The Company of Strangers (28 page)

‘How much?’

‘Fifty thousand escudos.’

‘You’re crazy.’

Paco closed his eyes, dismissing the notion. Rui nodded in sudden comprehension.

‘You think it’s all over?’ he asked. ‘Time to get out?’

‘For me,’ said Paco. ‘You belong here.’

‘Buy yourself some land, is that what you’re thinking?’

Paco shrugged. Exactly that. Back to Galicia. No more
selling water in the Alfama as he’d done in the years before the war. His own piece.

The Portuguese told him not to move and ran down the steps and back up Rua das Janelas Verdes, leaping up the
calçada
steps towards the British Embassy and swinging left to the German Legation, arriving at the gate with his lungs in rags. He babbled to the gate man and the very correct woman in reception. He dripped on the floor by her desk as he watched the muscles stand out in the backs of her bare legs as she climbed the stairs. She was back in seconds and didn’t bother coming all the way down but beckoned him to follow her. He held his hat over his groin as he told Wolters the news, saw his eyebrows rise when he said the
inglesa
was lying, heard the explosion as he gave the price.

‘Fifty thousand to know why the Englishwoman was lying,’ roared Wolters. ‘How much are you taking?’

‘Nothing. I swear to you. Nothing.’

‘Bring him.’

Voss had felt something different. There was something distinctive about urgency in forty degrees Centigrade. He opened his door a crack, saw the receptionist scuttle out of Wolters’ office and down the stairs. She came back up with Rui dripping with sweat. He waited. Rui came back out, rattled down the stairs. Voss crossed to the window, watched him swing on the gate post and sprint down Rua do Pau de Bandeira. As far as Voss knew, this was a man who never ran. He put an eye to the crack of the door. Wolters crossed the corridor to the safe room, returned with blocks of escudo notes. Expenses.

Voss went back to the window and smoked hard, so hard that the nicotine closed the walls in around him. He waited for a lifetime, which in normal currency was only twenty minutes. The Portuguese came back down Rua Pau
da Bandeira, trying to make Paco walk faster, but Paco, as Voss knew, had only one pace.

As they came up the stairs, Voss leaned against the door jamb, half in the corridor. Rui knocked on Wolters’ door, holding Paco by the arm. Very valuable merchandise. Paco glanced over his shoulder at Voss and in one shameful lowering of his eyelids communicated everything Voss needed to know.

Voss didn’t go back into his office. He walked straight down the stairs and out into the barbaric heat, forcing his legs down the driveway in casual strides. He slipped out of the gates with a nod to the gateman and as his foot hit the cobbles of the street he heard the first shout. There was no need to look back. He leaned into the thick air and ran.

He sprinted down Rua do Sacramento à Lapa; the sun at his back needled straight through his jacket and shirt. Sweat popped fatly in his hair. He heard the boots on the cobbles behind him, put his head down, lifted his knees and stamped his feet harder into the pavement. A tram thudded across the entrance to the street, heading downhill towards the British Embassy. He hit the corner fast, coming out into the street and swinging wide and right in behind the tram. He ran between the silver rails, gaining on the tram as its brakes bit and the wheels screeched. The Union Jack appeared blue/red/white high in the corner of his eye. Then he saw the group who’d come out of the legation and run the other way, down Rua Pau da Bandeira, up Rua do Prior and were aiming to cut him off at the embassy gates, which they could because no gateman alive would understand such urgency in this heat. He closed on the tram, where two barefoot boys were hanging off the back, looking at the foreigner in amazement. Voss lashed out at the rail, once, twice, caught it. His feet flailed wildly until they found the ledge. He pressed his streaming
face to the glass, a woman inside stepped back, nudged her companion, who turned and looked affronted. Voss worked his way round to the blind side of the tram and it wasn’t until it slowed into the left-hand bend that he heard the group behind him roaring at the other pursuers to change direction. The tram picked up speed downhill. One of the runners fell over himself and brought down others in his wake, a few continued down the hill but quickly gave up.

