Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  But the bathroom was empty.

  Nothing on the floors or counters; no one in the stalls.

  The panic surged a second time, more powerful. Without that passport, I was trapped. In trouble. And, as Guy had warned, in trouble much more serious than I had ever known. My fingers tightened on the little medal hanging round my neck – my little image of St Christopher. But even Tony couldn’t help me now, I thought. He wouldn’t be able to get me new documents here. And anyway, I had no way to call him. With my wallet gone, I didn’t even have a coin to use the phone.

  I gave myself a stinging mental kick. How could I have been so stupid? After all Tony’s coaching and all his hard work, his instructions on how to be careful, I’d gone and blown the whole thing before even reaching Lisbon. And in less than five minutes. It couldn’t have been any longer than that since I’d stood in this bathroom with Anne Wood and…

  Anne Wood. My racing mind clutched at the name. She’d been the only other person in the bathroom at the time – perhaps she’d been the one who’d picked up my travel wallet, too, and perhaps she was this minute on her way to hand it in to the appropriate authorities. She couldn’t have got far, not in such a short time.

  Spurred by the faint hope of catching up with her, I bolted from the bathroom, my pace growing increasingly frantic as I scanned the sea of heads and shoulders, trying without any luck to remember what colour Anne Wood had been wearing.

  ‘Are you Miss Allen?’ Asked just like that, in a light, almost cheerfully feminine voice, the question stopped me dead.

  The woman who’d spoken was uniformed, very young, very blonde, driving a golf-cart-like airport convenience car. She’d been going in the opposite direction, but had braked now and was looking at me, smiling. Repeating her question, she nodded when I told her yes, I was.

  ‘I thought so.’ She reached out to hand me the bright blue travel wallet, that still bulged reassuringly. ‘Another woman found this in the washroom,’ she informed me, in a voice tinged with the lovely classy accent of the Dutch. ‘I was taking it up to your gate, but you’ve saved me the trip.’

  Clumsily, I hastened to undo the zipper; check the contents.

  ‘It’s a good photograph, in your passport,’ the young woman complimented me. ‘I recognised you right away.’

  Still feeling shaken by the whole affair, I managed to get out a ‘Thank You’ before the woman deftly wheeled her vehicle around and, wishing me a pleasant journey, buzzed away again along the bustling corridor.

  With hands still shaking slightly from adrenalin, I sorted through the contents for a second time, to make absolutely certain. It was all there – my passport, my traveller’s cheques, everything.

  Stuffing the travel wallet safely in my bag again, I drew the first deep breath I’d breathed in what seemed like an age, and, boarding pass in hand, I turned and headed for the gate.

  I couldn’t see the runway that we landed on in Lisbon for the rain. Not that there would have been much to see – the modern airport lay, as did most airports, in an industrial area at the north edge of the city. There was no chance, from this approach, that I would see the wide impressive view of Lisbon from the harbour, with its tile-roofed buildings climbing up the terraced hills, that would have greeted Deacon, coming in by Pan Am Clipper in the final days of 1943.

  I did think, though, that he might have felt as relieved as I was to have landed. I’d been reading, in my research, some accounts of the Atlantic crossings in those days, by seaplane – such a dangerous adventure, and not only because of the threat posed by enemy aircraft. The simple act of travelling by air was risky then. One of the flights not too long before Deacon’s had managed to make it the whole perilous way across the Atlantic, only to crash in the harbour on landing in Lisbon, killing many of its passengers. Small wonder that my grandmother had feared for Deacon’s safety.

  The rain, at least, was easing by the time I caught my taxi, and the driver did his best to make up for my less than inspiring first view of Lisbon. He had a tour guide’s gift for running patter, and he took me to my hotel by the scenic route, leaving behind the wider modern avenues and groomed green parks in favour of the older, crowded, climbing streets.

  ‘We say,’ he said, his English rather excellent in spite of his thick accent, ‘that Lisbon is a white city, because the colour of the sun gives a lot of light, and most of the walls are in white, but also we like this pink colour, and the roofs in Portugal, the tiled roofs, they are in general red. These tiles come from the Roman times, and the mosaics of the Romans, this is what has later given us our sidewalks here in Portugal, isn’t it? We have beautiful sidewalks in Lisbon.’

