Looking back, after all the turmoil and tragedy had gone by, Napier realized, as clearly as though he had been an eye-witness, the despair that fell on Julian when he heard from her own lips that Nan was "against what Germany stands for. I want my country to be against it," she wrote Napier, "and there seems to be only one way. It isn't, not yet, the way of peace. Well, there it is. I have failed Julian in the work he cares more about than anything in the world. I say to myself, I won't fail him in other ways if I can help it. What do you say, Gavan?"
Before there was time to "say," Napier had received his two wounds, a shell-shattered foot and a damaged right wrist. He was sent home, and for six-and-thirty days lay chafing in a London hospital. The time hung horribly. Most of Napier's friends were in active service or dead; the rest were swamped in work. He'd have gone out of his mind, he said afterward, if it hadn't been for Tommy Durrant. Tommy, with his eye-glass and his pre-war elegance unimpaired, his alertness and sound sense increased by new responsibilities, was still behind the old scenes and in and out of the new as well. He had been "lent" to the Admiralty Intelligence Department. Tommy was full of the increasing difficulty in Anglo-American relations. One day he came in full of "a scheme we've just put through"—a scheme talked of with a careless air, but in a voice carefully modulated.
"That woman on the other side who used to be at the McIntyres'—came back as a Belgian nun after we'd deported her, you know—well, your friend in New York, Taylor, has traced a beastly lot of trouble to her and her gang. For months Taylor's kept telling our people over here it was childish to go straining every nerve to keep the American balance from tipping the wrong way, pouring out money, losing prestige, above all, losing time, while we leave people like Schwarzenberg and her nest of adders to breed their poison—"
"What can we do?" Napier interrupted, hopeless of the answer.
"Get her out of that."
"Out of America?"
Tommy nodded with such vigor his eye-glass fell out.
"I admit it'll be damned difficult, but Singleton," he said, replacing the monocle firmly once more—"Singleton thinks he's found the way." Then, in the deepest confidence, Tommy told Napier about an ex-German spy, one Ernst Pforzheim, who'd had relations with the Schwarzenberg woman. "He'd done a lot of useful work in America as well as here, but Singleton had got our people to tell him they weren't satisfied. There was really only one thing they wanted of Pforzheim, and he hadn't done it. He'd already told the chief there were special reasons why he, Pforzheim, of all people in the world, shouldn't touch this Schwarzenberg business. The chief couldn't see it.
"'But I'm dead!" wails Pforzheim.
"'You've got to come alive,' the chief grinned. But you never in your life saw a man as depressed as that German when he heard he was somehow or other to find a way to rid us of Schwarzenberg.