Chapter 19: The Account

A burned legation and a murdered Abwehr chief are not the sort of thing even Lisbon could pretend had not happened, and Lisbon did try, which tells you something about Lisbon, but the pretending did not take, and for the better part of a week the city we had moved through so carefully for so long turned itself inside out looking for us. Salazar’s police, the PVDE, were beside themselves — not from grief, the Germans were nothing to them, but from the unforgivable rudeness of it, the spoiling of the tidy neutral shop window they had kept polished all through the war so that both sides would go on paying to drink there; somebody had broken the glass and put a body through it, and the PVDE meant to hang the somebody before the foreign newspapers made it a story. And what was left of the SD, the survivors of their own botched storming, wanted us too, quietly and for keeps, because a service that has just lost a station chief it meant to arrest and try has a powerful institutional interest in making certain the people who got to him first never tell anyone they did. So we were hunted by the law and the Lord both again, the way Vera had been hunted her whole life, only now the law was Portuguese and the Lord wore a black coat, and between them they turned over every hotel and pension and rooming house in the lower city while we lay still in the one place neither of them thought to look.

I will not tell you whose attic it was, because the man is likely still alive and the keeping of his name is the least I owe him. I will tell you that Vera could not be moved easily — the hand had been seen to by a doctor who asked no questions and charged accordingly, and she ran a fever the second and third days that frightened me more than the whole of the legation had — and that lying still in a stranger’s attic with the city baying below us was, in its way, harder than the night of the fire, because the fire at least had asked something of us, and the attic asked only that we wait and heal and not die of waiting, which is the one thing neither of us had ever been any good at. But the file moved even if we could not. That was the thing that kept Vera’s fever from being the worst of those days; on the second morning, left-handed and grey with pain, she had me carry word the way she directed it, down a chain of names she had been building in her head for two years against exactly this need, to the one set of people in Lisbon who could turn a copying clerk’s preserved truth into a girl walking out of a camp gate — the quiet network that bought and forged and bribed Jews and Poles and the war’s other discards out of the machine while there was still time, and asked nothing in return but that you never speak of them, which I never have, until this line, and only now because they are all of them safely dead and beyond the reach of my gratitude. The file went to them. Hania’s freedom started moving the morning Vera’s fever broke, and I have always believed the two were the same event.

Carruthers found us on the fifth day, because of course he did; the law and the Lord had the whole of Lisbon and could not find us, and the smiling old man wanted a quiet word and had only to wait in the one café he knew I would eventually have to pass to reach our chain of names, and I came round a corner into the morning and there he was at a pavement table, pink and soft and beautifully turned out and entirely at his ease, the kind uncle’s face on him, pouring me a coffee I had not asked for, exactly as he had poured me the vermouth a lifetime and a week before.

I sat down because there was nothing else to do that wasn’t worse, and because my legs had gone to water, because I knew what he was owed and I knew that London kept its bargains and enforced them, and a man does not screen an operation and square a debt with Washington and put his men in a shooting street and come away with nothing and simply shrug. He had Vera’s signature. She had given it to him in a tobacconist’s booth in thirty seconds, sold her whole tomorrow to buy a single night, and the night had burned his harvest to ash but it had not burned her name off his books, and I sat down at that table braced with the whole of myself for the collection — for him to tell me she was London’s now, that the box was a dead letter but the asset was a live entry, that he would have what he could still carry out of the wreck and what he could still carry was her.