The Portuguese Escape (13 page)

‘Off the Praça José Fontana—I'll show you the street.'

The Praça José Fontana is a long narro wish square with a rather modest garden in it. Richard drove in from the northern side and swung round the end of the garden, keeping his eyes open; at the mouth of a side street an open touring car was parked—he flashed on his headlights for a second, and read the number.

‘That's them,' he said, accelerating. ‘You'd better come home with me for tonight, hadn't you? I should say that you won't be able to function very usefully until the police have done something about that car and its occupants.'

‘I'm afraid I agree. Yes, if it won't be a bore I should be glad of a bed. It's very good of you, Atherley.'

‘The Queen's government must go on!' Richard said, as he shot through the midnight streets. He eventually pulled up, not at his own little house, but outside the British Embassy. The Ambassador's residence in Lisbon is quite separate from the Chancery, and stands in an angle between two streets, one sloping and one level—Atherley left his car in the level one, the Rua Arriaga.

‘I hope you don't mind walking a little way,' he said, as he pocketed the key and slammed the door—‘usually I leave her outside my house, but I don't really want any stilettos in my tyres, and your friends are so attentive.'

‘Is this any safer?' Torrens asked, glancing round him —he did not at once realise where he was.

‘Oh very much so—patrolled day and night, as you see,' Richard said, acknowledging the salute of a neat Portuguese policeman with a cheerful ‘
Boa noite
,' and walking off up the steep street.

‘Yes, I see now,' Torrens said, as they passed the front door of the Embassy. ‘I've only been here once, to write my name, so I didn't recognise it.' He laughed. ‘Very convenient, to have a guard for your car.'

‘I told you I enjoyed diplomatic immunity,' said Atherley.

‘Julia's car's done for,' Richard Atherley told his J guest the following morning as they sat down to breakfast on the small vine-shaded terrace. ‘ The chassis's fractured. I've been on to Julia and told her she'll have to hire a new car—she didn't seem to mind. She said everything was covered.'

‘It's the other car I'm worrying about,' Torrens said.

‘Naturally. I've arranged to see Colonel Marques about that—someone is having us both in for drinks before lunch.'

‘Oh, is that how you do it here? '

‘Obviously. This is really your people's pidgin, so if for any reason I intervene myself, it is always on a very social plane. Could you look in at the Chancery about 1.30? I might know something by then.'

Major Torrens said he would look in. ‘You seem to have been working rather fast,' he said.

‘Oh, the Portuguese get up quite early, however lethargic they may be when they have got up. Colonel Marques as a matter of fact is always on call—he's immensely efficient.'

‘Good.' But Major Torrens looked rather abstracted.

‘Have you any idea where your man is to be parked when you get him here?' Richard asked.

‘No—I left that to Melplash. I must see him about it this morning; the way things are it will have to be cast-iron, a hundred per cent safe.'

‘Oh, Melplash!' Richard permitted himself that expression at this rather crucial point.

‘Precisely. “Oh, Melplash!” is the word for it,' the Major said, with a rather wry smile. ‘But we have an
homme de confiance
of our own here, so if necessary I can lay him on.'

‘You'll have to settle that of course before you have your theologian come. You'd better let me know about
that, so that I can get the little Countess a veil.'

‘Get her a veil today—we may have to move pretty fast when the time comes,' Torrens said. He got up. ‘Well, if you will excuse me, I think I will go off. Thank you immensely for the “bed and breakfast”, Atherley.'

‘It has been, as they say, a pleasure,' Richard replied. ‘See you presently.'

They met again four hours later in Richard's room in the Chancery.

‘What a nice place you work in,' Torrens said, leaning back in a comfortable leather armchair and glancing appreciatively out of the high windows at the green expanse of garden and trees.

‘Yes. Lisbon is one of the more elegantly sited posts. Did you ever see those awful war-time hutments in Washington?—really the most sordid Embassy accommodation ever known, I should think.'

Torrens laughed a little—he was beginning to like Atherley.

‘Well?' he asked.

‘That car was stolen. I told the little Colonel that we were interested in it, and gave him the number—he rang up his people there and then, and in less than half an hour they rang back and informed him that it belonged to a Mr. da Silva, who had advised the City police of its loss soon after tea-time yesterday. The police will soon get it, of course.'

