by Joe Joyce
‘Just wandering about. It’s a nice city.’
‘They’re improving it. A lot of work going on these days.’ Strasser was in a pleasant mood this morning, more like Hopkins’s description of him than he had been the previous night.
‘You been here a long time?’ Duggan dared to ask, playing the innocent abroad. The woman came from behind the bar with a coffee and a glass of water for him without being asked.
Strasser had already emptied his small cup. ‘Long enough.’
‘I’d like to stay longer. But my ship sails tomorrow.’ Duggan took a sip of his coffee. ‘So I need to deliver the item I brought from Ireland today.’
Strasser studied him with an unblinking stare. Duggan held it for a moment, then turned his attention back to his coffee to avoid creating the impression that he was getting into a competition. ‘He hasn’t given you any instructions?’ Strasser asked at last, his neutral tone failing to conceal his surprise.
Duggan shook his head. Strasser didn’t know anything about the Norden, he decided.
‘You’ll have to ask him.’
‘I could leave it for you,’ Duggan offered. ‘Around the corner. In that house.’
Strasser shook his head. ‘You have to ask him.’
‘I’m running out of time.’
‘Meet him at the usual place this afternoon.’
‘Should I bring it with me? That might be the handiest thing to do.’
Strasser shook his head again. ‘Talk to him first.’ He stood up and left some coins on the table.
‘Please tell him I’m running out of time,’ Duggan said up to him.
Strasser nodded, picked up his hat and said goodbye to the woman behind the counter.
Duggan sat back in his chair and closed his eyes as a wave of tiredness broke over him. He’d had hardly any sleep and the day already felt long, although it wasn’t yet noon. The uncertainty of the last few days, Strasser’s suspicions, the man who’d been ineptly tailing him, and trying to figure out Hopkins’s game were all taking their toll.
He thought about going back to the ship and lying down for a while but knew that his mind was too active to allow sleep. Maybe he should go back to Cascais or Estoril for another swim, take his mind off all of this. But he knew it wouldn’t.
Fresh blood, he thought. The phrase Hopkins had used. That’s what I am. Which created a less-than-reassuring image of sharks circling in the water, moving in for the kill. Don’t be overly dramatic, he told himself, opening his eyes and lighting a cigarette.
The woman was sitting behind the bar, reading a magazine, and there was no sound in the café, only the distant rumble from the docks and some construction work somewhere, and the occasional grind of a nearby tram slowing its descent down the hill.
Hopkins. His thoughts kept coming back to him. What was he up to? Friendly Hopkins. Helpful to the new kid on the block. Offering assistance if needed. Just call Belinda. Which, he had to admit, was a reassurance. Not feeling completely isolated, completely on his own. No one to back him up if things went very wrong. No legation in which to seek sanctuary.
But Hopkins was clearly a liar behind the pleasantries. He wasn’t an occasional visitor to Lisbon as he’d said on their journey through Wales. He hadn’t just happened to be near Pembroke when someone was needed to bail Duggan out. And he was the one who’d made sure that Aiken’s visit to the US was a disaster. With some assistance from Aiken, of course. He’s working a case. And I’m it, thought Duggan. Fresh blood.
But he couldn’t see what the operation was. Maybe just to exploit this supposed IRA radio link to feed disinformation to the Germans. Another game, like Wiedermeyer’s ploy of afternoon drinks with innocent bystanders. Maybe that’s what all the spies spent their time doing in Lisbon. Playing mind games with one another. It was hard to see how any of it could make a difference to the real war. But he wouldn’t know, he told himself. He was already long enough in the business to know that small things could mount up and have consequences out of all proportion to their apparent significance. Like the interpretation of Aiken’s after-lunch comments.
He stood up and left a couple more coins on the table and said ‘Obrigado, senhora’ to the woman and went out into the blinding sunlight.
He climbed up the remainder of the hill of Alfama, walked around the Castelo de São Jorge, continuing his random rambling, followed the tram tracks down the other side through steep narrow streets of faded houses, and found himself in Praça da Figueira, the square beside Rossio. He went on into Rossio and crossed between the cars parked in its centre to the Metropole Hotel, and checked its terrace for Wiedermeyer. There was no sign of him among the lunch crowd. There was one seat free at the back and he took it, ordering something off the chalked slate the harassed waiter handed him.
All around were suited businessmen having lunch. The refugees who usually occupied a few of the tables were absent. The waiter left a plate of large prawns in their shells in front of him and carried three more plates to another table. Duggan stared at the prawns, not sure what to do with them. He tried using the knife and fork to pry off their shells, then gave up and used his fingers instead, but with little more success.
The waiter offered coffee as he took the half-finished plate away, and Duggan nodded. The terrace was beginning to empty out fast as the lunch hour ended. A family speaking French took an empty table close by: the first of the refugees moving in for another afternoon of whiling away the time. Presumably they weren’t among the lucky ones with places on the Portuguese liner still in the harbour.
