The Time in Between A Novel

Chapter Fifty-Nine

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How much would it be for you to take me to Lisbon?”

The man looked one way then the other to make sure that there wasn’t anyone watching us. Then he took off his cap and scratched his head furiously.

“Ten escudos,” he said, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

I held out a twenty.

“Let’s go.”

I had tried unsuccessfully to sleep: emotions and sensations raced across my mind all jumbled together, bumping against the walls of my brain. Satisfaction that the mission had finally begun to make progress, anxiety about what was awaiting me, unease at the terrible certainty of what I had learned. And on top of all that, the fear of knowing that Marcus Logan was on a grim list, which he probably had no idea existed, and frustration at having no way of alerting him about it. I had no clue where to find him, I’d only run into him in two places that were as different from each other as they were far apart. Perhaps the only place where they could give me any information would have been Da Silva’s own offices, but I didn’t dare approach Beatriz Oliveira again, especially now that her boss was back.

One in the morning, half past, a quarter to two. Sometimes I was hot, sometimes cold. Two, two ten. I got up several times, opened and closed the balcony doors, drank a glass of water, turned on the light, turned it off. Twenty to three, three, three fifteen. And then, suddenly, I thought I’d found the solution. Or at least something approaching it.

I put on the darkest clothes I could find in my closet: a black mohair suit, a lead-grey jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down to my eyebrows. The last things I took were the key to my room and a handful of banknotes. I didn’t need anything else, apart from luck. I tiptoed down the back stairs; everything was calm and there was practically no light. I continued on with no clear idea of where I was, letting my instinct guide me. The kitchens, the storerooms, the washrooms, the boiler rooms. I reached the street through a back door out of the basement. It definitely wasn’t a good omen; I’d just realized that it was the way they took out the trash, albeit rich people’s trash.

It was a dark night, with the lights of the casino glimmering a few hundred yards away, and from time to time I could hear one of the last late-night partygoers: a good-bye, a muffled laugh, the engine of a car. Then silence. I settled down to wait, my lapels raised and my hands in my pockets, sitting on a curb and protected by a pile of soda-siphon crates. I was from a working neighborhood myself, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the bustle would start: there were a lot of people who woke at the crack of dawn in order to make life more pleasant for those who could allow themselves the luxury of sleeping well into the morning. The first lights in the lower service floors of the hotel were on by four, and soon after that a couple of employees came out. They stopped to light a cigarette in the doorway, cupping the flame with their hands, and then wandered off in no apparent hurry. The first vehicle was a sort of van; without pulling in too close it disgorged more than a dozen young women and then was off again. They went in grumbling tiredly: the waitresses on the next shift, I guessed. The second motor was that of a three-wheeler. A skinny, badly shaved man got out and began to rummage in the back for something or other. Then I saw him go into the kitchen carrying a large wicker basket that didn’t seem to weigh much, and whose contents, with the darkness and the distance, I wasn’t able to identify. When he had finished, he headed back to the little vehicle, and it was then that I approached him.

Using a handkerchief, I tried to clean off the straw that covered the seat, but I couldn’t do it. The interior smelled of chicken droppings, and there were feathers, broken shells, and old bits of excrement everywhere. The breakfast eggs were presented to the guests exquisitely fried or scrambled on gold-edged porcelain plates. The vehicle that transported them from the laying coops to the hotel kitchens was a whole lot less elegant. I tried not to think about the soft leather of the seats in João’s Bentley as we made our way, swaying to the rhythm of the three-wheeler’s clattering. I was sitting on the egg-deliveryman’s right, the two of us squeezed into a narrow front seat less than three feet wide. Despite the tight quarters, we didn’t exchange a word, except when I needed to give him the address where he was to take me.

“Here it is,” I said when we arrived.

I recognized the façade.

“Another fifty escudos if you come and collect me in two hours.”

A gesture touching the brim of his cap meant that we had a deal.

The main door was shut; I sat on a stone bench to wait for the night watchman. With my hat pulled down and the lapels of my jacket still up, I got rid of my doubts by concentrating on trying to remove one by one the pieces of straw and feathers that had stuck to my clothes. Fortunately I didn’t have to wait long: within a quarter of an hour the man I was waiting for arrived, brandishing a large set of keys. He swallowed the tale I spun for him, in fits and starts, about having forgotten a handbag and let me in. I looked for the name on the mailboxes, ran up two flights of stairs, and rapped on the door with a bronze knocker that was bigger than my own hand.

It didn’t take them long to wake. First I heard somebody moving, with the weary tread of someone dragging along a pair of old slippers. The peephole was opened and on the other side I could see a dark eye full of sleep and surprise. Then I heard the sound of quick, more energetic footsteps. And voices—low, urgent voices. Though they were muffled by the thickness of the solid wooden door, I recognized one of them. The one I was here for. It was confirmed when another eye, lively and blue, appeared at the little hole.

