The Elegant Lie

…

It was Carter’s own father, the chief of police in Dunellen, who recruited him straight out of college for a career in undercover work.

The year was 1937. With the Great Depression still in full swing, New Jersey was locked in a crime wave, much of it focused on the docklands of Newark and Elizabeth, just across the Hudson River from New York. The police were sorely in need of intelligence from inside and, after completing his basic training at the police academy, Carter was given the task of infiltrating the small, close-knit bands of thieves among the longshoremen.

He spent the next four years working as a stevedore along the docks, loading and unloading cargo from ships. Despite his police training, most of what he learned about undercover work could not be taught, even if there had been someone to teach him. Since the crew rosters were constantly being reshuffled, Carter found it easy to move among the longshoremen without drawing attention to himself, constantly aware that even the slightest mistake could get him killed. To keep his cover intact, he rented out three apartments, none within a mile of each other and each one under a different name. He kept no bank account, always insisting that he be paid in cash. He made no friends, but made sure he was known to everyone. Since much of what he learned came from hanging out at the longshoremen’s bars after work, he mastered the art of heavy drinking, or at least pretending to. Often, he would pick up half-empty glasses of beer when he had just ordered a fresh one, knowing that the owners of those half-empty glasses would gladly take his full glass without pointing out the mistake.

Carter became so adept at maintaining his forged identity that when, after a series of raids in which dozens of longshoremen were arrested, and rumours began to circulate that a police informant had penetrated the ranks of those who supplemented their income by stealing cargo off incoming ships, Carter was approached by his shift boss, a man named Alphonse Labrija. Labrija, whose work details were responsible for the majority of thefts at one of the largest docks in Elizabeth, entrusted Carter with the task of finding the undercover agent.

Now effectively in search of himself, Carter confronted another member of Labrija’s work detail, a twitchy, pinch-faced man named Harvey Kirsh, whom he knew had been stealing cargo in addition to that which had been sanctioned by Labrija. The punishment for these unauthorised thefts, devised by Labrija himself, was to have all five fingers of the man’s right hand severed at the middle joint. It could be made to look like an industrial accident and that was how it would be reported, even by the man who had witnessed his own fingers being removed with a meat cleaver, because reporting the matter to the police would only have resulted in the loss of more critical body parts. Carter had no difficulty persuading Kirsh to disappear and, under the pretext of some imagined solidarity, even provided him with the bus fare out of town.

As soon as Kirsh was gone, Carter informed Labrija that Kirsh had been the informant all along. Since Kirsh had vanished without any other apparent reason, Labrija readily accepted Carter’s story. Two months later, Labrija was arrested in a raid, along with most of his men, and was still blaming Kirsh for his misfortune when he began his ten-year sentence behind bars.

The River Gangs, as they were called, had initially made no distinction about what they stole. Often, they robbed crates without even knowing their contents. A profit could be turned from almost anything, and the River Gangs had many contacts in the areas around New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where stolen items could be funnelled into the marketplace and sold, sometimes without any knowledge of the fact that they had been robbed, to the same shops where the goods would have been bought anyway.

But when war broke out in Europe in the autumn of 1939, the River Gangs turned increasingly to the theft of fuel. The reason for this was not only that the profit margin for selling fuel far outstripped the margins that could be earned from anything else coming off the ships in Elizabeth seaport, but also that most companies had switched from making products for the civilian marketplace to the production of wartime equipment, whether it was clothing, shoes or canned C-rations. Whereas there had always been a market for civilian goods, as well as a multitude of places where such items could be sold, military gear was issued as a matter of course, and only had to be paid for if it was lost.

But everybody needed fuel, and almost everybody wanted more than they were getting from the government. Attempts to colour fuel that had been designated for military use largely failed because military gasoline was sometimes issued legally to civilians when undyed fuel could not be found to meet the ration quotas.

The theft of gasoline and diesel became so pervasive that people who would never normally have considered buying stolen goods now did precisely that, since it had largely lost the stigma of criminality. People knew it was wrong, but it seemed like everybody was doing it, so it became easier to blame the government for over-zealous rationing restrictions than to admit that they were committing a crime.

Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the total mobilisation of the American war machine, the US military was losing twenty thousand gallons a day, 10 per cent of its total intake, to thefts ranging from a couple of gallons to entire tanker trucks which disappeared without trace.

From Carter’s vantage point, the problem had grown far bigger than anything people in his line of work could handle.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, the government had arrived at the same conclusion.