Cardew told Anne he’d bring the car around to the front of the Shell office building. He was looking after her, she knew it, keeping her close. The news of Sutherland’s collapse had shaken them both, but the feeling of Rose’s new hands on the helm had been immediate. She was on the leash now, not exactly mistrusted but a variable that Rose did not like having in his calculations. She went into the ladies powder room and left, via the back of the building, and headed straight for Estrela and the basilica. She let herself into Voss’s apartment, saw the photograph back on its shelf, inspected the brush to find her strand of hair missing. She sat on the back of the sofa, drew her dress up to her thighs to keep cool and smoked out of the window while looking down into the square between the gardens and the church. It was a few minutes past five o’clock.

The tram came to a halt on Calçada Ribeiro Santos just on the other side of Avenida 24 Julho from Santos station and Voss leapt off and on to the pavement. The liners and cargo ships in the docks beyond seemed, at first, an interesting place to lose himself, stow away even, but the risk of being picked up by the port police and taken to the PVDE was too high. He preferred the idea of getting into the maze of streets around the Alfama and disappearing
until nightfall, when he could make contact with Sutherland.

The tram seemed to be stationary for a long time and Voss looked around for cabs, which were rare now in this part of Lisbon with the fuel shortages. His shirt had become a second sodden skin under his suit. He emptied the jacket pockets into his trousers, keeping his eye on the road back up to Lapa from where he was expecting his pursuers. He tried to remember if there’d been any legation cars around. There’d been none in the driveway. At that moment the tram slowly pulled away again just as he heard the sound of a set of tyres squealing and thudding over hot cobbles. Voss hopped on to the ledge at the rear doorway of the tram, pressed himself against the folding door. A black legation Citröen, two chevrons on its grille, the windscreen crowded with faces, drove down Calçada Ribeiro Santos with two wheels up on the pavement.

The tram was painfully slow as it moved away from Santos, as if the electricity in the overhead cables was suddenly draining away into the Tagus. The legation Citroën overtook, with two men leaning out of the windows, straining to see into the tram. Voss crouched. The tram’s speed increased suddenly as it moved out of Madragoa into the Bairro Alto. If he could stay with this tram until Cais do Sodré he knew he could get a cab from there into the old medina of the Alfama district and they’d never find him in there, with all the alleys and staircases, the
tascas
and shops, the crowds and chaos of the early evening.

The Citroën pulled up and parked across the tramlines in the Rua da Boa Vista – the bonnet was up but nobody was looking in the engine. A man stood forward from the car with his hand up to stop the tram. Voss worked his way around to the back and came off at a run and kept his momentum up some
calçada
steps. He saw Kempf’s big
fist reach out, the finger pointing, and heard the crack of leather soles on cobbles as three men gave chase. He wasn’t worried about Kempf – heavy, and his system riddled with pox, he wasn’t going to last in this terrain and heat – but the young men behind him were fit and fired up with Wolters’ zeal. Voss cut through a small
largo,
sprinted up
travessas,
and got into his stride down the Rua do Poço dos Negros. The tram he wanted was just ahead of him, one that would take him through the Baixa and up into the Alfama. He felt oddly unpursued. There was no sound of running behind him. He glanced back at an empty street and he suddenly thought that he was going to get there, that he’d lost them. He tore off his jacket and hurled it into an open doorway and ran, taking big strides, feeling strong, feeling elated. He put his head back and stared up at the light sky above the canyon of the narrow street and his running thoughts suddenly met stationary ones. His knees juddered as he came to a halt. He looked at his watch. It was 5.15 p.m. He’d stopped between the silver threads of the tram tracks. He looked back down the empty street, dropped his hands to his knees, hung his head and knew that he was lost.

Anne would be in his apartment.

They would go to his apartment. They would find her and they wouldn’t just kill her.

