The Company of Strangers (21 page)

Rui and his partner were following Voss’s orders and shadowing him from behind and in front, used to the man’s problems after all these months. They were bored. They knew, as always, where he was heading. It was a hot night and they didn’t want to be out in it, especially not following the Frenchman. When they arrived at the Monsanto hills they let Mesnel get ahead so that he could perform his usual disgusting business with the gypsy boys in the caves. They lay down in the burnt, dry grass and talked about cigarettes which neither of them had.

Mesnel waited for his two shadows as he had done on a number of occasions before when he’d come to these meetings. He satisfied himself that they weren’t following, turned away from the caves and began the brutal ascent to the Alto da Serafina and the viewpoint high above the western end of Lisbon. He sat exhausted on a rock and stared open-mouthed at the aura over the city, its dark-crowded edges pricked with light, a view of a different galaxy. Sweat dripped off his chin. He wanted away from this. He wanted Paris. A Paris that would be free in months, maybe weeks. He would have survived the occupation but…the Russians had asked him to do this thing. For the Party.

‘You can’t see the mulberry trees this time of night,’ said the American voice behind him, soft, a presence that had been there all the time watching him.

‘The worm turns it to silk,’ said Mesnel, to identify himself.

‘You alone?’

‘You know I’m alone. My apostles are down there, as usual, lying in the grass talking about football. Benfica. Sporting.’

The American moved around him, stepped on to his rock and then in front of him, his face not visible.

‘So what did you get for me?’

Mesnel sighed. A hot breeze blew from the city bringing stink and pollution.

‘You did see your guys?’ asked the voice. ‘I told you this was the last chance.’

‘As you know it’s not so easy without a Russian mission in Lisbon.’

‘We been through that a few times already.’

‘But I did see them, yes.’

‘So what did they offer for the opportunity not just to become an atomic power but to prevent the Germans from becoming one, too?’

‘They didn’t,’ said Mesnel, shifting his position, his hand easing over towards the hardness on his left hipbone.

‘They didn’t?’ said the American. ‘Do they understand what we’ve been talking about? That this is a unique opportunity to get on even terms with the United States in the production of an atomic bomb. Did they really understand that? I know you’re a university man, but did you tell them right?’

‘I told them correctly…as you told me. They understand,’ said Mesnel, ‘but they’re not interested.’

‘How long have we been talking, Monsieur O?’

‘Some months.’

‘Some months? It’s been nearly five months. And it’s after five months that they decide they’re not interested?’

‘Monsieur, you can’t just pick up the phone in Paris and call Moscow. We haven’t even been able to call London for four years. Imagine what it’s like. It all goes by courier…’

‘You’re boring me.’

Mesnel moved his hand again.

‘And don’t move.’

‘I only want to wipe my face. It’s a hot night, monsieur.’

The American, who’d had his hand in his pocket, released the safety catch on his revolver, took it out of his pocket and rested it on Mesnel’s forehead.

‘What is this?’ said Mesnel, bowels liquefying as his own hand closed over the butt sticking out of his waistband. He heard the hammer click back.

‘It’s a Smith & Wesson revolver, Monsieur O.’

‘I’m only the messenger,’ said Mesnel.

‘Are you?’ said the American. ‘I don’t know who you are any more, but you’re not the guy who’s brought me a Russian offer which I’ve been waiting for very patiently for five months.’

‘They’ve seen your sample drawings of the structure of the pile, just as you gave them to me. They had better intelligence themselves from inside the American project. That is all. There is nothing to be gained from shooting me…’

‘They have better?’

‘That’s what they said. They have their own people in America.’

The revolver slipped on Mesnel’s greasy forehead. He fell to one side. The American fired, grazing Mesnel’s head. Mesnel tore out his own revolver but the American was on him. The revolver back in his face, on his eye, jammed into the socket with anger.

‘Just the messenger, Monsieur O?’

‘Not now, monsieur, please,’ said Mesnel, close to tears. ‘It’s nearly the end of all this. Paris will be liberated in weeks. Please, monsieur, it’s nearly all over.’

‘I know,’ said the American, nearly kind. ‘It’s just policy.’

A second shot and the whining finally stopped in Mesnel’s head.

