Restless

9. Don Carlos

'PEOPLE WILL THINK WE'RE having an affair,' Bobbie York said. 'All these impromptu visits. I'm not complaining. I'll be very discreet.'

'Thank you, Bobbie,' I said, refusing to participate in his banter. 'You are my supervisor, after all. I'm supposed to come to you for advice.'

'Yes, yes, yes. Of course you are. But how can I advise someone as capable as you?'

I had postponed Bérangère's tutorial so I could see Bobbie in the morning. I didn't want to sit in his rooms as he plied me with whisky again.

'I need to talk to somebody who can tell me about the British Security Services in World War Two. MI5, MI6 – that sort of thing. SIS, SOE, BSC – you know.'

'Yeeesss,' Bobbie said. 'Not my strong point. I sense Lord Mansfield has bitten.'

Bobbie was no fool, however hard he strove to seem like an amiable one.

'He has,' I said. 'I'm to meet him on Friday – at his club. I just feel I need to be a bit more clued-up.'

'My, what drama. You've got to tell me all about this one day, Ruth, I insist. It seems splendidly cloak-and-dagger.'

'I will,' I said. 'I promise. I'm a bit in the dark myself, to tell the truth. As soon as I know I'll fill you in.'

Bobbie went to his desk and searched through some papers.

'One of the very few advantages of living in Oxford,' he said, 'is that there is an expert on just about every subject in the world, sitting on your doorstep. From medieval astrolabes to particle accelerators – we can usually serve one up. Ah, here's the man. Fellow of All Souls called Timothy Thoms.'

'Timothy Thoms?'

'Yes. Thoms spelt with an "h". I know he sounds like a character in a children's book or some harassed clerk in Dickens but he's actually a hundred times cleverer than I am. Mind you – so are you. So you and Timothy Thoms should get along like the proverbial conflagrating house. There: Dr T.C.L. Thoms. I've met him a couple of times. Agreeable fellow. I shall procure you a meeting.' He reached for his telephone.

Bobbie arranged for me to see Dr Thoms two days later at the end of the afternoon. I deposited Jochen with Veronica and Avril and I went into All Souls and was directed to Dr Thoms's staircase. The afternoon was sultry, oppressive and threatening, the sun seemed sulphurously hazed, producing an odd yellow light in the air that amplified the yellow in the stones of the college walls and I wondered for a moment – prayed for a moment – that it would storm. The grass in the quadrangle was the colour of desert sand.

I knocked on Dr Thoms's door and it was opened by a burly young man in jeans and a T-shirt – in his late twenties, I would have said – who had a shock of curly brown hair tumbling to his shoulders and an almost painfully neatly trimmed beard, all angles and hard edges.

'Ruth Gilmartin,' I said. 'I've come to meet Dr Thoms.'

'You've found him. Come in.' He had a strong Yorkshire or Lancashire accent – I couldn't tell them apart – 'Coom in' he had said.

We sat down in his study and I refused his offer of tea or coffee. I noticed he had a computer with a screen like a television on his desk. Bobbie had told me that Thoms had written his doctorate on Admiral Canaris and MI5 penetration of the Abwehr in World War Two. He was now writing a 'vast book' for 'vast sums of money' on the history of the British Secret Service from 1909 to the present day. 'I think he's your man,' Bobbie had said, rather pleased with his efficiency.

Thoms asked me how he could help me and so I started to tell him, in the most circumspect and vague terms I could manage, given my limited knowledge of the subject. I said I was going to interview a man who had been fairly high up in the Secret Intelligence Service during the war. I just needed some background information, particularly about what was going on in America in 1940-1, before Pearl Harbor.

Thoms made no effort to conceal his quickening interest.

'Really,' he said. 'So he was high up in the British Security Coordination.'

'Yes,' I said. 'But I get the impression he was something of a freelance – had his own small operation.'

Thoms looked more intrigued. 'There were a few of them – irregulars – but they were all reeled in as the war went on.'

'I have a source who worked for this man.'

'Reliable?'

'Yes. This source worked for him in Belgium and then in America.'

'I see,' Thoms said, impressed, looking at me with some fascination. 'This source of yours could be sitting on a goldmine.'

'What do you mean?'

'He could make a fortune if he told his story.'

He. Interesting, I thought – let's keep him a he. And I had never thought of money, either.

'Do you know about the Prenslo Incident?' I asked.

'Yes. It was a disaster, blew everything wide open.'

'This source was there.'

Thoms said nothing – only nodded several times. His excitement was palpable.

'Have you heard of an organisation called AAS Ltd?' I asked.

'No.'

'Does the name "Mr X" help you identify anyone?'

'No.'

'Transoceanic Press?'

'No.'

'Do you know who "C" was in 1941?'

