The Magicians of Night

Three


“YOU WANT ME TO find a what?” Tom Saltwood tossed the slim dossier of photographs, maps, handwritten notes, and one or two cheesily printed magazine articles back onto the desk and regarded the man who had been his commander in Spain with mingled bemusement and uncertainty. “With all due respect, Colonel Hillyard...”

“I know.” Hillyard’s mouth flicked into its wry, triangular grin. “I’ll admit that’s how it sounded to me.”

“And to me.” The third man in the nameless London office, a stooped Englishman with very bright black eyes peering from a heavily lined face, reached across to the dossier with one arthritic finger and flipped free a snapshot that hadn’t been very good even before it had been blown up to eight-by-ten. Mayfair, Hillyard had introduced him to Saltwood, though Tom was pretty certain that wasn’t his name.

“But some rather strange rumors have come to us from some of the more secret bureaus of the SS, and this one we’ve had—er—independently confirmed. We think it bears looking into.”

“Not,” Hillyard added, settling his lean form back in the worn brown leather of his chair and reaching briefly, almost automatically, behind him to tweak the tiniest chink out of the bow window’s heavy curtains, “that it would be easier to believe if we’d had it confirmed by personal telegram from Hitler, but there it is.”

Tom was silent for a moment, wondering what it was that was causing the alarm bells to go off at the back of his mind. A false note in Hillyard’s voice, maybe, or the way he tilted his head when he looked across at the man he called Mayfair—the suspicion and query in his eyes. Maybe it was just time and place. What three weeks ago—when he’d gotten the enigmatically worded request to report back to London—would have been normal or at least explicable now bore a staggering load of contextual freight.

Or maybe he was just tired. Several hours spent crammed in a corner of a destroyer’s gun deck with seven hundred filthy and exhausted British soldiers wasn’t particularly conducive to napping, even under the best of circumstances. The steady cannonade of shellfire and strafing hadn’t helped, nor had the unencouraging sight of slate-colored water, littered with hawsers, oil slicks, fragments of mined ships, and floating bodies visible every time he turned his head to glance over the rail.

But on the whole, it was better than the hell of exhaustion and death he’d left behind him on the Dunkirk beach.

And there on the docks at Dover, among all those nice British ladies with cups of tea and elderly blue-clothed policemen saying Step along this way now... had been Colonel Hillyard, tired, unshaven, and grimy as any of the troops, but with that old businesslike glint in his dark eyes as he’d said, “About time you showed up. I have a car.” Tom had barely had time to change and shave—he’d slept on the way up.

And now they were asking him to do... What?

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and picked up the photograph. The reproduction was grainy. The building in the background might have been one of those big mansions rich folks built up the Hudson from New York a hundred years ago—heavy granite walls, peaked gables, crenellated ornamental turrets on the corners and pseudo-Gothic traceries on the windows—except that, judging by the number of men in SS uniforms standing around and the little swastika flags on the hood of the car in the foreground, it was obviously somewhere in Germany. A civilian was standing near the car: a bearded, tired-looking little man of forty or so with curly hair long and unruly and steel-rimmed glasses concealing his eyes.

“His name is Sligo,” Mayfair said in a voice crusty and plummy as eighty-year-old port. “Professor Rhion Sligo.”

“Sounds Irish,” Hillyard remarked from the depths of his armchair. “Gaelic form of Ryan, maybe.” He ran a hand over his sun-browned bald scalp. “Any Irishman working for the SS these days would be using the Gaelic form, of course.”

“Perhaps,” Mayfair agreed. “We have no record of anyone of that name graduating, teaching, or publishing at any university or college we have checked; but then, a false degree is as easy to assume as a false name, and both are rather common in occult circles.” He sipped his tea, which a secretary had brought in a few minutes before.

