'Murdered or raped they took some risks.'
'They? Interesting.'
'I don't know why I said that… fifty-five kilos isn't that much.'
'You're right though… why dump her here? In full view of the Marginal… cars going up and down all night. Not that this part is particularly well lit…'
'Somebody local?' asked Carlos.
'She's not a local girl. The contact addresses for Catarina Oliveira are Lisbon and Cascais. And anyway, what's local? There's quarter of a million people living within a kilometre of where we're standing. But if she did come here and meet a creep, why kill her in the pine trees and dump her on the beach? Why kill her in any pine woods in the Lisbon area and bring her here to this spot?'
'Is it relevant that you live near here?'
'I suppose you don't know why you said that either?'
'Possibly because you were thinking it.'
'And you can read my thoughts… all on your first day?'
'Maybe you're revealing more than you think now your beard's gone.'
'That's a lot to read off any man's cheeks, agente Pinto.'
Chapter III
15th February 1941, SS Barracks, Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde Even for this time of year night had come prematurely. The snow clouds, low and heavy as Zeppelins, had brought the orderlies into the mess early to put up the blackout. Not that it was needed. Just procedure. No bombers would come out in this weather. Nobody had been out since last Christmas.
An SS mess waiter in a white monkey jacket and black trousers put a tea tray down in front of the civilian, who didn't look up from the newspaper he wasn't reading. The waiter hung for a moment and then left with the orderlies. Outside the snowfall muffled the suburb to silence, its accumulating weight filled craters, mortared ruins, rendered roofs, smoothed muddied ruts and chalked in the black streets to a routine uniform whiteness.
The civilian poured himself a cup of tea, took a silver case out of his pocket and removed a white cigarette with black Turkish tobacco. He tapped the unfiltered end on the lid of the case, gothically engraved with the letters 'KE', and stuck the dry paper to his lower lip. He lit it with a silver lighter, engraved 'EB', a small and temporary theft. He raised the cup.
Tea, he thought. What had happened to strong black coffee?
The tight-packed cigarette crackled as he drew on it, needing to feel the blood prickling in his veins. He brushed two white specks of ash off his new black suit. The weight of the material and the precision of the Jewish tailoring reminded him just why he wasn't enjoying himself so much any more. At thirty-two years old he was a successful businessman making more money than he'd ever imagined. Now something had come along to ensure that he would stop making money. The SS.
These were people he could not brush off. These people were the reason he was busy, the reason his factory-Neukolln Kupplungs Unternehmen, manufacturer of railcar couplings-was working to full capacity, and the reason why he'd had an architect draw up expansion plans. He was a Forderndes Mitglied, a sponsoring member of the SS, which meant he had the pleasure of taking men in dark uniforms for nights out on the town and they made sure he got work. None of this was in the same league as being a Freunde der Reichsfuhrer-SS, but it had its business advantages and, as he was now seeing, its responsibilities as well.
He'd been living with the institutional smells of boiled cabbage and polish in the Lichterfelde barracks for two days, snarled up in their military world of Oberfuhrers, Brigadefuhrers, and Gruppenfuhrers. Who were all these people in their Death's Head uniforms, with their endless questions? What did they do all day when they weren't scrutinizing his grandparents and great-grandparents? We're at war with the whole world and all they need is your family tree.
He wasn't the only candidate. There were other businessmen, one he recognized. They all worked with metal. He had hoped they were being sized up for a tender, but the questions had been strictly nontechnical, all character assessment, which meant they wanted him for a job.
An assistant, or adjutant or whatever these people called themselves came in. The man closed the door behind him with librarian care. The precise click and satisfied nod started the irritation winding up inside him.
'Herr Felsen,' said the adjutant sitting down in front of the wide, hunched shoulders of the dark-haired civilian.
Klaus Felsen shook his stiff foot and raised his hefty Swabian head and gave the man a slow blink of his blue-grey eyes from under the ridged bluff of his forehead.
'It's snowing,' said Felsen.
The adjutant, who found it difficult to believe that the SS had been reduced to considering this… this… some ruthless peasant with an unaccountable flair for languages, as a serious candidate for the job, ignored him.
'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-Gruppenfuhrer Lehrer in fact.'
Felsen shrugged; he didn't know the name.
'Is that it? Lehrer and me?'
'And SS-Brigadefuhrers 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-Gruppenfuhrer 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 Brucke sat in the small study of her second-floor apartment on Kurfurstenstrasse 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 Kurfurstendamm, 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.