Chapter One — The Casino at Estoril

The summer of 1943 found me at the Casino do Estoril, which in those years was less a gambling establishment than a kind of geopolitical mixer with chips. Every Nazi cultural attaché, exiled Bourbon, freelancing Hungarian, and out-of-work Romanian count in southern Europe was packed in there pretending to play chemin de fer while they sized each other up for assassination, recruitment, or marriage — sometimes all three before the evening was out. I was nominally there as Calvin Brennan, war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune Foreign Service, and actually there because Bill Donovan’s people in Washington had decided I’d look natural with a press pass and a drinking problem.

They were right about both.

The Madeira at Estoril was the color of weak tea and twice as honest. I’d been working on a glass of it for nineteen minutes at the rail of the table, doing what Donovan’s Lisbon station called ambient collection and what I called drinking on the government’s tab while watching other people lose money. It was a Tuesday. Tuesdays at the casino were the good nights — the weekend crowd was gone, the serious players hadn’t yet arrived from Madrid, and the room belonged to the regulars and to whoever the regulars were trying to bed.

The croupier was a slim Portuguese named Duarte whose hands moved with the soft economy of a man who had been doing this for a very long time and who knew, with the certainty of a priest hearing confession, exactly how the shoe was rigged tonight and for whom. I’d been watching his hands for six hands. By the seventh I was certain. The shoe was bleeding low cards toward seat four, where a thin Frenchman with the look of an aging tennis pro was losing slowly enough to disguise the fact that he intended to win catastrophically in about twenty minutes.

I was making a mental note of the Frenchman’s face — Section X liked faces — when the Romanian came in with the woman.

Cantacuzino I knew. Bern station had circulated three surveillance photographs the previous Tuesday, attached to a memo from London that used the phrase of urgent interest twice, which in SIS dialect means either we are about to assassinate this man or we have been trying to assassinate this man for six months and would like to know if anyone has any ideas. He was forty-something, bald in the way certain Eastern European men are bald — completely, gleamingly, as if the hair had been a moral failing he had renounced — and he wore his dinner jacket the way a man wears a uniform he has earned. Money once. Influence still. The Abwehr paid him in something other than cash, was the rumor, though no one had yet established what.

The woman I did not know.

She was wearing a green silk dress that had clearly been bought before the war by someone with money and worn since the war by someone with cleverness, and she was looking at the table the way a cat looks at an aquarium. Her hair was the dark red-brown that in certain lights reads as black and in others as a kind of slow fire. She was younger than Cantacuzino by fifteen years, possibly twenty, and she walked the way a dancer walks when she is trying not to walk like a dancer.

Cantacuzino put his hand on the small of her back, said something close to her ear that made her smile without warmth, and peeled off toward the bar.

I gave it ninety seconds.

The Madeira had warmed in my hand. I set it down on the rail, took a step along the brass, and stopped at her shoulder. Close enough to smell her perfume — something French, something old, something she had worn before this war and would wear after it.

“You’re not going to bet,” I said quietly.

She did not turn her head. “I’m not?”

“You’ve been watching that table for six hands and you haven’t reached for your purse. Either you can’t afford it, which the dress says you can, or you’ve worked out the shoe is rigged, which means you’ve worked it out faster than three men at the rail who do this professionally.”

A small movement at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. The acknowledgment of a smile, withheld for later use.

“You are observant,” she said.

“It’s been mentioned. Usually as a complaint.”

She turned then, finally, and looked at me properly. Her eyes were the gray-green of the Tagus in November and entirely without warmth. She was beautiful in the specific way that women become beautiful when beauty has been useful to them for a long time — a beauty that has been appraised, by others and by herself, and weaponized accordingly.

“Mr. Brennan,” she said.

That was the first wrong note of the evening. I had not given her my name.

“You have me at a disadvantage.”

“Vera,” she said. “And you should not look so surprised. You are in a casino in Estoril in the summer of 1943. Everyone here knows everyone here. The only question is which of them is pretending not to.”

