A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XII

16th December 1941, SS Barracks, Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde 'So,' said Gruppenfuhrer Lehrer, summarizing the wolfram campaign to Brigadefuhrers Hanke, Fischer and Wolff, 'we have received 2200 tons here in Germany. There's 300 tons in transit and there are 175 tons of stocks in Portugal. By my mathematics that makes a total of 2675 tons which is 325 tons below the 3000-ton target for the year.'

Silence from the four men. Felsen sat smoking in a chair about three metres adrift from Lehrer's desk.

'Our Intelligence in Lisbon inform us that the British exported 3850 tons.'

'You probably haven't seen the Beralt mine, sir,' said Felsen. 'It's a colossal operation…'

'Intelligence goes on to say that 1300 tons of that was "free" wolfram, uncontracted wolfram. As I see it that's 1300 tons that should have come to Germany. My God,' said Lehrer, rifling through the papers on his desk, 'the money we're paying for this…'

'660,000 escudos per ton,' said Felsen.

'That doesn't mean anything to me.'

'Six thousand pounds per ton,' said Wolff.

'Exactly,' said Lehrer. 'Huge money.'

'It's over seven thousand pounds a ton in Spain and product is moving across the border to take advantage of that,' said Felsen. 'In a market like this it's not always easy to persuade people to sell. The British moved out of the market in October and you saw the price fell by a quarter. Now they're back in.'

'That shouldn't stop you from buying.'

'We have to accept that when the British are in the market they will always have their contacts. These are people who cannot be persuaded to sell to us, not with money and not with fear.'

'Fear?'

'We are conducting our own war in the Beira, it's just not as well covered as the Russian campaign.'

'Blankets,' said Hanke, in a knee-jerk reaction to the word Russia.

'Not now, Hanke,' said Lehrer.

'It might make you happier to know that the British are paying more for their wolfram,' said Felsen. 'Salazar introduced a 700 pounds per ton export tax in October. All the British product goes out by sea so they have to declare every kilo in the ports. I've shipped more than 300 tons without paying any tax.'

'Smuggling?' asked Fischer.

'It's a long and difficult border.'

'We understand that Salazar wants to reduce the wolfram production. All this money we're pouring into his country is worrying him… inflation, that sort of thing.'

'That's why he brought in the export tax,' said Felsen. 'Now he's put a special department of the Metals Corporation in position which is designed to buy all wolfram and tin…'

'Yes, yes, yes, we know all this,' said Hanke. 'Our legation in Lisbon will now have to persuade Salazar that Germany deserves the lion's share of the "free" wolfram ahead of the British.'

'I will carry on buying and smuggling,' said Felsen, 'but from now on the big tonnage will be settled in the government offices in Lisbon and not out in the fields of the Beira. It will take time though…'

'Why?'

'Ask Poser. He thinks Salazar's the trickiest bastard since Napoleon.'

'What's Salazar after?' asked Wolff.

'Gold. Raw materials. No trouble.'

'We have gold. We can probably lay our hands on some good steel and if he doesn't like that we can hurt him,' said Lehrer.

'How?' asked Fischer.

'We sank the SS Corte Real back in October, Fischer. Don't you remember anything? There's no reason why we shouldn't torpedo another one.'

'Oh, I see what you mean,' said Fischer, who'd had something more personal in mind.

'Now… blankets, Hanke,' said Lehrer.

The meeting and dinner afterwards went on until 11.00 p.m. Lehrer had accompanied him to his waiting car, jolly, drunk and dangerous.

The Americans are in now, Felsen. How about that?' he'd said and run his finger back and forth over his palm as if he was spreading something. Then he'd clapped his hands. 'Don't forget the liverwurst.'

Felsen didn't react. Lehrer shook with laughter.

The car started its slow mole-crawl back to his apartment in Berlin. Felsen hadn't said anything in the meeting, but those figures had bothered him. He knew his campaign hadn't made the 3000-ton target, but he also knew he was a lot closer than 325 tons adrift. There must have been something wrong with the way the stocks had been calculated in Portugal. He smoked a cigarette in about three drags, thinking about it.

