The Company of Strangers (17 page)

He laughed at his insanity and ramped his head up on his elbow. With no warning the faces of his father and brother came to him. His eyes filled, blurring the room, and the long hot day drew to a close.

Monday, 17th July 1944, Estrela, Lisbon.

At 9.30 p.m. Voss got up, dressed, picked up a newspaper, drank a coffee at the corner café and went to his customary bench in the Estrela Gardens. He sat with the newspaper on his lap. People walked under the trees. There was a sense of relief after the brutal heat of the day. Most of the women were well dressed – in expensive silks if they could afford it or high-quality cottons if they couldn’t. The men, if they were Portuguese, wore dark suits and hats. If they were foreigners, the richer ones were dressed in linen, the poorer in material too thick for the weather. Money had filtered through Lisbon.

Voss blinked, saw the scene through a different lens, saw the other people in the gardens. These were not men and women enjoying an evening stroll. These were the sweat of the city. They oozed out of the dark, polluted buildings, seeped out of the cheap
pensões
, which stank of the drains, leaked out of the stuffy attics in rinsed underwear dried crisp in the sun. They were looking for the odd escudo to weigh down the damp pockets creeping up their thighs. They were the watchers, the listeners, the whisperers, the fabricators, the rumourmongers – the liars, the cheats, the conmen and the crows.

One of this number sat on Voss’s bench. He was small, emaciated, unshaven and toothless with black eyebrows that sprouted an inch from his head. Voss tapped the bench
with his newspaper and some of the man’s sour smell wafted towards him. His name was Rui.

‘Your Frenchman hasn’t been out of his room for three days,’ said Rui.

‘Is he dead?’ asked Voss.

‘No, no, I mean he’s only been out for coffee.’

‘And he drank that on his own?’

‘Yes. He bought some bread and tinned sardines too,’ added Rui.

‘Did he speak to anyone?’

‘He’s scared, this one. I haven’t seen anyone so scared. He’d turn on his own shadow and kick at it in the street.’

You would too, thought Voss. Olivier Mesnel had come from Paris where he had only one enemy, to Lisbon where he has two, the Germans and the PVDE. Who’d be a French communist here?

‘Has he made any more trips to the outskirts of town?’

‘Those trips to Monsanto, they seem to drain him too much. This is a man who has few reserves left…not for what he’s doing.’

‘Tell me when he does something. You know the form,’ said Voss, getting up and leaving the newspaper, which Rui started flicking though to find the twenty-escudo note slipped between the sports pages.

Voss left the gardens at the exit closest to the basilica and headed for the Bairro Alto down the Calçada da Estrela, looking behind him for a taxi but also checking that there was no
bufos
on him. A cab pulled up and he let it take him to the Largo do Chiado. He thought about Mesnel. He worried about him. Always the same worries. Why would the Russians choose such a man for intelligence work? The hopeless loner, the seedy neurotic, the unwashed loser, the…the liver fluke, the mattress flea.

Voss left the cab and walked at pace up through the grid of the battered cobbled streets of the Bairro Alto to a
tasca
where they where grilling horse mackerel outside. He took a seat in the darkest corner with views out of two doors. He ordered the mackerel and a small jug of white wine. He ate with no enthusiasm and washed it back with the wine, fast so that he couldn’t taste its sharpness. Nobody showed at the two doors. He ordered a
bagaço.
He wanted that ferocity of the pure, colourless alcohol in is throat. He smoked. The cigarette stuck to the sweat between his fingers.

Anne tried the study door. It was unlocked and empty. She moved on to the sitting room. Dark. On the back terrace Wilshere sat alone at the small table smoking and drinking undiluted whisky from a tumbler. She sat. He didn’t seem to notice her but kept up his silent vigil on the empty lawn, while moving the heavy, dark furniture of his doubts and concerns around in his head.

She was trying to work out how she was going to fit Sutherland’s orders into her strange relationship with Wilshere. She had no ease with the man. Whatever charm Cardew said he possessed must be reserved for men. With her he was either disconcertingly intimate or unfathomably distant. Either stroking her, kissing the corner of her mouth or thrashing the hide off her horse. The man’s wealth had insulated him from ordinary mortals, it was always a job to think how to tease his brain towards interest.

‘Dinner ready?’ he asked, exhausted by the notion.