Rui and Luís had heard the first shot, it brought them to their feet.

‘What was that?’ asked Rui.

‘Don’t be an idiot,
homem.
’

‘What do you think?’

The second shot.

‘I think that the boys in the caves don’t have guns.’

They ran down the hill, split up and walked back into the safety of the well-lighted city.

Voss was waiting for her in the shadows of the church in Largo de Jesus. They came together as if they’d been a week apart. She as excited as a child, wrapped her arms around his neck, crushed the tendons. He held her, nearly paternal. She kissed him, moulded herself to him.

‘Now can we walk,’ she said.

They went behind the church, through the back alleys, across the Rua do Século and into the narrow streets of the Bairro Alto. Relief had come for the people of the Bairro with the cool of the night. Their windows and shutters were open and there was the smell of fried onions and garlic, the grilling of fish. Families murmured on the other side of lace curtains and the tentative plucking of the strings of a Portuguese mandolin joined the rattling of feet on the cobbles.

A woman’s voice started up, sang a single tremulous phrase and stopped, as did the people in the street. Women appeared in doorways, dark women, dark as dates, feet bare under their colossal skirts hiding ranks of children. The lovers leaned back against a flaking wall to listen. Another phrase, a wail to silence, the words not discernible, comprehensible only as a terrible sense of loss or the
pity of it. The voice rose again. They listened, despite having found what this voice had lost. All love born with an innate understanding of its fragility.

They pushed through the streets, always walking across the steep slope, until they broke out into the Rua São Pedro de Alcântara. They walked up the hill following the silver threads of the tramlines until they reached the boarding stage of the funicular. They crossed the road and drifted under the dark trees and along the railings of a small park as the lighted carriage of the funicular began its groaning descent.

They were alone. The lights of Lisbon were spread out before them across the Baixa below and up to the medina of the Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge. She leaned against the railings, dragged him to her by the lapels, wanted to squeeze him into her.

‘Is this completely normal?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been in love once.’

‘Who with?’ she asked, those few words opening up an abyss.

‘You,’ he said, ‘crazy.’

She laughed, relief flooding the momentary chasm, and realized the absurd frailty of any commitment. It all hung by threads and words could sabre through them.

They talked, lover’s talk. Talk unbearable to the ears of normal mortals with jobs and attic rooms and small coins for the rest of the week. Talk that married people might hear in small snatches in cafés and bars and shake their heads. Talk that might make a wife look at a husband and try to remember if he’d ever said things like that. Talk that was so interesting that Anne forgot there was a world with cigarettes until Karl produced a crumpled packet and they held on to the bars of the railings and smoked.

The Baixa below them began to fill with mist drifting up from the river. Buildings blurred, their lights diffused.
The castle glowed in grainy luminescence. Anne leaned back into him, fists clamped to the railings below his.

Karl looked at his watch.

They walked back through the Bairro, the streets and doorways still full of people, Voss nervous now, looking for faces he knew, who knew him. They split up and took different routes back to the Estrela Gardens. Voss ran back up to his apartment and found the gun given to him by the colonel from the Free Poles. He wanted it with him now at all times. He wasn’t just protecting himself any more. He put the gun in its cloth back in the tool box in the boot. He picked her up from a dark street by the gardens and took her back to Estoril, the glare of the headlights butting against the sea mist that hung just off the coast. The air cool on that side. He dropped her in a street away from the casino, crushed a kiss on to her lips and took his usual long roundabout route to the gardens of Monserrate.

Tuesday, 18th July 1944, Hal and Mary Couples’ house, Cascais.

There’d been a bad scene in the kitchen at Hal and Mary Couples’ small house in Cascais in the late morning. The heat had just worked its way under the roof and there seemed to be nowhere in the house where the distance between them could be described as comfortable. So they stood on either side of the kitchen table, holding on to the chair backs, shouting at each other over a pair of soiled and crumpled knickers.

‘Maybe you should ask yourself,’ screamed Mary, ‘maybe you should ask yourself what you’re doing going through my dirty laundry.’

‘But I’m not,’ said Hal, ‘because that was not the crime.’

‘Crime? Since when has it been a crime? Maybe that says more about you, Hal Couples, than it does about me.’

