The Company of Strangers (27 page)

She could feel her mind restructuring. These were sights, sounds, smells and emotions which could not be accommodated in the soft, pliable naïveté of her life of just last week. They’d been gulped, forced, packed in, rammed down her gullet, so that she thought she could never be hungry again, so that her mind would never lack for this terrible nourishment which trembled her fingers, shuddered her insides, crawled over her skin to the top point of her scalp. She knew then, lying under the open window in the vague, indirect moonlight, how much Voss mattered. He was the only one who knew. He was the only one who could comprehend. He would be her salvation, the one who could order this fresh chaos and make it sad, documentary reading.

She was living for 5.30 p.m. Friday 21st July 1944. As long as there was this one last time everything else would work out. It would be like the clue, the code, the recipe for an equation which would give her the unknown value of
x.

Her thoughts sped like silver fish out of the light into the darkness of sleep and she dreamt for the first time the
dream which would be hers for years. She was running through the streets of an unknown city – buildings, monuments that were all foreign to her. It was hot. She was dressed in a slip but there was snow on the ground and her breath was visible. She was heading for somewhere where she knew she would find him and she found the door in an unlit alley. There was yellow light coming from the door, painting the cobbles gold. She ran up the wooden stairs and she found she knew the stairs and that her heart and mind were full of hope, that she knew she was going to see him, that he would be waiting for her in the room at the top, their room. She was running faster and faster up the stairs, more landings…more landings than she could remember, so many landings and new flights that she began to worry that this wasn’t the stair, the right house, the correct street, the real city. But then the door appeared, the right door, behind which she would find him, and she hung exhausted on to the handle, preparing herself for the sight of his face, the bones pushing up under his skin in the way that made his face unique, and she threw open the door, and there was nothing, there was no floor, there was no room, there was only a hot, dry wind over the frozen city and she was falling into the dark.

She woke in a flash of light on a black horizon. Dawn had settled into the room, comfortable as a pet. Her scalp was drenched in sweat, her heart thumping between the walls of her chest like a hard ball thrashed by a madman. Was this it? Was this the mind’s new régime?

She got dressed like an old person, consciously putting each foot through the leg hole of her knickers, drawing them up to her waist. She harnessed herself in her bra. Her dress hung off her differently. The hairbrush bit into her scalp as it had never done. The mirror showed her someone who was so nearly her that she had to lean forward to see what was missing from her face. It was all
there, all in the right order, no anagram but a nuance. That was something unbearable to a mathematician, because a nuance meant that something was just slightly wrong, the logic had foundered and thrown up, not an error, but just the
nuance
of one, something that was deep in the logic, perhaps a small line somewhere in a mass of equations, something that would be immensely difficult to find and root out, something that might mean you’d have to start all over again…from scratch. But there was no starting again for her. This was it for the rest of time. A change that would have to be accepted, housed, hidden from view. And for no reason at all her mother came to mind.

She had breakfast. She let coffee trickle down her throat, no solids. Family conversation careered around the table, vectors that never reached her. Cardew drove her to work beside a sea so blue it made her ache.

Dawn came up in Sutherland’s office gradually painting him into a corner of his room in the embassy where he’d sat all night after hearing news of the failed assassination attempt, smoking bowl after bowl of tobacco in his pipe. The empty pouch now lay on the floor along with loose strands of shag and dead matches from the overflowing ashtray on the arm of the chair. He’d been thinking about everything, everything that had ever happened to him, including the one thought that he’d never allowed, from the moment he’d received the letter back in 1940 telling him that she’d died in an air raid. How had he dealt with that? Everyone had someone who’d died in an air raid, he was no different. And now here he was, exhausted, completely shattered, the tiredness so profound that it had gone through all his organs and leaked into his bones, sucking on the marrow.

