The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘We finally gave them something to do,’ he said.

  Beecham Lazard leaned against the ship’s rail of the small trans-Tagus ferry. There were four cars on board and over seventy passengers. He’d seen his man come on at the ferry terminal at Cais do Sodré and had worked around him from several angles to make sure he was clean. The ferry was crossing to Cacilhas and everyone was on deck to catch the cooler air on the water. The ferry made slow going through the crowded river of cargo boats and liners waiting to dock and the low, muscular tug boats looking for work. Black smoke from a ship’s funnel joined the haze on the river, scarfing the high sun. The colonnade of the huge square of the Praça do Comércio behind them was soon vague behind a humid gauze.

  Lazard completed another circuit of the ferry and walked into a gap on the ship’s rail next to his contact man, who’d been one of the crowd coming out of the legation for lunch. They knew each other by sight. They switched identical briefcases and parted, Lazard now with the diamonds. Fifteen minutes later Lazard stepped off the ferry and walked to the Cacilhas bus terminal, where he took a ride along the south bank of the Tagus to the village of Caparica and then down to the ferry station at Porto Brandão. He waited there for half an hour until the ferry arrived and took him back across the river to Belém and the old 1940 Expo site. He checked his back walking around the docks, and crossed the railway tracks through the Belém train station. He took a short walk up to a house on the Rua Embaixador.

  He’d rented a small apartment on the first floor. He took off his dark grey suit and put on a light blue one. He took a white hat with a dark band out of the wardrobe and laid it on the bed. He closed the other suit and briefcase into the now empty wardrobe. He checked the empty street, picked up the telephone and dialled a Lisbon number. He spoke to a man with a Brazilian accent.

  ‘Did you pick up my laundry?’ asked Lazard.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, words from a wooden actor, ‘and it had all been ironed.’

  Lazard hung up, annoyed, and checked his watch. He was running early. Hours to go before check-in. He took off his jacket, moved the hat to one side and lay down. Important thoughts hung in his brain like large harbour fish. His mind drifted through them until he came across something that would help pass the time. Mary Couples kneeling at the foot of the hedge with her dress bunched up around her waist, her underwear stretched between her thighs, the dark crease through her white bottom, the tan lines from her bathing costume, his thumbs hooked around the two straps of her suspender belt, her shoulders lunging forward with each of his thrusts.

  Why had she done it? He was quite used to having the lewd suggestions he made to her pearl-studded lobes turned down. Why had she acquiesced suddenly and degraded herself in such a fashion? He was sure she didn’t even like him.

  From there it was a short hop to the thought that Mary didn’t like Hal much, either, and probably not herself too. These thoughts excited him. Could she be pushed further? He entertained himself by making unacceptable proposals to Mary Couples. His hand stroked the seam of his fly as his mind dropped further into his cold, dark world.

  At 4.30 p.m. he swung his legs off the bed, straightened his trousers, put on his jacket, the white hat and a pair of sunglasses. He picked up a suitcase and briefcase in matching caramel leather, both monogrammed BL in dark red lettering. He walked down to the taxi rank and asked to be taken to the airport where he checked in his suitcase. He sipped coffee in the lounge and picked out the British and German agents loitering in and around the airport building.

  At 5.45 p.m. he went to the toilets, urinated, washed his hands until the room was empty and took the cubicle closest to the wall in which there was yesterday’s sports newspaper A Bola on the cistern. He locked the door, removed his hat and sunglasses and passed them under the cubicle wall with his briefcase. He removed his suit and red tie and the brown English brogues which followed the hat which was still sitting on the floor. His eyes widened. He checked the newspaper. It was the right one. He had a sudden hysterical vision of a stranger staring at a hat, briefcase and a bundle of clothes, puzzled and then affronted, followed by an interview with the GNR in his stockinged feet.

  A dark suit appeared under the cubicle wall. A black hat, a dark blue tie, a pair of black Oxfords, no briefcase. Lazard dressed, left the toilets and walked directly out of the building to the taxi rank and took a cab into the centre of town and a train from Cais do Sodré to Belém.

  At 6.20 p.m. a man in a light blue suit, white hat and sunglasses, carrying a caramel briefcase with BL in red on the side, boarded the evening flight to Dakar. As the plane took off the exhausted agents from both sides made their reports.

  Sutherland, still shaking at the morning’s catastrophe, slumped in his chair, beckoning tobacco into his pipe. Rose let himself into the office, leaned over the desk.

  ‘We seem to have clawed something back from that fiasco outside the legation this morning.’

  ‘Lazard’s on the plane?’

  ‘Let’s hope Voss’s intelligence is correct and he has the diamonds with him.’

  ‘Voss has asked for another meeting.’

  ‘Already?’ asked Sutherland.

  ‘He’s rated it even higher priority than last night.’

  Voss, having made his dead-letter drop to the British on the way back from the legation, sat in the Estrela Gardens waiting for Paco. He tapped his knee with yet another newspaper, thinking this business was an editor’s dream. When this war was over there’d be a circulation drop of a thousand because one thing nobody ever did was read the newspapers, which were heavily censored. There was also the question of the Portuguese journalistic style, which was not dissimilar to Wolters’ description of the contessa’s intelligence reports, except there were the four hundred petticoats and then, damn, no ankle.

