The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘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.’

  ‘We’ll tail him from Lisbon.’

&nb
sp; ‘I wouldn’t put anybody on the flight,’ said Voss. ‘He’s a very cautious man. Even our own agents won’t make contact until he arrives in Rio.’

  ‘We’ll check him on and check him off,’ said Sutherland. ‘Can I have a word, Richard?’

  The two Englishmen went out on to the colonnade and as they went down some steps and on to a steep lawn out of sight Voss heard their opening exchange:

  ‘You can’t put this to him now,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Rose, ‘I think the timing is perfect.’

  Voss pressed the sweat out of his eyebrows with the edge of his thumb. Five minutes and the two men were back. Sutherland was, as usual, grave and Rose’s reliable levity was turned off. They’d gone out English and come back very serious men. Voss felt something turning in his bowels.

  ‘We’re going to make a communication with Wolters through our usual channels,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘Your usual channels?’ asked Voss. ‘I’m not sure what that means.’

  ‘We have a way of letting Wolters know about intelligence we want him to hear.’

  ‘Real intelligence?’

  ‘Yes, the real thing.’

  ‘You mean threats?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And you’re going to tell me first…to see how I react?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Rose. ‘We know how you’ll react. It’s just that we think the information you’ve given us makes you a member of our club.’

  ‘I don’t like clubs,’ said Voss, suddenly revealing things about himself. ‘I’m not a member of any.’

  ‘It’s also important that you know that this message to Wolters has nothing to do with the intelligence you’ve just given us.’

  ‘The communiqué that will be given to Wolters tomorrow will be as follows,’ said Sutherland, his voice so low that the other two had to lean in to him: ‘If we do not have an unconditional surrender from Germany by the 15th August, by the end of that month an atomic device will be dropped on the city of Dresden.’

  Voss lost the ability to swallow. It was as if what his mind was refusing to accept was also being rejected by his body. The sweat, which had gathered in his hair and eyebrows from the hot night and the heat of the hurricane lamp, now broke and flowed over the taut skin of his drawn features, so that he had to wipe his cheeks as if he was crying. He thought of his mother.

  ‘Are there any other circumstances, apart from unconditional surrender, in which this could be prevented from happening?’

  The two men opposite him thought about the meaning of unconditional surrender.

  ‘Well, I suppose…Hitler’s death might do it…as long as Himmler didn’t take over, or anyone like him,’ said Rose.

  ‘If we got cast-iron proof that there was no atomic bomb programme, or we had the exact location of any laboratories and the crucial scientists involved in the programme – Heisenberg, Hahn, Weizsäcker – so that they can be destroyed…then possibly the action could be…’ said Sutherland.

  ‘It would save a great number of lives,’ said Rose.

  ‘But not many of them in Dresden,’ said Voss.

  The two Englishmen stood. Voss felt broken in the middle, his legs not operational. As they left, Rose, not a normally demonstrative man, patted him on the back. Voss sat alone for a quarter of an hour until his motor responses normalized. He picked up the hurricane lamp, went out of the room and handed it to the remaining agent, who stood at the edge of shadow under the Moorish arches of the colonnade.

  ‘A beautiful evening, sir,’ said the agent, dowsing the lamp.

  Voss’s legs didn’t work the pedals very well on the way back. He scared himself taking hairpin bends with one foot flooring the clutch and the other still on the accelerator. The tyres had squealed, the engine howled, and the steering wheel slithered through his wet hands. He found himself thinking of Judy Laverne coming off the same road and wondered whether this was what had happened. Something terrible had been said to her, some terrible revelation and she’d given up, thrown herself away, exhausted by man’s capacity for inflicting horror.

  He took a walk on the beach at Guincho for twenty minutes to stop his legs shaking, to see if the Atlantic rollers could thump out the dark empty space in his chest and guts. But all he’d felt was the ground trembling beneath him and its reverberation through the cast of his body. He’d thought about something Rose had quoted to him in a previous meeting. Something about hollow men. He couldn’t remember it precisely, but Rose’s first words, as they’d met that evening, came back to him. The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind. Yes, that was what he’d become. Alone out here, between the earth and the sea. Nobody. He was nobody any more. Modelled. Fabricated. Moulded. Cast. And with no way back to the old Karl Voss. The one that…the one that used to what? Believe in things? Admire people? The Führer? Pah! He was lost. That Rose. He says these words and then: ‘Nothing, Voss, old chap, nothing.’ It is nothing. He’s right. Karl Voss is nothing but a hunted man. Hunted by himself.

