A Small Death in lisbon (30 page)

In the evening he went to the back of the burnt-out Reichstag building and bought four bars of chocolate on the black market. He didn't sleep much that night but lay on his luxurious bed in the Hotel Adlon, drank far too much and swelled his chest with fantasies of rescue. He could see Eva and himself climbing the steps up to the aeroplane in Tempelhof airport and flying out of the bomb-shattered Berlin to the blue sea, the wide Tagus and a new life in Lisbon. It was the closest he'd come to crying, emotional crying, as a grown man.

The next morning was cloudless, the landscape on the sixty-kilometre drive north of Berlin was frozen still and dusted white with an iron-hard frost that the low winter sun would never burn off. Felsen's eyeballs felt hot and were cracked with red lines. His stomach was burning sour, but he still managed to feel some of the heroicism of the night before. He parked outside the camp and was admitted through the barbed-wire walls into a compound consisting of low wooden huts. He was taken into one of these and left alone with four lines of wooden benches. Time passed. Hours of it. No other visitors came in. He sat on the bench and moved with the sunlight coming in through the window to keep warm.

At lunchtime a female guard came into the room in a grey greatcoat and side cap. Felsen stood to complain but saw that she was followed by a figure in a striped prison uniform about three sizes too big with a green triangle on the breast pocket. The guard sent the shaven-headed prisoner down the benches towards Felsen. The prisoner marched like a soldier on drill.

'You have ten minutes,' said the guard.

Felsen was not prepared for this. The prisoner's appearance was so dislocated from the human beings beyond the barbed-wire periphery that he wasn't sure if his language would be the same. It took a full half-minute to find the vestiges of Eva Brücke, Berlin nightclub-owner, in the sunken, grey, papier-mache skull. He had thought for a moment that this prisoner was going to take him to Eva—blonde, white-skinned and smoking somewhere else in the camp.

'You came,' she said, flatly, and sat down next to him.

He held out his massive hand. She folded her shrivelled, blackened monkey's paws in her lap. He broke off a piece of chocolate, she took it whole and swallowed it. The chocolate combusted inside her instantly.

'You know,' she said, 'I used to have dreams about my teeth falling out. Nightmares. People would tell me it was because I was worried about money. But I knew it wasn't that. I've never cared that much about money. Not like you. I knew that I was petrified of losing my teeth because I'd seen all those toothless women in villages, their faces fallen in, their beauty gone, their personality diminished. I have eight left, Klaus, I am still human.'

'What happened to your hands?'

'I make uniforms all day, every day. It's the dye.'

She looked at his hand still held out for hers and then at his face. She shook her head.

'I'm going to...'

'This is my lunch break, Klaus,' she cut in on him savagely. 'Give me some more chocolate, that's all I'm interested in. Not hope, not promises and certainly not sentimentality. Just chocolate.'

He broke off another piece and gave it to her.

'And I won't waste your time either,' she said. 'I presume you've come for an explanation. Well, you did see me that night in Bern. That pig Lehrer ... he was such a bad loser. I warned you about him, didn't I?'

'Why Lehrer?'

'I knew him. I knew him before you, years before. He came to all my clubs. I was surprised you'd never met. He asked me one night if I knew anyone who could speak languages and was good at business, good at making things happen. And it all just fell into place. You, him and what I was doing. You should consider yourself lucky. If he hadn't sent you to Lisbon, you'd probably be in Dachau. It was a solution—Lehrer removed you from the scene and my involvement with him meant that people didn't look at me so closely.'

'But why didn't you tell me?'

He was angry He looked into her ruined face, the prominent craters of her eye sockets, the remaining yellow teeth blackened by molten chocolate, the veins standing out on her shaved head, the scabs from shaving nicks in the down forming over her china-thin cranium. And she saw that he was angry.

'More chocolate,' she said, not bothering to answer the question from the man in an SS uniform, the man who had been a
Förderndes Mitglied
of the SS, the man who'd made couplings for the SS, for God's sake, the man who bought wolfram for the SS so that the Nazi war machine could thunder on. Why hadn't she told
him?

He broke off another piece.

'Don't think I was being brave, Klaus. It all happened by accident ... after what happened to those two Jewish girls, you remember that, I told you
everything
about that, didn't I, the ones I sent to Lehrer and his friend, that was a risk me telling you that ... a risk I did not repeat when I saw...' she stopped, and controlled herself. 'So, I moved the other two Jewish girls I had out of Berlin and that was it, I was involved. They kept coming to me and I couldn't turn them away. I'd become a link in the chain.'

'One more minute,' said the guard.

'When you saw what?' asked Felsen.

'Nothing.'

'Tell me.'

'When I saw that it didn't concern you,' she said quietly.

'I'll speak to Lehrer,' said Felsen in a rush, so that he didn't have to contemplate what she'd just said for too long.

'You don't get it do you, Klaus? It was Lehrer who put me in here. He got rid of me. I'd become an embarrassment to the Obergruppenführer. The only person who can get me out of here is the Reichsführer Himmler himself. So don't even think about it. More chocolate.'

He gave her the three bars in his pocket and they disappeared into her clothing. She got up and he rose with her. She stood to attention. He took the back of her baby's head in the palm of his hand. Her head jerked back in astonishment and she turned out of his hand and away from him.

'Visit terminated,' said the guard.

She marched to the door and, without looking back, straight out into the winter sunshine. It was the last he saw of her.

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 Neukölln 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 Sturmbannführer 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 Brücke 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 Alemán Transatlántico in'São 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 Führer 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.'