Across the city bells rang. Doves rose from the roof of the house overlooking the courtyard, wheeled and returned. It was somewhere near the middle of the day. A smell of frying fish drifted over the walls. The only other smell—other than the horses and horse dung—was the smoke from the cigar the Spanish officer was smoking as he leaned against a pillar on the other side of the courtyard. He and Calley had arrived at almost the same moment, though from different ends of the street. Coming in, each had silently chosen which side of the courtyard to wait on, had eyed each other, briefly, across the sheer fall of light between them, then ignored the other’s existence. Time crawled, the hours passed. There was nowhere in the world, perhaps, where nothing could happen in quite the way it could in Lisbon.

Then, from above, came the sound of a door opening and the head and shoulders of a man looked at them from over the white parapet at the top of the steps. He came down the steps to the courtyard. When he arrived he looked suddenly lost, as though he had entered some new element, had slid into water or from water into air. He was wearing a black coat thick enough for the cool of an English April. He moved forward, cautiously, peering through his glasses at the figures on the bench under the blue flowers.

“Are these people the witnesses?” he asked. An English voice and a voice fresh from England. It was not clear who he was addressing. Perhaps he did not see very much through his glasses, was not yet accustomed to seeing life in the shadows.

The Spanish officer pushed himself away from his pillar. “Yes,” he said. “These are the witnesses.”

The man stared at him, this figure, half gorgeous, half absurd in the canary-yellow uniform of a Spanish cavalry regiment. He nodded, then hurried back to the stairs and hurried up them. At the top he paused to catch his breath, then disappeared through the double doors into the upper apartments.