A Small Death in lisbon (8 page)

They headed south-west out of Berlin to Leipzig and then across the whitened countryside to Weimar, Eisenach and Frankfurt. Lehrer worked out of a briefcase all the way, reading documents and
drafting memos in a spidery unreadable hand. Felsen was left to think about Eva but couldn't find any discernible change in the pattern of things—long nights drinking and laughing and listening to jazz—bouts of lovemaking in which she couldn't seem to wrap her arms around enough of his body—terrible arguments which started because he wanted to have more of her but she wouldn't give it, and which only stopped when she threw things at him, normally her shoes, never the china unless she was in his apartment and there was some Meissen available.

There was nothing ... except for the incident with the Jewish girls. For days after she'd found out about them, she'd been like the sole survivor from a direct hit—pale, vacant and fluttery. But it had passed, and anyway it didn't have anything to do with him, with them. He looked across at Lehrer who was humming to himself now and staring out of the window.

They arrived at a
Gasthaus
on the other side of Karlsruhe just as the light was failing. Felsen lay down in his room while Lehrer borrowed the manager's office and made telephone calls. At dinner they were alone but Lehrer was distracted until he was called to the telephone. He came back in an expansive mood and demanded brandy in front of the fire.

'And coffee!' he roared. 'The real stuff, none of this nigger sweat.'

He rubbed his thighs and warmed his arse. He took in his surroundings as if it had been far too long since he'd been in a simple roadside inn.

'I've never seen you in the
Rote Katze
before,' said Felsen, testing some untrodden ground.

'I've seen you,' said Lehrer.

'Have you known Eva long?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I just wondered how you knew about my old girlfriends. She introduced me to all of them ... including the poker player.'

'Who was that?'

'Sally Parker.'

'She didn't mention her.'

'If she had you wouldn't have proposed the game.'

'Yes, well ... I've known Eva for some time. Since she had that first club. Where was it now,
Der Blaue Affe?
'

'I've never heard of it.'

'Back in the twenties when she first started out.'

Felsen shook his head.

'Anyway. Your name came up. I recognized you. I asked Eva, who spoke very highly of you which she knew very well was not what I wanted. Then, of course, she was as discreet as she could be but, I'm an SS-Gruppenführer and ... and that's it,' he said, taking the brandy off the tray. 'You weren't...?'

'What?'

'Fräulein Brücke wasn't one of the reasons you didn't want to leave Berlin, was she?'

'No, no,' said Felsen, annoyed at himself for snatching at it.

'I was going to say...'

The wood hissed in the fire. Lehrer moved his hands over his buttocks to warm them.

'What were you going to say, sir?' asked Felsen, unable to stop himself.

'Well, you know, Berlin clubs ... the women ... it's not...'

'She wasn't a hostess,' said Felsen, tamping his anger.

'No, no, I know that, but ... it's the culture. It's not conducive to...' he waited to see if Felsen would fill in the word for him and reveal some more of himself, but he didn't, '...stability. Very artistic. Very free. Very easy. Permanent attachments are rare in a night-time culture.'

'Wasn't the most famous Party rally of all time held at night?'

'Touché
,' roared Lehrer, throwing himself into an armchair, 'but that was just so the camera wouldn't pick up the fat sods in the
Amtswalter
and make the Party look like a bunch of Bavarian pigs. And, may I remind you, Herr Hauptsturmführer, that glibness is not an approved National Socialist attitude.'

They went to bed shortly after that, Felsen feeling outmanoeuvred and sick. He lay on his cot and stared at the ceiling smoking through his cigarettes, turning over Eva's dismissal of him, the slickness with which she'd set him up and pulled it off.

'Ah well,' he said out loud, crushing his last cigarette into the ashtray on his chest, 'just another in a long line.'

It took him two hours to go to sleep. He couldn't get rid of a picture in his brain and a thought. The sight of his father's bare feet and ankles, swaying minutely at eye height, and why did he take his shoes and socks off?

27th February 1941

They wore suits to breakfast. Lehrer's was single-breasted thick wool, dark blue and heavy. Felsen felt flashy in his Parisian cut, double-breasted bitter chocolate suit and a regrettable red tie.