  They were lovely – small even squares of stone set into intricate patterns of black, grey, and white, stunning on the larger streets and lending beauty even to the meanest of the narrow ones. I might have admired the stone patterns more had we not, at that moment, taken a stomach-dropping downward turn towards the broad blue ribbon of the river Tagus. It must, I thought, be murder to walk in a city like this.

  When I said as much, the taxi driver smiled. ‘The city has been built on seven hills, the legendary seven hills of Lisbon, just like Rome, isn’t it? Look to the other bank of the river – you see how hilly, undulating? This is the land of this region, so you see Lisbon was constructed on hills like those, imagine.’

  As we came within view of the river itself, and the harbour, I saw a long, red bridge, like San Francisco’s Golden Gate, that stretched across the strip of water to the farther shore.

  ‘This,’ my taxi driver said, ‘is our most famous bridge. Till the construction of that bridge, till 1966, imagine, people had to go across the river by ferry boat. You still can do that, and it’s a very pleasant trip for you to want to do one of these days, but it is better now, I think, to have this bridge. And from the bridge is one of the nicest views over the city. The best of all is from the Castelo de São Jorge, the big fort on the hill, you can see if you look out your window – is the best viewpoint of the city. But from the bridge is also very nice. From there you can see to the lighthouse that will show where finishes the river and begins the ocean.’

  I couldn’t see the lighthouse, but I saw the long, straight line of Lisbon’s harbour wall stretched like an arrow pointing out to the Atlantic, to the whitecaps faintly visible beyond the mirror stillness of the bay. Even the clouds didn’t dare venture in past that stillness. They kept farther out, like great plumes of spray tossed in the air by the ocean, enraged that it couldn’t come near.

  The view was a picture of postcard perfection…but I’d never much trusted perfection. Still waters ran deep, as my grandmother had liked to say, and Lisbon’s glassy harbour didn’t fool me. Something had happened here. Something that changed Andrew Deacon. And it had happened in Lisbon, I felt more sure of that than I had ever felt of anything, although I had no evidence to go on. Call it journalistic instinct. Call it Deacon’s ghostly guidance – I could all but feel his presence with me in the taxi, tugging at my sleeve. It’s here, he seemed to say, You’re close, so close…

  ‘So now we come to Lapa, where is your hotel,’ my driver said. ‘This is the part of Lisbon where the English have been living, from the times of the Crusaders, isn’t it? There has for many centuries been such a great alliance with the English and the Portuguese. Our royal families married with each other, and even the mother of our famous prince, Prince Henry the Navigator, she was an English princess who became the Queen of Portugal. So always there were English people living here – the merchants, and the diplomats. And Lapa is the place, still, for the embassies, and for the residences of ambassadors. You will see many buildings of great beauty, here. The hotel where you’re staying, it is beautiful as well. It was a convent once.’

  Which made it as fitting a place as any, I thought, in which to seek sanctuary.

  The York House Hotel wasn’t the sort of a place anybody would look for me, if they were looking. Its façade fooled the eye. It appeared
, from the front, to be one more ordinary building in the narrow and plain, although lyrically named, Rua das Janelas Verdes – Street of the Green Windows – just up from the harbour. The only entrance looked to be a single open doorway in the blank wall, uninviting, but by now I’d grown used to things not being what they seemed.

  From the moment I stepped through that door in the wall, and was met by the young seated porter, I felt that I’d entered a world of seclusion. The porter directed me up a long flight of mosaic-tiled stairs, thick with green twisted vines that arched over the stairwell in places, creating a garden-like sense of seclusion. Already the street, and the city, felt far away, behind the thick rose-coloured stuccoed walls, and the whine of a plane overhead seemed an almost indecent intrusion.