The car dropped him off just before midnight. He waited for it to leave and then he set out for Eva's club on the Kurfurstendamm.

He took a small table on his own in an alcove with a view of Eva's office door. A girl with short jet-black hair, and bare white arms, was singing badly up on the stage, but getting away with it because her legs were long, slim and perfect in nylon. He ordered a brandy and looked at all the women in the house. No Eva. A girl came to his table and asked if he wanted company. She was boyish, with no hips and a starved bottom. He shook his head without speaking. The girl shrugged her bony shoulders.

Felsen took out his cigarettes, the silver case slipped out of his hand. He fished around under the table. There was another hand there. He surfaced. Eva was putting one of his cigarettes in her mouth. She lit it, then Felsen's, and polished the case on her dress.

'I thought it was you,' she said. 'I still don't recognize you in uniform. I mean I can't distinguish men in uniform. Shall I join you for a bit?'

She swung her legs under the table and her knee touched his. There was a spark of recognition, a pulse that travelled, and brought back a time and two people who'd known something of each other.

'What happened to you?' she asked, giving him back his case, touching his hand, the familiar hair, tough hair, strong as pig bristle. 'You've lost your Berlin pallor.'

'You were always the pale one,' he said.

'Recently, I've become translucent,' she said. 'It's the diet and the fear.'

'You don't look scared.'

'The only reason I have a full house tonight is because of the cloud cover. Some nights it's just me and the girls… and our friends from across the water dropping Christmas turkeys.'

'The girls are looking scrawnier,' said Felsen, not seeing Eva's stick-thin arm.

'Me too,' she said, showing him an arm stringy with muscle.

He played with his glass and made a perfect cone of the ember of his cigarette. How to get started? Nine months out of Berlin, and he'd lost the veneer, the hard-dried varnish of cynicism and wit, that got the Berliners through their days.

'I saw you in Bern,' he said, to the ashtray.

She frowned and her cheeks sank as she drew on her cigarette.

'I've never been to Bern,' she said. 'You must have…'

'I saw you in a nightclub in Bern… back in February.'

'But, Klaus… I've never even been to Switzerland.'

'I saw you there with him.'

He was completely still and looking at her with the intensity of a hungry wolf down from the mountain. She returned the look, back-lit, the smoke curling around her head. No backing down from the lie.

'You've changed,' she said, and took a sip from his brandy glass.

'I spend a lot of time outdoors.'

'We've all changed,' she said, and her knee disconnected from his. 'There's been a human hardening.'

'We all end up doing things we don't necessarily want to do,' he said. 'But it's not as if there's no opportunity.'

'Just that there's not always the choice.'

'Yes,' he said, and had a hot stink of memory from a July afternoon in a disused mine when there had been a choice and something had gone wrong.

'What happened to you, Klaus?' she asked, the different emphasis jolting him, as if he'd been wearing something on his face he shouldn't have.

'Some things can't easily be explained.'

'That is very true,' she replied.

The girl who'd come by earlier drew up next to Eva.

'Nobody wants me to sit with them,' she said.

'Sit with Klaus,' said Eva. 'He wants you to sit with him.'

They looked at him. He nodded to the empty space. The girl wriggled in, happy now. Eva leaned over and put her cheek next to his.

'It's been nice,' she said, 'to have a little talk.'

She left no scent, only the feeling of her warm breath.

'My name is Traudl,' said the girl.

'We met before,' he said and turned the brandy glass around on its coaster. He put it to his lips where Eva's had been. She still wore the same lipstick.

He took Traudl back to his apartment. She talked for the two of them. He hung his coat up, poured himself a drink and found that she'd gone. He was relieved until she called him from the bedroom. He told her to come back into the living room.

'It's cold,' she said.

