Chapter 6

Warsaw — an evening in early August under an uncertain sky. Lucy had a train to catch, but the station she’d known from her student days had been demolished five years earlier, and construction had yet to start on the replacement. Her soon to be ex-lover Jan Tomczak took her and her suitcase to the temporary station on Chmielna Street. The suitcase and most of the clothes it contained (with sleeves shortened and hemlines raised) were castoffs of Wanda’s. Lucy’s friend had also given her a home-baked poppyseed cake for the journey. They had said their goodbyes early to avoid emotional platform scenes.

When the boat train to the new Polish port of Gdynia started to board, Jan didn’t waste their last moments together on hollow endearments. Instead, he wanted to give her advice. He impressed upon Lucy that the British were big on proper channels of communication. Ultimately, she’d want to get her information into the hands of the Secret Intelligence Service, but as the United Kingdom never admitted to spying on other states she couldn’t approach MI6 directly. Her best route would be through Scotland Yard’s eminently respectable Special Branch. Even though their mandate was confined to counter-intelligence and counterterrorism, they would have access to the shadowy spymasters that briefed Whitehall.

The train trip and sea voyage passed without incident. In London, a modest daily donation secured her one of twenty small guest rooms in the house of the Sisters of Saint Hedwig. During her first days in the city, she had some dental work done to repair the damage Trigorin had caused. At the same time, remembering the threatening car in Warsaw, she cast about for a means of speedy escape. She pored over ship and railway schedules. The hostel’s practice of collecting passports of foreign guests at check-in and retaining them for the full duration of their stay gave her an idea for disguise. She studied the other women with a view to choosing which she might, with a little stage makeup, impersonate. Her first choice had to be ruled out when it transpired that the woman, a Czechoslovak, was leaving in three days. The runner-up, an Australian, had an educational conference to attend plus visits to pay to a number of grammar schools in the London area, all of which would take her at least two and a half weeks. The trouble was that Edna was appreciably shorter than Lucy. Lucy could only hope that in the next day or so, as residents came and went, a better fit would show up.

At the same time, she got on with her mission, presenting her true identity documents at New Scotland Yard on the Victoria Embankment. She had taken the risk of travelling to Britain under her own name, had even ventured into Warsaw’s New Town to obtain a copy of her certificate of baptism from St. Kazimierz Church. The desk bobbies kept her waiting while they made telephone calls. She was prepared to be suspected of being a crank, but was eventually given an appointment for the next day, August 18. Two men interviewed her, Messrs. North and Green. North, the younger, was well-tailored and well-educated, blond, confident, polite. The older one — by twelve or fifteen years — had a worried look; he was rumpled, corpulent, balding, and spectacled.

Green peered at Lucy through his thick lenses and got her to tell her story. North asked follow-up questions. Both men looked at her photographic prints. Then Green asked if Lucy could remain in London for a few weeks. She said she could if she were given a cover identity and documents permitting her to work. Green said he’d look into it. He didn’t offer government money. She wasn’t looking for it: being believed at the highest level would be payment enough. North asked her about the women’s hostel and told her to inform them of any change of address. And she might as well hand over the negatives from which the document prints were made.

Lucy demurred. In that case, North didn’t see that they could extract full value from her discovery. The prints she had shown them were up to the standard of a commercial photo shop, but His Majesty’s Government had more sophisticated equipment that stood an excellent chance of making any blurred print legible. Lucy said she’d think this over. Green hastened to say that would be satisfactory. Nothing moved at breakneck speed in the civil service, he noted. They would doubtless be dealing with this business for weeks to come, if not months. Relieved and discouraged at once, Lucy asked if the two men didn’t think her discovery of this breach of the Versailles Treaty significant. Of course, North promptly replied. Germany’s perfidy was what men of his generation had been suspecting for years, and it was jolly good to get hold of some proof. Green smiled regretfully and said that security considerations prevented them from telling her how her contribution confirmed, extended, or contradicted what Britain already knew. But they appreciated the long and dangerous journey she had undertaken to bring these photos to them. They would be in touch.

Lucy had been hoping that within days if not hours of her revelations she would be reading in the Times of parliamentarians denouncing the Russo-German military pact. It now seemed that she was in for a long and dreary wait. She never had waited well: patience was the one espionage asset she knew she lacked. She had some sense of London from her time here five years earlier, but naturally could not get in touch with any of her previous contacts, had indeed to avoid any places she might run into members of the CPGB.

