CHAPTER 5

Battling his nerves, talking a mile a minute, Harry continues his history lecture:

From demolished 1755 Lisbon, the Marquês de Pombal built an entirely new city center, he tells Dorothy. Using a grid layout of streets, he linked the waterfront’s Praça de Comércio with Rossio Square to the north. The buildings were semi-uniform and neo-Classical. It was Europe’s first grid system, quite a deviation from impromptu layouts that on a map resembled week-old spaghetti. There were a number of heroic statues of the Pombal fella in town, and Harry figures he deserved them as much as anyone else.

This district is called Baixa (pronounced bay-sha), and Baixa is where Dorothy and Harry are, at a café on a side street, shielded by three and four-story buildings, out of sight of the riverfront and Harry’s handiwork. The flames are gone as are the majority of the curious, but black smoke continues to rise and diffuse. They are within earshot of the sirens that have finally fallen silent. Thanks to Harry Antonelli, there is disorder in an area that passes for order in 1940 Lisbon.

Dorothy is having a small coffee, an uma bica, and a round egg-tart pastry, a local delicacy known as a pastel de nata. These are among the many unrationed treats in Europe’s new City of Light.

“You have a knack for teaching history, if you’d please slow down and catch your breath,” Dorothy says.

“Not teaching in a classroom. Only on field trips like this.”

She says, “Teaching history while you modify it.”

Harry’s nerves are steadying, thanks to cigarettes and beer, his second Super Bock, a local brew.

“Dorothy, did you do something to make that goon howl and limp?”

“I did, by giving him a little squeeze.”

“Um, did you give him a little squeeze where I think you little-squeezed him?”

“And twisted him too. He was unzipped and had it out. I didn’t have to understand Portuguese to understand what he was saying he was going to do with it once he tore my clothes off. He was asking for it,” Dorothy says. “You men, your brains are there.”

Harry shivers, thinking that no squeeze in that region of the anatomy is a little squeeze.

“I’m not debating that one with you.”

“I overheard the crazy Jew-hating rant by your Nazi friend. You haven’t converted to Judaism, have you? Your mother had to drag you kicking and screaming to Mass. If you have converted, I’m not criticizing.”

“I think conversion to Judaism is automatic after you’ve beaten up twenty-five Nazis. I’ve almost qualified. I should have drowned the son of a bitch. That’d count as double points.”

She smiles. “That is so mean of you.”

Harry tells her about his experience at Kristallnacht. “I have dreams where I’m walking on broken glass. Barefoot. These Nazis are creatures, Dorothy. They’ve turned their population into animals. I don’t know how else to put it. They’re the most modern in the world at war too. That blitzkrieg of theirs. Who knows what else they have up their sleeves.”

“Harry, up on your soapbox, you’re as red as a beet. I didn’t know you had a political bone in your body.”

“I do when ten Nazi fanatics try to stomp me into a grease spot,” he says.

“Ten?”

“I was busy flooring the bastards. I wasn’t counting.”

“Did I overhear that creepy crawly Nazi demand gold from you?”

“Yeah, you did. Gold is a bulletin to me.”

Dorothy looks at him.

“Really.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I can tell the truth once in a while, you know, and I’d sure remember gold.”

“Because of those grunting Neanderthals, I didn’t hear everything. Did he ask you about tungsten too?”

He stares at her. “Where did that come from?”

She sips her espresso.

“You pulled ‘tungsten’ out of the clear blue sky, Dorothy. Wessel didn’t mention tungsten,” he says, recalling Peter’s cryptic comment on it.

She says, “Not actually out of the clear blue sky. We have some other topics too we need to cover, you and I, to be perfectly honest.”

“There’s that we again,” Harry says, leaning forward. “You turning up at my dump too. Nature abhors a coincidence, you know.”

“Doesn’t nature abhor a vacuum?”

“I’m speaking of history. I don’t know anything about science and vacuums. I never got above a B-minus in a science or math class. That’s your field. In case you haven’t heard, Lisbon is a playpen for MI6, the SS, and the Gestapo. And American spies, neutral noncombatants with nothing better to do. Training for the war that we’re itching to get into, if you believe some. Everybody’s spying on everybody else and making money selling information to each other whether it’s bushwa or not. Some spies are good at it. Others are conspicuously inconspicuous. There are more stool pigeons in this town than pigeons on heroic statues. Any time you come across a journalist, watch out.”

“Why?”

“Half of them are secret agents. They can ask rude, demanding questions without being suspected by playing dumb, which some of them are.”

“Is that what your English friend, Mr. Peter Owen, does for a living? Is he a stringer for British papers?” Dorothy says, then taking a bite of her pastel de nata. “This is absolutely delicious, Harry. I’ve never had anything like it.”

Harry chokes on his beer. Dorothy jumps up and slaps his back.

When he stops coughing, he says, “Out with it, Dorothy. What the hell is going on, you turning up here on my doorstep? You and your we, blindsiding me with Peter. If this is football, you’d be flagged for fifteen yards.”

“Your doorstep,” she says, sighing.

“Speaking of which. We can go back there and discuss it in private.”

She says, bending a permanent-wave curl, “In case you have any ideas about you and me, forget it.”

“Who, me?” he says, stroking her arm.

“Not so fast, buster. I have a confession to make. In London, I had and have a whirlwind romance going with a dashing British Spitfire pilot. He’s already shot down four Messerschmitt fighters. He’s the bravest man I’ve ever known.”

“I guess tossing a Nazi in the drink doesn’t count for much compared to that. On top of beating up twelve Nazis during Kristallnacht,” says a deflated Harry, thinking that her Spitfire deadeye probably isn’t afraid of guns or clowns. Certainly not clowns.

She replies by sipping her coffee.

Harry says, “Horst Wessel falsely accused me of having an English partner, but not by name.”

“This is wonderful coffee, Harry, superior to any I’ve ever tasted at home.”

Harry studies her. There’s something different about Dorothy Booth, not her appearance, but something deeper, how she talks, how she carries herself. She’s always been independent, speaking her mind, but now it was beyond that. She’s acting like a—suffragette.

Whether it’s her intention or not, she’s validated the fact that he’s wasted the last two years, bumming around Europe. Much of the time spent in Lisbon isn’t entirely due to his fascination with it, but because it was his last stop before heading home to begin life as an adult. Adulthood is nipping at his heels and he’s losing ground.

Dorothy also studies Harry. She’s almost but not quite sorry that she broke the news about her romance in England. Almost. Harry does wear his heart on his sleeve. Regardless of his shenanigans, he is to her an imperfect Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy. The little kid who tore into playground bullies and gained inspiration from heroes in comic strips.

“Wait. Didn’t you say you came in on the Clipper? It comes from the Azores, not London.”

“That was an earlier trip, Harry.”

“For the hundredth time, who the hell is we?”

She gently puts down her cup, stands up, and brushes her skirt.

“Harry, please hail a taxi and escort me home. It’s close by, but under the circumstances, let’s not walk and be moving targets.”