The Company of Strangers (26 page)

‘She knows nothing. She wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘She said she was there. She said she had breakfast with Wilshere in the morning and went to work, but the reality…I don’t know…foreigners.’

‘Foreigners?’

‘She was off with her English boyfriend somewhere in Lisbon…These women…she only arrived here on Saturday. I should have been born…’

Lourenço trailed off. Voss survived the jolt, which had started out as fear, turned into a wild, irrational jealousy
and finished as happiness. He lost Lourenço’s words as he stared across the street at the sun blinding the windows of the building opposite.

Wolters listened to Voss’s report of the interview with Lourenço in hard silence, his eyes blinking once a minute as if that was part of the process of taking in the disaster. A million dollars lost, the most valuable supplier of industrial diamonds dead, the plans, which would have taken them a step nearer to a secret weapon, well, where were they? Did they ever exist?

‘What do we know about this?’ asked Wolters, the process of shifting blame already starting in his head.

‘What we know is useless to us,’ said Voss, relishing this moment, wanting to be able to share it with someone – this was what happened when the SS took over Abwehr intelligence operations.

‘But we do know something?’ he asked, clutching.

‘We know that someone calling himself Beecham Lazard boarded the Lisbon/Dakar flight. According to Immigration in Dakar he arrived safely but nobody of that name was on the Dakar/Rio flight which has now taken off…’

‘Yes, yes…I know these things.’

Voss studied him, looking for confirmation of his theory, but Wolters was expressionless. There was nothing in his face to show whether he knew what Lazard had been doing, whether this had been part of the game – a bluff to the SIS and the OSS to focus their attention outside Portugal. Whatever. It had gone wrong.

‘
I
will write the report of this matter,’ said Wolters. ‘
I
will send the report personally to Berlin. Is that understood?’

Voss waited until evening to see whether a report came out of Wolters’ office. Only Wolters himself came out and that was to leave the legation for a cocktail party at the Hotel Aviz and then dinner at the Negresco afterwards.

Voss left the building at 7.00 p.m. and went back to his apartment where he knelt at the window smoking, drinking his preferred rubbing alcohol and watching the square, waiting, waiting for tomorrow to finally arrive.

Because he never took cabs it had been a long walk for Paco to the small park above the Santa Clara market in the Alfama district. He had been told that the information he was going to be given would certainly be worth the very long walk from Lapa across the city. He sat under the trees with a view over the church of Santa Engrácia, wondering whether this was a dangerous place to be. Behind him, watching him, was someone else who was also reflecting on the same building, which was still incomplete after 262 years’ work. Paco sat back and tried to enjoy the warm night air of the empty park and watched the lights of small craft inching their way across the Tagus which was as big as a small sea at this point.

The voice that came to Paco from behind him was not Portuguese. He had heard this kind of voice before. It was a voice incapable of relaxing. It was an English voice and only capable of speaking barely comprehensible Portuguese. The park was so dark that even when he turned round he couldn’t see who was speaking. He didn’t like this voice. Paco didn’t
like
anybody. But he especially didn’t like this voice because it belonged to someone who wouldn’t make themselves known, the type who would always be on the edge of light, just in the shadows.

‘Ah yes, Paco. Beautiful up here, isn’t it? Especially at night. Very quiet. Hardly aware of the city.’

Paco didn’t reply. These were just some of the things that Englishmen said.

‘I have something for you, Paco. A piece of information. Something that you could use at the right moment. I can’t tell you when that moment will be. It might be tomorrow
or the next day. You will listen and watch as you always do and you will decide the correct moment for you to go with this piece of information to the man who will pay you well.’

‘Who is the man who will pay me well?’

‘This isn’t anything that should go to the PVDE.’

‘
They
do not pay me well.’

‘Then that is good,’ said the English voice. ‘The man who will pay you well is SS General Reinhardt Wolters of the German Legation.’

‘He will never see me. Why should such a man want to see Paco Gomez?’

‘There is no doubt that he will want to see you with this piece of information.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You will tell him that last night you saw his military attaché, Captain Karl Voss…you do know who I mean, don’t you, Paco?’

‘Certainly.’

‘You will tell him you saw Captain Karl Voss with the English girl…’

‘The English girl who works for Shell, who lives in the house of Senhor Wilshere?’

