The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Fifty

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I’d received my instructions days earlier in Madrid via a most unconventional channel. For the first time it hadn’t been Hillgarth who’d been responsible for giving them to me, but someone under his command. The woman who worked at the beauty salon who was there every week led me dutifully to one of the inner rooms where they did their beauty treatments. Of the three reclining chairs they used for these functions, the one on the right, almost horizontal, was already occupied by a client whose features I wasn’t able to make out. She had a towel wrapped around her hair like a turban, another round her whole body from her neckline to her knees. She had a kind of white mask covering her whole face apart from her mouth and eyes, which were closed.

I changed behind a screen and sat down in the adjacent seat in identical apparel. After the employee had reclined my backrest with a pedal and put the same mask on me, she left silently, shutting the door behind her. Only then did I hear the voice next to me.

“We’re glad that you will be undertaking the mission after all. We trust you, we think you’ll do a good job.”

She spoke without moving, her voice low and with a heavy English accent. Like Hillgarth she used the plural “we.” She didn’t identify herself.

“I’ll do my best,” I replied, looking at her out of the corner of my eye.

I heard the click of a lighter and a familiar smell filled the air.

“We’ve had a request directly from London to provide reinforcements,” she went on. “There are suspicions that a supposed Portuguese collaborator might be playing a double game. He isn’t an agent, but he has an excellent relationship with our diplomatic staff in Lisbon and he’s involved in various deals with British firms. There are indications, however, that he’s beginning to establish parallel relationships with the Germans.”

“What kind of relationships?”

“Commercial relationships—very powerful ones, probably aimed not only at benefiting the Germans but also at boycotting us. It isn’t entirely clear. Food, minerals, perhaps arms: products for the war. As I say, everything is still only within the realm of suspicion.”

“And what would I have to do?”

“We need a foreigner who won’t be suspected of having any relationship with the British. Someone coming from a more or less neutral territory, completely unconnected with our country, who might need to go to Lisbon to acquire stock of something concrete. And you fit that profile.”

“So the idea is that I’m going to Lisbon to buy fabrics, or something like that?” I asked, as I cast another glance over at her that she did not return.

“Precisely. Fabrics and merchandise related to your work,” she confirmed without moving a muscle. She was still in the same position in which I’d found her, with her eyes closed and almost exactly horizontal. “You’ll go under the cover of a dressmaker wanting to obtain materials that are still not possible to get hold of in this ruined Spain.”

“I could have had them sent to me from Tangiers,” I interrupted.

“That, too,” she said after exhaling the smoke from another drag on her cigarette. “But for different reasons you’re going to have to rule out all the other alternatives. Silk from Macao, the Portuguese colony in Asia, for example. One of the sectors in which our suspect has thriving commercial interests is in textile import and export. Normally he works on a large scale, only dealing with wholesalers and not with private buyers, but we’ve managed to arrange for him to meet you personally.”

“How?”

“Thanks to a chain of varied undercover connections: quite common in the world we move in. It’s not the time to go into details now. That way, not only will you arrive in Lisbon free of any suspicion of affinity to the British, but you’ll also be backed up with contacts with direct connections to the Germans.”

That whole widespread network of relationships was quite beyond me, so I chose to ask as little as possible and wait for this stranger to go on dispensing information and instructions.

“The suspect’s name is Manuel Da Silva. He’s a businessman, a good one and very well connected, who seems ready to multiply his fortune in this war even though to do it he’d have to betray the people who have been his friends. He’ll get in touch with you and secure you access to the best fabrics available in Portugal today.”

“Does he speak Spanish?”

“Perfectly. And English. And possibly also German. He speaks all the languages he requires to do his business.”

“And what am I expected to do?”

“Infiltrate his life. Be charming, win his affection, work hard to make him ask you to go out with him, and above all get yourself invited to a meeting with Germans. If you’re finally able to get close to them, what we need is for you to sharpen your senses and register any relevant information that reaches your eyes and ears. Get hold of as complete an account as possible: names, businesses, firms, and products they mention; plans, activities, and any additional pieces of information you consider interesting.”

“You’re telling me that you’re sending me over to seduce a suspect?” I asked in disbelief, sitting up in my chair.

“Use whatever resources you think most appropriate,” she replied, fully justifying my assumption. “It would appear that Da Silva is a confirmed bachelor who likes to wine and dine beautiful women without involving himself in any kind of relationship. He enjoys being seen with elegant, attractive ladies, and if they’re foreign, so much the better. But according to our sources, in his dealings with the female gender he’s also the perfect old-style Portuguese gentleman, so you needn’t worry because he won’t try to go any farther than you’re prepared to go.”

