300 Days of Sun (14 page)

He shrugged, like a boy. “I guess I felt that you would have worried. First rule: keep quiet, the fewer ­people who know, the better. It's not as if I'm not working for the wire ser­vice. I
do
have to prove myself here. I'm a foreign correspondent, for God's sake. Trouble is what we do.”

“So . . .” Alva wanted to make sure she had this right. “We are staying because you have to prove yourself, not because you want to. And not at all because you're excited to be part of some spy games?”

“I wouldn't put it exactly like that, but—­why not? It's exciting. It feels like I'm doing my part. It felt like I just couldn't get a break, and then I could.”

“But it's dangerous, as Jim Kosek found out!”

“Yeah, well. Any way you want to play it, the war is on here despite what anyone says about neutrality. It's fierce and it's all the more deadly because it's running in secret.”

“We're Americans—­it's nothing to do with us.”

She read the pity in his face, that he thought her so stupid he had no idea where to begin to explain.

“But we will be part of it, Alva. Sooner or later, just like last time.”

S
o now she knew. A good number of the journalists were working as spies. Mostly, they were stringers for the British newspapers, but the Canadians and the Americans were involved, too. In this city teetering on the Atlantic, at the edge of Europe, little was quite what it seemed. It wasn't only the hundreds of staff at every embassy, far more than could ever have been put to work as second secretaries and visa assistants; plenty of others were engaged in observation, incitement, and economic warfare.

Perhaps that was why she sometimes felt as if she was being watched even as she walked innocently down the street. The photography could also be interpreted in an entirely new light, especially her forays down to the quay where the flying boats docked and the studies of the shipping traffic.

As if he read her mind, Michael said, “I've been asked to tell you to stop wandering around with that camera. It draws attention and we don't want that.”

“We?”

“Enough, Alva. You need to stop.”

She had attributed the feeling of being observed to the codes of behavior expected of women in Portugal. Beyond Ronald's warnings, she had made her own observations. A Portuguese man did not take out a married woman alone. A woman would not usually go to a party without her husband. However, the husband would enjoy evenings out without his wife, leaving her at home as a matter of course. (Though this created the ideal opportunity for her to slip away to an assignation under cover of darkness.) Now she wondered who exactly had been watching her, and why.

If Michael hadn't told her this, she would probably have stayed in Lisbon and did as she pleased while he went to Estoril that weekend. But now she felt uneasy.

 

ii

I
t occurred to Alva that the rich in the palace hotels of Estoril, bathing and dressing and drinking cocktails in the warm summer evenings, were doing very much what they would have been doing in other circumstances. The Bartons were, too, as they walked to the neon-­lit casino from their backstreet
pension.

When they arrived Michael spent five minutes talking to a man, then giving a note to a cigarette girl. It might have meant something, or not. When she asked, he said, “Word is that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are in town.”

“The English king?”

“Who gave up his throne for the American divorcee who looks like a wooden peg doll.”

Alva questioned this with a tilt of the head.

“The girl said we missed them,” said Michael. “They've gone again.” He usually looked uncomfortable in a tuxedo, but tonight the formal attire seemed to accentuate the keenness in his expression, the liveliness of his eyes, when he was onto a story. Intelligence agents from all sides were mingling among the international clientele, and he could now confide in his wife. “The Nazi intelligence chief is Albert von Karsthof. He's a regular at the casino. Just another superior thug. Women, gambling, drinking, as pleasant a war as can be found. Some of the German women, especially the beautiful ones, will pose as neutral Swiss nationals in order to seduce Allied ser­vice personnel. Some of them pass messages by placing chips on certain numbers on the roulette table. It might be a code number, or just as easily a room number.”

“It must be a very expensive method,” said Alva. “Black twenty-­nine,” she reminded him. “What did it mean?”

“That wasn't anything—­I was just muddying the waters to see what happened.”

“You shouldn't have involved me.”

“No, I shouldn't have.”

Alva watched a young woman with a voluptuous figure and a lascivious face painted with bright lipstick, too bright. Two men in suits came up on either side of her, nodded without smiling, and led her away. What was that about? An old woman, with a lined, leathered face leaned in to talk to a man but looked over his shoulder as she did so, with one large unblinking eye, like a reptile biding its time. Alva thought she saw Ronald Bagshaw, but she might have been mistaken.

Under the dazzle of the chandeliers, she sensed foreign dust, shaken from clothes and baggage, remnants of thousands of lost places thickening the air. The glazed expressions of the men and women standing around the tables never varied whether they won or lost, their fortunes resting elsewhere, in visas and scraps of documents on the cusp of expiration.

Clack, clack, clacketty: the ball rolled in the roulette wheel.