'Expensive?' asked Lehrer, his mouth full of black bread and ham.

'Not cheap.'

'Bankers don't believe you unless you wear dark blue.'

'Bankers?'

'The bankers of Basel. Who did you think we were going to see in Switzerland? You can't buy wolfram with chips.'

'Or Reichsmarks apparently,' said Felsen.

'Quite.'

'But Swiss francs ... dollars.'

'Dr Salazar was a professor of economics.'

'And that entitles him to be paid differently to everybody else?'

'No. It just entitles him to the opinion that in wartime it's best to have strong gold reserves.'

'You're sending me down to Portugal with a consignment of
gold?'

'A problem is developing. The Americans are being difficult about letting us have our dollars so we've started paying for what we want in Swiss francs. Our suppliers in Portugal exchange those Swiss francs for escudos. Eventually, through the local banks, the Swiss francs find their way to the Banco de Portugal. And once they've accumulated enough, they use them to buy gold from Switzerland.'

'I don't see the problem.'

'The Swiss don't like it. They're worried about losing control of their gold reserves,' said Lehrer. 'So, we are experimenting.'

'How do we move this gold?'

'Trucks.'

'What sort of trucks?'

'Swiss trucks. There'll be armed soldiers with you all the way. It's taken some organization I can tell you. You don't think I enjoy having my head in my briefcase all day, do you?'

'I didn't realize gold was physically moved. I thought it was accounted for on paper by national banks.'

'Perhaps Dr Salazar likes ... physically ... to sit on his gold,' said Lehrer, thinking some more, but he left it at that.

'Whose gold is this?'

'I don't follow your question.'

'Wouldn't German gold be held in the Reichsbank?'

'Now you're asking me questions which I can't ... which I don't have the knowledge to reply to ... or the authority. I am merely an SS-Gruppenführer, after all.'

By 11.00 a.m. they had drawn up outside an unmarked building in Basel's business district. There was nothing inside or out to indicate what happened in this building. There was a handsome woman in her thirties sitting behind a desk with a single telephone on it. A large marble staircase spiralled behind her. Lehrer talked to the woman quietly. Felsen only heard a single word—'Puhl'. The woman picked up the telephone, dialled a number and spoke briefly. She stood and set off on strong legs up the stairs. Lehrer indicated that Felsen should wait while he followed the legs.

Felsen sat in a densely packed leather armchair. The woman returned and sat at her desk without looking at him. She folded her hands and waited for the next high point in her day. It took Felsen half an hour and several cubic feet of charm to find out that he was in the lobby of the Bank of International Settlements. The name meant nothing to him.

At one o'clock Felsen and Lehrer were sitting at a table in a restaurant called Bruderholz. Only other men in dark suits ate in this place and at tables well-spaced from each other. There were four
petits poussins
between the two men and a flat plate of
boulangère
potatoes. Lehrer was holding a glass of Gewürztraminer and rolling the stem between his thumb and forefinger.

'It's so good to have Alsace back in the German fold, don't you think? What magnificent country, magnificent wine. The meat of the
poussin
will be a little delicate for this, we should have ordered goose or pork, hearty Alsatian fare, but I can't have too much fat, you know. Still ... the fruits of summer in the dead of winter. Your health.'

'Was that a particularly successful meeting, Herr Gruppenführer?'

'Tell me what you think of the Gewürztraminer?'

'Spicy.'

'I'm sure you can do better than that. I was always told that you were very appreciative of the good things in life.'

'Boldly fruity, but clean and dry. The spice holding from the top to the bottom, as long as an Atlantic cruise.'

'Where did you get that from?' Lehrer laughed.

'It's not true?'

'It's true ... but not as boring or as dangerous as an Atlantic cruise,' said Lehrer. 'I think a heavenly
brioche
is called for after this.'

They ate the
poussins
and drank two bottles of the Gewürztraminer. The restaurant emptied. They ate the
brioche
with a half-bottle of Sauternes. They ordered coffee and cognac and sat in the fading light of the darkening afternoon with cigars growing inches of concertinaed ash. The staff left them and the bottle and retired. The two men were well loosened up. Lehrer's cigar arm swung off the back of his chair and Felsen's legs were spread wide, a foot on either side of the table legs.

