The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Oh, Hal,’ she said, back in her wifey voice, ‘I can’t wait ‘til we get back.’

  He nodded. She flicked the pages, sighed.

  ‘I’ll meet him on my own if you want,’ he said, a vague hope.

  ‘It’s not what he’s expecting,’ she said, her voice grating, as if this was a trip to a difficult in-law.

  Maybe he should let her have the drink. That might help. He went into the kitchen, fixed two Tom Collins with lots of ice. They drank, but it didn’t smooth him out. He finished the work.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  ‘As I’ll ever be, Hal.’

  He put a dark jacket on over his dark shirt, ran a comb through his hair.

  ‘You look nice, Hal.’

  He fixed her with a look. She unpinned it, went over to him and brushed off his shoulders, straightened his lapels, made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  ‘It was only sex, Hal,’ she said from behind him. ‘Nothing important.’

  ‘Yeah, but it wasn’t part of the brief,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what it means when we get up there. How it’s going to affect the deal we’re doing with him.’

  ‘It won’t mean anything, Hal,’ she said. ‘Now that I know.’

  There it was again.

  ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure who you are any more – what you want.’

  ‘I’m your wife, Hal,’ she said, and that worried him. ‘All I want is a little kiss and let’s get going.’

  He went to kiss her forehead but she tilted her head back and fastened her lips on to his, they were wet and cool from the ice, they were sucking, penetrating and their teeth clashed. It was like eating a mollusc on the half-shell.

  She brushed past him into the hall. He followed her dark blouse, black skirt, stockings and soft leather pumps. They got into the car and started driving out of Cascais, heading west on the Guincho road. He checked the rear view and her all the way.

  He’d tried to make the OSS pull her out, but she was their agent. He’d insisted that her behaviour could threaten the assignment, but of course, when she was with them, she was always fine. ‘It’s too important for personal considerations,’ they’d said. Now look. The woman’s mind unravelling like bad knitting.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ she said, ‘you’ll see. After this we’ll get back together and it’ll just be you and me.’

  She rested a hand on his thigh, kneaded the muscle, and Hal’s sole inspiration for getting through the night was a decision to just go along with it.

  ‘Florida,’ he said.

  ‘The Keys,’ she said. ‘You ever been to the Keys?’

  ‘Fishing,’ he said, and her hand moved higher and the little finger strayed over his fly.

  He removed her hand from his crotch, kissed the back of it, held it on his knee and rubbed it with his thumb.

  ‘They run rum up from Cuba,’ she said. ‘We could do that.’

  ‘I thought you were talking about a holiday.’

  ‘I was…but maybe we could live there, you know…the two of us on an island.’

  He’d have been pushed to spend ten minutes with her in New York City, let alone a lifetime on a Florida Key. She slipped down the leather seat of the car, rested her neck on the back and let her head loll, wanting him to look. Her skirt had ridden up her thighs to the stocking tops. She stretched her legs out and drew her heels back up but this time with her knees open.

  ‘We’ll get tight on our rum,’ she said. ‘Drink all the profit.’

  She laughed and took his hand off the steering wheel and put it on the inside of her thigh, part on the stocking top, part on the hot skin. He swallowed. Christ, this is what happens when you go with it.

  ‘We’ll do it on the beach in the open air and it won’t matter, not like it does here, with all the bathing suit police.’

  She drew the hand up to the apex. He yanked it away as if he’d touched red-hot iron.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Mary, where’s your goddamn underwear?’

  ‘You know I don’t like blasphemy, Hal.’

  ‘Where is it, for God…where is it?’

  ‘I don’t have any clean.’

  ‘You can’t…’

  ‘Nobody’s going to know.’

  He rubbed the side of his little finger which had come into contact with her damp sex. It itched. The car climbed up through the pine trees of the serra.

  ‘This is business, Mary,’ he said. ‘This is the work, now.’