A small grubby boy appeared in front of him and, before Duggan could say no, dropped to his knees and began polishing his shoes. He tried to pull his foot away but the boy had a hold of his heel and wouldn’t let go. Duggan gave up and left him to it as the waiter brought his coffee. No one paid any attention to the shoeshine boy; they were almost as common as pigeons seeking pickings among the terrace tables.
The boy stood up and Duggan left a few coins on the table in front of him, not sure how much he should give him. The boy counted them with a serious expression and appeared satisfied. He nodded and smiled and placed a postcard on the table and wandered off. Duggan hadn’t noticed that before, hadn’t seen the shoeshiners
giving their customers postcards, but maybe they did. Part of the trade for some reason.
The card was a black-and-white photo of Praça do Rossio, the same view he had sent Gerda the last time. Maybe I should send her another one, he thought, smiling to himself at an image of her surprise that he was back here. He picked up the card and tapped its side on the table. On the other hand, it had been foolish to send it to her, a breach of security undermining his cover story, never mind what difficulties it could have posed for her if it had stirred suspicions in the mind of some American censor. Even more so if Linqvist were to activate his threat against her.
He turned it over, still in two minds. There was an address, handwritten, in the area for the message: a number on Rua da Condessa.
He looked up quickly to find the shoe-shine boy but there was no sign of him. He scanned the terrace with greater care, to see if he was hidden by any tables, at work on someone else’s shoes. He wasn’t.
Somebody’s been following me all along, he thought. Although Hopkins didn’t think so when I met him. Unless, of course, the British are the ones following me. Or did someone pick me up from Antonio’s, after meeting Strasser? Maybe Strasser’s henchman from last night? Or was it the Americans?
He looked at the address on the card again. He had no idea where Rua da Condessa was. Not anywhere where he’d been, as far as he knew. The handwriting had the telltale Continental way of writing the number ‘1’ in the address. The Germans, he thought. A new rendezvous for Wiedermeyer. Strasser knew more than he pretended to.
He took his time before leaving the terrace, smoking a cigarette, deciding what to do, and trying to memorise all the faces of likely followers within sight. He had to go back to the ship fi
rst, to consult the street map he hadn’t bothered bringing with him. He could ask someone for directions but it would be better to work out a route and how he might figure out if anyone followed him.
On board the ship he checked that the Norden was still in his kitbag, tossed out the dirty clothes, and left it out ready to bring with him. This was it, he had decided, the rendezvous that Wiedermeyer had been hinting at. He spread out the street map on his bunk and figured out how to get to Rua da Condessa. It was in Bairro Alto, another of the city’s high hills, but an area he hadn’t visited before. There were three elevadors serving it: it was just a question of which one to use.
He picked the only one he already knew and set off with the kitbag, crossing the open space of Praça do Comércio diagonally. The sun beat down, unhindered by any clouds or buildings, and bounced off the tiles. His shirt was wet with sweat from the heat and the weight of the Norden before he got to the shade of Rua Áurea and went up by its shops and banks to the Santa Justa elevador shaft. He joined a short queue, mainly of women with shopping baskets, to wait for the next car up the tower, which looked liked six storeys of glassless church windows on top of one another.
This would be ideal to check if he was being followed, he thought. But he didn’t mind being followed, if it was the Americans. This was what they wanted to see, the delivery of the Norden to the Germans. It was their own fault if they didn’t witness the handover. He’d done nothing to throw them off this time.
But nobody who looked like a tail followed him into the elevador car as the operator took his money and shut the metal gates. On top a young couple who looked like they were on their honeymoon, climbed up the circular stairs to the viewing platform, but he followed the old women along the bridge over the canyon of city streets below and past the skeletal ruin of Carmo Convent. They came out into a small dusty square dotted with crabbed trees around an old fountain, and he went by the front of the ruin and a military barracks with striped guard huts outside and into Rua da Condessa.
The houses were high, five storeys, blocking out the sunshine from the narrow street as it climbed away from him around a left-hand bend. The buildings seemed to be holding themselves back from toppling downhill. Some had low doors, hardly five feet high, as if they too were digging in to resist the pull of gravity. Small balconies were draped here and there with drying clothes. He walked up the street’s cobbled centre, passing the number he wanted with a sideways glance. It had a front wall of faded blue tiles in a flower pattern and its lower windows were shuttered behind bars. The bland exterior told him nothing.
He stopped at the top of the street, where steep steps led back down to the city centre and, on the other side, climbed farther up the hill into the distance. He turned back and checked the street. Nobody had followed him all the way up. The only person in sight was an old woman, all in black, who had paused for breath, one hand against a wall, the other holding a basket.
He made his way back down to the blue-tiled house and took a deep breath and rapped on the small door with his knuckles.
A bolt was shot back after a moment and the door moved inward. It was so low he could only see at first that it was a woman from her sandals and bare legs and he had to bend down to see her face.
‘What . . . ?’ he began to say, but Gerda pulled him towards her by his shirt and he stepped down into the house and she put her finger across his lips and closed the door and then replaced her finger with her lips.
He responded to her deep kiss in kind, all the tumbling questions banished in the warmth and press of her body. She pulled back after a few moments to look at him, laughter twinkling her dark eyes. He found it hard to believe what he was seeing and went to say something again but she shook her head and put her finger over her own lips and took his hand and led him up the stairs.
