The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

we will try to position you in Lisbon.’

      ‘Lisbon?’

      ‘It’s the only place in Europe now where we can talk easily with the Allies.’

      

      Voss lived with his mother while he completed his training in Zossen. She looked after him as if he was at school again and it was a comfort for both of them. It was a wrench when he was transferred to France in June.

      He spent eight months in the Abwehr’s French headquarters at 82 Avenue Foch in Paris and, furnished with his new perception of the power of words, saw the horrific consequences for others who hadn’t yet come to the same understanding.

      French and British men and women were arrested, sent to concentration camps, tortured and executed for what was, more than half the time, a totally imaginary situation. Both the Abwehr and the SD/Gestapo, who operated from next door, were playing what became known as radio games. Voss never worked out whether it was merely Allied stupidity or German infiltration into their intelligence operations at a very high level which enabled these deadly games to be played. Once an Allied radio operator was captured and his codename and signal extracted an Abwehr operator would continue broadcasting to London. Later when there were two security signals required, the Allies would reply simply reminding the operator that he’d forgotten his second signal but to continue. The baffled and angry radio operators soon supplied the second security signal to the Germans. Following these fictitious Abwehr broadcasts more agents and supplies would be flown into some misty French field and a reception from the Occupying force. These new agents’ codenames were then used to build fictitious networks operated by the Abwehr and Gestapo, dispersing vast quantities of misinformation to the Allies. Meetings convened by operational Allied agents were frequently attended by Abwehr men using captured agents’ codenames.

      Occasionally Voss would stage arrests in the street to maintain verisimilitude.

      Most intelligence activity was mirage and artifice. Very little was real. Intelligence, he discovered, was built on the foundations of the imagination and, in the case of the radio games, a blind belief in the veracity of technology. It was a terrifying concept, as terrifying as if the basic principles of physics or maths were completely wrong and whole academic disciplines had been built on falsehood and thus all discoveries were intrinsically wrong, all achievements bogus.

      Voss also learned never to fall in love in this world. Lovers betrayed each other easily. Torture, the Gestapo’s preferred method, was unnecessary. Just the insinuation of a lover’s infidelity to a prisoner was as powerful as any of their appalling applications. The emotional betrayal played such devious and teasing tricks on the mind. Jealousy was inevitable in the loneliness of a cell. The darkness, with only the infected mind for company, created powerful images that at first disheartened and later so enraged and ravaged the prisoners that they would grasp at a new strength and in their vindictiveness bring down not just the lover, but all the connections as well.

      This did not mean that Voss was celibate in his time in Paris – that was impossible and there was something to prove to Giesler too – but he kept his distance. A French-woman called Françoise Larache taught him a different and darker lesson about love in the intelligence game.

      They met when using the same bar. He would take a coffee in the mornings and find her watching him. He would stop off in the evening for a glass of something and she was often there at a table, smoking her strong cigarettes. They exchanged words and began to share a table, where he would watch her red lips connect with the thick tip of her cigarette, and her fingers pick off the flakes of tobacco from her pointed tongue. One night they went for a meal and back to his apartment where they made love. She was energetic and inventive, doing things on their first night which surprised him.

      They became regulars of each other’s company in bed, and as Françoise was quick to demand, out of bed as well. She pushed him to do things which were at first exciting and then became increasingly more reckless. She liked to make love on the balcony with people passing in the street below. She would lean back over the rail, her arms around his neck, and then suddenly let go so that he nearly lost her over the edge. They would have sex in doorways and on landings while people ate their dinner and table-talked. She would even cry out and the talk would stop inside. Voss would have to close his hand over her mouth. The greater the chance of being discovered, the more excited Françoise became.

      Then one day in the autumn with the dried leaves rustling over the balcony, her mischievous eye, the one that glinted when she looked up at him from under her eyebrow, became darker, as if he was seeing deeper in and what was there was more sinister, taboo.

      It started with a request that he spank her for being a naughty girl. Voss felt stupid with a grown woman over his knees and she had to encourage him to be serious and to be more severe. It didn’t seem to be fun any more. He still lusted after her, but for Françoise the sex was being driven by something else. He became reluctant to play her games, she angry. They had furious arguments, monumental rows with flying objects, which would end in brutal love-making where each thrust into her seemed to be a payment back. He found himself reeling out of his apartment into the docility of occupied Paris, unable to believe what he’d participated in the night before, only knowing that it was powerful, intense and degrading.

      Françoise’s goading became worse. There was no fun now. She said terrible, unforgivable things and, although he could see what she was doing, he was a part of it too. There was no stepping back. She was forcing him to slap her, and not just a hysteria-breaking slap, a punishing slap. She wanted to be hit hard. She drove her face at him. The words came out slicing the air, lacerating, stabbing, each one honed to cut deep to the bone. They grappled and wrestled each other to the floor. She sunk her nails into his neck. He wrenched himself free and found his fist cocked back to his shoulder. He swayed, dizzy at what this had come to. Her face was suddenly soft, her eyes dreamy. This was what she wanted. He stood up, straightened his clothes. All lust gone. Her face hardened. He gave her his hand, she took it and he pulled her to her feet. She spat in his face. He pulled her to the door, grabbing her coat and handbag on the way, and threw her out of the apartment.

      He made discreet inquiries. She was an informer, a collaborator. She delivered her countrymen, neatly trussed, to the Gestapo. The SD man Voss spoke to tapped the side of his head, shook it.

      He saw her once more before he left Paris, walking in a snow-covered street on the arm of a huge, black-coated SS sergeant. Voss hid in a doorway as they went past. She was holding snow to the side of her face.

      

      In mid January 1944 Voss was called to a meeting at the Hotel Lutecia. It was at night and the room in which the meeting was being held was dark. Only a small lamp lit one corner. The man he was meeting sat in front of the light, he had no face, only the silhouette of hair combed back, maybe grey or white. His voice was old. A voice that spoke as if under pressure, as if the chest was tight with phlegm.

      ‘There are going to be some changes,’ he said. ‘It seems our friend Kaltenbrunner at the Reich’s Main Security Office is going to get his way and bring the Abwehr under the direct control of the SD. God knows, they’ve been trying long enough. It is something we are going to have to live with. We want to be sure that you are in position with the right information for negotiation with the Allies before it happens. I understand you have been following the activities of a French communist intellectual, Olivier Mesnel, here in Paris.’

      ‘We are in the process of disentangling his network. We haven’t found out yet how his information is reaching Moscow or how his orders come in.’

      ‘He has now applied for a visa to go to Spain.’

      ‘He is ultimately heading for Lisbon,’ said Voss. ‘We were lucky enough to intercept the courier sent by the Portuguese communists asking him to go there.’

      ‘Do you have any idea why he is required in Lisbon?’

      ‘No, and I don’t think Mesnel does either.’

      ‘You will take this opportunity to follow him to Lisbon and to install yourself as the military attaché and security officer in the German Legation. When these changes