CH 2 – The Cadre

1945

The nurse sat opposite him in his small untidy office in a nondescript building in Sydney’s Haymarket. A heavily bespectacled man of about forty with untidy hair, prominent nose and the stink of tobacco about him. There was one file on his desk, hers, and when he opened it she could see the first page contained a list of names, about twenty or so.

‘You have a lot of friends,’ he said, ‘ and quite a few nurses amongst them.’ He stabbed a finger at one. ‘This one is interesting, or rather her husband is.’

The cadre instructed her to begin a deeper social relationship with this friend and her husband, join them regularly for drinks at the hotel he knew they both frequented, a fact that was noted on another page in the file, as were many other personal details of his list of twenty of her friends. Details the nurse was only too happy to provide him with at their meeting at Taronga Park a week earlier, both of them leaning over the lion enclosure as she talked. She realised now how prodigious his memory was as he had made no notes at the time.

‘Sit with them, drink with them and listen to them,’ he said, ‘they will talk about many mundane matters but if there is ever any mention of naval shipping commit what you hear to memory. Not everything is reported in the newspapers.

‘I will meet you at a place to be decided where you can pass on this information, and remember, commit nothing to paper. Ever.’

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