The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Get the door key,’ said Wilshere, grim as winter.

  Anne crawled over to Lazard, searched his pockets, the body now in some terrible state of spasm as life clung on, or struggled away.

  ‘Open the door,’ said Wilshere. ‘We’re going to finish this all now.’

  He grabbed Anne’s wrist and dragged her past the figurines, amor é cego, across the hall and up the wooden stairs, the panelled wall, Anne hardly able to keep her feet, until he suddenly stopped.

  Mafalda stood at the top of the stairs in her nightdress. She had a leather cartridge belt slung over her shoulder and a twelve-bore shotgun in her hands. After the shot and what she’d heard coming up through the fireplace, she’d known who was going to be next. Anne took one look at her and decided that nothing was up for discussion. She twisted her wrist out of Wilshere’s grip, hurled herself over the bannister into the hall, as Mafalda pulled both triggers. Wilshere took the double quantities of shot in the chest. It ripped him open, tore everything out. Everything that had ever troubled him.

  Mafalda didn’t pause. She broke the gun, the spent cartridges popped out. She reloaded, turned her shoulder and put both barrels into the ceiling. The massive wrought-iron chandelier, fixed to the ceiling by a metal plate, parted from the splintered wood. A quarter of a ton of chandelier headed for the floor. Anne scrabbled across the chequered squares. The chandelier crashed into the tiled floor, sending out shrapnel of black and white chippings. Mafalda reloaded, walked down the stairs, calm, professional, work to be done. Anne hobbled down the corridor to the french windows, which she now saw were shut. Had Lazard locked them? The seconds it would take to try might be vital. Mafalda skirted the fallen chandelier, saw Anne sidestep into the drawing room, slowed down, checked her weapon, fingered the triggers, proceeded.

  Chapter 23

  Wednesday, 19th July 1944, Monserrate Gardens, Serra de Sintra, near Lisbon.

  Voss sat alone in the dark palace. Rose and Sutherland had run for their cars and headed back into Lisbon. The agent from the colonnade came in, lowered the flame on the lamp and picked it up. He waited while Voss applied his fingertips to his temples, trying to force in the energy to think.

  After a minute of the agent swinging the lamp and watching the effect on their shadows, Voss stood. The agent led him up through the trees to his car. Voss stared at the steering wheel, the agent looked in on him.

  ‘You have to put the key in the ignition, and turn it, sir,’ said the agent. ‘That way the motor starts. Good night, sir.’

  Voss pulled out and drove back to Sintra, past the palace of Seteais, blue and silent in the moonlight. He took the high road above Sintra town and drove through the unlit village of São Pedro heading south to Estoril. Check Wilshere first, he thought, there was a chance that Lazard would go there if they were in this together, and check Anne, too. Then go back to Lisbon.

  In the open country between the serra and the coast he pulled off the road under some pines trees. Another thought: whatever Lazard was doing had been a carefully planned operation; Voss would represent a threat to that plan. He went to the boot and lifted out the tool box. From the cloth bag he removed the Walther PPK, well-oiled and loaded. He checked it, laid it on the passenger seat and drove into Estoril from the north, heading down to the sea and the casino square.

  He walked up the garden, the night air full of barking dogs that had been set off by Wilshere’s shot. He heard Mafalda put both barrels into Wilshere. He was running by the time the next two barrels were emptied into the ceiling. He hit the lawn at a sprint and slowed, checking the windows of the house. Light in the study only, then light in the drawing room and Mafalda holding the twelve bore with the cartridge belt still over her shoulder, sweeping the room like a hunter in a copse.

  He ducked, ran across the lawn and hit the wall close to the last window. Mafalda had got up on a coffee table and was looking amongst the furniture.

  ‘Judy,’ she said in a little voice, coaxing a kitten. ‘Judy.’