In October 1942, Carter received an order to appear at his precinct headquarters, an imposing stone structure called the Marquette Building, which took up half a block on Arcade Street in downtown Elizabeth. Although Carter had entered the building several times during his early days as a recruit, once he became an undercover detective he rarely went near the place. Even to be seen in the vicinity of the Marquette Building by a member of the River Gangs might be enough to blow his cover.

The order came with no explanation, only a date, a time and a room number. The only thing Carter could think of as to why he had been summoned in this way was that he had made some kind of mistake, for which he would now be facing an official reprimand and perhaps even suspension. In the days leading up to his appearance, Carter racked his brain for what he might have done wrong. His father, to whom he might have turned for information, had retired owing to ill health some years before and now rarely left his little clapboard house in Belmar, out on the Jersey shore. So there was no point in bothering him.

On the day he was due to appear, Carter called in sick and took a taxi to a place two blocks from the Marquette Building. From there, he walked to a vegetable market across the road from police headquarters. At the back of the market was a stairway that went down to a storeroom where vegetables were kept cool before being put on display. At the back of this storeroom was a door with a combination lock, which led to a narrow tunnel that ran under the street. The tunnel was lined with off-white tiles the colour of coffee-stained teeth and had no illumination, so Carter found his way by the greasy flame of a Zippo lighter. The tunnel ended at another door, which led up to the basement of the Marquette Building. This tunnel had been built for use by undercover police, and for smuggling informants in and out of the building.

In a room on the third floor he presented himself to a man he’d never met before and who did not identify himself. He did not wear a police uniform, but from his haircut◦– short but not a military crew cut◦– and from the clothes he wore◦– a starched, pointy-collared white shirt with a brown tie and suspenders◦– Carter guessed him to be a federal agent. He had learned to place people very quickly, based on nothing more than instinct and a glance. In Carter’s line of work, the clothes a person wore told you almost everything you needed to know about them; not only where they came from but also where they imagined they were headed, in their careers and in society. Even the room told him something. It was bare, except for a desk and a filing cabinet with a clamshell for an ashtray on top. There was nothing to indicate that the man worked here. No pictures of his family. No diploma or citations on the wall. No cigarettes crumpled in the ashtray. Whoever this man was, he had come to deliver a message. That was all. Within the hour, all trace of him would have vanished.

All this made Carter very nervous.

‘You are being transferred,’ said the man, ‘to the Office of Price Administration.’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Carter.

‘That’s about to change,’ said the man. ‘We were created, by order of the President, to investigate the theft of military supplies. You will be responsible for the same areas you were working in before, but you’ll be working for us from now on.’ He reached down beside him and removed a manila envelope from a briefcase. He placed the envelope on the table and slid it across to Carter. ‘This will tell you who you are reporting to. Your office is located in one of the disused warehouses on Cranston Street.’

Cranston Street was not really a street at all, but rather a wind-blown alleyway between two sets of warehouses where the sun only reached to the potholed concrete surface for about half an hour every day.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Carter. ‘I think there has been a mistake.’

The man looked at him. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

‘I work undercover,’ explained Carter. ‘That’s all I’ve ever done, and the dockyards are the only place I’ve ever done it. I’m known there as a longshoreman. I push carts. I swing a billhook. Guys like me don’t have offices. We don’t have much of anything. My cover would be blown in a day. Do you understand me, sir? I can’t do what you’re asking of me.’

‘I’m not really asking,’ said the man, ‘and I do understand what you’re saying. But I’m telling you that things have changed. There’s a war on. You no longer have the luxury of anonymity.’

‘But wouldn’t I be more useful to you if I stayed undercover?’

‘The President doesn’t think so,’ said the man. ‘It’s his opinion that, with the Office of Price Administration, we are making a statement that the epidemic of thefts of government property across this country will no longer be tolerated. We are putting people on notice. Letting them know that they are being watched.’

‘But we’re already watching them!’ shouted Carter, throwing up his hands. ‘And I’m the one doing the watching!’

The man smiled a humourless smile. ‘There’s a difference,’ he said, ‘between going up against a local police force, which is what you were, and going up against a federal agency, which is who you are working for now. You used to put people away for, what, a year or two? And maybe you slapped them around a little bit along the way, just to remind them who’s boss. But the people you work for now will throw a man into a concrete hole and leave him there for the rest of his life. It’s a whole new game, Mr Carter. You know that now’◦– the man raised his arm and pointed towards the docklands◦– ‘and they will too, soon enough.’

