A Small Death in lisbon (5 page)

'It is quite possible you have been...'

'And as for the Reich, we have overrun most of Europe lately which hardly...'

'...possible you have been unaware,' finished Koch shouting him down.

The double doors to the mess thumped open and a tall, heavy man took three strides into the room. Koch shot off his chair. The Brigadeführers all stood up. SS-Gruppenführer Lehrer flicked his wrist at waist height.

'Heil Hitler
,' he said. 'Bring me a brandy. Vintage.'

The Brigadeführers and Koch responded with full salutes. Felsen eased himself slowly out of his chair. The mess waiter whispered something to the dark, lowered head of the Gruppenführer.

'Well, bring me a brandy in the dining room then,' he shouted.

They went straight into dinner, Lehrer fuming because he'd wanted to stand in front of the fire, warming his arse, with a brandy or two.

Koch and Felsen sat on either side of Lehrer at the dinner. Over a nasty green soup Hanke asked Felsen about his father. The question Felsen had been waiting for.

'He was killed by a pig in 1924,' said Felsen.

Lehrer slurped his soup loudly.

Sometimes he used a pig, other times a ram. What he didn't do was tell the truth, which was that as a fifteen-year-old, Klaus Felsen had found his father hanging from a beam in the barn.

'A pig?' asked Hanke. 'A wild boar?'

'No, no, a domestic pig. He slipped over in the pen and was trampled to death by a sow.'

'And you took over the farm?'

'Perhaps you know this already, Herr Brigadeführer. I worked that farm for eight years until my mother died. Then I sold it and joined the Fiührer's economic miracle and I've never looked back. It's not something I enjoy doing.'

Hanke sat back after that, shoulder to shoulder with his protégé who smiled pinkly. Lehrer slurped on. He knew it all anyway. Except
for the pig, of course. That had been interesting, not true, but interesting.

The soup bowls were removed and replaced by plates of overcooked pork with boiled potatoes and a sludge of red cabbage. Lehrer only ate it for something to do while Koch gave him the party line. He shovelled food faster and faster into his face. In a momentary lull he leaned over to Felsen and said:

'Not married, Herr Felsen?'

'No, Herr Gruppenführer.'

'I've heard,' he said, nibbling at a hangnail, 'that you have a reputation with women.'

'Do I?'

'How does a man who's never been south of the Pyrenees speak Portuguese?' asked Lehrer, valuing his earlobe with thumb and finger. 'And don't tell me that that's what they're teaching you down in Swabia these days.'

Lehrer arched his eyebrows in a parody of innocence. Felsen realized that Susana Lopes had moved in higher circles than even he'd known about.

'I used to go riding with a Brazilian around the Havel,' he lied, and Lehrer's stomach grunted.

'Horses?' he asked.

After dinner they moved into an adjoining room. They each bought a hundred RM of chips and sat at a green baize table. The waiters moved a wooden trolley with drinks and glasses alongside, served brandies and left. Lehrer loosened off his tunic and drew on the cigar Felsen had given him, blowing the smoke on to the ember.

The light above the table, stratified by smoke, lit only the players' faces. Koch, even pinker now with the wine and brandy. Hanke with hooded unreadable eyes, the shadow of his dark beard already showing through. Fischer with pouches under his eyes and his skin taut and scraped raw as if he'd been half the night in a blizzard. Wolff, blonde and blue-eyed, impossibly young for a Brigadeführer, in need of a duelling scar to lend experience to the face. And Lehrer, the big man, with jowls fully formed, hair grey on the wings, dark eyes, wet and glistening with the anticipation of joy and further corruption. If Eva had been there, thought Felsen, she'd have told him that this was a man who liked to spank.

They played. Felsen lost consistently. He dumped hands which had any excitement in them and bluffed with no will to back it up. Koch lost flamboyantly. They both bought more chips and transferred them to the SS officers who showed no inclination for the process to stop.

Then Felsen started to win. There were comments about the cards turning. Hanke and Fischer were quickly burned out. Koch was stripped clean, going down for 1600 RM. Felsen concentrated on Wolff and began to lose to the man consistently on bluffs. Felsen was down to 500 RM when Lehrer cleaned Wolff out with four of a kind to a full house. Wolff looked as if he'd been speared to his chair. Lehrer was enormous behind his stacks of chips.