  Now he could see Anne hiding behind the sofa at the far end of the room, crouched with a dark stain around the neck and shoulders of her dress. He ran to the back terrace, eased open the doors of the french windows and stood in the doorway of the sitting room. Mafalda had her back to him. He raised the Walther PPK.

  ‘Put the gun down, Dona Mafalda.’

  Mafalda turned slowly, the twelve bore at her hip.

  ‘Put it down, slowly,’ said Voss, checking her face.

  He stepped behind the corridor wall as the shot crashed through the open doorway and ravaged the plaster beyond. Voss stepped back into the frame as a large vase hurled from the far end of the room shattered on the edge of the table on which Mafalda was standing. She lost her balance, fell, the gun slipped off her hip, the stock thudded into the floor. The blast ripped into her nightdress, rolled her off the table – a crack as she hit the floor. Voss was on her in a second, pulled open the shredded nightdress, her left breast gone, the blood – thick, arterial, important – flooded into her ragged lungs, drained out.

  Anne crashed across the room. Voss tucked his gun into his waistband. Outside, the ringing bell of a police car started up in the distance. Anne, oddly calm, seeing everything slowly now, walked quickly back into the study. She opened Lazard’s briefcase, slapped the envelope on top of the velvet bag of high-quality gems, scraped the contents of the safe into it, which included a few white paper sachets of other diamonds and some documents, shut the briefcase and left the safe open with the gold bars still in it. Headlights flashed through the front door into the hall. She and Voss ran out on to the back terrace and on through the hedge to the perimeter wall at the back of the property. Over the wall they walked briskly downhill and back towards the casino, which they avoided because a crowd had gathered outside. The town dogs were still barking and howling into the night.

  They drove down the Marginal without exchanging a word. Voss hung on to the wheel as if it was a cliff face, Anne pulled her heels up on to the seat, jammed herself into a corner and hugged her knees, shaking. Lisbon was fogbound and strangely cool. They went to Estrela, parked and walked up to the apartment. He ran a bath, lit cigarettes, poured out some harsh bagaço he kept in the kitchen. He took her into the bathroom, stripped off her dress and put it in the basin to soak. He bathed her as he would a child and towelled her dry. He put her into bed, where she cried for an hour; the images of the burning woman, the innocent burning woman with love and petrol in her throat in the furnace car, refused to go out. He washed her dress, hung it up by the window. He stripped, got into bed behind her, pulled her back to his chest. They stared into the dark corner of the room. She told him everything that had happened.

  Dawn came early with a faint mist by the window and woke them up out of short, deep sleep and back into hard fact. Her forehead was pressed against his back, her arm over his chest. His hand was resting on her hip. She knew he was awake, could hear his brain ticking.

  ‘Lazard and Wilshere knew you were a double,’ she said, the words reverberating up his spine. ‘Lazard told me last night. Does that mean Wolters knows?’

  He didn’t reply but brushed his thumb over her hip bone, back and forward. He was staring at the briefcase under the table. He imagined Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg going into the Wolfsschanze situation room (or would it be in the new bunker, whose five-metre thick walls he’d never seen), positioning his briefcase, being called out to the telephone, the explosion and then the end of all this and a return to real life – which, of course, would not be possible, to go back, to return. There was only one direction in this life and that was relentlessly forward, away from old states of comparative innocence and on to new states, the images collecting in the brain to be shown in one horrific flash should you be unfortunate enough to drown.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ she asked. ‘You can’t go back.’

  ‘Back?’ he asked, momentarily confused.

  ‘To the legation,’ she said. ‘They know yo
u’re a double.’

  ‘I have no choice,’ he said. ‘I have to go back.’

  ‘If you come with me now to the embassy…’

  ‘I can’t. I have my duty.’

  ‘What duty?’

  ‘With any luck, tomorrow will be the beginning of the end and I have to be there for it. I have my part to play.’

  ‘Take the case,’ she said. ‘It’s got everything in it…the diamonds…the envelope with the plans, everything you need to survive.’