She was naked walking on tiptoe across the polished floor, the tendons and sinews in her thin legs visible. The unfilled flaps of her breasts with shrivelled nipples hung off the racked ribs of her chest. She hugged them to herself. He took off his tunic and loosened the braces off his shoulders. She shivered with her fists under her chin. He saw her back view reflected in the glass doors of the bedroom-the sad bottom with hip bones protruding. He nearly lost all enthusiasm for the project. He sat down and asked her to massage the front of his trousers. Her teeth chattered. His penis wouldn't stir.

'You're cold, go back to bed,' he said.

'No,' she said, 'I want to.'

'Go back to bed,' he said, with a little blade in his voice and she didn't argue.

He sat in the dark and drank aguardente that he'd brought back with him for Christmas. It tasted like hell. He circled over his meeting with Eva looking for scraps. There were none. In the early hours he decided there was nothing left for him in Berlin and he'd take the next flight back to Lisbon.

He flew back the next day via Rome and spent only enough time in Lisbon for Poser to tell him that something had happened. He didn't know what it was, he had men working on it, but Salazar was not happy.

'He's frothing at the mouth,' said Poser, relishing it, 'completely rabid with fury. Magnificent rage. And the Allies are catching it… just in time for our negotiations with the Metals Commission.'

Felsen drove up to the Beira and spent the afternoon of the 19th December with the accountant in Guarda. He made a small circuit of his territory and three days before Christmas appeared in Amendoa on a wind-whipped frozen morning. There was no sign of Abrantes. The old woman was there with her husband, Abrantes' father, sitting in his customary winter position in the fireplace, crying from the smoke. The girl was there too with her son, Pedro, who was four months old. Felsen asked her where her husband was, and she looked embarrassed, which she was only rarely in his company now that she was used to him. Her fingers were ringless. She wasn't married.

Felsen stroked the baby's downy head which fitted neatly into his palm. The girl offered him food and drink and flipped the baby on to her hip.

'Let me take him,' said Felsen.

She hesitated and searched the German's face with her lime-green eyes. Foreigners. She gave him the baby and went to the kitchen. She'd never regained her girlish form. Her bosom had stayed full and her hips swung in her calf-length skirts. When she turned she found Felsen looking at her in that way and she nearly smiled. He tickled the baby. Pedro grinned and Felsen had a cameo of Joaquim Abrantes with his dentures out.

She brought him some wine and chourico. He gave her the baby who reached for her breasts.

'Is he out on his land?' asked Felsen, thinking Abrantes might be fossicking his twenty hectares now that the wolfram price had peaked.

'He left this morning. He didn't say,' she said.

'Do you expect him back?'

She shrugged-Abrantes didn't talk to any of the women in his house. Felsen drank two glasses of the rough wine and ate a couple of chunks of chourico and went out into the cold morning. He drove into the next valley and found someone to take him to Abrantes' piece of land. He was right, they were working it. But no Abrantes.

There was a small granite and slate house on the property. Half its roof was fallen in, the unbroken slates stacked in rows on the floor, the shattered ones in a pile of grey shards. A woman was cooking in there out of the wind, stirring a pot on a rusted brazier. She was filthy and haggard, her face sunken with toothlessness.

The door was rotten on the other side of the house. People were living in there. There was a rag-covered pallet and some chipped clay jars. The place smelled of damp earth and urine. Something small was shivering under the rags.

One of Abrantes' peasants from Amendoa came around the side of the house and stopped, surprised to see Felsen. He removed his hat and came forward, bowing. Felsen asked after Abrantes.

'He's not here,' said the peasant looking at the ground.

'And the others? Where are they? Why aren't they here?'

No answer.

'And who are these people living out here on the land of Senhor Abrantes like this?'

The woman left her pot and began talking to the peasant in toothless Portuguese and at some length using her wooden spoon for emphasis.

'What is she saying?'

'It is nothing,' said the peasant.

The woman railed at him. The peasant looked away. Felsen directed his question at the woman. She gave him a very long answer during which the peasant cut in with the short words:

'She is the wife of Senhor Abrantes.'

