ROBERT WILSON

A Small Deathin Lisbon

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © Robert Wilson 1999

Robert Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007322152

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007378142

Version: 2014-09-24

Dedication

For Janeandmy mother

Note

Although this novel is based on historical fact the story itself is complete fiction. All the characters and events are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to any event or to any real person, either living or dead.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note

Map

Prologue

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Part Two

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Map

Prologue

She was lying on a crust of pine needles, looking at the sun through the branches, beyond the splayed cones, through the nodding fronds. Yes, yes, yes. She was thinking of another time, another place when she’d had the smell of pine in her head, the sharpness of resin in her nostrils. There’d been sand underfoot and the sea somewhere over there, not far beyond the shell she’d held to her ear listening to the roar and thump of the waves. She was doing something she’d learned to do years ago. Forgetting. Wiping clean. Rewriting little paragraphs of personal history. Painting a different picture of the last half-hour, from the moment she’d turned and smiled to the question: ‘Can you tell me how . . .?’ It wasn’t easy, this forgetting business. No sooner had she forgotten one thing, rewritten it in her own hand, than along came something else that needed reworking. All this leading to the one thing that she didn’t like roaming loose around her head, that she was forgetting who she was. But this time, as soon as she’d thought the ugly thought, she knew that it was better for her to live in the present moment, to only move forward from the present in millimetre moments. ‘The pine needles are fossilizing in the backs of my thighs,’ was as far as she got in present moments. A light breeze reminded her that she’d lost her pants. Her breast hurt where it was trapped under her bra. A thought tugged at her. ‘He’ll come back. He’s seen it in my face. He’s seen it in my face that I know him.’ And she did know him but she couldn’t place him, couldn’t name him. She rolled on to her side and smiled at what sounded like breakfast cereal receiving milk. She knelt and gripped the rough bark of the pine tree with the blunt ends of her fingers, the nails bitten to the quick, one with a thin line of drying blood. She brushed the pine needles out of her straight blonde hair and heard the steps, the heavy steps. Boots on frosted grass? No. Move yourself. She couldn’t get the panic to move herself. She’d never been able to get the panic to move herself. A flash as fast as a yard of celluloid ripped through her head and she saw a little blonde girl sitting on the stairs, crying and peeing her pants because he’d chased her and she couldn’t stand to be chased. The rush. The gust of terrible energy. The wind up the stairs, whistling under the door. The forces winding up to deliver. Doors banging far off in the house. The thud. The thud of a watermelon dropped on tiles. Split skin. Pink flesh. Her blonde hair reddened. The cranial crack opened up. The bark bit a corner of her forehead. Her big blue eye saw into the black canyon.

Part One

Chapter I

15th February 1941, SS Barracks, Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde.

Even for this time of year night had come prematurely. The snow clouds, low and heavy as Zeppelins, had brought the orderlies into the mess early to put up the blackout. Not that it was needed. Just procedure. No bombers would come out in this weather. Nobody had been out since last Christmas.

An SS mess waiter in a white monkey jacket and black trousers put a tea tray down in front of the civilian, who didn’t look up from the newspaper he wasn’t reading. The waiter hung for a moment and then left with the orderlies. Outside the snowfall muffled the suburb to silence, its accumulating weight filled craters, mortared ruins, rendered roofs, smoothed muddied ruts and chalked in the black streets to a routine uniform whiteness.

The civilian poured himself a cup of tea, took a silver case out of his pocket and removed a white cigarette with black Turkish tobacco. He tapped the unfiltered end on the lid of the case, gothically engraved with the letters ‘KF’, and stuck the dry paper to his lower lip. He lit it with a silver lighter, engraved ‘EB’, a small and temporary theft. He raised the cup.

Tea, he thought. What had happened to strong black coffee?

The tight-packed cigarette crackled as he drew on it, needing to feel the blood prickling in his veins. He brushed two white specks of ash off his new black suit. The weight of the material and the precision of the Jewish tailoring reminded him just why he wasn’t enjoying himself so much any more. At thirty-two years old he was a successful businessman making more money than he’d ever imagined. Now something had come along to ensure that he would stop making money. The SS.

These were people he could not brush off. These people were the reason he was busy, the reason his factory – Neukölln Kupplungs Unternehmen, manufacturer of rail-car couplings – was working to full capacity, and the reason why he’d had an architect draw up expansion plans. He was a Förderndes Mitglied, a sponsoring member of the SS, which meant he had the pleasure of taking men in dark uniforms for nights out on the town and they made sure he got work. None of this was in the same league as being a Freunde der Reichsführer-SS, but it had its business advantages and, as he was now seeing, its responsibilities as well.