“And which of them are you pretending not to know?”

She tilted her head, considering me. The chandelier light caught the small silver pendant at her throat — a leaf, or a feather, hard to say. “Tonight? Almost all of them. It is exhausting.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Do you bet, Mr. Brennan?”

“Only when I know how the shoe is rigged.”

She laughed at that — a real laugh, brief, surprised out of her, and somewhere in Berlin a man’s career took a step it did not know it had taken.

“Then you do not bet at Estoril,” she said. “Not seriously. You drink Madeira and you watch.”

“I’d watch better with company.”

“My company is at the bar.”

“Your company is buying a Cognac he will pretend to enjoy and watching us in the mirror behind the bartender. He has about three more minutes of patience. You have about two before he comes back. You should use them telling me something I don’t already know.”

She looked at me for a long moment. I could see her deciding something. It was not the decision I had expected her to be making — should I talk to this man — but something colder and more interior, the calculation of a chess player who has just realized she may have to think.

“Avenida Palace,” she said. “The bar. Eleven thirty. Come alone or do not come at all.”

She turned back to the table. The conversation was over. I stood at her shoulder for another five seconds for the sake of the watcher at the bar, then drifted back along the rail, retrieved my Madeira, and walked out into the casino’s main room as if I had been politely refused something I had not particularly wanted.

I did not look at the bar.

I did not need to.

* * *

She let him work it out.

Vera waited until the American had moved a precise distance away — far enough to look like rejection, close enough that Cantacuzino, watching in the long mirror, could read the rejection and be reassured — and then she let her shoulders fall by the smallest fraction. The performance of disappointment. A woman whose evening had not gone the way she’d hoped.

It was a good performance. She had been giving it, in various forms, for nineteen months.

She walked to the bar with the unhurried pace of a woman who knew exactly where her companion was, and slid onto the stool beside him. Cantacuzino did not look at her. He was watching the room in the mirror.

“Well?” he said. In Romanian. The Romanian of Bucharest before the war, when Bucharest still thought of itself as a small Paris and not a large barracks.

“He is bored,” Vera said. In the same Romanian. “And drunk. And useful, I think. He has been here six months. He drinks too much for a journalist.”

“All journalists drink too much.”

“Not like this. This is the drinking of a man who is paid to drink. Donovan’s people, certainly.”

“You are certain?”

“I am certain enough to be useful to you. Which is what you pay me for.”

Cantacuzino took a slow sip of his Cognac. His face in the mirror showed nothing. He was not a stupid man and he was not, by the standards of his profession, a cruel one. He was simply a man who had decided, sometime in 1939 or 1940, that his survival required the survival of certain other arrangements, and who was now too far down that road to turn around.

“Stahl will want to meet him,” he said.

“Then arrange it.”

“You will arrange it.”

She did not let her face change. She reached for the small glass of port the bartender had set down for her — Cantacuzino always ordered for her, always port, always the same brand — and lifted it to her lips.

“When?” she said.

“Soon. Stahl is patient but he is not infinitely patient. The convoy schedules are leaking and he has decided the leak is American. He would like to know which American.”

“It might not be Brennan.”

“It might not be. But Brennan will know who it is, or he will know how to find out who it is. So you will arrange it.”

She set the glass down. Inside her chest something old and tired moved once and was still.

“I will arrange it,” she said.

In her purse, against her hip, the small photograph of her sister — folded once, edges soft from a year of folding — pressed silently into the silk.

* * *

I took the late train back to Lisbon.

The Linha de Cascais ran along the coast from the station at Estoril through Carcavelos and Algés and on into Cais do Sodré, thirty-five minutes if the driver was awake and forty if he wasn’t, and at this hour the carriages were nearly empty. I had the second-class compartment to myself except for an old Portuguese woman sleeping under a black shawl and a young man in a cheap suit who was either a clerk going home from a long shift or someone Cantacuzino had put on the train to watch me. I assumed the latter and made it easy for him: I sat by the window, lit a cigarette, and looked out at the dark coast going past.

