ve healed.”
“Oh, I see. That’s good.”
She made sure to go to bed with him so that he could watch her undress, but he always turned his back.
As they lay there, dozing off, she would move so that her hand, or her thigh, or her breast, brushed against him, a casual but unmistakable invitation. There was no response.
She believed firmly that there was nothing wrong with her. She wasn’t a nymphomaniac—she didn’t simply want sex, she wanted sex with David. She was sure that, even if there had been another man under seventy on the island, she would not have been tempted. She wasn’t a sex-starved tart, she was a love-starved wife.
The crunch came on one of those nights when they lay on their backs, side by side, both wide awake, listening to the wind outside and the small sounds of Jo from the next room. It seemed to Lucy that it was time he either did it or came right out and said why not; and that he was going to avoid the issue until she forced it; and that she might as well force it now.
So she brushed her arm across his thighs and opened her mouth to speak—and almost cried out with shock to discover that he had an erection. So he could do it! And he wanted to, or why else—and her hand closed triumphantly around the evidence of his desire, and she shifted closer to him, and sighed, “David—”
He said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” and gripped her wrist and pushed her hand away from him and turned onto his side.
But this time she was not going to accept his rebuff in modest silence. “David, why not?”
“Jesus Christ!” He threw the blankets off, swung himself to the floor, grabbed the eiderdown with one hand, and dragged himself to the door.
Lucy sat up in bed and screamed at him, “Why not?”
Jo began to cry.
David pulled up the empty legs of his cut-off pajama trousers, pointed to the pursed white skin of his stumps, and said, “That’s why not! That’s why not!”
He slithered downstairs to sleep on the sofa, and Lucy went into the next bedroom to comfort Jo.
It took a long time to lull him back to sleep, probably because she herself was so much in need of comfort. The baby tasted the tears on her cheeks, and she wondered if he had any inkling of their meaning—wouldn’t tears be one of the first things a baby came to understand? She could not bring herself to sing to him, or murmur that everything was all right; so she held him tight and rocked him, and when he had soothed her with his warmth and his clinging, he went to sleep in her arms.
She put him back in the cot and stood looking at him for a while. There was no point in going back to bed. She could hear David’s deep-sleep snoring from the living room—he had to take powerful pills, otherwise the old pain kept him awake. Lucy needed to get away from him, where she could neither see nor hear him, where he couldn’t find her for a few hours even if he wanted to. She put on trousers and a sweater, a heavy coat and boots, and crept downstairs and out.
There was a swirling mist, damp and bitterly cold, the kind the island specialized in. She put up the collar of her coat, thought about going back inside for a scarf, and decided not to. She squelched along the muddy path, welcoming the bite of the fog in her throat, the small discomfort of the weather taking her mind off the larger hurt inside her.
She reached the cliff top and walked gingerly down the steep, narrow ramp, placing her feet carefully on the slippery boards. At the bottom she jumped off on the sand and walked to the edge of the sea.
The wind and the water were carrying on their perpetual quarrel, the wind swooping down to tease the waves and the sea hissing and spitting as it crashed against the land, the two of them doomed to bicker forever.
Lucy walked along the hard sand, letting the noise and the weather fill her head, until the beach ended in a sharp point where the water met the cliff, when she turned and walked back. She paced the shore all night. Toward dawn a thought came to her, unbidden: It is his way of being strong.
As it was, the thought was not much help, holding its meaning in a tightly clenched fist. But she worked on it for a while, and the fist opened to reveal what looked like a small pearl of wisdom nestling in its palm—perhaps David’s coldness to her was of one piece with his chopping down trees, and undressing himself, and driving the jeep, and throwing the Indian clubs, and coming to live on a cold cruel island in the North Sea…
What was it he had said? “…his father the war hero, a legless joke…” He had something to prove, something that would sound trite if it were put into words; something he could have done as a fighter pilot, but now had to do with trees and fences and Indian clubs and a wheelchair. They wouldn’t let him take the test, and he wanted to be able to say: “I could have passed it anyway, just look how I can suffer.”