Tired as he was, Tom had to smile a little at the teacups. In an American office they would have been those thick white mugs reminiscent of every cheap diner from Brooklyn to Bodega Bay. Here they were somebody’s second-best Spode that had gotten too chipped for company. The office, in one of those politely anonymous terraced squares so typical of London, likewise had the air of having been donated by a Duke in reduced circumstances. It had clearly started life as somebody’s parlor, with faded pink wallpaper framing a stained plaster mantel and a fireplace prosaically tiled over and occupied by an electric grate. The whole setup was straight out of Thackeray. The faded draperies were firmly shut over the bow window, the blackout curtain beyond them cutting out any possibility of a view. Now and then a car would go by outside with a soft swishing of tires, or he would hear the swift clip of hurrying shoe heels on the pavement. But few, Tom thought, would be abroad tonight.

Somewhere in the building, someone had a radio on. Tom couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t need to. So many ships safely returned to Dover with their cargos of beaten, exhausted, wounded men—so many shelled to pieces or sunk by mines in the channel. And still more men trapped on the beaches, between the advancing German army and the sea.

No sign yet of an air attack on London.

No sign yet of landing barges setting out with German troops.

No sign yet.

Sitting here in this quiet, lamplit office, Tom experienced a sensation of mild surprise that he was alive at all. Twelve hours ago he would have bet money against it.

Mayfair’s voice called his attention back. “...arrangements made, as you know, three weeks ago to transfer you from your unit in Belgium. What was important then, when the entire question was an academic one of if and when, is doubly important now in the light of an imminent invasion.”

Tom looked from the bent, grizzled old man behind the desk to the lean, browned one in the dull khaki uniform, and rubbed his hand over his face, trying to be sure he was completely awake and alert for all this. “With all due respect, sir... a wizard?”

“So he claims.” May fair produced a pipe from his jacket pocket and began the meticulous ritual of reaming, cleaning, stuffing, and experimental puffing that Tom had observed pipe smokers to treasure, probably above the actual taste of the tobacco itself. “And the SS seem to believe him enough to cherish him...”

“Yeah, well, they cherish Himmler’s slumgullion about a master race, too.”

“Perhaps. But Sligo’s claim is not only that he is a wizard himself, but that he can teach wizardry to others.”

Tom chuckled. “Hell—sir. Professor Marvello the Magnificent taught me magic in the carney when I was eighteen, but nobody from the government ever tried to hire me.”

“Well.” Hillyard smiled, brown eyes sparkling against a brick-red tan. “Now they have.”

Saltwood was startled. “You mean just because...”

“No, no.” Mayfair waved a dismissive hand and set his pipe down on the scarred leather blotter before him. “Although that is what you Americans call a ‘dividend’ for us—that you may stand a better chance of spotting a hoax. No. The reason I asked Colonel Hillyard to contact you—the reason we’ve arranged for you to be seconded from your regiment...”

What’s LEFT of my regiment, Tom thought grimly, remembering the men who had fallen at the crossings of the Leutze and the Scheldt, remembering the men who had crouched in shell holes in the sand with him, who had not gotten up again.

“...is because you speak German like a native, because you look German, and because you’ve done a bit of intelligence work during the fighting in Spain. Is this correct?”

There was another folder, closed, at Mayfair’s elbow on the battered mahogany of the desk; Tom glanced at it, guessing it was his and wondering exactly how much it contained.

“A whole swarm of Germans and Swedes homesteaded the bottomlands along the Missouri near our ranch when I was a kid,” he explained. “My grandmother was German—she lived with us. I spoke it at home and playing with the German kids. For years I had this real hick Saxon accent—I boarded with a German family when I worked on the New York docks, and the wife said I spoke German like a pig and worked to straighten me out.” He grinned a little at the memory, not adding that his landlord had also been his cell leader in the Industrial Workers of the World and that most of his practice in the language had been obtained in endless summer-night discussions on the stoop about socialist political argument.

