The Company of Strangers (15 page)

She let go of her hand. Anne closed the door. The car moved off after the others. The contessa’s tired half-lit face didn’t turn – the night, her friend, took her in for a few more hours until the start of another interminable, brilliant summer’s day.

Anne left Wilshere saying goodbye to his guests and retreated to the back terrace, where she smoked in the uncomfortable light, all these lives suddenly pressing in on her own. The last car pulled away and the façade lights drowned in the darkness, dowsed to orange filaments that glowed like night insects. The smell of cigar smoke preceded a red coal crowded with ash. Wilshere sat down across the table from her, crossed his legs. Faint light from the house caught the rim of his glass as it went up to his lips.

‘Another long day in paradise gone,’ he said, the man stuffed full of its cloying sweetness.

She didn’t respond, still thinking about the gross happenings of the day, trying to make them net, trying to see the profit, if there was any. Too much had happened. There was too much to be considered. That was the adult state. You might start swimming against the torrent of events and exchanges but then, after a while, you tired and let it all rush over you, until finally, like the contessa, it wore you away however hard the rock you were made of.

‘Thinking anything interesting?’ asked Wilshere.

‘I was thinking,’ she said, stopping her foot from nodding with the irritation building inside her, ‘I was asking myself, why do you keep dressing me up as Judy Laverne?’

The words came out with their hard edges and she watched them in amazement as the points and corners of the toppling letters delivered their little blows to the dark face of the man opposite.

There was a long silence, filled only by the softest whistling of the crickets, in which Wilshere’s presence intensified, his cigar glowing redder as he drew on the smoke.

‘I miss her,’ he said.

‘What happened to her?’ she asked, but not softly, still angry, and when he didn’t immediately reply, she added: ‘There seems to be some doubt. This afternoon I was told she was deported, this evening that she died in a car accident.’

‘No doubt,’ he said, something catching in his throat, the harsh smoke or the brute emotion. ‘She died…in a car accident.’

Darkness and the descent of the night’s cathedral cool brought the confessional to the table. A nightingale started up with hollow bars of song from the high vaulted trees and Wilshere’s glass resettled on the table. The cigar seemed screwed into the night.

‘We’d argued,’ he said. ‘We were up at the house in Pé da Serra. We’d been riding all afternoon and afterwards we started drinking. I was on the whisky, she, as always, drank brandy. The alcohol went to our heads and we started arguing…I can’t remember what it was about even. She’d driven up in her own car so, when she stormed out, she just drove off. I followed her. She was a good driver normally. I let her drive the Bentley whenever. But, you see, she was angry, angry
and
drunk. She drove too fast for the road. She went into a tight bend, couldn’t hold it and the car shot over the edge. It’s a terrible drop there, a terrible drop. Even if the petrol tank hadn’t caught she’d have been…’

‘When was this?’

‘Some months ago. Early May,’ he said, and the nightingale stopped. ‘I fell for her, you see, fell all the way, Anne. Never happened to me before, and at my age, too.’

The way he said it, his reaching for the glass, made her think that perhaps the argument had been that Judy Laverne had not fallen in the same way or to the same extent as he.

‘That argument…’ she started, but Wilshere leapt to his feet, shook his head and arms, panic-struck, as if he’d felt himself slipping away somewhere to forget who and where he was. The cigar coal rolled to a corner of the terrace.

Wilshere turned his back on the lawn, let his head rock back to release himself from the thoughts he did not want. Anne was gripping her chair arms with her elbows and didn’t see what Wilshere saw in the window above – Mafalda’s white nightdress, her palms pressed against the glass.

Wilshere drew Anne up to her feet.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said, and kissed her, the corner of
his mouth connecting with hers so that her organs flinched.

Anne wasn’t tired, too restless with aggregate knowledge. She took a couple of cigarettes from the box and some matches from a glass holder. She kicked her shoes off and walked across the lawn to the path and down to the summerhouse and the bower. She sat under the hanging fronds of the passionflower, pulled her heels up on to the edge of the seat and fitted a cigarette into her mouth, chin resting on her knees. She slashed a match across the stone seat and started in the flare of light. Sitting in the corner, ankles crossed, arms folded, was Karl Voss.

‘You can frighten people like that, Mr Voss.’

‘But not you.’

She lit the cigarette, shook the match dead, eased her back against the tiled panel behind.

‘Is the military attaché from the German Legation watching this house?’