“Rosalinda, it’s me, Sira. Please, open up.”

A bolt—thunk. Another.

Our greeting was hasty, full of restrained joy and excited whispers.

“What a marvelous surprise! But what are you doing here in the middle of the night, querida? They told me you were coming to Lisbon but I wouldn’t be able to see you—how is everything in Madrid? How’s—”

My joy was great, too, but fear made me revert to a state of caution.

“Shhhhhhh . . . ,” I said, trying to contain her. She ignored me and continued with her enthusiastic welcome. Even having been dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning didn’t diminish her usual glamour. Her delicate bone structure and transparent skin were covered by an ivory silk dressing gown that came down to her feet, her wavy hair was perhaps a little shorter, but her mouth was still running on in a jumble of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, just as it used to.

Having her so close to me unleashed a million questions that had long been coiled and ready to spring. What had become of her in the long months since she’d left Spain, what cunning wiles had allowed her to get ahead, how had she taken Beigbeder’s fall? Her house emanated an aura of luxury and well-being, but I knew that the fragility of her financial resources prevented her from affording a place like this on her own. I preferred not to ask. However heavy the pressures may have been, and however dark the circumstances, Rosalinda Fox continued to radiate the same positive vitality she always had, an optimism that could topple any wall, get around any obstacle, or raise the dead if she so willed it.

We walked down the long hallway arm in arm, talking amid whispers and shadows. Upon reaching her bedroom, she closed the door behind us and a memory of Tetouan immediately assailed me like a gust of African air. The Berber rug, a Moorish lamp, the pictures on the walls. I recognized a Bertuchi watercolor: the whitewashed walls of the Moorish quarter, the Riffian women selling oranges, an overloaded mule, haiks and djellabas, and—way out in the background—the minaret of a mosque cut out against the Moroccan sky. I looked away; this wasn’t the time for nostalgia.

“I need to find Marcus Logan.”

“My, what a coincidence. He came to see me just a few days ago: he wanted to know about you.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked in alarm.

“Only the truth,” she said, raising her right hand as though about to swear an oath. “That the last time I’d seen you was last year in Tangiers.”

“Do you know how to find him?”

“No. We left it that he’d come by El Galgo again sometime, that’s all.”

“What’s El Galgo?”

“My club,” she said with a wink, lying back onto the bed. “A brilliant business I’ve opened, going halves with a friend of mine. We’re making a mint,” she finished with a laugh. “But I’ll tell you all that some other time; let’s concentrate on urgent matters for now. I don’t know where to find Marcus, querida. I don’t know where he lives, nor do I have his telephone number. But come now, sit down next to me and tell me the story, and let’s see if something occurs to us.”

It was such a consolation to be reunited with the same old Rosalinda. Extravagant and unpredictable, but also efficient, quick, and decisive even at the break of dawn. Once she’d gotten over the initial surprise and understood that my visit had a concrete objective, she didn’t waste any time asking about matters that weren’t any use, nor did she want to know about my life in Madrid or my assignments for the Secret Intelligence Service, into whose arms she’d thrown me. She simply understood that there was something that needed resolving urgently and she set about helping me.

I summarized the Da Silva story and the part Marcus played in it. We were lit only by the dim light that filtered through a pleated silk lampshade, both of us on her large bed. Although I knew I was going against the express orders I’d received from Hillgarth not to contact Rosalinda under any circumstances, I didn’t worry about letting her in on the details of my mission: I trusted her implicitly, and she was the only person I could run to. Besides, in a way it was their fault that I’d ended up seeking her out: they’d sent me to Portugal so unprotected, so unsupported, that I had no choice.

“I see Marcus very occasionally: sometimes he comes by the club, from time to time we run into each other at the restaurant at the Hotel Aviz, and there have been a couple of nights when like you we’ve crossed paths in the Estoril casino. Always charming, but somewhat evasive about the work he’s involved in: he’s never explained to me what it is he’s up to at the moment, but at any rate I very much doubt it’s journalism. Every time we meet we chat for a couple of minutes and say an affectionate farewell, promising to meet up more often, but we never do. I have no idea what he’s got himself into, querida. I don’t know if his business dealings are clean or whether they’re in need of a little laundering. I don’t even know if he lives in Lisbon permanently or comes and goes from London or somewhere else. But if you give me a couple of days, I can make some inquiries.”

“I don’t think there’s time. Da Silva has already given orders for him to be removed to leave the way free for the Germans. I have to warn him as soon as possible.”

“Be careful, Sira. You might be involved in something shady that you’re not aware of. You haven’t been told what sort of dealings linked him to Da Silva, and a lot of time has gone by since we were with him in Morocco; we don’t know what’s become of his life from the day he left up till now. And to tell the truth, we didn’t know all that much back then, either.”

