A Small Death in Lisbon. Robert Thomas Wilson

first,’ said Felsen, who’d have been happy to go on.

      Lehrer shrugged. He turned over four aces and a king. Koch was gritting his teeth with fury at how Felsen had bought the job from under him.

      ‘Well, Felsen,’ said Wolff.

      Felsen turned over his draw cards first. The seven and ten of diamonds. Wolff sneered but Lehrer leaned forward. The next two cards were the eight and nine of diamonds.

      ‘I hope that last one’s not a jack,’ said Lehrer.

      It was the six.

      Lehrer tore his tunic off the back of his chair and left the room.

      Perhaps, thought Felsen looking at the deflated men leaving around him, that had been a step too far. Beating four of a kind with a low straight flush – that could be seen as humiliation.

      The sleet had turned back to snow. Then it became too cold for snow and the air froze still. The black ruts in the white roads iced over and the staff car taking Felsen back to Berlin fish-tailed its way up Nürnbergerstrasse.

      Felsen tried to tip the driver, who refused. He limped slowly up the stairs to his apartment. He let himself in, threw off his coat and hat and slapped his money on the table. He poured himself a brandy, lit a cigarette and, despite the cold, stripped off his jacket and hung it off the back of a chair.

      Eva was asleep in a wool coat, a blanket over her legs, on the chaise longue. He sat in front of her and watched her eyes fluttering under their lids. He put his hand out to touch her. She woke up with a small cry that sounded as if it came from the night rather than her throat. He took his hand back and gave her a cigarette.

      She smoked and stared at the ceiling and stroked his knee without thinking about it.

      ‘I was dreaming.’

      ‘Badly?’

      ‘You’d left Berlin, I was on my own at a U-bahn station and where the tracks should have been there were crowds of people looking up, as if they were expecting something of me.’

      ‘Where’d I gone?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘I doubt I’ll be going anywhere after tonight.’

      ‘What did you do?’ she asked, mother to small boy.

      ‘I cleaned them out.’

      Eva sat up.

      ‘That was stupid,’ she said. ‘You know Lehrer . . . he’s not so nice. You remember those two Jewish girls?’

      ‘The ones who got washed up in the Havel . . . yes, I do, but that wasn’t him was it?’

      ‘No, but he was there. He was the one who’d ordered the girls.’

      ‘He knew about me too,’ said Felsen sipping the brandy. ‘He knew about me and Susana Lopes. How do you think he knew that?’

      ‘It’s the nature of the regime isn’t it?’

      ‘It was years ago.’

      ‘It was a totalitarian state before the war too,’ she said, swinging her knees round to between his legs and taking the brandy glass from him. ‘Is that why you beat him at cards?’

      ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, annoyed to have sounded defensive.

      ‘You were jealous, weren’t you? I can tell,’ she said. ‘Of him and Susana.’

      Her hands found the front of his trousers and rubbed the thick material.

      ‘I beat him because I didn’t want to leave Berlin.’

      ‘Berlin?’ she asked, toying with him now.

      She undid the front of his trousers and unbuttoned his fly. He slipped out of his braces and she tugged his trousers down to his thighs and yanked his undershorts out and over his erection.

      ‘Not just Berlin,’ he said, and gasped as her hands enclosed the stem of his penis.

      ‘Sorry,’ she said, without meaning it.

      He swallowed. His penis felt extremely hot in her small, cold, white hands. She moved her fists up and down, painfully slowly, without taking her eyes off his face. His neck juddered and he pulled her forward on to his lap, pushing the coat open and drawing her dress up over her stocking tops. He tugged the gusset of her knickers aside and she had to grab at the arms of the chair to save herself from falling. She found him and lowered herself down on to him feeling the slow burn creeping into her.

      At dawn the heavy black curtains were crushing the iron-grey light back outside. The white linen bedclothes were stiff with cold. Felsen’s head came off the pillow at the second crash, which came with the noise of a length of wood splintering. Boots thundered over wooden floors, something fell and rolled. Felsen turned, his shoulders hardened by the frost, his brain grinding through the gears, drink and tiredness confusing the double declutch required. The two huge panes of mirrored glass in the double doors of the bedroom shattered. Two men in calf-length black leather coats stepped through the door frames. Felsen’s single thought – why didn’t they just open the doors?

      Eva came out of sleep as if she’d been stabbed. Felsen slid out of the bed and crouched naked. A leather heel from a black boot hit him on the side of his cloth-filled head and he went down.

      ‘Felsen!’ roared a voice.

      Felsen murmured something to himself, things slopping in his head, the room full of Eva shouting hobnail German.

      ‘You! Shut up!’

      He heard a dull smack, something delivered with a closed fist, and then quiet.

      Felsen sat with his back against the bed, his genitals shrinking back from the cold polished wooden floor.

      ‘Get dressed!’

      He stumbled into clothes. Blood trickled, warm behind his ear. The men took a shoulder each. They crunched over the broken glass, opening the doors this time, polite on the way out.

      A green padlocked van was the only colour in a crevasse of snow-covered gunmetal buildings, whose street was frozen into arctic maps of white, fringed grey and black. The door of the van opened. They heaved Felsen into the darkness and pant of fear.

Chapter II

      16th February 1941, 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, RHSA Headquarters.

      The van doors opened to an inarticulate shriek from an armed soldier. Felsen took a sideswipe from a rifle butt on the shoulder. He lowered himself into the ankle-deep black slush and staggered up the steps out of the courtyard into the grim stone Gestapo building. He was one of four prisoners. They were led straight down into the cellars, into a long narrow corridor with cells on either side. Most of the light came from an open door from which came the moaning of a man post-coitus. The two men ahead of Felsen looked into the light and switched their heads away fast. A man in shirt sleeves wearing a stiff, grossly stained, brown apron was attending to a man strapped into a chair.

      ‘Shut the door, Krüger,’ he said, in a tired, long-suffering voice. A man with a full day’s work ahead of him and none of it easy.

      The corridor darkened with a bang to a sodium-lit gloom. Felsen was put in a stinking unlit cell with a pallet and full bucket for company. He put his hands up against the damp wall and tried to breathe away the cold clamminess he felt on the inside of his rib cage. He had gone too far. He knew that now.

      They came for him after several hours, took him past the shut door of the horror room up to the first floor and into an office with tall windows in which a man in a dark suit sat at a desk cleaning his glasses for an absurdly long time. Felsen waited. The man told him to sit.

      ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

      ‘No.’