The sea that summer was very black and very calm. Lights showed in the windows of villas where exiled royals were drinking themselves slowly to death on what remained of their portable jewelry. Beyond Carcavelos a man was walking his dog along the path above the rocks — at this hour, in this country, which had perfected the slow uneventful evening as a form of national defense against the rest of Europe. Somewhere down the carriage a radio was playing fado, the long slow vowels of a woman who had perfected mourning as an art form.

I thought about Vera.

She had known my name. That was the thing. Cantacuzino’s people would have briefed her — of course they would have — and Cantacuzino’s people meant, at one or two removes, the Abwehr station in Lisbon, and the Abwehr station in Lisbon meant Oberst Friedrich Stahl. Bern had a file on Stahl. I had read it twice. Prussian, forty-eight, third son of a minor military family, two years on the Eastern Front before they’d reassigned him to neutral capitals because someone in Berlin had decided he was too valuable to lose to a Russian mortar. He spoke six languages. He had not, as far as Bern could establish, ever joined the Party. He was the kind of man you wanted across the table from you because he would not be theatrical, and the kind of man you did not want across the table from you because he would be everything else.

If Vera was working for Cantacuzino, she was working for Stahl. Which meant the invitation to the Avenida Palace was either an operation against me or an audition for one.

The interesting thing — the thing I turned over in my head as the train rattled through the long curve into Algés — was that she had not seemed to enjoy the work. I had been around Abwehr women before. Berlin in ’38, Madrid in ’40. They came in two basic models: the believers, who were terrifying, and the professionals, who were merely good. Vera was neither. There was something underneath the performance that did not match the performance, and that something was the only reason I was going to the Avenida Palace instead of cabling Donovan’s people and going home.

That, and the way she had laughed.

The train pulled into Cais do Sodré at eleven-twelve. The young man in the cheap suit got off three cars ahead of me and did not look back, which told me everything I needed to know about him: a professional, not a thug, and therefore Stahl’s, not Cantacuzino’s. Stahl was already taking an interest. That was both good and very bad.

I caught a taxi at the rank outside the station and rode the eight minutes up the Avenida da Liberdade to the hotel. The driver did not speak. I tipped him in escudos and added a few more for not speaking, and he nodded the small particular nod of a Lisbon taxi driver who had decided that the American was a tipper but not a problem.

The doorman at the Avenida Palace knew me. He held the door without comment.

The bar at the Avenida Palace at eleven twenty on a Tuesday in July was nearly empty. Two German businessmen in the corner who were not businessmen. An old Englishwoman drinking gin and reading a French novel. The bartender, Manuel, who knew my bourbon and who poured it without asking, three fingers in a heavy glass, no ice because the ice at the Avenida Palace in 1943 was not to be trusted.

I took my drink to a small table against the back wall, from which I could see the door and both entrances from the lobby, and I waited.

She came in at eleven thirty-two.

She had changed. The green dress was gone; she was wearing something darker now, a kind of charcoal silk that looked like mourning if you were the sort of person who looked at women in that way. Her hair was the same. Her perfume was the same. Cantacuzino was not with her.

She crossed the bar and sat down opposite me without being invited, which I appreciated.

“You came alone,” she said.

“You asked me to.”

“Many men do not do what they are asked.”

“I’m not many men.”

“No.” She looked at me. The eyes were less guarded than they had been at the casino. Not unguarded — I do not think Vera was ever unguarded — but the topmost layer of varnish was off. “You are not.”

Manuel materialized at her elbow. She ordered a brandy, in Portuguese, with the small particular grace of a woman who had been ordering brandy in foreign bars for a long time. He went away.

“How long do we have?” I said.

“Until two o’clock. He believes I am visiting an aunt in the Bairro Alto. The aunt exists. She will lie for me. She is very fond of me, and not at all fond of him.”

“And after two o’clock?”

