A Small Death in lisbon (12 page)

He played over the scene of the first time she ended up in his bed
after four years of knowing each other, after four years of being friends. She'd sat astride him in her black silk stockings and suspenders running her hands over and over his chest.

'Why?' he'd asked.

'Why what?'

'After all these years ... why are you here?'

She'd pursed her lips and looked at him out of the corner of her face measuring the question for its long-term prospects. Then she'd suddenly gripped his penis with both hands and said:

'Because of your big Swabian cock.'

They'd laughed. It hadn't been it, but it would do.

Now as he came to that point, for the hundredth time, where Eva had diminished him, he all but writhed in his seat with the torment of his sexual jealousy. He saw the heavy-waisted, pink-skinned, uncontoured-buttocked Gruppenführer squeezing and pumping between her slim white thighs, her heels encouraging him, her breath coming out in jolts, his trembling grunts into the corner of her neck, her clawing fingers on his flabby back, his greedy hands, her rising knees, his deeper thrusts ... Felsen would shake his head. No. And he would go back to Eva again sitting astride him in her black ... Why?

'Power does it for the ladies,' Lehrer's chauffeur had said, 'even Himmler...' That's what Felsen had thought as he watched Lehrer eat his breakfast the morning after he'd seen him in the club with Eva. That's what he'd thought as he strolled through the dark morning to the Swiss National Bank, as he'd signed the release documents, as he'd supervised the loading of the gold, as he'd shaken hands with Lehrer and watched him walk back to the Schweizerhof, to his three days in Gstaad with Eva.

He could barely remember crossing the border. He couldn't think of any moment in France apart from the stupid driver. He'd lived inside his head until the cloud had lifted off the Pyrenees that morning and the Swiss wouldn't stop talking about it.

He got drunk that night with a Standartenführer of a Panzer division in Bayonne who'd told him his tanks would be in Lisbon before the end of the month.

'We got to the Pyrenees in four weeks. We'll reach Gibraltar in two, Lisbon in one. We're just waiting for the crack of the Führer's starting pistol.'

They drank claret, a Grand Cru Classé from Château Batailley, bottle after bottle of it as if it was beer. He slept in his clothes that night and woke up in the morning with his face hurting and his throat sore from snoring like a hog. They crossed the border into Spain and picked up an army escort sent with a personal instruction for their safety from General Francisco Franco himself. By nightfall they were still grinding up the hairpins of the Vascongadas as if they were dragging Felsen's hangover behind them.

Now that there was no threat of Allied air attack they drove through the night and they were glad to be able to keep the engines running because once they came out of the mountains and on to the
meseta
there was nothing to stop the wind which drove a bleak mixture of freezing rain and ice into the sides of the trucks. The drivers stamped their feet on the metal floors to keep them from going numb. Felsen, hunched behind the collar of his wool coat, stared into the darkness, the swerving road, the headlights arcing across the trees. He didn't move. This had become his kind of temperature.

They refuelled in Burgos, a bleak and frozen place with disgusting food laced, no, swimming in the acrid urine of the poorest quality olive oil which burnt through the bowels of the drivers so that they shat all the way to Salamanca. They shat so frequently that Felsen refused them permission to stop and they just hung their bare arses out of the doors and let the icy wind take it wherever.

Refugees appeared on the road, most of them on foot, some with a cart between them and occasionally an emaciated mule. They were dark people with faces hollowed out by fear and hunger. They walked automatically, the adults grim, the children blank. These people silenced the drivers, who stopped complaining about the food and the cold. As the trucks ground past them not a head turned, not a single homburg altered its course. The Jews of Europe tramped through the empty wilderness of Spain with their cardboard suitcases and knotted sheets, seeing no further than the next wind-blasted oak on the skyline.

Felsen looked down on them from the cab. He'd expected to find some pity for them as he had for the two men from Sachsenhausen who'd swept his factory floor after their release at the time of the Berlin Olympics. He found nothing. He found he didn't have room for anything else.

