A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter VIII

2nd March 1941, South-west France It was a perfect morning. The first perfect morning for days. The sky was pristine, cloudless and of such a blue that only pain could come from looking at it. To the south the mountains, the snowcapped Pyrenees, were just catching the first rays of the rising sun and the thin, spiky cold air up there sharpened the white peaks and deepened the blue of the sky close to them. Felsen's two Swiss drivers couldn't stop talking about it. They were from the south and spoke Italian and they knew mountains, but only the Alps.

They didn't talk to Felsen unless he spoke to them first which was infrequently. They found him cold, aloof, abrupt, and on one occasion brutal. In the few moments he fell asleep in the cab they heard him grinding his teeth and saw the muscles of his jaw bunching under the skin of his cheek. They called him 'bone-crusher' when he was visible and at some distance. That was the only risk they were prepared to take after witnessing the excessive kicking he'd given a driver who'd accidentally reversed into a gatepost in the barracks outside Lyons. They were Italian-Swiss after all.

Felsen hadn't noticed. He didn't care. He was treading a well-trodden circle, going over and over the same ground so that if he'd walked his thoughts he'd have been in a circular trench up to his shoulders. He'd smoked hours of cigarettes, metres of them, kilos of tobacco while he dissected his every living moment with Eva searching for the moment. And when he couldn't find the moment, he came at Eva from a different angle sizing all the sentences, all the phrases, weighing every word she'd ever said to him and all the ones she hadn't as well, which was a bigger task because Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it.

He played over the scene of the first time she ended up in his bed after four years of knowing each other, after four years of being friends. She'd sat astride him in her black silk stockings and suspenders running her hands over and over his chest.

'Why?' he'd asked.

'Why what?'

'After all these years… why are you here?'

She'd pursed her lips and looked at him out of the corner of her face measuring the question for its long-term prospects. Then she'd suddenly gripped his penis with both hands and said:

'Because of your big Swabian cock.'

They'd laughed. It hadn't been it, but it would do.

Now as he came to that point, for the hundredth time, where Eva had diminished him, he all but writhed in his seat with the torment of his sexual jealousy. He saw the heavy-waisted, pink-skinned, uncontoured-buttocked Gruppenfuhrer squeezing and pumping between her slim white thighs, her heels encouraging him, her breath coming out in jolts, his trembling grunts into the corner of her neck, her clawing fingers on his flabby back, his greedy hands, her rising knees, his deeper thrusts… Felsen would shake his head. No. And he would go back to Eva again sitting astride him in her black… Why?

'Power does it for the ladies,' Lehrer's chauffeur had said, 'even Himmler…' That's what Felsen had thought as he watched Lehrer eat his breakfast the morning after he'd seen him in the club with Eva. That's what he'd thought as he strolled through the dark morning to the Swiss National Bank, as he'd signed the release documents, as he'd supervised the loading of the gold, as he'd shaken hands with Lehrer and watched him walk back to the Schweizerhof, to his three days in Gstaad with Eva.

He could barely remember crossing the border. He couldn't think of any moment in France apart from the stupid driver. He'd lived inside his head until the cloud had lifted off the Pyrenees that morning and the Swiss wouldn't stop talking about it.

He got drunk that night with a Standartenfuhrer of a Panzer division in Bayonne who'd told him his tanks would be in Lisbon before the end of the month.

'We got to the Pyrenees in four weeks. We'll reach Gibraltar in two, Lisbon in one. We're just waiting for the crack of the Fuhrer's starting pistol.'

They drank claret, a Grand Cru Classe from Chateau Batailley, bottle after bottle of it as if it was beer. He slept in his clothes that night and woke up in the morning with his face hurting and his throat sore from snoring like a hog. They crossed the border into Spain and picked up an army escort sent with a personal instruction for their safety from General Francisco Franco himself. By nightfall they were still grinding up the hairpins of the Vascongadas as if they were dragging Felsen's hangover behind them.