‘Yes, that girl. You will tell him that you saw them walking together in the Bairro Alto last night,’ said the English voice, ‘and that they are lovers. That is all.’

Thursday, 20th July 1944, PVDE Headquarters, Rua António Maria Cardoso, Lisbon.

Anne was released in the morning at 9.00 a.m. She was met by Cardew who took her straight off to his home in Carcavelos, where she showered and changed into some clothes borrowed from his wife. Anne insisted on going into work. She needed to be occupied, she said. She didn’t say that she needed to be in Lisbon with a chance of seeing Voss.

They drove back into Lisbon. She typed for the rest of the morning and then began translating articles on physics from the
Naturwissenschafen
journal. She looked at the clock constantly, so frequently that the hands stopped moving.

Voss sat in his office looking at the clock giving Berlin time which, because of the Führer’s insistence that all parts of the Third Reich should operate on German time, meant that he was also looking at Rastenburg time,
Wolfsschanze
time. It was midday and in a matter of minutes Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg would be positioning his briefcase, maybe he had already positioned his briefcase and was waiting to be called to the telephone, praying to be called to the telephone in the
Wolfsschanze
signals room. Voss tried the bottom drawer of his desk, which was locked. It contained the Walther PPK given to him by the Free Poles colonel which he’d brought into the building
that morning and was going to be used to take control of the German Legation.

‘You all right, sir?’ asked Kempf.

‘Yes, yes, just stretching my back, Kempf,’ said Voss. ‘You better?’

‘Not better exactly, sir.’

‘You should stick to English nannies, Kempf.’

‘Thank you for the advice, sir. I’ll try to remember that the next time I’m drunk, down at the Santos docks surrounded by sailors,’ said Kempf. ‘I’ll put out the call for an English nanny…’

‘Point taken, Kempf.’

‘If you’re trying to get into that drawer, sir, I’d…’

‘No, no, Kempf. Just stretching.’

‘I was going to say, a good kick will sort it out. I know that desk.’

‘No, no, no, Kempf. It’s just a way of bracing myself, that’s all. Let’s go through the mail. You have brought the mail with you?’

Kempf stalled.

‘Go and get the mail, Kempf.’

Voss sat back, his whole body in a lather.

Paco lay on his bed curled in a tight ball, with his kneecaps pressed into his eye sockets, tears leaking out at the excruciating pain in his stomach. After the Englishman had given him his intelligence gift he had also pushed a hundred-escudo note into his pocket and with this Paco had gone back through the Alfama district where he’d stopped and eaten his first meal of the day. He had been stupid to choose the pork. Pork in this heat…and you never knew how long they’d kept it there, rotting in their kitchens, these filthy people. As soon as he’d tasted that sharpness he should have stopped. It was the sharpness of vinegar which they used to disguise the age of the meat. He’d spent
the whole night crouched over the stinking toilet, vomiting between his knees, while his innards streamed out of his backside. When he was empty, when he was no more than a dry, flattened bladder, he’d crawled to his room and dry-retched until dawn, while a fever wrung out the little moisture left in him, so that the yellowing bedsheets were soaked through. The boy had come and made him drink water and the wire spring of his abdomen had contracted, doubled him over so that his vertebrae stuck out of his back under his paper-thin skin. Only at midday did his stomach release him, let him stretch out and fall into a prickly sleep, from which he would jolt awake at the strange and ghastly images that surfaced in his mind.

At lunchtime Anne went to the Estrela Gardens, sat on a bench and watched people, checking if she was being followed. She went into the basilica and out again and up the wooden stairs to Voss’s apartment. She let herself in, he wasn’t there. She wandered about the rooms, tested the sofa, sat on his bed and looked at his family photograph, the three men in it. The father and Julius looked alike, broad, strong men with dark hair and eyebrows, handsome, sporty. They were in uniform. Voss was wearing a suit and a student scarf. He had the same fair looks as his mother and, it seemed to her, the same lightcoloured eyes and vulnerable bone structure. She held the image of the mother up to her eye to see if any of that sadness she must have felt, that disappointment at not being the love of her husband’s life, was evident. It wasn’t, she looked happy.

