A Small Death in Lisbon

‘I’m staying here for a while and then . . . who knows? And you?’

‘From Holland. I want to go to America.’

Her blue eyes flickered out over the balcony again and then searched the room behind where the man was sitting. His coffee arrived. He ordered one for her. The waiter took her old stained cup away. Her eyes settled back on to him.

‘He’ll come,’ he said, with a reassuring wink.

The four refugees on the table behind had started running down the Portuguese. How uncivilized they were. How uncouth. How all the food tasted the same and have you tried to eat that bacalhau? Lisbon, oh Lisbon was so boring.

She’d heard it all before and she leaned away from them. She knew it could be dangerous to speak to the man, but after three months in the Lisbon refugee world she thought she’d developed some instinct.

‘I can’t bear not knowing,’ she said.

‘Like the waiting.’

‘Yes. If I know . . . if I knew . . .’ she drifted off. ‘You don’t know what it’s like yet, you’ve only just arrived.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘In the Pensão Amsterdão on Rua de São Paulo. And you?’

‘I’ll find somewhere.’

‘Everywhere’s full.’

‘So it seems. Perhaps I’ll go out to Estoril.’

‘It’s more expensive out there,’ she said, shaking her head.

He didn’t seem bothered by that. She let her head fall over her shoulder again to look out of the window. This time she leapt to her feet and started waving. She dropped back into her seat and closed her eyes. Her table companion twisted around to view the top of the stairs. A man in his early twenties with blonde, reddish hair came striding through the tables. He faltered when he saw the older man but pulled a chair out and pushed it close to the girl. Her eyes snapped open. Her face fell. He took her hands. She stared into the tablecloth as if her own blood was growing a stain in the middle of it. He leaned into her ear and whispered in English.

‘I did everything I could. It’s just not possible without . . . The woman in the visa office . . .’ he stopped as the waiter put a coffee down in front of her, he looked across at the man at their table who was looking out of the window. ‘It takes money. A lot of money.’

‘I haven’t got any money, Edward. Do you know how much the tickets are now? You used to be able to get one for $70, now it’s $100. I was there today at the ticket office. A man paid $400 to get on the Nyassa. The longer I stay here . . .’

‘I got as far as the guichet . . . but then she comes to the window. She doesn’t recognize me. She doesn’t know me. She won’t even take the application unless . . . unless you can come up with the money, or the right invitations, or . . .’

The German called for the waiter and paid for the two coffees. He stood and looked down at the young couple. The Englishman was suspicious. The woman had a different look than before – a hungry intensity in her face. The German put on his hat and tipped it at her.

‘Thank you for the coffee,’ she said. ‘You didn’t tell me your name.’

‘You didn’t say yours. I don’t think we got that far.’

‘Laura van Lennep,’ she said. ‘And this is Edward Burton.’

‘Felsen,’ he said. ‘Klaus Felsen.’

He put out his hand. The Englishman didn’t shake it.

Chapter IX (#ulink_635925b6-7abc-5f27-8f67-89d5e2b71fe7)

8th March 1941, the German legation, Lapa, Lisbon.

The ambassador didn’t make the reception or the dinner that night. Felsen sat between two wolfram exporters, a Portuguese with three concessions in the Trancoso area in the Beira Alta, and a Belgian aristocrat who wouldn’t tell him anything other than that it was his group who was providing a shell company through which Felsen was going to export his wolfram.

The members of the legation, who were without their ambassador to remind them of their own insignificance, spent too much of their time extending their own importance into areas which were none of their business. Felsen was left with the impression that all the real work would be done in the corridors of power and hotel lounges of Lisbon rather than in the bleak mountain ranges of the north. He didn’t improve his popularity by asking how their oblique bargaining was going to translate into tons in trucks crossing the border. They patronized him back. They hinted at intricate negotiations but offered no substance. They said that he would feel the results. Felsen reinterpreted all this to himself. The Abwehr and Supply Department resented the intrusion of the SS into their territory. He was on his own.

After dinner, as they gathered on the steps waiting for the cars to take them out to Estoril, Felsen still couldn’t help being unnerved by the unembarrassed flagrance of light everywhere. All the windows of the palácio, each one or two metres high, glowed from reckless chandeliers of glittering incandescence. As he’d left the Baixa by taxi in the evening the Nyassa was still at anchor, unconcerned in the heart of the docks, blazing with light as the loading continued. Berlin had been widowed for two years. You could end up in a concentration camp for lighting a cigarette in the street after dark. Cars moved around at night with slit eyes, blind as moles. The rest of Europe was like a coal hole and Lisbon its furnace mouth.

A crack and crump of small-arms fire started up around the city. One of the younger legation members with a glass too much of wine inside him shouted: ‘The invasion!’ and roared.

The Portuguese was stone-faced as they got in the cars. Felsen sat with Poser again in the back of the leading Mercedes. They dropped down the steep hill to Alcântara and headed west out of town.

‘What was “the invasion”?’ asked Felsen.

‘A nightly reminder of who’s in charge,’ said Poser, looking out of the window as if he was expecting crowds. ‘Salazar only allows the Lisboans to beat their carpets after nine at night.’

They drove through Belém, past lit buildings and monuments.

‘Not used to the light yet, Herr Hauptsturmführer?’ said Poser. ‘Still jittery after Berlin, the flak towers and the air raid warnings? This is last year’s Expo site. While London burned and France fell, Lisbon showed off its eight hundred years of sovereignty to the world.’

‘I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Herr Poser.’

‘You went walking today.’

‘You told me to go the gardens in Estrela and I just kept going, over the top of the Bairro Alto, down to the Chiado and then into the Baixa.’

‘Ah, the Bairro Alto,’ said Poser. ‘And did you see the market in Praça da Figueira – it doesn’t smell too bad at this time of the year; and that rat hole – the Mouraria, or the stinking, crumbling Alfama?’

‘I walked up to the Castle of São Jorge and took a taxi back.’

‘So you’ve seen some of Lisbon,’ he said. ‘Now when you see Salazar’s capital after dark perhaps you understand my point about the harlot. Lisbon’s a whore, a peasant Arab whore, who wears a tiara at night.’

‘Perhaps you’ve been here too long, Poser.’

‘Ach, Salazar, he says one thing, he does another, he leans one way and sticks a foot out the other. He takes our Swiss francs and gold bars and then extends unlimited credit to the British. He rails at them for blocking his imports from the colonies and . . . ach . . . The man’s a Moor and he’s making the beast with two backs with anyone he pleases,’ Poser finished bitterly.

‘Now you’re thinking that because you pay the whore she should be faithful. Next you’ll be wanting her to fall in love with you.’

‘Quite so, Felsen,’ said Poser, coolly. ‘I forgot your expertise in these matters.’

They hit the new coast road, the Marginal. The lights of the dormitory villages of Caxias, Paço de Arcos, Oeiras, Carcavelos and Parede glittered by the black heave of the unseen Atlantic. Poser was still sulking as they pulled up outside the lit façades of the Hotels Parque and Palácio. The high heads of the Washingtonian palms in the gardens in front were just out of the light. Poser pointed out the Casino at the top of the long square which sloped several hundred metres down to the sea front. Music came from the low modem building. Queues of cars stretched down the side of the gardens. The bellboy fetched the bags from the boot and Felsen and Poser went through the high Roman arch which made up the front of the Hotel Parque.

‘There’s somebody you should meet,’ said Poser, heading for the concierge’s position.

‘This is Felsen,’ he said to the sharp-faced man behind the counter.

The concierge flicked through his register. He rattled something off to the bellboy without taking his eyes off the book.