The City in Darkness Read online

  He stopped at a café with tables outside but decided to sit inside. He ordered a coffee and sat on a stool by the window. He could see the front windows of Tavares to his right and just enough of the street on either side.

  After half an hour he came to the conclusion nothing was going to happen. He assumed Leopold Kerney was in there but there was no obvious surveillance outside. Then he saw the man he now knew as Chillingham, a cheroot clenched between his teeth, strolling towards the restaurant from the other end of the Rua da Misericórdia. The Englishman stopped and got into the taxi. He spoke to the driver for several minutes. It was a relaxed conversation; they were both laughing. Chillingham took out his wallet, then he got out of the taxi and started to stroll back the way he had come.

  The restaurant was being watched but only by a taxi driver. It could even be the taxi that brought Kerney there. If it was then Chillingham was better than Stefan had thought. And it was Chillingham he decided to follow now. He walked back into the street. It was almost dark now though the Rua da Misericórdia was bright and loud. He saw the Englishman turning down to the lower town ahead of him. There probably wasn’t much to gain from following except to demonstrate that he was better at it. The chances were he would get no more than a walk through the city and end up at the British Embassy. A better option would be to confront the man. He increased his pace till they were parallel then turned with an affable smile.

  ‘A beautiful evening.’

  The Englishman returned the smile. Stefan could see that Chillingham thought he should recognize him. He was trying to place him.

  ‘We get some rough stuff off the Atlantic now and again,’ said the Englishman, ‘but it usually is a beautiful evening, which makes discussing the weather pointless. If you’re English, it leaves nothing to talk about.’

  ‘Or if you’re Irish,’ replied Stefan.

  ‘Or if you’re Irish, ah!’ Chillingham repeated the words and grinned. He recognized Stefan now; the Irish policeman from the Avenida Palace.

  ‘You do know who I am, but we haven’t been introduced. It’s Stefan Gillespie. You have seen my passport already so I don’t need to expand.’

  ‘Simon Chillingham,’ said the Englishman, then burst out laughing. ‘That little rat, Agostinho. He would sell his grandmother for a dollar.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have wasted two on him then.’

  ‘Two dollars? My God, man, you can’t go off hiking the prices like that. It’ll be round every hotel in Lisbon. I don’t know about the Jerries, but HMG can’t afford bribes at such stiff rates. There is a war on, old fellow!’

  ‘Your war, Mr Chillingham, not ours. Our Department of External Affairs won’t like you following Irish ambassadors. Any reason for it?’

  Simon Chillingham ignored the question and took out a packet of cheroots. He offered Stefan one. He shook his head. Chillingham lit his.

  ‘You’re right, they’re disgusting. The mosquitoes think so, which is a help. I took you for some kind of plod, if you don’t mind my saying. A plod of no account. My mistake. But you are a policeman, though, an inspector?’

  ‘Special Branch.’

  ‘Oh, your version of that mob. They didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘What are you, Military Intelligence?’

  ‘A lowly attaché, third secretary – general dogsbody.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

  Chillingham blew out a cloud of acrid smoke.

  ‘Well, it is all hands to the pump. I’d better buy you a drink,’

  ‘As you’ve cost Ireland two dollars we can’t afford, you had.’

  In a corner of the Praça do Comércio the two men sat under the stone arches of Martinho’s café. Inside it was dark and cramped but here, where the Rua da Prata met the Pombalina, you could see, usefully, in every direction. The grand square of the Praça do Comércio was full of people.

  Walking through the square, Simon Chillingham had chatted idly about the city and its sights, and its new population of refugees fleeing the war in Europe; as he reminded Stefan often enough to make him regret saying it, ‘Our war, not yours.’ Mostly the refugees were from Germany and Austria, Jews in large numbers, but all sorts of people the Nazis didn’t much like, for whatever reason, and they had a lot of reasons. They came from Czechoslovakia too, and from Poland. They were there from France as well, from Belgium, the Netherlands, trickling in from all over Europe; those with the money or the vision to read what was coming if things went wrong. And if things did go wrong the stream of refugees trying to get a boat to the United States or South America, anywhere that wasn’t Europe, would turn into a flood. Chillingham referred to the possibility of a flood only once, but he said ‘if things go wrong’ a number of times. The idea that Hitler’s planes and tanks were unstoppable, as they had been in Poland, was everywhere in Europe. Stefan felt it in the night air of Lisbon now, as he had felt it in Dublin and in a railway carriage rattling through Hampshire.