It was cruelly, screamingly unjust: he had had the courage, and he had suffered the wounds, but he could take no pride in it. If a Messerschmidt had taken his legs the wheelchair would have been like a medal, a badge of courage. But now, all his life, he would have to say: “It was during the war—but no, I never saw any action, this was a car crash. I did my training and I was going to fight, the very next day, I had seen my kite, she was a beauty, and…”
Yes, it was his way of being strong. And perhaps she could be strong, too. She might find ways of patching up the wreck of her life. David had once been good and kind and loving, and she might now learn to wait patiently while he battled to become the complete man he used to be. She could find new hopes, new things to live for. Other women had found the strength to cope with bereavement, and bombed-out houses, and husbands in prisoner-of-war camps.
She picked up a pebble, drew back her arm, and threw it out to sea with all her might. She did not see or hear it land; it might have gone on forever, circling the earth like a satellite in a space story.
She shouted, “I can be strong, too, damn it.” And then she turned around and started up the ramp to the cottage. It was almost time for Jo’s first feed.
6
IT LOOKED LIKE A MANSION, AND, UP TO A POINT, that was what it was—a large house, in its own grounds, in the leafy town of Wohldorf just outside North Hamburg. It might have been the home of a mine owner, or a successful importer, or an industrialist. However, it was in fact owned by the Abwehr.
It owed its fate to the weather—not here, but two hundred miles southeast in Berlin, where atmospheric conditions were unsuitable for wireless communication with England.
It was a mansion only down to ground level. Below that were two huge concrete shelters and several million reichsmarks’ worth of radio equipment. The electronics system had been put together by a Major Werner Trautmann, and he did a good job. Each hall had twenty neat little soundproof listening posts, occupied by radio operators who could recognize a spy by the way he tapped out his message, as easily as you can recognize your mother’s handwriting on an envelope.
The receiving equipment was built with quality in mind, for the transmitters sending the messages had been designed for compactness rather than power. Most of them were the small suitcase-sets called Klamotten, which had been developed by Telefunken for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr.
On this night the airways were relatively quiet, so every one knew when Die Nadel came through. The message was taken by one of the older operators. He tapped out an acknowledgment, transcribed the signal, quickly tore the sheet off his note pad and went to the phone. He read the message over the direct line to Abwehr headquarters at Sophien Terrace in Hamburg, then came back to his booth for a smoke.
He offered a cigarette to the youngster in the next booth, and the two of them stood together for a few minutes, leaning against the wall and smoking.
The youngster said, “Anything?”
The older man shrugged. “There’s always something when he calls. But not much this time. The Luftwaffe missed St. Paul’s Cathedral again.”
“No reply for him?”
“We don’t think he waits for replies. He’s an independent bastard, always was. I trained him in wireless, you know, and once I’d finished he thought he knew it better than me.”
“You’ve met Die Nadel? What’s he like?”
“About as much fun as a dead fish. All the same he’s the best agent we’ve got. Some say the best ever. There’s a story that he spent five years working his way up in the NKVD in Russia, and ended up one of Stalin’s most trusted aides…. I don’t know whether it’s true, but it’s the kind of thing he’d do. A real pro. And the Fuehrer knows it.”
“Hitler knows him?”
The older man nodded. “At one time he wanted to see all Die Nadel’s signals. I don’t know if he still does. Not that it would make any difference to Die Nadel. Nothing impresses that man. You know something? He looks at everybody the same way—as if he’s figuring out how he’ll kill you if you make a wrong move.”
“I’m glad I didn’t have to train him.”
“He learned quickly, I’ll give him that. Worked at it twenty-four hours a day, then when he’d mastered it, he wouldn’t give me a good-morning. It takes him all his time to remember to salute Canaris. He always signs off ‘Regards to Willi.’ That’s how much he cares about rank.”
They finished their cigarettes, dropped them on the floor, and trod them out. Then the older man picked up the stubs and pocketed them, because smoking was not really permitted in the dugout. The radios were still quiet.
