'It'll be late. You know what poker's like.'
'Wake me if I'm sleeping.'
He opened the door to the apartment and looked back down the corridor at her. Her dressing gown had been rucked open. Her knees, below the hem of her slip, looked tired. She seemed older than her thirty-five years. He closed the door, trotted down the stairs. At the bottom he rested his hand on the curl of the bannister and, in the weak light of the stairwell, had the sense of moorings being loosed.
At a little after six o'clock Felsen was standing in his darkened flat looking out into the matt black of the Nurnbergerstrasse, smoking a cigarette behind his hand, listening to the wind and the sleet rattling the windowpane. A slit-eyed car came down the road, churning slush from its wheel-arches, but it wasn't a staff car and it continued past him into the Hohenzollerndamm.
He smoked intensely thinking about Eva, how awkward that had been, how she'd needled him bringing up all his old girlfriends, the ones before the war who'd taught him how not to be a farmboy. Eva had introduced him to all of them and then, after the British declared war, moved in herself. He couldn't remember how that had happened. All he could think of was how Eva had taught him nothing, tried to teach him the mystery of nothing, the intricacies of space between words and lines. She was a great withholder.
He pieced their affair back to a moment where, in a fit of frustration at her remoteness, he'd accused her of acting the 'mysterious woman', when all she did was front a brothel as a nightclub. She'd iced over and said she didn't play at being anything. They'd split for a week and he'd gone whoring with nameless girls from the Friedrichstrasse, knowing she'd hear about it. She ignored his reappearance at the club and then wouldn't have him back in her bed until she was sure that he was clean, but… she had let him back.
Another car came down Nurnbergerstrasse, the sleet diagonal through the cracks of light. Felsen checked the two blocks of Reichsmarks in his inside pockets, left the window and went down to join it.
SS-Brigadefuhrers Hanke, Fischer and Wolff and one of the other candidates, Hans Koch, were sitting in the mess taking drinks served by a waiter with a steel tray. Felsen ordered a brandy and sat amongst them. They were all commenting on the quality of the mess cognac since they'd occupied France.
And Dutch cigars,' said Felsen, handing round a handful to all the players. 'You realize how they used to keep the best for themselves.'
'A very Jewish trait,' said Brigadefuhrer Hanke, 'don't you think?'
Koch, still as pink-faced as he had been at fourteen, nodded keenly through the smoke of his cigar which Hanke was lighting for him.
'I didn't know the Jews were involved in the Dutch tobacco industry,' said Felsen.
'The Jews are everywhere,' said Koch.
'You don't smoke your own cigars?' asked Brigadefuhrer Fischer.
'After dinner,' said Felsen. 'Only cigarettes before. Turkish. Would you like to try one?'
'I don't smoke cigarettes.'
Koch looked at his lit cigar and felt foolish. He saw Felsen's cigarette case on the table.
'May I?' he said, picking it up and opening it. The shop's name was stamped on the inside. 'Samuel Stern, you see, the Jews are everywhere.'
'The Jews have been with us for centuries,' said Felsen.
'So was Samuel Stern until Kristallnacht,' said Koch, sitting back satisfied, synchronizing a nod with Hanke. 'They weaken us every hour they remain in the Reich.'
'Weaken us?' said Felsen, thinking this sounded like something verbatim from Julius Streicher's rag, Der Sturmer. 'They don't weaken me. "
'What are you implying, Herr Felsen?' said Koch, cheeks reddening.
'I'm not implying anything, Herr Koch. I was merely saying that I have not experienced any weakening of my position, my business, or my social life as a result of the Jews.'
'It is quite possible you have been…'
'And as for the Reich, we have overrun most of Europe lately which hardly…'
'…possible you have been unaware,' finished Koch shouting him down.
The double doors to the mess thumped open and a tall, heavy man took three strides into the room. Koch shot off his chair. The Brigadefuhrers all stood up. SS-Gruppenfuhrer Lehrer flicked his wrist at waist height.
'Heil Hitler,' he said. 'Bring me a brandy. Vintage.'
The Brigadefuhrers and Koch responded with full salutes. Felsen eased himself slowly out of his chair. The mess waiter whispered something to the dark, lowered head of the Gruppenfuhrer.
'Well, bring me a brandy in the dining room then,' he shouted.
They went straight into dinner, Lehrer fuming because he'd wanted to stand in front of the fire, warming his arse, with a brandy or two.
Koch and Felsen sat on either side of Lehrer at the dinner. Over a nasty green soup Hanke asked Felsen about his father. The question Felsen had been waiting for.
'He was killed by a pig in 1924,' said Felsen.
Lehrer slurped his soup loudly.
Sometimes he used a pig, other times a ram. What he didn't do was tell the truth, which was that as a fifteen-year-old, Klaus Felsen had found his father hanging from a beam in the barn.
'A pig?' asked Hanke. 'A wild boar?'
'No, no, a domestic pig. He slipped over in the pen and was trampled to death by a sow.'
'And you took over the farm?'
'Perhaps you know this already, Herr Brigadefuhrer. I worked that farm for eight years until my mother died. Then I sold it and joined the Fiuhrer's economic miracle and I've never looked back. It's not something I enjoy doing.'
Hanke sat back after that, shoulder to shoulder with his protege who smiled pinkly. Lehrer slurped on. He knew it all anyway. Except for the pig, of course. That had been interesting, not true, but interesting.
The soup bowls were removed and replaced by plates of overcooked pork with boiled potatoes and a sludge of red cabbage. Lehrer only ate it for something to do while Koch gave him the party line. He shovelled food faster and faster into his face. In a momentary lull he leaned over to Felsen and said:
'Not married, Herr Felsen?'
'No, Herr Gruppenfuhrer.'
'I've heard,' he said, nibbling at a hangnail, 'that you have a reputation with women.'
'Do I?'
'How does a man who's never been south of the Pyrenees speak Portuguese?' asked Lehrer, valuing his earlobe with thumb and finger. 'And don't tell me that that's what they're teaching you down in Swabia these days.'
Lehrer arched his eyebrows in a parody of innocence. Felsen realized that Susana Lopes had moved in higher circles than even he'd known about.
'I used to go riding with a Brazilian around the Havel,' he lied, and Lehrer's stomach grunted.
'Horses?' he asked.
After dinner they moved into an adjoining room. They each bought a hundred RM of chips and sat at a green baize table. The waiters moved a wooden trolley with drinks and glasses alongside, served brandies and left. Lehrer loosened off his tunic and drew on the cigar Felsen had given him, blowing the smoke on to the ember.
The light above the table, stratified by smoke, lit only the players' faces. Koch, even pinker now with the wine and brandy. Hanke with hooded unreadable eyes, the shadow of his dark beard already showing through. Fischer with pouches under his eyes and his skin taut and scraped raw as if he'd been half the night in a blizzard. Wolff, blonde and blue-eyed, impossibly young for a Brigadefuhrer, in need of a duelling scar to lend experience to the face. And Lehrer, the big man, with jowls fully formed, hair grey on the wings, dark eyes, wet and glistening with the anticipation of joy and further corruption. If Eva had been there, thought Felsen, she'd have told him that this was a man who liked to spank.
They played. Felsen lost consistently. He dumped hands which had any excitement in them and bluffed with no will to back it up. Koch lost flamboyantly. They both bought more chips and transferred them to the SS officers who showed no inclination for the process to stop.