'You might wish to replenish your stocks if you want to take me on,' said Lehrer. Felsen poured himself a brandy and sucked on his cigar. Lehrer beamed. Felsen reached into his pocket and took out 2000 RM.

'Will that be enough?' he asked and Lehrer licked his lips.

They played for an hour with Lehrer, now stripped to his shirt, losing lightly. Wolff, out of the light, watched the game with the intensity of a falcon. Hanke and Koch colluded on the sofa while Fischer slept noisily.

Just after 1.30 a.m. Lehrer declined to draw on a hand. Felsen thought for a full three minutes and drew two which he looked at and laid face-down on the table. He moved 200 RM into the centre of the table. Lehrer matched him and raised him 400 RM. Felsen likewise matched and raised. They stopped and checked each other. Lehrer was trying to find the light, the narrow crack, the hairline fissure that was all he needed. Felsen knew then that his strongest card wasn't face-down on the table in front of him and allowed himself a tiny smile in the pit of his stomach. It was enough for Lehrer who matched Felsen and raised him 1000 RM. Felsen moved his remaining 500 RM into the centre and drew a block of 5000 RM out of his pocket and threw it on top.

Wolff was up to his chest at the table burning holes in the green baize. Hanke and Koch shut up. Fischer stopped snoring.

Lehrer smiled and drummed the table with his fingers. He asked for a pen and paper. He pushed his remaining 2500 RM into the centre and wrote a note for 2500 RM.

'I think we should see each other now,' he said.

'You first,' said Felsen, who'd have been happy to go on.

Lehrer shrugged. He turned over four aces and a king. Koch was gritting his teeth with fury at how Felsen had bought the job from under him.

'Well, Felsen,' said Wolff.

Felsen turned over his draw cards first. The seven and ten of diamonds. Wolff sneered but Lehrer leaned forward. The next two cards were the eight and nine of diamonds.

'I hope that last one's not a jack,' said Lehrer.

It was the six.

Lehrer tore his tunic off the back of his chair and left the room.

Perhaps, thought Felsen looking at the deflated men leaving around him, that had been a step too far. Beating four of a kind with a low straight flush—that could be seen as humiliation.

The sleet had turned back to snow. Then it became too cold for snow and the air froze still. The black ruts in the white roads iced over and the staff car taking Felsen back to Berlin fish-tailed its way up Nürnbergerstrasse.

Felsen tried to tip the driver, who refused. He limped slowly up the stairs to his apartment. He let himself in, threw off his coat and hat and slapped his money on the table. He poured himself a brandy, lit a cigarette and, despite the cold, stripped off his jacket and hung it off the back of a chair.

Eva was asleep in a wool coat, a blanket over her legs, on the chaise longue. He sat in front of her and watched her eyes fluttering under their lids. He put his hand out to touch her. She woke up with a small cry that sounded as if it came from the night rather than her throat. He took his hand back and gave her a cigarette.

She smoked and stared at the ceiling and stroked his knee without thinking about it.

'I was dreaming.'

'Badly?'

'You'd left Berlin, I was on my own at a U-bahn station and where the tracks should have been there were crowds of people looking up, as if they were expecting something of me.'

'Where'd I gone?'

'I don't know.'

'I doubt I'll be going anywhere after tonight.'

'What did you do?' she asked, mother to small boy.

'I cleaned them out.'

Eva sat up.

'That was stupid,' she said. 'You know Lehrer ... he's not so nice. You remember those two Jewish girls?'

'The ones who got washed up in the Havel ... yes, I do, but that wasn't him was it?'

'No, but he was there. He was the one who'd ordered the girls.'

'He knew about me too,' said Felsen sipping the brandy. 'He knew about me and Susana Lopes. How do you think he knew that?'

'It's the nature of the regime isn't it?'

'It was years ago.'

'It was a totalitarian state before the war too,' she said, swinging her knees round to between his legs and taking the brandy glass from him. 'Is that why you beat him at cards?'

'What do you mean?' he asked, annoyed to have sounded defensive.

'You were jealous, weren't you? I can tell,' she said. 'Of him and Susana.'

