'By the window… a small leather case.'
Felsen sat back and smoked. Lehrer let out rhythmic grunts as if constipated.
'What was the worst thing, Oswald?'
'Get me the morphine, Klaus… please.'
'Tell me the worst thing.'
'I can't say.'
'What does that mean? There were too many or one was too awful?'
'I can't… I don't know what you mean.'
'I just want to know if there was one thing that made you suffer… I mean personally.'
Just do me the kindness of shooting me, Klaus. I'm not going to play this…'
'Not until you've tried.'
Felsen lit another cigarette and handed it to Lehrer who took it and hid his face in the crook of his elbow, like a schoolboy faced with an ugly test.
'I'll start you off, Oswald,' said Felsen, taking a gulp of brandy. 'There was a woman who used to be a whore, who got some money together and opened a club. Not much more than a bordello with drinks and bad acts, but a popular place with the military, because the woman could always find something special for her clients… Your turn, Oswald.'
Lehrer's head came up, bewildered to find himself in such a place. He knocked the brandy glass over. Felsen righted it and refilled. Lehrer tried to get the cigarette into his mouth. Felsen pushed it in.
'One day she got a telephone call from a Gruppenfuhrer in which she was asked to send two Jewish girls to an address on the Havel. They were taken into a beautiful high-ceilinged room with a view over the lake from tall windows. There were two officers in there. The Gruppenfuhrer and his superior. The girls were told to strip naked and then to put their coats back on. The Gruppenfuhrer's superior pinned a Star of David on each lapel. Do you remember this, Oswald?'
Lehrer said nothing. The cigarette smoked in his lips. The sweat continued.
'The girls were given a horsewhip each and told to administer a beating on the the bare buttocks of the superior officer. They were young girls and not very strong and the horsewhips were too short, so they were given canes instead. After they'd laid stripes across the officer's arse they were told to kneel down and, still with his trousers around his ankles, the SS officer shot them both in the head.'
'Is this true?' asked Lehrer, as if he'd dreamt it.
'You were there. You saw it. You told Eva. You had to tell her what had happened to her girls. That's why she started harbouring illegals. That's why the Gestapo called one day.'
'Hah!' said Lehrer, leaning into the candlelight. 'That's what this is all about. Eva Brucke. You're a sentimental one after all, aren't you, Klaus?'
'You had her arrested.'
'Schmidt told me what she was doing. I had no choice in the matter.'
'Is that true?' asked Felsen.
'You don't have to justify what you're doing,' said Lehrer. 'You don't have to try and ennoble your actions with some sentimental cause. Shoot me and take the gold, Klaus. You deserve it. You outplayed me. I chose too wisely and too well.'
They sat there for a few more minutes in silence. Felsen not quite satisfied, wanting to draw something more from the situation. Lehrer stared into the wavering light of the candle and smoked another cigarette. A shot broke open the night. The echo cracked over the terrace. Felsen picked up the Mauser and walked around the table. He bent over Lehrer like a solicitous waiter. He put an arm around him and lifted him up. Lehrer hooked an arm around Felsen's neck. They walked out into the cool night, across the terrace, past the thick, rough green leaves of the fig tree, through the break in the wall, across a rutted track and out into a field of grass and wild flowers which were closed up for the night. After barely fifty yards Lehrer's legs gave way and Felsen lowered him to the ground. He lay on his side:, panting and blinking like a wounded animal which has retreated into itself. Felsen put the barrel to Lehrer's temple and fired once. The gun kicked back, the jolt ran through the body and there was a sharp cough as if there had been something inside that couldn't wait to get out.
Felsen walked back to the house with a pre-dawn freshness in his nostrils. Abrantes was waiting for him drinking brandy, his face dirty and sweating.
'You found Schmidt,' said Felsen.
Abrantes nodded.
'Where was he?'
'Down by the river.'
'You shot him.'
'He's in the river… I weighed him down with rocks.'
Felsen went out to the truck and came back with a mattock and a shovel. In the dining room he gave the mattock to Abrantes and drank brandy from the neck of the bottle. Abrantes spat on his hands. They walked out across the terrace with the first light turning the darkness. Part Two
Chapter XXII
Saturday, 13th June 199-, Rua Actor Taborda, Estefania, Lisbon It had been dark in the teacher's apartment. The evening had felt more advanced than it really was. I crossed the Largo Dona Estefania, with Neptune riding his two dolphins to eternity in the fountain, and headed for Rua Almirante Reis and the Arroios Metro station. The streets were empty and there was no traffic. The tall trees were still in the evening heat, there wasn't a single child in the Arroios park, not even a couple of old boys playing cards, just pigeons. It was as if the population knew something I didn't and had skipped town.
I telephoned Carlos who wasn't there and left a message that I was going to the Alfama to speak to Jamie Gallacher.
I peeled my jacket off and walked the silent blue mosaicked corridor into the deserted Metro station and waited fifteen minutes in the strip-lit tunnel. Music was playing faintly on the sound system. I couldn't pick it up and it was broken anyway by the thunder and hiss of a train heading north. I thought about meeting Luisa Madrugada under different circumstances, but none of my conversations with her got very far, because the only thing I wanted to do was go back to the darkened room in her apartment with all its intimate possibilities. What would a different woman be like, after eighteen years? A different smell, shampoo, perfume, sweat?
Wind thumped in the tunnel, pushing out the smell of burnt brake linings. As I got into the empty compartment the music became more distinct. It was Al Green and it was absurd, because he was singing 'I'm so tired of being alone'. Why do these things happen? I looked at my blurred reflection, two images, slightly different, laid over each other until the door shut leaving a single sharp outline of my new face.
I got off the Metro at Martim Moniz and took a number 12 tram full of Spanish tourists, all talking as if they were due to go on a Trappists' retreat for a month the next day. The tram groaned up the steep hill, bored to death. I got off early and walked to the Largo das Portas do Sol to catch the breeze and a beer perhaps, and to look out across the red roofs of the Alfama to the blue Tagus, wide as a sea at this point. The Spanish herd followed me, and sat down at the cafe that I'd wanted to and ordered fifty drinks between them. The barman soaked up the order without changing his expression.
I retraced my steps and followed the Rua das Escolas Gerais around the corner and dropped into the medina of alleyways that made up the Alfama. The old Arab quarter wasn't smelling so fresh after the night of?santo Antonio, after a night when half a million sardines have been grilled and consumed. Jamie Gallacher lived just off the Beco do Vigario, above a barber's shop in which an old boy was having his weekly shave, lying down on an old black leather hydraulic chair. A crew-cut kid stood beside him taking an interest, and the old guy ran his hand down the boy's shirt, reminding himself what it felt like to be young.
I walked up a narrow staircase barely wide enough for my shoulders, and knocked on the only door at the top. It took some time for Jamie Gallacher to open it. He was unshaved with hair like an exploded mattress. He was wearing a wrinkled and faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and a pair of rucked-up boxer shorts gathered in a twist around his crotch. He had a joint, unlit, in his left hand.