A Small Death in Lisbon. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ been living with the institutional smells of boiled cabbage and polish in the Lichterfelde barracks for two days, snarled up in their military world of Oberführers, Brigadeführers, and Gruppenführers. Who were all these people in their Death’s Head uniforms, with their endless questions? What did they do all day when they weren’t scrutinizing his grandparents and great-grandparents? We’re at war with the whole world and all they need is your family tree.

      He wasn’t the only candidate. There were other businessmen, one he recognized. They all worked with metal. He had hoped they were being sized up for a tender, but the questions had been strictly non-technical, all character assessment, which meant they wanted him for a job.

      An assistant, or adjutant or whatever these people called themselves came in. The man closed the door behind him with librarian care. The precise click and satisfied nod started the irritation winding up inside him.

      ‘Herr Felsen,’ said the adjutant sitting down in front of the wide, hunched shoulders of the dark-haired civilian.

      Klaus Felsen shook his stiff foot and raised his hefty Swabian head and gave the man a slow blink of his blue-grey eyes from under the ridged bluff of his forehead.

      ‘It’s snowing,’ said Felsen.

      The adjutant, who found it difficult to believe that the SS had been reduced to considering this . . . this . . . some ruthless peasant with an unaccountable flair for languages, as a serious candidate for the job, ignored him.

      ‘It’s going well for you, Herr Felsen,’ he said, cleaning his glasses.

      ‘Oh, you’ve had some news from my factory?’

      ‘Not exactly. Of course, you’re concerned . . .’

      ‘Everything’s going well for you, you mean, I’m losing money.’

      A nervous look from the adjutant fluttered over Felsen’s head like a virgin’s petticoat.

      ‘Do you play cards, Herr Felsen?’ he asked.

      ‘My answer’s the same as the last time – everything except bridge.’

      ‘There’ll be a card game here in the mess tonight with some high-ranking SS officers.’

      ‘I get to play poker with Himmler? Interesting.’

      ‘SS-Gruppenführer Lehrer in fact.’

      Felsen shrugged; he didn’t know the name.

      ‘Is that it? Lehrer and me?’

      ‘And SS-Brigadeführers Hanke, Fischer and Wolff who you’ve already met, and another candidate. It’s just an opportunity for you . . . for them to get to know you in a more relaxed way.’

      ‘Poker’s not considered degenerate yet?’

      ‘SS-Gruppenführer Lehrer is an accomplished player. I think it . . .’

      ‘I don’t want to hear this.’

      ‘I think it would be advisable for you to . . . ah . . . lose.’

      ‘Ah . . . more money?’

      ‘You’ll get it back.’

      ‘I’m on expenses?’

      ‘Not quite . . . but you will get it back in another way.’

      ‘Poker,’ said Felsen, wondering how relaxed this game would be.

      ‘It’s a very international game,’ said the adjutant getting up from the table. ‘Seven o’clock then. Here. Black tie for you, I think.’

      Eva Brücke sat in the small study of her second-floor apartment on Kurfürstenstrasse in central Berlin. She was at her desk wearing just a slip under a heavy black silk dressing gown with gold dragon motifs and a woollen blanket over her knees. She was smoking, playing with a box of matches and thinking of the new poster that had appeared on the billboard of her apartment building. It said ‘German women, your leader and your country trust you.’ She was thinking how nervous and unconfident that sounded – the Nazis, or maybe just Goebbels, subconsciously revealing a deep fear of the unquantifiable mystery of the fairer sex.

      Her brain slid away from propaganda and on to the nightclub she owned on the Kurfürstendamm, Die Rote Katze. Her business had boomed in the last two years for no other reason than she knew what men liked. She could look at a girl and see the little triggers that would set men off. They weren’t always beautiful, her girls, but they’d have some quality like big blue innocent eyes, or a narrow, long, vulnerable back, or a shy little mouth which would combine perversely with their total availability, their readiness to do anything that these men might think up.

      Eva’s shoulders tightened and she pulled the blanket off the back of the chair around her. She’d begun to feel dizzy because she’d been smoking too fast, so fast that the end of her cigarette was a long, thin, sharp cone. This only happened when she was irritated, and thinking about men irritated her. Men always presented her with problems, and never relieved her of any. Their job, it appeared, was to complicate. Take her own lover. Why couldn’t he do what he was supposed to do and just love her? Why did he have to own her, intrude on her, occupy her territory? Why did he have to take things? She chucked the matches across the desk. He was a businessman, and that, she supposed, was what businessmen did for a living – accumulated things.

      She tried to get her mind off men, especially her clients and their visits to her office at the back of the club where they’d sit and smoke and drink and charm until they’d get to what they really wanted which was something special, something really special. She should have been a doctor, one of those new-fangled brain doctors who talked you out of your madness, because as the war had worn on she’d noticed the tastes of her clients had changed. Normally, these days, as she’d found out to her cost, to include pain – both inflicting it and, perhaps to redress the balance, receiving it. And then there was one man who’d come and asked of her something that even she didn’t know whether she’d be able to supply. He was such a quiet, insignificant, enclosed man, you wouldn’t have thought . . .

      There was a knock at the door. She crushed her cigarette, threw off the blankets and tried to plump some life into her blonde hair but lost heart when she caught sight of herself in the mirror with no make-up. She refolded the dressing gown across herself, pulled the belt tight and went to open the door.

      ‘Klaus,’ she said, producing a smile. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

      Felsen pulled her over the threshold and kissed her hard on the mouth, desperate after two days in the barracks. His hand slid down to her lower back. Her fists came up and she pushed herself away from his chest.

      ‘You’re wet,’ she said, ‘and I’ve only just woken up.’

      ‘So?’

      She went back inside and hung up his hat and coat and led him back to her study. He followed with his slight limp. She never used the living room, she preferred small rooms.

      ‘Coffee?’ she asked, drifting over to the kitchen.

      ‘I was thinking . . .’

      ‘The real СКАЧАТЬ