The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  This did not mean that Voss was celibate in his time in Paris – that was impossible and there was something to prove to Giesler too – but he kept his distance. A French-woman called Françoise Larache taught him a different and darker lesson about love in the intelligence game.

  They met when using the same bar. He would take a coffee in the mornings and find her watching him. He would stop off in the evening for a glass of something and she was often there at a table, smoking her strong cigarettes. They exchanged words and began to share a table, where he would watch her red lips connect with the thick tip of her cigarette, and her fingers pick off the flakes of tobacco from her pointed tongue. One night they went for a meal and back to his apartment where they made love. She was energetic and inventive, doing things on their first night which surprised him.

  They became regulars of each other’s company in bed, and as Françoise was quick to demand, out of bed as well. She pushed him to do things which were at first exciting and then became increasingly more reckless. She liked to make love on the balcony with people passing in the street below. She would lean back over the rail, her arms around his neck, and then suddenly let go so that he nearly lost her over the edge. They would have sex in doorways and on landings while people ate their dinner and table-talked. She would even cry out and the talk would stop inside. Voss would have to close his hand over her mouth. The greater the chance of being discovered, the more excited Françoise became.

  Then one day in the autumn with the dried leaves rustling over the balcony, her mischievous eye, the one that glinted when she looked up at him from under her eyebrow, became darker, as if he was seeing deeper in and what was there was more sinister, taboo.

  It started with a request that he spank her for being a naughty girl. Voss felt stupid with a grown woman over his knees and she had to encourage him to be serious and to be more severe. It didn’t seem to be fun any more. He still lusted after her, but for Françoise the sex was being driven by something else. He became reluctant to play her games, she angry. They had furious arguments, monumental rows with flying objects, which would end in brutal love-making where each thrust into her seemed to be a payment back. He found himself reeling out of his apartment into the docility of occupied Paris, unable to believe what he’d participated in the night before, only knowing that it was powerful, intense and degrading.

  Françoise’s goading became worse. There was no fun now. She said terrible, unforgivable things and, although he could see what she was doing, he was a part of it too. There was no stepping back. She was forcing him to slap her, and not just a hysteria-breaking slap, a punishing slap. She wanted to be hit hard. She drove her face at him. The words came out slicing the air, lacerating, stabbing, each one honed to cut deep to the bone. They grappled and wrestled each other to the floor. She sunk her nails into his neck. He wrenched himself free and found his fist cocked back to his shoulder. He swayed, dizzy at what this had come to. Her face was suddenly soft, her eyes dreamy. This was what she wanted. He stood up, straightened his clothes. All lust gone. Her face hardened. He gave her his hand, she took it and he pulled her to her feet. She spat in his face. He pulled her to the door, grabbing her coat and handbag on the way, and threw her out of the apartment.

  He made discreet inquiries. She was an informer, a collaborator. She delivered her countrymen, neatly trussed, to the Gestapo. The SD man Voss spoke to tapped the side of his head, shook it.

  He saw her once more before he left Paris, walking in a snow-covered street on the arm of a huge, black-coated SS sergeant. Voss hid in a doorway as they went past. She was holding snow to the side of her face.

  In mid January 1944 Voss was called to a meeting at the Hotel Lutecia. It was at night and the room in which the meeting was being held was dark. Only a small lamp lit one corner. The man he was meeting sat in front of the light, he had no face, only the silhouette of hair combed back, maybe grey or white. His voice was old. A voice that spoke as if under pressure, as if the chest was tight with phlegm.

  ‘There are going to be some changes,’ he said. ‘It seems our friend Kaltenbrunner at the Reich’s Main Security Office is going to get his way and bring the Abwehr under the direct control of the SD. God knows, they’ve been trying long enough. It is something we are going to have to live with. We want to be sure that you are in position with the right information for negotiation with the Allies before it happens. I understand you have been following the activities of a French communist intellectual, Olivier Mesnel, here in Paris.’

  ‘We are in the process of disentangling his network. We haven’t found out yet how his information is reaching Moscow or how his orders come in.’

  ‘He has now applied for a visa to go to Spain.’

  ‘He is ultimately heading for Lisbon,’ said Voss. ‘We were lucky enough to intercept the courier sent by the Portuguese communists asking him to go there.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why he is required in Lisbon?’

  ‘No, and I don’t think Mesnel does either.’

  ‘You will take this opportunity to follow him to Lisbon and to install yourself as the military attaché and security officer in the German Legation. When these changes come through, which could be next month, you will find yourself directly answerable to SS Colonel Reinhardt Wolters. He is not one of us, needless to say, but you must make him your friend. Sutherland and Rose are running the Lisbon station of the British Secret Intelligence Service, you will be talking to them directly, procedure is in the brief. There are some documents here which you should look at and memorize before you go and a letter which contains important information on microdot. You will use this information to open negotiations with the British. You must show them that we can be trusted, that our intentions are honourable and that the reverse is true of the Russians.’

  ‘I’m not sure how the latter will be possible. I understand there is no Soviet legation in Lisbon.’