The responsibilities which Richard Rose wore like a summer suit hung off Sutherland’s shoulders like a yoke of
full pails. The losses from various operations stacked up in his mind, like coffins in a carpenter’s yard. This time, though, he would not make the same mistake. He would pull Karl Voss, codename Childe Harold. He would get him out. The man had been right about everything and now, with the failure of the assassination attempt and what Anne had told them, he was in terrible danger, his identity as the military attaché in the German Legation held in place by paper walls. As soon as Rose came in he would announce the operation. Voss would be on his way to London and taking a debrief by evening.

Rose announced himself with a roll of knuckles on the door at 9.00 a.m. He walked in to what he thought was an empty room, not seeing Sutherland still in his chair behind the door.

‘We’re pulling Voss out today, Richard,’ said Sutherland.

‘Good morning, old boy,’ said Rose, spinning on his heel. ‘Just came to talk to you about these decodes.’

‘After the failed coup he’s sitting in a house of cards…one breath from the wrong direction and the whole lot’ll come down around him.’

‘To be frank, I’m surprised he’s not here. He must have heard hours before we did…should have come knocking straight away, if he could.’

Sutherland was unbalanced. For some reason he’d expected resistance from Rose. Rose always hated losing sources. The battles they’d had.

‘Checked his whereabouts, old man?’ asked Rose.

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, if he’s gone to work that should give us some idea of how he feels about the situation himself.’

‘We pull him, Richard. I won’t tolerate…’

‘Of course we do, but we can’t drive up Rua do Pau de Bandeira calling for him to come out, can we, old chap?’

Old boy, old man, old chap…just call me Sutherland, he thought, raising himself out of his chair, his arm curiously tingling, his left foot dead.

‘Are you all right? Look damned pale to me.’

‘Been up all night,’ he said, trying to shake life back into his foot.

‘Steady on.’

Sutherland was suddenly seeing the world at floor height, a landscape of carpet and furniture legs, with an atmosphere of dust motes and broken sunlight. He didn’t understand it and he couldn’t articulate his inability to comprehend. His mind ticked like a gramophone needle stuck in a groove.

At 10.00 a.m. the ambassador assembled everyone in the German Legation and gave the same announcement that Wolters had made to Voss the night before. The opening of the speech that followed was about betrayal, treason and terrorism. Wolters, the disciplinarian at the headmaster’s side, surveyed the room with the eyes of a bird of prey, so that everyone glued their looks to the picture of the Führer above the dignitaries’ heads. The ambassador finally asked them to rejoice in the tragedy averted and led them into an exultant
Heil Hitler!
which rattled the windows. They went back to their offices like chastened schoolchildren after assembly. The world was no different as they streamed back to their desks, only now there was an undertow which was black and uncertain. An undertow that would be random in its search for a scapegoat.

Voss sat at his desk in the legation, sweat at the back of his knees trickling down his calf muscles to his sock tops. He had woken at 5.00 a.m. on the sofa with his tie still up to his neck. He’d clawed it down to his chest, popped the stud at his throat, gulped in air that was at its coolest now
but only for an hour. He’d stripped, gone to the bed and found the photograph face-up on the pillow. He put it on the shelf, laid down and found the faintest smell of her on his pillow, sunk his face into it and then looked up through the bars of the bedhead at the plaster beyond and those words came to him again:

‘Lazard and Wilshere knew you were a double. Lazard told me last night. Does that mean Wolters knows?’

He’d showered, shaved and walked naked to the chest of drawers to find the top one open a crack and his brush in a different position. He turned it over and saw the single long black thread of hair, doubled back four times through his own.

Now he was giving Hein and Kempf a solid good morning. Cheerful. All black thoughts banished to the black metal trunk with the white stencilling at the back of his mind. Now he thought of fields of buttercup. Shadows of clouds blown across the face of the sun moving over the flowers at summer’s speed. He briefed Kempf and Hein about the two people who were presumed by Lourenço to have been in the Quinta da Águia but were still unaccounted for. He sent them out to put the word on the streets and told them that all reports must come to him first and none of them must be written. This would be a verbal operation. Kempf and Hein looked at each other. There was no such thing.

‘These are direct orders from SS General Wolters,’ said Voss.

