A Small Death in lisbon (27 page)

'When do you want the product moved?' asked Abrantes, anxiety showing through.

'It's supposed to be in last year's accounts which should be finalized by the end of January.'

Felsen went into the kitchen. Maria was there holding her baby, looking pathetic. He strode past her, crossed the courtyard and packed his clothes.

In the back of the Citroën he wrote a note to the manager of the compound in Ciudad Rodrigo and gave it to the driver. As they drove down the hill they caught up with a procession. There were men he recognized carrying a body wrapped in cloth and women walking behind. He dropped the window.

'Who has died?' he asked.

The men didn't answer. A woman spoke up.

'It is Alvaro Fortes,' she said, 'and this is his widow and son.'

Felsen blinked and told his chauffeur to drive on.

27th December 1941, German legation, Lapa, Lisbon

'Salazar,' said Poser, who hadn't referred to him as a cheating Arab for over twenty-four hours now, 'was in such a lather ... still is ... about the invasion, that we thought it expedient to open our wolfram negotiations for 1942 immediately. It's been a marvellous sight. Sir Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador, has been staggering about like a concert pianist with broken fingers. The good doctor has spent the whole year in a state of irritation with the British, who've put an arm around his shoulder and whispered the old alliance in his ear and taken advantage of his credit, while with the other they blockade him and sweep troops into Dili. We, on the other hand...'

'...have been sinking his ships.'

'True. Minor, but necessary, corrective measures or should we say reminders of his neutral status.'

'As far as Salazar's concerned, Christmas happens once a year and he gets all the presents. What are you offering?'

'Steel,' said Poser, brimming with confidence. 'Steel and fertilizer. We'll be making an offer in two weeks' time. Salazar will give us guaranteed export licences for 3000 tons and, once we have that, these other negotiations about who will get what from the Metals Corporation will be immaterial. We will get what
we
want and the British can learn about sweating for 1942.'

'And do I continue my operations?' asked Felsen.

'Of course you do, unless you receive orders to the contrary. I think a more clandestine approach might be in order, but you should have an open field.'

'Where's this intelligence from?'

'Not intelligence, just an observation about British character. You probably don't know much about cricket, do you? Nor do I. But I'm told it's all about fair play. They'll play by the book and report all your indiscretions to Salazar like the good boys they are. And Salazar ... if we keep stroking his fur the right way, will ignore them.'

Poser took one of Felsen's offered cigarettes, lit it and stuck it in his prosthetic hand. He sipped his coffee, licked his lips and applied his handkerchief to them as if they were sore. He sat back patting his chest as if that was where he had his winnings.

'Is that it?' said Felsen. 'You brought me all the way down from the Beira just to tell me how brilliant you are?'

'No,' said Poser, 'just to smoke some of your cigarettes. I like the brand.'

Felsen checked him over.

'Yes,' confirmed Poser, 'I've been learning from you, Felsen. A joke. A rare thing in diplomatic circles.'

'When are you and Salazar getting married, Poser?'

'The wedding, I fear, is still some way off,' he said, grinning.

'Happy Christmas, Poser.'

'And to you, Felsen,' said the Prussian, raising his prosthetic hand in a half salute. 'And by the way, there's someone to see you in my office.'

For an irrational moment, caught up in Poser's good humour, Felsen thought that it would be Eva. But he was distracted by the smell of burning in his nostrils and Poser tearing the cigarette out of his prosthetic hand, the glove burnt through and ruined.

'Shit,' said Poser.

'Another rare thing in diplomatic circles?' asked Felsen.

In Poser's office, sitting with his back to the door and his feet up on the window sill, looking out at the weak, winter sunshine filtering through the Phoenix palms in the gardens, was Gruppenführer Lehrer.

'Heil Hitler
,' said Felsen. 'What a surprise, Herr Gruppenführer, what a wonderful surprise.'

'Don't waste any of that Swabian charm on me, Herr Sturmbannführer.'

'Sturmbannführer?'

