The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Your job, once you’ve received the signal that Operation Valkyrie has started, will be to take control of the German Legation here in Lisbon. It may require strong methods. If SS General Wolters does not obey your orders you will shoot him without hesitation. Do you have a gun?’

  ‘Only one from the legation which I have to sign in and out.’

  ‘The colonel will provide you with a firearm.’

  ‘Is this certain?’

  ‘We have been close several times but have been frustrated at the last moment by changes in schedule. This time the Führer is fixed at the Wolfsschanze and we are going to him. This is the most certain we have ever been, which is why you are being informed and can pass it on to the British. I hope this means you won’t be alone for much longer,’ he said. ‘One last thing before you go. Olivier Mesnel?’

  ‘Olivier Mesnel, as far as I am informed, does nothing except have occasional, unspeakable assignations with gypsy boys in the caves on the outskirts of the city.’

  ‘The colonel has found that he’s making contact with a communist courier who visits him in the Pensäo Silva on Rua Braancamp. The colonel believes that whatever Mesnel is giving him will find its way back to the Russians.’

  ‘I don’t know what he can be giving him. He never goes out.’

  ‘Then perhaps he’s receiving instructions. The point is that whatever he’s involved in could help us with the British. If we can show that the Russians are not to be trusted it will help our cause.’

  Chapter 18

  Tuesday, 18th July 1944, the German Legation, Lapa, Lisbon.

  The man in the dark suit sat with his hands clasped and jammed between his knees. He was tense and the natural hunch his occupation had given him gave the impression that he was about to sustain a series of blows across the shoulders. His hat sat on the table in front of him. A black homburg. The drag of the heavy bags under his eyes made his long face longer, his sadness sadder.

  ‘Couldn’t you find anyone else?’ asked Voss, looking at him through the glass panel of the door. ‘In all those jewellery stores off the Rossio? There must have been someone local, surely.’

  Hein, one of Voss’s subordinates, didn’t say anything but let his hand do the talking. They were too gabby down there.

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘The Jewish Refugee Commission.’

  ‘Did he volunteer?’

  ‘Kempf said he’d find out about his family for him.’

  ‘And did he?’

  Hein gave Voss a diagonal look and shrugged.

  ‘Well, he won’t talk, that’s for sure,’ said Voss. ‘Where’s he from?’

  ‘Antwerp. Worked a lot with Belgian Congo product.’

  ‘Keep Wolters away from him.’

  ‘That’s probably your job, isn’t it, sir?’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Hirschfeld…er…Samuel Hirschfeld,’ said Hein, morose now.

  Voss went in, shook hands with the man and told him to set up his equipment. The man, wordless, opened a wooden case and lifted out his scales, weights, tweezers, eyeglass and a square of worn dark velvet.

  Voss knocked on Wolters’ door, waited the customary beat, announced the diamond assessor.

  ‘Bring him in, Voss, bring him in.’

  ‘I’ve just told him to set up in the other room.’

  ‘Each stone individually weighed and valued.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And someone in the room with him at all times.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Wolters lobbed him the bag as if it was nothing more than a sack of marbles. Voss went back to the Belgian, who declined his offer of a cigarette and went to work.

  Jim Wallis had filed his report at 8.00 a.m. and gone home to bed. Sutherland read it shortly afterwards and smoked a whole pipe bowl thinking about it. At 9.30 a.m. Cardew sent a coded message to the embassy and an hour later Sutherland and Rose were in a safe house just off the Largo do Rato with Anne sitting, knees pressed together, handbag on top, just like the virgin Sutherland had imagined her to be.

  She took them through last night’s business. Sutherland whistled through the now empty pipe, annoying her. He checked the numbers she gave him from Wilshere’s diary. They talked about the safe, its make, whether there was a key as well as a combination. He told her Cardew would arrange for her instruction on how to open the safe. Anne continued the story, same as she had for Cardew. How Wilshere had surprised her in the study, how she had left via the window, how she wandered the garden and the final incident on the back terrace. Sutherland nodded her through it.

  ‘Your report is incomplete,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten something.’

  ‘No, I’m sure I haven’t.’