That same afternoon, Carter rode the Long Branch train down to Belmar and went to see his father. After retiring from the police, the old man had sold his house in Dunellen and moved permanently to their summer cottage by the shore. It was a three-room, single-storey house that stood amongst rows of identical cottages, most of which were empty since it was October and only a few papery leaves still clung to the sycamore trees that grew on strips of grass between the pavement and the road.

Carter visited his father most weekends, just to check in on him. There was a frailty to the old man now that seemed to have come upon him quite suddenly, catching both father and son by surprise. Through all the years of his growing up, Carter had thought of his father as being indestructible and had allowed himself to believe that things would always be this way. But the years seemed to have caught up with him at last, and it was almost as if he had become somehow opaque, fading from the world like a photograph left out in the sun.

Carter’s father came to the door, moving slowly and using a rubber-tipped cane to walk. He wore a thick, waffle-grid undershirt and had not shaved in several days. His hair was thin and grey, but still cut short and a little spiky on top, the same way he had worn it in his days with the police. He had smoked heavily throughout his career, and his lungs had finally given out. Now he wheezed like a kettle coming to the boil. He spent most of his time in a chair whose leather cushions had moulded to the shape of his body.

It was cold in the house, and wind whistled in at the kitchen window.

They walked into what his parents had called the ‘family’ room, which had a couch and a couple of overstuffed chairs gathered in a semi-circle around a coffee table and facing a large radio cabinet, which stood against the wall. There were several copies of the local Asbury Park newspaper on the table, which did not look like they had been opened.

‘You should get some insulation for this place,’ said Carter, as they each took a seat in one of the overstuffed chairs.

‘I have a stove,’ said the old man, nodding to a potbellied clump of iron in the corner.

‘Do you have any wood for it?’

‘I can get wood when I need it.’ The old man reached across to a little table beside the chair and fetched his cigarettes. With crack-nailed fingertips, he rummaged in a box for a match, which he lit by striking it against one of the brass button nails that ran down the length of his chair.

Carter’s gaze followed the ribbon of smoke up to where a bloom of dirty yellow, the stain of a thousand other smokes, spread across the ceiling.

‘This isn’t your usual day for a visit,’ said his father.

Carter told him about his transfer to the Office of Price Administration.

The old man sat very still as he listened, pausing now and then to draw from his cigarette.

By the time Carter had finished, his father had put away two more smokes and was scratching at his chin with soft raking movements of his fingertips, the way a barnacle sweeps its claw through the tide.

‘I think they’re trying to get me killed,’ said Carter.

His father shrugged. ‘The work we’re in, it seems like they are always doing that. “Was”, I should say.’ With a gurgling cough, he cleared his throat. ‘The work that I used to be in.’

Before Carter left, he strolled with his father down to the boardwalk. It took a long time, since his father often had to stop and catch his breath, hand resting on the dappled bark of the sycamore trees. On the boardwalk, they sat on a bench and looked out over the ocean. The beach, which in summer would be almost too crowded to see the sand, was almost empty now, except for a few people walking their dogs and some fishermen casting for striped bass.

For a while, they just sat there in silence.

It was his father who spoke first. ‘You know why I picked you for undercover work?’

‘You told me you thought I’d be good at it.’

‘But do you know why I thought that?’

He had never asked his father, not because he wasn’t curious but because it seemed like the kind of question his father wouldn’t have wanted to answer.

‘We’re all part of one tribe or another,’ said his father, ‘and, for a lot of people, everything they think and say and do depends on fitting in with the tribe. They’re terrified of getting out of line. Their whole sense of who they are depends on staying in the ranks. They’ll do anything for that, suffer any indignity, betray their closest friends, whatever it takes to belong. But not everybody in the tribe is like that. Some of them know who they are without having to be told. People like that can survive on their own if they want to. And I always knew you could do that. It’s why I knew you could handle undercover work, but I didn’t think enough about the price you’d have to pay.’

It unnerved Carter to hear his father talking this way. He never spoke in these terms. Anything beneath the surface of emotions was taboo. ‘What price is that?’ he asked.

‘By the time I was your age, I’d already been married for a while. We already had you, for Christ’s sake! I had a normal life, as normal as it could have been until your mother died. I just don’t know how you are ever going to have that.’