They drove through Salamanca. The golden stone of the cathedral
walls and the university buildings was dull under the white dome of the frozen sky. There was no fuel. The drivers managed to buy some
chorizo
and weevil-riddled bread. The convoy moved on to Ciudad Rodrigo and the border town of Fuentes de Oñoro. The Spanish army escort harassed the columns of refugees who shifted off the road on to the barren rock-strewn plain without even a raised gesture.

The twenty whitewashed hovels on the rocky treeless site that made up Fuentes de Oñoro were frozen in a piercing wind that kept the inhabitants indoors and the refugees huddled behind boulders and upturned carts. The drivers blundered amongst them looking for food and found everyone in a worse state than themselves. A woman in the only shop offered them lumps of pork fat in what looked like the same rancid oil they'd had in Burgos. They named the dish
Gordura alla Moda della Guerra
and didn't touch it.

The customs formalities on the Spanish side were brief. The officials left their less lucrative work of minutely inspecting the jittery refugees' papers and their reductions of a lifetime's possessions and came to get their bonuses. Felsen, who knew that this was the border post that would see most of his business, had prepared himself for the crossing with French brandy and
jambon de Bayonne.
His drivers were furious. The deal was sealed with shots of cheap
aguardente
and the convoy moved across to the Portuguese side at Vilar Formoso.

The Portuguese army escort had not arrived. There was a member of the German legation who'd already dispatched a messenger to Guarda. They arranged for the drivers to park the trucks in the square outside the ornately tiled railway station, which showed framed scenes of all the major towns in Portugal. The square was packed with more wild-eyed people. The drivers went looking for food again. They found a soup kitchen which had been set up by firms from Porto but it was for British passport-holders only. They tried talking to the refugees. The women, collapsed under coloured shawls, wouldn't look at them, and with the men, in long mud-rimmed coats with furry hats jammed down over thick black matted hair and faces blanked out and ragged with beards, they could find no common language. There were Poles and Czechs, Yugoslavs and Hungarians, Turks and Iraqis. They tried the less picturesque—men in creased three-piece business suits who stood above exhausted women and howling children but they were Dutch or Flemish, Rumanians or Bulgarians and in no mood for sign language, especially of the sort which involved pointing a
finger into the mouth. Even the young were uncommunicative—the boys shifty, the girls cringing and babies either wailing or mute and vacant. When the engine of one of the approaching Portuguese army motorcycles back-fired, this massed driftwood of war ducked and flinched as one.

Felsen worked on the customs officials using charm and some supplies that the member of the German legation had brought with him. The Portuguese responded with cheese,
choriço
and wine and were very helpful with the reams of bureaucracy that needed to be filled out to allow the trucks to move freely in the country. When the convoy moved off the
chefe
of the
alfândega,
the customs, came out to wave and wish him a speedy return because he could see that this was the auspicious start of what could be years of graft.

They crossed the River Coa and spent a night at an army post in Guarda where they ate an enormous meal whose four courses all tasted the same and drank a lot of wine from five-litre flagons. Felsen had already begun to feel himself coming round. He knew because he was interested in seeing the women in the kitchens. Since moving to Berlin he'd barely gone forty-eight hours without sex and now it had been more than a week. When finally he saw the women he hoped they'd been especially selected to keep the soldiers' ardour at bay They were all tiny with no more than an inch of forehead between their dark eyebrows and the scarves around their heads. Their noses were sharp, their cheeks sunken and their teeth gone or rotten. He went to bed and slept badly on a flea-ridden mattress.

In the morning they began driving through some of the places they'd seen depicted on the blue and white
azulejos
in the station at Vilar Formoso. The drivers realized what had been missing from the designs, or perhaps bad roads, poverty and filth looked different in their own colours. They rounded the pine-forested, rock-strewn mountains of the Serra da Estrela on the northern boundary of the Beira Baixa which, as Felsen already knew, was going to be his home for the next years of his life. Where schist and granite meet was where the black, shiny crystalline wolfram occurred, and Felsen could see from the grey/brown block stone houses and slate roofs that this was the right country.