Mayfair studied him awhile longer, taking in, Saltwood knew, the craggy bones of his face, the ridiculously baby-fine dust-colored hair, the blue eyes, broad shoulders, fair skin. His “intelligence work” in Spain had come about because he’d been the only man of their company in the Lincoln Brigade capable of passing himself off as a German. One night he’d gotten three of the local Anarchists out of rebel hands with only some very unconvincing forgeries of Gestapo i.d. Their Russian military advisor had reprimanded him strongly, for the Anarchists, though officially Republican allies, were considered not worth the risk.

“You understand,” Mayfair went on after a moment, “that you’ll probably be impersonating an SS Trooper for part of the time—and the Nazis are not signatories of the Geneva accords.”

“Neither were the nationalists,” Tom said quietly. “I went through all that in Spain.”

“So I see.” Mayfair sat back and picked up his pipe again, puffing at it in the usual vain effort to get the thing to go. He nodded down at the closed folder. “A volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, later seconded to the Internationalist Front headquarters in thirty-six. You were listed as captured—”

“I escaped,” Tom said. “Nobody seemed to be trying very hard to get us out.”

“Ah.” Mayfair took a few more draws on the pipe, then gave it up as a bad job and opened the folder, turning over the pages with an arthritic’s careful deliberation. Presumably, Tom thought, it hadn’t been his department. At least he had the good grace not to say, as so many did, “Well, politically we were in an awkward situation with regard to prisoners...”

After a moment he resumed. “You returned to America, though we don’t have any record here of an official repatriation...”

“It wasn’t under my own name.”

The grizzled eyebrows took a whole ladder of parallel forehead wrinkles with them on their way up.

Saltwood shrugged. “They weren’t falling over themselves to repatriate those of us who’d been antifascist enough to go to Spain and get shot at, so I figured somebody who’d been in trouble over labor unions would stand even less of a chance. So when one of my old chess-playing buddies in the Brigade took a bullet in Madrid I sort of appropriated his papers.”

“I see.” By the shrewd glance in his black eyes Tom wondered exactly what he did see. “And were you involved with the labor unions in the United States?”

“I was on the fringes of them, yes,” Tom lied, folding his hands over the buckle of his Sam Browne belt and doing his best to look like a dumb, blue-eyed farmboy, something he had always been good at. “After Pa died and our ranch went bust, I spent a lot of time on the road. Working in the mines and the factories, you couldn’t hardly help running across them.” From the corner of his eye he saw Hillyard sigh and shake his head, but, after all, his old commander said nothing. Considering Tom’s rowdy and violent career as an organizer in the IWW, that was probably just as well.

“Well,” Mayfair grunted at length, “least said about that the better, perhaps. And you arrived in this country last September and volunteered... again.”

Tom felt himself blush as if Mayfair had unearthed a stint with a ballet troupe in his past. After Spain he really should have known better. “Hell—begging your pardon, sir. But nobody back in my country seemed to be standing in line to do anything about Hitler.

“You need hardly apologize, Sergeant Saltwood.” The old man closed the folder again and looked across at him from under jutting brows. “Will you take it?”

Tom hesitated for a long time, all the topics that the old man had not brought up—like, Who is this man REALLY and, for that matter, who are you? and Why don’t you get somebody from regular Intelligence? and What’s scared you into sending someone at a time like this?—combining in his mind into a strong odor of rat. He’d gotten Hillyard’s telegram asking him to come back to London for “family business”—a code between them from their days with the Brigade that had meant “I’ve got a job for you...”—two days before the panzers had come rolling out of the Ardennes Forest like a tidal wave of iron and fire. At least, he reflected wryly, I was already packed.

“There are, of course, a number of explanations as to what might be going on,” Hillyard said, in the deep, brocaded baritone that wouldn’t have disgraced an RADA performance of King Lear. “Sligo may very well be a confidence trickster, out to take the SS for whatever he can.”

“That’s not something I’d care to try, unless I had some way of getting out of that country real fast.”

“As you say,” Hillyard agreed. “But stupider things have been attempted—and have succeeded. In fact, he may know that Hitler has a blind spot where the occult is concerned. Then again, Sligo may be mad...”