Her hands found the front of his trousers and rubbed the thick material.

'I beat him because I didn't want to leave Berlin.'

'Berlin?' she asked, toying with him now.

She undid the front of his trousers and unbuttoned his fly. He slipped out of his braces and she tugged his trousers down to his thighs and yanked his undershorts out and over his erection.

'Not just Berlin,' he said, and gasped as her hands enclosed the stem of his penis.

'Sorry,' she said, without meaning it.

He swallowed. His penis felt extremely hot in her small, cold, white hands. She moved her fists up and down, painfully slowly, without taking her eyes off his face. His neck juddered and he pulled her forward on to his lap, pushing the coat open and drawing her dress up over her stocking tops. He tugged the gusset of her knickers aside and she had to grab at the arms of the chair to save herself from falling. She found him and lowered herself down on to him feeling the slow burn creeping into her.

At dawn the heavy black curtains were crushing the iron-grey light back outside. The white linen bedclothes were stiff with cold.
Felsen's head came off the pillow at the second crash, which came with the noise of a length of wood splintering. Boots thundered over wooden floors, something fell and rolled. Felsen turned, his shoulders hardened by the frost, his brain grinding through the gears, drink and tiredness confusing the double declutch required. The two huge panes of mirrored glass in the double doors of the bedroom shattered. Two men in calf-length black leather coats stepped through the door frames. Felsen's single thought—why didn't they just open the doors?

Eva came out of sleep as if she'd been stabbed. Felsen slid out of the bed and crouched naked. A leather heel from a black boot hit him on the side of his cloth-filled head and he went down.

'Felsen!' roared a voice.

Felsen murmured something to himself, things slopping in his head, the room frill of Eva shouting hobnail German.

'You! Shut up!'

He heard a dull smack, something delivered with a closed fist, and then quiet.

Felsen sat with his back against the bed, his genitals shrinking back from the cold polished wooden floor.

'Get dressed!'

He stumbled into clothes. Blood trickled, warm behind his ear. The men took a shoulder each. They crunched over the broken glass, opening the doors this time, polite on the way out.

A green padlocked van was the only colour in a crevasse of snow-covered gunmetal buildings, whose street was frozen into arctic maps of white, fringed grey and black. The door of the van opened. They heaved Felsen into the darkness and pant of fear.

16th February 1941, 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, RHSA Headquarters

The van doors opened to an inarticulate shriek from an armed soldier. Felsen took a sideswipe from a rifle butt on the shoulder. He lowered himself into the ankle-deep black slush and staggered up the steps out of the courtyard into the grim stone Gestapo building. He was one of four prisoners. They were led straight down into the cellars, into a long narrow corridor with cells on either side. Most of the light came from an open door from which came the moaning of a man post-coitus. The two men ahead of Felsen looked into the light and switched their heads away fast. A man in shirt sleeves wearing a stiff, grossly stained, brown apron was attending to a man strapped into a chair.

'Shut the door, Krüger,' he said, in a tired, long-suffering voice. A man with a full day's work ahead of him and none of it easy.

The corridor darkened with a bang to a sodium-lit gloom. Felsen was put in a stinking unlit cell with a pallet and full bucket for company. He put his hands up against the damp wall and tried to breathe away the cold clamminess he felt on the inside of his rib cage. He
had
gone too far. He knew that now.

They came for him after several hours, took him past the shut door of the horror room up to the first floor and into an office with tall windows in which a man in a dark suit sat at a desk cleaning his glasses for an absurdly long time. Felsen waited. The man told him to sit.

'Do you know why you're here?'

'No.'

The man fitted his face into the glasses and opened a file which he tilted away from Felsen, who stared at the precision of the man's parting.

'Communism.'

'You're joking.'

The man looked up but didn't comment.

'You are pro-Jewish.'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'You also knew a woman called Michelle Duchamp.'

'That
is true.'

'My colleagues have been talking to her for a week in Lyons. She's been remembering things about the time she spent in Berlin back in the thirties.'

'Before the war ... when I knew her, you mean.'

'But not before politics. As you know, she's been working for the French Resistance movement for over a year.'

'I'm not political and no, I didn't know that.'

'We are all political. Party member number 479,381,
Förderndes Mitglied
to SS unit...'