This, too, came as a shock. His father almost never spoke of her. She had died when Carter was six and these days he had trouble recalling what her voice sounded like, or the precise colour of her hair, or the smell of her; a mixture of coal tar soap, perfume and freshly folded laundry, which had lingered in the house for a while after she was gone. Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, she would appear suddenly in his thoughts. In those moments he would see her again as a whole person, but if he tried to focus on her, she would vanish and he would be left to assemble her from the jumble of remembered senses, like a bucket full of broken glass spilled out inside his brain.

His father looked across and smiled, then reached out an arm and gently patted his son on the back. ‘I was thinking I owed you an apology, for getting you into this line of work.’

‘Are you saying I should quit?’ asked Carter.

The old man shook his head. ‘You don’t quit the job. The job quits you when you’ve got nothing left to give. I’m not talking about the years you spend punching the clock. I mean in here.’ He tapped one finger against his temple. ‘How deep it gets inside your head. And when you finally make peace with all the things you did and didn’t do, what’s left is only fit for sitting on a bench and staring out to sea. Unless.’

‘Unless what?’ asked Carter.

‘Unless you find that precise moment in time when you can leave on your own terms, before you’re broken, inside and outside.’ His father stared at him hard, as if to show his words meant more than he was saying. ‘And when that moment arrives, you cannot hesitate.’

‘How would I recognise it?’ asked Carter.

‘When the time comes, you will know.’

‘Have you ever seen it done?’

His father breathed out. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘but I sure wish I could have given it a try.’

‘I guess I’ll keep a look out,’ said Carter.

‘Until then,’ said the old man, ‘just stick to the third rule.’

He did not need to explain what that meant. In that moment, the old man had switched from talking as father to son and was now speaking as one policeman to another. In addition to the duties of protection and service, there was a third, unspoken, unofficial rule: survival. This was not as straightforward as it seemed. To put oneself in harm’s way was a part of the job, and anyone who did not have the instinctive ability to do that needed to find another line of work. The third rule meant knowing the difference between willingly going into harm’s way and being put there by the ill-considered orders of someone who had not grasped the danger of the situation. There was sometimes a very fine line between those two things, but life itself could depend on knowing when that line was crossed.

The old man had turned his gaze towards some distant point on the horizon. Now he raised one arm and pointed out to sea. ‘I heard that German submarines come up at night, not half a mile from shore, just so they can see the lights of the Ferris wheel in Asbury Park.’

‘Why would they do that?’ asked Carter.

‘Maybe it helps them remember what their country used to look like before they got it in their heads to rule the world.’

Two days later, Carter showed up at his new office on Cranston Street. There, in the middle of a space that had once been the salesroom of a fish wholesaler, he found a man standing with his hands on his hips and a gun in a shoulder holster tucked under his left armpit.

‘You must be Nathan Carter,’ said the man. He was short and bald, with a head like a battering ram and a massive barrel chest. His name was Salvatore Palladino and he explained that, until the war had brought him back out of retirement, he had spent twenty-five years as a uniformed police officer.

‘I didn’t know they were sending me a partner,’ said Carter.

‘You used to work undercover, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’

‘Well, you’re in broad daylight now, son, and this is no place to find yourself alone.’

Once Carter had got over the surprise of working with a partner, he and Palladino quickly settled down to the business of tracking stolen shipments of fuel, as well as uncovering false-bottomed fuel tanks where hundreds of gallons could be secreted away.

At first, Carter had worried constantly that he would be spotted by one of the longshoremen with whom he had worked in his days as an undercover detective. He took the same precautions as he had done when he was working undercover, renting out three different rooms in town and never sleeping at the same one more than three nights in a row. Other times, he slept on a canvas cot in the office, a loaded pistol lying on the floor beside him. He took most of his meals at a little diner called Pavel’s. It was wedged between a laundry and a cobbler’s down on 12th Street, only a short walk from the docks. Pavel, an old Russian with watery blue eyes whose wrinkled forehead made him look as if he were always just about to sneeze, made pastrami and sauerkraut sandwiches, matzo ball soup and gravlax salmon marinated in lemon juice, pepper and dill, which he sliced paper-thin and served on pumpernickel bread.

As time passed, Carter slowly began to relax. His new work rarely brought him into direct contact with the longshoremen. This, combined with the shifting nature of the crews, many of whom had been drafted or enlisted, and others who were constantly being shuttled around to different dock sites, allowed him to avoid being recognised.

