A Small Death in lisbon (29 page)

The doctor rejoined the queue for his meal. Felsen looked around him without seeing what the doctor had meant. The girl wasn't at the table any more. He left the building, stood on the steps, lit a cigarette and flicked the match off into the street. He walked down through the Bairro Alto in the high autumn sunshine to the Largo do Carmo where he took the
elevador
down to the Rua d'Ouro.

He went up to the second floor of the building they'd leased for the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. The offices occupied the ground and first floors and there were two apartments on the floors above, the top floor being his and the second floor belonging to Abrantes and his family. Abrantes had asked him to be godfather to his second son. He'd called Felsen at the German legation that morning to say that Maria was being released from hospital and he should come and look at his new godchild.

The maid led Felsen through to the living room. Maria was lying on the chaise longue in a fur coat which wasn't necessary, given the weather. He could hardly bear to look at her. In less than a year the peasant girl had transformed herself into a travesty of a forties film star. She couldn't read but she'd flicked through the magazines, choosing whatever took her fancy, and Abrantes had indulged her. Felsen lit a cigarette to stop himself from sneering. Maria lit one too and blew smoke out in a practised stream.

Abrantes was staring down into the Rua do Ouro through windows criss-crossed with sticky tape against the bombing raids that the Portuguese were still expecting to move down from Europe like a bad weather front. Felsen had even heard air raid warnings and seen the soldiers sitting on sandbags behind their barbed wire barricades in the Praça do Comércio, wondering what the hell they were supposed to be doing.

Abrantes was dressed in a grey suit and now wore spectacles although he never pretended he could read. He smoked a
charuto.
His transformation from Beira peasant had gone better than Maria's. He had some stature and a sinister look that could command respect from the city-dwellers. He'd learnt things about behaviour and manners just as Felsen had done when he first came up from Swabia. He greeted Felsen flamboyantly, as a successful wartime businessman should. He guided him to the edge of the cradle on which Maria rested a proprietorial hand.

'My second son,' he said. 'Your godson. We have called him Manuel. I would have liked to have called him after you but, Klaus ... I'm sure you understand, a Portuguese boy can't bear the name Klaus. So we named him after my grandfather.'

Felsen nodded. The baby was sleeping, tightly wrapped in what seemed like far too many clothes. He looked like any other baby except a little less wrinkled than usual. Maria tickled the baby with her finger. Felsen was aware of her watching him. The baby struggled against the intruding finger. A bubble appeared at his pursed little mouth. His eyes suddenly opened, surprised and big for his face. Felsen frowned. Maria's face came into his vision.

'He looks like his mother this one,' said Abrantes, on his shoulder.

There was a lot of blue in those eyes and, maybe if you were the father, the faintest hint of Maria's green in them, but to Felsen they were blue eyes, his own eyes.

'A beautiful baby,' said Felsen, automatically, and Maria sat back on the chaise longue.

Abrantes dug the baby out of the cradle and held him high. He growled at him. The baby blinked at the big bad bear.

'My second son,' he said. 'No man could be happier than one with two sons.'

'What about a man with three sons?' asked Maria, cheeky, confident of her status.

'No, no,' said Abrantes, superstition rippling through him like wind through the broom in the Beira, 'out of three, one will always be bad.'

The baby gathered his small but impressive powers and let out a long piercing wail.

list December 1942, SS-WHVA, 126–35 Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde

'Stalingrad,' said Lehrer, who was sitting sideways to his desk, his elbow resting on a blotter, hand up in the air, poised, blade-like. 'Are they talking about Stalingrad in Lisbon? Are they drinking to Stalingrad in the goddamned Hotel Parque in Estoril?'

Felsen sat alone on the other side of the desk. He smoked but didn't answer. Nobody was talking about Stalingrad.

'Are they?' insisted Lehrer.

'Not at the dinner I was at last night.'

'Just cutlery clattering on the plates.'

'Not quite as bad as that.'

'And Poser? What did Poser look like?' asked Lehrer, shifting in his seat, his belt, longer than a pack mule's girth, creaking over the movement of his belly.

'Like Poser always does, but sicker.'