‘Nothing written?’

‘That’s what he said. He will make the written report to Berlin when the matter has been resolved.’

Kempf and Hein left the legation and drifted into the cafés and dark bars, where the occupants took their time to develop after the fierce light of the street and who, on hearing the word from the legation’s men, downed their
tumblers of wine and waded out into the crushing heat.

Voss stayed in his office, smoked and took some small comfort from moving his thumb up and down, nose to hairline. It had to be that only Lazard and Wilshere had known that he was a double. That Wolters’ knowledge stopped at Anne as the informer positioned by Wilshere to send the British chasing after the wrong Beecham Lazard. How else could he be surviving this débâcle? Nobody knew that he’d been in the house. Lourenço had bought Anne’s story. He was surviving. The next hours were critical, but what would come back from the street? Had anyone seen him and Anne walking in the Bairro Alto? The cigarette trembled in his mouth. He drew too hard and burnt his lips.

That morning, when the sweat of the city oozed out of their attics, their threadbare
pensões,
their stuffy rooms and dark bars they found the streets zipping with the new blood of fresh news. They sucked it in, this strange tribe, like cannibals who have to eat it to make something their own. They regurgitated it into the mouths of others, with new morsels added from their own inventive minds. The rumours grew and then multiplied when an ambulance reversed into the gateway of the British Embassy, stayed for five minutes and sped out, bell ringing, heading for the Hospital São José. The city ran a fever until lunchtime when those who’d made their small piece piled their olive pits, ate their fish and chewed their bread.

Except Paco.

Paco woke up at three in the afternoon, still dryretching. He told the boy to bring him a jug of lemon water with salt dissolved into it. He drank it, forcing it down his throat, crying at its sourness. It revived him instantly. He went downstairs on shaky legs and sat, like a patient, under a shade in the sunlit courtyard. He found a half-smoked
cigarette in his pocket which, when the boy bought him a herbal tea, he lit for him. He spoke to the boy, and because he was the only one who ever spoke to the boy with consideration, the boy told him things, told him everything that had happened whilst he’d been sick. Paco sat back and knew that his time had come, knew that this was the moment the Englishman had spoken about. Now it was only a question of timing and money.

The tea made him sweat and he thought he should go back upstairs and lie down, but then a Portuguese lowered himself on to the wooden chair opposite.

‘I didn’t see you this morning,’ said Rui.

‘I was sick.’

‘You missed it all.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You could have made your piece.’

‘There’s time.’

‘So you do know something,’ said Rui. ‘I knew if there was anybody who would know something it would be Paco.’

‘What do I know?’ asked Paco.

The Portuguese sat back from the table to size up the state of Paco’s mind, see if there was anything written on his face. He offered Paco a cigarette, a generosity which in Paco’s experience was unusual.

‘You heard about the murders?’ asked the Portuguese.

‘I heard there were six deaths. I don’t know how many of them were murders.’

‘Three people died in Estoril.’

‘In the Quinta da Águia…where they had the robbery.’

‘The husband killed the American. The wife killed the husband. But who killed the wife?’

‘I thought it was an accident,’ said Paco.

‘Nearly.’

‘Who got the loot?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Haven’t they asked the English girl who was staying at the house?’

‘She wasn’t there…off fucking her boyfriend…that Englishman you see down at the docks…what’s his name?’

‘Wallis,’ said Paco, screwing his fist on to his chin so that, for the first time, Rui knew with certainty that Paco held cards.

‘There’s money in this, Paco.’

‘From whom, and how much?’

‘The Germans, and that depends.’

‘Not the PVDE.’

‘No.’

‘Is it interesting for them to know that the
inglesa
is lying?’ asked Paco, and Rui went very still. ‘That her lover is
not
Jim Wallis?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they want to know?’

‘The identities of two people who left the Quinta da Águia on the night of the killings.’

‘I can tell them something from which they will be able to draw their own conclusions.’

‘How much?’

‘But I will only talk to General Reinhardt Wolters…nobody else.’