Lost Among the Living(69)

“And these men you—reported on. Were they arrested?”

“Not at all. Most of them weren’t agents, so the information gathered dust. A few of them, however, had agreed to send communications back to Germany, in much the same way I had agreed to inform my own government. Those fellows had their letters intercepted, and the local police kept tabs on their movements. An active agent, you see, can lead you to even more active agents, whereas an agent under arrest or executed can lead you to no one. That is the game.” Alex uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. His hair gleamed in the lamplight. “As for me, when I had information I passed it to Colonel Mabry’s London representative. A solicitor near Gray’s Inn.”

Ice shot up my spine. I sat straighter on the bed. “You can’t mean it,” I said. “Casparov?”

“He was acting as an intermediary, yes. He’d take my information and send it along the proper channels.”

My mind spun. Proper channels. “Those letters we typed. All those letters—stacks of them.”

“Some of them were legitimate,” Alex said softly. “Casparov was actually practicing law. But others were most likely code.”

I put a hand to my forehead. Helen and me, typing all those snowdrifts of shorthand. Your business is the typing only, and the looking respectable. Day after day in that tiny office. And Alex, walking in from the wet cold, and Casparov telling him, My thanks.

“Oh, God,” I said. “That was why you were there. I typed all those letters with no clue they were code. I never had any idea, and I worked for him for months. You must have thought me so incredibly stupid.”

“Stupid?” He sounded surprised and a little angry. “You’re missing the point.”

“The point?” I dropped my hand and looked at him. “The point is that you sat across from me at the dinner table that night and told me absolutely nothing about yourself.”

“I told you everything that mattered,” Alex shot back. “What I was doing didn’t matter anymore, because I quit.”

“You what?”

“I resigned when I met you,” he said. “I did it the next morning, after we’d been together. You weren’t stupid, for God’s sake; you were Jo. I knew what I wanted from the first minute I saw you, and it wasn’t ferreting out Mabry’s useless Germans. It was you.”

I took a breath, my cheeks flushing hot.

He continued, his voice gentling a little. “I knew before we’d finished our first glass of wine that night that I had to do it. I was forbidden to speak about what I was doing. If I kept it up, and kept it from you, you would figure it out eventually. You were too sharp. And once you knew I’d been hiding things from you, you’d walk away without a look back. Of that much, I was sure. So it was easy, really. I had no choice.” His eyes watched me in the dim light. “Mabry argued with me, of course, but it was no use. By the time I met you coming out of Casparov’s office the next day, it was over.”

This was going to kill me. If he kept talking he was going to kill me, but still I spoke—still I pushed him on. “But it wasn’t over. Was it?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. Around us, the house was still. For the first time I wondered how late it was, what had happened to the party, whether all of the guests had gone to bed. It all seemed so far away.

When Alex spoke, his voice was a rasp. “It was over for a time,” he said. “And then the war came. And it wasn’t over anymore.”

The war. Me sitting on the bench in Victoria Station that last time, sick and feverish and desperate, his kiss on my lips. The pain had been so awful I had thought I would die.

I closed my eyes, which were burning and dry, and steeled myself.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT



Alex uncrossed his legs and stood, restless. He paced across the room, his long legs taking it in three strides, and turned. “Mabry contacted me again when the war started,” he said. “He had more work for me. I told him no. My reasons were the same as ever—I would not lie to my wife. I would fight for my country, but I would do it as everyone else did—as a soldier.”

Bitterness rose in my throat. I would not lie to my wife. “Go on,” I said.

“Mabry told me I was insane,” Alex said. “The war was in its early days, but he already knew how it was. He told me I’d be bloody mulch in a Belgian battlefield in six weeks, when instead I could be doing actual good for my country. With my skills I could be ferreting out agents, decoding messages, even traveling Germany undercover and reporting. He said I had no right to commit suicide.” Alex glanced at me. “But I was a foolish optimist, like everyone else in 1914. I didn’t know any better. I chose the RAF, because it seemed more challenging and more glamorous than ground fighting. I wanted to do something hard.” He shrugged, the gesture almost a flinch of pain. “I got my wish, in that at least.”

“I suppose you gave in,” I said, not wanting to hear him say any more, not wanting to hear another lie come from his lips. “Because you went to Reims, when you told me you trained at Reading. I read your file.”

He stopped pacing. He had turned away from the lamp, and I watched his shadow go still. “Mabry?” he asked, his voice strangled.