“After two o’clock I have to be back at his villa in Cascais, in his bed, telling him about you.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“What he wants to hear. That you were bored and drunk and that I am working on you. That you may know who is leaking the convoy schedules. That I will need a week, possibly two, to bring you to a useful state.”

“That’s generous.”

“It is two weeks of my life I am giving you, Mr. Brennan. I would not call it generous. I would call it an investment.”

Manuel brought the brandy. She lifted it but did not drink. The light from the wall sconces caught the small silver leaf at her throat.

“Why,” I said, “are you telling me this?”

She looked at me for a long time.

“Because in five minutes,” she said, “I am going to take you upstairs to a room I have on the third floor, and we are going to spend an hour and forty minutes in that room, and afterward you are going to walk out of this hotel and decide whether you trust what I am about to say to you. And I would rather you decide that with the facts. I do not want to seduce a man who does not know what he is being seduced for. I have done that work. It is the worst work there is.”

“What are you going to say to me?”

“That I want you to help me kill Friedrich Stahl.”

She said it very quietly. Manuel was three meters away and did not look up. The English-woman turned a page of her French novel.

I drank my bourbon and set it down.

“All right,” I said.

“All right what?”

“All right, I’ll come upstairs.”

She studied me. Whatever she had expected me to say, that had not entirely been it.

“You are not going to ask the obvious questions?”

“I’m going to ask them at one fifty-five. Right now I’d rather have the hour and forty minutes.”

She did not smile, but the corner of her mouth moved in the way it had moved at the casino, the acknowledgment of a smile, withheld.

“Mr. Brennan,” she said. “I think you may turn out to be a problem.”

“It’s been mentioned. Usually as a complaint.”

She stood up, left her brandy untouched, and walked toward the elevator. I left two escudos on the table for Manuel and followed her.

* * *

The room was on the third floor, at the back of the hotel, looking out over a small courtyard with a fig tree and a stone fountain that had not run since the Republic. A single lamp was on, low, beside the bed. The bed was made. She had not been here yet tonight; she had taken the room earlier in the day and changed somewhere else. The room had the slightly held-breath quality of a hotel room reserved for one purpose and not yet used.

She closed the door behind me and turned the key in the lock.

“There is a telephone,” she said, nodding at the small desk. “It rings sometimes, when he is checking. If it rings I will answer it. Do not speak.”

“Understood.”

She stood very still for a moment with her back against the door. Then she crossed the room to me. She did not kiss me first. She put one hand flat against my chest, the way you check a horse before you mount it, and looked up at my face.

“I have not done this,” she said quietly, “with someone I chose, in eighteen months.”

“Then choose carefully.”

“I have.”

She kissed me.

I had been kissed before by women who wanted something from me. Vera kissed me the way a woman kisses a man when she has decided, against her own better judgment, that she would like to remember how it felt to want something for its own sake. It was not a soft kiss. It was a kiss that had been waiting in her for a long time and was now arriving all at once. I felt her hand fist in my shirt at the collarbone, the small involuntary tightening of someone who has been holding themselves apart and is letting go an inch at a time.

When she pulled back her eyes were closed.

“The light,” she said. “Leave it.”

“All right.”

“I want to see you.”

She let me unfasten the back of the charcoal dress. It came off her shoulders the way the dress had been cut to come off, easily, with the slow inevitability of good tailoring, and she stepped out of it and stood in the lamplight in a slip the color of cream. Her shoulders were narrower than I had expected. There was a small pale scar at the base of her throat, just beside the silver leaf, the kind of scar a child gets from a fall and a grown woman stops noticing. Her breasts beneath the silk were small and high and her nipples showed dark through the fabric.

She watched me look at her.

“You are not in a hurry,” she said.

“No.”

“Good.”

I took my time with her. She had said she had not done this with someone she had chosen in eighteen months, and I believed her, and I wanted her to remember the choosing. I kissed the small scar at her throat first, and then her mouth, and then the hollow at the base of her neck where her pulse was beating fast and shallow under the skin. She made a small sound — not quite a word, the breath of a word — when I drew the strap of the slip down off her shoulder.