  ‘Favor, uma garrafa de Vinho Verde,’ said Chillingham.

  The waiter gazed at the Englishman and Irishman with mild irritation.

  ‘You don’t mind that? Cheap and very cheerful.’

  ‘I’d say cheerful would be grand,’ smiled Stefan.

  ‘Ignore me! What the hell did we talk about before we had a war?’

  The wine arrived and Chillingham poured it out.

  ‘I hope we can drink to the end of you following Mr Kerney.’

  ‘Well, I’m out of it anyway now. Well spotted!’

  ‘We’ve done the jokes, Mr Chillingham. Do you want a complaint made?’

  ‘That would be rather tedious, old man. These things are. But do bear in mind HMG’s own complaints wending their way across the Irish Sea.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Your ambassador’s peculiar taste in dinner guests.’

  ‘Why do you care who he eats with?’

  ‘You’d expect us to be interested in what German Intelligence is up to, wherever they’re up to it. Old Lisboa in this case. Well, that’s the game. So if the Irish ambassador to Spain is chomping away in a restaurant one evening with a chap who’s an Abwehr colonel, it’s entirely reasonable we raise our eyebrows. I happen to be the eyebrows chosen to be raised.’

  It was news to Stefan, though Chillingham clearly didn’t think so.

  ‘We assume it’s all to do with this chap Ryan.’

  ‘Which chap Ryan would that be?’

  ‘Oh, you can do better than that. We know Mr Kerney’s been talking to the Jerries about lifting Ryan from prison in Burgos. Frank Ryan’s no secret himself. He was always splashed across the newspaper before the war interrupted such things. All sorts of grandees trying to get Franco to let the poor bastard out, here there and everywhere. Questions about him in the House of Commons and all that. At one time HMG was even giving a push behind the scenes. Although there is a little rumour that some of your fellow countrymen aren’t as keen to have him home as they say. Unfortunately for Mr Ryan, the world has other things to think about now. I doubt he’s even much of a priority for Mr de Valera these days. But we have a natural curiosity about why the dear old Germans would want to spring an International Brigade officer who hates the Nazis worse than the plague.’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘Oh, come on, old man!’ Simon Chillingham laughed and shook his head. He took the bottle of Vinho Verde and poured two more glasses.

  ‘Ryan is of a red complexion naturally, but not a commie. Less keen on commies than he was perhaps, after their antics in Spain. Still, more red than IRA according to our people.’

  ‘I’m just a policeman making sure Mr Kerney gets to Madrid.’

  ‘Via Salamanca and Burgos?’

  ‘Don’t you like the route?’

  ‘Franco hasn’t entirely moved his cohorts out of Burgos yet. It was his HQ, of course. And Salamanca is where German Military Intelligence set up in the Civil War. They’re still there too. They must like it. And they’re based in th
e Irish College. I don’t doubt you’ll stay with the rector there. Mr Kerney always does, you know. Bit of an Irish home from home.’

  Stefan drank the light, fizzy wine and said nothing. The Irish College was already in his head, but for reasons that made the British Intelligence man’s interest in it seem unimportant. Simon Chillingham was looking for reactions. He was showing how much he knew and implying he knew more. It was clumsily done. And it was not hard for Stefan to look as if what he was saying had passed over him and didn’t matter. It didn’t, not yet. All that mattered to him about Salamanca was that he had a reason to go there.

  ‘It’s a curious business,’ continued Chillingham. ‘Abwehr chap for dinner here, Abwehr chaps for dinner at the Irish College. You may not know the colonel Mr Kerney is entertaining tonight. The Abwehr are a fairly decent bunch as these things go, next to the Gestapo and their ilk. Military types for the most. Oberst Melsbach is Military Intelligence too, but he isn’t liked, I mean by his own crew. They’re wary of him. That’s the word.’

