Chapter 2: The Legation

by Wesley Doyle

The British gave the best parties in Lisbon, which was a strange thing to be true in the fourth year of a war they were not obviously winning, but it was true, and everyone who was anyone and a great many people who were no one at all turned up to confirm it.

The party that Thursday was at the residence of a counsellor named Hollis in the Lapa, the high quiet district where the embassies kept their secrets behind pink and ochre walls and bougainvillea did the work that barbed wire would have done in a less civilized country. I arrived at half past eight, which is the correct hour to arrive at a party you intend to work — late enough that the room is full and the careful people have had two drinks, early enough that the indiscreet ones have not yet had four. I gave my hat to a Portuguese manservant who took it the way a priest takes a confession, and I went in.

The room was already doing what these rooms did. Forty or fifty people, six nationalities, three of them at war with one another, all of them being marvelous about it. A Spanish Marquesa was telling a story to a Swedish businessman who sold ball bearings to whoever asked. Two men from the German commercial mission stood near the windows with the particular stillness of men who have been told to listen and report. A Portuguese gentleman of the better sort moved among the guests with the bland watchful courtesy of the PVDE, Salazar’s secret police, who attended every party in Lisbon and were, as a class, the only people in the room genuinely enjoying themselves. There was a long table of food that would have started a riot in London, and there was champagne, and there was the particular electric hum of a great many people each pretending to be slightly drunker and slightly more foolish than they were.

I took a glass of champagne I did not want from a passing tray and began the slow circuit of the room.

I should explain what I was doing there, because it was not what it looked like. What it looked like was Calvin Brennan, Chicago Tribune Foreign Service, drinking another man’s champagne and gathering color for a dispatch about life in the neutral capital. What it was, was the thing Donovan’s people called ambient collection and I called eavesdropping with a press pass, which is the second-oldest profession and pays better than the first. You stood at the edge of conversations. You remembered names. You noticed which Germans talked to which neutrals and which Frenchmen had stopped getting invited anywhere. You filed it, some of it to Chicago and the more interesting half to a careful man named Eldridge who held a vice-consul’s title he had not earned and a job he could not name.

I had done it perhaps two hundred times. I was good at it. The trouble that Thursday was that I was doing it for the first time as a liar.

Forty-some hours earlier I had agreed, in a hotel room with the lamp left on, to a thing I could not tell Eldridge, could not tell anyone, could barely tell myself in the daylight without wanting a drink. Now I had to walk into a room full of people whose entire profession was the reading of other people and be exactly the man I had been on Monday. I had spent the train ride in from Estoril telling myself that the only difference between Monday’s Brennan and Thursday’s was a single fact locked in a single room behind my eyes, and that no one could see a locked room.

I did not entirely believe it. But it is the kind of thing you must decide to believe, the way you decide to believe a parachute will open, and so I had decided.

I drank the champagne after all.

Roy Petersen found me by the food, which is where Roy always was, on the sound principle that a man who is eating cannot be expected to file copy and a man who is filing copy should be ashamed of himself at a party this good.

“Brennan,” he said. “You look like a man who’s been getting enough sleep. I find that suspicious in a journalist.”

“I’ve been resting up. Big week. I’m planning to file four hundred words on the wolfram situation and then lie down.”

“Four hundred words on the wolfram situation.” Roy put a small cold thing wrapped in a smaller colder thing into his mouth and considered it. “Now there’s a man who’s read the cable traffic. You know they’ve got the Germans and our people bidding each other up for the same Portuguese rock, and Salazar standing in the middle taking both checks and selling tinned sardines on the side. It’s the only honest economy left in Europe. Everybody’s buying, nobody’s pretending it’s anything but money.”

Roy Petersen was the genuine article, which in Lisbon in 1943 made him approximately as rare as an honest croupier. He was a wire man, United Press, forty-six, gray at the temples and gray in the soul in the good way that the best reporters go gray, the way that means they have stopped expecting the world to be better than it is and started, against considerable evidence, to love it anyway. He did not drink at parties because he had decided some years before that a sober man in a room full of drunks was the closest thing to a spy a journalist had any business being. He watched everything. He had, I was fairly sure, watched me for some time, in the patient way of a man who has noticed that the Tribune’s Lisbon correspondent files a great deal less copy than his expense account would suggest, and who has been too decent or too tired to make anything of it.

“You filing on it?” I asked.