‘Not particularly the house.’

‘The people
in
the house, then?’

‘Not all of them.’

A thin silver thread tugged her stomach tight.

‘So what’s going to happen this time?’

‘I can’t think what you mean.’

‘You have a way of being on hand, Mr Voss.’

‘On hand?’

‘Around when you’re needed, for carrying and lifesaving, for instance.’

‘I seem to have my uses,’ he said. ‘What for this time…who knows?’

He followed the tip of her cigarette. Her lips, nose and cheek glowed as she drew on it, burning that facial fragment on to his retina. He searched himself for words, like a man who’s put a ticket in too safe a place.

‘How well do you know Mr Wilshere?’ she asked.

‘Well enough.’

‘Is that well enough to carry him home when he’s drunk or well enough that you don’t want to get to know him better?’

‘I’ve done business with him. He seems honest. That’s all I’ve needed to know about him so far.’

‘Did you ever see him with his mistress…Judy Laverne?’

‘A few times…they weren’t hiding…at least not when they were in Lisbon. They used to go to nightspots and bars quite openly.’

‘How did they look together?’

A long silence, long enough for Anne to finish the cigarette and crush it out on the underside of the stone seat.

‘I didn’t mean the question to be that hard,’ she said.

‘In love,’ he said, ‘that’s how they looked.’

‘But you had to think about it,’ she said. ‘Do you think it was two-way?’

‘Yes, but what does anybody know from just looking?’

She liked that. It showed an understanding of unspoken languages.

‘I’ve a cigarette, only one, if you want to share,’ she offered.

He had his own in his pocket but he came and sat next to her. She found his hand with hers, put the cigarette into it. The match rasped and ignited between them. He held the back of her hand just as she had imagined somebody would. He drew a knee up and rested his cigarette hand on it.

‘Why are you asking me these things about Wilshere?’

‘I’ve been billeted with a man who dresses me up in his ex-lover’s – no, his
late
lover’s clothes. I don’t know what
that means except that it upsets his wife. He told me tonight that he missed her…the lover.’

‘That could be true.’

‘But you, as a man, you don’t think that’s strange?’

‘He wishes that she wasn’t dead. He’s playing a trick on his mind.’

‘Why should he do that?’

‘There were things he left unsaid, maybe.’

‘Or he feels guilty?’

‘Probably.’

She slid the cigarette out of his hand, drew on it and eased it back between his fingers, feeling bolder with him now. Kissing by proxy.

‘Did you hear about the accident?’ she asked.

‘Yes…I also heard that she was leaving.’

‘Deported.’

‘So they said.’

‘You mean she might not have been? She might have
wanted
to leave.’

‘I didn’t know her,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘I couldn’t say.’

They smoked again, fingers touching.

‘Could you kill someone if they didn’t love you?’ she asked.

‘That might depend on some things.’

‘Like what?’

‘How far I’d fallen. How jealous I was…’

‘But you
could
kill…?’

He didn’t shoot the answer back. It took some ruminative smoking.

‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘No.’

‘That was the right answer, Mr Voss,’ she said, and they both laughed.

He crushed the cigarette out with his foot. They sat in silence and when their heads turned to each other there
was only inches between them. He kissed her. His lips changed physiognomies with a touch, fear and desire became indistinguishable. She had to wrench herself away, get to her feet.

‘Tomorrow night,’ he said to her back. ‘I’ll be here.’

She was already running.

She ran back up the path, sprinted to the back terrace and collapsed on the chair panting, acid in her lungs, her heart walloping in her throat. She slumped back, looked up at the stars, fought her heart back down behind her ribs, thinking stupid girl, that’s all I am, a stupid little girl. The memory of the slash of her mother’s white hand across her face in the garden in Clapham sat her up straight.

Fraternizing with the enemy, Wolters had called it. Fraternizing. Brothering. This was more than that. This was crazy and dangerous. She could feel herself coming off the silver tracks. She bent over, gripped her forehead with her fingertips. Why him? Why not Jim Wallis? Why not anybody else but him?

She picked up her shoes, exhausted now by her behaviour, no better than a heroine from a slushy romance. She went into the house, up the corridor into the hall, thinking how else do we learn about these things? Not from mothers. The clay figurines in their cabinet caught her eye, one in particular. She turned on the light, opened the glass doors. The figurine was one of several, not the same exactly, but developments on the theme. It was of a woman blindfolded. She turned it over, looking for some clue as to its meaning. On the bottom was the maker’s name, nothing more. A blur closed in, a face sharpened as it appeared on the other side of the glass door. The skin on her scalp crawled and tightened.

