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‘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 (#ulink_f81f8503-526e-54f4-8b81-de1b697ff878)
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.’
The man fitted his face into the glasses and opened a file which he tilted away from Felsen, who stared at the precision of the man’s parting.
‘Communism.’
‘You’re joking.’
The man looked up but didn’t comment.
‘You are pro-Jewish.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘You also knew a woman called Michelle Duchamp.’
‘That is true.’
‘My colleagues have been talking to her for a week in Lyons. She’s been remembering things about the time she spent in Berlin back in the thirties.’
‘Before the war . . . when I knew her, you mean.’
‘But not before politics. As you know, she’s been working for the French Resistance movement for over a year.’
‘I’m not political and no, I didn’t know that.’
‘We are all political. Party member number 479,381, Förderndes Mitglied to SS unit . . .’
‘You know as well as I do that there is no life outside the Party.’
‘Is that why you joined, Herr Felsen? To grow your business? Improve your prospects? Just hitching a ride on us are you, while the going’s good?’
Felsen sat back from the desk and looked out of the window at the bleak Berlin sky, realizing that this could happen to anybody and did . . . every day.
‘That’s a nice jacket,’ said the man. ‘Made by your tailor . . .’
‘Isaac Weinstock,’ said Felsen. ‘That’s a Jewish name in case . . .’
‘You know it’s forbidden for Jews to buy yarn.’
‘I bought the cloth for him.’
It was snowing again. He could just make out the grey flakes against the grey sky through the grey glass over the grey filing cabinet.
‘Olga Kasarov,’ said the man.
‘What about her?’
‘You know her.’
‘I went to bed with an Olga . . . once.’
‘She’s a Bolshevik.’
‘She’s a Russian, I do know that,’ said Felsen, ‘and anyway, I didn’t know you could catch communism from fucking.’
That seemed to snap something inside the man who stood up and tucked the file under his arm.
‘I don’t think you understand your situation very well, Herr Felsen.’
‘You’re right, I don’t. Perhaps you would be good enough . . .’
‘Some rehabilitation is, perhaps, in order.’
Felsen suddenly felt the runaway vehicle he was on lurch down a steeper slope.
‘Your investigation . . .’ he started, but the man was moving towards the door. ‘Herr . . . Herr . . . wait.’
The man opened the door. Two soldiers came in and heaved Felsen to his feet and took him out.
‘We’re sending you back to school, Herr Felsen,’ said the dark-suited man.
They took him back down to his cell where they kept him for three days. Nobody spoke to him. They gave him a bowl of soup once a day. His bucket wasn’t emptied. He sat on his pallet surrounded by his piss and faeces. Screams would occasionally penetrate his darkness, sometimes faint, other times horrifically close and loud. Terrible beatings took place in the corridor outside his cell. More than one man called for his mother under the crack of his door.
He spent the hours and days preparing himself. He tutored his brain into a state of excessive politeness and his demeanour into one of submissive timidity. On the fourth day they came for him again. He was stinking and feeble with fear. They didn’t take him to the horror room and they didn’t take him upstairs for another meeting with the man in the dark suit. They handcuffed him and took him straight out into the courtyard, the snow falling in soft large flakes but packed hard underfoot by boots and tyres. They loaded him into an empty van with a large and still tacky stain on the floor. The doors shut.
‘Where’s this going?’ he asked the darkness.
‘Sachsenhausen,’ said the guard outside.
‘What about the law?’ said Felsen. ‘What about the process of law?’ The guard hammered on the side of the van. The driver slammed it into gear and sent Felsen cannoning against the doors.
Eva Brücke sat in her office in Die Rote Katze smoking cigarette after cigarette and trickling more brandy into her coffee cup until it was all brandy, no coffee. The swelling on her face had gone down with the daily application of a little snow and she was left with a blue and yellow mark which disappeared under foundation and the white powder she used.
The door to her office was open and she had a clear view of the empty kitchens. She heard a light tapping on the back door and stood to answer it. At that moment the telephone went off louder than a stack of china hitting the floor. She jumped and steadied herself. She didn’t want to pick it up, but the noise was shattering and she snatched it to her ear.
‘Eva?’ asked the voice.
‘Yes,’ she said, recognizing it. ‘This is Die Rote Katze.’
‘You sound tired.’
‘It’s a job with long hours and not much opportunity for rest.’
‘You should take some time off.’
‘Some “Strength through Joy” perhaps,’ she said, and the caller laughed.
‘Do you have anybody else with a sense of humour?’
‘It does depend on who’s telling the jokes.’
‘No, well, I mean . . . someone who appreciates fun. Unusual fun.’
‘I know people who can still laugh out loud.’
‘Like me,’ he said, laughing out loud to prove it.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, not laughing with him.
‘Could they come and see me for an evening of amusement and wonder?’
‘How many?’
‘Oh, I think three is a merry number. Would three be all right?’
‘Could you drop by and give me a better idea of what . . .?’
‘It’s rather inconvenient at the moment.’
‘You know, I worry after . . .’
‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t be concerned. The theme is food. What could be more joyous than food in this day and age.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you, Eva. Your service is appreciated.’
She hung up and went to the back door. The small, enclosed man she’d been expecting was there in the snow-packed alley. She let him in. He shook the snow off his hat and stamped his boots clean. They went to the office. She pulled the telephone plug out of the wall.
‘Do you drink, Herr Kaufman?’
‘Only tea.’
‘I have some coffee.’
‘Nothing, thank you.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I was wondering if you’d have room for two visitors?’
‘I told you . . .’