They made very few actual arrests, since those whose task it had been to transport the stolen fuel usually bolted, leaving both trucks and fuel behind. It was Palladino who taught Carter not to bother chasing down the runners.

‘Those guys are the smallest fish in the pond,’ he told Carter. ‘Even if you catch them, there’s nothing they can tell you that’s of any use because they simply don’t have the information. And they’re easily replaced. Better to let them go and have them explain to their bosses why they lost a whole shipment of gasoline, not to mention a five-ton truck. Believe me, by the time their bosses are done with them, they’ll wish they’d surrendered to us.’

Even though Carter and Palladino recovered an average of five thousand gallons of stolen gasoline a week and prevented the theft of at least that much again, the problem continued to grow. Two years after Pearl Harbor, although the proportion of stolen fuel remained at 10 per cent, the overall consumption had skyrocketed after the Allied invasion of France and the amount of the loss stood at 2.5 million gallons per day, nationwide.

Against this tide of thieving, the question of whether these two men were doing enough good to justify their existences remained a mystery to them. They were never brought in for review, never received promotions or letters of commendation or of reprimand. Carter began to wonder if they might, somehow, have been forgotten. Until someone came along to tell them otherwise, however, they continued with the task they had been given. For a while, at least, it seemed as if their partnership might last until the Office of Price Administration vanished back into the bureaucratic haze from which it had emerged.

But that all changed one afternoon in the autumn of 1944.

They were down at the docks sitting in their V8 Packard cruiser, which was parked in an alleyway between two warehouses. A fuel barge had just arrived at Elizabeth port after a long journey up from Corpus Christi, Texas. According to the bills of lading filed with the port authority, the cargo was supposed to be transported to a refinery in Newark by three fuel trucks but, on the day of the transfer, four fuel trucks arrived.

It took several hours for the fuel to be unloaded, during which time Carter and Palladino sat in the car in the alleyway, hearing the wind moan through the broken windowpanes high up in the dust-smeared skylights of the corrugated iron sheds, their grey sides all tattooed with rust.

Finally, the trucks departed and, with Palladino driving, the two men slipped in behind the convoy, which was heading for the main road out of town.

Just before the trucks emerged from the tangle of roads that snaked across the docklands, one of them pulled out of the line and made its way towards an area of swamp known as the Meadowlands, where fields of tall bulrushes formed a shifting screen from everything but planes flying overhead.

The truck appeared to be heading towards a warehouse normally used for the storage of oxygen cylinders used in oxyacetylene welding, which required it to be set well apart from any other building due to the risk of explosion.

At a curve on the long, straight stretch of the potholed road, Palladino pulled in front of the truck and brought it to a stop. Then both men got out, carrying their guns.

The driver jumped down, wild-eyed and ready to bolt into the rustling thickets of bulrushes. But suddenly he stopped and stared at Carter. ‘Nathan?’ he said.

Carter felt his heart slam into his rib cage. He had almost managed to persuade himself that this day would never come.

‘It’s me,’ said the man. ‘Johnny Shreve. We worked the South Pier together back in thirty-nine. I figured you must have been called up. Jesus!’ said Shreve, his voice nearly falsetto with relief. ‘I thought you were police.’

Before Carter could think of what to say, Palladino burst out laughing. ‘I guess that spooked you!’ he said.

Shreve laughed too. ‘I’ll say it did.’

Palladino holstered his gun. ‘It’s a misunderstanding is all. We just got our wires crossed. No harm done though, right?’

‘Sure,’ Shreve assured him. ‘It’s no problem. I guess I’ll just be on my way, if that’s all right with you.’

‘Of course, and so will we.’ Palladino turned to Carter. ‘Why don’t you go turn the car around?’

Carter wondered what Palladino was playing at, but he did as he was told and started walking for the car.

Shreve lifted one hand in farewell. ‘So long, Nathan,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you around.’

Carter waved goodbye and climbed into the Packard. The road was narrow at the curve and the way ahead was blocked by the fuel truck, so Carter had to reverse around the bend. Then he wrestled with the wheel, knocking the gears back and forth from forward to reverse, before he finally had the car facing back the way they’d come. He had just brought the car to a stop when Palladino came running around the curve. He opened the passenger side door and jumped in. ‘Drive,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Carter.

‘Just drive!’ Palladino commanded.

Carter slammed the Packard in gear and headed back towards the docks. Sunlight flickered off the windshield, as if someone were flashing a knife in front of his face. He waited for Palladino to explain what was happening, but the man said nothing at all.

