Chapter 8: Mercy

Carruthers gave me the way, as he’d promised, written on the back of his own card in a hand too elegant for the century — a turning off the Sintra road, a lane, a gate, they’ll be expecting you, dear boy, do try to come back with something I can use — and I drove up into the hills on a Thursday evening with the unsent cable in my breast pocket where I had taken to carrying it the way other men carry a saint’s medal, for luck, or for the opposite of luck, I was no longer sure which.

The road climbed into the damp. Sintra makes its own weather; you leave Lisbon in the flat gold of a dying summer afternoon and twenty minutes later you are inside a cloud that has been sitting on the same hill since the Moors, everything dripping and green and smelling of stone that has never once been dry, and somewhere in that climb the cold clerk took the wheel from me the way he had been taking everything since the Tamariz, and the other man, the one who had decided at a window that he did not much mind how this ended, sat over in the passenger seat with his hands folded and watched the cloud come down.

I knew the house before I saw it. That was the thing that nearly undid me at the gate, and it is the kind of detail that tells you what a summer has cost you: I had been driven up to a house I had never visited, in the dark, and I knew it, because a woman had built it for me once in another darkness, brick by brick, with her head on my chest. The study is on the garden side. The safe is behind the Friedrich the Great — he thinks it is funny, the old king watching over his papers. The study has a door to the terrace, the terrace has steps to the garden, the garden has a gate to the lane, and the lane is not watched, because he does not believe anyone would be mad enough to come at the house from the lane. Forty-one steps. She had given me the map in bed in the spring of us, before any of this, and the cold clerk had filed it, and now I was driving up to the original of a thing I had only ever held as her tracing, and the part of the night that should have felt like tradecraft felt instead like grief, because every measured fact of that house was also a place her voice had been.

The gate stood open. A man was waiting in the light of the door.

Hoffmann did not introduce himself and did not need to; I had carried the name for two months without a face to hang it on, and here was the face, and it was the face of a man who had been chosen precisely for having none — middle height, middle age, the flat attentive nothing of a good butler or a good executioner, the two professions having more in common than either likes to admit. He took my hat. He did not take my coat, which told me he had been told I would not be staying long enough to remove it, which told me the evening had a shape already and the shape was Stahl’s. He does not drink and he does not leave, Vera had said, and he is the reason the house is more dangerous than the man. Hoffmann poured me a brandy I had not asked for, handed it across without a word, and withdrew to a chair in the corner of the hall from which, I understood, he intended to spend the evening being furniture that answered.

“Mr. Brennan.” Stahl came out of the lit room beyond, in a cardigan, of all things, an old man’s grey cardigan that did more to unnerve me than any uniform could have, because it said you have caught me at home, there is nothing here to perform. Which was the performance. “You came. I confess I had wagered with myself you would not — that you would think better of an evening in the hills with a dull German and send a polite note about a deadline. I am pleased to lose the wager. I lose so few.” He had the mineral water in his hand, sweating as it always sweated. “Come in out of my weather. The house is warm, which is the one mercy it offers. The people who built it believed warmth was morally suspect.”

I will not pretend I remember the first hour cleanly, because the first hour was the trap of the whole evening and I knew it was the trap and walked into it anyway, the way you do. The trap was comfort. He had built, in that wet stone box on a hill in a neutral country in the fourth year of a war, a room so deeply, fundamentally comfortable — the fire, the books to the ceiling, the gramophone turning over something by Mozart at a volume just below conversation, the two good chairs angled toward the hearth like an argument that had long ago been settled in friendship — that the body simply surrendered to it before the mind could file an objection. I had come to case a fortress. He had shown me a study, and the study had wanted to keep me, and a man who has been cold and hunted and lying for a season does not have the defenses he thinks he has against a warm room and a chair that fits.