They crossed the Mondego and Dão rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria. The air changed. The dry cool of the mountains disappeared and a warm humidity took over. The sun
was hot even in early March and they stripped off their coats. The drivers rolled up their shirt sleeves and looked as if they might sing. There were no refugees on the road. The representative from the German legation told them that Salazar was making sure that no more came into Lisbon—the city was already full. They spent a last night on the road at Vila Franca de Xira and got up early the next morning to deliver the gold to the Banco de Portugal before normal office hours.

It was first light as they turned away from the Tagus into the Terreiro do Paço and the trucks made their way behind the arcaded eighteenth-century façade into the grid system of the Baixa, purpose-built by the Marqués de Pombal after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. They drove along Rua do Comércio, behind the massive triumphal arch at the head of the Rua da Augusta, to the conglomeration of buildings including the church of Sâo Julilo that made up the Banco de Portugal. They waited for the gates to open in the Largo de'Sâo Juliâo and one by one the trucks reversed in to unload.

In the bank Felsen was met by the Director of Finance and another, more senior and taller, member of the German legation who greeted his offered hand with a spring-loaded salute and an incongruous '
Heil Hitler'
This did not appear to disturb the bank's finance director who, he found out later, was a member of the Portuguese Legion. It had confused Felsen who only managed a half-wave in return, like a bad attempt at getting a waiter's attention, and the words
'Ja, ja.'
He also missed the tall, Prussian-looking man's name. It wasn't until the gold had been unloaded and accounted for that Felsen saw the man signing the endless documentation with his left hand in the name of Fritz Poser. He noticed that the right hand was a gloved prosthesis.

By 11.00 a.m. the business was completed. The junior member of the legation had taken the drivers to an army barracks on the outskirts of the city and Poser and Felsen were sitting in the back of a flagged Mercedes driving down Rua do Ouro towards the river. The pavements were packed with people, mostly men in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and hats a size too small for their heads who swerved past barefooted boys selling newspapers. The few women were smart and dressed in tweed suits with hats and furs even though it wasn't cold. The faces flashed by as the car picked up speed in the empty street, one woman hatless and blonde stared at the car, the small swastika flapping on the bonnet, mesmerized. Then her head
flicked away and she buried herself in the crowd. Felsen turned in his seat. A boy was running alongside the car waving the
Diário de Notiçias
in his face.

'Lisbon is full,' said Poser. 'It's as if the whole world is here.'

'I saw them at the border.'

'The Jews?'

Felsen nodded, tired now after the anxiety of the journey.

'There's a more eclectic mix down here. Lisbon can cater for all tastes. It's one long party for some.'

'So there's no rationing.'

'Not yet and not for us anyway. It will come though. The British are mounting their Economic Blockade and the Portuguese are beginning to suffer. Fuel could start to be a problem, they don't have any of their own tankers and the Americans are being difficult. Of course you can eat well if you like seafood and drink their wine if your palate's not too French. There's still sugar at the moment and the coffee is good.'

They turned right out of the Praça do Comércio and followed the Tagus past the docks. At Santos there was a huge brawling mass of people, men, women and children fighting outside the offices of the shipping lines.

'This is the more distasteful end of Lisbon,' said Poser. 'You see that ship, the
Nyassa,
in the docks there. They all want to get on the
Nyassa
but it's full. It's been full for weeks. In fact it's been filled twice over but these morons think that because it's there they can get on it. Most of them don't have any money which means they don't even have American visas. Ah well, the
Guarda National Republicana
will be along in a moment and break them up. Last week it was the same with the
Serpa Pinto
, next week it will be the
Guiné.
Always the same.'

'We seem to be leaving Lisbon,' said Felsen, as the driver accelerated away towards the green outskirts of the city.

'Not yet. This evening perhaps. We're going to the Palâcio do Conde dos Olivais in Lapa where we've installed the German legation. You'll see we have the best location in Lisbon.'

They came into Lapa from Madragoa and drove up the Rua'Sâo Domingos à Lapa. Halfway up the Union Jack hung limply off a long pink building with tall white windows and a central pediment which made up about fifty metres of the street's façade. The Mercedes thundered past on the cobbled street.