Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

Lehrer was foetal holding on to his bloody knee, roaring. He had flames attached to his ankles, shins and shorts. Felsen stepped over the body and picked up the gun. He carried on into Lehrer's room, tore the sheet off the bed and smothered the flames. Lehrer gritted his teeth and hissed in agony. Abrantes stood over him, the knife in his hand. Felsen gave him Lehrer's Walther PPK and told him to find Schmidt.

Felsen grabbed Lehrer under the armpit and hauled him up to the dining room, the man shouting out in pain all the way. He lit the candles on the table. He propped Lehrer up on a chair who collapsed across the table, gasping. One leg was badly burned, the flesh blistered and blackened. His other leg had a bullet below the kneecap. Felsen sat opposite him, the warm Mauser between them. He reached for the brandy and two used glasses. He filled them and slid one across to Lehrer.

'Drink it, Oswald. It'll get you through the next ten minutes.'

Lehrer's head came up, the sweat of pain and effort peeling down the side of his face, tears spreading across his cheeks. He drank. Felsen refilled.

'There's some morphine in my room.'

'Is there?'

'A small leather case by the window. There's a syringe and four ampoules.'

'What's that for?'

'Just in case, you know.'

Felsen didn't move. He lit a cigarette.

'I didn't think that with your deep understanding of it, you'd be afraid of pain.'

'By the window… a small leather case.'

Felsen sat back and smoked. Lehrer let out rhythmic grunts as if constipated.

'What was the worst thing, Oswald?'

'Get me the morphine, Klaus… please.'

'Tell me the worst thing.'

'I can't say.'

'What does that mean? There were too many or one was too awful?'

'I can't… I don't know what you mean.'

'I just want to know if there was one thing that made you suffer… I mean personally.'

Just do me the kindness of shooting me, Klaus. I'm not going to play this…'

'Not until you've tried.'

Felsen lit another cigarette and handed it to Lehrer who took it and hid his face in the crook of his elbow, like a schoolboy faced with an ugly test.

'I'll start you off, Oswald,' said Felsen, taking a gulp of brandy. 'There was a woman who used to be a whore, who got some money together and opened a club. Not much more than a bordello with drinks and bad acts, but a popular place with the military, because the woman could always find something special for her clients… Your turn, Oswald.'

Lehrer's head came up, bewildered to find himself in such a place. He knocked the brandy glass over. Felsen righted it and refilled. Lehrer tried to get the cigarette into his mouth. Felsen pushed it in.

'One day she got a telephone call from a Gruppenführer in which she was asked to send two Jewish girls to an address on the Havel. They were taken into a beautiful high-ceilinged room with a view over the lake from tall windows. There were two officers in there. The Gruppenführer and his superior. The girls were told to strip naked and then to put their coats back on. The Gruppenführer's superior pinned a Star of David on each lapel. Do you remember this, Oswald?'

Lehrer said nothing. The cigarette smoked in his lips. The sweat continued.

'The girls were given a horsewhip each and told to administer a beating on the the bare buttocks of the superior officer. They were young girls and not very strong and the horsewhips were too short, so they were given canes instead. After they'd laid stripes across the officer's arse they were told to kneel down and, still with his trousers around his ankles, the SS officer shot them both in the head.'

'Is this true?' asked Lehrer, as if he'd dreamt it.

'You were there. You saw it. You told Eva. You had to tell her what had happened to her girls. That's why she started harbouring illegals. That's why the Gestapo called one day.'

'Hah!' said Lehrer, leaning into the candlelight. 'That's what this is all about. Eva Brücke. You're a sentimental one after all, aren't you, Klaus?'

'You had her arrested.'

'Schmidt told me what she was doing. I had no choice in the matter.'

'Is that true?' asked Felsen.

'You don't have to justify what you're doing,' said Lehrer. 'You don't have to try and ennoble your actions with some sentimental cause. Shoot me and take the gold, Klaus. You deserve it. You outplayed me. I chose too wisely and too well.'

They sat there for a few more minutes in silence. Felsen not quite satisfied, wanting to draw something more from the situation. Lehrer stared into the wavering light of the candle and smoked another cigarette. A shot broke open the night. The echo cracked over the terrace. Felsen picked up the Mauser and walked around the table. He bent over Lehrer like a solicitous waiter. He put an arm around him and lifted him up. Lehrer hooked an arm around Felsen's neck. They walked out into the cool night, across the terrace, past the thick, rough green leaves of the fig tree, through the break in the wall, across a rutted track and out into a field of grass and wild flowers which were closed up for the night. After barely fifty yards Lehrer's legs gave way and Felsen lowered him to the ground. He lay on his side:, panting and blinking like a wounded animal which has retreated into itself. Felsen put the barrel to Lehrer's temple and fired once. The gun kicked back, the jolt ran through the body and there was a sharp cough as if there had been something inside that couldn't wait to get out.

Felsen walked back to the house with a pre-dawn freshness in his nostrils. Abrantes was waiting for him drinking brandy, his face dirty and sweating.

'You found Schmidt,' said Felsen.

Abrantes nodded.

'Where was he?'

'Down by the river.'

'You shot him.'

'He's in the river… I weighed him down with rocks.'

Felsen went out to the truck and came back with a mattock and a shovel. In the dining room he gave the mattock to Abrantes and drank brandy from the neck of the bottle. Abrantes spat on his hands. They walked out across the terrace with the first light turning the darkness.

It had been dark in the teacher's apartment. The evening had felt more advanced than it really was. I crossed the Largo Dona Estefânia, with Neptune riding his two dolphins to eternity in the fountain, and headed for Rua Almirante Reis and the Arroios Metro station. The streets were empty and there was no traffic. The tall trees were still in the evening heat, there wasn't a single child in the Arroios park, not even a couple of old boys playing cards, just pigeons. It was as if the population knew something I didn't and had skipped town.

I telephoned Carlos who wasn't there and left a message that I was going to the Alfama to speak to Jamie Gallacher.

I peeled my jacket off and walked the silent blue mosaicked corridor into the deserted Metro station and waited fifteen minutes in the strip-lit tunnel. Music was playing faintly on the sound system. I couldn't pick it up and it was broken anyway by the thunder and hiss of a train heading north. I thought about meeting Luisa Madrugada under different circumstances, but none of my conversations with her got very far, because the only thing I wanted to do was go back to the darkened room in her apartment with all its intimate possibilities. What would a different woman be like, after eighteen years? A different smell, shampoo, perfume, sweat?

Wind thumped in the tunnel, pushing out the smell of burnt brake linings. As I got into the empty compartment the music became more distinct. It was Al Green and it was absurd, because he was singing 'I'm so tired of being alone'. Why do these things happen? I looked at my blurred reflection, two images, slightly different, laid over each other until the door shut leaving a single sharp outline of my new face.