The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  The responsibilities which Richard Rose wore like a summer suit hung off Sutherland’s shoulders like a yoke of full pails. The losses from various operations stacked up in his mind, like coffins in a carpenter’s yard. This time, though, he would not make the same mistake. He would pull Karl Voss, codename Childe Harold. He would get him out. The man had been right about everything and now, with the failure of the assassination attempt and what Anne had told them, he was in terrible danger, his identity as the military attaché in the German Legation held in place by paper walls. As soon as Rose came in he would announce the operation. Voss would be on his way to London and taking a debrief by evening.

  Rose announced himself with a roll of knuckles on the door at 9.00 a.m. He walked in to what he thought was an empty room, not seeing Sutherland still in his chair behind the door.

  ‘We’re pulling Voss out today, Richard,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘Good morning, old boy,’ said Rose, spinning on his heel. ‘Just came to talk to you about these decodes.’

  ‘After the failed coup he’s sitting in a house of cards…one breath from the wrong direction and the whole lot’ll come down around him.’

  ‘To be frank, I’m surprised he’s not here. He must have heard hours before we did…should have come knocking straight away, if he could.’

  Sutherland was unbalanced. For some reason he’d expected resistance from Rose. Rose always hated losing sources. The battles they’d had.

  ‘Checked his whereabouts, old man?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well, if he’s gone to work that should give us some idea of how he feels about the situation himself.’

  ‘We pull him, Richard. I won’t tolerate…’

  ‘Of course we do, but we can’t drive up Rua do Pau de Bandeira calling for him to come out, can we, old chap?’

  Old boy, old man, old chap…just call me Sutherland, he thought, raising himself out of his chair, his arm curiously tingling, his left foot dead.

  ‘Are you all right? Look damned pale to me.’

  ‘Been up all night,’ he said, trying to shake life back into his foot.

  ‘Steady on.’

  Sutherland was suddenly seeing the world at floor height, a landscape of carpet and furniture legs, with an atmosphere of dust motes and broken sunlight. He didn’t understand it and he couldn’t articulate his inability to comprehend. His mind ticked like a gramophone needle stuck in a groove.

  At 10.00 a.m. the ambassador assembled everyone in the German Legation and gave the same announcement that Wolters had made to Voss the night before. The opening of the speech that followed was about betrayal, treason and terrorism. Wolters, the disciplinarian at the headmaster’s side, surveyed the room with the eyes of a bird of prey, so that everyone glued their looks to the picture of the Führer above the dignitaries’ heads. The ambassador finally asked them to rejoice in the tragedy averted and led them into an exultant Heil Hitler! which rattled the windows. They went back to their offices like chastened schoolchildren after assembly. The world was no different as they streamed back to their desks, only now there was an undertow which was black and uncertain. An undertow that would be random in its search for a scapegoat.

  Voss sat at his desk in the legation, sweat at the back of his knees trickling down his calf muscles to his sock tops. He had woken at 5.00 a.m. on the sofa with his tie still up to his neck. He’d clawed it down to his chest, popped the stud at his throat, gulped in air that was at its coolest now but only for an hour. He’d stripped, gone to the bed and found the photograph face-up on the pillow. He put it on the shelf, laid down and found the faintest smell of her on his pillow, sunk his face into it and then looked up through the bars of the bedhead at the plaster beyond and those words came to him again:

  ‘Lazard and Wilshere knew you were a double. Lazard told me last night. Does that mean Wolters knows?’

  He’d showered, shaved and walked naked to the chest of drawers to find the top one open a crack and his brush in a different position. He turned it over and saw the single long black thread of hair, doubled back four times through his own.

  Now he was giving Hein and Kempf a solid good morning. Cheerful. All black thoughts banished to the black metal trunk with the white stencilling at the back of his mind. Now he thought of fields of buttercup. Shadows of clouds blown across the face of the sun moving over the flowers at summer’s speed. He briefed Kempf and Hein about the two people who were presumed by Lourenço to have been in the Quinta da Águia but were still unaccounted for. He sent them out to put the word on the streets and told them that all reports must come to him first and none of them must be written. This would be a verbal operation. Kempf and Hein looked at each other. There was no such thing.

