The Poison Tide Read Online Free PDF

with his case had fought his way off the ship and was negotiating with a cab driver.
    The police officer demanded Wolff’s passport in perfect English, and turned its pages deliberately, holding the red State Department stamp to his eye. He was older than Wolff, with an intelligent face but the complexion, the small broken veins, of a heavy drinker.
    ‘Your name is de Witt?’ he asked at last.
    ‘That’s what it says.’
    ‘What is your business here?’
    ‘I’m visiting a client. Paulsen Shipping.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘And then a meeting in Copenhagen.’
    ‘I see.’ The police officer folded the leaf with the stapled photograph of Wolff carefully into the passport and offered it back to him: ‘It seems in order.’
    But when Wolff tried to take it he wouldn’t let go.
    ‘Where will you be staying in Christiania, Mr de Witt?’ There was something in the way he spoke the name
de Witt
that suggested he had heard it before, something in his frown and in his little bloodshot eyes, a crack in the veneer of cool indifference that is the part of the experienced minor official everywhere.
    ‘I have a reservation at the Grand Hotel,’ Wolff replied curtly. ‘So, if you’ve finished . . .’
    The policeman stared at him suspiciously for a few seconds more, then released his passport: ‘Thank you, Mr de Witt.’ And the mask slipped back into place.
    The Grand Hotel was the place to be noticed in Christiania. It wasn’t handsome or especially grand but it was on the city’s main thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the parliament, palace, National Theatre and university. The hotel of choice for well-heeled travellers and businessmen, and now Europe was at war – for the gentleman spy. Its façade was in the French style and reminded Wolff a little of the Bureau’s offices in Whitehall Court. A letter on Westinghouse headed paper was waiting in reception with instructions for his meetings in Christiania and Copenhagen and promising a further communication in Berlin, and Wolff noted that the reservation had been made for him by someone at the company in America. The Bureau hadn’t cut any corners. The porter carried his bags to the room and was rewarded with a gratuity generous enough to be memorable. Wolff unpacked his own clothes. They had been bought for him in America but were too crisp and new to risk handing over to a valet. It was just the sort of small thing that might arouse suspicion. There was always someone happy to sell information in a grand hotel: perhaps the maid who emptied the wastepaper baskets of well-to-do guests for only a few krone a week, or the pageboy who delivered their correspondence for even less, or the concierge who summoned the taxicabs and spoke to their drivers later. Policeman or spy, British or German – there was money to be made from everyone in a neutral country. Wolff poured himself a whisky from the bottle he’d brought with him, ran a hot bath and lay sipping and soaking in a cloud of steam.
    He’d spent six weeks growing into Mr Jan de Witt’s skin.
    ‘I know it isn’t long,’ C had observed. ‘But I’m confident we’ve thought of everything. You’ll need a legend the enemy can follow. Mansfeldt Findlay at the Legation in Christiania can help you with footprints. He’s a good fellow. Done this sort of thing for us before. We have him to thank for the informer.’
    Wolff lifted a soapy hand to his beard. Jan de Witt’s little Dutch beard. It took time to get used to. A beard always changed his appearance markedly; it made his thin face fuller and intensely serious, like the photograph of his father that hung in a thick black frame above the fireplace in the parlour at his mother’s farm.
    ‘Damn good thing your beard, you know,’ C had teased. ‘Traitors have beards.’
    ‘Oh? I thought it was a monocle?’
    C had chuckled like a fat schoolboy. ‘Makes you look a little like Casement.’
    The following morning, Wolff took breakfast at the Grand Café