“He’s definitely mad,” Mayfair put in. “According to one of our sources, he seems to suffer from a number of rather curious delusions, apparently without affecting his usefulness to the SS.”

“The third explanation,” Hillyard went on, “is that the occult group—composed of several genuine occultists from Paris and Vienna spiritualist and meosophist circles—is a cover for something else, some new weapon or device that is being developed, and that is what we’re worried about.”

He folded his hands on one jodhpurred knee—like Tom, he’d had a change of uniform, a wash, and a shave in that rented room in Dover, but then, he’d always managed to look neat, even when crouching in a Catalan sheep pen under Luftwaffe fire. “We still don’t know how the Germans took the fortress of Eban Emael—the key to that whole section of the Maginot Line. We only know that it was impregnable and that it went without a shot being fired.”

“Conversely,” Mayfair added, “the occult trappings could just as easily be for Sligo’s benefit as for ours or Himmler’s. From all we can ascertain, the man definitely believes himself to be a wizard. Whatever he has or may have invented, he may attribute to magic, just as our system of radio directional finders grew out of an attempt to invent a death ray—something the Nazis are still working on. The Nazis may have enlisted his assistance by humoring his belief.

“In any case it makes no odds.” He picked up his pipe again, and appeared to be surprised—as pipe smokers invariably were—to find that it had gone out. For a moment he sat cradling it, his dark eyes gazing out past Tom, into some middle distance of thought, and Tom saw weariness descend upon him like a double load of grain bags carried too far—the weariness of waiting and wondering, less urgent perhaps than the ground-in ache in his own flesh, but ultimately just as exhausting. At least for the past ten days his own thoughts had been absolutely concentrated on the moment: cover, spare ammo, a place in the retreating trucks. He hadn’t had time, as this old man had, to consider the larger implications of that tidal wave of gray-clad men sweeping across the flat green Belgian landscape—he hadn’t spent the past ten days wondering What the hell will we do when the Germans land at Dover? knowing that every gun, every truck, every grenade and clip of ammo the British Army possessed had been left on Dunkirk beach.

Then Mayfair sighed and straightened his shoulders again, as if reminding himself, First things first. “Are you interested? You’ll be put ashore by submarine, probably near Hamburg; we’ll give you the names of contacts in Hamburg and in Danzig as well—if you have to flee in that direction—for you to radio for instructions about when and where you’ll be taken off again. You’ll have a couple of German identities, with uniforms, passbooks, ration cards, maps... photographs of the men involved, if we can get them in time. Colonel Hillyard tells me you’re a man to be trusted to do the job and not to panic if things come unstuck. At present, Sligo’s group is headquartered somewhere in the wilds of Prussia near the Polish border, and you may have to make a judgment about which direction to run. But that can all be worked out later. The question is, are you willing?”

“To kill Sligo?”

Mayfair nodded, unfazed at the bald statement that the mission was, in fact, being undertaken for the purpose of murder. “If you can ascertain what they’re up to, of course we’d like to know that, too. But I understand you’re not a scientist. The main object is to kill Professor Sligo, at whatever cost.”

Tom glanced over at Hillyard. His brain was still ringing with the alarm bells of unanswered questions, where it wasn’t thick with sleepiness and exhaustion, but he guessed if he were to ask now, he wouldn’t get answers anyway.

But two years of fighting in Spain, of ambushes in dry ravines and blowing up bridges and trains, of firefights in the streets of Madrid, and of the thornbush morasses of guerrilla politics had taught him that Hillyard was a man to be trusted. Hillyard met his eyes and nodded.

“I’m your man,” Tom said laconically. Then he added, “God willing and the creek don’t rise.”

Mayfair’s mouth tightened. “As you say,” he agreed, and his tone was dry. Elsewhere in the building, the radio announcer’s voice chittered frighteningly on.