Now that there was no threat of Allied air attack they drove through the night and they were glad to be able to keep the engines running because once they came out of the mountains and on to the meseta there was nothing to stop the wind which drove a bleak mixture of freezing rain and ice into the sides of the trucks. The drivers stamped their feet on the metal floors to keep them from going numb. Felsen, hunched behind the collar of his wool coat, stared into the darkness, the swerving road, the headlights arcing across the trees. He didn't move. This had become his kind of temperature.

They refuelled in Burgos, a bleak and frozen place with disgusting food laced, no, swimming in the acrid urine of the poorest quality olive oil which burnt through the bowels of the drivers so that they shat all the way to Salamanca. They shat so frequently that Felsen refused them permission to stop and they just hung their bare arses out of the doors and let the icy wind take it wherever.

Refugees appeared on the road, most of them on foot, some with a cart between them and occasionally an emaciated mule. They were dark people with faces hollowed out by fear and hunger. They walked automatically, the adults grim, the children blank. These people silenced the drivers, who stopped complaining about the food and the cold. As the trucks ground past them not a head turned, not a single homburg altered its course. The Jews of Europe tramped through the empty wilderness of Spain with their cardboard suitcases and knotted sheets, seeing no further than the next wind-blasted oak on the skyline.

Felsen looked down on them from the cab. He'd expected to find some pity for them as he had for the two men from Sachsenhausen who'd swept his factory floor after their release at the time of the Berlin Olympics. He found nothing. He found he didn't have room for anything else.

They drove through Salamanca. The golden stone of the cathedral walls and the university buildings was dull under the white dome of the frozen sky. There was no fuel. The drivers managed to buy some chorizo and weevil-riddled bread. The convoy moved on to Ciudad Rodrigo and the border town of Fuentes de Onoro. The Spanish army escort harassed the columns of refugees who shifted off the road on to the barren rock-strewn plain without even a raised gesture.

The twenty whitewashed hovels on the rocky treeless site that made up Fuentes de Onoro were frozen in a piercing wind that kept the inhabitants indoors and the refugees huddled behind boulders and upturned carts. The drivers blundered amongst them looking for food and found everyone in a worse state than themselves. A woman in the only shop offered them lumps of pork fat in what looked like the same rancid oil they'd had in Burgos. They named the dish Gordura alla Moda della Guerra and didn't touch it.

The customs formalities on the Spanish side were brief. The officials left their less lucrative work of minutely inspecting the jittery refugees' papers and their reductions of a lifetime's possessions and came to get their bonuses. Felsen, who knew that this was the border post that would see most of his business, had prepared himself for the crossing with French brandy and jambon de Bayonne. His drivers were furious. The deal was sealed with shots of cheap aguardente and the convoy moved across to the Portuguese side at Vilar Formoso.

The Portuguese army escort had not arrived. There was a member of the German legation who'd already dispatched a messenger to Guarda. They arranged for the drivers to park the trucks in the square outside the ornately tiled railway station, which showed framed scenes of all the major towns in Portugal. The square was packed with more wild-eyed people. The drivers went looking for food again. They found a soup kitchen which had been set up by firms from Porto but it was for British passport-holders only. They tried talking to the refugees. The women, collapsed under coloured shawls, wouldn't look at them, and with the men, in long mud-rimmed coats with furry hats jammed down over thick black matted hair and faces blanked out and ragged with beards, they could find no common language. There were Poles and Czechs, Yugoslavs and Hungarians, Turks and Iraqis. They tried the less picturesque-men in creased three-piece business suits who stood above exhausted women and howling children but they were Dutch or Flemish, Rumanians or Bulgarians and in no mood for sign language, especially of the sort which involved pointing a finger into the mouth. Even the young were uncommunicative-the boys shifty, the girls cringing and babies either wailing or mute and vacant. When the engine of one of the approaching Portuguese army motorcycles back-fired, this massed driftwood of war ducked and flinched as one.

Felsen worked on the customs officials using charm and some supplies that the member of the German legation had brought with him. The Portuguese responded with cheese, chorico and wine and were very helpful with the reams of bureaucracy that needed to be filled out to allow the trucks to move freely in the country. When the convoy moved off the chefe of the alfandega, the customs, came out to wave and wish him a speedy return because he could see that this was the auspicious start of what could be years of graft.