  Her face hardened. She sat up, pushed the skirt back down. The one eye Hal could see had a nasty determination to it. They turned away from Malveira and headed towards Azoia.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about Judy Laverne?’ asked Mary.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. He didn’t want to hear about her from Mary. He’d liked Judy Laverne. She was one of the few people in American IG who’d been spotless, but it hadn’t mattered, she was linked to Lazard, the OSS made sure she was fired.

  ‘That’s where she came off the road,’ said Mary, as they rounded the bend.

  Hal changed gear, turned hard right up a dirt track, doubling back on himself. Mary looked down on the old crash site. Hal slowed and dowsed the lights.

  ‘There were no skid marks in the road,’ she said. ‘The guys from the OSS said that if the car had been moving at speed the impact point would have been much further down the hill.’

  ‘What are you saying, Mary?’

  ‘I’m saying her car was rolled off.’

  Hal was driving with his face up close to the windscreen, the darkness impenetrable amongst the pine trees. They crawled along the ridge.

  ‘By who?’ he asked.

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t moving that fast.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s kinda sad, don’t you think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That she wasn’t even working for us. She’d turned us down and they didn’t have anything on her, not like they had with you.’

  ‘So why did they roll her off, Mary?’

  ‘It’s a mystery, Hal,’ she said. ‘A sad mystery. She was crazy about Wilshere. Crazy about him.’

  Hal stuck his head out of the open window to see if the visibility was any better and because he didn’t want to hear Mary any more, not when she was talking about people being crazy about each other.

  They connected with another track, turned right and began a slow descent into the back end of the village of Malveira. The first building they came to was a partially built villa which overlooked the rest of the village on the main road below. The house had a roof and walls but the windows were boarded up, the land around full of builder’s detritus, not much evidence of recent work.

  They took hurricane lamps from the boot and a flashlight. Mary walked on ahead with the envelope containing all the microfilmed plans. Hal pocketed a small revolver which he’d hidden earlier in the tool box and followed her. They let themselves in with a key, which Hal knew where to find. They lit the lamps, put them on a table made of a board supported by bricks. Hal sat on a column of stacked bricks. Mary paced the room. There was some threat in the way she moved, the careful placement of each foot. He tried to think of some small talk to smooth her out but none came to mind in the heat and smell of cement. At 11.30 p.m. a car pulled up outside. Mary went to one of the boarded-up windows, peered through the crack.

  ‘It’s Lazard,’ she said.

  Mary was applying lipstick, using a hand mirror with the torch balanced in a niche in the wall. Hal and Lazard made the usual identifying exchanges and Hal opened the door.

  ‘Hi, Beech,’ said Mary.

  ‘Hal…Mary,’ said Lazard, shaking hands, except Mary kissed him on the cheek, too. He was sweating and she wiped her lips afterwards.

  ‘Hot night,’ said Hal.

  ‘I thought it’d be cooler up here.’

  They stood around for a moment, uncertain as to how this business should be conducted.

  ‘I don’t have
much time,’ said Lazard, knowing the flight was due to land in Dakar in an hour.

  ‘Give him the envelope, Hal.’

  Hal wanted to hit her, keep her mouth shut. Lazard noted the palpable friction, handed over the diamonds.

  ‘I’m just going to have to check these over quickly,’ said Hal.

  ‘Sure,’ said Lazard, calmer by the second.

  ‘This your place, Beech?’ asked Mary.

  Lazard nodded.

  ‘Whyn’t you show me around while Hal does his work,’ she said, and wiggled the flashlight, whose beam happened to be on Lazard’s thigh. Hal wouldn’t have minded breaking her teeth. Lazard shrugged. Hal went to the table, laid a piece of velvet on the board and poured the diamonds on to it. Mary took Lazard by the arm and went off into the house. Hal watched them leave, the torch beam bouncing around the walls, their voices echoing in the distant rooms. He went to work. Minutes passed.

  ‘We’re just going upstairs, Hal,’ Mary called, sing-song, from deep in the house.

