A Game of Spies by John Altman Page B

back to reality again, the office was dark. Light from the hallway leaked stealthily under the door.
    He sat up straighter. The smell of bread was dissipating now.
    What had he been thinking, before his mind had wandered? He couldn’t recall.
    His eyes ticked over the contents of the desk: the file, the telephone, the framed photograph of his mother, the blotter, the pencil. Ordinary things. Nothing of importance there. But he had the nagging feeling that he had been thinking of something important, before his mind had taken him back to the front. Hadn’t he?
    He licked his lips, then shook his head. He needed a good night’s sleep. That was all.
    He would remember in the morning.
    He let himself out, leaving the file untouched on the edge of his desk.

4
    HOHENZOLLERNDAMM, WILMERSDORF
    Once Wilmersdorf had been a bourgeois district.
    Then, at the turn of the century, the immigrants had come. The old Junker mansions had been split into apartments to accommodate the influx; the neighborhood had turned plainly residential. Now the few opulent manors in the area were separated by tenements, with a profusion of bulbous blue church domes—the architecture of the Russian Orthodoxy—rising above the rooftops.
    William Hobbs looked out at the neighborhood for a moment, then let the curtain fall closed. When he turned from the window, he was surprised to see Ernst Gehl standing by the grandfather clock, watching him.
    â€œHerr Gehl,” he said. “You startled me.”
    Gehl gave a listless smile. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man in his late sixties. Something about him reminded Hobbs of Arturo Toscanini, the legendary conductor: a resemblance through the nose and the eyes, in the high forehead and the saturnine demeanor.
    Gehl turned to the towering grandfather clock, opened it, and began to adjust the weights inside. “Going out again?” he asked.
    â€œFor the last time,” Hobbs said.
    Gehl did not turn to face him, but Hobbs could read the man’s thoughts as clearly as if he’d spoken them aloud. Every time Hobbs left the modest brick house, he risked bringing attention to the Gehls. In one way, Herr Gehl would have preferred that he stayed locked in the attic, out of sight and out of mind. On the other hand, Herr Gehl knew that Hobbs could not move on—to the extraction site, away from the Gehl house for good—until he had successfully contacted the agent for whom he had come here.
    â€œI won’t be coming back,” Hobbs said.
    Gehl, still occupied with the clock, gave a negligent wave. Hobbs, of course, had already left the house three times hoping to make contact. Gehl did not have any reason to believe that this time would be different.
    Hobbs looked at the man’s back for another moment. He felt a slow, rising surge of sympathy. Ernst Gehl and his wife, Ursula, Hobbs knew, were reluctant associates of the British. They had promised their help in the days when it had been easy to promise such help, when noble virtues had seemed most important, when the specter of war had been something on the distant horizon. Now war had come and eyes were everywhere. Gehl and his wife were already guilty of treason, so they could hardly turn back; but they plainly regretted the position in which they found themselves.
    After watching Gehl adjust the clock for a few moments, he turned to the staircase and climbed to the house’s second floor. Apologies and thanks would be worthless. The best thing he could do for them would be to get on with his mission, and out of their lives.
    A heavy chain hung from a trapdoor in the second-story ceiling. When he pulled on it, a ladder folded open like an oversized accordion. He moved up the rungs, into the close confines of the attic. He had spent the past few days living in this attic—but it had come, in that short span of time, to feel something like home.
    Which was, he thought now, really rather sad.
    He came off the