Chapter 4: The Civilized Hour

by Wesley Doyle

The thing about a door you have been walking toward for the better part of a month is that when it finally opens it does not look like a door. It looks like an old Englishman buying you a drink you did not ask for. Most of the consequential doors in Lisbon were got through exactly that way, and this was the one I had been told to expect — it will come to you wearing the face of an accident, she had said, an introduction that seems to be someone else’s idea — and so when the accident arrived, on a Tuesday, in the person of Sir Edmund Carruthers, I had at least the small advantage of knowing it was not one.

He found me at the Grémio with a whisky already in each hand, which was his way of conducting a negotiation before you knew one had begun.

“Brennan, dear boy. You look rested. I shall have to find out who’s been letting you sleep and have them stopped.” He pressed the second glass on me. “I’ve a thing Thursday you ought to come to. Dull little dinner up at Sintra — the Verdes’ place, you don’t know them, nobody does, which is rather their charm. A few people. Nobody important.” He said nobody important the way a fisherman says there’s nothing biting, which is to say while watching the line. “You’ll come. The air’s better up there and you’re looking peaky, whatever you say.”

“Who’ll be there, Sir Edmund?”

“I’ve just told you. Nobody.” He sipped. “One or two of the German commercial people, I expect, since the Verdes will invite anyone who owns a dinner jacket and a grievance. A Swede who sells things. The usual Lisbon zoo.” And then, lightly, on his way past it, the way he did everything that mattered: “There’s a fellow I think you’d find worth your while. Quiet sort. Reads a great deal. I shan’t say more — I’d hate to oversell him and have you disappointed.”

I have learned that when a man like Carruthers declines to oversell something, it is because he knows he doesn’t have to. He had brokered the introduction, and dressed it as a dinner, and would never once say the name Stahl, and I would go, and we both knew I would go, and the only thing left unspoken between us was the price — because Sir Edmund did not do favors, he extended credit, and the interest on it would come due at a moment of his choosing, in a currency he had not yet named.

“It’ll cost me something, this dinner,” I said. “Won’t it.”

He looked genuinely delighted. “Dear boy. Everything costs you something. The only question worth asking in this town is whether you’ll be told the price before or after.” He patted my arm. “Thursday. Eight. Wear the good suit, you’ve an awful one and a less awful one, wear the less awful one.” And he was gone into the club, leaving me holding a whisky I had not ordered and an appointment I had been steering toward for weeks and had not, until that moment, quite believed I would keep.

I reported to Eldridge on the Wednesday, which was a mistake, except that not reporting would have been a worse one.

We walked, which was how he liked it when there was anything real to say — Eldridge trusted open air the way other men trusted locked rooms — down through the Baixa with the trams grinding past and the lottery sellers calling the numbers, and I gave him the week’s product, the true dull half of it, the bits of color a correspondent gathers, and I did not tell him that tomorrow I was going to Sintra to sit down with the Abwehr. I had decided that on the train days before. There was no version of I am meeting Stahl that did not end with Eldridge forbidding it, because Stahl was too useful alive to Donovan’s people and a journalist cozying up to him was a risk with no sanctioned reward, and forbidding it was exactly the correct call, which was why I could not let him make it.

So I steered, the way you steer a man who is better than you by giving him true things to hold so his hands are full when the false one goes by.

“The Vera business,” he said, when I’d finished. Not a question. He had been turning it over for two weeks, I could tell, in whatever cold clean place he turned things. “Where are we.”

“Slow. Like you said. I’m letting her come to me.”

“Good.” He walked a few steps. “Pull back from it.”

I had been ready for a great many things from Eldridge and not for that. “Pull back.”

“There’s chatter.” He didn’t look at me; he was reading a shop window, or appearing to. “The other side’s hunting the convoy leak harder than they were, and the word that’s come back to me twice now is that they’ve decided it’s an American, and they’re working out which one. Which means anyone of ours who’s suddenly interesting to them is a man standing under a tree in a lightning storm.” Now he looked at me, the insurance-salesman face giving nothing, the eyes giving the small cold draft I’d learned to mind. “A turned woman walking up to hand you the leak is the brightest lightning in Lisbon right now. I’m not saying drop her. I’m saying go quiet. Slow to a crawl. Don’t let yourself get interesting this month. You hearing me?”