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“Tell me the names and addresses of friends either of you still have in Berlin,” he replied. “Elena will in all probability seek out at least one of them. She’s alone with limited money. She’ll need help. Think about who she would trust, who has the means and the nerve to help, who can be held hostage to fortune that you know of, and therefore could be forced to hand her over. Think like Elena and give me them in order of likelihood. If I can find her, I can probably get her out of Germany.”
Margot felt a twinge of guilt. He would be endangering his career at least, possibly his life. But Elena was her sister. Damn her for being impossibly stupid! Didn’t she learn from experience? It looked as if she had trusted the wrong man—again!
“Thank you,” she said quite humbly. She had some idea w
hat she was asking, and she really was grateful. “I’ll give it a few moments’ thought, try to see it from her point of view, then I’ll make the list.”
“Good. Would you like a cup of tea while you’re thinking? We have some pretty decent biscuits here. We get them sent over, of course.”
“Yes, please. I seem to have forgotten to eat.”
He smiled. She guessed he was wise enough not to make any promises he could not keep.
She respected that.
CHAPTER
17
When Margot had gone, Cordell stood for several moments wondering what to do. He had her list. He was always seeking knowledge, and he had wanted Margot to believe that he would be all the help he could.
Tragedy had touched her deeply. There was perhaps a little bitterness in her, but he did not find it repellent. He could understand it only too well. She was angry, but she had not lost her capacity to hope, and to feel. There was still a hunger for life in her. He felt certain that if she had ever given up, it had been for a few moments in the loneliness of the night, but in the morning, when the light came back, she would be ready to fight again.
If you struck Margot, she would strike you back. Not like Winifred, who would do nothing, as if she did not feel. As if she were essentially alone, and you did not exist, except peripherally, seen and heard but never felt. Was that his fault? He had tried, hard, though perhaps in the wrong ways? One way or another, he had failed.
He remembered Margot from her time in Berlin. She was like her father in that she was clever, angry, but a realist. She had more hunger for life than her father, but the same ability to see and acknowledge the truth. She had her mother’s elegance, not a traditional beauty, but alluring…that was the word. And never a bore. There was nothing about her at all that was tedious, or cold. At least that was what she seemed from the outside. She might be hiding a coldness inside, but then so might anyone.
He looked at the paper in his hand. What was he going to do with a list of Elena’s friends? If he called them and asked if they had seen Elena, that would warn her, and she would be gone almost immediately. Running from one place to another. She had been nearly hysterical when she turned up at his office two days ago—what must she be like now?
She would believe he had not warned the authorities, but he had. Though perhaps not the right ones. Perhaps he could have done more to prevent the assassination of Scharnhorst. The man was an abomination!
But that was Cordell’s risk to take, not Charles Standish’s daughter’s. He owed Charles more than that. Charles was at least ten years older than Cordell, but they had been good friends. Comfortable in conversation or silence. They cared about the same values of honesty and stoicism, liked oblique humor and walking the quieter, older parts of the city. He remembered vividly searching antiques shops and seeing old meerschaum pipes and wondering together about who had carved them, the lives of those who had smoked them. Going to the theater and seeing small productions of classic plays, young actors perhaps on the way to greatness.
He understood Charles’s deep pain at the loss of his only son, and why he couldn’t speak about it. There are some wounds you don’t touch. To say the pain would pass in time was offensive. One spoke of other things, the bone-deep resolve that such a war would never happen again. It was the only decent legacy they would leave behind from all the years of work, living in marvelous cities that were not home, and never would be.
He straightened up and put the list in his pocket. He would make a copy of it and give it to the police. She might actually be safer if she were caught and put in a prison. The embassy would provide first-rate legal counsel for her. Possibly there was some deal that could be made to return her to England, although the German government would ask a high price, and very possibly make a humiliating show of it.
But then maybe she would not be at any of her friends’ houses.
And what the devil had happened to Ian Newton? Had he gone completely rogue? Cordell had thought him the standard, idealistic, young, upper-class Englishman with little imagination for the lives of anyone different from himself. Cambridge scholar in classics and modern political history. Had he taken a swift turn to the left…communism, or something of the sort? God knows, there were those who had. They would wake up one day, when it was too late.
Had Elena fallen in love with him, too, and even been turned herself? A young woman—she must be, what, twenty-eight?—not married, leading a fairly boring life without much hope of anything else? A handsome young man, the Amalfi coast, a lot of idealistic nonsense talked about the future. Change! The dreams of those who had not yet tasted life, except the froth on the surface.
Poor Charles. He did not deserve that; neither did Margot. She cared for her sister, as she naturally would. Perhaps he should send one of his men to look discreetly for Elena’s friends. If he found her, there might be a way of getting her back to England with no one seeing her.
He pressed the bell on his desk for his assistant to return.
CHAPTER
18
“What?” Lucas demanded, sitting in his study and staring at Peter Howard, who stood in front of the bookcase, too tense to stop shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Howard repeated what he had said. “Elena was at the British Embassy the day before yesterday. She saw Cordell.”
“In Berlin?” Lucas said. “Why, for God’s sake? She was on her way from Amalfi to Paris, then home with some young man she’d made friends with.” He stopped. Saying a thing over and over did not make it true. Nor did it ease the coldness inside him, the sudden sense of real fear. “What did she see Cordell about?” he asked. “For heaven’s sake, Peter, give me this in some sort of order. How do you know Elena was there? Who recognized her? Are they sure? What did they say, exactly?”
Howard’s face was bleak. “That Elena Standish came to the British Embassy in Berlin, the day before the shooting. She asked to see Roger Cordell. Identified herself, unmistakably. She said it was both urgent and extremely important. It was late in the afternoon, but she insisted, and was allowed in. Lucas, the young man Elena was traveling with was Ian Newton.” Howard went on quickly. “She is unhurt, except emotionally. She finished Newton’s intended journey, to see Cordell…”