Someone she did run into, two days after meeting Green and North at the Yard, was the latter, at the self-serve restaurant of a Lyons Corner House. North expressed pleasure at the chance encounter. He asked her to call him Harry and suggested they share a table. He said there was a sit-down dining room upstairs where they could have wine if she’d prefer. She replied that tea was fine.

They drank a lot of tea. Harry North said he was from the Midlands and had only been in town a couple of years himself. He sounded more tentative and timid than during working hours, though he did his bit to keep conversation going. He gathered Lucy hadn’t had much playtime recently. Well, London was the place to catch up. Did she like the theatre? No, No, Nanette was still on at the Palace. Perhaps she preferred the cinema. Did she dance? Play any games? Lucy merrily claimed to be the Soviet women’s golf champion, as well as to play ice hockey, polo, and football. He laughed and asked her about water polo. Did she swim? Yes. Seriously? She liked to swim, she told him, sincerely if not seriously. She was enjoying herself too much to be serious. He asked if he could take her to Hampstead Ponds on the weekend.

She said she had no bathing suit. “On the continent we swim naked. Would that be all right?”

Harry’s face turned pink. “Steady on. We’re just getting used to mixed sex bathing here. Not to worry. The city Parks Department can likely rent us a costume for you. Just a light wool covering neck to knees — probably in navy or black.”

“Every woman’s dream.”

They drained their teacups for the last time, and he walked her back to the Sisters of Saint Hedwig in time for her curfew.

Only when they were out on the street did Harry North refer to the photographs. He said that at their last meeting he hadn’t wanted to scare her, but that London could be a dangerous place. The negatives would really be safer with him. Did she have them with her? No? In her room then? Harry would wait on the pavement while she got them. She said they weren’t in her room either, adding that she understood his fear but that she had hidden them well. He looked into her eyes with a look that started in kindly concern and ended in admiration. He said he’d pick her up the next afternoon at three.

Lucy could not make up her mind about Harry. For the first hour after she went to bed, she didn’t feel she had a mind, so absorbed was she by fantasies of the elegant blond Englishman. When these at last started to bore her, she turned on the light and washed her face. Time to see where she stood. She wanted to believe she was making a useful ally of the secret service agent. But his insistence on taking her negatives set off alarm bells. And she was quite sure that thoughts of her in his arms had not deprived him of any sleep this night. More alarm bells: she had trained to be the swallow, not the swallowed.

Saturday morning, Lucy spent the last of Jan Tomczak’s money on a bathing costume — just in case the ones for rent were as hideous as they sounded. The garment she bought was lime green with thin straps that left her shoulders bare; it stopped six inches above the knee. She had just enough pennies left over for a red rubber cap.

Harry’s cab arrived punctually at three. He tried to light a cigarette for her twice on the drive up to Hampstead Heath and dropped the match each time. The third time, Lucy held his hand steady. She asked if he wanted to peek at what was in her Marks and Spencer shopping bag. He said he’d rather wait and see it on her. Lucy had never met a man nervousness became so well.

At the ponds, Lucy and Harry were each assigned a cubicle in which to change and leave their street clothes. When she’d changed, Lucy left the key to the cubicle with the women’s attendant and received a token bearing the same number as the key. She attached the token as instructed to the shoulder strap of her bathing costume and when she met Harry out on the terrace noticed he had done the same. When Harry saw her green swimsuit, he called it “abso-bally-lutely smashing,” and it really sounded to Lucy as if he meant it as high praise.

One end of the mixed bathing pond, the highest of the three in Hampstead Heath, was full of families — mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters — enjoying the chance to swim together, but there was lots of open water further from shore. Despite the warmth of the summer day, the water was cold. Lucy didn’t mind, except that she was afraid her goosebumps made her arms ugly. She distracted Harry by challenging him to a race, then smelled a rat when she won. In the rematch, she sternly insisted he go flat out. When she finally caught up to him at the finish line, he was wearing a sheepish grin. She scooped water in his face and told him she liked him all the better for not trying to make it close. They splashed about until their lips turned blue and Harry suggested they get dressed and have some tea.

When she exchanged her token for her cubicle key, the motherly attendant told her she could see from Lucy’s face that she’d had a good bathe. Lucy realized that all the time she’d been in the pond she hadn’t had a single thought of German warplanes — and still she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. She unlocked her cubicle. When she was inside with the door closed, light came through openings front and back just below the ceiling. She peeled off her suit and wrung it out well so it wouldn’t soak through her paper shopping bag. She took care not to dribble water into her shoes. That’s when she noticed there was something different about them. They were patent leather Mary Janes she had picked up in Warsaw and cleaned up this morning with a little spit and toilet paper. She’d carelessly left one upright and one on its side when she’d changed earlier, and that’s the way she found them. But the insole in the upright one was now wrinkled. She squatted down and ran two fingers over the wrinkles. That insole was loose. She stuck her fingers into the other shoe and found its insole loose too. Both had been securely glued down at noon. She shivered now not just from the cold water. Just minutes ago, while she’d been frolicking with Harry, her effects had been searched for the thirty-five millimetre negatives. An expert job betrayed by a lack of glue.