  ‘I can’t take the case. I can’t do that. If Wolters gets those plans, everything I’ve worked for will have been for nothing.’

  ‘Then take the case and leave me the envelope. At least you’ll salvage the diamonds.’

  ‘If I take the case I place myself at the scene. They will know I was at the house. There are three dead bodies there including Lazard, who was supposedly brokering a deal for us. It will be difficult.’

  ‘You invent something. If you go back empty-handed I don’t know how you’ll be able to survive. You’ll have nothing to bargain with. Nothing that proves you’re not a double.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference. My only chance to hold Wolters off, if he knows I’m a double, would be if I gave the briefcase to him complete and saved his intelligence coup from disaster. I won’t do that.’

  He got up, made coffee which they drank without sugar because he hadn’t picked up his ration. They shared a dry biscuit. It felt like the spare meal of a condemned man who no longer had an appetite for life. Voss looked at his watch and then out of the window.

  ‘The sun will burn this off in no time.’

  ‘When do I see you?’ she said, suddenly made desperate by his insouciance.

  ‘That will be difficult. You’re going to be in trouble, too. There’ll be a lot of explaining. I’ll be here in the evenings, if you can come…come, but not tomorrow. I will be here at five thirty on Friday. If something happens…if I’m not here…call this number and ask for Le Père Goriot. He’ll tell you.’

  He gave her a number and the lines of code. She didn’t want to hear them. They made her feel dark, cavernous. He gave her keys to his apartment. They kissed, a brushing of the lips, and he handed her the briefcase. He followed her out of the room, watched her go down the stairs, looking up at him as she went, until her face disappeared in the dark well.

  He went to the window and waited for her. She walked up the short hill behind the basilica and at the top she turned and waved, one straight arm salute, which he returned.

  She went straight to work and a one-hour debrief with Cardew, who pushed her to tell him everything not just about the débâcle in the Wilsheres’ house but about Voss as well. Once Wallis had lost her, Rose and Sutherland had been on to him, and now he wanted to give them as full a picture as possible about her movements. He was annoyed.

  At 9.30 a.m. she was sitting in the room of the safe house in Rua de Madres in Madragoa. Rose and Sutherland were there and two Americans, OSS men from the American consulate.

  The men took up their positions around the room, Sutherland and Rose in the chairs, the Americans standing by the walls. No explanation was given for the Americans’ presence.

  They asked for her story, the same story she’d given Cardew, from the moment she left the Shell building the previous afternoon. It meant she had to start where she didn’t want to – with Karl Voss. Sutherland was still annoyed after receiving Cardew’s report. Rose was prurient. The Americans were baffled.

  ‘How long were you with him?’ asked Sutherland.

  ‘Five hours or so.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Part of the time in his apartment but we went for a walk in the Bairro Alto, too. Then he drove me back to Estoril.’

  ‘How long were you in the apartment?’

  ‘Two to three hours.’

  Silence while the Americans’ boredom settled. This was not why they were here.

  ‘Did you have…relations?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, bold now, and one of the Americans raised his eyebrows, smirked, straightened his tie. ‘We are lovers, sir,’ she added.

  ‘Was that all it was?’ asked Sutherland.

  ‘What else could it have been, sir?’ asked Anne.

  They moved on to Estoril. They went through what had happened in Wilshere’s house four or five times until the Americans were satisfied and got to their feet.

  ‘Do you mind?’ asked one of them to no one in particular.

  He opened the briefcase, removed the envelope, looked it over and tapped it on his fingernail.

  ‘Pity,’ he said, and the two Americans left the room.

  Rose took the empty chair, played a quick piece up and down the arms, not chopsticks, more Mozart. It annoyed Sutherland.

  ‘Pity?’ asked Anne.

  ‘The OSS were running an operation without telling us,’ said Sutherland, more drained than ever before. ‘When I heard Lazard wasn’t on the Dakar flight I contacted them. By then they had permission to talk to us about Hal and Mary Couples. They asked what you were doing and I told them that you were an observer. Their only comment was that you should “maintain that status”.’