‘I don’t know, I’ve been upstairs.’

‘Drink?’

‘I’m all right, thank you.’

‘Smoke?’

He lit her cigarette, tossed his own and lit another.

‘I will have that drink, after all,’ she decided.

‘João?’ called Wilshere, to no response. ‘I thought it was
awfully quiet. You know, I don’t know whether we’re going to get any dinner tonight.’

He fixed Anne a brandy and soda from the tray.

‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.

‘They
should
give us something. Mafalda confuses them sometimes, I think.’

‘When we were riding yesterday,’ said Anne, deciding on a frontal assault, ‘why did you hit my horse?’

‘Hit your horse?’ he said, sitting slowly.

‘You remember my horse bolted?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but careful now, uncertain of other things, ‘she did bolt.’

‘It was because you hit her with your crop as you rode past.’

‘I did,’ he said, a statement, but on the edge of a question.

‘Why was that? I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the major. I was thinking that it might have had something to do with this girl Judy Laverne. I’ve been worrying about it.’

‘Worrying?’

‘Yes,’ she said, realizing now that she’d drawn a blank.

His eyes turned furtive in his head. It scared her. Sutherland had been wrong. This had not been the right thing to do.

‘I thought it was…I thought it was maybe my mare that had spooked the filly, coming up on you so fast like that.’

She had the image of him clear in her head – half standing out of the saddle, crop arm raised, intent on damage.

‘Perhaps that was it,’ she said, grasping at anything conciliatory. ‘Was Judy Laverne a good horsewoman?’

‘No,’ he said, close to vehement now, ‘she was a
brilliant
horsewoman. Fearless, too.’

He socked back the whisky, drew savagely on the cigarette
and bit his thumbnail, staring through her, wild for a moment.

‘I think I’ll go and see what’s happened to dinner,’ he said.

The lawn darkened another degree. She gulped her brandy. Her confidence in Sutherland had evaporated. Whatever this was, her presence here, it was
all
to do with Judy Laverne.

Voss left a few coins on the table, the meal costing so little it was difficult to imagine the lives of those providing it. He walked back down to the statue of Luís de Camões, did a circuit under the trees of the people sitting on the stone seats who were not interested in him. He headed down the Rua do Alecrim to the railway station at Cais do Sodré and bought a ticket to Estoril. He sat in one of the middle carriages of the almost empty train. Just before the train was due to pull out he left the carriage and walked back up the platform. There was nobody following him. The guard blew his whistle. He stepped into the first carriage of the moving train.

In Estoril he walked up through the gardens to the Hotel Parque. He watched the cars and people from under the palm trees, waited until the pavements were clear and crossed the road. He walked towards the casino and, in a single movement, opened a car door and swung in behind the wheel. He started the car, drove behind the casino and down the other side of the square. He headed west, through Cascais and out to Guincho, where the long stretches of straight road showed him that he was not being followed.

The road climbed up the Serra de Sintra past Malveira, past the bend in the road where the American woman had come off, past the Azoia junction, through Pé da Serra, down to Colares and then back up the north side of the
serra
, past a dark village, some unlit
quintas.
After some kilometres he pulled off the road and parked the car deep in some trees. He crossed the road, went through an iron gate and down a cobbled track into the gardens of Monserrate.

Twenty yards down the track he was joined by a man behind and a man in front, who shone a torch in his face.

‘Good evening, sir,’ said an English voice. ‘
What is the worst of woes that wait on age
?’

The man with the torch spurted laughter, while the one at Voss’s rear whispered softly in his ear.

‘
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow
?’

Voss sighed but remembered his lines:

‘
To view each loved one blotted from life’s page,

And be alone on earth, as I am now.
’

‘It’s not as bad as all that, sir. We’re all friends here, as you know.’

The English and their sense of humour, thought Voss. This was Richard Rose’s work, the writer. He had the whole of the Lisbon station spouting the classics.

‘Learn while you work,’ he’d said. ‘It’s our way of handling the serious business.’

The three men walked down to the unlit building in the centre of the gardens. The first time Rose had met Voss here he’d told him that the gardens had originally been landscaped by an eighteenth-century English aesthete called William Beckford, who’d had to leave England in a hurry or face the noose.

‘What had he done?’ Voss had asked, innocent.

