Robert Wilson: A Small Death in Lisbon

'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, Fm 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 thing. And brandy?'

He shrugged and went into the study. He sat on the client side of the desk, lit a cigarette and picked the flakes of tobacco off his tongue. Eva came in with the coffee, two cups, a bottle and glasses. She stole one of his cigarettes which he lit for her.

'I was wondering where that was,' she said, tugging the lighter out of his grip, annoyed.

She was wearing lipstick now and had brushed her hair. She pulled the telephone plug out of the wall, so that they could talk privately.

'Where've you been?' she asked.

'Busy.'

'Trouble at the works?'

'I'd have preferred that.'

She poured the coffee and tipped some brandy into hers. Felsen stopped her doing the same to his.

'After,' he said. 'I want to enjoy the coffee. They've been making me drink tea for two days.'

'Who's they?'

'The SS.'

'They're so brutal those boys,' she said, irony on automatic, unsmiling. 'What do the SS want from a sweet little Swabian peasant like you?'

The smoke curled under the art deco lamp. Felsen tilted the shade downwards.

'They're not saying, but it feels like a job.'

'Lots of questions about your pedigree?'

'I told them my father ploughed the strong German soil with his bare hands. They liked it.'

'Did you tell diem about your foot?'

'I said my father dropped a plough on it.'

'Did they laugh?'

'It's not a very humorous atmosphere down there.'

He finished his coffee and poured brandy over the dregs.

'Do you know someone called Gruppenführer Lehrer?' asked Felsen.

'SS-Gruppenführer Oswald Lehrer,' she said, becoming very still. 'Why?'

'I'm playing cards with him tonight.'

'I've heard he's in charge of running the SS or rather the KZs as a business… making them pay for themselves. Something like that.'

'You know everybody, don't you?'

'That's my business,' she said. 'I'm surprised you haven't heard of him. He's been in the club. This one and the old one.'

'I have. Of course I have,' he said, but he hadn't.

Felsen's mind raced. KZs. KZs. What did that mean? Were they going to assign him some cheap concentration camp labour? Switch his factory over to munitions production? No. Job. It was for a job. He felt the cold in his bones suddenly. They weren't going to make him run a KZ, were they?

'Drink some brandy,' said Eva, sitting on his lap. 'Stop guessing. You've got no idea.'

She ran her fingers over his bristly head and thumbed one of his cheekbones as if he was a child with a mark. She tilted his head and planted some fresh lipstick on his mouth.

'Stop thinking,' she said.

He slipped a large hand up under her armpit and cupped one of her firm, braless breasts. He eased another hand under the hemline of the slip. She felt him hardening under her. She stood, wrapped herself in the gown again and knotted the belt. She leaned in the doorway.