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Chapters (46)
  1. The Man Who Loved Mata Hari
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. PART I: The Early Years
  5. Prologue
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II: The Middle Years
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. PART III: The War Years
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-One
  29. Chapter Twenty-Two
  30. PART IV: The Last Year
  31. Chapter Twenty-Three
  32. Chapter Twenty-Four
  33. Chapter Twenty-Five
  34. Chapter Twenty-Six
  35. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-One
  40. Chapter Thirty-Two
  41. Chapter Thirty-Three
  42. Chapter Thirty-Four
  43. Chapter Thirty-Five
  44. Montserrat
  45. Author’s Afterword
  46. Table of Contents

"Look, Nicky, I shall be painfully honest with you. It's quite likely that this entire Mata Hari business is merely Charles Dunbar's circus. Nonetheless the case has caught the attention of some very influential people. As a result you and I are to play spycatcher for a while. If in fact she's actually connected then we'll do our best to entice her back to our team. If on the other hand, she's innocent, then we've both had a lovely time wasting the taxpayer's money. Now frankly I can't think of a more agreeable way to fight this war, can you?"

He smiled, clearly pleased with himself.

There were at least some six hours when they left him alone with her: cigarettes on the nightstand, Scotch on a table, rain mixing with the blackness to form a solid wall so that no one could touch them. For a long time he simply lay very still, gazing at a patch of sky through the curtains. Then at last he turned to the file. There were two classic nude studies from her stay in Madrid—the first, a full-length back view so that he could not see her face, but the slender hips, the slight buttocks, and the mane of dark hair were unmistakable; the second, a seated frontal view with her hands laced behind her head to reveal the smooth hollows of her arms. She seemed to be smiling at something beyond the camera; her eyes were alight with a dazed tenderness.

Zelle. Oh Lord, Zelle.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Four

SHE was arrested at Falmouth on the twelfth of November, allegedly mistaken for a notorious German agent by the name of Clara Benedix. The presiding officer was a George Reid Grant, assisted by his wife Janet. In a 1965 interview Grant would say, "A message came down from Scotland Yard instructing me to detain a certain woman if she happened to pass through Falmouth, and to bring her to headquarters for interrogation/' In order to facilitate identification, a photograph of Zelle had been attached to the order: a 1913 publicity shot of her dressed as a Spanish dancer. Reid, however, had been told only that the suspect's name was Clara Benedix, and was advised to disregard all evidence to the contrary.

Although an intensive search of the suspect's belongings—and a strip search of her person—revealed nothing incriminating, Grant and his wife nonetheless escorted Margaretha off the ship and took her to their lodgings in the village. There, according to Grant, she spent a despondent afternoon, "drinking an awful lot of coffee, but refusing all food." At about six o'clock in the evening the party then boarded a train for London, where Margaretha was finally turned over to Chief Inspector Edward Parker.