  ‘And what were the Couples doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Hal Couples worked for Ozalid. He was spying on military installations while selling them Ozalid machines. The OSS turned him and he cleaned out the American IG stable for them. This was his last job. They put one of their agents with him and sent him to Lisbon with a set of plans. I think I told you that Bohr was being debriefed by the Americans about the German atomic programme. He had with him a sketch that Heisenberg had given him the year before. He thought it was an atomic bomb. The American scientists saw something different – not a bomb but an atomic pile…something that could make fissionable material for use in a bomb in quantity.’

  ‘Wilshere called it the core to the atomic apple.’

  ‘Artistic mind, that Wilshere,’ said Rose.

  ‘The Americans have been worried by the quality of the physics coming out of Germany in the last five years. After debriefing Bohr they were concerned about Heisenberg’s loyalties. Was it to physics or the Führer? They decided that, although he might not be a fanatical Nazi, he was sufficiently drawn to the excitement of progress that he might be developing a bomb. With the German rocket capability this became a somewhat worrying prospect.’

  ‘So if the Couples were working for the OSS, what did they have for sale?’

  ‘Some cleverly constructed plans that would have built a very dangerous atomic pile. The intelligence the Americans would get back after the documents were received would have given them a clear indication of how close the Germans were to including unconventional explosives in their rockets.’

  ‘You mean Karl Voss could have taken the case, he could have given General Wolters the envelope, that was what the Americans wanted, that would have been the perfect solution?’

  Sutherland and Rose said nothing. Anne’s eyes filled with tears which rolled down her face, bit into the corners of her mouth and dripped off her jaw on to her still damp dress, silent as soft rain off the eaves.

  Voss had been right. By the time he arrived at the legation the sun had burnt off the mist and the temperature was already in the high twenties centigrade. He called Dakar airport and asked them for a report on the Rio flight. It still hadn’t taken off. He went straight in to see Wolters with this diversionary piece of information and was astonished to find him cheerful and expansive.

  ‘So maybe it will be a little cooler today, Voss,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know about that, sir,’ he said. ‘Just to let you know, sir, the Dakar/Rio flight still hasn’t taken off.’

  ‘Thank you, Voss, I had that checked. I hope that wasn’t a report you received.’

  ‘No, sir, I cleared all our men away from the airport.’

  ‘Keep it that way.’

  Voss was dismissed. He went to his office light on his feet again, threw h
imself into his chair. Happy.

  ‘You in love, sir?’ asked Kempf.

  Voss whipped round, hadn’t seen him there in the corner of the room, leaning up against the window.

  ‘Just had a good night’s sleep, that’s all, Kempf. First cool night in weeks. You?’

  ‘What, sir? Sleeping well?’

  ‘Or in love?’

  ‘Not that sort of love, sir. Not the sort that makes you happy.’

  ‘What sort, Kempf?’

  ‘The sort that makes the first piss of the morning absolute agony, sir. Think I’ve got myself a dose.’

  ‘Take the morning off, Kempf.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Voss lit a cigarette, stretched his feet out and saw the cello of Anne’s body at the window and the thick black sash of her hair over one shoulder. The phone rang. He listened, hung up and left the legation, buying his usual newspaper as he went.

  He walked down to the Pensão Rocha with nothing on his mind apart from the blue Tagus in front of him and ships easing past, visible though the gaps in the buildings heading for the Atlantic.

  He took his usual table in the courtyard, laid the newspaper in front of him, saw a small item at the foot of the front page. The PVDE announced that a communist cell had been captured in a safe house in Rua da Arrábida. The same place where Mesnel had been visiting and he’d sent Paco to check. Paco, thought Voss. You have to be careful of Paco. He has only one loyalty – money. A few minutes later Rui lowered himself into the chair opposite.