“Wolfram? God, no. Nobody reads economics. I’m filing on the refugees, same as everybody. The Clipper came in Tuesday, took out nineteen lucky souls and left about four thousand on the dock.” He said it lightly and it landed heavy, the way Roy’s lines did. “There’s a woman down at the Aviz been waiting fourteen months for a seat. Used to own half of Prague. Now she owns a hat. I’m going to write four hundred words about the hat and some editor in New York is going to cut it to two hundred and run it next to an advertisement for cigarettes.”

“You’re a ray of sunshine, Roy.”

“I’m a wire man. Sunshine doesn’t move on the wire.” He looked at me then, briefly, with the flat unhurried attention I had learned to be careful of. “You all right, Cal? You’ve got a look.”

“What look.”

“I don’t know. The look a man gets when he’s carrying something.” He shrugged, and let it go, which was the most alarming thing he could have done. “That Spain look. You used to have it more.”

And there it was — the small door I kept locked, swinging open an inch on its own, the way it did when somebody who didn’t know what was behind it leaned against it by accident.

Spain. The word still arrived in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, a long fall and then the small far sound of it hitting water. I had gone to Barcelona in the winter of ‘37 a believer, which is the most dangerous thing a journalist can be, and I had written the war the way a believer writes it, in the present tense, with the names of the brave men in it. One of those names had been Andreu Marçal — a printer, an organizer, a Catalan with ink under his nails and a laugh you could hear across a square, the kind of man a young American reporter falls a little in love with and writes a glowing column about. I had written the glowing column. I had named him, and named the café where he held his meetings, and quoted him on the subject of the revolution that was being strangled in its cradle by the very people who claimed to be its parents.

The column ran in March. By May the Republic was busy murdering its own left flank in the streets of Barcelona, and the men who did the murdering read foreign newspapers, and they were grateful, I have to assume, to the earnest young American who had so helpfully provided the printer’s name and the address of the café. Andreu Marçal and most of the men who met with him went into a building near the port one night in May and did not come out, and I learned of it three weeks later in a bar in Valencia from a man who told me as a kindness, thinking I would want to know, not understanding that he was telling me I had done it.

I had written them dead. The press pass had felt like a loaded thing in my pocket ever since, and the worst of it — the part I had never said aloud to anyone, not to a woman, not to a priest, not to the bottom of a great many glasses — was that I had not been wrong about Andreu. He had been exactly the man I said he was. The words were true. That was what I couldn’t get past. A lie might have saved him. It was the truth that killed him, my true and lovely and admiring words, set down by a man who had not yet learned the single most important thing about this work, which is that the truth is a weapon and you had better know which way it is pointed before you fire it.

“It comes and goes,” I said to Roy.

“Yeah.” He didn’t push. That was Roy. “Well. Whatever it is, don’t carry it standing up. Bad for the posture.” He took another small cold thing off the tray and drifted toward the windows, toward the Germans, because that was where the story was, and Roy went where the story was the way water goes downhill.

I stood by the food for a moment longer and waited for the well to go quiet again.

It did. It always did. That was the trick of it, the only trick I had: you let the stone fall, and you listened to it hit, and then you went back to the party, because the party was the work and the work was the only thing that had ever made the noise stop.

The noise that made the other noise stop was, that evening, a voice.

It came from the far end of the long room, where someone had put a small black piano and a stool, and on the stool a man I didn’t know was playing something slow, and beside him, in a dress the color of old wine that had been good wine once, stood Lola Schiff, and she was singing.

She was singing in German, which took a particular kind of nerve in that room and on that continent in that year, and she knew it, and that was the point. It was an old Viennese thing, a cabaret song from before the world ended, about a woman watching a man leave on a train and being terribly, terribly reasonable about it, and Lola sang it the way she sang everything, which was as though she found the whole business of human feeling slightly funny and was doing you the courtesy of not laughing. The Germans by the window had gone still. The Marquesa had stopped her story. Even the PVDE man had paused in his rounds, and for the length of the song the room full of liars went quiet and let one woman tell them the truth in the language they were all, in one way or another, at war with.

When she finished there was the small uncertain silence that follows a thing too good for the room, and then applause, the loud relieved applause of people glad to be let off the hook of feeling something, and Lola inclined her head a precise quarter inch, which from Lola was a curtsy, and said something to the pianist, and stepped down.