“Yet the players pray to the Holy Ghost,” said Alva.

“What?”

“I overheard someone.
Espírito Santo
.”

Michael laughed. “They talk about him all the time here. Doesn't mean what you think.”

“No?” There didn't seem that much room for doubt.

“Espírito Santo? Many of them also call him Ricardo, and they rely on him all right. Ricardo Espírito Santo is a banker. A very powerful man, the most influential in Portugal. He has the ear of Salazar, and the money of many more countries. He is . . . facilitating the access of all these ­people to their funds . . . Let's say, he's having a very good war so far. Ah, there are the others.”

He led her to the table where Blake and Frank were sitting with Mary and Anita.

I
t was Anita, Frank Ellis' girl with the squashy mouth, who told her. Perhaps Frank's close call with Jim Kosek at the
fado
club had got to her, or perhaps she just liked to drink; either way she had knocked back too many martinis and her nose had bled, in a spontaneous rush that dropped wet roses in her yellow silk lap. Alva dutifully went with her to the ladies' powder room, though she got no gratitude.

“I don't know how you can stand it,” murmured Anita, pinching her nose, head tilted back against the mirror by the washbasin.

“Here, take this,” said Alva. She handed Anita her own handkerchief dampened with cold water. “Do you want me to try to do something about your skirt before it dries?”

“I don't care. If you want to. I said, I don't know how you stand for it.”

Alva stared at her. “Stand what?”

“You husband running around town with another woman.”

Alva had to steady herself against the vanity unit.

“That . . . Otávia. Her name's Otávia. I'm not married to Frank, but I'd give him hell if he did such a thing.”

Alva shivered. In the mirror she glimpsed her reflection, a pinched white face. “Pardon me?”

“Why do you . . . oh, hell, I'm going to throw up . . .”

Still Alva stayed to help her, turning on the faucet and letting the water run, hoping the attendant would not come in at that moment. Yet another grubby, stinking secret to come out in a place where trust was lost, even among those who knew each other well. She left Anita, moaning, head lolling and almost asleep in a chair in the washroom, put a tip in the attendant's saucer and emerged, wound tight, into the foyer.

Alva walked shakily back into the gaming room. Michael was playing blackjack. “Hey, honey, where have you been?” he said, hardly taking his eyes from the cards being dealt, brazening out his broken promise not to risk losing any of their scarce resources.

“I want to talk to you. Now.”

“Cut me some slack,” said Michael. “I'm going swell here.” It was always the same; when Curnow was around, the old Mike upped and left to be replaced by this selfish facsimile. Too many whiskies tossed back too quickly in her absence gave his face a wet sheen.

“Why doesn't it look that way, then?” She didn't dare contemplate how much he was down.

“I want to speak with you,” she repeated.

“We can't talk now, can we?”

“I could start, if I had to. You might want to think about what might be overheard, though. You will find me outside. As soon as you like, Mike.”

He ignored her, far more interested in his cards on the baize in front of him.

She turned away, heart pounding. Beyond the portico of the main entrance, the garden was pleasantly cool. A scent of jasmine hung under the palms. She breathed in the sweet air, deeply and slowly, trying to rid herself of the sick perfume of vomit and betrayal. The realization hit like one of those winter raindrops that bursts icy sleet on your face, letting you know that snow is on the way. She had always trusted Michael: trusted in their marriage and in his loyalty. Sure, he could be unthinking and bound up in his job; what man was perfect? But he had never been a liar. But as the weeks had passed in Portugal, she had realized that was no longer true. He lied even when he pretended he was telling her the truth at last.

Otávia
.
Her name's Otávia
. Was he about to leave her? Leave her alone in a foreign country with no means of getting home?

A shadow shifted and came toward her. Instinctively she turned her back, sure that it was Michael. She had no idea how she was going to begin until she said it.

“Otávia,” she said. “I want to know what the hell you are playing at, and I want it straight.” She swung round to see how he took it.

It wasn't Michael.

“Cigarette?” The accent was German.

“No, thank you.”

“I saw you leave,” said the stranger.

She tensed as a struck match lit the outline of cheekbones and bulky shoulders.

“I'm waiting for someone,” she said tersely.

“He is not coming. The cards are more important.”

She shook her head. “Please leave me alone.”

“I'm not a German, if that is what worries you. I am a Swiss businessman.”

Alva made a move back toward the brightly lit entrance. “Good night.”

Feeling even more uncomfortable, she waited in the foyer for a while, then returned to the card table where she stood with arms crossed as Michael lost another two rounds. Finally he acknowledged her. He rose unsteadily from his chair, and she smelled the alcohol on his breath as he stumbled against her. He put his arm over her shoulders, a gesture that could have looked romantic, but she knew to be insolent, and they made an attempt at dignity as they made their exit. Palm fronds rustled in the wind as they covered the path down to the road in silence.