She put the photograph down on the bed, went to the dresser, rummaged amongst his clothes in the drawers and found a small package of letters tied with ribbon. She read the letters, the need for a sense of his presence was too strong for her to consider privacy. The letters were in date
order and most of them consisted of a few lines from his father finishing with a chess move. She flipped through them in a state of vague contentment until she reached Julius’s letter, dated New Year’s Day 1943. She found herself crying, half blind with tears, not seeing the deserving end of an invading army but the unfolding of a family tragedy – a father’s desperation, a brother presenting Julius with his terrible choice and then the final letter from the unknown lieutenant. She retied the ribbon, tucked the letters back in the drawer and took some of his hairs out of his brush and comb. She went to the bathroom even hungrier for him now and fingered his shaving gear, thumbed the badger brush, sniffed the razor to see if there was something of him on it. Nothing. She had to go, yet she wanted to leave something of herself for him but nothing legible, or personal so that it could be traced back to her. She went to the dresser, plucked a hair from her own head and wove it amongst the bristles and hairs in the brush.

Voss watched the Berlin clock move around to 5.00 p.m. The hour at which it would be certain that Stauffenberg would be back in Berlin after the three-hour flight from Rastenburg. Still nothing. Voss forced himself to stay still, sitting at his desk he went through papers again and again, reading nothing, taking in nothing, being nothing.

Wolters had kept his secretary working late and now she was leaving the building, her heels clopping on the tiled hall, skipping down the stone steps to the driveway and into the hot evening of the city. Voss sat back in his chair, elbow up on the arm, thumb supporting his chin, forefinger sweeping over his lips back and forth, eyes blinking once a minute in the thickening silence. Wolters stirred out of his office. Voss tracked the creaking leather of the man’s shoes until they reached his door. The handle turned.

‘Ah, Voss,’ said Wolters, ‘working late?’

‘Thinking late, sir.’

‘Would you care to join me for a drink? I’ve just taken delivery of some rather fine cognac.’

Voss followed him back to his office where Wolters laid out the glasses and poured the brandy.

‘What were you thinking about, Voss?’

Lines sprinted through Voss’s mind, none of them usable. Wolters’ lips hovered over the rim of his glass, waiting. Alternatives did not immediately present themselves to Voss. His head was too full of what should be happening now in Berlin.

‘It was nothing important,’ he said.

‘Tell me.’

‘I was wondering why Mesnel was armed. Had I been running him, I would not have used him for assassination work. That was all.’

Wolters’ face darkened. He stuck two fingers into his collar, pulled at it to let some of the blood drain into his body. Voss raised his glass. They drank. The alcohol smoothed Wolters out. He lit a cigar.

‘I have been thinking about something, too,’ said Wolters. ‘I have spoken to Captain Lourenço myself now. It seems that he is under the impression that there were two people who left Quinta da Águia alive on that Tuesday night.’

‘Why two people?’

‘The situation in the drawing room where they found the body of Dona Mafalda.’

‘What was that?’

‘A vase had been thrown the length of the room. The vase was one of a pair that belonged on the mantelpiece.’

‘Yes.’

‘And there was evidence of shot having peppered the wall of the corridor beyond the living-room door,’ said
Wolters. ‘Captain Lourenço thinks that Dona Mafalda was shooting at someone in the doorway and that another person, at the far end of the room, either wanted to distract her or hit her with the vase. The vase smashed, startling Dona Mafalda, who lost her footing and accidentally shot herself as she fell. Captain Lourenço doesn’t think that the person who was shot at in the doorway could be the same as the one who threw the vase from the other end of the room, which is why he now thinks that there are two people unaccounted for. I have been thinking, Captain Voss…’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I have been thinking that I would very much like to talk to those two people and that what they took from the Quinta da Águia that night could be very interesting to us.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want you to use your considerable intelligence resources to find those two people.’

The phone rang, jolting the two men in the smokelayered stillness. Wolters picked up the phone and Voss heard the urgent voice of the switchboard operator, a corporal in the telegraph room. Von Ribbentrop, the Reichsminister for Foreign Affairs, was on the line. Wolters checked his watch, just after 8.00 p.m. He asked Voss to leave the office for a moment, take his glass. Voss paced the corridor for some minutes and then collapsed behind his desk, suddenly exhausted, nerves shot, knowing that von Ribbentrop calling Lisbon at this hour was not a good sign. He gulped the brandy, which slipped down like burning silk. He lit a cigarette, watched his trembling fingers until they stilled, then sat back and smoked. Did they delay again? But von Ribbentrop calling on the evening of such a day. They must have failed. The gun. He must get the gun out of the building. If a gun is found in his desk he
will be finished. Now they will be looking at everyone, especially the ex-Abwehr men.