'And this child in here?'

The peasant beckoned Felsen away from the old crone around to the back of the house where there were three mounds of grass unmarked.

'The children of Senhor Abrantes,' said the peasant. 'A sickness of the lungs.'

'And the one inside?'

The peasant nodded.

'All girls?'

He nodded again.

'Where is Senhor Abrantes?'

'Spain,' he said without taking his eyes from the mounds.

The peasant's name was Alvaro Fortes. Felsen put him in the front seat next to the driver and they went to the border at Vilar Formoso. Felsen drank aguardente from the same metal bottle he used for water in the summer and ran his thumb over the calculations he'd made-28 tons from Penamacor, 30 tons from Casteleiro, 17 tons brought over from Barco, 34 tons up from Idanha-a-Nova. All missing-which was why the Portuguese stocks were 109 tons lower than they should have been.

At the border he drank with the chefe of the alfandega who was pleased to give him the information that the British had been tracking German shipments through the border all last month, and there'd been rumours that Lisbon were going to issue orders to hold up his consignments of wolfram. Felsen gave the man a bottle of brandy and asked after Abrantes. The chefe hadn't seen him in a week.

It started to rain as they drove south along the border to Aldeia da Ponte and then on to Aldeia do Bispo and Foios at the foot of the Serra da Malcata, whose vast low, lynx-patrolled hills crossed the border. Here there was a contrabandista who was going to run a pack mule operation through the serra for him if Dr Salazar decided to make life difficult.

'Have you ever made the journey across to Spain?' he asked the back of Alvaro Fortes' head. No answer.

'Did you hear me?'

'Yes, Senhor Felsen.'

'Have you done it before?'

Again no answer.

'When was the first time?'

Alvaro Fortes answered by not answering. Felsen began to feel the heat of his missing tonnage as the wind strafed the car from the north. They drove through the village to the house and stables of the man who kept the mules. The serra was invisible under low cloud.

At the mule-owner's house Felsen went to the boot and unlocked a small metal trunk. He removed his Walther P48 and loaded it. He told Alvaro Fortes to get out of the car. They went to the back of the granite house, into the stableyard, which had a warehouse at one end, chained and padlocked. There were no mules. Alvaro Fortes jiggled about like a man with a full bladder.

Felsen banged on the door at the back of the house with the heel of his hand. No response. He made Alvaro Fortes hammer continuously, and they heard the old man's voice from inside.

'Calma, calma, ja you,' he said. I'm coming.

The rain was slanting across the yard as he opened the door on the German standing in a thick leather coat with his hands clasped behind his back. He knew he was in trouble well before a hand came out and put a gun in his face.

'No mules,' said Felsen.

'They're out working.'

'Who's with them?'

'My son.'

'Anybody else?'

The old man's eyes flicked across to Alvaro Fortes who was no help.

'Have you got the key to that warehouse?'

'It's empty.'

Felsen put the barrel of the gun right up to the man's eye so that he could smell the oil, see the narrow, dark, escape route from life. The old man produced the key. They walked across the puddled yard. He opened the padlock and ripped the chain out. Alvaro Fortes opened the doors. The warehouse was empty Felsen went down on his haunches and pressed his finger on to the dry floor and came back up with fine black chips embedded in his skin. He stood up.

'Kneel, both of you,' he said.

He fitted the gun barrel under the occipital bulge at the back of the old man's head.

'Who is with your son and the mules?'

'Senhor Abrantes.'

'What are they doing?'

'Running wolfram to Spain.'

'Where do they take the wolfram?'

'A warehouse in Navasfrias.'

He pressed the gun into Alvaro Fortes' head.

'What happens to the wolfram?'

'He sells it.'

'To who?'

'To the highest bidder.'

'Has he sold to the British?'

Silence. The rain lashed the yard and the roof overhead.

'Has he sold to the British?'

'I don't know who he sells to. Senhor Abrantes doesn't talk of such things.'