‘I’m just asking you, who you did it with and why. You tell me and it’s finished. We’ll work it out and move on from there.’

She leaned over the chair back, heavy breasts. His eyes flickered from her face to her cleavage and back up.

‘Beecham Lazard,’ she said, a whisper over the crumple of white cotton on the table.

His face twitched on one side as if she’d slapped it.

‘You
slept
with Beecham Lazard?’ he said, the words coming out piecemeal from his perplexed mind.

‘Not
slept
exactly,’ she said, straightening up.

‘When?’ he asked, sharp as a hatchet.

‘At the cocktail party.’

‘You went upstairs at Wilshere’s cocktail party?’

‘Not upstairs. We found someplace in the garden.’

Hal squeezed his eyes shut with his fingers and thumb, gripped the flesh over the bridge of his nose.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said to himself. ‘I thought you hated Beecham Lazard.’

Mary was unnerved. She’d expected, wanted, a different reaction, more explosive, more physical. If there’d been a crime, there should be punishment. But not this, not reason, because there was no reason, not one that had surfaced in her mind.

‘We’ve been living a long time like this,’ she said.

Hal’s guts went cold. He reached for the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, plugged in its chewed end, relit it.

‘There’s been some pressure,’ he said, to get some thinking time, to keep at bay what was coming out in the room.

‘The man and wife bit,’ she said, and pushed her arms together so her cleavage swelled, ‘you know…but not.’

Hal puffed hard. What is this? He stared at the underwear, blinked at it. She’s cracking up. For Christ’s sake, push back the stuffing, doll, we’ve only got twenty-four more hours of this to go.

‘Maybe you should go and pick up the mail,’ he said.

She nodded, backed away from the table, turned into the hall. She checked herself in the mirror, applied lipstick. She left the house. He watched her hips walk down the street. He picked up the underwear, went back to the bathroom and laid it on the lid of the laundry basket where he’d found it. Women don’t leave their underwear lying around like that, he thought, and tipped the lid over.

Hal Couples – Harald Koppels – had been an Ozalid
salesman in Los Angeles for twelve years when the FBI came to him one night in early 1942 and gave him two options: jail on a spying charge or work for the government. He was divorced and living alone and he could see that this could be the undramatic end to what had been a short life. He took their offer, turned Ozalid inside out for them and GAF and Agfa, too. Handed them all the names of anybody of whom he had the slightest suspicion of spying. He did his bit, but they kept that hook stuck in his gullet and wouldn’t let him off. One last job, they said. You’re going to Lisbon to look up an old friend. This is your new wife, her name’s Mary, she’s going to keep an eye on you. What they didn’t say was: Don’t go to bed with Mary, it makes her nuts. He went to bed with her, but it wasn’t what he wanted, so he slept in the spare room and took his fun where he could find it. Mary started to go nuts.

Now it was night and they were sitting in the living room, Mary with her feet up on the sofa, reading a fashion magazine, fanning herself with the pages. She hadn’t eaten all day, had a stomach full of olive sticks and could have used the dry martinis to go with them. She wanted to talk to him but he’d been in professional mode all afternoon, preparing his product, the strips of microfilm with the plans, the dots with the building specs. He fed film into the seams of the buff envelope, attached microdots to the documents to go inside. She clapped her heel with her shoe, the foot nodding in the corner of his eye, the beat in his ear. He didn’t look up.

‘Oh, Hal,’ she said, back in her wifey voice, ‘I can’t wait ‘til we get back.’

He nodded. She flicked the pages, sighed.

‘I’ll meet him on my own if you want,’ he said, a vague hope.

‘It’s not what he’s expecting,’ she said, her voice grating, as if this was a trip to a difficult in-law.

Maybe he should let her have the drink. That might help. He went into the kitchen, fixed two Tom Collins with lots of ice. They drank, but it didn’t smooth him out. He finished the work.

‘You ready?’ he asked.

‘As I’ll ever be, Hal.’

He put a dark jacket on over his dark shirt, ran a comb through his hair.

‘You look nice, Hal.’

He fixed her with a look. She unpinned it, went over to him and brushed off his shoulders, straightened his lapels, made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

‘It was only sex, Hal,’ she said from behind him. ‘Nothing important.’

