The Company of Strangers (16 page)

‘You haven’t mentioned Karl Voss.’

‘The military attaché is an Abwehr man. He reports directly to Wolters,’ said Sutherland, stopping in the middle of the room, on the brink of offering additional material but deciding against it.

‘Major Almeida?’

‘Portuguese Army officer. Don’t know which side his bread is buttered, so steer clear,’ he said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

If there were other things, Anne couldn’t think of them. What she thought, at first, was the stress coming from Sutherland seemed to have pushed everything else out of the room. It was only later, as she made her way down to the station, that she realized it could have been something else – ambition. This could be Sutherland’s big moment of the war.

Karl Voss was happy, although he didn’t quite know it yet. He was at that stage of happiness where his behaviour could still be classified as normal – no unconscious outbursts of laughter, no running skips in the street, no profligacy to beggars – but a change had taken place. His insides were weightless, his step was light on the uneven cobbles, he hopped off pavements, trotted over tramlines, made way for struggling ladies, even in the dire heat he couldn’t put a foot wrong. He looked up and out too. He noticed things in an unintelligent way for the first time in years. Façades of buildings, panels of tiles, shop fronts, railings, dogs flaked out in the square, a girl hanging out washing from a high window, dust on the leaves of the trees, and the blue sky, even the blue sky beyond the skeletal arches of the Igreja do Carmo, destroyed in the earthquake and left as a monument to Lisbon’s dead. He was at that stage of happiness where he no longer looked down or inwards. He wasn’t thinking about his situation any more.

He broke into a run as he saw people coming across the metal walkway. The
elevador
had just arrived. He made it to the lift, which descended to the Baixa. He took the steps down to the Rua do Ouro two at a time and headed towards the river at a fast walk. He crossed the road to the building of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha which at this time of the day was closed. He looked up and down the street for the car he’d arranged to meet him outside the bank. He didn’t mind the five-minute wait, which was unusual for him. The car arrived, he rang the bell to the offices on the first floor. Fifteen minutes later he was sitting in the back of the car with a small but heavy case beside him.

Monday, 17th July 1944, outside Lisbon.

Anne sat in a railway carriage opposite a Portuguese couple in their sixties with a dog at their feet, which had legs too short for its body and bulging eyes. The man had a goitre the size of a cantaloupe hanging from his neck. The woman was so small her feet didn’t touch the floor and her left leg was swollen to twice its normal size. Anne didn’t want to look at them but each time she turned away from the view out to sea, of a three-funnelled ship pumping black smudges into the bleached sky, their eyes were on her, even the dog’s. It was only on the third occasion, as she let her gaze drop from thyroid to dog, that she noticed the couple’s hands were clasped between them, resting on the seat.

She leaned her forehead against the window. The silver train curved out in front, reflecting the ocean in its glass panels. A sandbank surfaced outside the Tagus estuary, the surf peeling back from its brown hump. She had an irrational desire to be out there, alone, simple, offshore from the complexities of the city. She glanced back over her seat. Jim Wallis had his head down in the
Diário de Notícias.
He looked up but not at her. They’d spoken earlier about the diamonds – how she would signal if the gems left the house. She turned back to the sea. Her mind circled back to the same spot – Karl Voss, Abwehr.

She would have to stop this…this what? What was it
she had to stop with Karl Voss? A kiss. Was that anything? She told herself not to think. The Rawlinson gambit – the
danger
’s in the thinking. Just finish it. Simplify the equation. Reduce the variables.

Forget Judy Laverne. Let her into the bracket and she was the quickest route to a blown cover.

Sutherland wanting her to break into Wilshere’s study. Was that the right thing to do? Was that an unnecessary risk? Surely the Americans were right, Lazard was the man to watch. He was the go-between.

She was leaning forward, her eyes were unconsciously drilling into the soft neck of the woman in front of her. She eased back. The train braked with a screech of metal as they came into Paço de Arcos station. The old couple got up and left the carriage, the woman on the man’s arm, the dog shuffling behind.

The image of Karl Voss returned, stronger now.

They hadn’t said anything to each other. They’d smoked a cigarette. Touched lips. Nothing had happened but everything had changed. They didn’t know each other and would never know anything of each other, except what was allowed to be known, and none of that was true. But then how much do we want to know about each other? Everything? Everything except that which sustains our interest – the mystery. To know that is to kill it.

Her thoughts multiplied. Squared. Cubed. Ramified to the
n
th.

She walked up through the square in Estoril. The heat was still terrible but a dying heat now, one that was slumped against the buildings, sagging in the stillness of the palm trees. She felt drowsy, needed to lie down after a long day, after long hours spent running around in her head.

The path up to the house seemed longer. She stumbled across the lawn and went into the house through the
french windows at the back. There were voices in the drawing room. She put her head in. The Contessa della Trecata and Mafalda stopped talking. Sutherland hadn’t mentioned Mafalda, probably written her off as a sad case. The contessa patted the sofa.