  ‘These are direct orders from SS General Wolters,’ said Voss.

  ‘Nothing written?’

  ‘That’s what he said. He will make the written report to Berlin when the matter has been resolved.’

  Kempf and Hein left the legation and drifted into the cafés and dark bars, where the occupants took their time to develop after the fierce light of the street and who, on hearing the word from the legation’s men, downed their tumblers of wine and waded out into the crushing heat.

  Voss stayed in his office, smoked and took some small comfort from moving his thumb up and down, nose to hairline. It had to be that only Lazard and Wilshere had known that he was a double. That Wolters’ knowledge stopped at Anne as the informer positioned by Wilshere to send the British chasing after the wrong Beecham Lazard. How else could he be surviving this débâcle? Nobody knew that he’d been in the house. Lourenço had bought Anne’s story. He was surviving. The next hours were critical, but what would come back from the street? Had anyone seen him and Anne walking in the Bairro Alto? The cigarette trembled in his mouth. He drew too hard and burnt his lips.

  That morning, when the sweat of the city oozed out of their attics, their threadbare pensões, their stuffy rooms and dark bars they found the streets zipping with the new blood of fresh news. They sucked it in, this strange tribe, like cannibals who have to eat it to make something their own. They regurgitated it into the mouths of others, with new morsels added from their own inventive minds. The rumours grew and then multiplied when an ambulance reversed into the gateway of the British Embassy, stayed for five minutes and sped out, bell ringing, heading for the Hospital São José. The city ran a fever until lunchtime when those who’d made their small piece piled their olive pits, ate their fish and chewed their bread.

  Except Paco.

  Paco woke up at three in the afternoon, still dryretching. He told the boy to bring him a jug of lemon water with salt dissolved into it. He drank it, forcing it down his throat, crying at its sourness. It revived him instantly. He went downstairs on shaky legs and sat, like a patient, under a shade in the sunlit courtyard. He found a half-smoked cigarette in his pocket which, when the boy bought him a herbal tea, he lit for him. He spoke to the boy, and because he was the only one who ever spoke to the boy with consideration, the boy told him things, told him everything that had happened whilst he’d been sick. Paco sat back and knew that his time had come, knew that this was the moment the Englishman had spoken about. Now it was only a question of timing and money.

  The tea made him sweat and he thought he should go back upstairs and lie down, but then a Portuguese lowered himself on to the wooden chair opposite.

  ‘I didn’t see you this morning,’ said Rui.

  ‘I was sick.’

  ‘You missed it all.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You could have made your piece.’

  ‘There’s time.’

  ‘So you do know something,’ said Rui. ‘I knew if there was anybody who would know something it would be Paco.’

  ‘What do I know?’ asked Paco.

  The Portuguese sat back from the table to size up the state of Paco’s mind, see if there was anything written on his face. He offered Pac
o a cigarette, a generosity which in Paco’s experience was unusual.

  ‘You heard about the murders?’ asked the Portuguese.

  ‘I heard there were six deaths. I don’t know how many of them were murders.’

  ‘Three people died in Estoril.’

  ‘In the Quinta da Águia…where they had the robbery.’

  ‘The husband killed the American. The wife killed the husband. But who killed the wife?’

  ‘I thought it was an accident,’ said Paco.

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘Who got the loot?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Haven’t they asked the English girl who was staying at the house?’

  ‘She wasn’t there…off fucking her boyfriend…that Englishman you see down at the docks…what’s his name?’

  ‘Wallis,’ said Paco, screwing his fist on to his chin so that, for the first time, Rui knew with certainty that Paco held cards.

  ‘There’s money in this, Paco.’

  ‘From whom, and how much?’

  ‘The Germans, and that depends.’