'Yes, of course,' he said. 'These names are beginning to come out now – now the whole Enigma/Bletchley Park secret is exposed. Old agents are talking – or talking so you can read between the lines. But,' he leant forward, 'this is what is fascinating – and it makes me sweat a little, to be completely honest – as to what SIS was really doing in the United States in the early days – what the BSC was doing in their name – is the greyest of grey areas. Nobody wants to talk about that. Your source is the first one I've ever heard of – from an agent in the field.'

'It's a stroke of luck,' I said carefully.

'Can I meet your source?'

'No, I'm afraid not.'

'Because I have about a million questions, as you can imagine.' There was a strange light in his eye – the light of the scholar-hunter who has smelt fresh spoor, who knows there is an unblazed trail out there.

'What I might do,' I offered, cautiously, 'is write some of it down, in broad outline, see if it made any sense to you.'

'Great. Happy to oblige,' he said, and leant back in his seat as if, for the first time, he were just taking in the fact that I was, for example, a member of the female sex, and not simply a new mine of exclusive information.

'Fancy going to the pub for a drink?' he said.

We crossed the High and went to a small pub in a lane near Oriel and he gave me a potted synopsis of SIS and BSC and the pre-Pearl Harbor operations as far as he understood them and I began to understand something of the context for my mother's particular adventure. Thoms spoke fluently and with some passion about this covert world with its interconnecting lines of duplicity – effectively a whole British security and intelligence apparatus right in the middle of Manhattan, hundreds of agents all striving to persuade America to join the war in Europe despite the express and steadfast objections of the majority of the population of the United States.

'Astonishing, really, when you come to think of it. Unparalleled…' He stopped suddenly. 'Why are you looking at me like that?' he asked, a bit discomfited.

'Do you want an honest answer?'

'Yes, please.'

'I can't decide whether the hair doesn't go with the beard or the beard doesn't go with the hair.'

He laughed: he seemed almost pleased by my bluntness.

'I don't usually have a beard, actually. But I've grown it for a role.'

'A role?'

'In Don Carlos. I'm playing a Spanish nobleman called Rodrigo. It's an opera.'

'Yeah. That Verdi bloke, innit? You can obviously sing, then.'

'It's an amateur company,' he explained. 'We're doing three performances at the Playhouse. Want to come and see it?'

'As long as I can get a baby-sitter,' I said. That usually scared them off. Not Thoms, though, and I began to sense Thoms's interest in me might extend further than any secrets I possessed about the British Security Coordination.

'I take it you're not married,' he said.

'That's right.'

'How old's the kid?'

'Five.'

'Bring him along. You're never too young to start going to the opera.'

'Maybe I will,' I said.

We chatted a bit more and I said I'd call him when I had my summary complete – I was still waiting for more information. I left him in the pub and wandered down the High Street to where I'd parked my car. Some students, wearing gowns and carrying champagne bottles, burst out of University College, singing a song with a nonsensical refrain. They capered off down the street, whooping and laughing. Exams over, I thought, term nearly finished and a hot summer of freedom ahead. Suddenly I felt ridiculously old, remembering my own post-exam euphoria and celebrations – an aeon ago, it seemed – and the thought depressed me for the usual reasons. When I took my final exams and celebrated their conclusion my father had been alive; he died three days before I had my results – and so he never learned that his daughter had got a first. As I made for my car, I found myself thinking about him in that last month of his life, that summer – six years ago, already. He had looked well, my unchanging Dad, he wasn't unwell, he wasn't old, but in those final weeks of his life he had started behaving oddly. One afternoon he dug up a whole row of new potatoes, five yards' worth, tens and tens of pounds. Why did you do that, Sean? I remember my mother asking. I just wanted to see if they were ready, he said. Then he cut down and burned on a bonfire a ten-foot lime sapling he'd planted the year before. Why, Dad? I just couldn't bear the thought of it growing, was his simple, baffling reply. Most strange, though, was a compulsion he developed in what was to be his last week on earth, for switching out electric lights in the house. He would patrol the rooms, upstairs and down, looking for a burning light bulb and extinguish it. I'd leave the library to make a cup of tea and come back to find it in darkness. I caught him waiting to slip into rooms we were about to vacate, poised to make sure the lights went off within seconds of their being no longer required. It began to drive me and my mother mad. I remember shouting at him once: what the hell's going on? And he replied with unusual meekness – it just seems a terrible waste, Ruth, an awful waste of precious electricity.

I now think he knew that he was soon going to die but the message had somehow become scrambled or unintelligible to him. We are animals, after all, and I believe our old animal instincts lurk deep inside us. Animals seem to be able to read the signals – perhaps our big, super-intelligent brains can't bear to decipher them. I'm sure now my father's body was somehow subtly alerting him to the impending shutdown, the final systems malfunction, but he was confused. Two days after I had shouted at him about the lights he collapsed and died in the garden after lunch. He was deadheading roses – nothing strenuous – and died immediately, we were informed, a fact that consoled me, but I still hated to dwell on his few, bewildered, frightened weeks of timor mortis.