'Mrnm,' murmured Lehrer seismically. 'Zeitzler, the Army Chief of Staff, went on Stalingrad rations for two weeks to show solidarity with his men at the front. He lost twelve kilos. What does that tell you?'

Felsen closed his eyes at another of Lehrer's endless test questions. He wanted to say that it told him that Zeitzler probably had more than twelve kilos to lose, but one look at Lehrer's creaking belt told him this would not lighten the tone.

'The Sixth Army is in big trouble,' Felsen trotted it out, Lehrer's best pupil.

'You know, I have my contacts in the East Prussian headquarters at Rastenberg, Herr Sturmbannführer. I am reliably informed that Field Marshal Paulus and his two hundred thousand men are finished,' said Lehrer, and his hand dropped, guillotining the Sixth Army off the Third Reich.

'Can't they break out, retreat, regroup?'

'The Führer won't allow it. He's obsessed with the disgrace of retreat, with the disgrace of losing all our heavy artillery. He doesn't appear to see Zeitzler's point that by leaving them there he will lose everything and not just Stalingrad ... the whole Russian campaign.'

'Does Stalingrad have some vital strategic importance?'

Lehrer held up his hands, if not to God then the blackout blinds.

'It's mythical,' he said. 'You hold Stalingrad, you hold Stalin by his steel balls.'

They talked about wolfram. Lehrer was listless and disinterested. He couldn't even raise the flag for the latest smuggling operation where Felsen had loaded 200 tons into rail cars in Lisbon and seen them travel on papers as manganese all the way through the border without even the customs opening them up. The Allied agents had come close to a fist-fight with the customs
chefes
who cleared the cargo in Lisbon and Vilar Formoso. They hadn't grasped that these two public servants creamed five million escudos between them which made their thousand escudos per month salaries look like Felsen's bar bill.

Lehrer managed a few half-hearted questions about the bank, which hadn't been doing very much except lending money to buy mining concessions on the border.

It was early evening by the time Felsen finished his report, but before Lehrer released him, the Obergruppenführer suddenly staggered to his feet, hobbled around the desk and sat on the corner.

'We have a special understanding, you and I,' said Lehrer, suddenly grave. 'I promised you when I took you away from your factory in Berlin that you would be properly rewarded for the work you have done. Next year, possibly, your job will be a different one. It is one in which you are experienced but whose nature is not the same. You must trust me. You must not be dismayed when I tell you that at this point we might have already reached the beginning of the end.'

'One thing Poser did say was that since Speer's promotion to Armaments Minister earlier this year there has been a massive improvement in our production capacity. I've felt it. The pressure for us to ship wolfram has been enormous...'

'This is true,' said Lehrer, batting him down gently, 'but my feet are telling me that this will only prolong the agony. And my feet are never wrong.'

Both men looked at Lehrer's boot-encased agony.

It was six o'clock and dark and freezing from a wind sent directly down from the eternal Finnish darkness. The car crawled forward like the half-blind creature it was. Felsen sat in the back confused. Did Lehrer know what he was talking about? He'd always billed himself as the visionary, but did the future of the Third Reich really come down to his being twenty kilos overweight, sitting behind a desk too much and atrocious chiropody? Could the great German army that had crashed through Europe, smashed through Russia all the way to the Caucasus, all the way to within twenty-five kilometres from Moscow, to the suburbs for God's sake, could it all be over for the loss of one city? Felsen smoked behind a cupped hand and looked at the destruction in the suburbs of Steglitz, Schonberg and Wilmersdorf and remembered Poser telling him something at the beginning of June he hadn't believed. On the night of the 30th May in just over an hour and a half, Allied bombers had dropped more than two thousand tons of bombs on the city. When Poser had told him this it was four days later and Berlin was still burning. He hadn't believed him and had tried to get past the demented Prussian and out of the room, but Poser had snagged his elbow with his prosthetic hand and said quietly in his ear, 'I've seen the damage estimation. The real one, not Goebbels' version. Now go and find your wolfram. We'll need every kilo you've got.'

