A Small Death in lisbon (31 page)

Felsen said nothing.

'Lisbon's been a long way from this war,' said Lehrer. 'Nobody's spoken to you about the Final Solution. It's not dinner-table conversation in Lapa. This gold has come from the Jews. Their watches, their spectacles, their jewellery, their teeth.'

'Their teeth?' said Felsen, moving his tongue over his own molars.

'The Führer will not capitulate because he knows, even in his madness, that the world will not accept his systematic annihilation of European Jewry. We will all have to go down fighting.'

On the 11th August 1944 Operation Dragoon began with a landing by American troops on the French Riviera. By that time 2714 kilos of Jewish dental and jewellery gold, and a rolled Rembrandt canvas were sitting in the vaults of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha in the Rua do Ouro in the Baixa in Lisbon. It would take Obergruppenführer Lehrer another nine months to come and claim them.

11th May 1945, Quinta das Figueiras, Alentejo, Portugal

The farmhouse was huge and fifteen kilometres from the nearest village on a chassis-breaking track of dried mud and slate. Nobody came to this place except the odd wandering shepherd to get water from the well in the high summer. The house occupied the top of a small rise in a landscape of rolling hills flecked with cork oaks and olive trees. The east side of the house overlooked the confluence of the Lucefecit and Guadiana rivers and there was a large, terracotta tiled terrace surrounded by a low wall and seven fig trees. It was under these trees that people would sit in the perfect cool and watch the river beyond the walled orange grove disappear into a rocky gorge, heading south to the Atlantic.

It was hot. Not the brutal summer heat which came when someone left the Sahara's furnace door open, but hot enough that after midday the birds fell silent, the sheep lowered their heads and gathered under the wide spread of the cork oaks and the Guadiana slowed almost to a stop. A car could be heard arriving for an hour, and the local people would listen because they were rare in these parts.

Felsen and Abrantes were driving a three-ton truck through a field of blood-red poppies, mowing through the blooms, up to the rear of the
quinta.
They were carrying two weeks' supply of tinned food, forty litres of wine in five-litre flagons, a case of brandy, a case of port, four suitcases of clothes, a stack of bed linen and two Walther P48S which they'd stowed under the driver's seat. There was a briefcase between them containing identity papers and passports for four men, four densely packed blocks of iooo-escudo notes and a velvet bag with twenty-four uncut diamonds. Felsen was trying to smoke but the truck was bucking so violently over the ruts in the field that he couldn't get the cigarette to his mouth. It was 6.30
P.M
.

They reached the beaten earth courtyard at the rear of the
quinta
and backed the truck up to the kitchen door. Felsen unlocked it and threw it open. The cool of the thick-walled house met him. They unloaded the supplies from the truck and drove it into the barn at the side of the house. Abrantes picked up two terracotta jars to fill from the well. Felsen took the bed linen further into the cool, dark house. He crossed the large dining room with its vaulted ceiling and opened up a set of double doors which led into a three-metre-wide corridor with eight bedrooms, four on either side.

The windows and shutters were closed in all the rooms with only cracks of intense light around the edges. The walls were half a metre thick here too, and all the ceilings vaulted. Felsen dropped linen into four rooms on the east side, and the last two rooms on the west side. At the end of the wide corridor was a crucifix which he straightened on the wall. He felt chill with the sweat of the drive still on him.

He opened a set of doors from the dining room to the terrace by removing a thick wooden pole inserted into holes within the walls on either side. He stood in the middle of the terrace and let the sun warm him through his damp shirt. He lit a cigarette and heard a distinct metallic click. He turned to find a man he didn't recognize, but whom he knew instantly was German, standing by the doors with a revolver in his left hand.

'Good evening,' he said. 'I am Felsen. We haven't met.'

The man was bigger than Felsen and brutal-looking with half-closed eyelids and a broken nose.

'Schmidt,' he said, and smiled.

Laughter came from under the fig trees and a familiar voice.

'Schmidt is very security conscious. We're glad to have him along, Klaus.'

Lehrer, Hanke and Fischer, all three of them dressed in collarless shirts, black waistcoats and trousers, came out from under the thick green fig leaves. Felsen embraced each of them.

'Where
is Wolff?'