‘Come and tell us about the real world,’ she said.

Mafalda, in a blue tea gown, was wearing the plaster cast of her own face – white, still and void.

‘The real world of dictation and typing has not been very interesting today.’

She tried to excuse herself but the contessa insisted. She sat on the sofa.

‘Don’t they let you out?’

‘I went to the PVDE for my papers, that was all.’

‘But lunch, you have to have lunch.’

‘Mr Cardew is very demanding.’

‘I’m surprised a young girl like you should want to come to a backwater like Lisbon…to be a secretary.’

‘I tried to join the WRENS. They wouldn’t have me. Medical. Lungs.’

‘You seem to be running around here all right,’ said Mafalda, as if this was the kind of cat-house behaviour she’d had to get used to.

‘In London I can hardly get to the end of the street without…’

‘Those peasoupers,’ said the contessa. ‘Shocking.’

‘My mother thought it was the bombing.’

‘Yes, well that would fit, wouldn’t it?’ said Mafalda, as if it was meant to but didn’t, not in her mind. ‘Nerves can do strange things.’

‘What does your father have to say on the matter?’

From nowhere came the image of her mother sitting on her like a bully girl at school.

‘My father? I don’t have…’ She checked herself, the image of her real mother had crowded out her surrogate
parents. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea. He doesn’t have an opinion.’

‘Most odd,’ said Mafalda. ‘My father was always inquiring after our health. Probably should have been a doctor.’

‘I never knew my father,’ said the contessa.

‘You’ve never mentioned him,’ confirmed Mafalda.

‘He was overseeing the loading of one of his ships in Genoa. A piece of cargo swept him overboard. He drowned before they got to him. My mother never recovered from it. It made her a very bitter, difficult woman. Nothing ever came up to standard in her view. She survived to a great age on the strength of it.’

‘My mother’s a very difficult woman too,’ said Anne, the words out before her teeth could clamp down on them.

‘Well, I’m sure there was some sadness in her life which has made her like that.’

‘Does your mother do anything with herself?’ asked Mafalda.

She lost it. The thread was just plucked out of her hand. She couldn’t think what her mother did. Even her name had gone. Ashworth, yes, but her first name.

‘She does what everybody’s doing these days,’ she said slowly, waiting for the jog which never came. ‘She works for the government.’

That wasn’t it. It would have to do. She would have to relearn that. Why couldn’t she think of her name? It was like forgetting the most famous person in the world at the moment. Retrain the mind.
Gone with the Wind
, lead actress…Clark Gable was the lead man and the lead actress was…Scarlett O’Hara…come on, think.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ said the contessa. ‘This heat today has been…’

‘I’m sorry, did you ask something? It
has
been a long day. I should really…’

Why has this happened? This has never happened
before. Your role is Miss Ashworth. You play the part. The lines are…

But reality had crept back in. All she saw was the audience. There were no lines. In her head there was only panic.

‘Mafalda just asked about your father, that was all. Is he in the fighting?’

‘No,’ she said, trying to swallow but not being able to, her mind even forgetting the motor reflexes.

‘No?’ asked the contessa, both women riveted to Anne’s crisis.

‘No,’ she reiterated, tears coming now, tears of frustration. She couldn’t think of his name either, nor his profession. The only name that arrived in her head was Joaquim Reis Leitão. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Not in the bombing?’ said Mafalda, appalled.

‘You’re upset,’ said the contessa, ‘perhaps you should lie down.’

‘No, not in the bombing,’ said Anne, buying herself seconds, waiting, hoping for the part to come back to her. She looked down at Mafalda’s feet, exactly where the prompter would have been in the theatre.

All I need is a name and it will all fit again.

‘So what happened, dear girl?’ asked the contessa, insistent, interested.

A car pulled up outside, the radiator grille visible at the corner of the window. Mafalda announced her husband’s return.

‘This heat,’ said Anne, getting to her feet. ‘Will you excuse me.’

She staggered from the room, set off down the corridor at a half run, a whining in her ears, a whining buzz like a reel paying out line to a sounding fish. She ran past Wilshere coming through the front door, swung up the stairs, felt his eyes rippling on her through the mahogany
bannisters. She got to the bedroom door, shut it behind her. Sick. Had she thrown it away? She collapsed on the bed. The breathing came back. The swallowing, too. How had she become this fragile? She took stock, an egg count. Cracks only. No omelette. She drank some warm water from the jug at her bedside.

The simplest cover story known to man…but who knows it? She undressed, ran a thumb down her wet spine, held her dress up to the window. A dark patch ran down the centre of the back. Nobody knows. She stood under the tepid shower, soaped herself, rinsed off the sweat. Nobody knows. She towelled herself dry, lay naked on the bed with just the towel over her. The PVDE knows. She wrote it on their form. Graham Ashworth. Accountant. But not deceased. It had all come back. Finally. The simplest cover story ever.