  She was sweating in the close, curtained room. The light from the single overhead bulb was jaundiced after the fierce brightness of the street. Nausea turned in her stomach.

  Sutherland bared his teeth where they were gnawing into his pipe stem.

  ‘Your angel,’ Rose prompted.

  She blinked. Jim Wallis. She had forgotten about Jim Wallis, who they’d sent to keep an eye on her. Free-fall sweat.

  The mournful notes of a knife-grinder’s flute sounded in the street below.

  ‘From the beginning,’ said Sutherland, drilling her.

  She told him about Karl Voss. The casino. The man who carried Wilshere back to the house. The beach. The cocktail party. The first and accidental meeting and the second, observed by Wallis, the unintentional one.

  ‘You may recall that I told you that Voss was with the Abwehr,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him about any of our business?’

  ‘No, sir, I haven’t. He thinks I’m a secretary at Shell.’

  ‘Karl Voss is an experienced officer,’ said Sutherland. ‘He’s been with military intelligence in Zeitzler’s team in Rastenburg. He’s worked at the Zossen headquarters in Berlin, Avenue Foch in Paris and now here in Lisbon. Do you for one moment think he doesn’t know how to play the…toy with the romantic illusions of a young woman?’

  ‘All I can tell you, sir, is that I haven’t told –’

  ‘Have you…’ Rose interrupted bluntly. ‘Have you had a physical relationship with Voss?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘That’s something,’ said Rose. ‘He’s a charismatic man, Voss. Very successful with the ladies. You wouldn’t have been the first and you most definitely wouldn’t have been the last.’

  Rose’s toxic words entered her intravenously. They went straight through her heart and into her head where the virus multiplied into a fever. Anger came first, a torrential rage, followed by cold, hard jealousy. They ran a circuit in her head, chasing, chasing but never catching up with the words, which remained intact, clear, defined as in the first moment that they were spoken.

  ‘Can I make a suggestion?’ said Sutherland, not looking for an affirmative. ‘That you leave Captain Voss to his womanizing and concentrate on your job.’

  Her handbag hung from her grip like a bad puppy as she went over to Sutherland, put him in her shadow.

  ‘I did not have sex with him,’ she said firmly. ‘I have not spoken to him about our business.’

  ‘If you had, my dear, you’d be on the first plane back to London,’ he said, those blackberry smudges under his eyes swollen with insomnia. ‘Dismissed.’

  By the time the Contessa della Trecata arrived at the German Legation at 11.00 a.m. the shade temperature was in the low nineties and the British agents were settled into their routine, watching from apartments at the side and rear. Sutherland had put additional men in cars in the backstreets, while their paid ardinas – the newspaper boys – walked the hot calçada barefoot, ready to flag them and set Operation Dragnet in motion.

  The contessa, wearing a petrol-blue silk dress cut to the mid calf of her still excelle
nt but unsteady legs, climbed the few steps into the legation, eyed the swastika flag hanging dead over the doorway and fluttered her fan under her chin. She was taken upstairs to a gilded chair outside Wolters’ office where she sat, fanning herself, in the still corridor. Voss watched her through the door from behind the hunched diamond assessor.

  She was called into Wolters’ office. They didn’t shake hands. No contact was an understood part of their arrangement. Wolters puffed his cigar heavily as if fumigating his office.

  ‘I know you see it as part of your cover, but could you be a little…a lot less rude when we’re in company?’ said Wolters.

  ‘I’m sorry to have overplayed my part.’

  ‘I can only think you used to be on the stage.’

  The contessa accepted this small humiliation.

  ‘What do you have for me?’ asked Wolters.

  The contessa set off in French, their common language, and the usual, baroque elaborations began to scroll the thick air of the room. Wolters slumped in his seat, fitted his cigar into the side of his mouth, between the gap in his teeth. He was used to the contessa’s embellishments, the magnificent constructions of stylish detail which were the accompaniment to the tiny morsels of intelligence she brought. For him it was like tugging aside four hundred petticoats until ah! – yes, the ankle. But not today. He banged the edge of the table, which sent the contessa’s fan off under her chin.

  ‘Tell me,’ he ordered.