  The stairs curved up, and climbed, and curved again, and opened out into a sunny courtyard, tiled even more elaborately in a white-and-black diamond pattern and ringed on three sides by the walls of the hotel, so thickly obscured behind ivy and tropical plants and the soft drooping branches of palm trees that I might have thought there were no walls at all, had it not been for the white French doors standing open to either side, and all the multi-paned white windows set amid the green.

  There were yellow-painted wooden chairs and tables in the courtyard, and a young man was busily wiping the wet of the rain from them. Seeing me, he stopped his work to come and take my single suitcase from my hand and lead me through the French door on the right.

  He took his place behind the small reception desk. ‘Miss Allen, yes,’ he said, and found me in the register. ‘We have your room. For seven nights, yes? If you would sign here, I will take you up.’

  I signed, and followed him up more stairs to the second floor. The corridors twisted, grew wider in places and then closed around us again. The hotel had obviously been cobbled together from more than one building, and the corridors were sectioned, too, with narrow French doors separating them in places, and uneven steps up and steps down to negotiate. The dark red tiles on the floor were large and loose in places, so they clunked when we walked over them. We passed small window niches set with painted tiles of blue and white, with ruffled white curtains and small potted plants. There were baseboards of blue and white tiles, as well, and the white plaster walls with their curved ceilings made quite an elegant contrast to all the dark wood.

  My room was equally impressive. One long window overlooked the private courtyard I had entered by. Thick rugs, like handstitched tapestries, lay on the wide-planked hardwood floor, the bathroom gleamed with mirrors, and the bed was like a canopied oasis for a queen. I’d come here with no expectations – I’d wanted a room for the week, nothing more. Evidently Tony’s travel agent friend – or, more likely, Tony himself – had decided I needed to hide out in style.

  ‘I am forgetting,’ said the desk clerk, ‘someone came this morning, asking for you, but I could not say when you would be arriving, so they asked me could I give you this.’

  That caught me off my guard, uncomfortably. There shouldn’t have been anyone, I thought, who’d know where I would be. I felt my sense of safety shatter, and my hand shook as I reached to take the envelope he offered me. Thanking him in a tight voice, I shut the door and bolted it behind him.

  The curtains were open. I drew them shut, too, and retreated like a hunted creature to the deeper shadows by the bed. It took me a couple of tries to tear open the end of the envelope. It held a single sheet of handwriting. I read it…and relaxed.

  Welcome to Lisbon, said the note. I thought you might be eager to get on with things, so came to see if you were here at lunch, but I will come again at seven for our dinner, as arranged. The signature was simply: Anabela. Guy’s reporter friend.

  I turned to check the carriage clock that faced me on the bedside table. Half past two. I still had time to kill. And as inviting as the bed was, and as tired as I might be from all the sleepless hours of travelling, I couldn’t shake the little voice reminding me that someone else might already have gotten here ahead of me; that every hour wasted was an hour that I could ill afford to lose.

  I closed my mind to everything except that voice, and turned my back towards the bed, and started looking for my Lisbon city map.

  I couldn’t find the Embassy.

  I had the address, copied from the pages of the Portuguese travel guide Guy had picked up at the library for me, and the street had been only a few minutes’ walk from my hotel – the Rua de São Domingos, in the heart of Lisbon’s Lapa district. When Deacon had arrived here, late in 1943, this had still been the place in Lisbon where the English lived. It likely hadn’t changed much since his day, I thought.

  The street was cobbled, dark with dampness from the drizzling rain that came and swiftly went again with unpredictability. To either side the buildings pressed in closely, three storeys tall, or four, or sometimes five, with rows of white-framed windows and ornate old iron balconies. Despite the day’s drabness, the colours of the plastered façades were marvelous – deep ochre yellow and blue-grey and rich terracotta, like weathered old brick. The buildings stood shoulder to shoulder, their tiled roofs tracing an uneven line down the steep slope of the hill, a roller-coaster drop towards a slice of pale blue water at the bottom, where the river Tagus estuary stretched to meet the darker south shore opposite.

  The roller-coaster impression was strengthened by two sets of streetcar rails sunk in the cobblestones, and the cars that had been parked up on the sidewalks to each side of me closed in the space and made it feel more narrow.