'You've been promoted. So have I. Now I'm Herr Obergruppenführer if you can manage that. And as from next March we'll be operating under the auspices of the
Wirtschaft-und Verwaltungshauptamt
or the WHVA if that means anything to you?' said Lehrer, who paused for a sign. 'Clearly not.'

'Now we get promoted for failing to achieve our targets...'

'No, for getting close to impossible ones. The circumstances have not been easy, I know, and you haven't had full control of the campaign, but despite all this you've made considerable progress and more important, the Reichsführer Himmler has been able to shine in front of the Führer and annoy Fritz Todt. The latter being the most gratifying.'

'I can only thank you for coming all this way to confer the honour, sir.'

Lehrer whipped his feet off the sill and swivelled his chair to face Felsen. Promotion had worked on him, there was a greater and harder authority emanating from under the black eyebrows.

'Do you know what temperature it is in Russia?'

'Now?' asked Felsen, unnerved. 'Well below zero, I imagine.'

'Minus twenty if you're in Moscow. Minus thirty if you're out in the wilderness somewhere ... and it's going down not up. It's not so easy to remember that in plus fifteen with the blue sea and the Estoril casino and the champagne...'

'The blankets...'

'Forget the damned blankets. The quality was complete shit anyway. I'm glad, you know this, I'm
glad
the British pre-emptive campaign was so successful. Now they've got all those blankets rotting in their own warehouses instead of them stinking out ours.'

'And Poser seemed so cheerful.'

'What you don't know about Poser is that he has a prosthetic head. Nothing in there is real,' said Lehrer. 'You know who they've got fighting our boys out there on the eastern front?'

'Russians?'

'Siberians. Flat-faced, slit-eyed Siberians. Those people, they sleep in the summer, it's too warm for them. They only wake up when the temperature drops below minus ten. That is their operating temperature. Our troops are still in their summer tunics. They haven't even got gloves. And they're faced with those barbarians who dance because it's so beautifully cold, who rub rancid pig fat on to their bayonets so that when they stick our half-frozen soldiers the wound will be hopelessly infected and they'll die in agony. If their screams could carry as far as Berlin we'd be out of there tomorrow.'

'Why are you telling me this?'

'The reward for failure is a posting to the Russian front. What does that tell you?'

'We are not experiencing total victory.'

'The real winter has just started, but it's been damn cold for two months. Our supply lines are stretched over thousands of miles. The Russians have retreated and left us nothing. They've razed everything to the ground. There isn't a single thing we don't have to transport. You know what we do with our Russian prisoners of war? We stick them behind barbed wire and watch them starve and freeze to death. We can't give them anything. We can't supply ourselves. Grim, is an unimaginably slight adjective for the situation out there.'

'The first half of the liverwurst sandwich?'

'Have you been out in the Beira with your head up a pig's arse? What happened on 7th December?'

'Pearl Harbor.'

'We already have the makings of the sandwich.'

'The way we see it here, we're twenty-five kilometres from Moscow. We're in the suburbs, for God's sake. The Americans are on the other side of the Atlantic. They've still got to invade Europe. Let's be reasonable, Herr Obergruppenführer.'

'I'm hopeful, Herr Sturmbannführer, but we must have contingency,' said Lehrer. 'Now ... that peasant you work with up there in the Beira.'

'Abrantes.'

'Can he read or write?'

'No,' said Felsen, 'but he has a signature.'

'Is he under control?'

'He's under control,' said Felsen, thinking how close it had been. 'As long as he's making money he's happy. He does well enough out of the wolfram cleaning companies we set up.'

'This is a different thing altogether. Those cleaning companies are nothing, they don't have significant assets. You remember what I said to you at the beginning of the year ... about private thinking.'

Their eyes connected and achieved an understanding.

'In the event of unlikely disaster...' Felsen allowed the sentence to drift.

'What I have in mind...' said Lehrer, 'we're going to open a bank, a Portuguese-owned bank.'

'Portuguese-owned?'

'If it comes to it ... the completion of the sandwich, I mean. I can assure you the Allies will be vengeful. No German assets will survive in Europe. This bank will be Portuguese-owned with significant, but very discreet, German shareholders.'

'And who are they going to be?'