“So what’s the story?” Tom fished in the pocket of his uniform tunic for makings as he and Hillyard emerged onto the high porch and paused to let their eyes adjust. With every window in the city swathed tight in blackout curtains, the darkness was startling, darker even than open country would be, for the shadows of the buildings blocked the dim ambient glow from the dusting of stars overhead. The night was fine and warm, the moist, thick smell of new-cut grass drifting to them from the little park in the center of the square, the colder, damper breath of moss-greened pavement and last year’s dead leaves rising from the sunken areaway that dropped like a dry moat below the porch to either side of them. The freshness of the air and the sweet, calm silence of the night cleared his head and drove back the exhaustion that seemed to weight his bones.

Tom’s match made a startling glare in the blackness. “You know as well as I do they’ve got guys in regular Intelligence who know German.”

“So they do. I’ve booked us rooms over in Torrington Place.” Starlight gleamed on the bald curve of Hillyard’s head as he led the way down the narrow porch stairs, his gas mask swinging awkwardly at his belt. “My guess is that Alec—Mayfair—” He corrected himself, “—couldn’t get approval from Intelligence to send one of their men. It’s not his department, you know.”

“It’s not?” They passed the little park. Against the pale scars of cut-up earth, Saltwood saw the low, dim bulk of a redbrick air-raid shelter, new and raw and waiting. He remembered Madrid again, and what he’d seen of the village of Guernica. Though the night was warm and peaceful, he shivered.

Hillyard shook his head. “He approached me privately, asked if there was anyone from the Brigade who’d be reliable. Most of the native Brits, I might add, have already vanished into the F.O.’s murky ranks—not that that affected my choice much. If he hadn’t arranged to call you back now over this, I’d still have been waiting for you on the docks.”

“I bet you meet all the ships, honey.” Tom grinned and made a smooching noise in the dark. From behind them came the sudden, full-throated rumble of a car’s engine—a big eight-cylinder American job by the sound of it—and a moment later a lightless black shape swept gleaming past them and away into the dark. “Whoa—somebody was sure thinking when they drew up the blackout regs... What’s up?”

“Well, there’s been a certain amount of discussion about forming guerilla forces, probably based in Scotland...”

“You don’t think England’s going to surrender, then?”

“Never,” Hillyard said decisively. “You’ve been in the fighting, so I don’t know how much you’ve seen of what the Luftwaffe and the German army did to Rotterdam...”

“I’ve heard.” Saltwood’s voice was grim.

“It’s going to be bad here,” Hillyard went on, suddenly quiet, as if he sensed all those families, all those children, all those peaceful lives and day-to-day joys that lay like a vast, murmuring hive around them in the lightless city. “And it may get bad very soon. But Churchill’s never going to surrender.”

“And with all this going on,” Saltwood said thoughtfully, dropping his cigarette butt to the sidewalk and grinding it out under his heel, “Mayfair still thinks this mad professor of theirs is important enough for me to go over to Germany now?”

There was long silence, broken only by the strike of the two men’s boots on the sidewalk and by the occasional surge of traffic—punctuated now and then by the startled screech of brakes—a few blocks away in Gower Street. But there were few passersby. Everyone in London—everyone in England, Tom thought—would be glued to a radio tonight.

They turned a corner, Hillyard seemed to know where he was going—but then, he always did, and could see like a cat in the dark. He steered Tom carefully across the street to avoid an entanglement of sandbags and barbed wire around some large building, nearly invisible in the pitchy gloom. Once they were stopped by a coveralled civilian, a fat old white-haired man wearing a warden’s armband and carrying a gas mask strapped to his belt, and asked for their papers, but when he saw their uniforms by the quick glow of his flashlight he hastily saluted and waved them on by.

At length Hillyard said, “We’ll probably have a little bit of breathing space, anyway—the latest reports say the German armored divisions are already turning south to mop up France.”

“Makes sense if Hitler wants to secure naval bases on the Channel.”

“So it does. But if there is to be an invasion, Mayfair seems to think that whatever Sligo is doing will make the situation worse. He’s been scared pretty badly.”

“Yeah, but... a wizard, Bill?”