When she met Harry, Lucy said she had a headache and was sorry she could not go for tea. In the taxi, Harry looked uncomfortable. Lucy wondered whether he suspected she’d found out about the search. Or was he just trying to appear sympathetic to her pain?

It was hard to believe he was innocent in the affair. The swim had been a dream opportunity to have her clothes picked over. She supposed the British secret service couldn’t let a foreign woman — especially one that spoke English so badly — hold out on them. They had tried first the gentlest path to their goal. They could still lock her up until she gave them the negatives. It would be done with all possible civility, no need to kill her. A darker prospect, however, had seized Lucy’s imagination. Suppose Harry were a closet Communist playing a double game, ostensibly working for Great Britain while owing his true allegiance to Soviet Russia. Then her life wouldn’t be worth two kopecks. Her safest course was to assume the worst and get far away from Harry North.

He made comments on the areas of London they were passing through on the way back to her hostel in the Victoria Station neighbourhood. When she didn’t respond, he asked if his chatter helped distract her, as he intended, or just made things worse. She told him to talk if he liked — it didn’t bother her — only he must not mind if she wasn’t able to answer. Thinking the couple would enjoy a view of the river this summer evening, the driver departed from the most direct route to take them down the Embankment. Passing New Scotland Yard gave Lucy the idea of asking Harry whether Mr. Green had managed to secure her new visa and work permit. When he answered not, Lucy scarcely had to murmur that that put her in a difficult position. With becoming reticence, Harry produced his billfold and asked her if as a special favour to him Lucy would accept a modest loan. He fanned out a few banknotes so that she could make the loan as modest as she chose. As if blinded by the pounding in her head, Lucy clutched them all. She smiled bravely at him then, told him he was sweet. As they parted at her front door, he kissed her cheek and expressed sorrow that their afternoon had ended so unfortunately. He promised to be in touch.

In her room, Lucy found what she expected: traces of an expert but not undetectable search. She now wasn’t sure whether the job had been botched or whether she’d been meant to be intimidated by the knowledge that OGPU had her in their sights. If it was indeed OGPU and not MI6, she knew what the next step must be: capture and interrogation. In the basement of the Lubianka, a prisoner could be broken down so gradually that a warder could look himself in the mirror at night and not see a torturer. But in the field an agent was always rushed and under-equipped. You might have to improvise with a blade under the fingernail, a cigarette lighter under the ear. Lucy didn’t know what all: that hadn’t been her department. But she had known not to ask. She also knew enough of how OGPU worked abroad to believe she would not be dragged from her room. They would wait till she went out, until she was walking alone on the street. Even a busy street. A car would stop just long enough for her to be pushed into the back and would speed away before bystanders had time to comprehend, let alone intervene.

That Saturday evening, Lucy did not leave her room. She went without supper. After the curfew, the office by the front door was not staffed. To be extra certain that all the inmates of the house were in their beds, Lucy waited until one a.m. Then she crept downstairs. The office door lock had not been changed in fifty years and yielded readily to someone with Lucy’s training. The Sisters of Saint Hedwig made no secret of which desk drawer held residents’ passports.

Lucy removed Edna Salisbury’s, no taller candidate for impersonation having shown up. Perhaps she could avoid comment on her longer legs by using a wheelchair at checkpoints. While her accented and fractured English sorted strangely with her new alias, she was prepared to say that her Australian father had died shortly after her birth in Melbourne and that her Polish mother had taken her back to Cracow, where she’d lived until age twenty. At that point, she’d returned to Australia as a teacher of European languages.

Lucy relocked the office on her way out and returned to her room.

OGPU might have a car stationed outside the Sisters’ front door on Belgrave Road, particularly if they believed Lucy knew her belongings had been inspected. But her main reason for not leaving immediately was that she wanted there to be nothing suspicious about her departure. Both front and rear doors to the hostel were bolted from the inside at night. If in the morning either bolt were found drawn, an investigation was liable to ensue, and the theft of Edna’s passport might be discovered.

