Chapter 15: The Friend

A plan built backward from a catastrophe has a particular smell to it, and I have never lost the smell, and I caught it the first morning we sat down to build the only operation left us. It is the smell of a thing assembled not because you believe in it but because it is the last shape the pieces will make. We sat with it, Vera and I, in the flattened careful way we did everything now, and we built the indivisible act, and the building of it was the worst kind of work there is, the kind where every step is sound and the sum of the sound steps is a horror.

It came down to his vanity, because everything about Friedrich Stahl came down to his vanity in the end, sitting as it did on top of the suspicion like a crown on a coiled snake. He had shown her the box like a ring. A man who shows a woman the outside of the box is a man who is, somewhere in himself, dying to show her the inside — to open it for her, to let her see the whole of what he is, the secret engine of his power laid bare for the one person he has decided to be known by. That is the deepest thing you can offer a woman, in the mind of a man like that: not the jewels but the combination; not the power but the trust of the power. And so the plan, the only plan, was to bring Friedrich Stahl to the moment where his vanity finally beat his suspicion all the way down — where, to complete his possession of her, to dazzle her, to be admired by her for the thing he was proudest and most secret about, he would turn his own hand to his own dial and open his own vault, of his own free unsuspecting will, and show her his heart. And in the half second the bolt threw and the great man stood turned to his treasure, lit up and unguarded and admired, Vera would take his life at arm’s length before he could understand that the admiration had a blade in it.

We had the shape of it inside an hour. What we did not have, and could not get, were the three things the shape needed to not be suicide, and I will give them to you plainly because they sat on the table between us un-mended for days: we did not know how to make a man that careful choose that moment on a night we controlled rather than one he did; we did not know how Vera came out of a legation alive having just killed its chief two floors up from a building full of his people; and we did not know, now that the box would never pay it, how I was to settle my debt to Eldridge — the convoy schedule, the source of the leak, the thing my own country had bought my whole life in Lisbon to obtain — with the only currency that could have paid it locked forever inside the man we were going to kill. Three holes. We could not fill one of them. And while we sat failing to fill them, the man came who could fill two, for a price, and the price was the third.

He was sitting at my table when I came down to the terrace of the Palácio at Estoril, which was a message, and an elegant one, and I read it the instant I saw him: I have been in your places before you arrive in them, Mr. Brennan, and I would like you to feel that, gently, before we speak. He was past sixty, pink and soft and beautifully dressed, with the wet blue eyes of a man who had drunk steadily and intelligently for forty years and meant to die at it, and a kind uncle’s face you would have handed your savings to on sight, and you would never have guessed from any of it that the soft pink hands had signed things, though they had. He half rose when he saw me, the way you do for a friend you have been waiting for, and he said, ‘Brennan. Sit, do, you look like a man the morning has used hard — they make a tolerable vermouth here, it’s the one civilised thing the Germans haven’t bought up,’ and he was pouring it before I had agreed to any of it, and that was the whole of Sir Edmund Carruthers, who had been angling for me the better part of a year by then — gently, persistently, the way a man fishes a river he owns — and who had finally found the afternoon he wanted, the one where I had run clean out of other rescuers: the man who tells you the worst news of your life while ordering you the better wine, and makes you grateful for the wine.

I sat, because there was nothing else to do that wasn’t worse, and I gave him the bland correspondent’s blink, and he waved it away before I’d got it fully up, not unkindly, the way you’d wave off a child’s small lie that you both know is a lie. ‘Oh, let’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s a lovely face you do and I’ve enjoyed it across three receptions, but we haven’t the afternoon. I’m going to talk and you’re going to drink your vermouth and discover that I already know the song, and then we’ll see what we can do for one another, because I rather think we can do quite a lot.’ He turned his glass by the stem. ‘I’ve had eyes on Friedrich Stahl for a year and some. One does, with a man like that; he’s the most interesting article in Lisbon, your Oberst, a great spider in a great web, and you cannot watch a spider for a year without learning the whole of his web by heart — every thread, Brennan, and everything that lands on one.’ The kind-uncle eyes came up. ‘You landed on one. Months ago. The hard-drinking correspondent and the sad Polish girl Stahl thinks he turned. I watched the girl turn the other way — watched her turn to you, which Stahl has not yet been clever enough to see, more’s the pity for him — and I watched the two of you start very quietly trying to get into a steel box on the third floor of the German legation, which is an ambition I find I share, and which is going rather worse for you than you’d hoped, because the box doesn’t open, does it. It opens for him. You’ve found that out the hard way, I’d guess, this last week, by the look you came down those stairs with.’