The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  Naked, they sat at either end of the sofa, her knees between his, a single glass of wine on top and a shared cigarette, no light in the room. He’d asked about her family and she was talking about her mother, her real mother, and Rawlinson – but not by name – with his wooden leg. How her mother had got her the job because she didn’t want her daughter to hear her with her peg-leg beau, helping him off with it at night, leaning it up against the wall and finding her waxing and polishing it in the mornings for him before he went to work. Voss was laughing, shaking his head at the irreverence, never heard a woman speak like this before. He asked about the father, who was dead, nothing more, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘I want to get dressed and go for a walk,’ she said, ‘with you. Like lovers would…afterwards.’

  ‘It’s not safe here,’ he said. ‘The city’s different. Everybody’s watching…As you said, oil is sensitive.’

  ‘Oil,’ she repeated, eyes wandering.

  ‘It’s all right to meet at a cocktail party, Anne, but…’

  ‘I want you to call me Andrea,’ she said.

  ‘Andrea?’

  ‘Not a question…a name.’

  Voss stood up and looked out of the window, surveyed the square and what he could see of the gardens. He knelt back down, said the words into her mouth.

  ‘I was interested to see how you’d lose him…Wallis.’

  ‘You knew it…’ she said, their eyes locked.

  ‘I saw you go into the basilica.’

  ‘There’s always more than one way out of a church,’ she said. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘The contessa gave a report to Wolters,’ he said, sad at how work had come back into the room like an engine starting up, ruining silence. ‘And others have noticed you.’

  ‘I didn’t last very long.’

  ‘Everybody knows everybody in Lisbon by now,’ he said, and then as an afterthought, striding ahead: ‘All we have to do is hang on, survive, until the end.’

  He wiped the thoughts of Beecham Lazard on a plane to Dakar, of another plane that could fly over Dresden just as the leaves were turning red and gold.

  ‘It’s already dark,’ she said. ‘We’ll walk. I’ll hold on to your arm. I want to show you something.’

  ‘We can’t leave together,’ he said and gave her directions to a small church in the Bairro Alto.

  Olivier Mesnel had spent the afternoon and evening stretched out on the floor. His room was like a furnace, his mattress thin and stuffed with something horrible like half-ground bonemeal, so it was always more comfortable lying on the floor on the strip of frayed carpet. His mind wouldn’t leave him alone, wouldn’t stop questioning him like some ghastly inquisitor off in the dark. Why had the Russians chosen him for this? How could they possibly think he was capable of such an act?

  His stomach was shot, completely burnt away, a rag of threadbare tripe. He would never be the same, digestion was something that had happened to him as distant as learning biology at school. He couldn’t remember his last solid motion, he would check the bowl to make sure he hadn’t given birth to his innards. He was carcass. Carcass with a mind that scribbled inside, like the mosquitoes at night close to his ear.

  He stood on his thin, shaking legs in the ludicrous sleeves of his pants, his buckled chest panting in a dishcloth vest. He stepped into his trousers whose waistband still had residual damp from the morning walk to Rua da Arrábida. Traffic gushed on the Rua Braancamp. He pulled on a shirt and jacket, a dark tie. He dabbed the sweat out of his moustache. He sat on the edge of the torture bed, his pelvis painful to his fleshless buttocks. The revolver which he’d taken delivery of that morning from the local communists lay under the pillow. He slid it out and reminded himself of its workings, checked the chambers, four bullets only. Enough.

  ‘Russians,’ he said to himself, a snippet from the tape of his thoughts. ‘Why have the Russians chosen me to be an assassin? I’m an intellectual. I study literature. And now I fire bullets into people.’

  At 9.30 p.m. he found himself sweat-slicked on the edge of the city so unable to control his fear and apprehension that he’d taken to walking backwards for several paces at a time until the inevitable had happened and now one side of him was covered in street dust, his left arm dead below the elbow and an imprint of the revolver on his flank.

