World War II Thriller Collection (16 page)

“Hm.” Vandam drank in this incidental information greedily. What kind of a spy spent his funds on imported delicacies? Answer: one who was not very serious. But Wolff
was
serious. It was a question of style. Vandam said: “I was wondering how soon he is likely to come back.”

“As soon as he runs out of champagne.”

“All right. When he does, I must find out where he lives.”

“But, sir, if he again refuses to allow me to deliver . . . ?”

“That's what I've been thinking about. I'm going to give you an assistant.”

Aristopoulos did not like that idea. “I want to help you, sir, but my business is private—”

“You've got no choice,” Vandam said. “It's help me, or go to jail.”

“But to have an English officer working here in my shop—”

“Oh, it won't be an English officer.” He would stick out like a sore thumb, Vandam thought, and probably scare Wolff away as well. Vandam smiled. “I think I know the ideal person for the job.”

 

That evening after dinner Vandam went to Elene's apartment, carrying a huge bunch of flowers, feeling foolish.

She lived in a graceful, spacious old apartment house near the Place de l'Opéra. A Nubian concierge directed Vandam to the third floor. He climbed the curving marble staircase which occupied the center of the building and knocked on the door of 3A.

She was not expecting him, and it occurred to him suddenly that she might be entertaining a man friend.

He waited impatiently in the corridor, wondering what she would be like in her own home. This was the first time he had been here. Perhaps she was out. Surely she had plenty to do in the evenings—

The door opened.

She was wearing a yellow cotton dress with a full skirt, rather simple but almost thin enough to see through. The color looked very pretty against her light-brown skin. She gazed at him blankly for a moment, then recognized him and gave her impish smile.

She said: “Well, hello!”

“Good evening.”

She stepped forward and kissed his cheek. “Come in.”

He went inside and she closed the door.

“I wasn't expecting the kiss,” he said.

“All part of the act. Let me relieve you of your disguise.”

He gave her the flowers. He had the feeling he was being teased.

“Go in there while I put these in water,” she said.

He followed her pointing finger into the living room and looked around. The room was comfortable to the point of sensuality. It was decorated in pink and gold and furnished with deep soft seats and a table of pale oak. It was a corner room with windows on two sides, and now the evening sun shone in and made everything glow slightly. There was a thick rug of brown fur on the floor that looked like bearskin. Vandam bent down and touched it: it was genuine. He had a sudden, vivid picture of Elene lying on the rug, naked and writhing. He blinked and looked elsewhere. On the seat beside him was a book which she had, presumably, been reading when he knocked. He picked up the book and sat on the seat. It was warm from her body. The book was called
Stamboul Train
. It looked like cloak-and-dagger stuff. On the wall opposite him was a rather modern-looking painting of a society ball: all the ladies were in gorgeous formal gowns and all the men were naked. Vandam went and sat on the couch beneath the painting so that he would not have to look at it. He thought it peculiar.

She came in with the flowers in a vase, and the smell of wisteria filled the room. “Would you like a drink?”

“Can you make martinis?”

“Yes. Smoke if you want to.”

“Thank you.” She knew how to be hospitable, Vandam thought. He supposed she had to, given the way she earned her living. He took out his cigarettes. “I was afraid you'd be out.”

“Not this evening.” There was an odd note in her voice when she said that, but Vandam could not figure it out. He watched her with the cocktail shaker. He had intended to conduct the meeting on a businesslike level, but he was not able to, for it was she who was conducting it. He felt like a clandestine lover.

“Do you like this stuff?” He indicated the book.

“I've been reading thrillers lately.”

“Why?”

“To find out how a spy is supposed to behave.”

“I shouldn't think you—” He saw her smiling, and realized he was being teased again. “I never know whether you're serious.”

“Very rarely.” She handed him a drink and sat down at the opposite end of the couch. She looked at him over the rim of her glass. “To espionage.”

He sipped his martini. It was perfect. So was she. The mellow sunshine burnished her skin. Her arms and legs looked smooth and soft. He thought she would be the same in bed as she was out of it: relaxed, amusing and game for anything. Damn. She had had this effect on him last time, and he had gone on one of his rare binges and ended up in a wretched brothel.

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“Espionage.”

She laughed: it seemed that somehow she knew he was lying. “You must love it,” she said.

Vandam thought: How does she do this to me? She kept him always off balance, with her teasing and her insight, her innocent face and her long brown limbs. He said: “Catching spies can be very satisfying work, but I don't love it.”

“What happens to them when you've caught them?”

“They hang, usually.”

“Oh.”

He had managed to throw her off balance for a change. She shivered. He said: “Losers generally die in wartime.”

“Is that why you don't love it—because they hang?”

“No. I don't love it because I don't always catch them.”

“Are you proud of being so hard-hearted?”

“I don't think I'm hard-hearted. We're trying to kill more of them than they can kill us.” He thought: How did I come to be defending myself?

She got up to pour him another drink. He watched her walk across the room. She moved gracefully—like a cat, he thought; no, like a kitten. He looked at her back as she stooped to pick up the cocktail shaker, and he wondered what she was wearing beneath the yellow dress. He noticed her hands as she poured the drink: they were slender and strong. She did not give herself another martini.

He wondered what background she came from. He said: “Are your parents alive?”

“No,” she said abruptly.

“I'm sorry,” he said. He knew she was lying.

“Why did you ask me that?”

“Idle curiosity. Please forgive me.”