They crossed the River Coa and spent a night at an army post in Guarda where they ate an enormous meal whose four courses all tasted the same and drank a lot of wine from five-litre flagons. Felsen had already begun to feel himself coming round. He knew because he was interested in seeing the women in the kitchens. Since moving to Berlin he'd barely gone forty-eight hours without sex and now it had been more than a week. When finally he saw the women he hoped they'd been especially selected to keep the soldiers' ardour at bay They were all tiny with no more than an inch of forehead between their dark eyebrows and the scarves around their heads. Their noses were sharp, their cheeks sunken and their teeth gone or rotten. He went to bed and slept badly on a flea-ridden mattress.

In the morning they began driving through some of the places they'd seen depicted on the blue and white azulejos in the station at Vilar Formoso. The drivers realized what had been missing from the designs, or perhaps bad roads, poverty and filth looked different in their own colours. They rounded the pine-forested, rock-strewn mountains of the Serra da Estrela on the northern boundary of the Beira Baixa which, as Felsen already knew, was going to be his home for the next years of his life. Where schist and granite meet was where the black, shiny crystalline wolfram occurred, and Felsen could see from the grey/brown block stone houses and slate roofs that this was the right country.

They crossed the Mondego and Dao rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria. The air changed. The dry cool of the mountains disappeared and a warm humidity took over. The sun was hot even in early March and they stripped off their coats. The drivers rolled up their shirt sleeves and looked as if they might sing. There were no refugees on the road. The representative from the German legation told them that Salazar was making sure that no more came into Lisbon-the city was already full. They spent a last night on the road at Vila Franca de Xira and got up early the next morning to deliver the gold to the Banco de Portugal before normal office hours.

It was first light as they turned away from the Tagus into the Terreiro do Paco and the trucks made their way behind the arcaded eighteenth-century facade into the grid system of the Baixa, purpose-built by the Marques de Pombal after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. They drove along Rua do Comercio, behind the massive triumphal arch at the head of the Rua da Augusta, to the conglomeration of buildings including the church of Sao Julilo that made up the Banco de Portugal. They waited for the gates to open in the Largo de'Sao Juliao and one by one the trucks reversed in to unload.

In the bank Felsen was met by the Director of Finance and another, more senior and taller, member of the German legation who greeted his offered hand with a spring-loaded salute and an incongruous ' Heil Hitler' This did not appear to disturb the bank's finance director who, he found out later, was a member of the Portuguese Legion. It had confused Felsen who only managed a half-wave in return, like a bad attempt at getting a waiter's attention, and the words 'Ja, ja.' He also missed the tall, Prussian-looking man's name. It wasn't until the gold had been unloaded and accounted for that Felsen saw the man signing the endless documentation with his left hand in the name of Fritz Poser. He noticed that the right hand was a gloved prosthesis.

By 11.00 a.m. the business was completed. The junior member of the legation had taken the drivers to an army barracks on the outskirts of the city and Poser and Felsen were sitting in the back of a flagged Mercedes driving down Rua do Ouro towards the river. The pavements were packed with people, mostly men in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and hats a size too small for their heads who swerved past barefooted boys selling newspapers. The few women were smart and dressed in tweed suits with hats and furs even though it wasn't cold. The faces flashed by as the car picked up speed in the empty street, one woman hatless and blonde stared at the car, the small swastika flapping on the bonnet, mesmerized. Then her head flicked away and she buried herself in the crowd. Felsen turned in his seat. A boy was running alongside the car waving the Diario de Noticias in his face.

'Lisbon is full,' said Poser. 'It's as if the whole world is here.'

'I saw them at the border.'

'The Jews?'

Felsen nodded, tired now after the anxiety of the journey.

'There's a more eclectic mix down here. Lisbon can cater for all tastes. It's one long party for some.'

'So there's no rationing.'

