'Like Poser always does, but sicker.'
'Mrnm,' murmured Lehrer seismically. 'Zeitzler, the Army Chief of Staff, went on Stalingrad rations for two weeks to show solidarity with his men at the front. He lost twelve kilos. What does that tell you?'
Felsen closed his eyes at another of Lehrer's endless test questions. He wanted to say that it told him that Zeitzler probably had more than twelve kilos to lose, but one look at Lehrer's creaking belt told him this would not lighten the tone.
'The Sixth Army is in big trouble,' Felsen trotted it out, Lehrer's best pupil.
'You know, I have my contacts in the East Prussian headquarters at Rastenberg, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. I am reliably informed that Field Marshal Paulus and his two hundred thousand men are finished,' said Lehrer, and his hand dropped, guillotining the Sixth Army off the Third Reich.
'Can't they break out, retreat, regroup?'
'The Fuhrer won't allow it. He's obsessed with the disgrace of retreat, with the disgrace of losing all our heavy artillery. He doesn't appear to see Zeitzler's point that by leaving them there he will lose everything and not just Stalingrad… the whole Russian campaign.'
'Does Stalingrad have some vital strategic importance?'
Lehrer held up his hands, if not to God then the blackout blinds.
'It's mythical,' he said. 'You hold Stalingrad, you hold Stalin by his steel balls.'
They talked about wolfram. Lehrer was listless and disinterested. He couldn't even raise the flag for the latest smuggling operation where Felsen had loaded 200 tons into rail cars in Lisbon and seen them travel on papers as manganese all the way through the border without even the customs opening them up. The Allied agents had come close to a fist-fight with the customs chefes who cleared the cargo in Lisbon and Vilar Formoso. They hadn't grasped that these two public servants creamed five million escudos between them which made their thousand escudos per month salaries look like Felsen's bar bill.
Lehrer managed a few half-hearted questions about the bank, which hadn't been doing very much except lending money to buy mining concessions on the border.
It was early evening by the time Felsen finished his report, but before Lehrer released him, the Obergruppenfuhrer suddenly staggered to his feet, hobbled around the desk and sat on the corner.
'We have a special understanding, you and I,' said Lehrer, suddenly grave. 'I promised you when I took you away from your factory in Berlin that you would be properly rewarded for the work you have done. Next year, possibly, your job will be a different one. It is one in which you are experienced but whose nature is not the same. You must trust me. You must not be dismayed when I tell you that at this point we might have already reached the beginning of the end.'
'One thing Poser did say was that since Speer's promotion to Armaments Minister earlier this year there has been a massive improvement in our production capacity. I've felt it. The pressure for us to ship wolfram has been enormous…'
'This is true,' said Lehrer, batting him down gently, 'but my feet are telling me that this will only prolong the agony. And my feet are never wrong.'
Both men looked at Lehrer's boot-encased agony.
It was six o'clock and dark and freezing from a wind sent directly down from the eternal Finnish darkness. The car crawled forward like the half-blind creature it was. Felsen sat in the back confused. Did Lehrer know what he was talking about? He'd always billed himself as the visionary, but did the future of the Third Reich really come down to his being twenty kilos overweight, sitting behind a desk too much and atrocious chiropody? Could the great German army that had crashed through Europe, smashed through Russia all the way to the Caucasus, all the way to within twenty-five kilometres from Moscow, to the suburbs for God's sake, could it all be over for the loss of one city? Felsen smoked behind a cupped hand and looked at the destruction in the suburbs of Steglitz, Schonberg and Wilmersdorf and remembered Poser telling him something at the beginning of June he hadn't believed. On the night of the 30th May in just over an hour and a half, Allied bombers had dropped more than two thousand tons of bombs on the city. When Poser had told him this it was four days later and Berlin was still burning. He hadn't believed him and had tried to get past the demented Prussian and out of the room, but Poser had snagged his elbow with his prosthetic hand and said quietly in his ear, 'I've seen the damage estimation. The real one, not Goebbels' version. Now go and find your wolfram. We'll need every kilo you've got.'
As they came into the south of Berlin on the Potsdamerstrasse he asked the driver to carry on and take a left up the Kurfurstenstrasse. The street was unrecognizable with rubble piled in heaps on either side and destroyed and burnt-out buildings. Eva's apartment building appeared to be still standing. He took a torch from the driver and went down the cobbled side street and into the backyard of the building, through a gate which opened to a precise quarter circle of rubble and a narrow path to the door of the building, whose whole rear was down so that he could see into Eva's kitchen.
The place wasn't habitable and he started to back out when he heard a voice, thin as bone china, singing an absurdly robust children's song from his homeland:
Ich bin ein Musikant, ich komm vom Schwabenland, Du bist ein Musikant, du kommst vom Schwabenland. Ich kann aufspielen auf Meiner Geige, Du kannst aufspielen auf Deiner Geige. Dela schum, schum, schum, Dela schum, schum, schum Dela schum, schum, schum, Dela schum. Felsen went up the stairs, still solid and unbroken. The voice continued the manic refrain of the bow across a violin. The door to the apartment was open. The living room had been stripped to the floorboards and even some of those had been taken up at the far end. He followed the voice into Eva's study. Huddled in the corner in a wild mix of clothing-scarves, cardigans, skirts, even a man's waistcoat-was Traudl. She stopped singing.
'Did you bring me anything today?'
Her face had completely regressed to a child's. A child's with no fat in it. The white skin over her skull was thinner than the finest glove leather. Her temples were sunken. He knelt down to her.
'Oh,' she said, seeing he was a man, 'do you want to fuck me?'
'Where's Eva, Traudl?'
'All right then, let me sit with you, just let me sit with you.'
'You can sit with me, but tell me where Eva is too.'
'She's gone away.'
'Where did she go?'
The girl frowned but didn't answer. He tried to put his hand through her hair but it was too matted. She began singing her song again.
Footsteps up the stairs. Light wobbled in the living room. A woman appeared in the doorway.
'What are you doing?' she asked, aggressive until she saw the uniform.
'I'm trying to find Eva Brucke.'
'Frau Brucke was arrested by the Gestapo months ago.'
The girl stopped singing the grating song.
'What for?' asked Felsen.
'Judenrein, judenrein, judenrein, ' chanted Traudl.
'Harbouring illegals,' said the woman. 'This one turned up some days after. She won't move, not even for air raids. I bring her something to eat now and again. But she'll have to move soon with this winter.'
Felsen took her to his apartment which had been requisitioned by the Organization Todt and filled with Speer's construction workers. He gave one of the women there all his ration cards and some money and left Traudl with her.
Felsen told the driver to take him to Wilhelmstrasse and booked himself into an absurdly luxurious room in the Hotel Adlon.
By 8.30 the next morning he was at No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse sitting in the office of SS Sturmbannfuhrer Otto Graf. They were waiting for the file to be delivered and Graf was enjoying one of Felsen's cigarettes and staring out into the still dark morning.
'What is your interest in this case, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer?'
'I knew her.'
'Intimately?'