The Elegant Lie

…

Although many of the skills Carter picked up while working undercover with the police had prepared him well for working under Wilby, there were others he’d had to learn from scratch. The most important of these, Wilby stressed, was the necessity of following agency protocols as soon as he emerged from Langsdorf prison.

The first step on being released had been to make contact with the barber on Zülpicherplatz, who then relayed the message to Bonn station that Carter was now ‘in play’, as Wilby had termed it.

After their initial meeting at the hotel, all future contact was to be initiated with the use of a drop box. This was not actually a box, but a loose brick in a wall in an alley called the Höfergasse, right outside the Cologne central train station. The message was written on a piece of cigarette paper, which would be rolled up and stashed behind the brick. The message contained five numbers, the first being between one and six. Each of these corresponded to one of six pre-arranged meeting places scattered around the city. One was in Vorgebirgs Park in the Raderberg district, just south of the main city centre. Another, on the steps of St Heribert church, was in the Deutz district, on the other side of the river from Cologne. A third was in a meat market on Jennerstrasse in the Ehrenfeld district, in the far north-west corner of the city. For each meeting place, a safety sign had been arranged. A man holding up a sign emblazoned with the words ‘Christ is Risen’ was an indicator that the meeting place had been compromised. Curtains drawn in an apartment that overlooked the cold storage warehouse where the Jennerstrasse meetings took place were also a warning to stay away. The drop box was checked twice a day and the time of the meetings corresponded to the remaining numbers that were written in the message. If the numbers were underlined, the meeting time was p.m.

Although Carter had made use of pre-arranged meeting places when working undercover in New Jersey, these had never involved drop boxes or safety signs. The added security measures came as no surprise to him. He did not have to be told more than once that his life depended on their being used correctly.

Once the protocols had been established, Carter had to memorise them. No written record could be kept.

There was one final message he could send. It consisted of an X with one dot pencilled into each of the four open V-shapes of the letter. This meant that his cover had been blown and that he was on the run. If this happened, he was to make his way to a safe house, located across the river at 106 Nassaustrasse in the Humboldt district. From there, if necessary, he would be smuggled out of the country.

For their first rendezvous using the numbered protocols, Carter chose the steps of St Heribert. Churches made good meeting places because they always had multiple exits and the layout of most provided excellent fields of view.

He chose eight o’clock in the morning, at the height of the rush hour. Joining a multitude of people passing over the Deutzer bridge, he turned right down a long set of stone steps, many of which still showed the marks of shrapnel damage from air raids which had pounded the district. He wandered through the narrow streets◦– Arminiusstrasse, Adolphstrasse, Mathildenstrasse◦– their names whispering themselves inside his skull, until he came to the church. It, too, had been badly damaged in the war, but enough of it still stood or else had been repaired that the structure had not been abandoned.

On his way he glanced in shop windows, studying the reflection of people passing in the street, in case he was being followed. Once or twice, he stopped and tied his shoes, glancing back to see if anyone came to a stop or suddenly changed direction, a sure sign that he had picked up a tail.

But there didn’t seem to be anyone and, as he walked across the city, his nerves were not crackling like static, the way they sometimes did when something was wrong, even if he couldn’t say exactly what it was.

Carter found Wilby sitting on the church steps reading a newspaper, a trilby pulled down over his eyes and a short-stemmed pipe jutting from between his clenched teeth. Before approaching his control officer, Carter looked for a person with a Christ is Risen placard, but there wasn’t anyone around. As he approached the man, Wilby folded the newspaper, stood and walked away.

Carter followed him across the wide Siegburger road and into a narrow park that ran beside the river. They leaned against a railing that overlooked the Rhine. The rush hour had passed and only a few people were left from the throng of pedestrians travelling over the Deutzer bridge. A barge passed by, its engine chugging against the current. A Dutch flag whipped from a post above its wheelhouse.

‘I found you a contact in the army,’ said Wilby, ‘someone who can get what Dasch is looking for. He’s a quartermaster at the base in Oberursel. The base is closing down and he’s responsible for shipping out about a hundred tons of supplies, either back to the States or else to bases that are remaining open. He can get you canned food, medical supplies, furniture. Whatever you want.’

‘How do I get in touch with him?’

‘He married a German woman whose family lives just north of here, near the old botanical garden. They visit once a month or so. His name is Tony Galton. He’ll be at a bar called the Minerva at noon.’ He handed Carter a piece of paper with an address in the Riehl district.

‘How will I know him?’

‘He’s got a tattoo of a cloverleaf on his right hand. He’ll also be in uniform. I told him to wait for an hour, and if you haven’t showed by then he’ll know the meeting’s off.’

‘Does he know who I am?’

Wilby shook his head.

‘Or who he will be working for?’

‘As far as he’s concerned, he’s working for himself.’

‘So he’s really going to steal these things?’

‘If Dasch is going to be convinced, he’ll need to see some results.’

‘Which means you’re asking me to commit an actual crime, not like the imaginary stolen cigarettes that got me thrown in prison.’

‘That’s right,’ said Wilby. ‘This one’s for real, which is why you really don’t want to get caught. If you are arrested, it will be very difficult for us to disentangle you from the local police◦– that is if they don’t shoot you on the spot. It would be a hassle finding somebody to take your place.’