And Hillyard laughed. “Well, I didn’t read the reports. That should be the Red Cow opposite.” He gestured toward what appeared to be a solid and anonymous wall of dark buildings on the other side of the narrow lane. “There isn’t a wireless in the hotel room. Think you can stay awake long enough for a beer?”

“I always knew you could smell beer across a street.”

Together they plunged across the bumpy pavement, dark as the inside of a closet, narrowly missing being run down by something powerful and nearly silent—a Dusenberg or Bentley, Tom guessed by the throb of the engine—that passed close enough to them that the wind of it flapped their trouser legs against their calves. Having spent twenty-four hours in a shell crater on the beach listening to machine-gun bullets smacking into the sand on all sides of him, Tom didn’t bother to jump, just quickened his stride enough to let the whizzing car pass.

“Here lies the body of Thomas Leander Saltwood,” he quoted his own epitaph, “who survived union goons in the West Virginia mines, special deputies in the California orchards, two years of fighting in Spain, nine months in a Spanish prison, the German invasion of Belgium, the shelling of the Dunkirk beaches, Luftwaffe strafing on the Channel, his commander’s driving on the way up to London...”

“Watch it, Sergeant!”

“...only to be killed in quest of beer by a careless driver during the blackout in the streets of London. You remember that case of Chateau Lafitte you found in Madrid?”

“Ah,” Hillyard said reminiscently as he reached into the stygian pit of a darkened doorway for a handle—even on the step here, Tom could now hear the hushed murmur of voices and smell the inevitable warm fustiness of beer and bodies within. “A very good year.” More than the wine, Tom remembered the bombing raid that had been going on when they’d found it... remembered his commander casually pouring out glassfuls for them both in the ruins of the old cellar, listening to the explosions getting nearer and nearer and remarking, That one’s two, three streets away yet... plenty of time... hmm, sounds like they’re dropping mines... “I remember old Palou insisting on unloading the wine from his cart during that big raid. ‘They are only Germans, but this... this is money...’ ”

“Funny what you get used to. I met Californios when I was working the Long Beach docks who wouldn’t get up from the suppertable for an earthquake but who swore they’d never go east of the Rockies for fear of tornadoes—tornadoes, for Chrissake!”

In the broad slit of yellow light as Hillyard opened the pub door, Tom saw his commander blench. “Er—have you seen many tornadoes?”

And Tom, who’d grown up with them, only laughed.

He took a seat at a table in a corner, under a moldering trophy head some aristocrat had shot in Kenya and an enameled tin ad for Green King Ale. The pub was very quiet, the scattering of workingmen and housewives there speaking softly, if at all, over their pints of ale and bitters, listening to the chatter of the radio announcer’s voice.

“...general withdrawal of all remaining forces to Dunkirk. On the Channel, the destroyer Wakeful was torpedoed and sunk, only a few survivors escaping to be picked up by the motor drifter Nautilus and the danlayer Comfort, themselves heavily loaded... the Queen of the Channel, with 920 men aboard, bombed and sunk, her crew and passengers picked up by the store-ship Dorrian Rose... Harvester, Esk, Malcom... the minesweeper Brighton Belle sunk in the Channel, her troops rescued by the Medway Queen... destroyers heavily engaged with shore batteries...”

They’ll never make it, Tom thought, leaning back against the dark wainscot walls and letting his eyes slip closed. Hillyard had gone to get them drinks—the soft murmur of voices washed over him, men’s and women’s both. It was a neighborhood pub, a family pub... It was good beyond anything to be among normal people, decent people, not in the terror and sweat and dirt of battle, the horrible inferno of waiting under shellfire, maybe to have your life saved and maybe not...

The rocking of the old Codrington that had taken him off the beach returned to him, seemingly woven into his bones. Like the rhythmic jostle of the freight cars he’d ridden, he thought, that came back to a man even when he was lying on a stable bed again. The memory of the smell of tornado weather, the dense, waiting stillness, the livid color of the sky, waiting and watching for spouts.