He lost count of the number of flights until they came to a small room at the top of the building. A single bed against one wall took up half the space and there was a washstand at one end, with a big ceramic jug and bowl. A suitcase lay flat on the floor beneath the open window and he shrugged the kitbag off his shoulder and left it down.
She began unbuttoning his shirt and he started opening the buttons on the front of her dress and he unbuckled the narrow belt around her waist as she unbuckled his, all the time looking into each other’s eyes. When they were naked they lay down on the narrow bed and made love without a word.
Afterwards, they held each other as their bodies cooled and he ran his finger over the round of her shoulder, feeling the firm texture of her skin and inhaling the scent of her black hair. All the questions had gone, no longer of any consequence in the here and now of her presence and the release of all the tensions of the last few days and the voyage before that.
They stayed unmoving for what seemed a long time and then Gerda moved back against the wall and propped her head on her hand. ‘I’ve been dreaming about this,’ she whispered.
‘Me too,’ he whispered back.
‘About making love in a bed,’ she grinned.
‘That too.’
‘Liar.’
‘Well, not so much about the bed.’
‘You preferred the cold floor of Mr Montague’s office?’
‘Hmm. Lino still reminds me of you.’
She leaned forward to kiss him again and all the months of stilted letters slipped away and it seemed that no time at all had passed since they had last made love on the floor of her former boss’s office as snow drifted down on a freezing Dublin. They made love again and he dozed afterwards, to the distant sound of workmen’s voices and the rumble of rubble being poured into wheelbarrows.
He woke with a start and she was lying on him, resting her weight on her elbows. ‘We don’t have much time,’ she said in a quiet voice.
He made an effort to come back to reality. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly three. I have to be somewhere soon.’
‘And then?’ He put his arms around her and ran one hand down her spine.
‘Then I’ll come back. You can wait here.’
He sighed with relief. ‘I have to be somewhere at five. Then I’ll come back too.’
‘Good,’ she said and leaned down to kiss him. ‘But I leave tomorrow.’
‘Me too.’ He searched her eyes, not wanting to bring up the present and future, but it was unavoidable. ‘You’re working for them. The OSS?’
She gave a slow blink of her eyes in silent confirmation.
‘You’re going back to America?’ he asked, knowing the answer was no.
‘Later,’ she said, and kissed him again. ‘I have to get dressed.’
He released her and she got up, trailing her hand along his arm as he let her go. She dressed quickly and he watched her, taking in all the details of her body, her quick movements, finding it hard to believe this was really happening. She sat on the side of the bed and brushed her black hair with firm strokes, and then kissed him goodbye. Her foot touched against his kitbag as she stood up and she said, ‘Is that the secret you’re giving the Nazis?’
‘How do you know?’ he asked automatically, taking her hand to delay her departure and pulling her towards him for another kiss.
She leaned in to him and dropped her voice even lower than the quiet voices they had been using. ‘It’s a trap.’
‘I know.’
She searched his eyes. ‘Then why are you doing it?’
He searched hers. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Why are you walking into the trap?’
‘It’s a trap for the Germans,’ he said, a sudden sinking feeling in his stomach.
‘It’s a trap for you,’ she said. ‘For Ireland. So they can use it against you if the British invade.’
Duggan stared at her, instantly recognising the neatness of it. Ireland consorting with the Nazis as the Americans had suspected all along, handing over one of America’s most important military secrets to the enemies of democracy. He could even imagine the presidential statements, the
headlines. More in sorrow than in anger. ‘People we always looked upon as our friends . . . to whom we gave sanctuary over the centuries . . . fully support the British invasion . . . totally justified in taking military action in all the circumstances.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, reading his realisation.
His mind was whirling, already a million miles away from their lovemaking.
She bent down to give him a gentle kiss. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, half statement, half question.
He nodded, his eyes half seeing.
‘I love you,’ she added, and kissed him again.
She gave him a worried look as she went out the door.
Twenty
He lay where she had left him, naked, feeling like he might throw up, trying to get his racing thoughts under control and figure out the meaning of what Gerda had told him. Max Linqvist is one devious fucker if this is his scheme, Duggan thought. Was it all a lie? All just to create a compromising situation for Ireland? Or is the plan to trap the Germans’ spy ring in America genuine? Does it make any difference? We have to get out of their trap. I have to get out of it. Now.
He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling, becoming aware in the silence that there was movement elsewhere in the house. Was it an OSS house or just a guest house? He had no idea. Think, he told himself, inhaling another deep lungful of smoke.
The easiest option was not to give the Norden to anyone. Take it back to the ship, drop it overboard on the voyage back to Ireland. Now that he knew Gerda was working for the OSS, Linqvist’s threats against her were meaningless.
I could even leave it here and walk away. Let her give it back to the Americans. But then she’d have questions to answer. How did I know to give it back? What had she told me? A smidgen of suspicion crossed his mind. Was Gerda part of the Americans’ plot? But he dismissed the thought, refusing to believe it for a moment.