‘Anything else?'

‘Well, I told him as much as I judged necessary—an English journalist's car crowded into the ditch and so on—but he pricked up his ears considerably when I mentioned that the worthies in it had spoken Spanish. He quite properly has his knife into Spanish thugs operating in Portugal—
“les Espagnols à l'étranger seront certainement des communistes!”
—and he wants a description of the men in the car.'

‘Julia will be able to give that—she's very observant.'

‘So I should imagine. I'll get it from her and pass it on, today. Have you organised something for your man?'

‘Yes—but through my own chap. The other, the local plan, was quite childish.'

‘That doesn't surprise me at all! Anyhow, when does he arrive?'

‘Tomorrow morning, 9.40, at Portela. We thought an early plane would be best, perhaps. Can you marshal your young lady at that hour?'

‘As she always goes to Mass at 7.30 a.m. it should be quite easy,' Richard said—and then regretted having spoken so energetically. But Torrens appeared to take no notice.

‘You won't forget to get that veil for her, will you?' was all he said—words which warmed Richard towards him. ‘Oh by the way, what about the Yank?' he added.

‘The Yank?'

‘Yes—the one who was there last night.'

‘Oh, Townsend.' (Richard, having lived in the States, never thought of Bostonians as Yanks.) ‘Yes—he rang up to report having delivered his charge into her mother's hands.'

‘Was he curious?'

‘Yes, of course, but I stalled him for the moment— he'll be at the Embassy on Friday anyhow. I told him the whole affair was classified,' Richard said, grinning a little, ‘but that I'd give him a sanitary version when I saw him.'

‘Did he understand that? I confess I don't.'

‘Oh yes, perfectly. It's the new American jargon: “classified” information is highly secret, and a “sanitary” version is what one tells the Press. Townsend won't give any trouble; he's very sensible and discreet, as well as extraordinarily nice.'

‘Good. Well, I expect you want to eat,' the Major was saying when the telephone buzzed.

‘That was the Colonel. The city police have picked up the car in a side street,
without
the ignition key,' Richard said, having spoken into the instrument. ‘ They're towing it back to Mr. da Silva's; luckily for him he has a spare key. But I think I shall have to go off now, if you will forgive me; I must see these young ladies—and buy a veil! —and be here again by five at latest. Unluckily H.E.
isn't
playing golf this afternoon.'

Atherley left Mrs. Tomlinson to make his two appointments,
and asked her to tell him the results at his house. There he sat down to, first, meltingly tender young french beans, then cold veal with salad followed by a delicious local cheese—all washed down with good red wine from a
garrafão
, the big wicker-covered glass carboy, holding five litres, in which the wise in Portugal buy their wine for household use; it works out at about twopence-halfpenny the half pint. While he was taking coffee on the little terrace Mrs. Tomlinson rang up to say that Miss Probyn could see him at ‘the palace' at any time after 2.30, and that Countess Hetta Páloczy would be in at four.

Richard was rather interested to penetrate into the Duke of Ericeira's town mansion. Though he knew the elderly brother and sister slightly he had never crossed their threshold till the previous night, when he went in to look at old Manoel's hooded chair; they lived much in the country, and in Lisbon entertained very little, and then mostly their contemporaries—except when they opened the house to accommodate floods of Bourbons for royal weddings. How typical of Julia Probyn to have inserted herself as a familiar into these legendary precincts!—and how rightly the Portuguese referred to the place as a palace, he thought, as he followed an elderly manservant in rich but rather threadbare livery up the immense staircase and along several wide corridors, all lined with treasures of furniture, pictures, ivories and porcelain which fairly made his mouth water with the desire to stop and examine them. In a broad upstairs lobby almost the size of a billiard-room the man handed him over to a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman, wearing a black silk apron over a tweed skirt and a silk blouse.

‘I'm Luzia's Nanny,' said this individual, in a pleasant Leicestershire accent—‘Will you come this way? Miss Probyn is in the schoolroom.'