I unlocked my car and sat down behind the wheel, feeling blue, missing him badly all of a sudden, wondering what he would have made of my mother's, his wife's, astounding revelations. Of course, it would have all been different if he'd been alive – a pointless hypothesis, then – and so, to move my mind away from this depressing subject I tried to imagine Timothy Thoms without his hidalgo 's beard. 'Rodrigo' Thoms. I liked that better. Perhaps I would call him Rodrigo.

New Mexico . 1941

EVA DELECTORSKAYA STEPPED QUICKLY off the train at Albuquerque 's Santa Fe station. It was eight o'clock in the evening and she was arriving a day later than she had planned – but better to be sure and safe. She watched the passengers disembark – a dozen or so – and then waited until the train pulled out, heading for El Paso. There was no sign of the two crows she had lost in Denver. All the same, she walked a couple of blocks around the station, checking, and, being shadow-free, went into the first hotel she found – The Commercial – and paid six dollars in advance for a single room, three nights. Her room was small, could have been cleaner, had a fine view of an air shaft, but it would do. She left her suitcase there, walked back to the station and told a taxi driver to take her to the Hotel de Vargas, her original destination and where she was due to meet her first contact. The de Vargas proved to be ten minutes away in the business district but after the scare in Denver she needed a bolt-hole. One town: two hotels – standard Lyne training.

The de Vargas lived up to its pretentious name. It was over-decorated, had a hundred rooms and a cocktail lounge. She put a wedding ring on her finger before she checked in and explained to the receptionist that her luggage was lost in Chicago and the railway would be sending it on. No problem, Mrs Dalton, the receptionist said, we'll be sure to let you know the moment it arrives. Her room looked out over a small faux-Pueblo courtyard with a pattering fountain. She freshened up and went down to the cocktail lounge, dark and virtually empty, and ordered a Tom Collins from a plump waitress in a short orange dress. Eva wasn't happy, her brain was working too hard. She nibbled peanuts and drank her liquor and wondered what was the best thing to do.

She had left New York and travelled to Chicago, where she spent a night, deliberately not making her connecting train to Kansas City. She saw the trajectory of her journey across America as a thrown stone, heading westwards, slowly falling on New Mexico. The next day she travelled to Kansas City, missed another connection to Denver and waited three hours in the station for the next. She bought a newspaper and found some items on the war on page nine. The Germans were closing in on Moscow but winter was impeding their advance – as for what might be going on in England she could find nothing. On the next section of her journey, as the train was approaching Denver, she did a routine walk through the coaches. She spotted the crows in the observation platform. They were sitting together, a silly, slack mistake: if they'd been apart she might not have noticed them but she had seen those two charcoal-grey suits in Chicago as well as the two ties, one burnt-amber, one maroon. The maroon tie had a diamond-patterned weave to it that reminded her of a tie she had once given to Kolia as a Christmas present – he wore it with a pale blue shirt, she remembered. She had made him promise that it would be his 'favourite' tie and he had solemnly promised – the tie of ties, he had said, how can I ever thank you? trying to keep his face serious. That's how she had remembered the crows. There was a young man with an undershot lantern-jaw and an older man with greying hair and a moustache. She walked by them and sat down looking out at the prairies rolling by. In the window's reflection she saw them separate immediately: Lantern-Jaw went downstairs, Moustache pretended to read his newspaper.

From Denver she had planned to go straight on to Santa Fe and Albuquerque but clearly now she had shadows she had to lose them. Not for the first time she was grateful for what she had learned in Lyne: broken journeys always make it easier to spot the shadow. Nobody would ever travel as she had done – so coincidence was ruled out. It wouldn't be difficult to get rid of them, she thought – they were either inept or complacent, or both.

At Denver Station she bought a locker, left her suitcase in it, and then walked out into the city and went into the first multistorey department store she encountered. She looked around, browsing, moving up through the floors until she found what she wanted: an elevator close to a stairway on the third floor. She made her way slowly back to the first floor, buying a lipstick and compact on the way. At the elevator she dithered, letting others go by her as she scrutinised the store directory, then slipped in at the last minute. Moustache had been hovering but was too far away. 'Five, please,' she said to the operator but stepped out on three. She waited behind a rack of dresses by the doorway. Seconds later Moustache and Lantern-Jaw thundered up the stairs, quickly scanned the floor, and, not seeing her, and spotting that the lift was still going up, bolted out again. Eva was down the stairs and out on the street a minute later. She doubled back and jinked around but they were gone. She collected her suitcase and took a bus to Colorado Springs, four stops down the line to Santa Fe and spent a night there in a hotel opposite the station.