Wolters left his office, his shoes smacked down the corridor in triumphant strides. He flung open the door. Voss found himself looking up, hunched over his cigarette like a prisoner in his cell.

‘A attempt was made on the Führer’s life this afternoon,’ Wolters announced, excitedly. ‘A bomb was placed in the situation room in the
Wolfsschanze.
It exploded right underneath the Führer’s feet but…it must be a sign, it must be some sort of a turning point…he has only been lightly wounded. An incredible thing. The Reichsminister said that, had they been in the new bunker, nobody would have survived…as it was, they were in Reichsminister Speer’s blockhouse, the bomb blew out the sides, releasing the blast, eleven people were injured, four of them seriously. Reichsminister von Ribbentrop is uncertain but he thinks that Colonel Brandt and General Schmundt have not survived their injuries. The Führer has a slight concussion, burst eardrums, damage to his elbow and splinters from the table have been blown into his legs, but he has assured everyone that he will be back at work tomorrow. The coup has been defeated. The terrorists are being rounded up in Berlin as we speak. It is a great day for the Führer, a great day for the Third Reich, a terrible day for our enemies and a great day for us, Captain Voss.
Heil Hitler.
’

Wolters clicked his heels and shot his arm out. Voss stood and responded in kind. They went back to Wolters’ study, replenished their glasses and toasted the survival of the right, the victory of justice, the defeat of terrorism, death to the conspirators and many more until the bottle was finished and Voss reeled out of the office drunk, desperate and clammy with fear. He went sweating back to his desk, removed the gun from its drawer and jammed it
down his trousers where it stuck into his groin, but he was numb to pain. He picked up his briefcase, crammed his head into his hat and left the building in the tunnel of his own mind. His eyes, pricked by the heat, were glassy as an old man’s and as he walked from Lapa to Estrela he stumbled over the
calçada
of the pavements and cobbled streets, his cheeks wet with tears – drained from rejoicing with Wolters, released from the tension of the past weeks and bleak with his vision of the future.

At the top of the Rua de São Domingos à Lapa he looked back down the hill at the limp Union Jack outside the British Embassy. A tram rumbled past, people stared out at him, looking without seeing, two boys hanging off the back yelled, seemed to be beckoning him. Anne’s words spoken into his back that morning came to him and he took two steps down the hill, saw himself knocking on the British Embassy door, his welcome into the sanctuary and then a terrible settling. The emptiness of defeat, the end of his cause while others, unbent by setbacks, endangered by his resignation, continued their struggle, his struggle.

He crossed the street, turned right down Rua de Buenos Aires, which was hot and stinking with the remains of a dead dog in the gutter. He dithered over the carcass, the bared teeth in the snout fierce in death, the intestines strewn and flattened across the road. He bared his own teeth at the thought of Wolters swaggering away from his costly intelligence fiasco into a new age of anti-conspiracy zeal, a place where his kind could shine, deflecting all critical scrutiny. Voss walked on at pace towards the back of the basilica, the brandy, hot and acidic, rising in his gullet.

Anne lay in bed in Cardew’s house listening to the excited whispered chatter of his daughters next door. Her empty stomach had been unable to accept any dinner, she’d
redesigned the landscape of her plate consuming nothing, as Dona Mafalda used to do. The ghastly images marched across her unclosed eyes of the innocent Judy Laverne, tearing down into the ravine in a cage of flame, Wilshere’s clawed fingers trying to prohibit entry of the worst possible truth into his mind, Lazard trampling the tortured Wilshere, Lazard’s torn throat after the ear-splitting blast from the gun from the safe, Wilshere’s ruptured chest as he fell back down the stairs and Mafalda’s missing left breast, the dark hole filled with black, central blood, the pallor of her life-drained face, the uncoloured lips. War in the living room. No different to the bombs that had fallen into her piano teacher’s house on the corner of Lydon Road in that other life that she’d lived, except this had been so personal.