  Back to the stones, Hal counting them, making the basic visual tests as he’d been taught, just to make sure he wasn’t getting glass. A noise stopped him. A noise over the loud whistling of the cicadas in the hot, still night. Was that grunting? He didn’t believe it. He stood up. Mary’s voice, loud and clear. Oh! Yes!

  She thinks she’s goading me…Jesus.

  He sat down, shaking his head. Only minutes and it’ll all be over. Mary’s voice cut through, almost a shriek this time, overplaying the pleasure. She never liked it that much. Hal knew.

  Silence. A tense, rock-hard silence. Then a crash, bodies upsetting something, falling into or over…He took the gun out of his pocket, moved through the ground-floor rooms to the bottom of the stairs. Not a sound inside the walls…only mosquitoes or tinnitus.

  Hal walked sideways up the stairs, back to the wall, no bannister on the open side. On to the landing, cracks of light around the boarded window on the far wall. The moon up high now outside. Light came from a doorless room, low light, floor height. He stepped into it. The flashlight lay on the wooden boards. He put the gun into the room first. Against the wall, to the right, Mary lay on her front, the wooden board of a workman’s table underneath her, the bricks toppled. She had a length of hemp rope wrapped around her neck so tight that her eyes were halfway out of her head. Her skirt was up over her buttocks, black suspenders, disappearing tracks. A black smear from the crack of her bottom that ran down the back of her thigh to her stockings. Blood.

  Hal swallowed hard against the gristle of his Adam’s apple, acid rising from his stomach. Nobody had mentioned this kind of thing in any of the briefings. The muzzle of Lazard’s revolver screwed itself into his neck.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Hal, the horizontals going in his mind.

  ‘Kneel down, just there, behind her,’ said Lazard. ‘I’ll take the gun as you go down.’

  Hal’s legs shook so much he dropped to the floor as if he’d been rabbit-punched. Lazard slipped the gun out of his wet grip and took hold of Hal’s jacket collar to keep him steady.

  ‘Now crawl over to her feet.’

  The sweat ran off Hal, sweat and tears because he knew this was it. He’d survived, made it through to the last minute and instead of the new beginning, it was the end of everything. Wasted years. Holy Christ. His head was shaking from side to side as he inched towards Mary’s fallen heels.

  ‘Drop your pants.’

  He undid his trousers.

  ‘And your undershorts.’

  He pushed them down and saw, now, what Lazard had done, what he’d done as he held her by the reins of his garrotte. He wanted to vomit.

  Lazard put the gun to Hal’s temple, pulled the trigger, the noise thunderous and ringing in the room. He let Hal fall forward. He came to rest with his face in the middle of her back, his groin on her buttocks.

  Lazard put the gun into Hal’s slack hand and took the front-door key from the dead man’s pocket.

  Downstairs he poured the diamonds back into the bag, cleared the velvet and Hal’s eyeglass. He knocked one of the boards out of a downstairs window, locked the house up, got into his car and drove up into the pine forest of the serra.

  Chapter 21

  Tuesday, 18th July 1944, Monserrate Gardens, Serra de Sintra.

  Just before midnight Sutherland, Rose and Voss were in the Moorish pavilion sitting on their usual chairs, smoking, apart from Sutherland, and drinking from Rose’s steel tumblers.

  ‘Two nights in a row,’ said Rose. ‘I hope it’s worth it. It’s no small operation to secure this place.’

  Rose always had his difficulties.

  Voss was preparing his words, small words which could accumulate to mean a future for Germany and an end to destruction or the bleak possibility of life under the Russian knout.

  ‘Did you make your communiqué to Wolters?’ asked Voss.

  ‘You haven’t spoken to him?’ asked Sutherland.

  ‘Not since that fiasco outside the German Legation this morning, no.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose, ‘what was that all about?’

  ‘Incompetence on a large scale,’ said Voss, ‘rather than the usual small-scale idiocies, which are an everyday occurrence in the intelligence world. I assumed you thought my services dispensable. What do you think Wolters made of it? He actually said to me that somebody must have told them something.’

  Rose and Sutherland stared at the chequered floor. Voss remembered postal games with his father. Chess. Strong central pawn.

