A Small Death in lisbon (18 page)

'Bury him,' said Felsen, and threw the cudgel at the feet of the men.

Abrantes led Burton to the back seat of his car while Felsen got behind the wheel. They stopped at Abrantes' house and picked up a chair, some rope, and a bottle of cool
bagaço
from the back of the cellar. They drove to a disused mine in the hills near Amêndoa, one where the wolfram vein had run out after about thirty metres. In the boot of the car was a brazier and some charcoal and a few
chouriços.
Abrantes sprinkled the raw alcohol of the
bagaço
over the coals and started a fire. In Burton's briefcase Felsen found bundles of notes amounting to 500,000 escudos and an unsigned contract for eighty
tons of wolfram with a mining concession down in Penamacor. His throat still felt dry, but there was no water so he chugged the cold
bagaço
and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

'Did you ever see Laura again?' asked Felsen in English, flicking through the contract.

'The Chave d'Ouro,' said Burton on automatic.

'Did she get her precious visa?'

Burton stared into his past as if it was his own country disappearing over the horizon. Felsen took another blast of alcohol trying to stop the needle from scoring the inside of his cranium. The cool alcohol burnt all the way down.

'Did she?' he asked again, and Burton looked up wild-eyed but didn't answer.

Felsen frisked the Englishman's pockets and came up with the wallet. He fingered through the currency and came across the photograph. He held it up to the terracotta light of the afternoon.

'Did you get what you wanted?' asked Felsen. 'At least tell me that.'

'I didn't
want
her to get a visa.'

'In that case you probably didn't get what you wanted.'

'What did I want?'

'You mean...' Felsen stopped. 'To fuck her, Mr Burton. Didn't you want to fuck her?'

'Laura?' he said.

'Ah,' said Felsen. 'A misunderstanding.'

'I don't follow.'

'Laura's deal. You didn't know Laura's deal? You get me a visa. No. You look as if you can get me a visa ... and you can fuck me. Just the word "visa" brought love into her eyes. It was there for everyone to see, Mr Burton. I was not the first, I can assure you, not by a long way.'

Felsen turned the photograph over.

'To Edward, with love,' he read, and for some reason it made Felsen crueller. 'Come on Edward, don't tell me ... I mean she was doing things you'd be hard pressed to get a Friedrichstrasse whore to do...'

Burton was off his chair and on him, his scrawny arm around the German's bull neck. He drove his boy's fist into the man's kidney. Felsen's thick elbow kicked back like a steam piston. The boy went down. Abrantes fanned the charcoal white.

Felsen secured Burton to the chair. He took another shot of the
bagaço.
His head felt better, clearer, smoother. He shook the contract at the Englishman.

'You're on my territory, Edward. This is my wolfram you're taking. Who else are you talking to down there?'

Burton shut down his brain. He didn't listen to the German. He didn't smell the acrid charcoal. He didn't feel the hot pant of Abrantes' fan. He didn't see the red clouds boiling in the strange sky.

Felsen found a length of wire in the boot of the car. Abrantes began roasting the
chouriços,
turning them with fingers suddenly dainty. Felsen pushed more questions at the English agent, his tongue thick in his mouth, the alcohol telling now. The alcohol reminding him of Laura, the stolen cufflinks, Eva, Lehrer, the whore in Guarda last night. Burton was silent, forcing the gross smell of the spitting pork fat out of his mind.

'That fat Rumanian sow in the visa office told me Salazar's police were Gestapo-trained,' said Felsen. 'My colleagues told me it was Kramer. He's a KZ commandant now. They know how to treat you in a KZ. We all hear about it, Edward, we all know ... but there's nothing like learning from actual experience. I've never been in one which means I've only learnt at second-hand, so you might find my methods a little unrefined.'

Felsen tucked the wire into the coals. He removed the agent's belt and using Abrantes' knife cut away the man's trousers and undershorts. He found a leather glove, fitted his hand into it and removed the hot wire. He stopped, feeling a rush of wind at his back, he looked out of the mine at the chemical sky, then stepped towards the Englishman.

The peasants who'd been burying the body of the driver in the pine forest arrived back in Amêndoa a little after five in the afternoon. The day was at its hottest. Their eyeballs stung in their sockets and their mouths were full of thick, rancid saliva. They went to the spring, drank heavily and dipped rags from their pockets into the water and cooled their necks and faces. They stopped only when they heard the animal for the first time. A strange animal, of a type they'd never heard before, and in terrible pain.

They walked to the edge of the village. A scream came from a hole out in the hills and suddenly they recognized it. They put their
hats on and straightened them. They went back to the cool of their granite houses and lay down on their wooden cots, heads on elbows, the balls of their palms in their ears.

The weather broke. The thunder roused Felsen from his drunken sleep. He didn't know where he was. His head ached so that he thought he must have fallen, and his mouth tasted sour as cheese. He rolled over to see the Englishman slumped in his chair and it shocked him. He was going to check him, but he saw the gun on the floor and the blood over the man's chest and ... how had that happened?

Rain began falling darkly. Felsen went out into it to wash his hands. He leapt back and fell staggering into the mine, crashing over Abrantes' supine body. His hands and shirt stained red, his arms flecked with more red. He kicked at the rocks on the floor to get away from the crude opening of the mine. It was raining blood out there. He roared at Abrantes who'd come awake and put his hand out into the rain and squeezed it in his fist.

'This happened before,' he said, and wiped his hand clean on his trousers. 'My father told me that it rained like this forty years ago. It comes through the red desert dust. It's nothing.'

They folded the agent's body into the boot of the car and backed up the track to Abrantes' house. They unloaded Burton into the yard. Felsen drove the car back and as deep into the old mine as it would go. The storm had brought night on early. When he dimmed the headlights in the mine there wasn't a scrap of ambient light. He gripped the steering wheel and pressed his forehead to it. The sound of shattering glass came to him, the
bagaço
bottle on the wall of the mine, the neck of it now forming the handle of a primitive tool. How could that have happened?

Abrantes was waist-deep in a hole in the yard, the girl watching him. She was big, pregnant, halfway through her term. She poured Felsen a glass of cool white wine and went into the house.

'Congratulations,' said Felsen, reconnected now with the world.

Abrantes wondered what he meant. Felsen nodded to the house.

'It had better be a boy,' said Abrantes.

'Isn't she young for children?'

'More likely to produce boys.'

'I didn't know that.'

'It's what the
Senhora dos Santos
says, our local wise woman.'

Abrantes shovelled earth, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

'How old is the girl?'

'I don't know.'

The girl came into the yard with olives, cheese and meats. She laid them on the table next to the wine.

'How old are you?' asked Abrantes.

'I don't know,' she said.

They buried the body and went to bed. Felsen dreamt vividly He woke up, his bladder swollen tight. He mistakenly stumbled into the main house to relieve himself and heard the sound of Abrantes' animal grunting and the girl making a kind of hissing sound as if she'd cut herself with a knife. He went back out into the yard and then to the edge of the village where the air was now fresh and the earth smelling rich after the rain. He pissed a twenty-metre length of barbed wire. Tears coursed down his face. That whore in Guarda. The pain was excruciating.

16th December 1941, SS Barracks, Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde

'So,' said Gruppenführer Lehrer, summarizing the wolfram campaign to Brigadeführers 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 Kurfürstendamm.

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.