“But he managed to bring my mother . . .”

“He was simply a mediator, and what’s more, he did it in exchange for something. It wasn’t a disinterested favor, don’t forget that.”

“And we knew he was a journalist.”

“That’s what we believed, but we never saw a published copy of the famous interview with Juan Luis, which was apparently his motive for coming to Tetouan.”

“Maybe—”

“Or the report on Spanish Morocco that kept him there for all those weeks.”

There were a thousand reasons we might not have seen his published pieces, and no doubt it would be easy to think of them, but I couldn’t waste any time. Africa was yesterday—Portugal was the present. And the pressure was in the here and now.

“You have to help me find him,” I insisted, leaping over all my fears. “Da Silva already has his people on the alert. Marcus at least needs to be warned; he’ll know what to do after that.”

“Of course I’m going to try to track him down, querida, rest easy, but I just want to ask you to be cautious and to bear in mind that we’ve all changed tremendously, that none of us are who we used to be. In the Tetouan of a few years ago, you were a young dressmaker and I was the happy lover of a powerful man; look what we’ve become now, look where the two of us are and how we’ve had to meet. Most probably Marcus and his circumstances have changed, too: those are the facts of life, especially in times like these. And if we knew little about him then, we know even less now.”

“He’s in business, that’s what Da Silva told me.”

She took my explanation with a wry laugh.

“Don’t be naïve, Sira. Nowadays the word ‘business’ is like a huge black umbrella that can cover a multitude of sins.”

“So are you telling me I shouldn’t help him?” I said, trying not to sound confused.

“No. What I’m trying to do is advise you to be very careful and not to take any more risks than you have to, because you don’t even know who this man is you’re trying to protect or what he’s involved in. It’s strange the turns life takes, isn’t it?” she went on with a half smile, pushing that eternal blond lock of hair back from her face. “He was crazy about you in Tetouan, and you refused to get involved with him at all despite the attraction between you. And now after such a long time, in order to protect him you’d risk being unmasked, throwing away the mission, and God knows what else, and all this in a country where you’re on your own and barely know anybody. I still don’t understand why you were so reluctant to start something serious with Marcus, but whatever impression he made on you must have been extremely deep for you to be exposing yourself like this for him.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times. I didn’t want a new relationship because my betrayal by Ramiro was still fresh, because I still had wounds that hadn’t healed.”

“But some time had passed . . .”

“Not enough. I was panicking at the idea of suffering again, Rosalinda, I was so afraid. The thing with Ramiro was so painful, so brutal, so, so overwhelming . . . I knew that sooner or later Marcus would end up leaving, too, and I didn’t want to go through that again.”

“But he never would have left you like that. Sooner or later he would have come back, perhaps you could have left with him.”

“No. Tetouan wasn’t his home, and it was mine, with my mother just about to arrive, two charges against me in Madrid, and Spain still at war. I was confused, I was bruised, still distressed by what had happened to me before, anxious for news of my mother, and constructing a fake personality to win clients in a foreign land. Yes, I built a wall to avoid falling desperately in love with Marcus, you’re right. And just the same he managed to get past it. He slipped through the net and reached me. I haven’t loved anyone else since, nor have I been attracted to any man, not really. His memory has been what’s kept me strong, allowed me to face my solitude, and believe me, Rosalinda, when I tell you I’ve been very much alone this whole time. And when I thought I was never going to see him again, life put him in my path at the worst possible moment. I don’t mean to rescue him, or build a bridge back to the past in order to recover what’s lost; I know that’d be impossible in this lunatic world we’re living in. But if I can at least help him avoid being wiped out on some street corner, I’ve got to try to do it.”

She must have noticed that my voice was shaky, because she took my hand and squeezed it hard.

“Well then, let’s focus on the present,” she said firmly. “As soon as the morning gets going I’ll start to mobilize my contacts. If he’s still in Lisbon, I’ll be able to find him.”

“I can’t see him, and I don’t want you to talk to him either. Use some intermediary, someone who can get the information to him without him knowing it’s coming from you. All he needs to know is that Da Silva not only doesn’t want anything to do with him but he’s given orders for him to be removed if he becomes a bother. I’ll notify Hillgarth about the other names when I get to Madrid. Or rather, no,” I corrected myself. “Better to give Marcus all the names; write them down, I know them by heart. Let him deal with getting the word around; he probably knows them all.”