That evening she called in from a pay phone in the lobby. She let it ring three times, hung up, called again, hung up after the first ring and called once more. She suddenly wanted to hear Romer's voice.

'Transoceanic. How can I help you?' It was Morris Devereux. She checked her disappointment, angry with herself at being disappointed it wasn't Romer.

'You know the party I went to.'

'Yes.'

'There were two uninvited guests.'

'Unusual. Any idea who they were?'

'Local crows, I would say.'

'Even more unusual. Are you sure?'

'I'm sure. I've lost them anyway. Can I speak to the boss?'

'I'm afraid not. The boss has gone home.'

'Home?' This meant England. 'A bit sudden.'

'Yes.'

'I was wondering what I should do.'

'If you're happy, I would proceed as normal.'

'All right. Bye.'

She hung up. It was illogical but for some reason she felt more insecure knowing that Romer had been called away. Proceed as normal as long as you're happy. There was no reason not to, she supposed. Standard operating procedure. She wondered who the two men were – FBI? Romer had said the FBI were growing worried at the size and scale of the British presence. Perhaps this was the first sign of penetration… All the same, she changed trains twice more on the way to Albuquerque, making slow progress.

She sighed and ordered another cocktail from the waitress. A man came up to her and asked if he could join her but he didn't use the passwords, just wanting to pick her up. She said she was on her honeymoon, waiting for her husband and he wandered away looking for more promising material. She finished her drink and went to bed where, try as she might to calm herself, she slept badly.

The next day she wandered around the old town, went into a church on the plaza and took a stroll through Rio Grande Park under the tall Cottonwood trees and looked out at the broad turbid river and the hazy mauve mountains to the west and, as she frequently did, marvelled that she should find herself here, at this stage of her life, in this town, at this time. She lunched at the de Vargas and, as she passed through the lobby afterwards, the desk clerk suggested she might appreciate a tour of the university, telling her that the library was 'magnificent'. She said she'd save it for another day. Instead she took a taxi to her other hotel and lay on her hard bed, reading a novel – The Hollow Mountain by Sam M. Goodforth – with dogged concentration throughout the rest of the afternoon.

She was back in a booth in the cocktail lounge at six, enjoying a dry Martini, when a man slipped into the seat opposite.

'Hi, glad to see you looking so well.' He had a plump, pasty face and his tie had grease stains on it. He had a local newspaper in his hand and was wearing a frayed straw trilby that he didn't remove.

'I just had a two-week vacation,' she said.

'Go to the mountains?'

'I prefer the seaside.'

So far so good, she thought. Then said, 'Have you anything for me?'

He pointedly placed the newspaper on the seat beside him. Very BSC, she thought, we love newspaper drops – anyone can carry a newspaper. Keep it simple.

'Go to Las Cruces. A man called Raul will contact you. The Alamogordo Inn.'

'How long am I meant to stay there?'

'Until Raul shows up. Nice talking to you.' He slipped out of the booth and was gone. She reached over and picked up the newspaper. Inside was a brown envelope sealed with sticky tape. She went up to her room and sat and looked at it for ten minutes then she tore it open to find a map of Mexico with the printed title: LUFTVERKEHRSNETZ VON MEXIKO. HAUPTLINEN.

She called Transoceanic.

'Sage, hello.' It was Angus Woolf – she was surprised to hear his voice.

'Hello. Moonlighting?'

'Sort of,' he said. 'How's the party going?'

'Interesting. I've made contact but my gift is particularly intriguing. Inferior material, I would say.'

'I'd better call the manager.'

Devereux came on the line. 'Inferior?'

'Not that you'd spot it immediately but it wouldn't take you long.'

The map looked professional and official and was printed in black and white and two colours, blue and red. Mexico was divided up into four districts – Gau 1, Gau 2, Gau 3 and 4 – and blue lines between red cities indicated air routes; Mexico City to Monterrey and Torreón; Guadalauara to Chihuahua and so on. Most unusual were lines extending beyond Mexico 's boundaries: one south 'für Panama ', and two north 'für San Antonio, Texas ' and another, 'für Miami, Florida '. The implication, Eva thought at once, was too clear – where was the subtlety? But more worrying too were the errors; HAUPTLINEN should have been HAUPTLINIEN, and 'für' in the sense of 'to' was not correct either – it should have been 'nach' – 'nach Miami, Florida '. To her eyes the positive first impression was quickly undermined and subverted by these factors. The spelling mistakes might just be explained by a compositor who didn't speak German (perhaps the map had been printed in Mexico) but the mistakes plus the territorial ambitions enshrined in the air routes seemed too much to her – trying too hard to get the message across.

'Are you sure this is our product?' she asked Devereux.

'Yes, as far as I know.'

'Will you tell the boss what I think and I'll call back later.'

'Are you going to proceed?' he asked.

'With due caution.'

'Where are you going?'