The schoolroom was large and sunny, and looked out onto a big garden; with its bareness, shabby comfortable armchairs and sofa, and bookshelves full of tattered classics it was exactly like an English schoolroom, except for a magnificent ivory crucifix over the fireplace—which had a completely Victorian brass-topped fender standing in front of it—and a lovely polychrome sculpture group of
St. Anne and Our Lady as a child on top of the bookshelves; both these holy personages were dressed in the height of 18th-century fashion.

‘Here's Mr. Atherley, Miss Probyn,' Nanny said comfortably. ‘Now, Luzia, you'd better come with me and feed the bantams.'

Julia was sitting at a large round walnut table in the middle of the room beside a tall coltish girl of sixteen or thereabouts, studying, Richard noticed, a map of Morocco in the
Times
Atlas—she got up, as did the young girl.

‘Hullo, Richard,' Julia said, holding out her hand. ‘Luzia, this is Mr. Atherley. Nanny, unless the bantams are
starving
, Luzia can stay—she won't be in the way.'

‘Oh Nanny, do let me! I have never met a diplomatist before!
Please!
' the girl said, imploringly. Richard, surprised and amused by this very Anglo-Portuguese little scene, noticed that Luzia had remarkable grey eyes under her dark hair, and a face which would presently be beautiful—from its unusual vividness of expression as well as from the fine structure of the bones.

‘Oh very well, Miss Probyn, if you say so,' said Nanny, compressing her lips in the expression of disapproving acquiescence which has been classical among English children's nurses for over a century.

‘Thank you, Nanny,' Richard said as she left the room.

‘Don't let her be a nuisance, Mr. Atherley,' Nanny replied, closing the door.

Julia had not been in the least surprised to get Mrs. Tomlinson's message, in fact she had been waiting rather impatiently for some word from Richard all the morning. ‘Well?' she now asked, sitting down again at the table, and pushing the atlas across to Luzia. ‘See if you can find Tindouf,' she told the child.

‘Have you organised another car? When do you get it? ' the young man asked.

‘Tomorrow.'

‘Good.'

‘Oh, Miss Probyn, did you have an accident? I
do
wish you would drive me out in your car!' Luzia said. Completely ignoring the map of Morocco, she kept her surprising grey eyes steadily fixed on Atherley.

‘Luzia, if you interrupt you will have to go and feed the bantams with Nanny,' Julia said, with cool firmness.

‘I am sorry—I will be silent.' But she did not relax that steady enquiring stare—Richard had difficulty in refraining from laughing. He had seated himself on the big shabby sofa, and as he did so he could feel that the springs were broken—this, combined with Nanny's behaviour, took him straight back to his own nursery days. But what a strange set-up to find in Lisbon!

‘Julia, I want you to write down a description, as full as you can make it, of the people in the other car,' he now said. ‘Can you do it at once?'

‘Yes of course.' She took a block out of a curved drawer in the round table as she spoke, and felt in her bag for her fountain pen. ‘Who wants it?—besides you?'

‘How unflattering you are!' Richard said—Luzia giggled audibly.

‘Luzia! Not another sound out of you, or off you go,' Julia said crushingly. ‘Sorry, Richard—I was only enquiring.'

‘I saw the Colonel we spoke of on the way home, this morning, and it's he who wants it. The other car was stolen—but it was waiting for Hugh outside his diggings last night, so he came and slept in my house.'

‘Not really?'

‘Yes. So do get down to it. May Luzia talk to me while you do your home-work?'

‘Yes, but somewhere else. Luzia, take Mr. Atherley to see the
Blanc de Chine
on the top corridor—you know, the white vases and things in those Chippendale cupboards.'

Nothing could have suited Richard better than this arrangement, nor could anything have been more satisfactory to Luzia than to have a live diplomat all to herself. ‘ For how long?' she asked earnestly.

‘Oh, about ten minutes.'

The collection of
Blanc de Chine
porcelain was magnificent, though not more so than the immense glass-fronted Chippendale cabinets in which it was housed. Goodness what wealth!—and what taste!—the young man thought. But on their way to it he had caught a glimpse of an equally spectacular display of the armorial porcelain
known as
Compagnie des Indes
, the Portuguese equivalent of ‘Chinese Lowestoft'; this was really more in Richard's line than antique Chinese stuff, which was beyond the reach even of his rather ample purse, and presently he asked to be taken to it.