She leaned over and touched his arm lightly, brushing his skin with her fingertips, a caress as gentle as a breeze. “You apologize too much.” She looked away from him, as if hesitating; and then, seeming to yield to an impulse, she began to tell him of her background.

She had been the eldest of five children in a desperately poor family. Her parents were cultured and loving people—“My father taught me English and my mother taught me to wear clean clothes,” she said—but the father, a tailor, was ultraorthodox and had estranged himself from the rest of the Jewish community in Alexandria after a doctrinal dispute with the ritual slaughterer. When Elene was fifteen years old her father began to go blind. He could no longer work as a tailor—but he would neither ask nor accept help from the “backsliding” Alexandrian Jews. Elene went as a live-in maid to a British home and sent her wages to her family. From that point on, her story was one which had been repeated, Vandam knew, time and again over the last hundred years in the homes of the British ruling class: she fell in love with the son of the house, and he seduced her. She had been fortunate in that they had been found out before she became pregnant. The son was sent away to university and Elene was paid off. She was terrified to return home to tell her father she had been fired for fornication—and with a gentile. She lived on her payoff, continuing to send home the same amount of cash each week, until the money ran out. Then a lecherous businessman whom she had met at the house had set her up in a flat, and she was embarked upon her life's work. Soon afterward her father had been told how she was living, and he made the family sit shiva for her.

“What is shiva?” Vandam asked.

“Mourning.”

Since then she had not heard from them, except for a message from a friend to tell her that her mother had died.

Vandam said: “Do you hate your father?”

She shrugged. “I think it turned out rather well.” She spread her arms to indicate the apartment.

“But are you happy?”

She looked at him. Twice she seemed about to speak and then said nothing. Finally she looked away. Vandam felt she was regretting the impulse that had made her tell him her life story. She changed the subject. “What brings you here tonight, Major?”

Vandam collected his thoughts. He had been so interested in her—watching her hands and her eyes as she spoke of her past—that he had forgotten for a while his purpose. “I'm still looking for Alex Wolff,” he began. “I haven't found him, but I've found his grocer.”

“How did you do that?”

He decided not to tell her. Better that nobody outside Intelligence should know that German spies were betrayed by their forged money. “That's a long story,” he said. “The important thing is, I want to put someone inside the shop in case he comes back.”

“Me.”

“That's what I had in mind.”

“Then, when he comes in, I hit him over the head with a bag of sugar and guard the unconscious body until you come along.”

Vandam laughed. “I believe you would,” he said. “I can just see you leaping over the counter.” He realized how much he was relaxing, and resolved to pull himself together before he made a fool of himself.

“Seriously, what do I have to do?” she said.

“Seriously, you have to discover where he lives.”

“How?”

“I'm not sure.” Vandam hesitated. “I thought perhaps you might befriend him. You're a very attractive woman—I imagine it would be easy for you.”

“What do you mean by ‘befriend'?”

“That's up to you. Just as long as you get his address.”

“I see.” Suddenly her mood had changed, and there was bitterness in her voice. The switch astonished Vandam: she was too quick for him to follow her. Surely a woman like Elene would not be offended by this suggestion? She said: “Why don't you just have one of your soldiers follow him home?”

“I may have to do that, if you fail to win his confidence. The trouble is, he might realize he was being followed and shake off the tail—then he would never go back to the grocer's, and we would have lost our advantage. But if you can persuade him, say, to invite you to his house for dinner, then we'll get the information we need without tipping our hand. Of course, it might not work. Both alternatives are risky. But I prefer the subtle approach.”

“I understand that.”

Of course she understood, Vandam thought; the whole thing was as plain as day. What the devil was the matter with her? She was a strange woman: at one moment he was quite enchanted by her, and at the next he was infuriated. For the first time it crossed his mind that she might refuse to do what he was asking. Nervously he said: “Will you help me?”

She got up and filled his glass again, and this time she took another drink herself. She was very tense, but it was clear she was not willing to tell him why. He always felt very annoyed with women in moods like this. It would be a damn nuisance if she refused to cooperate now.

At last she said: “I suppose it's no worse than what I've been doing all my life.”

“That's what I thought,” said Vandam with relief.

She gave him a very black look.

“You start tomorrow,” he said. He gave her a piece of paper with the address of the shop written on it. She took it without looking at it. “The shop belongs to Mikis Aristopoulos,” he added.

“How long do you think this will take?” she said.

“I don't know.” He stood up. “I'll get in touch with you every few days, to make sure everything's all right—but you'll contact me as soon as he makes an appearance, won't you?”

“Yes.”

Vandam remembered something. “By the way, the shopkeeper thinks we're after Wolff for forgery. Don't talk to him about espionage.”

“I won't.”

The change in her mood was permanent. They were no longer enjoying each other's company. Vandam said: “I'll leave you to your thriller.”

She stood up. “I'll see you out.”

They went to the door. As Vandam stepped out, the tenant of the neighboring flat approached along the corridor. Vandam had been thinking of this moment, in the back of his mind, all evening, and now he did what he had been determined not to do. He took Elene's arm, bent his head and kissed her mouth.

Her lips moved briefly in response. He pulled away. The neighbor passed by. Vandam looked at Elene. The neighbor unlocked his door, entered his flat and closed the door behind him. Vandam released Elene's arm.

She said: “You're a good actor.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good-bye.” He turned away and strolled briskly down the corridor. He should have felt pleased with his evening's work, but instead he felt as if he had done something a little shameful. He heard the door of her apartment bang shut behind him.