  Number 37 was supposed to be the Embassy, but having walked the full length of the street two times now, once on each side, I had come to the bottom again, to the place where the street narrowed too much for cars to pass through; where a tight, shadowed lane wound on downward between low, small houses, becoming the flight of stone steps that had brought me up here to begin with. I turned, at a loss.

  I could see, near the top of the hill, a policeman, who’d come out from somewhere to stand at the edge of the street, and willing him to stay in just that spot till I could ask him for directions, I began the climb again, but by the time I’d reached the first main corner he had disappeared.

  I stopped beneath a tangled net of intersecting streetcar cables. A woman passing briskly on the sidewalk slowed her pace, and met my eyes, and smiled. She spoke to me directly, in good English. ‘Are you lost?’

  I wondered how she’d known that I spoke English, till I realised that the map I held was printed in that language. Still, the average person wasn’t quite so quick at observation, and while I welcomed her assistance, I was wary. ‘I was looking for the Embassy,’ I said. ‘The British Embassy.’

  ‘It is not here. It was for many years this building,’ she said, pointing at a pale pink building further up the street, ‘but it now is in the Rua de São Bernardo, in Estrela. Not in Lapa.’ And she showed me on the map.

  I marked the place, and thanked her, and with one more smile she carried on where she’d been going, with that same quick, certain step. I watched her out of sight, then hailed a passing taxi.

  As it left the kerb, I twisted in my seat to take a good look at the massive pale pink building where the Embassy had been. It was a magnificent place, almost Georgian in its symmetry, a great block of a house with tall, multi-paned windows and giant-sized double wood doors and ornate black wrought-iron balcony railings. The roofline had large, classic dormers; more windows, more railings, and elegant, round, fluted chimneys.

  There wasn’t any number I could see; no sign to say that it had been the British Embassy – a role it must have given up just recently, because my guidebook hadn’t been that out of date – but having been so long the scene of things of great importance, having heard the steps of dignitaries passing through its corridors, with whispers of affairs of state, it seemed to me this pink-walled building, growing smaller through the rain-spattered rear window of my taxi, yet retained a sense of grandeur.

  So it must have looked to Deacon,
too, when he’d first seen it – standing stoic on its sloped street, with the streetcar cables framing it as darkly as a spider’s web.

  He was tired. He’d slept little on the long flight over, despite the Clipper’s comfortable cabin and the polite privacy given him by the few military men who had been his travelling companions. They’d done well to leave him be, he thought. He hadn’t been in any mood for socialising.

  Remembering, he moved his thumb to turn the wedding band upon his finger in a gesture that had almost grown to be part of him. And then, because that made him frown again, he turned from his study of a large oil portrait, in search of distraction.

  He caught a breath of outside air, that smelt of rain-damp earth. It came, he thought, from somewhere to his left, and so he followed it. The young man who had left him in this broad hall at the top of the sweeping main stairway hadn’t told him that he couldn’t move about, and since he’d already been kept waiting for the better part of half an hour, he figured they’d forgive his curiosity.

  Anyone, he thought, could be forgiven curiosity in such a place as this. He hadn’t been in many embassies, but Lisbon’s seemed more beautiful than most. He followed the scent of fresh afternoon air through an angled glass passage that led to a great ballroom, grand with gilt mirrors. The glazed doors here stood open to a sheltered flagstone courtyard, its walls beautified by a series of blue-and-white tiles displaying varied coats of arms.

  He stepped through the glass doors and into the courtyard. The change of air swept through his mind like a tonic, relaxing his frown. There were steps climbing out of the courtyard – stone steps decorated with more of the blue-and-white tiles, and shaded by the overhanging branches of a venerable pepper-tree. He had half a mind to climb them, too, and see where they would take him, but prudence kept him where he was. It was enough, for now, to be outdoors.

  He was still there when they came looking for him. Without looking round, he could tell there were two of them. Their footsteps echoed plainly on the wide floor of the ballroom, one set firm and even, and the other with a slightly offset rhythm and the measured punctuation of a walking stick. He waited till they’d nearly reached the door before he turned.