‘Yeah, but it wasn’t part of the brief,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what it means when we get up there. How it’s going to affect the deal we’re doing with him.’

‘It won’t mean anything, Hal,’ she said. ‘Now that I know.’

There it was again.

‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure who you are any more – what you want.’

‘I’m your wife, Hal,’ she said, and that worried him. ‘All I want is a little kiss and let’s get going.’

He went to kiss her forehead but she tilted her head back and fastened her lips on to his, they were wet and cool from the ice, they were sucking, penetrating and their teeth clashed. It was like eating a mollusc on the half-shell.

She brushed past him into the hall. He followed her dark blouse, black skirt, stockings and soft leather pumps. They got into the car and started driving out of Cascais, heading
west on the Guincho road. He checked the rear view and her all the way.

He’d tried to make the OSS pull her out, but she was their agent. He’d insisted that her behaviour could threaten the assignment, but of course, when she was with them, she was always fine. ‘It’s too important for personal considerations,’ they’d said. Now look. The woman’s mind unravelling like bad knitting.

‘We’ll be all right,’ she said, ‘you’ll see. After this we’ll get back together and it’ll just be you and me.’

She rested a hand on his thigh, kneaded the muscle, and Hal’s sole inspiration for getting through the night was a decision to just go along with it.

‘Florida,’ he said.

‘The Keys,’ she said. ‘You ever been to the Keys?’

‘Fishing,’ he said, and her hand moved higher and the little finger strayed over his fly.

He removed her hand from his crotch, kissed the back of it, held it on his knee and rubbed it with his thumb.

‘They run rum up from Cuba,’ she said. ‘We could do that.’

‘I thought you were talking about a holiday.’

‘I was…but maybe we could live there, you know…the two of us on an island.’

He’d have been pushed to spend ten minutes with her in New York City, let alone a lifetime on a Florida Key. She slipped down the leather seat of the car, rested her neck on the back and let her head loll, wanting him to look. Her skirt had ridden up her thighs to the stocking tops. She stretched her legs out and drew her heels back up but this time with her knees open.

‘We’ll get tight on our rum,’ she said. ‘Drink all the profit.’

She laughed and took his hand off the steering wheel
and put it on the inside of her thigh, part on the stocking top, part on the hot skin. He swallowed. Christ, this is what happens when you go with it.

‘We’ll do it on the beach in the open air and it won’t matter, not like it does here, with all the bathing suit police.’

She drew the hand up to the apex. He yanked it away as if he’d touched red-hot iron.

‘Jesus Christ, Mary, where’s your goddamn underwear?’

‘You know I don’t like blasphemy, Hal.’

‘Where is it, for God…where is it?’

‘I don’t have any clean.’

‘You can’t…’

‘Nobody’s going to know.’

He rubbed the side of his little finger which had come into contact with her damp sex. It itched. The car climbed up through the pine trees of the
serra.

‘This is business, Mary,’ he said. ‘This is the work, now.’

Her face hardened. She sat up, pushed the skirt back down. The one eye Hal could see had a nasty determination to it. They turned away from Malveira and headed towards Azoia.

‘Did I ever tell you about Judy Laverne?’ asked Mary.

‘No,’ he said flatly. He didn’t want to hear about her from Mary. He’d liked Judy Laverne. She was one of the few people in American IG who’d been spotless, but it hadn’t mattered, she was linked to Lazard, the OSS made sure she was fired.

‘That’s where she came off the road,’ said Mary, as they rounded the bend.

Hal changed gear, turned hard right up a dirt track, doubling back on himself. Mary looked down on the old crash site. Hal slowed and dowsed the lights.

‘There were no skid marks in the road,’ she said. ‘The
guys from the OSS said that if the car had been moving at speed the impact point would have been much further down the hill.’

‘What are you saying, Mary?’

‘I’m saying her car was rolled off.’

Hal was driving with his face up close to the windscreen, the darkness impenetrable amongst the pine trees. They crawled along the ridge.

‘By who?’ he asked.

‘Who do you think?’

‘Maybe she wasn’t moving that fast.’

‘Anyway, it’s kinda sad, don’t you think?’

‘What?’