'A place called Las Cruces,' she said instantly, then thinking: why am I being so honest? Too late now.

She hung up, went to the front desk and asked where she could hire a car.

The road to Las Cruces was due south on Highway 85, some 220 miles or so on the old Camino Real that followed the Rio Grande valley all the way to Mexico. It was two-lane tarmacadam most of the way, with some sections in concrete on which she made good, steady going, driving a tan-coloured Cadillac touring car with a retractable roof that she did not bother to retract. She barely looked at the scenery as she drove south but was aware, all the same, of the rugged mountain ranges to the east and west, the ranchitos with their melon and corn patches clustered around the river and, here and there, she saw from the road the rocky stretches of desert and the lava beds of the fabled jornada del muerte - beyond the river valley the land was hard and arid.

She arrived in Las Cruces in the late afternoon and drove down the main street, looking for the Alamogordo Inn. These small towns already seemed familiar to her having driven through some half-dozen or so identical ones on her journey south: Los Lunas, Socorro, Hatch – they all blended into a homogenous image of New Mexican provinciality. After the adobe ranch houses came the gas stations and the auto shops, then the neat suburbs on the outskirts, then the freight yards, the grain silos and the flour mills. Each town had its wide main street with its garish shop-fronts and neon advertisements, its awnings and shaded walkways, dusty cars parked at an angle on both verges of the road. Las Cruces looked no different: there was the Woolworths, a jeweller with a winking plastic gem the size of a football, signs for Florsheim Shoes, Coca-Cola, Liberty Furniture, the drugstore, the bank and, at the end of the street, opposite a small park with a stand of shady cottonwoods, the plain concrete façade of the Alamogordo Inn.

She parked in the lot at the back and went into the lobby. A couple of roof fans stirred the air, there was a cracked-leather, three-seater sofa and worn Indian rugs on the wooden floor. A cobwebbed cactus stood in a pot of sand studded with cigarette butts, below a sign that said: 'Positively no loitering. Electric light in every room'. The desk clerk, a young man with a weak chin and a shirt collar three sizes too big for his neck looked at her curiously as she asked for a room.

'You sure you want this hotel?' he asked, meekly. 'There are much nicer ones just out of town.'

'I'm quite happy, thank you,' she said. 'Where can I get a bite to eat?'

Turn right out the front door for a restaurant, turn left for a diner, he said. She chose the diner and ordered a hamburger. The place was empty: two grey-haired ladies manned the soda fountain and an Indian with a sternly handsome, melancholic face swept the floor. Eva ate her burger and drank her Coca-Cola. She experienced a strange form of inertia, an almost palpable heaviness, as if the world had stopped turning and only the swish of the Indian's broom on the cement floor was marking the passage of time. Somewhere in a back room jazz was playing on the radio and Eva thought: what am I doing here? What particular destiny am I playing out? She felt she could sit on here in this diner in Las Cruces for all eternity – the Indian man would be sweeping the floor, her hamburger would remain half eaten, the thin jazz would continue to play. She allowed the mood to linger, steeping herself in it, finding it oddly calming, this late-afternoon stasis, knowing that whatever she did next would set a new chain of events in motion that would be out of her control. Better to savour these few moments of stillness where apathy ruled unchallenged.

She went to the diner pay phone, in a small booth by some shelves stacked with tins, and called Transoceanic. Devereux answered.

'Can I speak to the boss?' she asked.

'Alas, no. But I spoke to him yesterday evening.'

'And what did he say?' For some reason Eva felt sure that Romer was in the room with Devereux – then she dismissed the idea as absurd.

'He says it's all up to you. It's your party. If you want to leave – leave. If you want to change the music – do so. Trust your instincts, he said.'

'You told him what I thought about my gift.'

'Yes, he's checked. It's our product, so they must want it out there.'

She hung up, thinking hard. So: everything was up to her. She walked slowly back to the Alamogordo, keeping to the shady side of the street. A large truck went by loaded with massive tree trunks followed by a rather smart red coupe with a man and a woman in the front seat. She stopped and looked behind her: some kids stood chatting to a girl on a bicycle. But she had the strangest feeling that she was being shadowed – which was crazy, she knew. She went and sat in the small park for a few minutes and read her guidebook to drive these demons from her mind. Las Cruces – 'The Crosses' – so called after the massacre by local Apaches of a freight party in the eighteenth century en route to Chihuahua and the tall crosses that were erected over their subsequent graves. She hoped it wasn't a bad omen.

The small red coupe passed by again: no man – the woman at the wheel.

No: she was being jumpy, naïve, unprofessional. If she was worried there were procedures she could follow. It was her party. Use your instincts, Romer had said. All right – she would.