“Yes, he won’t use his code name,” the older man went on. “Von Braun gave it to him, and he’s never liked it. He’s never liked Von Braun either. Do you remember the time—no, it was before you joined us—Braun told Nadel to go to the airfield in Farnborough, Kent. The message came back: ‘There is no airfield in Farnborough, Kent. There is one at Farnborough, Hampshire. Fortunately the Luftwaffe’s geography is better than yours, you cunt.’ Just like that.”
“I suppose it’s understandable. When we make mistakes we put their lives on the line.”
The older man frowned. He was the one who delivered such judgments, and he did not like his audience to weigh in with opinions of its own. “Perhaps,” he said grudgingly.
“But why doesn’t he like his code name?”
“He says it has a meaning, and a code word with a meaning can give a man away. Von Braun wouldn’t listen.”
“A meaning? The Needle? What does it mean?”
But at that moment the old-timer’s radio chirped, and he returned quickly to his station, so the explanation never came.
Part Two
7
THE MESSAGE ANNOYED FABER BECAUSE IT FORCED him to face issues that he had been avoiding.
Hamburg had made damn sure the message reached him. He had given his call-sign, and instead of the usual “Acknowledge—proceed” they had sent back “Make rendezvous one.”
He acknowledged the order, transmitted his report and packed the wireless set back into its suitcase. Then he wheeled his bicycle out of Erith Marshes—his cover was a bird-watcher—and got on the road to Blackheath. As he cycled back to his cramped two-room flat, he wondered whether to obey the order.
He had two reasons for disobedience: one professional, one personal.
The professional reason was that “rendezvous one” was an old code, set up by Canaris back in 1937. It meant he was to go to the doorway of a certain shop between Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus to meet another agent. The agents would recognize each other by the fact that they both carried a Bible. Then there was a patter:
“What is today’s chapter?”
“One Kings thirteen.”
Then, if they were certain they were not being followed, they would agree that the chapter was “most inspiring.” Otherwise one would say, “I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.”
The shop doorway might not be there any more, but it was not that that troubled Faber. He thought Canaris had probably given the code to most of the bumbling amateurs who had crossed the Channel in 1940 and landed in the arms of MI5. Faber knew they had been caught because the hangings had been publicized, no doubt to reassure the public that something was being done about Fifth Columnists. They would certainly have given away secrets before they died, so the British now probably knew the old rendezvous code. If they had picked up the message from Hamburg, that shop doorway must by now be swarming with well-spoken young Englishmen carrying Bibles and practicing saying “Most inspiring” in a German accent.
The Abwehr had thrown professionalism to the wind back in those heady days when the invasion seemed so close. Faber had not trusted Hamburg since. He would not tell them where he lived, he refused to communicate with their other agents in Britain, he varied the frequency he used for transmission without caring whether he stepped all over someone else’s signal.
If he had always obeyed his masters, he would not have survived so long.
At Woolwich, Faber was joined by a mass of other cyclists, many of them women, as the workers came streaming out of the munitions factory at the end of the day shift. Their cheerful weariness reminded Faber of his personal reason for disobedience: he thought his side was losing the war.
They certainly were not winning. The Russians and the Americans had joined in, Africa was lost, the Italians had collapsed; the Allies would surely invade France this year, 1944.
Faber did not want to risk his life to no purpose.
He arrived home and put his bicycle away. While he was washing his face it dawned on him that, against all logic, he wanted to make the rendezvous.
It was a foolish risk, taken in a lost cause, but he was itching to get to it. And the simple reason was that he was unspeakably bored. The routine transmissions, the bird-watching, the bicycle, the boardinghouse teas—it was four years since he had experienced anything remotely like action. He seemed to be in no danger whatsoever, and that made him jumpy because he imagined invisible threats. He was happiest when every so often he could identify a threat and take steps to neutralize it.
Yes, he would make the rendezvous. But not in the way they expected.
THERE WERE STILL CROWDS in the West End of London, despite the war; Faber wondered whether it was the same in Berlin. He bought a Bible at Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly, and stuffed it into his inside coat pocket, out of sight. It was a mild, damp day, with intermittent drizzle, and Faber was carrying an umbrella.