“Who's the girl, Mike?”

He had never been able to lie when he was drunk. She braced herself for what she was going to hear.

“What girl?”

Drunk or not, he wasn't going to make this easy.

“The one you go out on the town with. Otávia.”

“Who told you about Otávia?”

“It doesn't matter. The point is, I know.”

“She's a contact. I asked her to do something for us, and she did. It's not what it looks like.”

“What does it look like, Mike?”

“Convincing. I admit it's supposed to be convincing, that she and I . . . you know. But that's all. It's an act. This woman has a friend who is seeing a German officer, they talk, and she passes on any useful information to me. That's all.”

“And which side is she really on?”

“She's Portuguese—­how would we know? Everyone's tried to recruit the Portuguese locals working around the foreigners. They bend with the wind, according to which side is looking strongest and how much cash is on the table.”

“But why? Why get yourself mixed up in this?”

“One of the Nazi intelligence officers here—­in Lisbon, rather—­has been trying to insin . . . insinuate himself with our side, with the guys at the embassy. We wanted to feed him a barium meal.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Is he sick?”

“A ‘barium meal' is information. Or it pretends to be information . . . but it's untrue, an invention. You feed it in, you wait to see where it comes out.”

“And did it . . . come out?”

“We're still waiting. But it will.”

“And there's a story in this, or—­?” Or is it an excuse for a few cheap thrills, she thought.

Michael threw his shoulders back, playing the big man. “It hardly matters, my dear. Sometimes we don't report the facts at all. Facts are not required. I'm catching up with that custom here, too. The British are way ahead of us on that one. The foreign editions of their papers are almost all misinformation for enemy consumption in the international newspapers on the stands in Lisbon.”

Alva stared at the man she thought she knew so well. “Don't patronize me, Mike. I thought we promised we would be honest with each other? Wasn't that what we always said?”

“You think that's important now?”

As a matter of fact, she did.

M
ichael was sleeping off his hangover the next morning as Alva slipped out of the hotel room. At the beach she found a quiet spot and concentrated on the feel of the wind and the sea on her skin as she watched the waves break.

“Are you feeling better today?”

She turned around. The man was blond and tanned, muscular. He spoke in a formal manner, with a clipped accent that fell toward a British pronunciation.

“I don't know what you mean,” she said.

“I saw you at the casino, last night. Then you ran outside.”

“You must be mistaking me for someone else. I am perfectly fine, thank you.”

“You were upset. A German claiming to be a Swiss businessman approached you in the grounds. He is not a nice man, and you did the right thing—­you didn't believe him.”

Alva stared but said nothing.

“You don't have your camera today, Mrs. Barton. Yet it would be a beautiful day for photography, don't you think?”

She started, alert suddenly to all the different languages she could hear spoken, including German. It was no longer shocking to find German agents and Nazi officers in the same places as their Allied equivalents. At Lisbon airport, British and U.S. commercial flights landed alongside planes painted in Nazi livery. On the beaches between Estoril and Cascais, the enemies sunbathed together and strolled the same walkways.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Klaus Mayer.”

“And you're actually Swiss, are you?”

He gave a short humorless laugh. “Most Germans here claim to be. Especially when they want something. But no, I am not Swiss.”

“Why do they lie?”

“Because everyone does. Just like your husband.”

She turned her back.

“I did not want to scare you,” he said. “That was not my intention.”

“What exactly do you want from me, Herr Mayer?”

“I want to help you. The truth is, we could help each other.”

“I doubt that.”

“You want to know who Otávia is, don't you?”

“How do you—­?”

“I heard you asking.”

The sounds of the beach, the crashing of the waves and the shrieks of bathers, the hubbub of conversation and cries from the vendors of broiled sardines, seemed to recede.

“I know exactly who you are,” said the German. “And your friends, too. Frank Ellis is fooling no one as a reporter. He is too obviously ineffective. Blake Curnow is an excellent journalist and information officer, but it comes too easily to him—­he's not as clever as he thinks, he is too casual. But he enjoys the duplicity—­whereas your husband is troubled by it, especially as he has realized too late that he is losing you because of this duplicity.”

“Please stop this. I am not interested in discussing my husband like this with someone who makes such ridiculous assumptions.”

He waited for her to say more. He was obdurate, a solid wall of a man.

“So you know everything, do you—­about what he is doing?” It was supposed to be sarcasm, but it came out almost as a plea for information.

“I would say, and I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, that his worst sins are toward you.” A long pause. “Another woman might slap my face and leave now.”