  Rui and his partner were following Voss’s orders and shadowing him from behind and in front, used to the man’s problems after all these months. They were bored. They knew, as always, where he was heading. It was a hot night and they didn’t want to be out in it, especially not following the Frenchman. When they arrived at the Monsanto hills they let Mesnel get ahead so that he could perform his usual disgusting business with the gypsy boys in the caves. They lay down in the burnt, dry grass and talked about cigarettes which neither of them had.

  Mesnel waited for his two shadows as he had done on a number of occasions before when he’d come to these meetings. He satisfied himself that they weren’t following, turned away from the caves and began the brutal ascent to the Alto da Serafina and the viewpoint high above the western end of Lisbon. He sat exhausted on a rock and stared open-mouthed at the aura over the city, its dark-crowded edges pricked with light, a view of a different galaxy. Sweat dripped off his chin. He wanted away from this. He wanted Paris. A Paris that would be free in months, maybe weeks. He would have survived the occupation but…the Russians had asked him to do this thing. For the Party.

  ‘You can’t see the mulberry trees this time of night,’ said the American voice behind him, soft, a presence that had been there all the time watching him.

  ‘The worm turns it to silk,’ said Mesnel, to identify himself.

  ‘You alone?’

  ‘You know I’m alone. My apostles are down there, as usual, lying in the grass talking about football. Benfica. Sporting.’

  The American moved around him, stepped on to his rock and then in front of him, his face not visible.

  ‘So what did you get for me?’

  Mesnel sighed. A hot breeze blew from the city bringing stink and pollution.

  ‘You did see your guys?’ asked the voice. ‘I told you this was the last chance.’

  ‘As you know it’s not so easy without a Russian mission in Lisbon.’

  ‘We been through that a few times already.’

  ‘But I did see them, yes.’

  ‘So what did they offer for the opportunity not just to become an atomic power but to prevent the Germans from becoming one, too?’

  ‘They didn’t,’ said Mesnel, shifting his position, his hand easing over towards the hardness on his left hipbone.

  ‘They didn’t?’ said the American. ‘Do they understand what we’ve been talking about? That this is a unique opportunity to get on even terms with the United States in the production of an atomic bomb. Did they really understand that? I know you’re a university man, but did you tell them right?’

  ‘I told them correctly…as you told me. They understand,’ said Mesnel, ‘but they’re not interested.’

  ‘How long have we been talking, Monsieur O?’

  ‘Some months.’

  ‘Some months? It’s been nearly five months. And it’s after five months that they decide they’re not interested?’

  ‘Monsieur, you can’t just pick up the phone in Paris and call Moscow. We haven’t even been able to call London for four years. Imagine what it’s like. It all goes by courier…’

  ‘You’re boring me.’

  Mesnel moved his hand again.

  ‘And don’t move.’

  ‘I only want to wipe my face. It’s a hot night, monsieur.’

  The American, who’d had his hand in his pocket, released the safety catch on his revolver, took it out of his pocket and rested it on Mesnel’s forehead.

  ‘What is this?’ said Mesnel, bowels liquefying as his own hand closed over the butt sticking out of his waistband. He heard the hammer click back.

  ‘It’s a S
mith & Wesson revolver, Monsieur O.’

  ‘I’m only the messenger,’ said Mesnel.

  ‘Are you?’ said the American. ‘I don’t know who you are any more, but you’re not the guy who’s brought me a Russian offer which I’ve been waiting for very patiently for five months.’

  ‘They’ve seen your sample drawings of the structure of the pile, just as you gave them to me. They had better intelligence themselves from inside the American project. That is all. There is nothing to be gained from shooting me…’

  ‘They have better?’

  ‘That’s what they said. They have their own people in America.’

  The revolver slipped on Mesnel’s greasy forehead. He fell to one side. The American fired, grazing Mesnel’s head. Mesnel tore out his own revolver but the American was on him. The revolver back in his face, on his eye, jammed into the socket with anger.

  ‘Just the messenger, Monsieur O?’