  Paco dropped on to the bench. He smelt worse, as if he was sweating some disease out of his system – something bad like yellow fever or plague. In fact, Paco had a black rim to his lips on the inside of his mouth, reminding Voss of yellow fever’s common name – black vomit.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not sick?’ asked Voss.

  ‘No sicker than I was at lunchtime.’

  ‘You said you were all right then.’

  ‘I’d been lying down,’ he said, resting his knees on his elbows, hunched forward as if constipated.

  ‘So what’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m always sick. So was my mother and she lived to be ninety-four.’

  ‘Go and see a doctor.’

  ‘Doctors. Doctors…they just say: “Paco, with you the good Lord should have started again.” Then they charge some money. I don’t go to doctors.’

  ‘What about the address?’

  ‘It’s a communist safe house.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They’re not careful. The PVDE will find that place in no time.’

  ‘Give it a few days, Paco.’

  ‘I won’t tell them. Those Reds,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘they’ll advertise it in their magazine, Avante, on the property rentals page.’

  Paco’s face strained into the closest expression he could get to a laugh but only managed to look as if he was passing a belligerent stool.

  Voss walked up to his apartment with the uneasy feeling that he could catch something from Paco. That Paco could be the death of him.

  Chapter 19

  Tuesday, 18th July 1944, Voss’s apartment, Estrela, Lisbon.

  Voss was sitting on the back of his sofa, looking out of the dormer window of his top-floor apartment over the Estrela Gardens and the square in front of the basilica. Anne had already come out of the gardens and he’d recognized Wallis leaning against the railings, reading the predictable newspaper. He was interested to see how she would deal with Wallis, who glanced up as she crossed the square and entered the basilica. Wallis took up a position in the shade by the entrance, lit a cigarette, rested a foot behind him against the wall. Pigeons took off f
rom one of the basilica’s towers, performed a circuit, relanded. A nun mounted the steps, brushing past Wallis. Two boys with shaved heads, filthy shirts and bare feet sprinted out of the gardens pursued by a policeman with his truncheon out. His cap came off, bounced off his back. Voss put his hand into the cold, wet towel sling he had hanging from the bolt of the window, testing the cool of the wine bottle. He smoked, flicked ash down the tiles in front of the window.

  ‘How much time do you spend looking out of that window waiting for your girlfriends?’

  He twisted and fell back awkwardly on to the sofa. She was sitting in a wooden armchair with her feet out of her shoes. Her face was set hard, not lovely, not how he remembered it in the kind flicker of a match flame. He smiled. This is what he liked about her – always challenging. He started forward but came up against some unseen field which repelled him, pushed him back on to the sofa.

  ‘Where do I fit in?’ she asked. ‘Which shift?’

  He smoked hard, thinking, glancing up at her.

  ‘You can throw one of those across,’ she said.

  He got up again.

  ‘Throw it.’

  He threw the packet, which she caught one-handed. She picked up a book of matches from the table, read the cover. She lit her cigarette.

  ‘The Negresco,’ she said. ‘You know, Beecham Lazard offered to take me there one night. He said it was the place to be seen in Lisbon for elegant couples…people like, for instance, Judy Laverne and Patrick Wilshere, I should think. Is that where you take yours?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Of course, I don’t even get to see the inside of the Negresco,’ she said. ‘I get a glass of lukewarm white wine, and then what? I suppose it’s bed.’

  She glanced at the bed visible through the door to the bedroom, a single, ascetic, hard-looking anchorite’s cot, rather than a Lothario’s empire bed, decked in shot silk and notched with conquests. She dragged on the cigarette.

  ‘Is this an English thing?’ he asked. ‘One of those humorous things that we Germans don’t understand.’

  Her glare was fierce, oxyacetylene harsh. Voss didn’t take his eyes off her in case she threw something. He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table between them. Drew back, slow movements as if with a wild animal. He wasn’t sure how to proceed now, like a comedian who’s tipped his audience over into tragedy and can’t get them back. Her eyes shifted to the bedroom again and then around the living room, taking in the shelf with three books and a family photograph, two landscapes on the wall, the bottle of wine in the towel, the carpets beaten and clean, the dark red sofa with two dents, neat.

  ‘I don’t like to be one of a crowd,’ she said.

  He nodded, taking it in, not understanding. He checked the room, as she had, to see if there were answers amongst his few possessions.

  ‘Are you an honourable man, Mr Voss?’

  ‘I’ve never been to the Negresco, if that helps.’

  She flung the book of matches at him. They fluttered and landed in no man’s land.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never been there. They were given to me.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Er, Kempf, I think.’

  ‘Mein Kempf, no doubt,’ she said.