Lucy had to get out of England. She would try the United States: they were the great power now. Americans had spent cash and blood on the Allied victory. The last thing they’d want would be a remilitarized Germany. Neither would such staunch capitalists want the Soviet Union deploying modern warplanes to attack and gobble up its neighbours.

At one twenty, Lucy sat down on her bed and began studying how her new acquisition might help her reach Washington. Finding that two strokes of a pen would increase the bearer’s height from five foot one to five foot four made her almost giddy with excitement. Good luck meant nothing to her beyond itself; she took it as no sign of divine favour. But fortune hadn’t smiled on her mission in either Warsaw or London. So when luck came, even in small parcels, it deserved its moment of celebration.

Continuing her study, Lucy found still more to cheer about. Edna’s passport was endorsed for the entire British Empire, excluding only Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. So she could enter Canada. From there, the U.S. border shouldn’t prove much of an obstacle. If she could get out of Russia, she could get into America. But wait — she saw that, in the endorsement section on page four, a line had been left blank. Just the opening for an OGPU-trained forger. Immediately below British Empire, she could write United States in the same bureaucratic hand and spare herself the inconvenience of smuggling herself in. Sleeping that night was like eating when you feel full. Lucy did it only by an effort of will and because the next day would be a long one.

She checked out at seven thirty a.m., leaving on foot in the midst of a group of residents attending the eight o’clock mass at Westminster Cathedral. Lucy was pretty sure no abduction would be risked so long as she was in the middle of this crowd. Along the way, she tried to spot a car rolling suspiciously slowly or a man stalking the cluster of women with something besides lechery on his mind. She saw nothing of the kind, although it didn’t escape her that her tail might be one of the cluster, the same woman perhaps that had searched her room.

During Mass, Lucy sat where she could see all her hostel-mates, taking leave of them after the Dismissal and Recessional. Then, to be on the safe side, she executed a number of feints. She jumped on omnibuses only to jump off as soon as she could switch to one going the opposite way. She boarded a train with a ticket to Dover, but got off at Maidstone. Her options were limited by Sunday schedules; nevertheless, by a combination of rail, bus, and hitchhiking, she made it to Southampton before midnight with the conviction that she had not been followed.

The ship on which Lucy booked passage to New York didn’t leave until early afternoon, which gave her time to shop for dowdy clothes, makeup, pen, and ink and to use her purchases to redecorate herself and the stolen passport to make them better agree. She lightened her suitcase by discarding all items not fitting her Edna Salisbury identity. She also practised Edna’s signature. It helped her that it was so copybook conventional and lacking individual character. A signature meant to be written slowly and carefully — on a blackboard, perhaps, to introduce Miss Salisbury to her pupils on the first day of school. If called upon to use it in front of other people, Lucy would have to look at home with the signature, but would never have to dash it off.

During the nine-day crossing on the USS Luxuria, Lucy maintained this identity, without passing up the pleasures of the dinner table or the gaming table. She had a good head and good nerves for cards, which her schoolmarmish appearance belied. A day out of Southampton, she had recouped the cost of her first-class passage with pennies to spare, then made a killing on the last night before docking in New York. The last opportunity for legal drinking and its attendant frenzy took her by surprise. Next day they would be crossing the three-mile limit into U.S. territorial waters, where the Volstead Act prohibited the recreational consumption of alcohol. Any beer, wine, or spirits would be placed under seal until the ship crossed the line again heading east. Such a prospect must have seemed too drab for some passengers, for rumours persisted that all the ship’s liquid treasure would be dumped over the side, and what a waste that would be! Better to drink hearty and leave nothing for the fishes. Lucy had not seen the bacchanal coming; it amazed her. All the same, she limited herself to three brandies for the evening and profited from the reckless play of her pie-eyed fellow passengers.

The risks of poker were nothing to her compared to the higher-stakes risk of arriving in New York with a stolen passport. The real Edna, if she’d kept to her intended timetable, wouldn’t yet have finished her school visits. The theft wouldn’t be discovered for another ten days. That was the course of events Lucy had gambled on. It was quite possible, however, that Harry North had come to the hostel asking after Lucy and her headache the day following their Hampstead Pond swim. Suspicious at her sudden departure, he’d have instigated a police investigation. If competently done, that investigation would have revealed that Edna’s passport was gone. Then the checking of ships’ passenger lists would have begun, starting with ships bound for British Empire ports. Finding that no one identifying herself as Edna Salisbury had gone aboard, would they assume that Lucy and the passport were still in the United Kingdom? Or suspect that the document had been tampered with and see where that hypothesis might lead?