“But I’m not asking you to risk anyone else. I’d go myself.”
“I’m afraid it’s impossible. Thorpe’s been trained. He knows it’s his duty to escape, not ours to spring him out, and I’ve no doubt he’s doing his utmost.”
“That’s not enough for me.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Thorpe,” Mr. B— says. “I don’t mean to be unkind. Naturally you’re suffering. It’s the most beastly news. One hopes for the best, of course. But one soldiers on. That’s all there is, just to soldier on.”
“That’s all terrific, if you’re a soldier. If you’re allowed to do something useful instead of twiddling your thumbs.”
“There are many ways in which women are able to serve the war effort, Mrs. Thorpe. And I can offer you my steadfast assurance that we’re doing our best, in my department and in Britain as a whole, all the services, every man Jack, to defeat Germany and bring your husband safely home.”
Across the street, a pair of women hurry down the sidewalk, buttoned up in wool coats and economical hats. The clatter of shoes echoes from the bricks, and it occurs to me how silent a city can be, when gas is rationed and private automobiles are banned. You can hear an omnibus rattle and grind from a couple of streets away, and you realize how alone you are, how desolate war is.
The women turn the corner. A man begins a slow, arthritic progress from the opposite direction, bent beneath the weight of his coat and hat. He’s smoking a cigarette. I figure the fellow’s probably deaf, but I speak softly anyway. Soft and firm.
“I understand your position, of course. I guess it’s about what I expected. I understand, I really do. But now I need you to understand me, Mr. B—.”
He turns his face toward me and lifts his eyebrows. At last, his voice goes a little cold, the way a man speaks to another man, his equal. “Oh? Understand what, Mrs. Thorpe? Let us be perfectly clear with each other.”
“All right, Mr. B—. Listen carefully. In the course of my service in Nassau, in my capacity as a journalist, as an intimate associate of the governor and his wife, I became privy to certain information. Do you catch my drift?”
There is this silence. I think, Well, he knows this already, doesn’t he? I wrote as much in my note. At the time, I thought I conveyed my meaning in circumspect sentences, that my note was a clever, sophisticated little epistle, but now it seems to me that my note was probably a masterpiece of amateurism, that Mr. B— probably laughed when he read it. Probably he’s suppressing his laughter right now. His silence is the silence of a man controlling his amusement.
He examines the end of his cigarette. “What kind of information?”
“You know. The kind of information that might prove embarrassing—embarrassing to say the least—were it to be made known to the general public.”
He drops his cigarette to the gravel and crushes it with his shoe. “Embarrassing to whom?”
“To the British government. To the king and queen.”
Mr. B— reaches into his jacket pocket and removes another cigarette from the case. He lights it with the same care as before, the same series of noises, the scratch and the flare, the covering of the flame. “Mrs. Thorpe,” he says softly, “I’m afraid I have a little confession to make.”
“Oh?”
“I may have stretched the truth just a bit, when I told you I was astonished by the contents of your letter.”
We still sit side by side, except we’ve turned a few degrees inward to address each other. Mr. B—’s elbow rests on the top slat of the bench. Because he’s looking at my face now, almost tenderly, I make a tremendous effort to keep my expression as still as possible. My fingers, however, have developed some kind of tremor. Imagine that.
“How so?” I ask.
“I received a memorandum a day or two ago. From a certain member of the Cabinet, in response to a cable sent him from Government House in Nassau. So we had some warning, you see, of your imminent arrival. We had some notion of what to expect.”
“I see.”
“Still, your note was—well, it was marvelous. I don’t wish to take anything away from that. My own men couldn’t have done better.”
“I’m flattered.”
He leans forward, so I can smell his cigarette breath, the faint echo of whatever it was he ate for lunch. “Mrs. Thorpe, I simply can’t allow that information to go any further. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand. That’s why I’m offering to—”
He drops the cigarette in the gravel and crushes it with his heel. “No, my dear. I don’t think you really do understand.”
And I’m ashamed to say it’s only now I realize what an idiot I’ve been. Not until this instant does it occur to me to ask why, if Mr. B— received my note in the morning—my note hinting delicately of treason at the highest level, treason within the royal family itself—he waited until the fall of night to meet me, to draw me outside, to walk with me into a darkened square before a thousand windows closed for the blackout.
Why, indeed.
I rise from the bench. “Very well. If you’re not going to cooperate, I have no choice—”
With remarkable swiftness, he rises too, draws a small pistol from his pocket, and lodges the end of it in the middle of my coat, just above the knotted belt.
“Mrs. Thorpe. I’m afraid I must insist you give me whatever evidence you’ve obtained in this matter.”
“I don’t have it. Not right here.”
“Where, then?”
“In my hotel room.”
He considers. The pistol remains at my stomach, moving slightly at each beat of my heart. Though my gaze remains on his, I gather the details at the edge of my vision: the trees, bare of leaves; the shrubs, the plantings, all of them shadows against the night, against the murky buildings surrounding us. I observe the distant noise of another omnibus, a faint, drunken cheer from a pub nearby. Possibly, if I screamed, someone might hear me. But I would be dead by the time this noise reached a pair of human ears.
“It’s well hidden,” I continue. “I could save you a lot of trouble.”
Mr. B— nudges the pistol against my stomach. “Very well. Move slowly, please.”
As I begin my turn, I jerk my knee upward, bang smack into the center of his groin. A shot cracks out. I grab the pistol, burning my hand, and slam it into his head, right behind his left ear. He slumps to the ground, and let me tell you, I take off running, hoping to God I don’t have a bullet in me somewhere, hoping to God I knocked him out as well as down.
As I dart across the street, there’s a shout. I don’t stop to discover where it came from, or whom. The sidewalk’s empty, the street’s dark. The sky’s begun to drizzle. I pass a red postbox, the house with the grand piano in the window I noticed this morning, except you can’t see that piano right now, I can’t see anything, the whole world is dark and wet, each stoop concealing its own shadows. I cross another street, another, not stopping to check for traffic—there isn’t any, not with wartime restrictions on brave, threadbare London—until the familiar white signboard resolves out of the mist, basil hotel in quaint letters.