This rendezvous was timed for either between nine and ten o’clock in the morning or between five and six in the afternoon, and the arrangement was that one went there every day until the other party turned up. If no contact was made for five successive days one went there on alternate days for two weeks. After that one gave up.
Faber got to Leicester Square at ten past nine. The contact was there, in the tobacconist’s doorway, with a black-bound Bible under his arm, pretending to shelter from the rain. Faber spotted him out of the corner of his eye and hurried past, head down. The man was youngish, with a blond moustache and a well-fed look. He wore a black double-breasted raincoat, and he was reading the Daily Express and chewing gum. He was not familiar.
When Faber walked by the second time on the opposite side of the street, he spotted the tail. A short, stocky man wearing the trenchcoat and trilby hat beloved of English plainclothes policemen was standing just inside the foyer of an office building, looking through the glass doors across the street to the man in the doorway.
There were two possibilities. If the agent did not know he had been followed, Faber had only to get him away from the rendezvous and lose the tail. However, the alternative was that the agent had been captured and the man in the doorway was a substitute, in which case neither he nor the tail must be allowed to see Faber’s face.
Faber assumed the worst, then thought of a way to deal with it.
There was a telephone booth in the Square. Faber went inside and memorized the number. Then he found I Kings 13 in the Bible, tore out the page, and scribbled in the margin, “Go to the phone booth in the Square.”
He walked around the back streets behind the National Gallery until he found a small boy, aged about ten or eleven, sitting on a doorstep throwing stones at puddles.
Faber said, “Do you know the tobacconist in the Square?”
“Yerst.”
“Do you like chewing gum?”
“Yerst.”
Faber gave him a page torn from the Bible. “There’s a man in the doorway of the tobacconist’s. If you give him this he’ll give you some gum.”
“All right,” the boy said. He stood up. “Is this geezer a Yank?”
“Yerst,” Faber said.
The boy ran off. Faber followed him. As the boy approached the agent, Faber ducked into the doorway of the building opposite. The tail was still there, peering through the glass. Faber stood just outside the door, blocking the tail’s view of the scene across the street, and opened his umbrella. He pretended to be struggling with it. He saw the agent give something to the boy and walked off. He ended his charade with the umbrella and walked in the direction opposite to the way the agent had gone. He looked back over his shoulder to see the tail run into the street, looking for the vanished agent.
Faber stopped at the nearest telephone and dialed the number of the booth in the Square. It took a few minutes to get through. At last a deep voice said, “Hello?”
“What is today’s chapter?” Faber said.
“One Kings thirteen.”
“Most inspiring.”
“Yes, isn’t it.”
The fool has no idea of the trouble he’s in, Faber thought. Aloud he said, “Well?”
“I must see you.”
“That is impossible.”
“But I must!” There was a note in the voice that Faber thought edged on despair. “The message comes from the very top—do you understand?”
Faber pretended to waver. “All right, then. I will meet you in one week’s time under the arch at Euston Station at 9 A.M.”
“Can’t you make it sooner?”
Faber hung up and stepped outside. Walking quickly, he rounded two corners and came within sight of the phone booth in the Square. He saw the agent walking in the direction of Piccadilly. There was no sign of the tail. Faber followed the agent.
The man went into Piccadilly Circus underground station, and bought a ticket to Stockwell. Faber immediately realized he could get there by a more direct route. He came out of the station, walked quickly to Leicester Square and got on a Northern Line train. The agent would have to change trains at Waterloo, whereas Faber’s train was direct; so Faber would reach Stockwell first, or at the worst they would arrive on the same train.
In fact Faber had to wait outside the station at Stockwell for twenty-five minutes before the agent emerged. Faber followed him again. He went into a cafe.
There was absolutely nowhere nearby where a man could plausibly stand still for any length of time: no shop windows to gaze into, no benches to sit on or parks to walk around, no bus stops or taxi ranks or public buildings. Faber had to walk up and down the street, always looking as if he were going somewhere, carrying on until he was just out of sight of the cafe then returning on the opposite side, while the agent sat in the warm, steamy cafe drinking tea and eating hot toast.