He stopped a cab going in the opposite direction and directed the driver to the rear of the Estrela Gardens. He sat in the back, a stripe of sun across his thighs, and felt himself suddenly on the other side of the impossible knot. He rolled up his shirtsleeves as the cab pulled in by the roundabout at the bottom of Avenida Álvares Cabral. He paid the driver and went into the gardens, heading for the basilica. He walked, a brisk walk through still, hot, empty gardens – the shade, the sun, the black, the white. He felt a strange exhilaration and in other times he would have
stopped to examine it in his head, but this time he knew. He was happy. My God, he was happy. And he remembered Julius writing from the
Kessel
at Stalingrad and knew now what he’d meant. He was free.

He stepped out of the gardens, through the iron railings and looked up and she was there at the window, waiting for him just as he’d expected. At that instant he knew that out there in the blinding sunlight of the square, in the whirling hub of the paranoid city, he was not alone and that nothing else mattered.

She saw him as soon as he stepped out of the gardens and threw her cigarette down the slope of the tiled roof. She leaned out of the window, kneeling on the back of the sofa. She was going to wave at him, but now she saw he was in shirtsleeves and that he’d raised his arms above his head, a strange thing to do. They came at him, running across the square and from left and right. A car appeared from nowhere. He was making no attempt to run. He stood like a sporting hero, expecting adulation from the crowd. He let one arm fall by his side, leaving the right arm raised in a salute. He swiped the air above him and with that gesture said it all – goodbye and get out.

The car pulled up in front of him. They scrummed him in. Anne ran for the apartment door, heard boots thundering up the wooden stairs. She turned back to the dresser and grabbed the package of letters and the Voss family photograph. She climbed out on to the roof, up and over the dormer window and lay there under the brutal sun while they crashed about in the room beneath her, chiselling and hacking at the air with their German voices.

Above her the sky was rediscovering itself in an aching blue after the slow bleaching of the long afternoon. A flight of pigeons took off from the bell towers of the basilica, the
first of the evening strollers arrived in the fading gardens and a knife-grinder played on his sad pipes in the street below.

30th July 1944.

This is not a diary. I am not allowed to write a diary. I think it must be rule number one of spycraft. I know that if I’m to survive this, with my mind intact and my nerves not so close to the surface that I bristle like a cat at the slightest movement, I must find a way of getting, if not all, then at least a part of it out of me. A release of pressure…is that what I mean? At the moment it is like a tumour which, because it is of the body, even if it is cell structure gone mad, it is treasured and nurtured by my biology. I can’t do anything about it. More blood supply attaches to it. It grows bigger, sucking from all corners like some beastly embryo. I’ve tried to contain it. I’ve tried to cordon it off. I’ve tried to shut it away in an attic room like a crazed aunt. But I can’t get the lid down, it broke through the ropes, it’s rampaging around the house breaking everything it can lay its hands on.

I’ve tried to breathe it out of me, speak it out of me, even vomit it out of me, anything to stop what it’s doing, which is taking me over. I lie on my back at night, the package of his letters and the Voss family photograph on my chest with only the grainy ceiling in my vision. I breathe very shallowly. The breath coming out in an ooze like bad air from a swamp and through this ooze I say the words, the words that are a part of it. ‘Are you alive or dead?’ I couldn’t keep this up for long because it didn’t seem to be a question any more about KV’s continuing
existence. I began to take it personally. There…I’ve smiled, nearly laughed reading that back. This could be working, except that even now I can see what I’m doing. I’m describing it and what it does to me but I’m not writing what it is.

What has happened to me? Nothing. I have sustained no physical injury apart from a bump on the head. I have only seen and felt things. This is how my brain works. Rationally. Logically. I am only two weeks older than when I left London. I am still the same height and weight. There is only one physical difference. I am no longer a virgin. But what was that? A hymen. An unseen membrane. There was hardly any pain, perhaps a little blood – I didn’t inspect the sheets. No, what I’ve come to realize is that the difference between now and then is that rather than living in a state of expectation, I am living in hope. Why am I hoping? Why am I desperately hoping?