Felsen went back to the old man.

'When will he return?'

'The day after tomorrow.'

'Will you tell him I have been here?'

'No, Senhor, I will not… if you don't wish it.'

'I don't wish it,' said Felsen. 'If you do tell him I will come back here and kill you myself. I will shoot you in the head.'

To show a level of seriousness he let off a round past the old man's ear that would leave him deaf for a week. The bullet ricocheted around the slate and granite warehouse. Alvaro Fortes threw his hands over his head and fell to one side. Felsen grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into the yard.

They went back to the car. Felsen sipped liquor from his bottle while Alvaro Fortes shivered with his hair plastered to his white forehead.

He ordered the driver to take them back to Amendoa and as the wind drove the rain over the hills and through the chestnut trees and oaks and on to the granite walls, rather than wolfram or Abrantes he found himself thinking of Eva. A few nights ago he'd been a civilized man sitting with a woman in a Berlin club. She'd lied to him. There'd been a betrayal before the lie, but he hadn't been able to drag up any anger. Out here in this rock-shambled, wind-blasted place, where the houses were carved out of the ground, he could only find a single-minded brutality to drive him through to the next day. He was a primitive, a man stripped down to the essentials.

And now he was going to have to kill Joaquim Abrantes.

It was dark when they arrived back in Amendoa. The girl and Abrantes' parents were eating. He joined them. The rain had stopped and only the wind was left, shifting the tiles on the roof. The old man wouldn't eat. His wife brought the food to his mouth but he wouldn't take it. She ate her own food, wiped her husband's eyes and took him to bed. The girl waited on Felsen. She wouldn't sit with him. He asked after the baby. The baby was sleeping. She offered him apples, but he hadn't finished the stew. He listened to her skirts as she moved around him. He thought about Abrantes grunting over her and that hissing sound she made.

She looked at him while he was eating. Every chance she had. Even when she was behind him he knew she was looking. He was different to look at. He asked for coffee, which they'd never had in the house before the German came. He drank it and poured aguardente on to the grounds and sank that. He said goodnight. She brought him a flat, metal pan of hot coals to take the edge off the cold in his bare room across the courtyard where they used to keep the hay for the animals.

He lay on his bed and smoked cigarettes by the light of the hurricane lamp. After an hour he got up and crossed the courtyard. He went to the girl's room which had just a curtain across the door. She was sleeping. He put the lamp on the floor. She woke up with a gasp. He clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled back the covers. The baby was sleeping at her back. He eased the child to one side. He rolled her on to her back trapping her arms underneath. He pushed his hand up her woollen-stockinged legs. Her thighs were clamped shut. He jammed his hand between them and prised them open by making a fist. Her eyes darted left and right over his hand. He tugged her drawers down to her knees and undid his trousers. He was surprised to slide into her easily and their eyes connected in the leopard light from the lamp on the floor. He was slow and gentle with the baby in the bed. After some minutes she closed her eyes and he felt her heel on his left buttock. He took his hand away from her mouth. She began to tense and shudder against him and the other heel began to kick at his right buttock. He quickened. Her eyes sprang open and he emptied himself into her and stayed there, rammed to the hilt and quivering.

The next day she gave him breakfast. It was no different to any other day except that she looked at him straight, with no shyness.

He stayed out all day, overseeing the loading of a cargo of wolfram into rail cars. He went back to Abrantes' house at nightfall. After dinner the old couple went to bed. The girl remained sitting at the table with Felsen. They didn't talk. He got up to go to bed. She gave him the pan of coals. He asked her name, and she told him Maria.

An hour later she joined him. This time, without the baby in the bed, he could be more robust with her but he was aware that she never hissed in the way that she did when Abrantes was covering her.

In the morning he dressed and checked the Walther P48, which he tucked into his waistband. Her muddy footprints had dried on the floor.

At breakfast he asked her to clean his room. Then he sat in the darkness of the main house, listening to the rain and waited for Abrantes.