  ‘Not now, monsieur, please,’ said Mesnel, close to tears. ‘It’s nearly the end of all this. Paris will be liberated in weeks. Please, monsieur, it’s nearly all over.’

  ‘I know,’ said the American, nearly kind. ‘It’s just policy.’

  A second shot and the whining finally stopped in Mesnel’s head.

  Rui and Luís had heard the first shot, it brought them to their feet.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Rui.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, homem.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  The second shot.

  ‘I think that the boys in the caves don’t have guns.’

  They ran down the hill, split up and walked back into the safety of the well-lighted city.

  Voss was waiting for her in the shadows of the church in Largo de Jesus. They came together as if they’d been a week apart. She as excited as a child, wrapped her arms around his neck, crushed the tendons. He held her, nearly paternal. She kissed him, moulded herself to him.

  ‘Now can we walk,’ she said.

  They went behind the church, through the back alleys, across the Rua do Século and into the narrow streets of the Bairro Alto. Relief had come for the people of the Bairro with the cool of the night. Their windows and shutters were open and there was the smell of fried onions and garlic, the grilling of fish. Families murmured on the other side of lace curtains and the tentative plucking of the strings of a Portuguese mandolin joined the rattling of feet on the cobbles.

  A woman’s voice started up, sang a single tremulous phrase and stopped, as did the people in the street. Women appeared in doorways, dark women, dark as dates, feet bare under their colossal skirts hiding ranks of children. The lovers leaned back against a flaking wall to listen. Another phrase, a wail to silence, the words not discernible, comprehensible only as a terrible sense of loss or the pity of it. The voice rose again. They listened, despite having found what this voice had lost. All love born with an innate understanding of its fragility.

  They pushed through the streets, always walking across the steep slope, until they broke out into the Rua São Pedro de Alcântara. They walked up the hill following the silver threads of the tramlines until they reached the boarding stage of the funicular. They crossed the road and drifted under the dark trees and along the railings of a small park as the lighted carriage of the funicular began its groaning descent.

  They were alone. The lights of Lisbon were spread out before them across the Baixa below and up to the medina of the Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge. She leaned against the railings, dragged him to her by the lapels, wanted to squeeze him into her.

  ‘Is this completely normal?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been in love once.’

  ‘Who with?’ she asked, those few words opening up an abyss.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘crazy.’

  She laughed, relief flooding the momentary chasm, and realized the absurd frailty of any commitment. It all hung by threads and words could sabre through them.

  They talked, lover’s talk. Talk unbearable to the ears of normal mortals with jobs and attic rooms and small coins for the rest of the week. Talk that married people might hear in small snatches in cafés and bars and shake their heads. Talk that might make a wife look at a husband and try to remember if he’d ever said things like that. Talk that was so interesting that Anne forgot there was a world with cigarettes until Karl produced a crumpled packet and they held on to the bars of the railings and smoked.

  The Baixa below them began to fill with mist drifting up from the river. Buildings blurred, their lights diffused. The castle glowed in grainy luminescence. Anne leaned back into him, fists clamped to the railings below his.

  Karl looked at his watch.

  They walked back through the Bairro, the streets and doorways still full of people, Voss nervous now, looking for faces he knew, who knew him. They split up and took different routes back to the Estrela Gardens. Voss ran back up to his apartment and found the gun given to him by the colonel from the Free Poles. He wanted it with him now at all times. He wasn’t just protecting himself any more. He put the gun in its cloth back in the tool box in the boot. He picked her up from a dark street by the gardens and took her back to Estoril, the glare of the headlights butting against the sea mist that hung just off the coast. The air cool on that side. He dropped her in a street away from the casino, crushed a kiss on to her lips and took his usual long roundabout route to the gardens of Monserrate.

  Chapter 20

  Tuesday, 18th July 1944, Hal and Mary Couples’ house, Cascais.