'A man,' said Lehrer heading for some pontification, pointing Felsen up with his cigar, ash still intact, 'must always do his important thinking alone.'

'What's a man's important thinking?' asked Felsen, licking his lips.

'Where he wants to be, of course ... in the future,' he sifted through the air for some more words, 'I mean, on your way you must gather your intelligence, you may ask opinion, but when you are determining your own place in the world ... this is your private, your secret thinking ... and if you are to be a man ... a man of difference, then this thinking must be done alone.'

'Is this the start of an essay entitled "How to become an SS-Gruppenführer " ?'

Lehrer waggled his cigar in the negative.

'That is my position only. A badge of the success of my thinking but it is not the ultimate purpose. A small example. You won the poker game the other night because your ultimate purpose was greater than mine. The adjutant told you to lose because I like to win. You wanted to stay in Berlin ... ergo you win. My intelligence, as you indicated to me last night, was not good enough to have played that game with you.'

'But you
did
win. I'm here. You lost a little money, that's all.'

Lehrer smiled broadly, his eyes glistening with drink, amusement and triumph.

'Perhaps you're thinking now why you're so important to me,' he said. 'Don't. My ultimate purpose should be no concern of yours.'

Except that it involves me, thought Felsen, but he said: 'Perhaps I should have one of my own.'

'My point entirely,' said Lehrer shrugging massively.

'This Russian campaign...' Felsen started and Lehrer held up his hand.

'You will get your intelligence by degrees,' he said. 'Let me ask you something first. What happened in the skies over England last summer?'

'I'm not sure we can read the precise truth in the
Beobachter
or the
12-Uhr Blatt.'

'Well, the precise truth,' said Lehrer leaning over and whispering into his brandy, 'is that we
lost
a great air battle. Goering will tell you otherwise. Goering has
told
me otherwise, but we all know how
he
keeps his distance from reality...'

'Excuse me, sir?'

'Nothing,' said Lehrer, straightening himself with a belch. 'The loss of a great air battle. What does that mean to you?'

'But we haven't been bombed in Berlin for nearly two months.'

'Berliners,' said Lehrer, despairing, 'even new Berliners, my God, man, believe me, we lost it. Now come on, tell me what that means.'

'If it's true, then we are exposed.'

'In the west and in the air.'

'So if we open up on an Eastern...'

'That's enough. I think you've understood something.'

'What is England with the Channel in between,' said Felsen. 'They're no threat.'

'I'm not being defeatist,' said Lehrer, 'no, no, no. But listen. We let them get away at Dunkirk. If we'd smashed them on the beaches then we'd be having this meal in London and we'd have nothing to worry about. But the English are determined. They have a friend across the Atlantic. The biggest economic force in the world. The Führer doesn't believe that, but it's true.'

'Perhaps we'll all join forces and smash the Bolsheviks.'

'That's a hopeful reading of the situation. Here's another,' said
Lehrer putting down his glass and screwing his cigar in between his teeth. He chopped down his left hand on the table and said: 'The United States and England.' He removed his cigar, chopped down his right hand and mouthed the word: 'Russia.' He pressed them together. 'And all that's left is a thin scraping of liverwurst in the middle.'

'Totally and utterly fantastic,' said Felsen. 'You're forgetting...'

Lehrer guffawed.

'That's the thing about intelligence. It's not always what you want to hear.'

'But do
you
believe that?'

'Of course I don't. It's just a thought. Don't trouble yourself with it. We will win the war and you will be in a perfect position to become one of the most powerful businessmen in the Iberian Peninsula. Unless, of course, I've misjudged you and you're a complete fool.'

'And if we lose, as you've suggested we possibly might?'

'If you're in Berlin and you listen to the Berliners, you'll be jam in the bottom of a bomb crater. But out there on the edge of the continent you will be far away from the disaster...'

'Then I have every reason to thank you for forcing this job on me, Herr Gruppenführer.'

Lehrer raised his glass and said: 'Prosperity.'