I felt a huge tiredness, almost as great as the distress I’d been carrying around inside me ever since Beatriz Oliveira had passed me that sinister list in the church of São Domingos. It had been a horrible day: the novena and what had come with it, the subsequent meeting with Da Silva, and the exhausting struggle to get him to invite me to his house; the sleepless hours, the wait in the dark beside the hotel trash cans, the tortuous journey to Lisbon stuck to the body of that foul-smelling egg man. I looked at my watch. There was still a half hour before he was to fetch me in his three-wheeler. Just to shut my eyes now and curl up on Rosalinda’s unmade bed seemed like the greediest of temptations, but now wasn’t the moment to think about sleep. First I had to catch up with my friend about her life, if only briefly: who knew if we would meet again?

“Tell me, quickly—I don’t want to go without hearing a bit about you. How have you worked things out since leaving Spain, what’s become of your life?”

“At first it was hard, I was alone, with no money and plagued by the uncertainty surrounding Juan Luis’s situation in Madrid. But I couldn’t just sit down and cry over what I’d lost: I had to make a living. At times it was even fun. I lived through a few scenes worthy of the finest comedy: there were a couple of decrepit old millionaires who offered to marry me, and I even managed to dazzle a senior Nazi officer who swore that if I’d agree, he was prepared to run off to Rio de Janeiro with me. Sometimes it was enjoyable; other times, to tell the truth, it was no fun whatsoever. I found ex-admirers who pretended not to recognize me, and old friends who turned away from me, people I’d helped once upon a time and who now seemed to be afflicted with amnesia, and liars who pretended to be very badly off to avoid my asking to borrow anything from them. That wasn’t the worst of it, however; the hardest thing in all that time was having to break off all contact with Juan Luis. First we gave up the telephone calls after he learned that they were being tapped, then we stopped using the post. And then came the dismissal and the arrest. The last letters for a long while were the ones he gave you and that you passed on to Hillgarth. And then, the end.”

“Have you been able to secure any information about how he is doing now?”

She sighed deeply before answering and pushed her hair back from her face one more time.

“Reasonably well. They sent him to Ronda, which was almost a relief because he’d thought they were going to destroy him completely, with accusations of high treason against the fatherland. But they ended up not establishing a court martial against him, more out of their own self-interest than out of compassion—getting rid of a minister like that, a minister who’d only been appointed a little more than a year earlier, would have had a serious negative impact on the Spanish population and on world opinion.”

“Is he still in Ronda?”

“Yes, but now just under house arrest. He lives in a hotel, and it seems they’re beginning to give him some freedom of movement. He’s started getting excited about some plans again, you know how restless he is, always needing to be active, involved in something interesting, coming up with ideas and making things happen. I’m confident that he’ll be able to come over to Lisbon before too long, and then we’ll see,” she concluded, her smile heavy with melancholy.

I didn’t dare to ask her what they were, these new plans that followed his being hurled into the pit with those who’d been stripped of glory. The ex-minister who was so friendly toward the English had very little clout in the New Spain that was so cozy with the Axis; a lot would have to change before he’d be in any position to show up back there.

I looked at my watch again; I only had ten minutes left.

“Keep telling me about yourself, how you managed to get by.”

“I met Dimitri, a White Russian who’d fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution. We became friends, and I convinced him to make me his partner in the club he was planning to open. He’d provide the money, I’d be responsible for the décor and for providing contacts. El Galgo was a success right from the start, which meant that not long after the business started operating, I threw myself into the search for a house to allow me finally to get out of the little room where some Polish friends had been hiding me. And then I found this apartment. If you can call something with twenty-four bedrooms an apartment.”

“Twenty-four bedrooms—that’s madness!”

“Don’t you believe it; I did it in order to make something from it. Lisbon is full of expatriates without much cash who can’t manage a long stay in a fine hotel.”

“Don’t tell me you’re running a guest house here.”

“Something like that. For elegant guests, worldly people whose sophistication can’t save them from being at the edge of an abyss. I share my home with them, they share their capital with me as far as their means allow. There’s no price: there are some who’ve enjoyed a room for two months without paying me a single escudo, and others who in exchange for having stayed a week made me a present of a diamond rivière bracelet or a Lalique brooch. I don’t give anyone a bill: each contributes whatever he or she can. These are tough times, querida: everyone just needs to survive.”

Indeed, to survive. And for me, the most immediate survival meant getting back into a three-wheeler smelling of chickens and making it back to my room in the Hotel do Parque before the morning began. I would have loved to keep chatting with Rosalinda until the end of time, lying on her big bed with no greater concerns than ringing a little bell to get someone to bring us our breakfast. But the time had come for me to go back, to resume reality, however dark it might appear. She accompanied me to the door; before opening it, she hugged me with her light body and breathed a piece of advice in my ear.

“I barely know Manuel Da Silva, but everyone in Lisbon has heard of his reputation: a great businessman, seductive and charming, and also hard as ice, merciless with his opponents, and ready to sell his soul for a good deal. Be very careful—you’re playing with fire in the company of a dangerous man.”