He’d been living with the institutional smells of boiled cabbage and polish in the Lichterfelde barracks for two days, snarled up in their military world of Oberführers, Brigadeführers, and Gruppenführers. Who were all these people in their Death’s Head uniforms, with their endless questions? What did they do all day when they weren’t scrutinizing his grandparents and great-grandparents? We’re at war with the whole world and all they need is your family tree.

He wasn’t the only candidate. There were other businessmen, one he recognized. They all worked with metal. He had hoped they were being sized up for a tender, but the questions had been strictly non-technical, all character assessment, which meant they wanted him for a job.

An assistant, or adjutant or whatever these people called themselves came in. The man closed the door behind him with librarian care. The precise click and satisfied nod started the irritation winding up inside him.

‘Herr Felsen,’ said the adjutant sitting down in front of the wide, hunched shoulders of the dark-haired civilian.

Klaus Felsen shook his stiff foot and raised his hefty Swabian head and gave the man a slow blink of his blue-grey eyes from under the ridged bluff of his forehead.

‘It’s snowing,’ said Felsen.

The adjutant, who found it difficult to believe that the SS had been reduced to considering this . . . this . . . some ruthless peasant with an unaccountable flair for languages, as a serious candidate for the job, ignored him.

‘It’s going well for you, Herr Felsen,’ he said, cleaning his glasses.

‘Oh, you’ve had some news from my factory?’

‘Not exactly. Of course, you’re concerned . . .’

‘Everything’s going well for you, you mean, I’m losing money.’

A nervous look from the adjutant fluttered over Felsen’s head like a virgin’s petticoat.

‘Do you play cards, Herr Felsen?’ he asked.

‘My answer’s the same as the last time – everything except bridge.’

‘There’ll be a card game here in the mess tonight with some high-ranking SS officers.’

‘I get to play poker with Himmler? Interesting.’

‘SS-Gruppenführer Lehrer in fact.’

Felsen shrugged; he didn’t know the name.

‘Is that it? Lehrer and me?’

‘And SS-Brigadeführers Hanke, Fischer and Wolff who you’ve already met, and another candidate. It’s just an opportunity for you . . . for them to get to know you in a more relaxed way.’

‘Poker’s not considered degenerate yet?’

‘SS-Gruppenführer Lehrer is an accomplished player. I think it . . .’

‘I don’t want to hear this.’

‘I think it would be advisable for you to . . . ah . . . lose.’

‘Ah . . . more money?’

‘You’ll get it back.’

‘I’m on expenses?’

‘Not quite . . . but you will get it back in another way.’

‘Poker,’ said Felsen, wondering how relaxed this game would be.

‘It’s a very international game,’ said the adjutant getting up from the table. ‘Seven o’clock then. Here. Black tie for you, I think.’

Eva Brücke sat in the small study of her second-floor apartment on Kurfürstenstrasse in central Berlin. She was at her desk wearing just a slip under a heavy black silk dressing gown with gold dragon motifs and a woollen blanket over her knees. She was smoking, playing with a box of matches and thinking of the new poster that had appeared on the billboard of her apartment building. It said ‘German women, your leader and your country trust you.’ She was thinking how nervous and unconfident that sounded – the Nazis, or maybe just Goebbels, subconsciously revealing a deep fear of the unquantifiable mystery of the fairer sex.

Her brain slid away from propaganda and on to the nightclub she owned on the Kurfürstendamm, Die Rote Katze. Her business had boomed in the last two years for no other reason than she knew what men liked. She could look at a girl and see the little triggers that would set men off. They weren’t always beautiful, her girls, but they’d have some quality like big blue innocent eyes, or a narrow, long, vulnerable back, or a shy little mouth which would combine perversely with their total availability, their readiness to do anything that these men might think up.

Eva’s shoulders tightened and she pulled the blanket off the back of the chair around her. She’d begun to feel dizzy because she’d been smoking too fast, so fast that the end of her cigarette was a long, thin, sharp cone. This only happened when she was irritated, and thinking about men irritated her. Men always presented her with problems, and never relieved her of any. Their job, it appeared, was to complicate. Take her own lover. Why couldn’t he do what he was supposed to do and just love her? Why did he have to own her, intrude on her, occupy her territory? Why did he have to take things? She chucked the matches across the desk. He was a businessman, and that, she supposed, was what businessmen did for a living – accumulated things.