  ‘The British girl staying at the Wilsheres’ house is a spy.’

  ‘Evidence?’

  ‘Dona Mafalda’s seen her wandering the house at all hours and she’s lied on her residency form to the PVDE about her father. To them she has said that he is an accountant and alive, to me that he is dead.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  The contessa wanted to round it out, give it body and depth, to disguise what in fact she was doing. She attempted to fill the silence. Wolters snapped her shut. He stood to drive her out. Her head ducked and trembled as she became the cringing bitch.

  ‘My family,’ she asked, ‘have they been found yet?’

  Wolters dropped his eyes to her. What was it to be today? Hope or no hope? He felt good.

  ‘They’ve been found,’ he said. ‘We’ll be moving them shortly. They were in Poland.’

  ‘In Poland?’

  ‘I am busy,’ he said, and pointed to the door.

  Voss glanced up from the diamond assessor as the contessa left. Samuel Hirschfeld signed a receipt for the small sum he’d been paid for the work.

  ‘I’ll go now,’ said Hirschfeld, wiping the palms of his hands on his knees.

  ‘Pack your things but wait for one moment.’

  Hirschfeld tried to sit back in his seat but couldn’t, his acid stomach churned around his ancient ulcers and tipped him forward. Voss took the diamonds and Hirschfeld’s calculations across to Wolters, who was standing at his window looking down on the nonchalant but significant activity in the Rua do Sacramento à Lapa.

  ‘Isn’t this unusual?’ asked Wolters, taking the paper from Voss, pointing to the street. ‘I mean they watch us, we watch them, but this…this is excessive.’

  ‘They’re on to something, sir.’

  ‘Or somebody’s told them something,’ said Wolters, no vaudeville menace but quiet, with weight.

  ‘What did the contessa have to say?’ asked Voss. ‘She was quick today.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wolters, ‘I kept her on the leash this time.’

  Voss frowned behind Wolters’ shoulder.

  ‘It was the usual thing,’ said Wolters. ‘Telling me things I already know. A baroque recital for a crumb of the obvious. Ach! These revolting people. They lick the hand that beats as eagerly as the one that feeds.’

  He shook his hand as if saliva still clung to it.

  Voss preferred Wolters in this mood. The man who knew, the man who was in total command of the multiplicity of strands that only his iron fist could hold.

  ‘Today’s treat?’ said Wolters, over his shoulder. ‘Today’s smear of caviar on toast?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Voss, letting Wolters dangle it in front of him.

  ‘The English girl in Wilshere’s house is a spy. Really? Does that Milanese strumpet think we are fools?’

  ‘Clearly,’ said Voss, his head crammed full.

  ‘And now this –’ said Wolters, nodding at the street, shaking with false mirth. ‘Ants.’

  He turned his back to the window, a silhouette against the brightness of the day. He threw himself into his chair, stamped his foot.

  ‘We will crush them.’

  ‘The parcel came out at close to one million one hundred thousand dollars,’ said Voss.

  ‘That should do it, don’t you think?’

  ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, you and I haven’t discussed anything beyond Lazard flying with these stones to Rio and on to New York, sir,’ said Voss. ‘Should I know what will happen there?’

  ‘I don’t want Lazard to be bothered by any of your people in Dakar,’ snapped Wolters. ‘Don’t have him tailed, he’s nervous enough as it is. Doesn’t know who’s who any more. Let him get to Rio in peace and we’ll pick him up there and make sure he gets to New York.’

  ‘And the return journey?’

  ‘That depends on the success of the negotiations.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Voss, getting to his feet, hoping to lure Wolters out by his own reticence.

  Wolters was disappointed with Voss’s deference. He burned with the brilliance of his plan. He wanted Voss to try harder, to work on him, to tease more out of him.

  ‘I understand the need for secrecy, sir,’ said Voss, making for the door. ‘I can only offer my help.’

  ‘Of course, Voss,’ said Wolters. ‘Thank you. Yes. This…this will be the single most important intelligence event of the war and you will have been a part of it. Heil Hitler.’

  Voss matched Wolters’ salute and left with some of what he’d wanted, which was confirmation of his assumption of the day before, that the diamonds were involved in the purchase of the Führer’s ‘secret weapon’.

