Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'Take hold of my belt,' said Müller.

'This floor's completely fucked,' said Schmidt, with a construction engineer's precision.

Eva forced herself out of the chair and down the corridor.

'For God's sake be careful,' she said. 'It's a seven-metre drop to the street. The fall will kill you if the rubble doesn't.'

'She's concerned for you, Müller.'

Müller strained forward, craning his neck around the door. Schmidt held on, smiling, and winking at Eva.

'I think she must like them slim,' he added.

'Shut up, Schmidt, and pull me back up.'

Schmidt, without taking his eyes off Eva, twitched his forearm and Müller sprang back and thumped into his chest. Schmidt put an arm around him.

'You know what you have to do,' said Schmidt. 'You have to be totally confident. You can't piss about. You just have to do it.'

He took two steps down the corridor and went into the bedroom on the left. The whole floor lurched. Beams groaned. Plaster and masonry broke off and powdered. There was a loud crack. Schmidt reappeared ashen-faced, his head wobbling on his neck. A line appeared in the plaster work above their heads.

'You fucking idiot,' said Müller, springing back down the corridor.

'There's nobody in there,' said Schmidt, walking tightly, buttocks squeaking.

'We're going now.'

'Didn't you smell anything?' asked Schmidt, recovering his cool.

'Only the shit you've got in your pants.'

Eva led them back to the living room. Müller was tight-lipped, furious and thwarted. Schmidt opened the door and looked back at Eva.

'What's in that,' said Müller, pointing at an old chest she'd moved up from the damaged room. It wasn't a big chest. It couldn't have taken a grown man.

'Books,' said Eva. 'Try lifting it.'

Müller tried the lid. It was locked.

'Open it,' he said.

'I haven't opened it in years. I don't even know where the key is.'

'Find it.'

'I don't…' Eva stopped. Schmidt had opened his coat and taken out a Walther PPK. 'What are you doing?'

'Best Jew detector I've ever known,' he said.

'And if there isn't a Jew in there you're prepared to give me six months of your salary?'

'Six months?'

'That's a seventeenth-century chest and the books are valuable too. Why do you think I moved it up from the bedroom?'

Schmidt regripped the gun and turned it on Eva.

'You know the penalty for harbouring illegals?'

'I imagine it involves some years in a KZ.'

'Boom!' he said.

'Let's go,' said Muller.

They left. Eva went straight to the lavatory and let out a thin stream of diarrhoea. She lit her first cigarette with her dress and coat still up around her waist.

She had to force herself out of the house. She had said she was going out so she had to do it. She knew they'd be sitting there in their car waiting for her. She finished the fourth cigarette, dropped the last of the brandy, swilled her mouth out with water and goaded herself out on to the street. She walked in the road. The pavements were covered in piles of rubble and there were always Poles and Czechs carting more of it out of the half-collapsed buildings. The Gestapo car pulled alongside and Schmidt rolled down his window.

'Want a lift?' he said. 'We must be going your way.'

'I'll walk thanks.'

'See you again. Number Eight Prinz Albrechtstrasse.'

She arrived at her club on the Kurfürstendamm. It had been cold in the street but she was in a sweat. Traudl was in her office lying on a camp bed behind a curtain. She lived there when she couldn't find men to take care of her, which was most of the time. She was thin and white, her facial bones as clear and as fragile as porcelain. Eva sent her out to clean the bar and sat back with another brandy and more cigarettes. Her body, which had begun to feel as dislocated as a cubist's idea of one, slowly came back together. Her insides warmed and filled, her guts firmed. She did the September accounts and put Hansel and Gretel to the back of her mind.

At 7.30 P.M. she left for home to change into her evening wear. It was a cold night. Small groups of Jews, all with the yellow stars they'd been required to wear by law since the beginning of September, trotted past her making for home before the 8.00 P.M. curfew-armaments factory workers, they were all legal.

Before turning down her cobbled street off Kurfürstenstrasse she looked up at the starry night. She sniffed the air. It was clean and there were no obvious Gestapo cars in the street. The bombers would be out though. It had been a terrible summer. First Lübeck, then Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Osnabrück, Bremen and, of course, Berlin. Putrefaction had clogged the air. Only the rats were fat. But tonight was clean. She went up to the apartment, let herself in and checked each room.

'It's safe,' she said, quietly.

Gradually there was movement from the end room. A young man inched around the door, his face contorted from the stiffness of his body.

'Where's the girl?' asked Eva.

The girl appeared behind her.

'Where were you?'

'In the chest,' she said. 'I was just trying it for size when they came.'

Eva suddenly had the girl's-eye view from inside the chest. She shuddered.

'You'll be leaving tonight for Gothenburg,' she said, moving on to better things.

The girl smiled at the ceiling. The boy squeezed Eva's arm. There was a soft knock at the door. The boy crept back down the corridor and around the door. The girl was gone. Eva cleared her throat.

'Who's that?'

Another soft knock.

She opened the door. Two girls. One late teens, the other fourteen at the most. Yellow stars.

'Yes?' said Eva, looking down the stairwell behind them.

'Can you help us?' said the eldest girl. 'We've come from Herr Kaufman.'

'I can't,' she said, and heard the girls gasp as if they'd been stabbed. 'I'm being watched.'

'What can we do?'

'You'll have to go somewhere else.'

'Now?'

'It's too dangerous for you to stay here.'

'Where shall we go?'

She blinked. Why hadn't Kaufman said he was sending two more? She thumped her forehead with a closed fist and tried to think of somewhere nearby.

'Do you know Frau Hirschfeld?' she asked.

They shook their heads.

'Do you know Berlin?'

Again.

She wrote out the instructions for them. It wasn't such an easy place to get to after 8.00 P.M. without papers. She sent them on their way. She still had plenty of work to do with Hansel and Gretel. She went into her office and unlocked and removed the second drawer. She took the contents out and turned it over. Taped on the underside were forged papers for Hansel and Gretel in the names of Hans and Ingrid Kube.

Another soft knock on the door.

What now?

She put the drawer and the contents back into the desk.

Another soft knock.

Those girls. What was Herr Kaufman thinking of?

She strode across the living room and opened the door. The two girls were standing there in their coats, their shoes planted together, good as gold. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders, was Müller. Schmidt's colossal fist came into the light waving the instructions she'd just written-a moment's loss of concentration. The smaller girl began to cry.

'Frau Hirschfeld sends her regards,' said Schmidt, shoving Eva with the flat of his hand between her breasts so that she fell on her back and skidded across the room.

'How expensive did you say that chest was?' he asked, and slammed the door behind him. He took out the gun. Footsteps down the stairs. He eased off the safety catch.

'No,' said Eva.

'No? Why no?'

'I've found the key.'

'It's too late for keys. I haven't the time for keys.'

He pumped two bullets into the chest. There was a muffled cry. Eva launched herself at Schmidt's gun arm and he cracked her across the forehead with the barrel. She went down but not quite out. Schmidt pumped another bullet into the chest. Eva felt herself lifted, her cheek landing on the carved top of the chest. Schmidt rucked up her skirt and his hand grabbed her roughly between the legs, his fingers finding their way in.