Eva no longer felt fear for the first time in two years. She felt relief that it was over. Relief, that was, until the house fell silent again and the floor was still there underneath her and Schmidt said:
'That really wasn't very safe at all, was it?' ist October 1942, Largo do Rato, central Lisbon In the Largo do Rato Felsen had picked up a taxi a gasogenio, something introduced nearly a year ago when the fuel shortages began to bite. For some reason he felt less safe with a wood-burning stove mounted on the boot generating steam into a cylinder in the front than he did with petrol doing much the same thing. He couldn't wait to get out, which was what he did no more than seventy metres down Rua da Escola Politecnica, but not because he'd lost his nerve.
He thought he was mistaken but the likeness was so exact he had to get out to check. The girl turned right into Rua da Imprensa Nacional and he put in a limping sprint to catch up with her. He had not been mistaken. It was Laura van Lennep. He grabbed her by the wrist as she was taking another right turn and she spun round and tried to wrench herself away from him.
'Remember me?' he said, holding on.
She looked blank.
'Chave d'Ouro, Estoril Casino, Hotel Parque, March 1941. We fell in love,' he said, sarcastically.
She blinked and he looked at her more closely. There was something missing, something not quite right in her head that was making itself known in her face.
'I have to go to America,' she said, trying to twist her wrist away from him.
'Klaus Felsen,' he said, hanging on to her. 'You might remember… you stole my cufflinks. They were engraved with my initials. KF. No? How much did you get for them? Not enough to get you to America by the looks of it?'
She backed away up the street, not out of fear but because she knew she had to get away from the pressure. The nasty pressure. She wanted to get to the place. The place where they were nice to you. The place where they looked after you. She turned. Felsen let go of her, hesitated and then followed. She went into the Travessa do Noronha where there was a soup kitchen and hospital set up by the Commissao Portuguesa de Assistencia aos Judeus Refugiados. It was lunchtime. Other people were going into the building. He watched her queue up and receive her food. She didn't talk to anyone. She looked around occasionally, but furtively with her head dipped over her spoon. He approached a white-coated doctor who was waiting to be served. He pointed out the girl and asked after her.
'We don't know exactly what happened to her,' said the doctor, speaking in Portuguese but with a Viennese accent. 'We had another case very like hers in which we saw the same neurotic obsession with getting to America. This other case had been put on a train by her parents in Austria and told to get to America at all costs. She later found out that her entire family had been taken to the camps. This news induced a curious reaction, which was a deep need to obey her parents combined with an obsessive guilt which prevented her from achieving it.
'The only reason we think the same might be true of this Dutch girl is that we've seen in her passport that at one stage she had an American visa, and amongst her possessions we found a valid ticket for a sailing long gone. Sad… but look around you.'
The doctor rejoined the queue for his meal. Felsen looked around him without seeing what the doctor had meant. The girl wasn't at the table any more. He left the building, stood on the steps, lit a cigarette and flicked the match off into the street. He walked down through the Bairro Alto in the high autumn sunshine to the Largo do Carmo where he took the elevador down to the Rua d'Ouro.
He went up to the second floor of the building they'd leased for the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. The offices occupied the ground and first floors and there were two apartments on the floors above, the top floor being his and the second floor belonging to Abrantes and his family. Abrantes had asked him to be godfather to his second son. He'd called Felsen at the German legation that morning to say that Maria was being released from hospital and he should come and look at his new godchild.
The maid led Felsen through to the living room. Maria was lying on the chaise longue in a fur coat which wasn't necessary, given the weather. He could hardly bear to look at her. In less than a year the peasant girl had transformed herself into a travesty of a forties film star. She couldn't read but she'd flicked through the magazines, choosing whatever took her fancy, and Abrantes had indulged her. Felsen lit a cigarette to stop himself from sneering. Maria lit one too and blew smoke out in a practised stream.
Abrantes was staring down into the Rua do Ouro through windows criss-crossed with sticky tape against the bombing raids that the Portuguese were still expecting to move down from Europe like a bad weather front. Felsen had even heard air raid warnings and seen the soldiers sitting on sandbags behind their barbed wire barricades in the Praca do Comercio, wondering what the hell they were supposed to be doing.
Abrantes was dressed in a grey suit and now wore spectacles although he never pretended he could read. He smoked a charuto. His transformation from Beira peasant had gone better than Maria's. He had some stature and a sinister look that could command respect from the city-dwellers. He'd learnt things about behaviour and manners just as Felsen had done when he first came up from Swabia. He greeted Felsen flamboyantly, as a successful wartime businessman should. He guided him to the edge of the cradle on which Maria rested a proprietorial hand.
'My second son,' he said. 'Your godson. We have called him Manuel. I would have liked to have called him after you but, Klaus… I'm sure you understand, a Portuguese boy can't bear the name Klaus. So we named him after my grandfather.'
Felsen nodded. The baby was sleeping, tightly wrapped in what seemed like far too many clothes. He looked like any other baby except a little less wrinkled than usual. Maria tickled the baby with her finger. Felsen was aware of her watching him. The baby struggled against the intruding finger. A bubble appeared at his pursed little mouth. His eyes suddenly opened, surprised and big for his face. Felsen frowned. Maria's face came into his vision.
'He looks like his mother this one,' said Abrantes, on his shoulder.
There was a lot of blue in those eyes and, maybe if you were the father, the faintest hint of Maria's green in them, but to Felsen they were blue eyes, his own eyes.
'A beautiful baby,' said Felsen, automatically, and Maria sat back on the chaise longue.
Abrantes dug the baby out of the cradle and held him high. He growled at him. The baby blinked at the big bad bear.
'My second son,' he said. 'No man could be happier than one with two sons.'
'What about a man with three sons?' asked Maria, cheeky, confident of her status.
'No, no,' said Abrantes, superstition rippling through him like wind through the broom in the Beira, 'out of three, one will always be bad.'
The baby gathered his small but impressive powers and let out a long piercing wail.
Chapter XIX
list December 1942, SS-WHVA, 126-35 Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde 'Stalingrad,' said Lehrer, who was sitting sideways to his desk, his elbow resting on a blotter, hand up in the air, poised, blade-like. 'Are they talking about Stalingrad in Lisbon? Are they drinking to Stalingrad in the goddamned Hotel Parque in Estoril?'
Felsen sat alone on the other side of the desk. He smoked but didn't answer. Nobody was talking about Stalingrad.
'Are they?' insisted Lehrer.
'Not at the dinner I was at last night.'
'Just cutlery clattering on the plates.'
'Not quite as bad as that.'
'And Poser? What did Poser look like?' asked Lehrer, shifting in his seat, his belt, longer than a pack mule's girth, creaking over the movement of his belly.