The slip came off. She was naked under it. She did not flinch when I looked at her, and I understood, in a small bad moment, that she had been looked at by men she did not want, often, and that the not-flinching was a thing she had built deliberately.

I made her flinch anyway, two minutes later, when I knelt and put my mouth on her, and she gasped and her hand came down hard on the back of my head — not pushing, holding — and she said something in Polish that was not a name and not a prayer and not, I thought, anything she had said to anyone in a long time.

She pulled me up before I could finish her that way. “Not yet,” she said. “Not the first time. I want —” She did not finish the sentence. She turned and walked the four steps to the bed and lay down on it on her back and held out her hand.

I undressed. She watched me without performing the watching. The lamplight was kind to both of us. When I came to her she opened her legs around me and pulled me down by the shoulders and I went into her slowly, slowly, watching her face, and when I was all the way in her she made a sound I will remember for the rest of my life — a small broken sound, half-laugh, half-sob, the sound of a woman who had not been touched gently in a very long time and who had forgotten until that moment that gentleness was a thing she had once required.

“Cal,” she said. It was the first time she had used my given name.

“I know.”

“Slowly.”

“Yes.”

I moved in her slowly. Her hands moved over my back the way a blind woman reads a face, finding things, learning them. Her hips rose to meet mine in a small careful rhythm that was nothing like the rhythm of a woman performing pleasure. It was the rhythm of a woman discovering that she was, after eighteen months of being used, still capable of pleasure, and the discovery was making her very quiet.

When she came it was not loud. She turned her face into my shoulder and bit down on the muscle there hard enough to leave a mark I would find in the morning and not mind, and her body went tight around me in a long slow wave, and then she was crying — silently, without moving, the tears running sideways across her temple and into her hair.

I held her through it. I did not finish. She felt me holding back and shook her head against my shoulder and whispered, “No, please, I want you to,” and I did, then, with my face in her hair, and afterward I stayed inside her for a long time and she did not ask me to move.

The telephone did not ring.

After a while she said, very quietly, “I am sorry I am crying.”

“Don’t be.”

“It is not — it is not what you think.”

“I know what it is.”

“Do you.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a long time. Her hand moved on my back in a small absent stroke.

“Cal,” she said.

“Yes.”

“At one fifty-five. You said you would ask the obvious questions at one fifty-five.”

“Yes.”

“It is one twenty.”

“I know.”

“Ask them now.”

I lifted my head and looked at her. The lamplight had not moved. Her face was wet and her eyes were open and she was looking at me the way a person looks at a door they have decided to walk through.

“Why do you want Stahl dead?” I said.

She told me.

It took eleven minutes. I will not put it on the page here, because some of it is hers and some of it is her sister’s and some of it belongs to a small town near Lublin that does not exist anymore, and a man does not have the right to make easy sentences out of those things. The shape of it was this: her mother and sister were in a camp. Stahl, personally, had arranged the leverage. Stahl, personally, would lift the leverage if he were dead, because the file on Vera was kept in Stahl’s personal safe in his villa in Sintra, and the orders concerning her family were Stahl’s orders alone, and with Stahl gone the file became one more loose paper in a war full of loose papers, and her mother and sister became merely two more Polish women in a camp, which — and she said this with the absolute steadiness of someone who had thought about it for a long time — gave them a better chance than they had now.

When she finished she said, “I have been waiting for the right American for nine months.”

“And I’m the right American.”

“I do not know yet. I think so. We will find out.”

“How.”

“You will go back to Donovan’s people. You will tell them that you have been approached by a Polish national working for Cantacuzino and that you believe she can be turned. You will tell them she has offered information on the convoy leak in exchange for her family’s extraction. You will not tell them about Stahl. Not yet. Donovan’s people would refuse. Stahl is too useful alive — they read his cables, they have decided he is the rational German, they will not authorize his removal. So you will work the convoy leak with me, and we will run that operation honestly, and meanwhile you and I will plan the other thing privately, and when the moment comes we will do it ourselves.”