  ‘I see. Do you have a glass of wine with the Abwehr chaps too?’

  ‘Not quite, but we all know who’s who in Lisbon.’

  ‘There must be worse places to follow each other around.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned if I want a posting anywhere there’s a real war.’

  ‘There’s always Dublin.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be so bad, apart from the bloody weather.’

  ‘You have our own sentiments about our country in one.’

  The Englishman laughed.

  ‘I’ll be serious, Gillespie. The Ryan business is odd but Melsbach makes it odder. He met your Mr Kerney last time he was in Lisbon. He’s an officer in the Brandenburgers, the Abwehr military set-up. He was in Spain in the Civil War. The view in London is that shallow graves all over España testify to his activities. Which makes his concern for an International Brigade officer, even an Irish one,’ he poured more wine, ‘sehr wunderbar.’

  Stefan took in the new information. The Brandenburgers were already part of this. Frank Ryan’s German friend, Helmut Clissmann, was in the regiment. If an Abwehr regiment was involved in Ryan’s release it was unlikely Clissmann hadn’t been acting on orders, whatever about their friendship.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be repeating all this to your ambassador.’

  Chillingham looked at Stefan with an arch, colleague-to-colleague grin. Stefan knew what was behind it. In there was a version of what Terry Gregory had told him to hold fast to at all times; never tell anybody everything. And the Englishman was right. There would be things about this conversation he wouldn’t tell Kerney, as there were things Kerney wasn’t telling him. Instinct, not logic, decided what those things were.

  ‘You might want to warn him to look out for Oberst Melsbach.’

  ‘There are a lot of people he needs to look out for.’

  ‘Oh, we’re a fairly harmless bunch. Don’t worry about us.’

  ‘No bodies in shallow graves where you go then?’

  ‘I can see you have a very low opinion of the British Empire.’

  ‘It must be what comes of having been a part of it.’

  Stefan walked back to the Avenida Palace Hotel through the streets of the Pombalina, along the Rua Augusta. It was less busy now in the restaurants and bars. Shops had closed. He bought a postcard to send to Tom. It was as much for something to do as anything else, while he thought through his conversation with the British Intelligence officer. He didn’t know what time Kerney would be back but he decided he would avoid the suite’s sitting room and go straight to bed. He needed a clearer head before he tackled the ambassador, starting with an explanation of why he had been following him through Lisbon. Kerney would be embarrassed. Stefan knew that when you had to embarrass the man you worked for, it required careful handling.

  Simon Chillingham stayed at Martinho’s for one more glass of wine. He had enjoyed his drink with the Irish policeman. Inspector Gillespie was clearly no fool but he knew less about what was going on than he pretended; he certainly had no idea how the game was played in Lisbon. But Chillingham wasn’t convinced any of this mattered much. The intrusion of amateurs only hammered it home. It was the station head’s view that the Irish ambassador to Spain was neither as naive nor myopic as he appeared, but he was still an Irishman soft on the IRA. Weren’t they all? That message had gone to London; from London it had found its way by commodious recirculation, as these things did, to Colonel Archer in Irish Intelligence. Yet Kerney was back on the Iberian peninsula doing whatever he was doing with the Germans. The Irish appeared happy for him to pursue the Abwehr’s plan for Frank Ryan if it didn’t embarrass Irish neutrality, and Chillingham’s masters seemed to have no strong objections, if they could keep an eye on it. There was no intelligence without letting things happen. If the Germans thought springing a defunct IRA leader from gaol was a good idea, allowing them get on with it might reveal something useful. From what Chillingham knew Ryan seemed a decent fellow, as that sort of Irishman went, and Franco’s prisons were filthy enough that you couldn’t blame a chap for not being choosy who opened the cell door to let him out.