She tried to get her mind off men, especially her clients and their visits to her office at the back of the club where they’d sit and smoke and drink and charm until they’d get to what they really wanted which was something special, something really special. She should have been a doctor, one of those new-fangled brain doctors who talked you out of your madness, because as the war had worn on she’d noticed the tastes of her clients had changed. Normally, these days, as she’d found out to her cost, to include pain – both inflicting it and, perhaps to redress the balance, receiving it. And then there was one man who’d come and asked of her something that even she didn’t know whether she’d be able to supply. He was such a quiet, insignificant, enclosed man, you wouldn’t have thought . . .

There was a knock at the door. She crushed her cigarette, threw off the blankets and tried to plump some life into her blonde hair but lost heart when she caught sight of herself in the mirror with no make-up. She refolded the dressing gown across herself, pulled the belt tight and went to open the door.

‘Klaus,’ she said, producing a smile. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

Felsen pulled her over the threshold and kissed her hard on the mouth, desperate after two days in the barracks. His hand slid down to her lower back. Her fists came up and she pushed herself away from his chest.

‘You’re wet,’ she said, ‘and I’ve only just woken up.’

‘So?’

She went back inside and hung up his hat and coat and led him back to her study. He followed with his slight limp. She never used the living room, she preferred small rooms.

‘Coffee?’ she asked, drifting over to the kitchen.

‘I was thinking . . .’

‘The real thing. And brandy?’

He shrugged and went into the study. He sat on the client side of the desk, lit a cigarette and picked the flakes of tobacco off his tongue. Eva came in with the coffee, two cups, a bottle and glasses. She stole one of his cigarettes which he lit for her.

‘I was wondering where that was,’ she said, tugging the lighter out of his grip, annoyed.

She was wearing lipstick now and had brushed her hair. She pulled the telephone plug out of the wall, so that they could talk privately.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.

‘Busy.’

‘Trouble at the works?’

‘I’d have preferred that.’

She poured the coffee and tipped some brandy into hers. Felsen stopped her doing the same to his.

‘After,’ he said. ‘I want to enjoy the coffee. They’ve been making me drink tea for two days.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘The SS.’

‘They’re so brutal those boys,’ she said, irony on automatic, unsmiling. ‘What do the SS want from a sweet little Swabian peasant like you?’

The smoke curled under the art deco lamp. Felsen tilted the shade downwards.

‘They’re not saying, but it feels like a job.’

‘Lots of questions about your pedigree?’

‘I told them my father ploughed the strong German soil with his bare hands. They liked it.’

‘Did you tell them about your foot?’

‘I said my father dropped a plough on it.’

‘Did they laugh?’

‘It’s not a very humorous atmosphere down there.’

He finished his coffee and poured brandy over the dregs.

‘Do you know someone called Gruppenführer Lehrer?’ asked Felsen.

‘SS-Gruppenführer Oswald Lehrer,’ she said, becoming very still. ‘Why?’

‘I’m playing cards with him tonight.’

‘I’ve heard he’s in charge of running the SS or rather the KZs as a business . . . making them pay for themselves. Something like that.’

‘You know everybody, don’t you?’

‘That’s my business,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him. He’s been in the club. This one and the old one.’

‘I have. Of course I have,’ he said, but he hadn’t.

Felsen’s mind raced. KZs. KZs. What did that mean? Were they going to assign him some cheap concentration camp labour? Switch his factory over to munitions production? No. Job. It was for a job. He felt the cold in his bones suddenly. They weren’t going to make him run a KZ, were they?

‘Drink some brandy,’ said Eva, sitting on his lap. ‘Stop guessing. You’ve got no idea.’

She ran her fingers over his bristly head and thumbed one of his cheekbones as if he was a child with a mark. She tilted his head and planted some fresh lipstick on his mouth.

‘Stop thinking,’ she said.

He slipped a large hand up under her armpit and cupped one of her firm, braless breasts. He eased another hand under the hemline of the slip. She felt him hardening under her. She stood, wrapped herself in the gown again and knotted the belt. She leaned in the doorway.

‘Am I seeing you tonight?’

‘If they let me go,’ he said, shifting in his seat, his erection troubling him.

‘Didn’t they ask how come a Swabian farmboy speaks so many languages?’

‘Yes, they did, as a matter of fact.’

‘And you had to give them a guided tour of all your lovers.’