'He's here,' said Wolff who appeared alongside Schmidt with Abrantes in front of him on the end of a Mauser.

'I wasn't expecting you for some days,' said Felsen.

'We got away early,' said Lehrer, and the men laughed. 'We've spent two nights in the barn.'

'Has there been any news from Germany?' asked Hanke.

'Weidling surrendered Berlin on May 2nd. Jodl surrendered to Eisenhower on the seventh and Keitel to Zhukov the day after.'

'Wasn't one surrender enough?' said Hanke.

'And the Führer?' asked Wolff.

'They think he's dead but there has been some confusion,' said Felsen. 'They haven't found a body.'

'He will return,' said Wolff, and Lehrer looked at him sceptically.

'I've bought you new clothes if you would like to change for dinner,' said Felsen.

'No, no,' said Lehrer, 'we're quite happy as labourers after ten days as priests. Let's eat. We've been starving out here for two days living on unripe figs.'

After dinner they sat in candlelight around the table with the doors open on to the terrace. They were all drinking brandy or port, except for Schmidt who didn't drink but sat with his left hand resting on the revolver and the fingers of his right stroking the break in his nose.

Felsen had distributed the identity papers which they were inspecting in the weak light.

'Did Schmidt bring photographs?' asked Felsen, as if Schmidt was out of the room.

Schmidt removed a packet from his waistcoat and threw it down the table.

'That could take me a few weeks to organize,' said Felsen.

'We're in no hurry,' said Lehrer. 'We're enjoying the peace. You have no idea of the chaos we have had to endure.'

The five men nodded solemnly. Felsen poured more liquor and checked the men's faces to see how this endurance had worn them. Hanke's eyes had cratered deeper into his face, his eyebrows had greyed as had the heavy beard on his sunken cheeks. Fischer had added more ruches to the pouches under his eyes and there were more red tributaries on his raw cheeks which had lost some of their tightness. Wolff had lost his middle-aged youth, his blonde hair had thinned on top, his eyes had creased and he had two deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Lehrer's head was entirely white, the hair cut short and close to his head like a new recruit. He'd lost weight, a lot of it, and the unfilled skin hung off his face and below his jaw to his neck. Curiously his eyebrows were still dark. They were all tired but the food and drink had enlivened them so that they now looked like pensioners on a summer jaunt to the local spa.

They drank until midnight. They drank until Hanke, Fischer and Wolff staggered off, followed by the vigilant Schmidt. Abrantes, bored by the Germans' conversation, had turned in at ten o'clock. Lehrer and Felsen went out on to the terrace with a hurricane lamp and another bottle of brandy. They lit cigars, whose smoke lingered before dispersing into the night, now faintly perfumed by the vestiges of the orange blossom still on the trees in the walled garden.

'It's worked out,' said Lehrer, inspecting the coal on the end of his cigar. 'It's worked out splendidly. Thank you, Klaus.'

'You of all people,' said Felsen, picking up on the sentimentality, 'have no need to thank me, Oswald.'

'It's important to thank people,' said Lehrer, swaying a little in his chair. 'You were always very good at showing your appreciation, way back in the Neukölln Kupplungs days. That's how I first heard your name. That's one of the reasons I chose you.'

'And this man Schmidt, why did you choose him?'

'Ah, yes. Schmidt was Gestapo and a very devout Catholic. His priest was very important to our plan. We came here from the Vatican.'

'His nerves might draw attention to you. He must learn to relax.'

'Ach, I know ... but it's good to have someone to be careful for you. It's in his nature. Gestapo men are always suspicious.'

Lehrer took a gulp of brandy, swilled it around his mouth and swallowed. He let his arms drop to his sides, dangling the glass and cigar, letting the stress pour off him. He breathed in the warm night, the crickets sawing through their longest shift and the frogs barking their chat like drunkards who never listen or give a damn.

'How long are you going to stay in Brazil?' asked Felsen.

A couple of years,' said Lehrer, and then thought about it, rolling his cigar between his lips, 'maybe more.'

'It'll all blow over in a year,' said Felsen. 'People are desperate to get back to normal.'

Lehrer's head turned slowly in the leaping light from the lamp, his eyes black but not shiny, as if any health in them had gone for good.

