The Sword and the Net полностью

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:

“You understand me, don’t you?” There was a vehemence in her tone which he had not heard before. “You see how good a camouflage that is. I have used it always—and the more I use it the better it becomes.”