‘Something like that.’

‘French from Michelle.’

‘That was French was it?’

‘Portuguese from that Brazilian girl. What was her name?’

‘Susana. Susana Lopes,’ he said. ‘What happened to her?’

‘She had friends. They got her out to Portugal. She wouldn’t have lasted long in Berlin with that dark skin,’ said Eva. ‘And Sally Parker. Sally taught you English, didn’t she?’

‘And poker and how to swing.’

‘Who was the Russian?’ asked Eva.

‘I don’t speak Russian.’

‘Olga?’

‘We only got as far as da.’

‘Yes,’ said Eva, ‘niet wasn’t in her vocabulary.’

They laughed. Eva leaned over him and tilted the lampshade back up.

‘I’ve been too successful,’ said Felsen, failing to look sorry for himself, trickling more brandy into his cup.

‘With women?’

‘No, no. Drawing attention to myself . . . all this entertaining I do.’

‘We’ve had some good times,’ said Eva.

Felsen stared into the carpet.

‘What did you say?’ he asked suddenly, looking up at her, surprised.

‘Nothing,’ she said, leaning over him to stub her cigarette out. He breathed her in. She stepped back. ‘What are you playing tonight?’

‘Sally Parker’s game. Poker.’

‘Where are you taking me with your winnings?’

‘I’ve been advised to lose.’

‘To show your gratitude.’

‘For a job I don’t want.’

Outside a car drifted through the slush down Kurfürstenstrasse.

‘There is one possibility,’ she said.

Felsen looked up, sun perhaps breaking through the cloud.

‘You could clean them out.’

‘I’ve thought of it,’ he said, laughing.

‘It could be dangerous but . . .’ she shrugged.

‘They wouldn’t stick me in a KZ, not with what I’m doing for them.’

‘They stick anybody in a KZ these days . . . believe me,’ she said. ‘These are the people who cut down the lime trees on Unter den Linden so that when we go to the Café Kranzler all we have are those eagles on pillars looking down on us. Unter den Augen they should call it. If they can do that they can stick Klaus Felsen, Eva Brücke and Prince Otto von Bismarck in a KZ.’

‘If he was still alive.’

‘What do they care?’

He stood and faced her, only a few inches taller but nearly three times wider. She put a slim white arm, the wrist a terminus of blue veins, across the door.

Take the advice you’ve been given,’ she said. ‘I was only joking.’

He grabbed at her, his fingers slipping into the crack of her bottom which she did not like. He went to kiss her. She twisted and yanked his hand away from behind her. They manoeuvred around each other so that he could get himself out of the door.

‘I’ll be back,’ he said, without meaning it to sound a threat.

‘I’ll come to your apartment when I’ve closed the club.’

‘It’ll be late. You know what poker’s like.’

‘Wake me if I’m sleeping.’

He opened the door to the apartment and looked back down the corridor at her. Her dressing gown had been rucked open. Her knees, below the hem of her slip, looked tired. She seemed older than her thirty-five years. He closed the door, trotted down the stairs. At the bottom he rested his hand on the curl of the bannister and, in the weak light of the stairwell, had the sense of moorings being loosed.

At a little after six o’clock Felsen was standing in his darkened flat looking out into the matt black of the Nürnbergerstrasse, smoking a cigarette behind his hand, listening to the wind and the sleet rattling the windowpane. A slit-eyed car came down the road, churning slush from its wheel-arches, but it wasn’t a staff car and it continued past him into the Hohenzollerndamm.

He smoked intensely thinking about Eva, how awkward that had been, how she’d needled him bringing up all his old girlfriends, the ones before the war who’d taught him how not to be a farmboy. Eva had introduced him to all of them and then, after the British declared war, moved in herself. He couldn’t remember how that had happened. All he could think of was how Eva had taught him nothing, tried to teach him the mystery of nothing, the intricacies of space between words and lines. She was a great withholder.

He pieced their affair back to a moment where, in a fit of frustration at her remoteness, he’d accused her of acting the ‘mysterious woman’, when all she did was front a brothel as a nightclub. She’d iced over and said she didn’t play at being anything. They’d split for a week and he’d gone whoring with nameless girls from the Friedrichstrasse, knowing she’d hear about it. She ignored his reappearance at the club and then wouldn’t have him back in her bed until she was sure that he was clean, but . . . she had let him back.

Another car came down Nürnbergerstrasse, the sleet diagonal through the cracks of light. Felsen checked the two blocks of Reichsmarks in his inside pockets, left the window and went down to join it.

