Chapter 65 The Green Gloves

Brennan reopened the red-bordered folder on the Saturday, laying it on the archive table with the ceremony of a surgeon uncovering instruments. The twice-monthly signals to the unnamed coastal frequency had continued through February and March, punctual as rent; the next transmission window fell, by the arithmetic of old schedules, on Tuesday week. Somewhere in England a fist that had outlived its architect still keyed reduced power into the dark, and Brennan had waited four years for that fist to reach for something bulky enough to be followed home. "Euston locker, Thursdays," he said. "The collection run outlived Hayes too — payments outward wrapped in railway timetables, cleared by a woman in green gloves who never hurried and never looked up. We watched her twice in '44 and lost her both times in the crowd, because losing people in crowds is a courtesy London extends to everyone equally." He squared the folder. "This Thursday the locker gets cleared again. This time I want her followed by women, because a tail with a skirt walks through London invisible and a tail with boots might as well carry a bell." Dorothy Chen came to the archive on Monday, thinner, quieter, seconded now to a translation desk in Whitehall, and volunteered with the economy of an old partnership: "You need somebody the crowd believes. I have been invisible in three languages since 1941." Margaret had forgotten how much she had missed being understood without explanation. They drank tea among the ledgers and planned a surveillance the way they had once planned decodes — layer by layer, with the map of Euston pinned where the wall of names would have hung if walls could travel. Thursday came in mild, with the station full of soldiers and farewells. At twenty past four the woman in green gloves entered by the side gate, medium height, ordinary face, coat a size too warm for the weather — the uniform, Dorothy murmured later, of people who change clothes in doorways. She cleared locker 187 with a key she did not hurry to find, took a parcel wrapped in newsprint into the crook of her arm, and walked out into the crowd at the pace of errands. Dorothy followed her for forty minutes through streets that doubled back on themselves, reporting by payphone in the boring voice of a wife confirming shopping, and lost her finally — deliberately, on instruction — only after the parcel changed hands in the back office of a forwarding agent in Fenchurch Street, where the day-book, consulted later by a man from Customs who owed Brennan, recorded the outgoing item with English simplicity: *one parcel printed matter, consignee Hallström & Söner, Göteborg.* "Göteborg," Margaret said, when the circle closed on the map. "The dealer sells us iron in December and collects its picture in March. The loop is not a loop, it is a ferry." She stood looking at the line her pencil had drawn, Fenchurch Street to the Baltic and back, patient as tides. "Photographs of forecasts going out wrapped in sentiment, and money coming home dressed as agriculture. Somewhere a ledger holds both halves and balances." So she spent the collector's card. She wrote three lines to the Swedish legation, care of the name on the card, and posted it before she could audit her own caution, and the reply came inside two days: an address in Pimlico, an hour, and a single letter — K — in lieu of signature, which was Lindqvist's idea of a joke and therefore not a joke at all. He received them in the back room of a tea shop with samovars and no witnesses, looking rested and expensive, and poured for three with the precision of a man who considered hospitality an intelligence function. "You used the card," he observed, handing Margaret her cup. "I confess that pleased me. Most people keep them for emergencies and die of politeness. Now. You wish to trade, and I am here to be traded with, so let us begin where trading begins — with what I am careful about." He set the pot down. "I am careful about dates, as you know. And lately I am careful about ribbon. Someone has been selling pictures of the counting house's dreams to buyers who prefer their futures printed. My employers disapprove — not of the selling; of the competition." "His name," Margaret said. "Loyalty forbids," said Lindqvist pleasantly, "and curiosity rewards, so I shall be curious instead. A man who inspects agricultural equipment fourteen Sundays running, in a nation that imports none. Initials L.S., initials that also stand, neatly countersigned, at the foot of certain requisitions of September 1942 — you will find the page in your canvas bag, Miss Chase; you have been carrying his signature for months without introducing yourself." He turned his cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "Leonard Sprott. Careful about Sundays. Careful about ribbon. And — my correction, free of charge, since this establishment trades in truth — careful now about timetables. He has booked leave in April. The stated purpose is an exhibition of farm machinery in Stockholm. My employers, who invented that exhibition, are rather looking forward to learning what he brings." The canvas bag confirmed him that evening: Hale's requisition of the fourteenth of September 1942, the order that had sent Alan Pemberton to water, and at its foot, in a clerk's obedient hand, the witnessing initials L.S., countersigned and dated — a bureaucrat's fingerprint, pressed into paper twenty months before Margaret had ever heard his name. "He was in the room when Pemberton drowned," she said. "He has been in the room his whole life. That is what the unfound courier was — not a person. A function. The room where signatures happen." Brennan laid the surveillance report beside the requisition, and the two papers lay together on the green-lit table like a marriage certificate. "Packing cases were delivered to the annex on Wednesday," he said. "Two of them. Stencilled for agricultural export. Whatever Mr. Sprott ships in April, he means to ship it properly crated." He looked up. "We have until then to learn which half matters more to him — the selling, or the leaving."