'Not yet and not for us anyway. It will come though. The British are mounting their Economic Blockade and the Portuguese are beginning to suffer. Fuel could start to be a problem, they don't have any of their own tankers and the Americans are being difficult. Of course you can eat well if you like seafood and drink their wine if your palate's not too French. There's still sugar at the moment and the coffee is good.'

They turned right out of the Praca do Comercio and followed the Tagus past the docks. At Santos there was a huge brawling mass of people, men, women and children fighting outside the offices of the shipping lines.

'This is the more distasteful end of Lisbon,' said Poser. 'You see that ship, the Nyassa, in the docks there. They all want to get on the Nyassa but it's full. It's been full for weeks. In fact it's been filled twice over but these morons think that because it's there they can get on it. Most of them don't have any money which means they don't even have American visas. Ah well, the Guarda National Republicana will be along in a moment and break them up. Last week it was the same with the Serpa Pinto, next week it will be the Guine. Always the same.'

'We seem to be leaving Lisbon,' said Felsen, as the driver accelerated away towards the green outskirts of the city.

'Not yet. This evening perhaps. We're going to the Palacio do Conde dos Olivais in Lapa where we've installed the German legation. You'll see we have the best location in Lisbon.'

They came into Lapa from Madragoa and drove up the Rua'Sao Domingos a Lapa. Halfway up the Union Jack hung limply off a long pink building with tall white windows and a central pediment which made up about fifty metres of the street's facade. The Mercedes thundered past on the cobbled street.

'Our friends, the British,' said Poser, waving his prosthetic hand.

The driver turned first left into Rua do Sacramento a Lapa and after a hundred metres a cuboid palace in its own grounds appeared on the left. Bougainvillea spilled over the iron railings, the leaves of the phoenix palms rattled in the light breeze and the three red, white and black swastika flags snapped gently. The gates were opened, the car swung away from a sea view and up a short gravel drive and stopped in front of the steps. A doorman opened the car.

'Early lunch?' asked Poser.

They sat in the dining room with the sun throwing short rectangles of light across the empty tables. They waited for soup. Felsen tried to remember a time when he'd felt such calm. It was before the war, before the Olympics, in his old apartment on… he couldn't remember where his old apartment was… the windows open in summer, lying on the bed with Susana Lopes, the Brazilian girl.

'You like it?' asked Poser, erect as if his spine was in a brace.

'Excuse me?'

'Our legation. Our palacio. '

'Magnificent.'

'The Baixa,' said Poser, wrinkling his nose, 'all the refugees, you know, it's very enervating. Lapa is so much more civilized. You can breathe.'

'And the war seems such a long way away,' said Felsen, stonily.

'Quite so. Berlin, I believe has not been so much fun,' said Poser trying to hit a more businesslike tone. 'We'll be having a small reception for you this evening and a dinner so that you can meet some of the people you'll be working with. It will be formal. Do you…?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Afterwards I thought perhaps you'd like to go out of town to Estoril. There's a room for you at the Hotel Parque. The casino's out there and there'll be some dancing. I think you'll find it very agreeable.'

'I'd like to have some sleep at some stage. I haven't had much on the road this last week.'

'Of course, I didn't mean to be presumptuous. I just wanted you to be sure of some comfort and entertaining company after the more serious occasion.'

'No, no, I'd be happy to. A few hours this afternoon will be fine.'

'I have a cot in a room next to my office. You can use that if you wish.'

The soup arrived and the two men worked their way through it.

'This Hotel Parque…?' started Felsen.

'Yes. We have the Hotel Parque and the British have the Hotel Palacio. We're next to each other. The Palacio is bigger but the Parque has the waters… if you like that sort of thing.'

'I was going to ask…'

'It's a very international crowd as I said. One long party. From the conversations you hear up there you'd think they were still having court balls in the Palace of Versailles. And the women out there, so I'm told, are a lot more progressive in their attitude than the natives.'

The soup plates were removed and replaced by a split grilled lobster.

'Did I answer your question?' asked Poser.

'Perfectly.'

'Your reputation precedes you, Hauptsturmfuhrer Felsen.'