SS-Brigadeführers Hanke, Fischer and Wolff and one of the other candidates, Hans Koch, were sitting in the mess taking drinks served by a waiter with a steel tray. Felsen ordered a brandy and sat amongst them. They were all commenting on the quality of the mess cognac since they’d occupied France.

‘And Dutch cigars,’ said Felsen, handing round a handful to all the players. ‘You realize how they used to keep the best for themselves.’

‘A very Jewish trait,’ said Brigadeführer Hanke, ‘don’t you think?’

Koch, still as pink-faced as he had been at fourteen, nodded keenly through the smoke of his cigar which Hanke was lighting for him.

‘I didn’t know the Jews were involved in the Dutch tobacco industry,’ said Felsen.

‘The Jews are everywhere,’ said Koch.

‘You don’t smoke your own cigars?’ asked Brigadeführer Fischer.

‘After dinner,’ said Felsen. ‘Only cigarettes before. Turkish. Would you like to try one?’

‘I don’t smoke cigarettes.’

Koch looked at his lit cigar and felt foolish. He saw Felsen’s cigarette case on the table.

‘May I?’ he said, picking it up and opening it. The shop’s name was stamped on the inside. ‘Samuel Stern, you see, the Jews are everywhere.’

‘The Jews have been with us for centuries,’ said Felsen.

‘So was Samuel Stern until Kristallnacht,’ said Koch, sitting back satisfied, synchronizing a nod with Hanke. ‘They weaken us every hour they remain in the Reich.’

‘Weaken us?’ said Felsen, thinking this sounded like something verbatim from Julius Streicher’s rag, Der Stürmer. ‘They don’t weaken me.’

‘What are you implying, Herr Felsen?’ said Koch, cheeks reddening.

‘I’m not implying anything, Herr Koch. I was merely saying that I have not experienced any weakening of my position, my business, or my social life as a result of the Jews.’

‘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 Führer’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 full 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.

Chapter II

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 . . .’

‘You know as well as I do that there is no life outside the Party.’

‘Is that why you joined, Herr Felsen? To grow your business? Improve your prospects? Just hitching a ride on us are you, while the going’s good?’

Felsen sat back from the desk and looked out of the window at the bleak Berlin sky, realizing that this could happen to anybody and did . . . every day.

‘That’s a nice jacket,’ said the man. ‘Made by your tailor . . .’

‘Isaac Weinstock,’ said Felsen. ‘That’s a Jewish name in case . . .’

‘You know it’s forbidden for Jews to buy yarn.’

‘I bought the cloth for him.’

It was snowing again. He could just make out the grey flakes against the grey sky through the grey glass over the grey filing cabinet.

‘Olga Kasarov,’ said the man.

‘What about her?’

‘You know her.’

‘I went to bed with an Olga . . . once.’

‘She’s a Bolshevik.’

‘She’s a Russian, I do know that,’ said Felsen, ‘and anyway, I didn’t know you could catch communism from fucking.’

That seemed to snap something inside the man who stood up and tucked the file under his arm.

‘I don’t think you understand your situation very well, Herr Felsen.’

‘You’re right, I don’t. Perhaps you would be good enough . . .’

‘Some rehabilitation is, perhaps, in order.’

Felsen suddenly felt the runaway vehicle he was on lurch down a steeper slope.

‘Your investigation . . .’ he started, but the man was moving towards the door. ‘Herr . . . Herr . . . wait.’

The man opened the door. Two soldiers came in and heaved Felsen to his feet and took him out.

‘We’re sending you back to school, Herr Felsen,’ said the dark-suited man.

They took him back down to his cell where they kept him for three days. Nobody spoke to him. They gave him a bowl of soup once a day. His bucket wasn’t emptied. He sat on his pallet surrounded by his piss and faeces. Screams would occasionally penetrate his darkness, sometimes faint, other times horrifically close and loud. Terrible beatings took place in the corridor outside his cell. More than one man called for his mother under the crack of his door.

He spent the hours and days preparing himself. He tutored his brain into a state of excessive politeness and his demeanour into one of submissive timidity. On the fourth day they came for him again. He was stinking and feeble with fear. They didn’t take him to the horror room and they didn’t take him upstairs for another meeting with the man in the dark suit. They handcuffed him and took him straight out into the courtyard, the snow falling in soft large flakes but packed hard underfoot by boots and tyres. They loaded him into an empty van with a large and still tacky stain on the floor. The doors shut.

