'The only reason I have a full house tonight is because of the cloud cover. Some nights it's just me and the girls… and our friends from across the water dropping Christmas turkeys.'
'The girls are looking scrawnier,' said Felsen, not seeing Eva's stick-thin arm.
'Me too,' she said, showing him an arm stringy with muscle.
He played with his glass and made a perfect cone of the ember of his cigarette. How to get started? Nine months out of Berlin, and he'd lost the veneer, the hard-dried varnish of cynicism and wit, that got the Berliners through their days.
'I saw you in Bern,' he said, to the ashtray.
She frowned and her cheeks sank as she drew on her cigarette.
'I've never been to Bern,' she said. 'You must have…'
'I saw you in a nightclub in Bern… back in February.'
'But, Klaus… I've never even been to Switzerland.'
'I saw you there with him.'
He was completely still and looking at her with the intensity of a hungry wolf down from the mountain. She returned the look, back-lit, the smoke curling around her head. No backing down from the lie.
'You've changed,' she said, and took a sip from his brandy glass.
'I spend a lot of time outdoors.'
'We've all changed,' she said, and her knee disconnected from his. 'There's been a human hardening.'
'We all end up doing things we don't necessarily want to do,' he said. 'But it's not as if there's no opportunity.'
'Just that there's not always the choice.'
'Yes,' he said, and had a hot stink of memory from a July afternoon in a disused mine when there had been a choice and something had gone wrong.
'What happened to you, Klaus?' she asked, the different emphasis jolting him, as if he'd been wearing something on his face he shouldn't have.
'Some things can't easily be explained.'
'That is very true,' she replied.
The girl who'd come by earlier drew up next to Eva.
'Nobody wants me to sit with them,' she said.
'Sit with Klaus,' said Eva. 'He wants you to sit with him.'
They looked at him. He nodded to the empty space. The girl wriggled in, happy now. Eva leaned over and put her cheek next to his.
'It's been nice,' she said, 'to have a little talk.'
She left no scent, only the feeling of her warm breath.
'My name is Traudl,' said the girl.
'We met before,' he said and turned the brandy glass around on its coaster. He put it to his lips where Eva's had been. She still wore the same lipstick.
He took Traudl back to his apartment. She talked for the two of them. He hung his coat up, poured himself a drink and found that she'd gone. He was relieved until she called him from the bedroom. He told her to come back into the living room.
'It's cold,' she said.
She was naked walking on tiptoe across the polished floor, the tendons and sinews in her thin legs visible. The unfilled flaps of her breasts with shrivelled nipples hung off the racked ribs of her chest. She hugged them to herself. He took off his tunic and loosened the braces off his shoulders. She shivered with her fists under her chin. He saw her back view reflected in the glass doors of the bedroom-the sad bottom with hip bones protruding. He nearly lost all enthusiasm for the project. He sat down and asked her to massage the front of his trousers. Her teeth chattered. His penis wouldn't stir.
'You're cold, go back to bed,' he said.
'No,' she said, 'I want to.'
'Go back to bed,' he said, with a little blade in his voice and she didn't argue.
He sat in the dark and drank aguardente that he'd brought back with him for Christmas. It tasted like hell. He circled over his meeting with Eva looking for scraps. There were none. In the early hours he decided there was nothing left for him in Berlin and he'd take the next flight back to Lisbon.
He flew back the next day via Rome and spent only enough time in Lisbon for Poser to tell him that something had happened. He didn't know what it was, he had men working on it, but Salazar was not happy.
'He's frothing at the mouth,' said Poser, relishing it, 'completely rabid with fury. Magnificent rage. And the Allies are catching it… just in time for our negotiations with the Metals Commission.'
Felsen drove up to the Beira and spent the afternoon of the 19th December with the accountant in Guarda. He made a small circuit of his territory and three days before Christmas appeared in Amendoa on a wind-whipped frozen morning. There was no sign of Abrantes. The old woman was there with her husband, Abrantes' father, sitting in his customary winter position in the fireplace, crying from the smoke. The girl was there too with her son, Pedro, who was four months old. Felsen asked her where her husband was, and she looked embarrassed, which she was only rarely in his company now that she was used to him. Her fingers were ringless. She wasn't married.
Felsen stroked the baby's downy head which fitted neatly into his palm. The girl offered him food and drink and flipped the baby on to her hip.
'Let me take him,' said Felsen.
She hesitated and searched the German's face with her lime-green eyes. Foreigners. She gave him the baby and went to the kitchen. She'd never regained her girlish form. Her bosom had stayed full and her hips swung in her calf-length skirts. When she turned she found Felsen looking at her in that way and she nearly smiled. He tickled the baby. Pedro grinned and Felsen had a cameo of Joaquim Abrantes with his dentures out.
She brought him some wine and chourico. He gave her the baby who reached for her breasts.
'Is he out on his land?' asked Felsen, thinking Abrantes might be fossicking his twenty hectares now that the wolfram price had peaked.
'He left this morning. He didn't say,' she said.
'Do you expect him back?'
She shrugged-Abrantes didn't talk to any of the women in his house. Felsen drank two glasses of the rough wine and ate a couple of chunks of chourico and went out into the cold morning. He drove into the next valley and found someone to take him to Abrantes' piece of land. He was right, they were working it. But no Abrantes.
There was a small granite and slate house on the property. Half its roof was fallen in, the unbroken slates stacked in rows on the floor, the shattered ones in a pile of grey shards. A woman was cooking in there out of the wind, stirring a pot on a rusted brazier. She was filthy and haggard, her face sunken with toothlessness.
The door was rotten on the other side of the house. People were living in there. There was a rag-covered pallet and some chipped clay jars. The place smelled of damp earth and urine. Something small was shivering under the rags.
One of Abrantes' peasants from Amendoa came around the side of the house and stopped, surprised to see Felsen. He removed his hat and came forward, bowing. Felsen asked after Abrantes.
'He's not here,' said the peasant looking at the ground.
'And the others? Where are they? Why aren't they here?'
No answer.
'And who are these people living out here on the land of Senhor Abrantes like this?'
The woman left her pot and began talking to the peasant in toothless Portuguese and at some length using her wooden spoon for emphasis.
'What is she saying?'
'It is nothing,' said the peasant.
The woman railed at him. The peasant looked away. Felsen directed his question at the woman. She gave him a very long answer during which the peasant cut in with the short words:
'She is the wife of Senhor Abrantes.'
'And this child in here?'
The peasant beckoned Felsen away from the old crone around to the back of the house where there were three mounds of grass unmarked.
'The children of Senhor Abrantes,' said the peasant. 'A sickness of the lungs.'
'And the one inside?'
The peasant nodded.
'All girls?'
He nodded again.
'Where is Senhor Abrantes?'
'Spain,' he said without taking his eyes from the mounds.
The peasant's name was Alvaro Fortes. Felsen put him in the front seat next to the driver and they went to the border at Vilar Formoso. Felsen drank aguardente from the same metal bottle he used for water in the summer and ran his thumb over the calculations he'd made-28 tons from Penamacor, 30 tons from Casteleiro, 17 tons brought over from Barco, 34 tons up from Idanha-a-Nova. All missing-which was why the Portuguese stocks were 109 tons lower than they should have been.