  There’d been a bad scene in the kitchen at Hal and Mary Couples’ small house in Cascais in the late morning. The heat had just worked its way under the roof and there seemed to be nowhere in the house where the distance between them could be described as comfortable. So they stood on either side of the kitchen table, holding on to the chair backs, shouting at each other over a pair of soiled and crumpled knickers.

  ‘Maybe you should ask yourself,’ screamed Mary, ‘maybe you should ask yourself what you’re doing going through my dirty laundry.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ said Hal, ‘because that was not the crime.’

  ‘Crime? Since when has it been a crime? Maybe that says more about you, Hal Couples, than it does about me.’

  ‘I’m just asking you, who you did it with and why. You tell me and it’s finished. We’ll work it out and move on from there.’

  She leaned over the chair back, heavy breasts. His eyes flickered from her face to her cleavage and back up.

  ‘Beecham Lazard,’ she said, a whisper over the crumple of white cotton on the table.

  His face twitched on one side as if she’d slapped it.

  ‘You slept with Beecham Lazard?’ he said, the words coming out piecemeal from his perplexed mind.

  ‘Not slept exactly,’ she said, straightening up.

  ‘When?’ he asked, sharp as a hatchet.

  ‘At the cocktail party.’

  ‘You went upstairs at Wilshere’s cocktail party?’

  ‘Not upstairs. We found someplace in the garden.’

  Hal squeezed his eyes shut with his fingers and thumb, gripped the flesh over the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said to himself. ‘I thought you hated Beecham Lazard.’

  Mary was unnerved. She’d expected, wanted, a different reaction, more explosive, more physical. If there’d been a crime, there should be punishment. But not this, not reason, because there was no reason, not one that had surfaced in her mind.

  ‘We’ve been living a long time like this,’ she said.

  Hal’s guts went cold. He reached for the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, plugged in its chewed end, relit it.

  ‘There’s been some pressure,’ he said, to get some thinking time, to keep at bay what was coming out in the room.

  ‘The man and wife bit,’ she said, and pushed her arms together so her cleavage swelled, ‘you know…but not.’

  Hal puffed hard. What is
this? He stared at the underwear, blinked at it. She’s cracking up. For Christ’s sake, push back the stuffing, doll, we’ve only got twenty-four more hours of this to go.

  ‘Maybe you should go and pick up the mail,’ he said.

  She nodded, backed away from the table, turned into the hall. She checked herself in the mirror, applied lipstick. She left the house. He watched her hips walk down the street. He picked up the underwear, went back to the bathroom and laid it on the lid of the laundry basket where he’d found it. Women don’t leave their underwear lying around like that, he thought, and tipped the lid over.

  Hal Couples – Harald Koppels – had been an Ozalid salesman in Los Angeles for twelve years when the FBI came to him one night in early 1942 and gave him two options: jail on a spying charge or work for the government. He was divorced and living alone and he could see that this could be the undramatic end to what had been a short life. He took their offer, turned Ozalid inside out for them and GAF and Agfa, too. Handed them all the names of anybody of whom he had the slightest suspicion of spying. He did his bit, but they kept that hook stuck in his gullet and wouldn’t let him off. One last job, they said. You’re going to Lisbon to look up an old friend. This is your new wife, her name’s Mary, she’s going to keep an eye on you. What they didn’t say was: Don’t go to bed with Mary, it makes her nuts. He went to bed with her, but it wasn’t what he wanted, so he slept in the spare room and took his fun where he could find it. Mary started to go nuts.

  Now it was night and they were sitting in the living room, Mary with her feet up on the sofa, reading a fashion magazine, fanning herself with the pages. She hadn’t eaten all day, had a stomach full of olive sticks and could have used the dry martinis to go with them. She wanted to talk to him but he’d been in professional mode all afternoon, preparing his product, the strips of microfilm with the plans, the dots with the building specs. He fed film into the seams of the buff envelope, attached microdots to the documents to go inside. She clapped her heel with her shoe, the foot nodding in the corner of his eye, the beat in his ear. He didn’t look up.