Derek Lambert - The Judas Code

A firework fizzed and exploded. A small boy watched artfully from behind a pillar. Behind him Hoffman caught sight of a man wearing a raincoat and a broad-brimmed hat. He had a lost air about him; a refugee probably. He turned to look at the decorative birds pecking the dust and Hoffman forgot all about him.

The birds were either black or white, the colours of Lisbon’s mosaic pavements. There was even a white peacock.

Hoffman glanced at his watch. In five minutes’ time he was due to meet Candida Pereira. He bade farewell to the American and retraced his footsteps. They would have some bacalhau, cod, served with baked potatoes, onions and olives and one of the honey-sweet desserts washed down with a bottle of vinho verde, and then … well, they might dance in the streets, carouse … and then …

Hoffman walked quicker.

So did the man in the pointed shoes, wincing with each footstep. But at least they seemed to be heading for the teeming streets of the Alfama which was where he wanted Hoffman.

Hoffman plunged into the maze like a rugby player into a loose scrum. Above him the rooftops reached for each other; from the walls hung pots of pink and red geraniums and bird-cages from which only the song of the captives escaped. From the dark mouths of bars came shouting and laughter and music, sometimes Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby on scratched phonograph records, sometimes the fado, the lament of Portugal.

He stopped at the foot of a flight of steps named Beco do Carneiro. Old hands still got lost in the Alfama. He turned and, over the heads of the crowds, noticed a broad-brimmed hat glide into a doorway. But it didn’t really register; he was imagining the invitation in the slumbrous eyes of Candida Pereira and was by now alarmed that he might be late. However slumbrous their eyes, the Candida Pereiras of this world didn’t wait around.

He hurried on, emerging eventually in the Largo de Santo Estevão. He had come a long way round but it wasn’t far now.

Near the café where they had arranged to meet, the scene was particularly boisterous. A group of men who looked like American gangsters’ barbers were singing lustily, children were wrestling and from the windows above women were shouting across the street.

The man in the pointed shoes took the firecrackers from his pocket. He gave three to children and told them to light them and throw them.

He moved up closer to Hoffman and, reluctantly, let go of the butt of the automatic. He lit three more firecrackers – Whizz Bangs they were called – and threw them just ahead of Hoffman. As they landed the children’s firecrackers exploded, cracks as loud as pistol shots in the cramped space.

He returned his hand to his pistol pocket and through the gaberdine aimed the barrel at Hoffman’s back. He waited for his own Whizz Bangs to detonate, finger caressing the trigger.

The three explosions were almost simultaneous. In fact everything happened at once. The shoulder charge that knocked Hoffman sprawling, the explosion behind him, the screaming.

When he got to his feet Hoffman was surprised to see the man he had noticed wearing the broad-brimmed hat in the grounds of the castle lying on his back, brown and white shoes pointing towards the sky.

*

‘What I don’t understand,’ Hoffman said, ‘is how you just happened to be there at the right time.’

The sun-tanned man in the navy-blue lightweight suit said: ‘We didn’t just happen to be there. We had been keeping tabs on the man who tried to shoot you.’

‘Shoot me? Why should he want to shoot me? Why should anyone want to shoot me?’

The man who had told him his name was Cross – ‘Double-cross’, with the mechanical laugh of one who had made the joke many times before – said: ‘We rather hoped you would be able to tell us that, Mr. Hoffman.’

Us? There was only Cross present; although in the Alfama earlier there had been two of them.

As he had picked himself up after the gunshot, one of the men – Cross, he thought – had thrust him through the throng and said: ‘Let’s get out of here before all hell breaks loose,’ and Hoffman had thought: ‘They must know about me.’

If not, he reasoned as they hustled him down steps and alleys to a waiting car, they wouldn’t have been so sure that he would be willing to be bundled away from trouble.

Beside the car, a black Wolseley, he had made a token resistance: ‘Before I get into that thing I want to know just who the hell you are.’

‘We’re from the British Embassy. We want to help you.’

And he had believed them. In the society in which he moved, British or American still had a reassuring ring to them.

‘Is the man who tried to shoot me dead?’

‘We think so.’

The car, with the second man, obviously junior to Cross, at the wheel, had taken them along the waterfront to an old, comfortable-looking block of flats in the Belém district, close to the Jeronimos Monastery.

The apartment itself, presumably Cross’s, was splendid. The living room was spacious and filled with light; the curtains were gold brocade, the chairs and sofas Regency-striped. Through the windows, before Cross drew the curtains, Hoffman could see the first lights of evening pulled across the Tagus.

Cross, who had identified himself as a second secretary at the British Embassy, was interrogating him in the nicest possible way. He held up a cut-glass decanter and said ‘Scotch?’ as if there could be any other drink.

Hoffman shook his head; Cross made him feel immature, and yet Cross couldn’t have been all that much older. Twenty-five perhaps, but contained and assured – some might have said condescending – in the way of some Englishmen; those, Hoffman divined, who were not quite of the noble birth to which they aspired, but formidable just the same. And well-heeled because few diplomatic services, least of all the British, would provide a twenty-five old employee with a flat as luxurious as this.

‘Well, I’m going to have one. Are you sure you won’t have a wee dram?’

‘No, thank you,’ sitting back to study Cross as he poured himself a drink.

Hoffman had met quite a few Englishmen since he came to Lisbon but somehow this one didn’t quite fit. He was elegant enough, suit not too keenly pressed, striped tie deliberately askew; his manner was languid, his smooth hair was a warm shade of brown and his features were handsome in a military sort of way. Odd, then, that he wasn’t in the Army. Hoffman could sense contradictions about him and they bothered him.

The sun-tan, for instance; diplomats were never bronzed. And his hands were too big, strangler’s hands, making an absurdity of the white silk handkerchief tucked in the sleeve of his jacket. Hoffman couldn’t imagine Cross playing the English game of cricket; blood sports would be more his line. His voice was modulated but controlled; when Cross appeared to be wasting words he was wasting them for a purpose. No, Hoffman thought, your appearance is camouflage; beneath those casual graces lurks a hunter.

Glass in hand, Cross walked to a coffee table standing in front of a coldly-empty marble fireplace and picked up a pistol. ‘Taft, the man who drove us here, took it out of the pocket of your assassin’s raincoat pocket. Would-be assassin,’ he corrected himself. He held the automatic by the barrel. ‘Crude but effective, as they say.’ He pointed at the letters CCCP on the walnut barrel. ‘No doubt where it came from.’ He sat on the sofa opposite Hoffman, still holding the gun.

‘Was he Russian?’ Hoffman asked.

Cross laid the gun on the striped cushion beside him and drank some whisky. ‘I think perhaps I should ask the questions,’ he said. ‘A rescuer’s privilege.’ He gave a cocktail party smile. ‘How long have you been in Lisbon, Mr. Hoffman?’