  ‘Not the PVDE.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it interesting for them to know that the inglesa is lying?’ asked Paco, and Rui went very still. ‘That her lover is not Jim Wallis?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do they want to know?’

  ‘The identities of two people who left the Quinta da Águia on the night of the killings.’

  ‘I can tell them something from which they will be able to draw their own conclusions.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘But I will only talk to General Reinhardt Wolters…nobody else.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty thousand escudos.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  Paco closed his eyes, dismissing the notion. Rui nodded in sudden comprehension.

  ‘You think it’s all over?’ he asked. ‘Time to get out?’

  ‘For me,’ said Paco. ‘You belong here.’

  ‘Buy yourself some land, is that what you’re thinking?’

  Paco shrugged. Exactly that. Back to Galicia. No more selling water in the Alfama as he’d done in the years before the war. His own piece.

  The Portuguese told him not to move and ran down the steps and back up Rua das Janelas Verdes, leaping up the calçada steps towards the British Embassy and swinging left to the German Legation, arriving at the gate with his lungs in rags. He babbled to the gate man and the very correct woman in reception. He dripped on the floor by her desk as he watched the muscles stand out in the backs of her bare legs as she climbed the stairs. She was back in seconds and didn’t bother coming all the way down but beckoned him to follow her. He held his hat over his groin as he told Wolters the news, saw his eyebrows rise when he said the inglesa was lying, heard the explosion as he gave the price.

  ‘Fifty thousand to know why the Englishwoman was lying,’ roared Wolters. ‘How much are you taking?’

  ‘Nothing. I swear to you. Nothing.’

  ‘Bring him.’

  Voss had felt something different. There was something distinctive about urgency in forty degrees Centigrade. He opened his door a crack, saw the receptionist scuttle out of Wolters’ office and down the stairs. She came back up with Rui dripping with sweat. He waited. Rui came back out, rattled down the stairs. Voss crossed to the window, watched him swing on the gate post and sprint down Rua do Pau de Bandeira. As far as Voss knew, this was a man who never ran. He put an eye to the crack of the door. Wolters crossed the corridor to the safe room, returned with blocks of escudo notes. Expenses.

  Voss went back to the window and smoked hard, so hard that the nicotine closed the walls in around him. He waited for a lifetime, which in normal currency was only twenty minutes. The Portuguese came back down Rua Pau da Bandeira, trying to make Paco walk faster, but Paco, as Voss knew, had only one pace.

  As they came up the stairs, Voss leaned against the door jamb, half in the corridor. Rui knocked on Wolters’ door, holding Paco by the arm. Very valuable merchandise. Paco glanced over his shoulder at Voss and in one shameful lowering of his eyelids communicated everything Voss needed to know.

  Voss didn’t go back into his office. He walked straight down the stairs and out into the barbaric heat, forcing his legs down the driveway in casual strides. He slipped out of the gates with a nod to the gateman and as his foot hit the cobbles of the street he heard the first shout. There was no need to look back. He leaned into the thick air and ran.

  He sprinted down Rua do Sacramento à Lapa; the sun at his back needled straight through his jacket and shirt. Sweat popped fatly in his hair. He heard the boots on the cobbles behind him, put his head down, lifted his knees and stamped his feet harder into the pavement. A tram thudded across the entrance to the street, heading downhill towards the British Embassy. He hit the corner fast, coming out into the street and swinging wide and right in behind the tram. He ran between the silver rails, gaining on the tram as its brakes bit and the wheels screeched. The Union Jack appeared blue/red/white high in the corner of his eye. Then he saw the group who’d come out of the legation and run the other way, down Rua Pau da Bandeira, up Rua do Prior and were aiming to cut him off at the embassy gates, which they could because no gateman alive would understand such urgency in this heat. He closed on the tram, where two barefoot boys were hanging off the back, looking at the foreigner in amazement. Voss lashed out at the rail, once, twice, caught it. His feet flailed wildly until they found the ledge. He pressed his streaming face to the glass, a woman inside stepped back, nudged her companion, who turned and looked affronted. Voss worked his way round to the blind side of the tram and it wasn’t until it slowed into the left-hand bend that he heard the group behind him roaring at the other pursuers to change direction. The tram picked up speed downhill. One of the runners fell over himself and brought down others in his wake, a few continued down the hill but quickly gave up.