'You and me for the moment,' said Lehrer. 'This is our private enterprise. No one, and certainly not that Prussian idiot, should know about it.'

'Is this an SS thing?'

'In a manner of speaking,' said Lehrer, trying to get a clearer reading from Felsen. 'But I hope you understand the importance of Abrantes in this. He must be reliable ... he must be a friend.'

'He's a friend,' said Felsen, holding Lehrer's adamantine look.

'Good,' said Lehrer, easing himself back into his chair. 'Now all we need is a name. A good Portuguese name. What does "felsen" translate as in Portuguese?'

'Rochedo rocha.'

'Rocha.
That sounds reliable, but I think we should have something big and encompassing to go with it.'

'The sea is probably the most important Portuguese icon,' said Felsen.

'What's "sea" in Portuguese?'

'Mar.'

'No, no.
Mar e Rocha
sounds like a bad restaurant.'

'Oceano e Rocha?'

'I think that could be it. Banco de Oceano e Rocha,' said Lehrer, looking out into the gardens. 'I'd put my money in that.'

1st October 1942, central Berlin

Eva Brücke sat in the study in her apartment. She smoked cigarette after cigarette and took sips of brandy from a glass she held with white hands in which she could see the blue veins working clearly. Her face had so little colour in it she thought her teeth might be visible through her cheeks if she stood in front of the light. Her insides? She didn't have any insides. She felt like a plucked and drawn bird, freezing too.

There were two of them in the apartment, nameless of course, Hänsel and Gretel, Tristan and Isolde. The two were practised, expert at not being there—quieter than insects but not so silent that the tension in the rooms became palpable. They'd been at it around Berlin for months and this was their last stop.

Eva had been getting ready to go out, had just got to the point of applying a nub end of a lipstick to her mouth when there'd been a knock at the door, a polite knock. She put the lipstick away. She didn't want to fluff it and break up the valuable nub end. The next knock was a roll of thunder, a heart-stopping pounding on the door followed by the dread three-syllable word that could jelly the thighs of a Berlin bartender.

'Gestapo!'

It was loud enough that the two in the back of the apartment would have heard and hidden themselves. She had no time.

'I'm coming,' she said, getting it out clear first time with no croaks and adding a slightly irritable intonation. The pounding continued. She shrugged into her overcoat and opened the door.

'Yes,' she said, efficient, a slight divot of a frown on her forehead. 'I was just on my way out.'

The two men pushed past her into the living room. They both wore black leather coats and black hats which neither of them removed. One was thin. The other a brute.

'Come in,' she said.

'Your papers?'

She took them out of her handbag and handed them over, straight-armed, on the confident side of impertinent.

'Eva Brücke?' said the thin one, not reading the papers.

'I think you'll find that's who I am.'

'You've been reported.'

'For what and by whom?'

'Harbouring illegals,' he said. 'Your neighbours.'

'I don't have any neighbours, I'm surrounded by rubble.'

'We're not necessarily talking about people who live next door. Neighbours could be those who overlook from the back, for instance.'

'They were bombed out last week,' she said.

'You don't mind if we have a quick look around.'

'I was on my way out,' she said, verging on the desperate.

'It won't take long,' said the thin one, sniffing the air.

'As long as you don't mind giving me the names of the neighbours, the names of your superior officers so that I can report those neighbours for nosiness when your superiors come to my club tonight, and your names too.'

'So that what? So that you can report us too?' asked the brute, hanging his face in front of her.

'Müller,' said the thin one pointing to his own chest, 'and Schmidt. Do you want to write those down? Can we get on with it now?'

'The back of the apartment is still unsafe from the bombing. I will not be responsible if you hurt yourselves. And if a wall falls out because of your carelessness and I'm left to freeze this winter I'll...'

'...sleep in this room,' finished Schmidt, his eyes gone sleepy, his nose broken and bent to the right.

'No. I will ask my friends, your superiors at the RHSA, to pay for the reconstruction.'

'In a pig's arse,' said Schmidt crudely. Nobody was sure what he meant.

They stared into her. She'd overdone it on the haughtiness and the name-dropping. Nerves. Müller gave her back her papers.