  ‘You said last night that there were two possibilities for Germany to achieve a conditional surrender.’

  ‘Did we?’ asked Rose. ‘I thought we said that we wouldn’t drop an atomic device on Dresden if you would give us the means to destroy your bomb programme or you disposed of your leadership. That’s not an offer of conditional surrender.’

  ‘Does that mean,’ said Voss, getting to his feet, ‘that even if we fulfil those conditions you will not open negotiations?’

  Silence, as they watched him move towards the door. There was the smell of sea and pine in the room, clean, as if it might have been possible for things to work out after all.

  ‘It would strengthen your position.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a “yes”.’

  ‘But it’s not a “no” either, Voss.’

  ‘I have information about a secret weapons programme. I have the locations of our research laboratories. I have very important intelligence about the German leadership. However, before I give you any of this I must have some assurances. Assurances which, after months of us talking and me giving the highest quality information, have still not been given.’

  ‘We’re not just British any more, Voss,’ said Sutherland. ‘We’re Allies.’

  ‘I know, but what do I have to show after months of giving you intelligence? No assurances, only an appalling threat.’

  ‘You told us about the V1 rockets,’ said Rose. ‘You were right. They came. They fell.’

  ‘With conventional explosives. I told you that, too.’

  ‘One of your…compatriots told us, months ago now, that Hitler would be assassinated,’ said Rose.

  ‘Still nothing,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘We told you about the U-boats,’ said Voss. ‘We pushed your false intelligence about the June landings in the Pas de Calais to the German leadership. Every day I receive reams of intelligence from your man sitting in his attic room in Lisbon, concocting his stories about British defences and aerodromes and God knows what rubbish, and I pass it on, as if it’s the genuine article, not a word out of place…’

  ‘Yes, yes, and yes,’ said Sutherland, ‘but, of that, what has been persuasive enough for us to break agreements with our Allies?’

  ‘Let’s be more specific,’ said Rose. ‘With an ally who has so far sacrificed millions of his countrymen to repel an invading army, which in turn has given us the opportunity to take the advantage on the western front. If we turn on the Russia
ns now I doubt there’ll be peace in Europe for a hundred years.’

  ‘You’ll see what’ll happen,’ said Voss. ‘You’ll end up with your friends, the Bolsheviks, on your doorstep and you know how it is with them, with Stalin. You can’t talk to the man. He’ll give you nothing except the cold wind from the steppes.’

  ‘He hasn’t failed us yet,’ said Rose. ‘It would be impossible for us to…’

  ‘Tell us, Voss,’ said Sutherland, scything through the world politics on which none of them would have the remotest effect. ‘By telling us, you at least give yourself a chance.’

  Voss had retaken his seat and found that he was now crouched over his knees as if racked by some terrible colic. He sat up and back, drew on his cigarette, drank his drink. That other world came to him, that distant planet less than fifty kilometres away where there had been certainties – a trembling ribcage in his hands and, beyond the bars, the railings, some kind of hope, the faintest possibility.

  ‘You all right, Voss, old man?’ asked Rose.

  Voss stood up again, another attempt to get away from this, to leave this dried husk, this slough of skin, the knotted nerves and stupid bones underneath.

  ‘Drop of whisky, perhaps, would that help?’ said Rose, leaning over with the flask, chugging the spirit in so that it splashed cold on Voss’s hand. Voss licked it, found the taste of her in the web between thumb and forefinger and gnawed at it.

  ‘You still there, old man?’

  ‘I look forward,’ said Voss, thinking she would be proud of him, ‘to seeing you kiss Stalin on his red, moustachioed lips.’

  ‘Now look here, Voss,’ said Rose, and Voss did, daring him, thinking where’s your sense of humour now, Richard verdammt Rose?

  Sutherland held up his hand between the two men.

  ‘We are Lisbon station, Voss. That is who and all we are. We communicate everything back to London. We are not able to make political decisions or offers. We can only do what we are told. London is very appreciative of your intelligence…’