Mafalda reached round the door and snatched the figurine from her hands.

‘I just wanted to know what it meant,’ said Anne.

‘
Amor é cego
,’ said Mafalda, replacing the figurine, closing the glass doors. ‘Love is blind.’

Monday, 17th July 1944, Shell office building, Lisbon.

Meredith Cardew was writing in pencil on single sheets of paper directly on to his highly polished desktop. Anne was fascinated by the work, which seemed more like brush strokes, Chinese calligraphy, than handwriting. Nothing touched the page apart from the anchor point of his palm, protected by a handkerchief, and the lead of the pencil which he sharpened between bouts. His script was not legible even the right way up and looked Cyrillic or hieroglyphic rather than English. He only wrote on one side of the paper and only drew new sheets from a particular pad in the third drawer down on the right of his desk. Occasionally he lifted the sheet and brushed his handkerchief over the desk’s polished surface. Was this eccentricity or security?

The debrief was long, more than three hours, because Cardew went over all the conversations at least twice and, in the case of the three-way discussion between Wilshere, Lazard and Wolters, five or six times. The word that seemed to bother him most was ‘Russians’ and he wanted to be certain that it was Wilshere who’d said it, that it had been interrogative and that there’d been no reply.

‘Is that it, my dear?’ asked Cardew, as his clock ticked round to midday and the heat outside finally caused him to remove his suit jacket.

‘Isn’t that enough, sir?’ she asked, desperate not to fail at her first debrief.

‘No, no, it’s fine. It’s very good. A very good weekend’s work. You’ll be coming into the office for a rest. No, excellent. I just wanted to be sure that we’d left nothing out.’

We? thought Anne and then the name Karl Voss, who’d been mentioned in passing on the beach and having a word with Wolters at the cocktail party but not, never, reappearing later that night down by the summerhouse. None of that exchange had found its way into the report.

‘We’ve left nothing out, sir.’

‘Well, now,’ said Cardew, laying down his pencil, counting off the sheets and then clawing tobacco into his pipe, ‘we might be about to see a very rare thing.’

Cardew swung round in his chair to face the window and its view of the heat cramming down on the red rooftops of Lisbon.

‘We might be about to see Sutherland in a state of excitement,’ he said.

The meeting was set for 4.00 p.m. in a safe house in Rua de Madres in the Madragoa district of Lisbon. Anne was to report to the PVDE in Rua António Maria Cardoso after lunch to confirm her residency and receive her work permit. From there she would go to Rua Garrett and buy cakes at the Jerónimo Martims cake shop and then walk to Rua de Madres where she would ring the bell to number 11 three times. To whoever came to the door she was to say:

‘I’ve come to see Senhora Maria Santos Ribeira.’

If the housekeeper said that Senhora Ribeira was out, Anne was to reply with the line: ‘
Come what come may
, /
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
’

The housekeeper would then tell her she could come in and wait. Anne relished the absurdity.

Shortly after 4.00 p.m.
Macbeth
had been recited and Anne was sitting on a hard wooden chair in a shuttered
room that was initially so dark Sutherland was not immediately apparent. He was sitting in a soft chair with wooden arms in a corner furthest from the window. Tea was laid out in front of him with an empty plate for the cakes. Behind him a crack had worked its way up the wall and finished in an estuary of lath at the ceiling. Sutherland volunteered to be mother, which she learned later from Wallis meant that he was pleased with her.

‘Lemon?’ he asked. ‘Milk’s a little complicated in this heat, although there might be some powder. Not the same, though, is it?’

‘Lemon,’ she said.

‘No problems with lemons in this country,’ he said, and sat back with his legs crossed, cup and saucer in hand, cake on the side. His first question was surprising but, she realized with more experience, typical.

‘Wilshere…whacking your horse like that…what do you think that was all about?’

‘Judy Laverne…I was wearing her riding clothes at the time.’

‘According to Cardew’s notes, or rather Rose’s reading of Cardew’s notes, because I still can’t read a damned word of what that man writes, you didn’t ask Wilshere what the hell he was up to, hitting your horse out of the blue, so to speak.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Any reason?’

‘First of all I didn’t want there to be any confrontation in front of the major and secondly, if he knew what he was doing…’

‘You mean if he was conscious of what he was doing…?’