  Kempf handed Voss the extracts from their dead-letter boxes. Voss read them through. Kempf stood at ease, hands behind back, eyes forward as if on parade.

  ‘What’s going on, sir?’

  ‘What do you mean, Kempf?’

  ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus out there, sir. They’ll be driving on the left-hand side of the road by the end of the day.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘Beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘We’re getting a little more attention than usual.’

  ‘It’s “Ring a ring of roses” out there, sir.’

  ‘What was that, Kempf?’

  ‘It’s an English nursery game, sir.’

  ‘You’re very knowledgeable, Kempf.’

  ‘Had an English girlfriend before the war, sir. She was the nanny from across the road. They were the only games she knew, apart from…but we won’t go into that, sir.’

  Kempf drifted into a momentary blissful state. Voss smiled.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything, Kempf. I’m in the dark myself.’

  ‘The Jew’s still waiting, sir. The stone man.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Voss. ‘I forgot about him. Hein said you made him a promise.’

  ‘You know how it is, sir,’ said Kempf. ‘I’ll move him along then, shall I?’

  ‘I’ll go, Kempf. I’ll go.’

  Hirschfeld was a little wild in the eye by this stage. Voss released him. His little feet clattered down the stairs and didn’t stop running until they were beyond the gates in Rua do Pau de Bandeira.

  Voss sat in Hirschfeld’s vacated warm, damp chair, tapped his lips with a finger. One of the dead-letter drops had revealed that Olivier Mesnel had made a move and not to the caves of Monsanto to perform any of his ghastly acts. He’d gone to an address in Rua da Arrábida off the Largo do Rato.

  Voss left the legat
ion. Kempf had been right, the ardinas were as good as selling The Times. He bought a Diário de Notícias and headed downhill, down the cobbled, stepped streets and into the Rua das Janelas Verdes. He turned into the dark, stone steps of the Pensão Rocha and climbed slowly up to the courtyard, writing down the address and pushing it inside the newspaper with a twenty-escudo note. He took a seat at a table. The clientele, exclusively men, eyed him over and around their own newspapers, not all of them today’s. The waiter, a boy, stood next to him, barefoot, trousers tied up with string.

  ‘Bring me Paco,’ said Voss.

  The boy walked through the tables, watched by the printed pages of the newspapers. He went into the pensão and did not return. Paco appeared some minutes later, a short, dark Spaniard from Galicia, with no forehead between hair and eyebrows and sunken cheeks that had known hunger from birth. He sat at Voss’s table, cheap suit, shirt buttoned to the throat, no tie and the faint smell of urine.

  ‘Are you sick?’ asked Voss.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Looking for work?’

  He shrugged, looked away, desperate for work.

  ‘I bought you this newspaper. There’s an address. I want to know how it’s used. Don’t take any friends.’

  Paco closed his eyes once. One of the newspapers behind him folded, upped and left.

  ‘Any new faces?’ asked Voss.

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘In Lisbon?’

  ‘There’s been talk of an English girl.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘She’s a secretary for Shell,’ he said, eyes dead, heading towards sleep. ‘Lives in a big house in Estoril.’

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Voss, putting two packets of cigarettes on the newspaper.

  ‘She’s working,’ he said, economic.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve been watching Wallis,’ he said, shifting a shoulder. ‘I think he’s looking after her.’

  ‘Be quick,’ said Voss, and got out of there.

  Back at the legation there were four cars in the short driveway between the gate and the steps up to the building. Voss went upstairs and stood in one of the front windows overlooking the intersection of Rua do Pau de Bandeira and Rua do Sacramento à Lapa. It was lunchtime and from underneath him people began to pour out of the legation building, an unusual number at once. Some got into the cars, others headed for the gates, which were now fully open. The cars all left in different directions. The streets were suddenly crowded, the ardinas flagging left and right in the confusion. In moments there was a traffic jam and people streamed off the pavements in between the cars. Men who had been walking like extras in a movie were now in a farce, looking up and down the four possible exits in complete indecision. Voss walked through the empty building and down the stairs. Wolters met him on the way up, grinning.