As they came into the south of Berlin on the Potsdamerstrasse he asked the driver to carry on and take a left up the Kurfürstenstrasse. The street was unrecognizable with rubble piled in heaps on either side and destroyed and burnt-out buildings. Eva's apartment building appeared to be still standing. He took a torch from the driver and went down the cobbled side street and into the backyard of the building, through a gate which opened to a precise quarter circle of rubble and a narrow path to the door of the building, whose whole rear was down so that he could see into Eva's kitchen.

The place wasn't habitable and he started to back out when he heard a voice, thin as bone china, singing an absurdly robust children's song from his homeland:

Ich bin ein Musikant, ich komm vom Schwabenland,
Du bist ein Musikant, du kommst vom Schwabenland.
Ich kann aufspielen auf Meiner Geige,
Du kannst aufspielen auf Deiner Geige.
Delà schum, schum, schum,
Delà schum, schum, schum
Delà schum, schum, schum,
Delà schum.

Felsen went up the stairs, still solid and unbroken. The voice continued the manic refrain of the bow across a violin. The door to the apartment was open. The living room had been stripped to the floorboards and even some of those had been taken up at the far end. He followed the voice into Eva's study. Huddled in the corner in a wild mix of clothing—scarves, cardigans, skirts, even a man's waistcoat—was Traudl. She stopped singing.

'Did you bring me anything today?'

Her face had completely regressed to a child's. A child's with no fat in it. The white skin over her skull was thinner than the finest glove leather. Her temples were sunken. He knelt down to her.

'Oh,' she said, seeing he was a man, 'do you want to fuck me?'

'Where's Eva, Traudl?'

'All right then, let me sit with you, just let me sit with you.'

'You can sit with me, but tell me where Eva is too.'

'She's gone away.'

'Where did she go?'

The girl frowned but didn't answer. He tried to put his hand through her hair but it was too matted. She began singing her song again.

Footsteps up the stairs. Light wobbled in the living room. A woman appeared in the doorway.

'What are you doing?' she asked, aggressive until she saw the uniform.

'I'm trying to find Eva Brücke.'

'Frau Brücke was arrested by the Gestapo months ago.'

The girl stopped singing the grating song.

'What for?' asked Felsen.

'Judenrein, judenrein, judenrein,
' chanted Traudl.

'Harbouring illegals,' said the woman. 'This one turned up some days after. She won't move, not even for air raids. I bring her something to eat now and again. But she'll have to move soon with this winter.'

Felsen took her to his apartment which had been requisitioned by the Organization Todt and filled with Speer's construction workers. He gave one of the women there all his ration cards and some money and left Traudl with her.

Felsen told the driver to take him to Wilhelmstrasse and booked himself into an absurdly luxurious room in the Hotel Adlon.

By 8.30 the next morning he was at No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse sitting in the office of SS Sturmbannführer Otto Graf. They were waiting for the file to be delivered and Graf was enjoying one of Felsen's cigarettes and staring out into the still dark morning.

'What is your interest in this case, Herr Sturmbannführer?'

'I knew her.'

'Intimately?'

'She'd been running clubs and bars in Berlin for years. A lot of people knew her.'

'But you, what about you?'

'I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't let herself be known.'

'Maybe ... what she was doing, you have to be.'

'I knew her before the war. She was always like that.'

The file arrived. Graf looked at the photograph and remembered her. He flicked through the pages.

'Yes, yes, I know the type,' he said. 'She looks as if she'll snap like a pencil on the first morning and three weeks later she's told us nothing. Not that...'

'Three weeks?'

'It was a very serious matter. She was smuggling Jews out. Sending them in rail cars of furniture to Gothenburg.'

'And after the three weeks?'

'She was lucky. If the presiding judge had been Freisler she would have hanged. As it is she's been sent to Ravensbrück for life.'

Felsen offered another cigarette which was taken. They were American, Lucky Strikes he'd brought over from Lisbon. He gave Graf the packet and another one from his pocket. He said he could arrange a carton, two cartons. Graf nodded.

'Come back at lunchtime, I'll have a visiting permit ready for you.'

It wasn't difficult to arrange a car, but it took all afternoon and another two cartons of cigarettes to get the petrol for it. He could have taken the train up to Fürstenberg but someone had told him the railway station was a long way from the camp and transport not always available.