‘Where’s this going?’ he asked the darkness.

‘Sachsenhausen,’ said the guard outside.

‘What about the law?’ said Felsen. ‘What about the process of law?’ The guard hammered on the side of the van. The driver slammed it into gear and sent Felsen cannoning against the doors.

Eva Brücke sat in her office in Die Rote Katze smoking cigarette after cigarette and trickling more brandy into her coffee cup until it was all brandy, no coffee. The swelling on her face had gone down with the daily application of a little snow and she was left with a blue and yellow mark which disappeared under foundation and the white powder she used.

The door to her office was open and she had a clear view of the empty kitchens. She heard a light tapping on the back door and stood to answer it. At that moment the telephone went off louder than a stack of china hitting the floor. She jumped and steadied herself. She didn’t want to pick it up, but the noise was shattering and she snatched it to her ear.

‘Eva?’ asked the voice.

‘Yes,’ she said, recognizing it. ‘This is Die Rote Katze.’

‘You sound tired.’

‘It’s a job with long hours and not much opportunity for rest.’

‘You should take some time off.’

‘Some “Strength through Joy” perhaps,’ she said, and the caller laughed.

‘Do you have anybody else with a sense of humour?’

‘It does depend on who’s telling the jokes.’

‘No, well, I mean . . . someone who appreciates fun. Unusual fun.’

‘I know people who can still laugh out loud.’

‘Like me,’ he said, laughing out loud to prove it.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, not laughing with him.

‘Could they come and see me for an evening of amusement and wonder?’

‘How many?’

‘Oh, I think three is a merry number. Would three be all right?’

‘Could you drop by and give me a better idea of what . . .?’

‘It’s rather inconvenient at the moment.’

‘You know, I worry after . . .’

‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t be concerned. The theme is food. What could be more joyous than food in this day and age.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thank you, Eva. Your service is appreciated.’

She hung up and went to the back door. The small, enclosed man she’d been expecting was there in the snow-packed alley. She let him in. He shook the snow off his hat and stamped his boots clean. They went to the office. She pulled the telephone plug out of the wall.

‘Do you drink, Herr Kaufman?’

‘Only tea.’

‘I have some coffee.’

‘Nothing, thank you.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘I was wondering if you’d have room for two visitors?’

‘I told you . . .’

‘I know, but it’s an emergency.’

‘Not here.’

‘No.’

‘How long?’

‘Three days.’

‘I might be going away,’ she said, off the top of her head, inspired by the telephone call.

‘They can manage on their own.’

‘I told you before that this would be . . . it would have to be . . .’

‘I know,’ he said, folding his hands into his lap, ‘but the circumstances are unusual.’

‘Won’t they always be unusual?’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

She lit a cigarette and sighed the smoke out.

‘When are they coming?’

Sachsenhausen was an old barracks turned concentration camp thirty kilometres north-west of Berlin in Oranienberg. Felsen knew of the place only because he’d taken on a political and two Jews to sweep the factory floors. They’d been released from there in 1936 just before the Olympics. They didn’t have to say anything about the conditions in the KZ, the two tendons at the backs of their necks stood out sharply from under their shaved heads – they were fifteen kilos underweight minimum.

It was an unnerving drive on snow-covered roads from Berlin. The van skidded and slewed across the road. At Sachsenhausen he heard the gates opening and a thunderous pummelling on the panels of the van. The van seemed to run a gauntlet for a hundred metres until Felsen’s nerve was completely shattered. Then silence and only the creak of tyres on snow. The van stopped. The wind moaned. The driver coughed in his cab. The doors opened.

Felsen got to his feet, felt the stickiness on the edges of his hands which were stained russet from the drying blood on the floor. He stumbled to the back of the van. Outside was a vast white expanse with just two lines across it from the wheels of the van. Far off, perhaps two hundred metres away, it was difficult to judge over the snow’s squinting glare, were trees and buildings.

The van took off, throwing him out on to the ankle-deep snow. The doors flapped and banged shut and he put his hands up over his head, confused by the sudden noise. At the edge of the enormous flat expanse of snow-covered ground a figure stood at ease. Felsen nosed forward, eyes creased shut. The figure, grey and indiscernible, didn’t move. Felsen flinched at a noise behind him, the sound of sharp metal slicing through snow. He whipped round. There were three men in black SS greatcoats and helmets. The hems of their coats rested on the surface of the snow. One carried a wooden club, the next a spade which he swung in an arc, the blade singing against the crystalline snow. The third held a metre length of steel cable, frayed at the end. Felsen looked back to the figure, as if he might help. The figure had gone. He got to his feet. The men were eyeless beneath their helmets. Felsen’s legs were shaking.