  ‘That’s true. Salazar won’t allow them in. No atheists on Catholic Portuguese soil – which reminds me, we must make sure the Portuguese don’t deny him a visa.’

  The man seemed to laugh for no particular reason, or perhaps it was a wheeze that became a cough. He lit a cigarette.

  ‘It is possible that Olivier Mesnel will lead you somewhere. He must be going to Lisbon for a purpose which I don’t think, given his political beliefs, will be to take a ship to the United States.’

  ‘At the Casablanca Conference it was decided that our surrender would have to be unconditional. We will have to offer something extraordinary for the British and the Americans to even consider breaking with the Russians.’

  A long silence. Smoke rising from the chair drifted towards the lamp behind.

  ‘Believe me, the Americans will be looking for any reason they can to cut themselves away from Stalin at the first opportunity, especially after the Russians have invaded Europe. At the Teheran Conference Stalin said that up to a hundred thousand German officers would have to be executed and he would need four million German slaves – that was his word – to rebuild Russia. This kind of talk is unacceptable to men of humanity such as Churchill and Roosevelt. If we can provide a catalyst…’ he paused, struggled in his chair as if suddenly cramped, ‘…the Führer’s death, I think, would be sufficient.’

  Voss shivered even though it was warm in the room. The water he was easing himself into now felt deep and cold.

  ‘Is that a planned action?’

  ‘One of many,’ said the man, as tired as if he’d planned them all. Voss wanted to get away from contemplating the enormity of the statement.

  ‘I’ve lost track of the development of our atomic programme. That could be important to the Allies. They’ve seen that we have the potential…can we put their minds at rest?’

  ‘It’s all in the documents.’

  ‘How much time have we got?’

  ‘We hope to make progress…like all things, in the spring, but by the end of the summer at the latest we must have results.
The Russians have retaken Zhitomir and have crossed the Polish border – they’re no more than a thousand kilometres from Berlin. We are being bombed to rubble by the Allies. The city is a ruin, the arms and munitions factories working at barely fifty per cent. The air force can’t reach the new Russian arms factories on the other side of the Urals. The bear gets stronger and the eagle weaker and more short-sighted.’

  There didn’t seem to be any need of more questions after that and Voss was gestured towards the table where three fat files awaited him. He sat down and reached for the lamp. A hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed it in the same way that his father’s used to – reassuring, giving strength.

  ‘You are very important to us,’ said the voice. ‘You understand what is written in these files better than anybody, but we have chosen you for other reasons too. I can only ask you, please, when you are in Lisbon, do not make the same mistake you made with Mademoiselle Larache. This is too important. This is about the survival of a nation.’

  The hand released him. The man and his pressurized voice left the room. Voss worked until 6.00 a.m. going through the files on the atomic programme and the V1 and V2 rocket programmes.

  On 20th January 1944 Olivier Mesnel was issued with an exit visa to travel to Spain. On the 22nd January Voss boarded the same night train as Mesnel, which left the Gare de Lyon heading south to Lyon and Perpignan, crossing the border at Port Bou and then on to Barcelona and Madrid. Mesnel rarely left his compartment. In Madrid the Frenchman stayed in a cheap pension for two nights and then took another train to Lisbon on the night of 25th January.

  They arrived in Santa Apolónia station in Lisbon late the following afternoon. It was raining and Mesnel in his oversized coat and hat walked at funereal pace from the station to the massive square of the Terreiro do Paço, which Voss was surprised to see sandbagged and guarded in a neutral country. He followed the Frenchman through the Baixa and up the Avenida da Liberdade to the Praça Marquês de Pombal where Mesnel, dragging his feet, seemingly weak with hunger, entered a small pensão on the Rua Braancamp. Voss was relieved to take a taxi to the German Legation on the Rua do Pau de Bandeira in Lapa, a smart quarter on the outskirts of the city. SS Colonel Reinhardt Wolters had been expecting him two days earlier but welcomed him all the same.

  On 13th February the Chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was escorted out of the Maibach II complex by officers sent from the Reich’s Main Security Office by Kaltenbrunner. He was taken to the house within the grounds where he packed and was then driven to his own home in Schlachtensee. On 18th February the Abwehr was dissolved and brought under Kaltenbrunner’s direct control. The rain was clattering against the windows of the German Legation in Lapa when Wolters came into Voss’s office to deliver the good news. As the SS man left the room, Voss was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, a man out on a limb at the westernmost tip of Europe with only the enemy to talk to.

  Chapter 6

  10th July 1944, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.

  Andrea Aspinall collapsed on her bed in her room with the windows open, just back from another trip to the air-raid shelter – the doodlebugs a menace, flying over at all times of day, not like the good old predictable nights of endless bombing raids in the Blitz. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of not going to the shelter – listen for the low drone of the diesel-powered rocket, wait for its engine to cut out, take pot luck under its silent falling, test her boredom threshold.