  He’d been drawn back to the car, winched to it. He sat behind the wheel, held his head out of the window, rested his chin on the ledge and smoked, staring at the ground. He drifted deeper into his dark mind, retreated until, panic-struck by his wanderings over that empty landscape, he started the car and headed back to Estoril.

  Voss parked up somewhere between the Hotel Parque and the casino. Smoking was all that was holding him together. He lit one cigarette from another. He strode up towards the casino. He wasn’t thinking any more. He was doing. He was desperate. He walked past Jim Wallis in his car without noticing. He went straight into Wilshere’s garden without checking his rear. Wallis had to run to catch up with him and even then he only just saw Voss’s back disappearing into the bower next to the summerhouse. Wallis slowed, eased back into the hedge, waited.

  Chapter 17

  Tuesday, 18th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

  It was 2.00 a.m. Anne lay on the bed, pinned to it, absorbed by the ceiling, waiting for time to shift. She wasn’t thinking about what she had to do – search the study. She was floating in and out of fantasy and reality, between Judy Laverne and Wilshere, Karl Voss and herself.

  Wilshere said he missed Judy Laverne, said he’d fallen. They appeared to be in love according to Voss and others. Now Wilshere was using her to remind himself of Judy Laverne. To torment his wife? To torment himself? He had struck the filly. He’d been angry, deranged by the vision of her. He’d wanted to drive her away, to banish her from his thoughts.

  Did Karl Voss know what she was? Was he on an operation or did he, in the heart of the paranoid city, see this as one of hers? Would it ever be possible to know what was real? She decided that she wouldn’t see him again or rather that she wasn’t going to put herself in that position. There would be no visit to the bottom of the garden tonight. There was too much that was unknowable. The equation would never simplify. The variables would mount. The additional logic would defeat itself. She didn’t have the tools to prove any part of the solution. In the end the silver thread would stop tugging.

  It was time to go to work. She walked the dark corridor, her shoulder brushing the wall. She waited at the gallery above the hall. The wood in the house groaned after a day spent straining against the heat. Moonlight lay in a blue rhombus across the chequered tiles. She went down the stairs, stepped around the moonlight, past the cases of Mafalda’s silent figurines. Amor é cego. She walked the length of the house and unlocked the french windows to the back terrace in case she had to get back in that way after escaping out of the window. She went back to the study, let herself in, closed the door behind her.

  She crossed the room, opened the window behind the desk and moved a plant on the window sill three inches to the right. She lifted her nightdress and took a torch from the waistband of her knickers. She sat in Wilshere’s chair and surveyed the night-lit room.

  The books in neat, leather-bound collections filled the walls
. Two paintings on either side of the door, one of men in Arab dress on camels in a desert scene, the other of a fishing boat dragged up on a mist-filled beach. Ireland, perhaps. One corner was African, with three masks mounted on the wall, the one at the apex maybe three-foot long with inch slits for eyes and mouth, the mask never more than six inches across through its entire length. Hair, a kind of rough hemp, sprouted from the top. The mouth even appeared to have teeth.

  She listened again to the settling house and painted the desktop with her torch beam. A blotter, two old newspapers, a pen and ink tray, tidy. She opened the central drawer. One block of clean paper and beside it a single sheet with a four-line stanza accompanied by jottings in the margins, the odd word crossed out and the replacement word connected by a line. The stanza seemed to read:

  Crow black in the middle night

  Around the marchers come for another fight.

  No boots, but claws scratching through the dust,

  No armour, but shells blistered with rust.

  That was how it stood at the moment, but it looked as if there were more drafts to be done and even then it would find its way to the bin. The wastepaper basket was empty. She drummed her chin with her fingers and shuddered. If that was what Wilshere had teeming through his mind of a night – ghostly, dark, restless, seething with ugly energy – maybe he was going mad. She had a memory flash, a story of her mother’s when she’d visited a cave in India – alone but with the sense of not being alone. Above her, covering every inch of the roof of the cave, were hanging, sleeping bats. The sight of the dormant army, their jostling folded wings, had turned her mother and sent her out in a crouched sprint into the sunlight. Was that the inside of Wilshere’s cranium?

  She opened all the desk drawers; some were empty, most of little interest. The bottom one was locked. She shifted books in the bookcase, she lifted pictures, she checked the fireplace. To the left of the fireplace in the darkest corner of the room was the cabinet where Wilshere kept his safe with a combination dial lock. She went back to the desk. She listened. Hands moist now. First nerves creeping in. House noises growing into something else in her mind. Footsteps on a stair. Stop breathing. Sweat under her breasts. She stood up. Remembered her training: never leave a warm chair. She opened all the drawers again, checked the roofs and sides. Central drawer, at the back, stuck with something resinous, a key.