A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XX

24th July 1944, Hotel Riviera, Genoa, N. Italy Felsen lay in bed, the windows of his hotel room wide open, the sun streaming across the breakfast tray and his body. He was exhausted and drowsy as a dog in the village square. The hand that held the cigarette weighed twenty kilos, he had to drag it off his chest to his mouth. He felt himself floating like a barrage balloon, just a thin thread of cable tethering him to the earth.

He'd worked for sixteen months solidly, with only one break. The one break was to let him return to Berlin to view the total destruction of Neukolln Kupplungs Unternehmen in the bombing raid of 24th March 1944. Speer was not even going to attempt to revive it. It was flattened.

The only reason Felsen could think of, that Lehrer had brought him back for this miserable funeral, was to show him what had become of the capital of the Third Reich. From high up in the air it had looked like the same city apart from the various plumes of smoke. It was only as the aircraft dropped towards Tempelhof airport that he saw that where walls still stood the buildings were skeletal, windowless, gutted and roofless. They provided no accommodation. Everybody was living underground. The city had been turned upside-down-a honeycomb below, a catacomb above.

He'd walked through the rubble-strewn streets, past the fourteen-year-old firefighters still trying to control blazes started several nights earlier-the roads a pasta dish of hoses, torn-up tram tracks, overhead cabling, drainage and water pipes, their ends wedged shut by overturned buses and burnt-out trams. And walking had been the only option. No S-bahn, no U-bahn-all the stations were packed with people. No fuel. He'd walked to No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse to ask Sturmbannfuhrer Otto Graf one question which he didn't want to go down a telephone line. For a carton of Lucky Strikes, Graf had told him that Eva Brucke had died on the 19th January. When he flew out of Berlin that afternoon he could think of no reason for ever going back.

Lehrer had promised him that his job would change, but until the end of April 1943 he worked exclusively on smuggling wolfram out of Portugal. It was only at the beginning of May that he began hauling bullion. His first transport was to take four trucks containing more than 4000 kilos of gold from the Swiss border to Madrid, where it was deposited in the Spanish national bank. He repeated this twice in June. In early July he took his first convoy since the start of the wolfram campaign to Portugal and deposited 3400 kilos of gold in the vaults of Banco de Oceano e Rocha. Four hundred and eighty kilos were sold to the Banco de Portugal to buy escudos, the rest was shipped to the Banco Aleman Transatlantico in'Sao Paulo, Brazil. Then came the Battle of the Kursk Salient and on 13th August 1943 he met Lehrer in Rome.

Lehrer had lost ten kilos in three months, his face was permanently red and not blasted by the sun. They went to a restaurant where Lehrer chased his food around the plate and consumed two and a half bottles of red wine before starting on the grappa. He winced and pushed his fingers into his stomach three or four times during the meal. He smoked all his own cigarettes and started on Felsen's.

'We lost Kursk,' he said.

'I heard,' said Felsen. 'There've been black days in Lisbon.'

'The war's finally got there has it?' said Lehrer, unpleasantly.

'Poser shot himself.'

'Not in the head I hope,' said Lehrer. 'That wouldn't have killed him.'

'What about wolfram?'

'Fuck wolfram. Don't you know what Kursk means?' Lehrer exploded, suddenly outraged, so that Felsen had to close his fist to keep himself calm. 'Kursk means we're not a tank-led army any more. Blitzkrieg is over. We can never replace the Panzers we lost at Kursk. The Soviets have opened a new factory at Chelyablinsk, ours are being destroyed daily by the Allied bombers. The Red Army is 1500 kilometres from Berlin. We don't need wolfram. We need a fucking miracle.'

'What about for solid-core ammunition?'

'Speer's using something called uranium from a special bomb project they've had to give up.'

'Is that the end of wolfram?'

'For you, yes. Abrantes can keep that running. Now your job is to take as much gold bullion out of Switzerland as possible and deposit it in Spain and Portugal. You'll receive instructions as to what to do with it.'

In the year since that Rome meeting Felsen had taken nearly two hundred and fifty trucks of bullion from the Swiss border to the Iberian Peninsula. From there the bullion was shipped out to banks in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Chile. During this time Felsen became Lehrer's most trusted subordinate. He worked at it. As far as he was concerned it wasn't good enough just to be Lehrer's colleague, he had to be nothing short of the man's son. By the time Salazar proposed a total embargo of all wolfram on ist June 1944 Felsen's success had been total. When Lehrer and he met now they didn't shake hands, they embraced. Lehrer even allowed himself to get emotional. They called each other Oswald and Klaus. For Lehrer, Felsen had become the only piece of solid ground in a Europe of chaos.

A knock on the door jerked Felsen off the bed. He stubbed out the cigarette and put on a dressing gown. He unlocked the door and Lehrer pushed in past him with a cloth-bound roll under his arm and a buff envelope in his hand.

'Is the truck loaded, Klaus?' he asked.

'The truck was lowered on to the deck of the SS Juan Garcia at six o'clock this morning.'

Lehrer leaned the roll up against the wall and put the envelope on the table. He helped himself to some of Felsen's breakfast. He'd put the weight back on and had got his ulcer under control in the last year.

'I'm worried,' he said, slurping at the top of the coffee. 'The Americans are going to hit us in the French Riviera any day now.'

'The ship's Spanish flag… and the Americans have got other things on their minds. What's in the roll?'

Lehrer's dark eyebrows jumped.

A Rembrandt,' he said. 'Take a look in the envelope.'

Felsen emptied the envelope out on to the bed. There were photographs and details of Lehrer, Wolff, Fischer and Hanke.

'You know what to do,' he said. 'Papers, passports, visas for Brazil. I want you to take a property somewhere close to the border in Portugal. Not in the wolfram mining areas where you're known, further south perhaps. I've heard it's a desert down there.'

'The Alentejo. We've been down there buying cork. There are places on the border. You'd just have to get across the Guadiana river,' said Felsen. 'But getting there from Berlin…'

'There will be chaos, believe me.'

'And what about the Rembrandt?'

'It'll go with you on the truck. You'll keep it in the vaults of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha with the gold.'

Felsen looked down at the bed. The photographs, the personal details.

'So this is it, Oswald?'

'The last one.'

'Have you arranged an escort at Tarragona?'

'There's no escort. Nobody must know about this consignment. Not the Spanish and not the Portuguese either.'

'You want me to smuggle it into Portugal?'

'You must have smuggled over a thousand tons of wolfram over the years, why not two and a half tons of gold?'

'And then what?'

'You wait.'

'How long?'

'That I can't say. If the Fuhrer capitulated it could be tomorrow but he won't. He can't.'

'Why not?'

'Did you read the documents for this gold consignment?'

'Read them? No. I don't read anything any more. I just signed them.'

'You didn't notice the origin of the three parcels?' asked Lehrer.

'No.'

'Lublin, Auschwitz and Majdanek.'

'Polish gold.'

'In a manner of speaking.'

'I don't follow.'

'My star pupil,' said Lehrer, shaking his head. 'There are no gold mines in those towns. Polish national gold was removed from Warsaw a long time ago.'

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 Fuhrer 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 Obergruppenfuhrer Lehrer another nine months to come and claim them.