Chapter 9: Wall Street Swastika: Nazi Pigs in the Wall:
Dora could hardly believe it when the ship finally docked in Southampton and they could disembark. They had made it all the way across the Atlantic! Finally!
Churchill, Edward, and Dora had room service breakfast in their cabins before they disembarked. They did not want to appear in public in the first class dining room. The last couple days of the voyage after the Prof had gotten the maps they had stayed secluded in their cabins and had not attended any social events. Nor had they dined in the dining room. They remained incommunicado with the Prof who had his strict instructions from Churchill about where to meet them on land. Churchill did not so much as pick up the cabin phone to talk to his friend. It was too dangerous. As far as Hitler’s spies were concerned when the Prof had bumped into Dora in the Queen’s Room and briefly danced with her it was supposed to be a chance encounter with another passenger who was in his cups. Nothing more. They did not want to make the Germans suspicious.
Edward had driven to the cruise terminal when he came to America. He remembered where the car was parked. They had disembarked early, earlier than anyone else on the ship. When the crew told them the gangway was not yet open, Dora tipped the man generously before he had finished objecting. Then the three of them were able to sneak off the ship undisturbed.
As soon as they pulled out into the traffic on the main road in Southampton, Churchill insisted that he needed refreshment. They had not partaken of the breakfast offered on the ship this morning. They were in too much of a hurry to depart. Edward proposed going to the PIg in the Wall nearby. That made the MP smile as mysteriously as the Mona Lisa if not more so.
Dora was beginning to get the idea that there was more to this than met the eye when they entered the old, medieval-looking establishment located in a building attached to the old stone walls that surrounded the city built after a pirate raid hundreds of years ago. There across the room she saw a familiar figure whom she had last seen on the dance floor aboard the ship. He had his pointed nose stuck in a copy of the Times of London.
Churchill shook the hand of the Prof as they were seated in a dark corner in the back of the wood paneled room with sconces everywhere for illumination even in the middle of the day. Here they were nearest to the kitchen. It was impossible for them to be seen from the entryway door.
“I think it went flawlessly,” Churchill remarked. “All those days acting in student dramas when you were at student at Oxford all those years ago stood you in good stead a few days ago. You looked just like a drunken, womanizing lout.” Churchill complimented him as he called for a glass of grog for everybody.
Dora told the waiter to bring her hot tea with cream and sugar instead.
“How did you get off the ship before we did?” Dora asked. “I had to bribe the cabin boys as it was to let us off.”
The Prof shrugged. “I just saw some men putting up a ramp. I walked down it before the cabin boys were manning it, that’s all. I knew it was better if I did the unexpected. Really nobody said a word.”
“You have that air about you that your students have appreciated for the past generation.,” Winston sipped his grog by the roaring fire.
Dora felt somebody staring at her. She turned to look back across the room. There at a table by the window sat the German thugs from the ship. No doubt they had been hired to follow them. They were genuine Nazi pigs in the wall, so silent they had not been heard until now.