  Cardew told Anne he’d bring the car around to the front of the Shell office building. He was looking after her, she knew it, keeping her close. The news of Sutherland’s collapse had shaken them both, but the feeling of Rose’s new hands on the helm had been immediate. She was on the leash now, not exactly mistrusted but a variable that Rose did not like having in his calculations. She went into the ladies powder room and left, via the back of the building, and headed straight for Estrela and the basilica. She let herself into Voss’s apartment, saw the photograph back on its shelf, inspected the brush to find her strand of hair missing. She sat on the back of the sofa, drew her dress up to her thighs to keep cool and smoked out of the window while looking down into the square between the gardens and the church. It was a few minutes past five o’clock.

  The tram came to a halt on Calçada Ribeiro Santos just on the other side of Avenida 24 Julho from Santos station and Voss leapt off and on to the pavement. The liners and cargo ships in the docks beyond seemed, at first, an interesting place to lose himself, stow away even, but the risk of being picked up by the port police and taken to the PVDE was too high. He preferred the idea of getting into the maze of streets around the Alfama and disappearing until nightfall, when he could make contact with Sutherland.

  The tram seemed to be stationary for a long time and Voss looked around for cabs, which were rare now in this part of Lisbon with the fuel shortages. His shirt had become a second sodden skin under his suit. He emptied the jacket pockets into his trousers, keeping his eye on the road back up to Lapa from where he was expecting his pursuers. He tried to remember if there’d been any legation cars around. There’d been none in the driveway. At that moment the tram slowly pulled away again just as he heard the sound of a set of tyres squealing and thudding over hot cobbles. Voss hopped on to the ledge at the rear doorway of the tram, pressed himself against the folding door. A black legation Citröen, two chevrons on its grille, the windscreen crowded with faces, drove down Calçada Ribeiro Santos with two wheels up on the pavement.

>   The tram was painfully slow as it moved away from Santos, as if the electricity in the overhead cables was suddenly draining away into the Tagus. The legation Citroën overtook, with two men leaning out of the windows, straining to see into the tram. Voss crouched. The tram’s speed increased suddenly as it moved out of Madragoa into the Bairro Alto. If he could stay with this tram until Cais do Sodré he knew he could get a cab from there into the old medina of the Alfama district and they’d never find him in there, with all the alleys and staircases, the tascas and shops, the crowds and chaos of the early evening.

  The Citroën pulled up and parked across the tramlines in the Rua da Boa Vista – the bonnet was up but nobody was looking in the engine. A man stood forward from the car with his hand up to stop the tram. Voss worked his way around to the back and came off at a run and kept his momentum up some calçada steps. He saw Kempf’s big fist reach out, the finger pointing, and heard the crack of leather soles on cobbles as three men gave chase. He wasn’t worried about Kempf – heavy, and his system riddled with pox, he wasn’t going to last in this terrain and heat – but the young men behind him were fit and fired up with Wolters’ zeal. Voss cut through a small largo, sprinted up travessas, and got into his stride down the Rua do Poço dos Negros. The tram he wanted was just ahead of him, one that would take him through the Baixa and up into the Alfama. He felt oddly unpursued. There was no sound of running behind him. He glanced back at an empty street and he suddenly thought that he was going to get there, that he’d lost them. He tore off his jacket and hurled it into an open doorway and ran, taking big strides, feeling strong, feeling elated. He put his head back and stared up at the light sky above the canyon of the narrow street and his running thoughts suddenly met stationary ones. His knees juddered as he came to a halt. He looked at his watch. It was 5.15 p.m. He’d stopped between the silver threads of the tram tracks. He looked back down the empty street, dropped his hands to his knees, hung his head and knew that he was lost.