  As the British Intelligence officer left Martinho’s he was unaware he was being followed for the third time that day, by another man who was better at it than him. He reached the little alley where the grey cast-iron lift of the Elevador de Santa Justa would take him up six storeys to the Barrio Alto. He would pay off the man he had left to watch outside Tavares and call it a day. Apart from the bare fact that Leopold Kerney’s dinner with Oberst Melsbach had happened there would be no more to learn in Lisbon.

  He watched the Santa Justa elevator clattering down from the Barrio Alta. He did not notice a blue sedan pulling past on the Rua Áurea.

  Two men got out of the car. The agent who had followed Chillingham up from the Praça do Comércio got in. The two men walked to the elevator and stood behind him. As the lift doors opened the Englishman and half a dozen other passengers got into the carriage in a haze of cigarette smoke. The doors closed. The lift hissed and rattled upwards. At the top Simon Chillingham was the last to exit, with the two men from the car. One stepped in front of him and asked for a light, in English. He obliged with a few words about the cold air tonight, registering that the accent was German. He walked on, aware for a moment how quiet it was. He stepped into the dark lane that led to the Barrio, squeezed in by the brooding, skeletal ruins of the Carmelite Convent. Quite abruptly the two men were on either side of him, hemming him in. The muzzle of a Walther M4 pushed hard into his ribs.

  18

  O Trem Noturno

  In the breakfast room of the Avenida Palace Hotel Stefan Gillespie sat by one of the big windows that gave on to the Praça dos Restauradores and the tree-lined boulevard of the Avenida da Liberdade. There wasn’t a lot of liberty in the Estado Novo created by António Salazar after his military coup in 1926. Portugal’s politics, such as they were, were a ragbag of fascist clichés and cherry-picked Catholic social doctrines. They didn’t matter much; it was what the New State was against that defined it, not only socialism, communism and liberalism of any shade, but anything that smacked of democracy. The New State had come about in an almost bloodless revolution by comparison with the slaughter that had engulfed Spain in its civil war, but it affirmed the faith that had swept through Europe in the aftermath of the Depression, the one thing that united the deceptively distinctive gospels of the right and the left: Democracy Doesn’t Work!

  On a sunny spring morning on the Avenida da Liberdade, Portugal didn’t feel like a state run by its secret police force. Lisbon didn’t look like a city whose population was being watched by the secret police either, but it was. Meanwhile, the British and the Germans were watching each other too, as well as the hotels, boarding houses and bars packed with migrants and ticket hustlers, passport forgers, information peddlers and fabricators, and amateur spies. The city fed off the desperation and abandonment that made even hope a saleable commodity, an
d if the Portuguese showed little interest in all this, apart from its usefulness in generating income, it was because they were too busy spying on their own citizens to notice.

  For Stefan Gillespie, however, the view from the Avenida Palace Hotel was full of light. But the view from any grand hotel was only a postcard of something that had already gone. Like everywhere else in the Europe, the light in Lisbon was growing dimmer.

  ‘A good evening?’ Leopold Kerney sat down.

  ‘I’m not sure, sir,’ said Stefan.

  ‘What did you eat?’

  ‘Pork.’

  ‘Stick to fish by the sea, meat in the country, in Spain particularly.’

  He took a copy of the Times and turned to the crossword.

  ‘Coffee, waiter, and some scrambled eggs and toast.’

  He peered down at the crossword. ‘Did you get a hat, Inspector?’

  ‘No, I’ll see to it today.’

  ‘Fonseca’s is the place, and keep the receipt.’

  After a moment he pushed the newspaper away.

  ‘I’ve a meeting with our honorary consul this morning, then I’m at the foreign ministry. We’re thinking of opening a full embassy. They’re going to suggest some properties. I need to get them down from the various palaces they’ll be offering us to something more like a two-room office.’

  He smiled, then turned back to the crossword.

  ‘I guess you don’t know you were being followed yesterday, sir?’

  Kerney looked up, frowning. ‘What on earth does that mean?’

  Stefan’s next sentence was in Irish.

  ‘You were followed from the hotel to Mass, then back to the hotel. You weren’t followed to the Tavares restaurant because the man who had you under surveillance knew you were going. Someone was outside, though. If your meeting with the Abwehr officer was meant to be a secret, it isn’t.’