They had been underway less than a minute when Carter saw a flash in the rear-view mirror and then he felt a tremor pass through him. He turned to see a ball of orange flame capped with thick black smoke rise, boiling, from the sea of rushes and unravel into the sky.

‘Don’t slow down,’ said Palladino.

Carter glanced across at him. ‘What have you done?’ he asked.

‘I stopped you from getting killed,’ said Palladino. ‘That’s what. You just got made. Your cover was blown. I did the only thing that could be done. The third rule isn’t just words. It’s the thing that will keep you alive.’

‘I never asked you for that.’

‘No,’ replied Palladino, ‘but your father did.’

‘What’s my father got to do with it?’ demanded Carter.

‘Kid, do you know why I came out of retirement?’

‘Because of the war, you told me.’

‘I lied about that. It’s because your father asked me to. I served alongside him for twenty years. You didn’t know that, did you?’

‘No,’ admitted Carter. ‘He didn’t talk much about work, or anyone he worked with.’

‘Well, knowing your father, that doesn’t surprise me one bit. But he told me to look after you and that’s what I’ve been doing all this time. How long do you think you would have lasted if the word had gotten out that you were working for the government?’

‘What did you do to that guy?’

‘What guy?’ asked Palladino. ‘There was no guy, and we were never here.’

The next morning, Carter was sitting on a round-topped stool at the counter at Pavel’s, eating a bagel with butter and a slice of tomato, when the door opened and a tall man in the faded pea green trench coat of a US Army officer entered the diner. Aside from Pavel, who was sitting by the register reading the New York Post, Carter had been the only person there. It was raining and, judging by the amount of water that had sunk into the stranger’s clothes, he had come quite a distance to get there.

The officer made no effort to remove his coat. Instead, he fixed his eyes on Carter. ‘You’re not an easy man to find,’ he said.

Before Carter could reply, the expression on the officer’s face suddenly changed. Slowly, he spread his hands out to the sides. ‘Take it easy,’ he said.

‘I’m not pointing a gun at you,’ said Carter.

‘No,’ replied the officer, ‘but he is.’ And then he nodded towards the cash register, where Pavel stood with a shotgun, its double barrels sawn off to the length of a man’s forearm.

‘Now how about you lower that old blunderbuss?’ asked the officer. ‘It looks like it could go off by itself.’

‘It might,’ said Pavel, ‘and my fingers are shaky these days.’ The gun stayed where it was, aimed at the officer’s head.

‘Who are you?’ asked Carter.

‘My name,’ said the man, ‘is Douglas Tate, and I am a captain in the Special Task Force division of the Military Police.’

Carter assumed that this must have something to do with what had happened out in the Meadowlands the day before. He had no idea what to do or what to say. Palladino’s voice kept repeating in his head◦– We were never here. We were never here.

‘And what do you want with my friend?’ asked Pavel.

‘To let him know that he has been relieved of his duties with the Office of Price Administration and that, effective immediately, he is being transferred to the US Army.’

‘What about Palladino?’ asked Carter.

‘Who?’

‘My partner.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Tate. ‘According to our records, you worked alone.’ Slowly, Captain Tate reached towards his chest and paused. ‘If I may?’ he asked the pug-faced old Russian.

Pavel made a grumbling sound in his throat, which the officer took to mean he could proceed.

Tate slid his hand beneath the double-breasted fold of his trench coat and removed a manila envelope. He stepped over to Carter, moving with the careful stride of a man setting out upon a frozen pond with no idea whether the ice was thick enough.

Carter reached out and took hold of the envelope.

Tate raised his hands again and stepped back.

At this moment, Pavel sighed and set the gun down on the counter. ‘I have decided, for the moment, not to kill you,’ he said.

‘For which I am eternally grateful,’ said the captain, lowering his hands. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of Lucky Strikes, its wartime wrapper olive green instead of peacetime white. Then he lit the cigarette with a black-painted Zippo lighter and, as the lid of the lighter flipped shut with the particular clunk-switch sound that only Zippos made, Carter noticed that the man’s fingers were trembling.

‘What does the army want with me?’ asked Carter.

‘Oh, it will be the same job, more or less.’ Tate picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. ‘We just need you to do it someplace else.’

‘Some place like where?’ he asked.

Tate pulled hard upon the cigarette until the end of it crackled and glowed. He spoke as he exhaled. ‘How do you feel about Belgium?’ he asked.