‘That she wasn’t even working for us. She’d turned us down and they didn’t have anything on her, not like they had with you.’

‘So why did they roll her off, Mary?’

‘It’s a mystery, Hal,’ she said. ‘A sad mystery. She was crazy about Wilshere. Crazy about him.’

Hal stuck his head out of the open window to see if the visibility was any better and because he didn’t want to hear Mary any more, not when she was talking about people being crazy about each other.

They connected with another track, turned right and began a slow descent into the back end of the village of Malveira. The first building they came to was a partially built villa which overlooked the rest of the village on the main road below. The house had a roof and walls but the windows were boarded up, the land around full of builder’s detritus, not much evidence of recent work.

They took hurricane lamps from the boot and a flashlight. Mary walked on ahead with the envelope containing all the microfilmed plans. Hal pocketed a small revolver which he’d hidden earlier in the tool box and followed her. They let themselves in with a key, which Hal knew
where to find. They lit the lamps, put them on a table made of a board supported by bricks. Hal sat on a column of stacked bricks. Mary paced the room. There was some threat in the way she moved, the careful placement of each foot. He tried to think of some small talk to smooth her out but none came to mind in the heat and smell of cement. At 11.30 p.m. a car pulled up outside. Mary went to one of the boarded-up windows, peered through the crack.

‘It’s Lazard,’ she said.

Mary was applying lipstick, using a hand mirror with the torch balanced in a niche in the wall. Hal and Lazard made the usual identifying exchanges and Hal opened the door.

‘Hi, Beech,’ said Mary.

‘Hal…Mary,’ said Lazard, shaking hands, except Mary kissed him on the cheek, too. He was sweating and she wiped her lips afterwards.

‘Hot night,’ said Hal.

‘I thought it’d be cooler up here.’

They stood around for a moment, uncertain as to how this business should be conducted.

‘I don’t have much time,’ said Lazard, knowing the flight was due to land in Dakar in an hour.

‘Give him the envelope, Hal.’

Hal wanted to hit her, keep her mouth shut. Lazard noted the palpable friction, handed over the diamonds.

‘I’m just going to have to check these over quickly,’ said Hal.

‘Sure,’ said Lazard, calmer by the second.

‘This your place, Beech?’ asked Mary.

Lazard nodded.

‘Whyn’t you show me around while
Hal
does his work,’ she said, and wiggled the flashlight, whose beam happened to be on Lazard’s thigh. Hal wouldn’t have minded breaking
her teeth. Lazard shrugged. Hal went to the table, laid a piece of velvet on the board and poured the diamonds on to it. Mary took Lazard by the arm and went off into the house. Hal watched them leave, the torch beam bouncing around the walls, their voices echoing in the distant rooms. He went to work. Minutes passed.

‘We’re just going upstairs, Hal,’ Mary called, sing-song, from deep in the house.

Back to the stones, Hal counting them, making the basic visual tests as he’d been taught, just to make sure he wasn’t getting glass. A noise stopped him. A noise over the loud whistling of the cicadas in the hot, still night. Was that grunting? He didn’t believe it. He stood up. Mary’s voice, loud and clear. Oh! Yes!

She thinks she’s goading me…Jesus.

He sat down, shaking his head. Only minutes and it’ll all be over. Mary’s voice cut through, almost a shriek this time, overplaying the pleasure. She never liked it that much. Hal knew.

Silence. A tense, rock-hard silence. Then a crash, bodies upsetting something, falling into or over…He took the gun out of his pocket, moved through the ground-floor rooms to the bottom of the stairs. Not a sound inside the walls…only mosquitoes or tinnitus.

Hal walked sideways up the stairs, back to the wall, no bannister on the open side. On to the landing, cracks of light around the boarded window on the far wall. The moon up high now outside. Light came from a doorless room, low light, floor height. He stepped into it. The flashlight lay on the wooden boards. He put the gun into the room first. Against the wall, to the right, Mary lay on her front, the wooden board of a workman’s table underneath her, the bricks toppled. She had a length of hemp rope wrapped around her neck so tight that her eyes were halfway out of her head. Her skirt was up over her buttocks,
black suspenders, disappearing tracks. A black smear from the crack of her bottom that ran down the back of her thigh to her stockings. Blood.