She went back to the Alamogordo and drove her car out on the Mesa Road towards the state college and found the new motel her guidebook had promised – the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She rented a cabin at the end of a wooden walkway and hid the map in the back of the wardrobe, behind a panel that she eased away with her nail file. The hotel was only a year old, the bellhop told her as he led her to her cabin. It smelt new: the odour of creosote, putty and woodshavings seemed to linger in her room. The cabin was clean and modern, its furniture pale and undecorated. A semi-abstract painting of a Pueblo village hung above the desk, which was fitted out with a bowl of cellophane-wrapped fruit, a tiny yucca in a terracotta pot and a folding blotter and writing kit of paper, envelopes, postcards and half a dozen monogrammed pencils. Everything is complimentary, the bellhop told her, with our compliments. She professed herself very pleased with the arrangement. When she was alone again she took 2,000 dollars out of the envelope and stashed the rest with the map.

She drove back to Las Cruces, parked behind the Alamogordo and went into the lobby. A man was sitting on the sofa, wearing a pale blue cotton suit. He had white blond hair and an unusually pink face – an almost albino she thought – with his pale blue suit he looked like a big baby.

'Hi,' he said, standing up. 'Good to see you looking so well.'

'I just had a two-week vacation.'

'Go to the mountains?'

'I prefer the seaside.'

He offered his hand and she shook it. He had a pleasant, husky voice.

'I'm Raul.' He turned to the desk clerk. 'Hey, sonny, can we get a drink here?'

'No.'

They walked outside and looked vainly for a bar for five minutes.

'I got to get some beer,' he said. He went into a liquor store and came out with a can of beer in a brown paper bag. They walked back to the park and sat on a bench under the cotton-wood trees while Raul opened his beer with a can opener that he had in his pocket and drank it in great draughts, not removing the can from the bag. I will always remember this small park in Las Cruces, Eva thought.

'Sorry,' he said, letting air escape from his belly with a whispery wheeze. 'I was dying of thirst.' Eva noticed his voice was markedly less husky. 'Water doesn't work for me,' he added by way of explanation.

'There's been a problem,' Eva said. 'A delay.'

'Oh yeah?' He looked suddenly shifty, displeased. 'Nobody told me nothing.' He stood up, walked to the trashcan and dumped his beer-bag. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked around as if he were being set up in some way.

'I've got to come back next week,' she said. 'They told me to give you this in the meantime.'

She opened her handbag and let him see the money. He came over quickly and sat beside her. She slipped him the wad of notes.

'Two thousand. The rest next week.'

'Yeah?' He couldn't keep the surprise and delight off his face. He wasn't expecting money, she thought: what's happening here?

Raul stuffed the money in his jacket pocket.

'When next week?' he said.

'You'll be contacted.'

'Okay,' he said, standing up again. 'See ya.' He sauntered away. Eva waited five minutes, still checking for shadows. She walked up the main street and went into Woolworths, where she bought a pack of tissues. She turned down a narrow lane between the bank and a realtor's and immediately retraced her steps back up it at speed. Nothing. She did a few other manoeuvres, finally convincing herself that no one had or could have been tailing her, before going back to the Alamogordo and checking out – no refunds, sorry.

She drove back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. It was dusk now and the setting sun was striking the peaks of the mountains to the east, turning them a dark-fissured, dramatic orange. Tomorrow she would return to Albuquerque and catch a plane to Dallas and make her way home from there – the sooner the better.

She ate in the hotel restaurant ordering a steak – tough – and creamed spinach – cold – washed down with a bottle of beer ('We don't serve wine, Mam'). There were a few other people in the dining-room, an elderly couple with guides and maps, a plump man who propped his newspaper in front of him and never looked up, and a well-dressed family of Mexicans with two silent, beautifully behaved little girls.

She walked along the walkway towards her cabin, thinking back over her day and wondering if Romer would approve of what her instincts had led her to do. She looked up at the stars and felt the desert air chill on her skin. Somewhere a dog barked. She checked the other cabins routinely before she unlocked her door: no new cars, all accounted for. She turned the key and pushed the door open.

The man was sitting on her bed, his thighs spread wide, his revolver pointing at her face.

'Shut the door,' he said. 'Move over there.' His accent was heavy, Mexican. He rose to his feet, a big burly man with a hanging gut on him. He had a dense wide moustache and his suit was dull green.

She moved across the room as he wagged his gun at her, obeying him, her mind frantic with questions, receiving no answers.

'Where's the map?' he said.

'What? Who?' She thought he had said 'Where's the man?'.

'The map.' He made the 'p' plosive. Spittle flew.

How could he know she had a map?

She noticed that her room and her suitcase had been searched, as her glance flicked about its four corners. Like some super-calculating machine her brain was running through the permutations and the implications of this encounter. It became clear to her almost instantly that she should give the map to this person.

'It's in the cupboard,' she said, walking over to it and hearing him cock his gun.