Another car arrived. She levered herself off the bed, wrapped herself in the towel, went to the window. Just who she didn’t want to see. Karl Voss got out of the driver’s seat, went round to the passenger side and pulled out a briefcase which hung heavily on his arm. Her stomach tightened. The silver thread tugged again. He stopped in front of the door. Anne pressed her eye to the glass to see him at that acute angle to the house. He ran a hand over his bony features, preparing a new face.

She dressed and went down the corridor to the empty bedroom over the study. Voss’s voice came up the stairwell. She sat at the fireplace. Small talk, the clink of bottles on glass, the gush of soda. She imagined his lips on the thin rim of the crystal.

‘Another brutally hot day in Lisbon?’ said Wilshere.

‘There’s more to come…so they say.’

‘When it’s like this I think of Ireland and the soft rain falling endlessly.’

‘And when you’re in Ireland…?’

‘Exactly, Herr Voss. It’s only variety we’re after.’

‘I never think of Berlin,’ he said.

‘There’s a different rain falling over there.’

‘My mother’s moved out to relatives in Dresden. She was in Schlachtensee. All the bombers flew over her on their way to Neukölln and…perhaps you don’t know this, but air bombing is a very inaccurate science. She had three land in the garden. Unexploded, fortunately.’

‘I didn’t know that about air bombing.’

‘But if you bomb enough…’ Voss trailed off. ‘Tell me something, Mr Wilshere. What do you think of the idea of a single bomb that could completely annihilate a whole city? People, buildings, trees, parks, monuments…all life and the product of life?’

Silence. The wood ticked. A huff of breeze shambled through the exhausted trees outside. A cigarette was offered and accepted. Chairs creaked.

‘I wouldn’t think it possible,’ said Wilshere.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ asked Voss. ‘But if you look at history it’s the only logical conclusion. In the last century we were standing in formation, blasting each other with inaccurate muskets. By the beginning of this century we were cutting each other down with very precise machine-gun fire and shelling each other from miles away. Twenty years later we have thousand bomber raids, tanks crash through countries bringing them to heel in a matter of weeks, unmanned rockets fall on cities hundreds of miles away. It stands to reason, given man’s creativity for destruction, that someone will invent the ultimately destructive device. Believe me, it’s going to happen. My only question is…what does it mean?’

‘Perhaps it will mean the end of war.’

‘A good thing then?’

‘Yes…in the long run.’

‘A good observation, Mr Wilshere. It’s the short run that’s the problem, isn’t it? In the short run there would
have to be a demonstration of the power of the device and, of course, a demonstration of the ruthlessness to use it, too. So it’s possible that before the end of this war, depending on which side has the device, Berlin, Moscow or London could cease to exist.’

‘That’s a terrible thought,’ said Wilshere, without conveying it.

‘But the only logical one. I’m predicting that this war generation will invent what H. G. Wells said they would invent at the end of the last century.’

‘I’ve never read H. G. Wells.’

‘He called them atomic bombs.’

‘You’ve taken an interest in this.’

‘I studied physics at Heidelberg University before the war. I keep up with the journals.’

It was difficult to judge the silence that followed, whether awkward or ruminative. Voss broke it.

‘Still, this is nothing to worry us here in Lisbon, where the sun shines whether we like it or not. I have brought your gold. It has been weighed at the bank as you will see from their receipt, but if you wish to verify that…’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Wilshere, moving across the room. ‘I’ll want you to count these to confirm that you’ve received one hundred and sixty-eight stones.’

‘We’ve arranged for the quality to be checked tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m sure there won’t be any problem but I’ll be here all day tomorrow if there is.’

The trickling of metal slipping against metal as Wilshere dialled in the combination to his safe. Silence while Voss counted the diamonds and Wilshere paced the room. A signature was applied to paper. The door opened. Voices entered the hall. Anne went back to her room and hung her wet towel out of the window. Her sign to Wallis.

Voss drove back to Lisbon, followed by Wallis. He went straight to Lapa and the German Legation where he presented Wolters with the receipt and the stones, watched him count them out and put them in the safe.

Voss walked back in the darkening evening to his apartment overlooking the Estrela Gardens and basilica. He showered and lay on his bed smoking and sinking into a drowsy sensuality. He wanted to bring her here, not that it was Lisbon’s best apartment, but it was a place to be alone, away from the eyes, a place where the moment wouldn’t have to be snatched. There would be time for…there would be time and intimacy. He ran his hand up his stomach and chest, drew on the thick white end of the cigarette, felt the blood rush, the prickle and the brain smoothing out into the warm evening.

‘I am not alone,’ he said, out loud, conscious of being absurdly dramatic – the melodrama of the Berlin cabaret singer to a bored audience.