All that time ago, in that different age, that first night in the casino, Voss was just a presence, nothing more. When he carried Wilshere up to the house he was just a body, mechanically useful. We didn’t meet until we clashed in the sea and we hardly spoke afterwards. How is it that in nearly drowning me he came to take responsibility for my life? I saw him again at the party. What did we talk about then? Nothing much. Fate…that was it, what else would we have talked about? What did he say? ‘It’s as if God’s lost control of the game and the children have taken over…naughty children.’ He said something else but down at the bottom of the garden, something about Wilshere and Judy. ‘What does anybody know from just looking?’ A spy’s words, or maybe not. He said something else along those lines too. ‘Everybody’s a spy…we all have our secrets.’ His parents and theirs. Mine. What do I know about mine? We are formed by our secrets. They enter us like bullets. No, that’s not it. Like diseases.
Bullets are a sweet release if they kill you, crippling if they don’t. Disease is more like it. One moment you are healthy, the next you are ill. You have caught something. Secrets are an emotional disease. You cope with it or you don’t. Stubbornness helps. My mother is a stubborn woman. Am I? What is my disease?

The next time we met was in his flat. I was so angry. I’ve never known anger like that. Hot rage. With my mother I’m like ice. A sentence from Rose and I was mad. A few lines from KV and I wasn’t. Tender and making love and then the walk. The walk. I’m crying now. Why am I crying about the walk? Yes, it was on the walk that he said, ‘I’ve only been in love once.’ I died at that moment, until he said, ‘With you, crazy.’ When the world dropped away from me then, I saw how anything could happen. How Lazard could have infected Wilshere’s mind. How he would believe Lazard over the veracity of his own heart. I know because I’d been falling into the ravine until he said those words: ‘You…crazy.’ How could that be?
Amor é cego.
Mad Mafalda’s blindfolded doll.

The last time. Not the very last time. The last time to touch. After the horror. He took charge of me again. He bathed me, towelled me dry, put me to bed as if I was a child. That’s what a lover is. Everything. Father, brother, friend, lover. Then lying there with the importance of it all in the briefcase, in the room. That first time he’d said something about ‘when we’re in here I want it to be just us’, and it was, but only that once. The other times we always had our terrible guests.

He made the decision, the important, noble decision, the only one a man like that could make. Wolters will not get his hands on those plans. And for what? All for nothing. Some trick by the Americans. Is that my disease? That he put himself in terrible danger for somebody else’s idiotic game, which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. He
would have been a hero to both sides if he hadn’t been so damned noble. No. That’s not it. That’s just the world’s disease. What’s mine? What am I going to have to grow around?

The last time, only to see, not to touch. The irony is in the brevity of the moment. Voss’s economy has produced the heaviest burden of all. That fearless walk from out of the dark gardens into the fierce heat and sunlight, his hands up, telling me he was caught. The salute, like my own when I left him that morning with the briefcase in my hand. Love and admiration in one. And the warning. Swiping the air as they came for him. Get out. I was the only one who would have understood him. Get out, Andrea.

I know things now that I didn’t know then. Rose and Sutherland were having their first planning meeting about how to get Voss out of Lisbon when Sutherland collapsed. Rose has told me that the PVDE were looking for two people whom they believed had left the Quinta da Águia alive that night. Wallis told me that one of the
bufos
from the Pensão Rocha had seen Voss and I together in the Bairro Alto. The
bufo,
a Galician, had been seen going into the German Legation on that last afternoon. Voss had got out of the legation. He was on the run but he’d come back. It was thought that he’d left something in his flat, something vital to the Allied cause. That could have been the only reason why he would do such a foolish thing as to go back. Nobody knew. But I knew.

This is my disease. But can I write it? I wish it were as impersonal as an equation, all algebra meaning something else. My disease is that I made him go for a walk in the Bairro Alto and we were seen. My disease is that he came back to get me out of his flat. To save me…again. My disease is that I have almost nothing of him and yet he has left me with everything.

This is my hope. This is my desperate hope. Not a cure. The cure is to have him back. This is a remission. How many times have I counted the days? How many times have I gone back to 30th June and counted. I was due the day before yesterday and I’m never late.