I didn’t know whether to be offended or to burst out laughing. I was being sent over to seduce a seducer, that’s what my thrilling Portuguese mission was going to be. For the first time in the whole conversation, however, the unknown woman in the neighboring chair seemed to read my mind.

“Please don’t believe that your assignment is something frivolous that any beautiful woman could take on in exchange for a few banknotes. It’s a delicate operation, and you’re the person to do it because we have confidence in your abilities. It’s true that your physical appearance, your apparent origins, and the fact that you’re a single woman could help, but your responsibility will go far beyond mere flirtation. You’ll have to win Da Silva’s trust, weighing each step you take with great care; you’ll have to calculate your moves and balance them precisely. You’ll be gauging the scope of situations yourself, controlling the timing, evaluating the risks, and deciding to proceed as each situation demands. We place great value on your experience in the systematic obtaining of information and your capacity to improvise in unexpected situations: you haven’t been selected for this mission at random, but because you’ve demonstrated that you have the resources to get by effectively in difficult circumstances. And on personal matters, as I’ve already said, you needn’t go beyond whatever limits you yourself choose to impose. But please, stick it out for as long as possible until you get the information you need. It’s basically not all that different from your work in Madrid.”

“Except that here I don’t need to flirt with anyone or sneak into private meetings,” I pointed out.

“That’s true, my dear. But it won’t require much time, and with a gentleman who it would appear is far from unattractive.” Her tone of voice surprised me: she wasn’t trying to minimize the matter, but merely making a cool statement of what to her was objective fact. “Just one more thing, something important,” she added. “You won’t have any local contact support, because London doesn’t want any suspicion about your assignment to be aroused in Lisbon. Remember there aren’t any guarantees about Da Silva’s dealings with the Germans, which is why his supposed disloyalty to the British is yet to be proved: as I’ve said, everything is currently in the realm of mere speculation and we don’t want him to suspect anything of our compatriots in Portugal. So no English agent based there is going to know who you are or what your relationship to us is: your mission will be brief, quick, and clean, and we’ll inform London about its conclusions directly from Madrid. Get in, gather the information you need, and come back home. Then we’ll see how things progress from here. No more than that.”

It wasn’t easy for me to reply; the mask had solidified on the skin of my face. I managed at last, barely parting my lips.

“And no less.”

At that moment the door opened. The employee came back in and set to work on the Englishwoman’s face. She worked for more than twenty minutes, during which time we didn’t exchange another word. When she finished, the girl went out again and my unknown instructor proceeded to get dressed behind the screen.

“We know that you have a good friend in Lisbon, but we don’t think it wise that you see each other,” she said from the other side of the room. “Mrs. Fox has accordingly been advised to act as though you don’t know each other if you happen to run into her at any point. We’d ask you to do the same.”

“Very well,” I muttered through stiff lips. I didn’t like that instruction one bit. I’d have loved to have seen Rosalinda again. But I understood why it was inconvenient and I obeyed: there was no other way.

“Tomorrow you’ll receive details about the journey, with perhaps some additional information as well. The time we’re predicting for your mission is no more than two weeks: if for some extremely urgent reason you need to stay a little longer, send a cable to the Bourguignon florists and ask them to send a bouquet of flowers to a nonexistent friend for her birthday. Invent the name and address; the flowers will never leave the shop, but if they receive an order from Lisbon they’ll pass the message on to us. Then we’ll get in touch with you somehow, you can count on that.”

The door opened again, and the employee came back in, laden with towels. This time I would be the object of her ministrations. With apparent docility I let her do her work, while I tried to see the just-dressed person who was about to emerge from behind the screen. She didn’t take long, but when she finally came out she was very careful not to turn her face toward me. I saw that her hair was fair and wavy, and she was wearing a tweed jacket, a typical outfit for the English. She reached out her arm to pick up a leather handbag that was resting on a little stool against the wall, a bag that looked vaguely familiar: I’d seen someone carrying it recently and it wasn’t the sort of accessory one could buy in Spanish shops in those days. Then she reached out a hand to a little red pack of cigarettes that had been left carelessly on a bench. And then I knew—the lady who smoked Craven A and who at that moment was leaving the room with no more than a muttered “Goodbye” was Captain Alan Hillgarth’s wife. The same one I’d seen just a few days earlier, on the arm of her husband, when he, the steely head of the Secret Intelligence Service in Spain, saw me at the Hippodrome and received one of the greatest shocks of his career.