‘You expect me to take comfort in that?’ asked Carter.

‘What I expect,’ replied Wilby, ‘is for you to understand that you are a cog in a machine with many moving parts, and I can protect you, but only as long as you don’t cause the machine to break down. I’ve been doing this job a long time now, and I have had to learn that sometimes you have to sacrifice a cog in order to keep the machine running. It’s not an easy choice, but it is one you have to make.’

‘Jesus, Wilby,’ said Carter, ‘how much blood do you have on your hands?’

‘More than you know,’ he replied, and as he spoke he removed his pipe, teeth clacking on the stem, and gestured with the stem across the fast-flowing, grey-green water towards the once densely populated streets of Rheingasse and Filzengraben, now mostly empty buildings with glassless windows like the eye sockets of skulls and heaps of stone still avalanched among those that had somehow remained intact. ‘Back in the war,’ he said, ‘I flew thirty-five missions in a B-17 and we dropped bombs on this city more than once.

Carter said nothing. He kept his eyes fixed on the ruins, wondering about the people who had once lived there.

‘I know what you think of me,’ said Wilby, ‘but don’t kid yourself. We have more in common than you think.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ said Carter.

‘Where do you think I go at the end of the day?’ asked Wilby. ‘Home to my wife and kids? To my neighbourhood bar, where I drink too much beer and talk sports? To confession every Saturday afternoon?’

‘How should I know? I don’t have any of those things.’

‘And neither do I. That’s my point. On the surface, we have to appear perfectly normal. And we’re good at it. Nobody’s stopping to stare at us as we walk by. We fit right in. At least, that’s how it seems. But underneath, the whole thing is a scaffolding of lies. The only person who is ever going to understand your world is someone who has lived in it themselves. And as for finding anyone to share a life like that’◦– Wilby patted Carter on the back◦– ‘well, all I can say is good luck.’

Wilby walked away, but Carter remained for a little while longer. He leaned against the railing and stared at the river swirling past. Much as Carter hated to admit it, Wilby had been telling the truth. He had known men, and women too, who had worked undercover and whose masks had come apart. More often than not, those people ended up dead, but Carter’s masks had always held together, because he kept in mind the one thing he could never do, and that was fall in love.

There had been two women in his life, and neither one had stayed around for long.

The first had been a police dispatcher. Her name was Gwen. She had a round freckled face, green eyes almost the colour of jade and a soft, unflappable voice which had made her so perfect for her job. As part of his department’s policy for undercover agents, Carter had been forced to ask his supervisor for permission to go out with her. The fact that she was also police made it easy for the supervisor to agree, but that turned out to be the only easy thing in Carter’s relationship with Gwen.

There had been no secrets going in, and it was this which had convinced Carter that things had a chance of working. She knew he worked undercover, and that he could not talk about his work except in the vaguest of terms and usually not even then. She knew he could not say where he had been when he was gone all night or who he had spent time with. The moments when he might have spoken to her even about the littlest of things instead became filled with a silence that only became deeper and more pressurised as time went by.

She started to mistrust the silence, even though she knew the cause of it. Her imagination, which might have tolerated such a crippled shared existence if he had spun for her a skein of believable lies, instead began to prey upon itself.

In the end, it was not lies that broke up what they had, as they break up the lives of many others. Instead, it was simply the absence of truth.

The second woman was named Penny, and he lied to her all the time. His supervisor had summoned Carter in one day and ordered him to begin a relationship. When Carter asked why, the supervisor told him that men who kept to themselves all the time always fell under suspicion, and even more from women than from men. Not having a girlfriend was putting Carter at risk, the supervisor said, and he was given one week to set that straight.

It took him only one day to settle on Penny. Penny acted as a landlord for one of the three buildings where Carter had rented an apartment. Penny didn’t actually own the building, but she collected the rent and oversaw the cleaning crews and all of the repairs. She was a nervous, energetic woman, brash and flirty and pushy, and she made no secret of her affection. Penny had been flirting with Carter ever since he rented the apartment, always asking him why he only stayed there one or two nights a week, and where he was from and what he did for a living and what kind of movies he liked. And to every one of these questions he told her the stories, some of them true, that belonged to the mask he was wearing.

They went out to dinner and ate the food his alter ego would have liked. They saw the movies both of them would have enjoyed if one of them hadn’t been lying. She talked a lot, fast and nervously and with a twang in her voice◦– clipping off the ends of some words and rounding out others as if she had forgotten how they ended◦– that belonged, unmistakably, to the ironbound section of Newark.

One night, as they were walking out of a showing of Drums Along the Mohawk, she stopped on the pavement and turned to look at him. There was a softness in her gaze, which said more than all the rapid-fire chatter with which she had concealed any vulnerability until now.

The next day he broke it off, moved out of the apartment and never went back, not even to that part of town.

When his supervisor called him in to ask what had happened, Carter reached across the desk, took hold of the man by the collar of his shirt, and through clenched teeth and with a lowered voice cursed him with every barbed, daggered word that he could find inside his head, as angry at himself for following the order as he was at the man who had given it.

From then on, Carter stayed on his own, as wary of loving as he was of being loved, because he knew that no camouflaging of his soul, no matter how elaborate and deep, could stand for long against the weight of true affection lived out in the framework of a lie.