“You and me.”

“You and me.”

“That is a great deal of trust, Vera, on a one-hour acquaintance.”

“It is one hour and forty minutes,” she said. “And I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking you to trust that I am a woman whose mother and sister are in a camp. That is a much smaller thing to trust.”

I lay beside her for a long time without speaking. The fountain in the courtyard did not run. The light from the lamp did not move. Somewhere on a lower floor a door closed.

“All right,” I said.

“All right what?”

“All right. We do it your way.”

She did not thank me. She turned her face into my shoulder and breathed out, once, the long breath of a person who had been holding her chest still for nineteen months.

At one fifty-five she got up and dressed. The charcoal dress went back on the way it had come off, easily, the body underneath it now a body I knew. She stood at the small mirror over the desk and put her face back on with a practiced economy that frightened me a little. The Vera who walked out of the room would not be the Vera who had cried into my shoulder. The Vera who walked out of the room would be a Polish national working for a Romanian count, returning to a villa in Cascais to lie in a man’s bed and tell him about a useful drunk American.

At the door she turned.

“Cal.”

“Yes.”

“Do not come to the casino tomorrow. Or the next day. He will expect me to be working. Let him expect it. I will find you on Friday.”

“All right.”

“And Cal.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for the slowness.”

She left.

I lay in the bed for ten minutes more, looking at the ceiling, and then I got up and dressed and went down to the bar. Manuel was still on. He poured the bourbon without asking. I sat at the same small table against the back wall and watched the door for a long time, though I knew she was not coming back tonight.

I thought about what I had just agreed to.

I had agreed, on the strength of an hour and forty minutes with a woman I had known for three hours and twelve minutes, to lie to Bill Donovan’s people and to plan the unauthorized assassination of a German colonel in a neutral country, with the assistance of a woman who was, as of approximately ninety minutes ago, still on the active payroll of the Abwehr.

It was, by some distance, the stupidest decision of my professional life.

It was also, I realized as I finished the bourbon and signaled Manuel for another, the first decision I had made since 1937 that did not feel like the wrong one.

I drank the second bourbon slowly. The English-woman finished her gin and her novel and went up to bed. The two German businessmen who were not businessmen left, separately, three minutes apart. Manuel began polishing glasses with the slow patience of a man whose shift had four more hours to run.

Outside, somewhere over the Tagus, the first light of Wednesday morning was a long way off.

I sat in the bar of the Avenida Palace and I thought about a green silk dress, and a small pale scar, and a woman who had cried silently into my shoulder, and a colonel in Sintra who kept a file in a safe, and a sister in a camp near Lublin, and the long bad road that had just opened up under my feet, and I knew with the absolute certainty of a man who has spent six years pretending not to care about anything that I was going to walk down it.

Chapter Two — The Legation

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.

I went to meet her at the edge of the room, by the doors to the terrace, where the hired help was permitted to stand and the guests were not expected to notice them.

“Calvin,” she said. “You came. I told Senhora Costa the American would come, because the American always comes where there is free whisky and a war on. She did not believe a journalist would attend a party at the British embassy. I said, my dear, a journalist would attend the opening of an envelope if the envelope contained gin.”

“Lola.”

“You are going to tell me I sang well.”

“You sang well.”

“I sang adequately to a room of people who do not deserve German.” She took a glass of champagne off a passing tray with the unthinking efficiency of a woman who had learned that you take the champagne when it passes because you do not know when it will pass again. “But it is the only German they will hear all night that is not a threat, so, a public service.” She drank. “You look terrible, by the way. No. Not terrible. You look like a man who has had good news and cannot tell anyone. It is a worse look than the other one. With bad news at least the face has something to do.”

I have said that Lola was the one person in Lisbon who could read me, and this is the moment to be honest about how much th