‘He would have apologized with an excuse, invented an accident.’

‘Unless he
wanted
a reaction from you.’

‘Of course, if he
wasn’t
conscious then we are dealing with somebody who has a mental problem and he would have to be handled accordingly. I decided to bide my time…see what else happened.’

‘You didn’t think that perhaps he was testing your cover?’

The words cooled her innards, which with the heat stuffed into the room as thick as wadding, made her light-headed.

‘I know this is a difficult situation, the sociability of the environment, but didn’t you think of that?’ he said, nibbling his cake.

‘Yes, but I was thinking more about Judy Laverne…I’d been unsettled by Wilshere’s wife’s reaction to the riding clothes…’

‘I think you should bring it up. Sooner rather than later,’ said Sutherland. ‘Make it plausible. You know…you didn’t want to bring it up in front of Major Almeida, been thinking about it a couple of days…that sort of thing. Give him chance to apologize and make his excuses.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘You mean if it
was
an unconscious act? Well, then it would appear that whatever happened between Wilshere and Judy Laverne has made him a somewhat unpredictable entity.’

‘And who was this Judy Laverne, sir?’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘A mess. A terrible mess. I don’t know whether we’ll ever get the full story on her. She used to be a secretary at American IG.’

‘What’s American IG?’

‘The American sister company of IG Farben, the German chemical conglomerate,’ said Sutherland. ‘And, as
you
know from what you overheard in Wilshere’s study, Lazard had been an executive with American IG too. As far
as I can make out, Judy Laverne had lost her job with them back in America and Lazard invited her over here to work for him.’

‘So, she wasn’t working for the Americans.’

‘In intelligence? The Office of Strategic Studies, you mean? Another one of their brilliant euphemisms, I must say. No, no, I don’t think she was, although there seems to be some confusion here. It seems that they were trying to get her to do some work for them but she was very loyal to Lazard, and enjoying herself with Wilshere, so didn’t want any part of it. We don’t know what they were after from Lazard, still don’t. Totally obsessive about secrecy, these Yanks – and this even after D-day, which, Christ Almighty, must…’ Sutherland reined himself in, pinched the bridge of his nose, screwed the tiredness up in his fist and threw it on the floor.

‘Do we know that she died in a car accident?’ asked Anne. ‘There was some confusion about deportation.’

‘Her visa renewal had been turned down by the PVDE,
that
was true. She had three days to leave, true as well. And she did meet her death in a car that came off the road around the Azoia junction…’

‘You don’t know why she was being deported?’

‘No, nor did the Americans. In retrospect we thought they might have arranged it, pulled her out when she wouldn’t play ball, but they deny it. They say it was as much a surprise for them as it was for Judy Laverne.’

‘The Italian contessa said that Mafalda arranged for her deportation.’

‘You can take that with a pinch of salt,’ he said. ‘Beecham Lazard is very close to the PVDE director, Captain Lourenço. He’d have found out.’

‘Do you think Lazard suspected that she was being approached by the OSS?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Do you think his suspicion might have been stronger than that?’

‘If he thought she was
working
for the OSS I don’t think he’d have just arranged for her deportation.’

‘You mean he’d have killed her?’ asked Anne. ‘Well, she did die.’

‘In a car accident.’

‘You’re satisfied with that?’

‘The PVDE came down on it hard and fast, wrapped it up in a matter of hours – don’t like a song and dance over foreigners’ deaths. They sent a full report to the American consulate. The Americans accepted it, or at least they didn’t react. More tea?’

She drank the first cup down. He poured more. The air became breathable again.

‘So, you don’t think my position is vulnerable.’

‘As long as you maintain your cover, no,’ said Sutherland. ‘We didn’t exactly position you, remember. We took advantage of an opportunity given to Cardew by Wilshere as a result of their relationship. The background to it is strong. Cardew’s secretary getting pregnant, wanting to leave…all that. But
you
tell me…what’s your worst fear?’

‘That Judy Laverne
was
working for the OSS, her cover was blown and Wilshere or Lazard killed her.’

‘Do you think Wilshere could have killed her?’ he asked, suddenly following the crack in the wall up to the lath estuary. ‘You say he loved her. Our reports of them being seen together in Lisbon indicate the same.’

What does anybody know from just looking, she thought. Voss’s words, which she’d so admired, suddenly began to create doubts in her own mind about his interest in her.