He came out after half an hour. Faber tailed him through a succession of residential streets. The agent knew where he was going, but was in no hurry. He walked like a man who is going home with nothing to do for the rest of the day. He did not look back, and Faber thought, Another amateur.
At last he went into a house—one of the poor, anonymous, inconspicuous lodging houses used by spies and errant husbands everywhere. It had a dormer window in the roof; that would be the agent’s room, high up for better wireless reception.
Faber walked past, scanning the opposite side of the street. Yes—there. A movement behind an upstairs window, a glimpse of a jacket and tie, a watching face withdrawn—the opposition was here too. The agent must have gone to the rendezvous yesterday and allowed himself to be followed home by MI5—unless, of course, he was MI5.
Faber turned the corner and walked down the next parallel street, counting the houses. Almost directly behind the place the agent had entered there was the bomb-damaged shell of what had been a pair of semidetached houses. Good.
As he walked back to the station his step was springier, his heart beat a shade faster and he looked around him with bright-eyed interest. It was good. The game was on.
HE DRESSED IN BLACK that night—a woolen hat, a turtleneck sweater under a short leather flying jacket, trousers tucked into socks, rubber-soled shoes—all black. He would be almost invisible, for London, too, was blacked out.
He cycled through the quiet streets with dimmed lights, keeping off main roads. It was after midnight, and he saw no one. He left the bike a quarter of a mile away from his destination, padlocking it to the fence in a pub yard.
He went, not to the agent’s house, but to the bombed-out shell in the next street. He picked his way carefully across the rubble in the front garden, entered the gaping doorway, and went through the house to the back. It was very dark. A thick screen of low cloud hid the moon and stars. Faber had to walk slowly with his hands in front of him.
He reached the end of the garden, jumped over the fence, and crossed the next two gardens. In one of the houses a dog barked for a moment.
The garden of the lodging house was unkempt. Faber walked into a blackberry bush and stumbled. The thorns scratched his face. He ducked under a line of washing—there was enough light for him to see that.
He found the kitchen window and took from his pocket a small tool with a scoop-shaped blade. The putty around the glass was old and brittle, and already flaking away in places. After twenty minutes’ silent work he took the pane out of the frame and laid it gently on the grass. He shone a flashlight through the empty hole to make sure there were no noisy obstacles in his way, opened the catch, raised the window and then climbed in.
The darkened house smelled of boiled fish and disinfectant. Faber unlocked the back door—a precaution for fast exit—before entering the hall. He flashed his pencil light on and off quickly, once. In that instant of light he took in a tiled hallway, a kidney table he must circumvent, a row of coats on hooks and a staircase, to the right, carpeted.
He climbed the stairs silently.
He was halfway across the landing to the second flight when he saw the light under the door. A split-second later there was an asthmatic cough and the sound of a toilet flushing. Faber reached the door in two strides and froze against the wall.
Light flooded the landing as the door opened. Faber slipped his stiletto out of his sleeve. The old man came out of the toilet and crossed the landing, leaving the light on. At his bedroom door he grunted, turned and came back.
He must see me, Faber thought. He tightened his grip on the handle of his knife. The old man’s half-open eyes were directed on the floor. He looked up as he reached for the light cord, and Faber almost killed him then—but the man fumbled for the switch and Faber realized he was so sleepy he was practically somnambulating.
The light died, the old man shuffled back to bed, and Faber breathed again.
There was only one door at the top of the second flight of stairs. Faber tried it gently. It was locked.
He took another tool from the pocket of his jacket. The noise of the toilet tank filling covered the sound of Faber picking the lock. He opened the door and listened.
He could hear deep regular breathing. He stepped inside. The sound came from the opposite corner of the room. He could see nothing. He crossed the pitch-dark room very slowly, feeling the air in front of him at each step, until he was beside the bed.
He had the flashlight in his left hand, the stiletto loose in his sleeve and his right hand free. He switched on the flashlight and grabbed the sleeping man’s throat in a strangling grip.
The agent’s eyes snapped open, but he could make no sound. Faber straddled the bed and sat on him. Then he whispered, “One Kings thirteen,” and relaxed his grip.
