“I’m sorry, I thought denial went without saying. Surely no one admits to that here.”
“Surely not. Who is Delphine St.-Simon?”
Hale exhaled so abruptly that it was a grunt. “Have you-detained her?” he asked with sudden hope. Perhaps the Air France clerk had been wrong in saying that she had caught the earlier flight.
Johns’s right eyebrow was arched. “No, she was off to Istanbul before we even registered that she had arrived, and we didn’t attach any importance to her anyway until you showed up downstairs this morning. So who is she?”
Hale slumped in his chair. “I don’t know. I suppose St.-Simon is a common name.”
Johns was nodding again, though suddenly he seemed very tired. “Your case is, marginally, interesting enough for me to check your bona fides-or mala fide-with the Security Service, of which Special Branch is the executive arm, in London. Not my outfit, but I’ll see who I can reach over the WT. In the meantime I can hardly place you under detention-I don’t even have any documentation to indicate that you’re a British subject.”
“I’d be happy to sign something,” said Hale eagerly, “attesting that I am.”
“You want to be detained? Is it the Gestapo you’re afraid of, or the NKVD?”
“I’d-certainly hate to come to the attention of either agency.”
“But you want to go back to England in shackles.” He shrugged. “To be preferred, under the circumstances, I do see. Look, sit in the lobby downstairs for a few hours, right? Anybody who queries you can be told that you’re waiting for me. If I haven’t found grounds to arrest you by nightfall, I’ll have security chase you out.”
“Fair enough,” said Hale, struggling to his feet and wishing he’d had a spare shirt and socks to bring along.
Hale did wear shackles when he flew back to England, accompanied by two British soldiers and the King’s Messenger and the diplomatic bag, aboard an RAF Catalina flying boat that took off from the consulate dock at Cabo Ruivo. The seaplane landed six hours later, chopping the tops off the low gray Channel waves just northeast of the Dungeness lighthouse and then chugging up on the plane’s pontoons to the RAF dock at New Romney.
Hale was immediately bundled across a chilly, snow-drifted yard into the back of a military lorry, along with two Army corporals who wore automatic pistols on their belts and who had apparently got the idea that he was a German spy; a tarpaulin had been laced over iron poles to make a windowless boxy tent of the truck bed, illuminated by an electric bulb that swung over the benches as the truck’s engine ground through the gears along some sequence of icy rural roads, and one of his guards solemnly passed across to Hale an unskilled and obscene pencil caricature of Hitler, and then one of Goebbels, and then one of Goering. Hale simply nodded politely after scrutinizing each one and handing it back with both manacled hands, and when the little ceremony was done his guards sat back with a satisfied air. Hale was nearly choking on the fumes of diesel exhaust, though it was cold enough for him to see his breath.
When the lorry finally halted and the engine was switched off, the tarpaulin was pulled away from the rear of the vehicle and Hale was helped down to stand on the deeply rutted gravel driveway of a sprawling Victorian mansion; a gated iron fence was stitched in black poles and barbed wire across the snow behind him, and a forest of pine trees hid the surrounding countryside. He could hear the stationary roaring motor of a generator, but there were no sounds of city or even suburban traffic. When he was forcibly turned toward the house and kicked into a march, he noticed the bright metal filaments of new aerials sprouting from the snowy roof, and iron bars on several, but not all, of the windows. His manacled hands were clasped in front of him as if in prayer.
He was interrogated in what might have been a dining room-a green baize cloth was draped over a trestle table in front of a tall stone fireplace, and pale sections of the wood floor indicated where vast carpets had once lain; and the empty room echoed when one of the officers at the table asked him for his name and date of birth.
“Andrew Hale,” said Hale, swaying with exhaustion and wondering if it would be rude to ask for a chair. “January 6, 1922.”
“When did you join the Communist Party?”
“Last semester sometime-spring of last year. At Oxford. My solicitor can clear all this up.” Corliss would surely contact Theodora, as he had done before. “His name is Corliss, and he’s in Cirencester-”
“Sir!”
Hale blinked at the man, who was apparently a colonel. “Yes?”
“Damn you, you will address me as sir!”
“Yes, sir, sorry. Henry Corliss, sir, can provide-”
“Describe the Communist spy network that smuggled you out of England.”
“Sir, I must insist that you contact Henry Corliss-”
“Insist?” The colonel thumped his fist on the table, spilling a glass of water. “I insist that you answer my question!”
One of the other officers, a younger man, leaned forward. “This is wartime,” he said in a helpful tone. “You don’t get to have your solicitor present.”
“I don’t want him as a solicitor,” Hale said loudly. The involuntary raising of his voice, and a sudden chill in the pit of his stomach, startled him; and for the first time it occurred to him that he might be in some enduring trouble here. And he was horrified to realize that hunger and anxiety and lack of sleep had brought him very near to tears. Where the hell was Theodora? “I don’t even need to talk to him,” he went on more quietly. “Sir. But he’ll be able to…point you toward an explanation of all this.”
“Where and how did you get the Philippe St.-Simon passport?”
“I don’t think I can answer these questions,” said Hale. The dripping of the spilled water onto the wood floor was distracting him. “Please get in touch with Corliss.” He wanted to wail, Ask James Theodora, of the Secret Intelligence Service!-but he kept remembering Theodora’s order: Don’t tell anyone about me, nor about your secret purposes. Not even Churchill.
A sickening punch to the kidney knocked Hale right down onto his knees and forehead and the fingertips of his manacled hands-one of the soldiers who had been in the truck with him had apparently walked up unheard from behind and got a signal from someone at the table-and now Hale was sobbing helplessly and drooling onto the cold floor. His nose had started bleeding, and blood and saliva streaked his chin when the soldier hauled him back up onto his feet.
“Who is your Party contact in England?”
The younger officer again spoke, in his helpful tone: “Spies can be executed in wartime, without the necessity of a trial.”
A man in a plain business suit who sat at the end of the table and had not spoken yet now crushed out a cigarette and said quietly, “Let him rest for now. We can talk to him again later.”
Hale was marched off to an emptied room that had been converted to a makeshift doctor’s office, with a wheeled metal cabinet and an upright set of green-enameled scales in the corner and eye charts on the wall, and finally the manacles were unlocked and his hands were freed. The soldier stayed in the room while a man in white coveralls asked Hale if he had any family history of tuberculosis or insanity, and listened to Hale’s chest with a stethoscope, and then asked Hale to read letters off the eye chart; finally Hale was escorted to a room with a barred window and a narrow, military-looking bed, and locked in.
He hadn’t eaten anything since a quick sandwich in the Lisbon embassy lobby the day before, and with frail bravado he thought he would have endured another punch for a cigarette, or many more punches for a tall glass of brandy; but as soon as he lay down on the bed, his cumulative exhaustion seemed to fall onto him like the rubble of a bombed house.