'I'm unarmed,' she said, gesturing for his permission to go further and then, when he nodded his head, reaching behind the loose partition and removing the map and the remaining 3,000 dollars. She handed them to the Mexican. Something about the way he took them from her, checked them and kept her covered made her think he was a policeman, not a crow. He was used to doing this, he did this all the time; he was very calm. He put the map and the money on the desk.

'Take your clothes off,' he said.

As she undressed she felt sick. No, not this, she thought, please no. She felt a horrible foreboding now: his bulk, his easy professionalism – he wasn't like Raul or the man in Albuquerque – it made her think that she was going to die very soon.

'Okay, stop.' She was down to her brassiere and panties. 'Get dressed.' There was no leering, no prurience.

He went to the window and pulled back the curtain. She heard a car start up some way off and approach the cabin and stop outside. A door slammed and the engine stayed running. There were others, then. She dressed faster than she had ever dressed in her life. She was thinking: don't panic, remember your training, maybe he just wants the map.

'Put the map and your money in the handbag,' he said.

She felt her throat swell and her chest tighten. She was trying not to think what might happen, to stay in the absolute here and now, but she realised the awful implication of what he had just said. It wasn't the map or the money he was after – he was after her: she was the prize.

She walked to the desk.

Why had she refused Romer's offer of a gun? Not that it would have made any difference now. A simple courier's job, he had said. Romer didn't believe in guns or unarmed combat: you have your teeth and your nails, he had said, your animal instincts. She needed more than that to fight this big confident man: she needed a weapon.

She put the map and the 3,000 dollars in her handbag while the Mexican went to the door. He kept her covered, opened the door and glanced outside. She shifted her body. She had one second and she used it.

'Come,' he said, as she was adjusting the combs that held her hair up in a loose chignon. 'Don't bother with that.' He linked arms with her, the snout of his revolver pressed into her side and they walked out to his car. Over at another cabin she could see the little Mexican girls playing on the porch – they paid her and her companion no attention.

He pushed her in and followed her, making her slide over behind the wheel. The headlights were on. There was no sign of the person who had delivered the car.

'Drive,' he said, looping his arm along the back of the front seat, the muzzle of his revolver now pressing into her ribs. She put the car in gear – the shift was on the steering column – and they pulled away slowly from the Mesilla Motor Lodge.

As they left the compound and turned on to the road to Las Cruces she thought he gave a sign – a wave, a thumbs-up – to someone standing in the shadows on the verge under a poplar. She glanced over and she thought she saw two men there, waiting by a parked car with its lights off. It looked like a coupe but it was too dark to tell what colour it was. And then they were past them and he told her to drive through Las Cruces and take Highway 80 heading for the Texas line.

They drove on Highway 80 for about half an hour. Just when she saw the city limits for Berino he told her to turn right on a gravel road sign-posted to Leopold. The road was in bad repair and the car bucked and juddered as she hit the ruts and the ridges, the Mexican's gun banging into her side painfully.

'Slow down,' he said. She cut the speed to about ten miles per hour and after a few minutes he told her to stop.

They were at a sharp bend in the road and the headlights lit up a section of scrub and stony ground crossed by what looked like a deep-shadowed arroyo.

Eva sat there, conscious of the adrenalin surge running through her body. She felt remarkably clear-headed. By any reasonable calculation she would be dead in a minute or two, she realised. Trust your animal instincts. She knew exactly what she had to do.

'Get out of the car,' the Mexican said. 'We're going to meet some people.'

This was a lie, she thought. He just doesn't want me to think this is the end of the road.

She reached for the door latch with her left hand and with her right looped a stray lock of hair that had fallen, back behind her ear. A natural gesture, a womanly reflex.

'Switch the lights off,' he said.

She needed light.

'Listen,' she said, 'I have more money.'

The fingers of her right hand that were in her hair touched the rubber eraser on the Mesilla Motor Lodge pencil that she had slipped in amongst her bunched and gathered folds of hair – one of the half-dozen new, sharpened, complimentary pencils that had been laid out on the blotter beside the notepaper and the postcards. New and newly sharpened with the name Mesilla Motor Lodge, Las Cruces, stamped in gold along their sides. This was the pencil she had picked up and slid into her hair as the Mexican peered briefly out of the door, checking on his car.

'I can get you another ten thousand,' she said. 'Easy. In one hour.'

He chuckled. 'Get out.'

She grabbed the sharp pencil in her hair and stabbed him in the left eye.

The pencil went in smoothly and instantly without resistance, almost to its full six-inch length. The man gave a kind of gasp-inhalation and dropped his gun with a clatter. He tried to raise his trembling hands to his eye as if to draw the pencil out then fell back against the door. The end of the pencil with the rubber eraser stuck out an inch above the punctured jelly of his left eyeball. There was no blood. She knew immediately from his absolute stillness that he was dead.