‘Sachsengruss,’ said the guard with the club.

Felsen put his hands on his head and began doing knee-bends. The Saxon Greeting. They kept him at it for an hour. Then they told him to stand to attention for an hour, until his body was shaking with cold and his ears full of the swish from the cable, the slicing of the spade, the tamping of the wooden club. The guards trod a circle around him.

They removed his handcuffs. The spade flew through the air at him. He caught it in fingers which he expected to shatter like porcelain.

‘Dig a path to the building.’

They walked behind him over the vast area as he dug hundreds of metres of paths. Tears streamed down his face, the snot ran in freezing rivulets from his nose, the steam poured off him thick as bull’s breath. It began to snow. They told him to reclear the paths he’d already made.

They worked him for six hours until it was completely dark, no light coming from the blacked-out buildings. They faced him out into the darkness and gave him another hour’s Sachsengruss while they told him how he was going to have to clear it all again tomorrow. In the last ten minutes he dropped to the floor twice and they kicked him back up on to his feet. He was glad to be kicked. He knew something from the kicking. He knew they weren’t going to beat him to death with the club, cable and spade.

They stood him to attention after that until a thin reed of music came floating through the pitch black. They told him to march into the building. He fell over. They dragged him backwards inside. His feet trailed damp lines over the polished floors.

The warmth of the building seemed to unfreeze his mind and tears poured out of his head, water leaked out of his nose and ears. The music grew louder. He knew it. Mozart. It had to be. All those notes. Voices and laughter came over the music. A familiar smell. The guards’ boots rolled over the polished floors. Felsen’s feet came back to a life of pain but he was grinning. He was grinning because he knew now what he’d suspected before out in the snow – he wasn’t in Sachsenhausen.

They arrived in a room with chairs and carpets, newspapers and ashtrays – unimaginable civilization after Prinz Albrechtstrasse. They stopped. The guards got him standing. One of them knocked and they took him backwards into the room. A girl giggled. The talking subsided, only the music remained.

‘Does the prisoner like this music?’ asked a voice.

Felsen swallowed hard. His legs trembled. His humiliation stiffened his neck.

‘I don’t know whether I should like it, sir.’

‘You have no opinion?’

‘No, sir.’

‘This is Mozart. Don Giovanni. This has been banned by the Party. Do you know why?’

‘No, sir.’

‘The libretto was written by a Jew.’

The music was cut.

‘Now what did you think of the music?’

‘I didn’t like it, sir.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I’ve been sent back to school, sir.’

Felsen’s feet throbbed in his ruined shoes, the blood thumping through them.

‘Why are you here?’ asked a different voice.

He thought for a long minute.

‘Because I’m lucky at cards, sir,’ he said, which screwed the tension down in the room so that the girl tittered. ‘Sorry sir, because I cheat at cards, sir.’

‘Prisoner, turn around and stand at ease.’

He didn’t see who was sitting at the table at first. His watering eyes took in the gross quantities of food before anything. Then he saw Wolff, Hanke, Fischer and Lehrer, two other men he didn’t know and a young woman who was smoking through lipstick already smudged.

Lehrer was smiling. The Brigadeführers were all amused. Fischer broke first and roared and drummed the floor with his boots. They all laughed, banging the table, even the girl, who didn’t know why she was laughing.

‘Is the prisoner permitted to laugh?’ asked Hanke.

They roared again.

‘Prisoner Felsen. Laugh!’ shouted Fischer.

Feslen smiled and started to blink, conjuring mirth from relief. His shoulders began to shake, his stomach pumped and he laughed, he laughed himself helpless, he laughed himself to a retching standstill. He laughed the SS officers silent.

‘The prisoner will stop laughing now,’ said Lehrer.

Felsen’s mouth clamped shut. He returned to ‘at ease’.

‘There are some clothes for you in there. Change.’

He went into the kitchens, stripped and got into a dark suit which hung off him. He rejoined the table.

‘Eat,’ said Lehrer.

He laid waste to the table in his immediate vicinity more thoroughly than a retreating army. The officers talked amongst themselves except Lehrer. ‘Don’t think I’m a bad loser,’ he said.