  He studied her, the small, silly, throwaway pun taking its time to work through the confusion of the initial minutes. He blurted a laugh, then a wheezing chuckle, followed by an open-mouthed belly roar and finally silent hysteria, which was fuelled by Anne’s maintenance of the steel line of her unsmiling lips. She held it for a minute until Voss’s madness filled the room and the thought occurred to her that this was a man who must be kept very short of decent jokes, which set her off. ‘I bought some wine,’ he said, wiping tears out of the corner of his eyes with the knuckle of his thumb.

  ‘And glasses?’

  He left the room, came back with two tumblers. She watched his movements, his face. Boyish. Eager to please. Tenderness, which had been tied up outside the door, managed to creep in and settle under the table.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ he said, ‘that somebody has told you something about me.’

  ‘That you’re a womanizer.’

  ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anybody in Shell. Oh, except Cardew, I know Cardew to say hello to…but not to exchange my private life with him…and he’s married, he wouldn’t go to the Negresco, couldn’t possibly have seen me even if I had been there.’

  They drank the first glass of wine quickly and Voss repoured, Anne with her eyes on him, not letting him go for a second – Sutherland’s words gone now, her day on the rack forgotten.

  ‘So you are,’ she said.

  ‘A womanizer? To be honest, Anne…and honourable with you…there’s been the opportunity here in Lisbon, but not the inclination. I work and I sleep. There’s little time in between. Whoever told you…’

  ‘They had their reasons,’ she said.

  ‘They?’ he said. ‘A collective attack. It seems one can make enemies in Lisbon without even trying.’

  ‘He was being protective.’

  ‘You know what I’d like?’ said Voss, looking at the door. ‘That in here it’s just us.’

  There was a pause while all the unwanted guests got out. Anne walked over to where he was sitting on the sofa on trembling legs. She threw her cigarette out of the window and put a hand through his hair while she drained the glass of wine. She kissed him and he groaned as if something had snapped inside him. He pulled her on to the sofa, her neck rested on the back, her hair spread out all over. They kissed madly, knowing that the kissing wasn’t going to be enough. Her tumbler rolled across the floor.

  Voss pulled away, rested his neck on the back of the sofa, held her hand. Her eyes drifted around the room taking in the softening light, the warm air. She knew that everything was going to happen here, that her whole life was going to take place in this room. He kissed her knuckles, turned to her, spanned her slim waist with his hand, moved it up her ribcage, felt her shivering underneath. She rolled towards him, held his face, searched the fragile contours. He ran a hand down her spine so that she pushed her hips to him. She pulled at the knot of his tie, inexpert, reduced it to a hard nut. He pulled the tie off over his head, tossed it away and found the hem of her dress, the warm, smooth skin of her leg. He watched as she undid his shirt buttons, better with those. She tugged the shirt out of his trousers, pushed her hands up his body. He bent down, kissed her knee, her thigh, each touch of his lips welding him to her. She undid the buttons of her dress so that it fell open. He kissed her stomach, her breasts still encased in their bra. She peeled his shirt back off his shoulders, down his arms, cuffing his hands behind him. He wrestled with himself, like a madman in a straitjacket. She shrugged off her dress, unhooked her bra. He hopped about, tearing off his shoes and socks, threw his trousers, showering money, keys and coins. He pulled her away from the dress which was left open on the sofa, ravaged.

  He walked her to the bedroom, took off his shorts and sat on the narrow bed. He kissed her stomach, drew her knickers down her long legs. Their bodies tensed as they touched in full-length nakedness. He kissed her all over, each individual rib, the tiny, hard, brown nipples, while her hands found every bone and muscle in his back.

  They looked into each other’s faces as he eased into her, the pain twitching around her eyes. She loved his bony hardness, the trace of hair that joined his nipples, the ridges of his stomach straining under the thin, stretched layer of skin. She looked down his body to the dark join and wanted all of him. She brought her knees up and dug her heels into the dents in the sides of his buttocks, spurring him on.

  She woke up with her lips on his skin, her head on his chest rising and falling. Beyond the cliff of his ribs, down the flat landscape of his stomach, his penis slept. She reached for it, examined it, played with it, almost politely, until it enlarged and she became more strenuous. Her tongue flickered over the salty skin on his ribs. The tendons in his feet surfaced as his to
es curled away from the end of the bed. His thighs twitched, his stomach quivered. She turned to his creased face, his closed eyes, his open mouth straining against the sweet agony so that she had to kiss him, lightly on the lip, while in her hand he leapt.

  He rolled and looked through the bedroom door. She was kneeling on the sofa, naked, her elbows up on the window ledge, her face to the evening light, birds sweeping across the square of sky in the frame. His eyes traced the cello of her body. He went to her. She glanced at him over her shoulder and then back to the sky. He put his hands on either side of her elbows on the window ledge, kissed her back, each individual vertebra from bottom to neck, until she trembled. She reached behind, pulled him in to her, rested her chin on her arms, felt her nipples harden against the cracked paint of the window ledge. His hands held her at the cello’s waist, the hardness of his thighs feathering against the back of her legs, and the bells started up for evening Mass. He took it as some sort of signal and began in earnest. She braced herself against the window, threw her head back laughing at the profanity of it, the bells so loud they could both shout at the reddening sky and not be heard.