She switched out the lights and stepped out of the car. She was shivering, but not excessively, telling herself that she had probably been a minute or two from her own death – the moment of life-or-death exchange – she felt no shock, no horror, at what she had done to this man. She forced herself away from that topic and tried to be rational: what now? What next? Run away? Perhaps there was something to be salvaged from this disaster: one step at a time, use your brain, she said to herself – think. Think.

She climbed back into the car and drove it a few yards off the road behind a clump of greasewood bushes and killed the lights. Sitting there in the dark beside the dead Mexican she methodically considered her options. She switched on the interior light above the rear-view mirror and picked up the gun, using her handkerchief to keep her prints off it. She opened his jacket and replaced it in his shoulder holster. There was still no blood from his wound, not even a trickle – just the end of a pencil sticking out of his unblinking eye.

She went through his pockets and found his wallet and his identification: Deputy Inspector Luis de Baca. She also found some money, a letter and a bill of sale from a hardware store in Ciudad Juárez. She put everything back. A Mexican policeman would have been her killer: it made no sense at all. She switched off the light again and carried on thinking: she was safe for a short while, she knew – she could flee back to her friends one way or another now – but tracks had to be covered.

She stepped out of the car again and paced about thinking, planning. There was a sickle moon casting no light and it was getting colder. She hugged her arms to her chest, crouching down at one stage when a truck bumped along the road to Leopold but the sweep of its headlights didn't come close. A plan began to form slowly and she teased it out in her mind, second-guessing, raising objections, considering advantages and disadvantages. She opened the boot of the car and found a can of oil, a rope and a spade. In the dashboard glove compartment was a flashlight, some cigarettes and chewing gum. It seemed to be his own car.

She walked a few paces along the road to Leopold where the corner was and saw, with the flashlight, that the arroyo at the bend was little more than a gulley about twenty feet deep. She started the car, switching on the headlights and drove to the edge, gunning the engine as she left the road, making the wheels spin, scattering gravel. She let the car roll to the very edge of the gulley and put on the handbrake. She made a final check, picked up her bag and stepped out, releasing the handbrake as she did so. The car began to move forward slowly and she ran round the back and pushed. The car toppled over the gulley rim and she listened to the heavy thump and tear of metal as it nosedived to the gulley floor. She heard the windscreen pop out and the shatter of glass.

With the flashlight she picked her way down to the wreck. One headlight was still on and the hood had buckled and sprung open. There was a smell of petrol leaking and the car had canted over forty-five degrees on the passenger side. She was able to wrench open the driver's door and put the gear lever into fourth. Luis de Baca had fallen forward in the descent and smashed his forehead on the dashboard. A small trickle of blood was now running from his eye to his moustache. The moustache filled and began to drip blood on to his shirt. She hauled him over to the driver's side noticing that one of his legs looked broken, skewed at an odd angle. Good, she thought.

She took the map out of her bag and carefully tore a large corner off it, leaving 'LUFTVERK' and the lines for San Antonio and Miami. She put the rest of the map in her bag, then, taking out a pen and spreading the torn corner on the bonnet, wrote notes on it in German: 'Wo befinden sich die Ölreserven für den transatlantischen Verkehr?' and 'Der dritte Gau scheint zu gross zu sein.' In the margin she wrote a small sum adding up some figures: 150,000 plus 35,000 = 185,000 then some meaningless letters and numbers – LBF/3, XPD 77. She smeared the torn corner against de Baca's bloodstained shirt and crumpled it up, then she slipped it under the shoe of his unbroken leg. She put the 3,000 dollars in the glove compartment in the dashboard under a road map and an instruction manual. Then with her handkerchief she wiped down the surfaces and the steering wheel, taking particular care with the gear lever. Finally she heaved de Baca up and propped him against the steering wheel so she could see his face. She knew that what she had to do next would be the hardest but she was so involved in the construction of the accident that she was operating almost automatically, with conscious efficiency. She scattered some windscreen glass over him and snapped off a bent windscreen wiper, tearing away the rubber blade.

She reached for the pencil in his eye and drew it out. It came easily, as if oiled, and with it blood welled up and flowed over the lids. She jammed the end of the windscreen wiper into the wound and stepped backwards. She left the door open and made a final check with the flashlight. Then she picked up her bag, scrambled up the gulley side and walked back along the road towards Highway 80. After about half a mile she left the road and buried the remains of the map, the flashlight and the pencil under a rock. She could see the lights of cars on the highway and the glow of lights from Berdino's main street. She headed off again. She knew what she had to do next: call the police and anonymously report a crashed car in a gulley between the highway and Leopold. A taxi would take her back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She would pay her bill and drive through the night to Albuquerque. She had done everything she could but she could not stop thinking as she walked into a Texaco gas station on the outskirts of Berdino – the truth had to be faced: someone, somehow, had betrayed her.