‘How would you feel,’ she said, ‘if you found that the woman you loved was a spy, was spying on you? You’d
start thinking that her love was part of the cover, wouldn’t you? And that would make you very angry, I’d have thought…that your trust had been so completely abused.’

‘
If
she was an agent, which she wasn’t.’

‘You asked me for my worst fear.’

‘And I say it has no basis in fact and that even if it did I doubt Wilshere could have killed her…Lazard, on the other hand…’

‘
That
makes me feel safe.’

Sutherland writhed in his seat, exasperated by what he saw as nothing but an irrelevance to the real intelligence operation.

‘You have to stop thinking about Judy Laverne,’ he said. ‘She has nothing to do with your assignment.’

‘But she could have a bearing, surely,’ she insisted.

‘We’ve examined the possibility of Wilshere positioning you so that he can control the flow of information or disinformation going out. We have decided that it was a game he didn’t need to play, so why, when there is so much at stake, play it?’

‘He’s a gambler. Cardew said.’

‘Yes,’ said Sutherland, taking out the chip which had found its way back to him from the dead-letter drop. ‘What is this?’

‘One of the many chips that Lazard swept over to Wilshere in the casino.’

‘But, you see, to me this is not a man who is gambling. This is a man who sat at a baccarat table and took a pay-off. He is someone who is playing certainties.’

Anne blushed at her own stupidity. She was losing this. Her mind was not concentrated on the information at hand. She’d been distracted by what she thought Sutherland would probably have called emotional nonsense. And not just Judy Laverne’s.

‘One other question…the man who helped you up to
the house with Wilshere?’ asked Sutherland. ‘You didn’t say…’

‘He didn’t make himself known.’

‘But clearly someone who was following you.’

‘It wasn’t Jim Wallis.’

‘Yes, well, I’d asked him to keep an eye on you but not to get too close. If he humped Wilshere up to the house that is what I would call…’

‘Then we have a mystery man.’

‘They’re all mystery men,’ said Sutherland.

‘Except for Beecham Lazard.’

‘Yes, he seems quite straightforwardly venal…although I was surprised by this business with Mary Couples.’

‘Perhaps the Couples are more desperate than we think.’

‘Well, now, here’s something interesting. You say he worked for Ozalid?’

‘That’s what he told me.’

‘We were talking about American IG earlier,’ said Sutherland. ‘Among the companies they own are General Aniline & Film, Agfa, Ansco and…Ozalid. GAF supplied khaki and dyes for military uniforms, which gave their salesmen access to every military installation in the United States. All military training films were developed in Agfa/ Ansco labs. All blueprints of military installations were made by Ozalid.’

‘And all that information found its way back to Berlin?’

‘It was a phenomenal breach of security, but it all changed in 1942 after Pearl Harbor,’ said Sutherland. ‘They had a spring clean…as they say.’

‘And one of the people swept out was Beecham Lazard?’

‘Which was why he came here…but as a free agent. He doesn’t work exclusively for the Germans, but he has those high-level contacts, he’s trusted by them…’

‘And by the Americans.’

‘It seems so,’ said Sutherland.

‘So, given that they worked for connected companies, it’s possible that Hal Couples and Beecham Lazard already knew each other?’

‘We’re not sure.’

‘Do you know when Couples started working for Ozalid?’

‘We’ve asked for more information from the Americans. It takes time.’

‘What would Hal Couples have for sale that could possibly be of interest to the Germans on a continent thousands of miles away?’

‘Quite. The dogs are on their doorstep, why should they want to know the state of the kennels?’ said Sutherland, sucking on his empty pipe, desperate for a smoke. ‘Now look, let’s not jump to conclusions about Couples. The Americans will come back in their own time. From our side we’ll be watching all the Lisbon/Dakar flights. Your next task is to get into Wilshere’s study and find any information you can about the provenance of these diamonds, where they’re being held, how this business is going to work…anything. If Wilshere
is
holding these diamonds you work out a system with Wallis to let him know if and when the gems leave the house.

‘Now, personalities…Wolters you know about. I think he revealed himself sufficiently at the dinner. To give you an idea, he took up this post at the beginning of the year as an SS Colonel. When the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was removed from office he was promoted. He is now an SS General. He is effectively running the German Legation. Who else? The Contessa della Trecata. I notice you gave her a very sympathetic review. Do not talk to her. She is dangerous for the very reason that she elicits sympathy. The others, well…you know, I think.’