'I didn't know I had one that could be of much interest.'

'You'll find the foreign women in Estoril very accommodating, although I should…'

'You're well-informed, Herr Poser. Are you with the Abwehr? '

'Although I should warn you that there are two currencies in this city The escudo and information.'

'Which is why you're here.'

'Everybody's a spy in Lisbon, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer. From the lowest refugee to the highest members of the legations. And that includes maids, doormen, waiters, bar staff, shop owners, businessmen, company executives, all women, whores or not, and royalty, real or fake. Anybody with ears to overhear can make a living.'

'Then there must be a lot of rumour as well. You've said yourself that the city is full, probably with a lot of people with nothing better to do than talk. It passes the time after all.'

'That is true.'

'Who does the winnowing?'

'Ah yes, your agricultural background coming out.'

Felsen stripped the white flesh out of the shell of his lobster.

'So where do the real spies pass their time?' asked Felsen.

'The ones who give us advance information on Dr Salazar's thinking about wolfram exports, you mean?'

'Does he do any thinking about that?'

'He's beginning to. We think he's beginning to perceive an opportunity. We're working on it now.'

Felsen waited for Poser to continue but instead the Prussian began dismantling his lobster claws with some difficulty given the stiffness of his gloved right hand.

'How many people know what I'm doing here?'

'Those you will meet this evening. No more than ten people in all. Your work is very important and, as you've probably realized, somewhat complicated by a very delicate political situation which, at the moment, we are winning. It is our people here who will make your work on the ground easier.'

'Or more difficult if you start losing.'

'We have good relations with Dr Salazar. He understands us. The British are relying on the strength of their old alliance, 13 86 I think it was, you wonder which century they're living in. We, on the other hand, are…'

'…frightening him?'

'I was going to say that we are providing him with what he needs.'

'But he's aware of the Panzer divisions in Bayonne, I'm sure.'

'And the U-boats in the Atlantic,' said Poser. 'But if you want to play the harlot and bed both sides you might expect to get slapped about. Sweet?'

'Excuse me?'

'The lobster.'

'Very sweet.'

'Portuguese lobster… small but perfectly sweet. The best in the world.'

'I thought I'd go for a walk after my nap.'

'The Jardim da Estrela isn't far and it's very pleasant.'

It was 5.00 p.m. and the Chave d' Ouro cafe in the Rossio square at the top end of the Baixa grid, in the heart of the city, was full to capacity. It was still warm and the windows were all open. Laura van Lennep sat by one of these open windows and looked into the square repeatedly. She fingered the single coffee she'd ordered in the hour and a half she'd been sitting there, but the waiters didn't bother her. They were used to it.

She was half-listening to a table of refugees speaking French with thick accents. The two men had seen army trucks in the Baixa first thing that morning and were expounding some fantastic invasion theory. It did nothing to calm Laura van Lennep down. She couldn't bear the inertia of these people, who she knew came from a pensao three houses down from her own in the Rua de Sao Paulo behind Cais do Sodre. She'd heard them in the street correcting each other about aristocrats they'd met at parties as if it had been only last week, when it had been in a different country, in a different decade. She was desperate with no cigarettes and the man who was going to change her life, who'd promised that he could change her life, wouldn't arrive.

A man appeared at the top of the stairs and looked around. He walked slowly around the room and finished up at her table. He wasn't short but his width and bulk made him look shorter than he was. He had short dark hair, cut en brosse and blue-grey eyes. He made her tremble inside. She looked away into the Rossio again, to the same groups of dark-suited men standing about on the black and white calcada, to the same lines of taxis, to the same kiosk where the cabbies drank coffee and talked about football. Sporting were going to be champions this year. She knew that by now. She turned back and he was still there. She felt those eyes on her. She gripped her handbag which contained her papers. Was he the police? She'd been told about the plain-clothed ones. He didn't look Portuguese but he had something of authority about him. She rearranged her claret dress which did not need rearranging but should have been thrown away last year.

'Could I join you?' asked the man in French.

'I'm waiting for someone,' she said, also in French, letting her blonde head slip around to the window again.