‘Buggered little boys, Voss,’ said Rose, eyes shining and alive to the possibilities. ‘The love that dare not speak its name.’

He’d confirmed it in German too, just to make sure Voss understood, to see how straight the tracks were that Voss was running on.

They arrived at the strange palace built in the middle of the last century by another English eccentric. The lead escort pointed with his torch down the Moorish colonnade to some open glass doors at the far end. Voss was relieved to see Sutherland there with Rose, the two men sitting on wooden chairs in the deserted room with the light from a hurricane lamp shuddering up the walls.

‘Ah!’ said Rose, standing up to greet Voss, ‘
the wandering outlaw of his own dark mind.
’

‘I’m not sure I understand you very well,’ said Voss, blank, unamused by Rose.

‘It’s nothing, Voss, old chap, nothing,’ said Rose. ‘Just a line from the poem that provides your codename…
Childe Harold.
Did you know that was written just down the road in Sintra?’

Voss didn’t respond. They sat, lit cigarettes. Sutherland sucked on his empty pipe. Rose removed three small metal goblets from a leather holder and half-filled them from a hip flask.

‘We’ve never thanked you properly for the information on the rockets,’ said Sutherland, raising his cup to Voss, striking the note he wanted for this meeting, steering away from Rose’s more reckless style.

‘Didn’t stop them falling, of course,’ said Rose, arm over the back of his chair, ‘but cheers, anyway.’

‘At least you were prepared,’ said Voss. ‘And you tested the craters?’

‘We tested the craters.’

‘And I assume you found that what I said was true.’

‘No evidence of radiation,’ said Sutherland. ‘Conventional explosives. But it doesn’t mean we’re no longer concerned.’

‘We’re of the opinion that they were test flights,’ said Rose.

‘Given the seriousness of the situation in Italy, France
and the East, do you think the Führer is of the temperament to spend his time in testing?’ said Voss.

‘The flight path of the rockets?’ asked Rose. ‘Yes, we do…until such time as Heisenberg has developed the atomic pile to create the Ekarhenium, as you call it.’

‘We’ve been through this before. Heisenberg and Hahn have been explicit. There is no atomic bomb programme.’

‘Heisenberg wasn’t explicit to Niels Bohr, and Niels Bohr is with the Americans now and he, along with others, has convinced them that Germany’s made serious advances, you’re damned close.’

Voss closed his eyes which were sore in his head. Some smoking ensued.

‘We know you didn’t bring us all the way out here just to talk us through that one again, Voss,’ said Sutherland. ‘You’re never going to convince us…and even if you did, we wouldn’t be able to convince the Americans, what with all the evidence they’ve been accumulating.’

‘There’s probably only twenty scientists in the world who know what any of this is about,’ said Rose. ‘Even you with your years of physics at Heidelberg University wouldn’t understand what it entails. You might have grasped some theory but don’t tell us that you, here in Lisbon, could have the first idea of the practicalities. This is innovative science. Brilliant men see things differently. Short cuts can be made. Heisenberg and Hahn are two such men. It would take a lot more than your word to send us back to London telling our people not to worry.’

‘I have something else for you,’ said Voss, sick of this endless battering and getting nowhere – intelligence services the world over only believe what they want to believe, or what their leadership wants them to believe.

Sutherland leaned forward to hide his excitement. Rose cupped his knee in the stirrup of his hands, tilted his head.

‘We have completed some negotiations and are now in
possession of a number of diamonds, which are not of industrial quality. They have a value in excess of one million dollars. These diamonds, which I have just delivered to the German Legation in Lapa, will be handed over to Beecham Lazard, who will be travelling tomorrow via Dakar and Rio to New York. I understand he will be acquiring something with the proceeds of the diamond sales which could advance or lead to the acquisition of a secret weapon programme for Germany. I don’t know what exactly he is buying or from whom, or even whether it is in New York.’

‘You said “secret weapon” – how do you know that much?’

‘I am reporting to you what has been heard in Germany, that there is talk of a secret weapon in Berlin and this has now reached the Führer. The best confirmation of this that I can offer is that, at the moment, we have insufficient funds in Switzerland to buy the diamonds outright and to make up the shortfall we had to take a loan of some gold from the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. That gold would not have been released without the highest authority from Berlin. I would suggest that it is worth following Lazard to New York.’