First, she brought some pastéis de nata from the best bakery in the Belém district. Next, she offered him a few sausages and a tin of quality sardines as a quick lunch when she knew the staff downstairs seldom had time to eat. The day after, she presented him with a bottle of green wine.
He knew she was building up toward something with her sweet smiles and interest in his day-to-day life. Yet when she asked the first time if he’d received the meticulously written and rewritten six copies of Form B, he had the audacity to tell her she was a copy short.
It was now 11:58 a.m., and she was done being nice.
She stood up from her desk, slipped into her heels, and straightened her skirt. Peggy met her gaze from across the office and offered a nod of encouragement, her eyes narrowed with assertiveness.
At 11:59, Ava left her desk and slowly made her way to the break room. Sure enough, Mr. Smith was standing there in his ill-fitting gray suit with a skin tone to match. His dark mustache reminded Ava of the long brooms used by the cleaning crew, and his brow remained in a perpetually glossy state. He wore the same exhausted, defeated expression as his fellow vice-consuls, all of them worked to the point they were bereft of patience and on the teetering edge of losing their humanity.
He eyed her warily.
She gave him her most charming smile, exactly as Peggy had directed. “Did you receive my updated copies of Form B?”
“Miss Harper.” He gave an exaggerated shift from one foot to the other, as if the weight of the world rested between his shoulders. “Was it entirely necessary to send over eight copies of the application for a visa?”
“Absolutely.” Ava crossed her arms over her chest. “Considering I left you ten.”
That had been Peggy’s idea too. Their hands were cramping by the tenth form, but the flattening of Mr. Smith’s lips beneath his mustache made it all worthwhile. The system was complicated and layered in bureaucratic tape, but she was learning to balance the twisted ropes, one grueling slip at a time.
And she would win.
The applications for the two US visas were exceptionally long and required exactly six copies for each person that she had painstakingly filled out. They had been completed in March when Sarah and Noah arrived in Lisbon. Though she had walked them downstairs herself, they refused to look at them and insisted the forms be set aside. In that time, they managed to lose a copy and took a month and a half to inform her one page was missing. She’d been waiting another month already on the second set of papers and refused to wait a single day more.
“They have been received,” Mr. Smith replied tightly.
“I’ll accompany you downstairs today while you approve them,” Ava said.
“That isn’t how it’s done, Miss Harper.” The condescension in his tone made what she had to do next all the easier.
“I’m well aware of how it’s done.” She unfolded her arms and straightened, fully prepared for this battle. “You delay visas so you don’t have to issue them. I have seen it time and again. All the necessary paperwork has been submitted, not once, but twice—”
“Your paperwork was incomplete last time.”
“It was not when I submitted it,” she corrected him. “I still fail to understand how it even got lost when they were all bound in an envelope.”
Mr. Smith narrowed his eyes. “Do I need to remind you of the fifth columnist?”
He did not. She was quite familiar with the phrase that referenced a Nazi sympathizer who might slip into the States as a refugee. The word was whispered in America with fear, and the newspapers mentioned it often enough that it practically became quotidian.
“This is a mother and child,” Ava said with exasperation. “One whose husband is already in New Jersey now working as a doctor. Their support affidavits and moral affidavits were received and accepted well over a month ago. They should be free from this scrutiny and this prejudice.”