'There's nowhere else to sit and I only want a coffee. You're a single person sitting at a table for four.'

'There's someone coming.'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to…'

'No, no, please,' she said suddenly, her nerves setting her hands off like the pigeons in the square.

He sat opposite her and offered her a cigarette. She refused but had to hold on to her hand to do it. He lit one for himself and seemed to enjoy more than the smell of his own smouldering tobacco. The waiter came to his side.

'Your coffee looks cold, may I…?'

'I'm fine, thank you.'

He ordered one for himself. She looked out into the square again. He'd spoken in Portuguese but not Lisbon Portuguese, more open, like slow Spanish.

'He won't come any quicker, you know,' said the man.

She smiled a sort of relief that she'd begun to feel that he wasn't going to ask to see her papers.

'I can't bear waiting,' she said.

'Have a cigarette, some warmer coffee… it'll pass the time.'

She took a cigarette. He looked at her empty ring finger and the tense shake in her hand. She puffed on it and left a red mark on the white end. She blew out the strange, strong smoke.

'From Turkey,' he said.

'You can get anything here if you can pay,' she said.

'I wouldn't know. I brought these with me. My first day in Lisbon.'

'Where have you come from?'

'From Germany.'

That's why he'd made her tremble.

'Where are you going?'

'I'm staying here for a while and then… who knows? And you?'

'From Holland. I want to go to America.'

Her blue eyes flickered out over the balcony again and then searched the room behind where the man was sitting. His coffee arrived. He ordered one for her. The waiter took her old stained cup away. Her eyes settled back on to him.

'He'll come,' he said, with a reassuring wink.

The four refugees on the table behind had started running down the Portuguese. How uncivilized they were. How uncouth. How all the food tasted the same and have you tried to eat that bacalhau? Lisbon, oh Lisbon was so boring.

She'd heard it all before and she leaned away from them. She knew it could be dangerous to speak to the man, but after three months in the Lisbon refugee world she thought she'd developed some instinct.

'I can't bear not knowing,' she said.

'Like the waiting.'

'Yes. If I know… if I knew…' she drifted off. 'You don't know what it's like yet, you've only just arrived.'

'Where are you staying?'

'In the Pensao Amsterdao on Rua de Sao Paulo. And you?'

'I'll find somewhere.'

'Everywhere's full.'

'So it seems. Perhaps I'll go out to Estoril.'

'It's more expensive out there,' she said, shaking her head.

He didn't seem bothered by that. She let her head fall over her shoulder again to look out of the window. This time she leapt to her feet and started waving. She dropped back into her seat and closed her eyes. Her table companion twisted around to view the top of the stairs. A man in his early twenties with blonde, reddish hair came striding through the tables. He faltered when he saw the older man but pulled a chair out and pushed it close to the girl. Her eyes snapped open. Her face fell. He took her hands. She stared into the tablecloth as if her own blood was growing a stain in the middle of it. He leaned into her ear and whispered in English.

'I did everything I could. It's just not possible without… The woman in the visa office…' he stopped as the waiter put a coffee down in front of her, he looked across at the man at their table who was looking out of the window. 'It takes money. A lot of money.'

'I haven't got any money, Edward. Do you know how much the tickets are now? You used to be able to get one for $70, now it's $100. I was there today at the ticket office. A man paid $400 to get on the Nyassa. The longer I stay here…'

'I got as far as the guichet… but then she comes to the window. She doesn't recognize me. She doesn't know me. She won't even take the application unless… unless you can come up with the money, or the right invitations, or…'

The German called for the waiter and paid for the two coffees. He stood and looked down at the young couple. The Englishman was suspicious. The woman had a different look than before-a hungry intensity in her face. The German put on his hat and tipped it at her.

'Thank you for the coffee,' she said. 'You didn't tell me your name.'

'You didn't say yours. I don't think we got that far.'

'Laura van Lennep,' she said. 'And this is Edward Burton.'

'Felsen,' he said. 'Klaus Felsen.'

He put out his hand. The Englishman didn't shake it.