Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [85]
“Then why are you here?” She still did not look at him. Her voice was light and very soft. He had to lean closer to her to be sure of catching every word. He could smell the perfume of her hair and see the shadow of her lashes on her cheek.
The orchestra started to tune up in the pit. People were still busy settling in their seats, waving to friends they recognized, calling out greetings. Girls were laughing and flirting. There was a hectic pleasure in the air. No comedian could fail to amuse them, nor on the other hand, could they totally block out the shadow of knowledge of world events just beyond the edge of the lights.
“I’m here deceiving everybody,” Matthew replied in a whisper. “I tell myself I’m here to gain confirmation from you, but that’s not true, because I don’t need it. We turned the spy in New York. We got all the information from him that we wanted, even the name of their man in the German bank, and the account numbers. But he paid for it with his life.”
She was silent for several minutes.
He waited. What she really wanted was to know if they had broken the code, but what would she pretend to want? In that instant he longed for her to be like the people around them, here just for fun, to flirt, perhaps even to love and lose, but without deceit. He longed for it so fiercely it was a hollow, physical ache inside him.
She turned and met his eyes. In a glance she understood, and allowed it to show in her own face. Then deliberately, like smashing a glass into a hundred shards of light, she broke it. “Did your people kill him?” she asked.
He was cold in the heat of the theater. “No,” he replied. “I imagine his own people did.”
“Then they knew he had betrayed them,” she pointed out. “They’ll change their routine. Your intelligence will be no good to you.”
He smiled bleakly. “We’ll act before then, if we haven’t already.”
“What good will that do?”
“The Germans won’t risk angering the Americans by doing it again. They’ll have to think of something else, and no doubt they will. But Wilson has this grand idea of stepping in to be the arbiter of peace in Europe. It seems to matter intensely to him. His place in history. Neither we nor Germany can afford to destroy that illusion, especially with presidential elections in November. Far more of this is about internal American politics than you might think.”
“There are a lot of Germans in America,” she said, looking at the stage where the tempo of the music had quickened.
“And Irish,” he added. “But plenty of British, too, and even a few French, and Italians. Don’t forget the Italians. God knows how many of them have been slaughtered on the Austrian border.”
She did not answer. Her face was bleak with misery, as if she had suddenly remembered a vast, ancient grief.
The music swept over them. All around them, young people were living in the moment, refusing to think of yesterday or tomorrow. Some sat close, arms around each other.
Detta said no more until the interval and they went to the foyer and bar. Matthew bought her a drink and some chocolates. A few yards away a group of young men in uniform were repeating one of the jokes and laughing too loudly, too long. The undertones of despair in their voices caught his ear like a cry.
He glanced at Detta. There was a naked pity in her eyes so powerful he put his hand on her arm without thinking what he was doing.
She turned to him in surprise, and the pity vanished, although hiding it cost her an effort. Then she read in his face that it had stirred a softness in him, no sense of victory over her because she had yielded a moment. For this instant her grace and her compulsive loyalty to her cause tugged at his emotions. It made him ache for her, made him long to break through the barrier of lies and games so that for a moment they could cling to each other in the passions of the mind and heart that hold people together. They had the understanding of the same beauty, the same gentleness, pity for hurt and loss, the infinite treasuring of life’s sweetness, and