  She went to sit on the window ledge, her room at the top, old servants’ quarters. She looked over the back garden through the lime trees to Macaulay Road, four houses along, direct hit from a doodlebug, not much left, blackened beams, piled rubble but nobody home at the time. She caught sight of herself, only her head in the bottom corner of the mirror on the dressing table across the room. Long black hair, dark, nearly olive skin, twenty-year-old brown eyes wanting to be older.

  She opened a packet of Woodbines, rested the filterless cigarette on her lower lip, let it stick. She struck a match on the outside wall, warm brick. Her hand came into the frame, she turned her face and accepted the light. She flicked her head back, unstuck the cigarette, let out a long stream of smoke and came back to herself in the mirror with her tongue on her top lip – being sophisticated. She shook her head at herself, looked out of the window – still a silly girl playing romantic games in the mirror. Not a spy.

  She’d spent most of her life at the Sacred Heart Convent in Devizes where she’d been sent at seven years old when her great aunt had died and there’d been no one to look after her while her mother worked. That was why the piano teacher and his wife, who’d been bombed in their home during the Blitz, had been so important to her, they’d become family, looking after her through school holidays. The piano teacher was her father. She’d never known her own, the one who’d died of cholera before she was born.

  They knew about discipline and religion at the Sacred Heart and not much else, but it hadn’t prevented her from getting a place at St Anne’s, Oxford to read maths. She’d done nearly two years of her degree when her tutor invited her to a party at St John’s. At the party a large quantity of drink was served and consumed by dons, undergraduates and other people not directly associated with the university. These people floated around the room and occasionally moored themselves to some young person or other and engaged them in short intense conversations about politics and history. She went to more parties like this and met a man who took a particular interest in her, who was called simply – Rawlinson.

  Rawlinson was very tall. He wore a three-piece suit, charcoal grey, a starched collar attached with studs to his shirt and a school tie which, if she’d known more, would have said Wellington and the military. He was in his fifties with all his hair, which was black on top, grey at the sides and combed through with tonic. He had only one leg and his prosthesis was stiff so that when he walked that leg swung in a semi-circle and he had to support himself with a duckhead-topped cane. She felt lucky because, while his conversation was the usual penetrative stuff, he participated with the charm of an uncle who shouldn’t really take a fancy to his niece but couldn’t help it.

  ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Mathematics. Has anybody ever asked you why mathematics? Interesting.’

  Andrea, a little drunk, shrugged. Unprepared for the question, her brain ticked. She spoke with her mind elsewhere.

  ‘You can get things to work out, I suppose,’ she said, feeling instantly stupid, embarrassed.

  ‘Not always, I shouldn’t think,’ said Rawlinson, surprising her, taking it seriously, taking her seriously even.

  ‘No, not always, but when you do it’s…well…there’s a beauty to it, an inconceivable simplicity. As Godfrey Hardy said, “Beauty is the test. There’s no place in this world for ugly mathematics.’”

  ‘Beauty?’ said Rawlinson, baffled. ‘Not something I remember from maths class. Fiendish is more the word. Show me beauty…beauty that I can understand.’

  ‘The number six,’ she said, ‘has three divisors – one, two and three – which if added together come to…six. Isn’t that perfect? And, seen in that same light, isn’t Pythagoras’s theorem beautiful too? So simple. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides squared. True for all right-angled triangles ever created. What seems terribly complicated can be resolved into equations…formulae which go towards completing the…well, at least part of the puzzle.’

  He tapped his cheek with a long finger.

  ‘The puzzle?’

  ‘How things work,’ she said, hysteria mounting as the banality took root.

  ‘And people,’ he said; question or agreement, she wasn’t sure.

  ‘People?’

  ‘How do people fit into the equation?’

  ‘There are infinite possibilities in maths. Every number is a complex number. It can be real or imaginary, and real numbers can be rational or irrational. Rational like integers or fractions, irrational like algebra or transcendental numb
ers.’

  ‘Transcendental?’

  ‘Real, but non-algebraic.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Like π.’

  ‘What are you saying, Miss Aspinall?’

  ‘I’m talking to you in the simplest way possible, at the most basic end of mathematics, and already there are things you don’t fully understand. It’s a secret language. Only very few people know it and can speak it.’

  ‘That still doesn’t explain how people fit into your world.’

  ‘I was just showing you that numbers can be complicated in the same way that people can be. And something else…I’m a person, too, with all the normal human needs. I don’t always speak in algorithms.’

  ‘Numbers are more stable than people, I’d have thought. More predictable.’

  ‘I haven’t come across an emotional number…yet,’ she said, her hands feeling huge at her sides, flapping like albatross’s wings, ‘which is why, I suppose, it’s possible to get things to work out…every so often.’

  ‘Are solutions important to you?’

  Andrea studied him for a moment, the question carrying interview weight. His eyes didn’t flinch from hers. She lost the match.

  ‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.

  After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent, but they gave her some additional training instead. Dead-letter drops, invisible ink, using miniature cameras, following people, talking to people while pretending to be someone else to find out what they knew – role-playing, they called it. The minuscule arts of deception. They also taught her how to fire a gun, ride a motorbike and drive a car.