'Nothing will be normal again after this war,' he said.

'They said the same after the last war. All those men dead for senseless stretches of mud.'

'Remember what I said to you about the origin of the gold,' said Lehrer in a voice so tired and quiet he could have been on his deathbed. 'There are other names to be careful of ... Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Kulmhof, Chelmno...'

In this same quiet voice Lehrer gave Felsen his final lesson. He told him about the rail cars, the cattle trucks all joined together by couplings that used to be made in Neukölln Kupplungs Unternehmen. He told him about the selections, the shower rooms of Zyklon B, and the ovens. He told him numbers, the numbers of people in a single cattle truck, the numbers of rail cars, the numbers tattooed on forearms, the numbers that could fit in a shower room, the numbers they could put through a crematorium in a day. And he told him the names again just so that he would remember.

'I've told you these things,' said Lehrer, 'because this could take as long as five years for the world to forget and during that time any association with the SS will be very dangerous. If you are going to stay here ... and there's no reason why you shouldn't ... you must keep quiet about these things and when they are mentioned say nothing.'

Felsen did just that. He smoked his cigar and sipped his drink. Lehrer got to his feet and shook his history off his shoulders. He jammed his hands into his kidneys and stretched back his head to look up at the clear night sky.

'It's late,' he said. 'I've drunk too much and I must sleep.'

'Take the lamp, Oswald,' said Felsen. 'You'll need it to find your room.'

'I've slept well here,' said Lehrer. 'The peace has been magnificent.'

'Goodnight.'

'You'll go to bed too?'

'In a while. I'm not sleepy yet.'

Lehrer hobbled into the house, his feet still giving him trouble but not telling him anything any more. Felsen heard the faint click of the latch as he opened and closed his bedroom door. He sat for an hour in the darkness, his eyes gradually picking out the leaves of the fig trees, the line of the wall and the fields beyond. He tuned out the insect noise and listened to the rafters creaking in the cooling roof and to the rhythmic snoring from an open window.

He crouched under the branches of the fig trees and crawled over the low wall. He eased a piece of slate out of the dry-stone wall and took out a cloth package which contained a bowie knife and another, short-bladed, knife used for severing the spinal columns of animals. It was 2.30
A.M
.

He went back into the house and opened the second bedroom door on the west side. Abrantes was waiting by the open window. He handed him the short brutal knife and crossed the corridor to the first bedroom. The room was full of Fischer's snoring. The man was lying on his back, his neck perfectly displayed. Felsen drove the blade unhesitatingly in and across the windpipe, feeling the tip connect with the vertebrae. Fischer's eyes snapped open, his mouth widened to draw in air. Felsen threw back the covers and jammed the blade up to the hilt under the man's ribs. He backed out of the room. Abrantes, who'd just delivered Hanke to a deeper sleep with a single stab to the cerebral cortex, was waiting for him. Felsen pointed him down to Schmidt's room at the end of the house.

Felsen pushed against Wolff's door and knew that something was wrong. The door would only open a crack. He rammed his shoulder into it which sent the bed in the room scraping across the floor. He squeezed himself through the one-foot space. Wolff came awake with his hand already enclosed around the butt of his Mauser. Felsen lashed out with his fist and caught him on the side of the neck. The blow smacked Wolff's head against the whitewashed wall but didn't stop him from loosing off a round which seemed to split the roof open with its colossal roar. Felsen grabbed the hand holding the Mauser and thumped the blade of the bowie knife high into the man's rib cage. It went through but only punctured a lung. He yanked it out and punched the blade in once more and hit bone and the knife clattered to the floor. He tore the gun from Wolff's slackening grip. Wolff grabbed at him and hung on. He coughed a splatter of warm blackness into Felsen's neck and chest. Felsen fitted the gun barrel into the man's stomach and fired twice, the force of the bullets jerked the body but Wolff did not release him and they fell on to the bed, exhausted as lovers. Felsen pushed away from him and reeled out into the hall and down towards Lehrer's room.

'He's not there,' hissed Abrantes across the hall, pointing into Schmidt's empty room. 'The window was open and he wasn't there.'

'Before or after the shot?'

'He wasn't there,' said Abrantes, confused.