Funny, he hadn’t thought about that since he was fourteen, the summer the ranch had finally gone bust and the bank foreclosed on them, sold their hard-held herd and plowed the whole concern under for a wheat farm. That was the first time he’d ridden the rails, down to Oklahoma, looking for work in the oil fields.

His head jerked; he realized he’d been slipping over into sleep. He saw Hillyard still by the bar, bending forward to catch the radio announcer’s voice. He tried to remember the last time he’d been this warm, this comfortable—tried to remember the last time he hadn’t been expecting to get blown away by the Germans in the next ten seconds...

His eyes slid closed again. The smells of tobacco and beer wreathed his thoughts, the gentle patter of voices like falling rain. “...expecting an announcement by the King of Belgium... Abukir destroyed... Shikari and Scimitar at Dover... special trains to take the men to rest camps...”

“...must use his influence, now more than ever,” a woman’s soft voice murmured at the next table. He’d noticed the two women there when he’d sat down, one delicate little white-haired finch of a lady, like a duchess in plain clothes, the other a striking redhead with eyes the color of the sherry in her glass. Like everyone else in the pub, they had gas masks with them, incongruous on the floor beside their worn leather handbags and as little regarded. The redhead’s voice was low and desperate as she went on, “I saw it in the crystal. I felt his coming on the night of the equinox... I felt it the first time he used the power of the leys. If he isn’t found, if he isn’t stopped...”

“He will be, darling,” the old lady’s comforting tones came, motherly and gentle through the drowsy fog of dreaming that padded Saltwood’s mind like a goose, down quilt. What they were saying made no sense, but it was good to just listen to women’s voices, after all those weeks of men, of gunfire, and of the overhead shriek of planes.

“Trust my husband to do his part, as we do ours. We have raised the power to keep the skies clear for the planes... later we can call down the clouds over the Channel... Alec!” she added in surprise, and Tom opened his eyes—or thought he opened his eyes, though he could very well have been dreaming, he thought—surely it was a dream that Mayfair had come into the pub, gas mask tucked under his arm, and was stooping, hesitant with arthritis, to kiss the little duchess on the lips.

“It is all being taken care of,” Mayfair said, and the red-haired woman sighed, her slim shoulders bowing suddenly, as if with exhausted relief. He added, “As the Americans say, God willing and the creek don’t rise...”

“No beer for you, Sergeant.”

Tom jerked awake, to see Hillyard standing at his elbow, a glass in either hand.

“I refuse to carry you all the way to Torrington Place.”

Saltwood blinked and rubbed his eyes. The table beside his was empty.

“Sorry for the delay.” Hillyard settled himself into the chair next to Tom and gave himself the lie by pushing a pint of Bass across to him. “They say they’ve got somewhere near seventeen thousand men landed at Dover and more coming over all the time... nearly all the army’s within the perimeter of Dunkirk. And the German armored divisions have definitely turned south, toward Paris. That leaves the Luftwaffe to contend with, but we may get a little breathing space... it’s my guess, in fact, that with Intelligence in a frenzy, there’ll be quite a delay in your setting out on your travels. It takes time to assemble papers, arrange transport, get photographs and maps, especially if one is doing it on the sneak.”

“Look,” Tom said curiously, as a few cautious sips of the nut-flavored ale cleared his head a little. “Just who is Mayfair? What department is he in? I mean, how did he find out about Sligo in the first place, if he’s not in Intelligence?”

“I didn’t ask.” Hillyard smiled. “Not that he’d have told me if I had. He’s in Finance—an auditor. Rumors do get around, especially the weird ones—perhaps he heard it from his wife.”

“His wife?” Alec, the little Duchess in his dream—if it had been a dream—had exclaimed. In her simple tweed skirt and strand of pearls under the neat home-knitted green cardigan the old lady had certainly been no Mata Hari. “Is she in Intelligence?”

Hillyard chuckled. “Intelligence? No—it’s just that for years there’s been a rumor going about that she’s a witch.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Wunderbar.”