‘I don’t think that, sir.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you are what your name implies . . . a teacher, sir.’

‘And what have you learned?’

‘Obedience, sir.’

‘We’re giving you this job you don’t want for a number of reasons. You can organize things. You are ruthless and aggressive. But you must not be insubordinate, Felsen. In your business you might lose an hour’s production because somebody didn’t follow your orders. In the business of war it could be a thousand lives or more. There’s no place for the maverick. Control is the key. And I am in control,’ he said, swilling the brandy in his glass. ‘So why don’t you want this job?’

‘I don’t want to leave Berlin, sir. I have a factory to run.’

‘At least it’s not a girl.’

‘I’ve produced quality goods and I’ve shown my appreciation.’

‘Don’t start on a different question. What’s in Berlin for a Swabian like you apart from your factory? We’re not talking about Paris or Rome. It’s not a city you can fall in love with. Not like Nuremberg, my city. And Berliners? . . . My God, they think the world owes them a living.’

‘Maybe I like their sense of humour.’

‘Yes, well, you’ve always been a bit dry down in Swabia.’

‘I don’t follow you, sir,’ said Felsen, touchy.

‘Trampled to death by a pig. What was that?’

Felsen didn’t respond.

‘Do you think I don’t know about your father?’ said Lehrer.

‘Yes, well, there you have two examples of Swabian humour.’

‘It gave me a problem, Hanke thought you were psychologically unsuitable.’

‘I should have tried harder with him.’

Lehrer leaned across the table, his face flushed with wine, his breath sour and cigar-streaked.

‘This job is a big opportunity for you . . . a big opportunity . . . You will thank me for it. I know you will thank me.’

‘Then why don’t you tell me about it, sir?’

‘Not yet. Tomorrow. You’ll come to Lichterfelde. I’ll have you sworn in first.’

‘Into the SS?’

‘Of course,’ said Lehrer, until he saw Felsen’s frozen face. ‘Don’t worry, you’re going west, not east.’

They drove slowly north through the fresh snow back to Berlin. That familiar smell had been the Lichterfelde barracks. On the few occasions a car passed in the other direction Felsen could see the shadows of the officers in the car in front, passing the girl between them. Lehrer didn’t speak. It stopped snowing. They cruised into Berlin and the first car peeled off to the Tiergarten and Moabit. Lehrer ordered the driver to do a small circuit of the city. Felsen stared out into the dark, the black parks, the flak towers, the lightless houses, the silent Anhalter station.

‘It’s the nature of war,’ said Lehrer, ‘that things happen. More things happen than could possibly happen in peacetime. In that respect it’s the most exciting time of a man’s life. One moment you’re running a factory, making more money than you could ever dream of as a farmer in Swabia. You dance with girls in the Golden Horseshoe, watch the shows in the Frasquita, walk the Kufu with all the other monied bastards. And the next moment . . .’

‘I’m in Prinz Albrechtstrasse.’

‘A new and radical regime must protect itself. Strength through fear.’

‘And the next moment . . . go on.’

‘Think international. Germany is not just Germany any more. Germany is the whole of Europe. A world power. Political and economic. Don’t be small-minded.’

‘It’s my peasant mentality. It’s how I get things done for the money.’

‘That’s good, but see the big picture too. The Reichsführer Himmler wants the SS to be an economic power in its own right within the new Germanic Reich. Think about that.’

The car finally turned into Nürnbergerstrasse and pulled up outside Felsen’s apartment. He got out and went up the two flights of stairs and found his front door repaired. He let himself in and lit one of his own cigarettes. He looked from behind the blackout and found the car gone. He put on a coat and hat and went out into the night.

It was a short walk to Kurfürstenstrasse. He walked in the street where it was easier. There was nobody out. The temperature had dropped sharply.

Felsen went down the small lane at the side of Eva’s apartment building and in through the gate. The mounds of earth and rubble taken out of the cellar were covered in thick snow. The door was locked. He hammered on it and stepped back and up on to one of the mounds to see if there were any cracks of light around the windows. He roared her name. After a few moments someone opened a window and told him to shut his drunken talk.

He went back home, soaked in a bath and got into bed. It was 2.30 a.m. He’d call her in the morning, he thought, as he drifted into his first hour’s sleep. He came awake four times, each time with a rush and a crack in his head as if he’d been hit with a brick. There was the smell of shit in his nostrils, and the last frames of his dream stayed with him; the white of the widening parade ground lengthening out for ever. He had to put the light on after that.

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