A Small Death in lisbon (20 page)

She looked at him while he was eating. Every chance she had. Even when she was behind him he knew she was looking. He was different to look at. He asked for coffee, which they'd never had in the house before the German came. He drank it and poured
aguardente
on to
the grounds and sank that. He said goodnight. She brought him a flat, metal pan of hot coals to take the edge off the cold in his bare room across the courtyard where they used to keep the hay for the animals.

He lay on his bed and smoked cigarettes by the light of the hurricane lamp. After an hour he got up and crossed the courtyard. He went to the girl's room which had just a curtain across the door. She was sleeping. He put the lamp on the floor. She woke up with a gasp. He clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled back the covers. The baby was sleeping at her back. He eased the child to one side. He rolled her on to her back trapping her arms underneath. He pushed his hand up her woollen-stockinged legs. Her thighs were clamped shut. He jammed his hand between them and prised them open by making a fist. Her eyes darted left and right over his hand. He tugged her drawers down to her knees and undid his trousers. He was surprised to slide into her easily and their eyes connected in the leopard light from the lamp on the floor. He was slow and gentle with the baby in the bed. After some minutes she closed her eyes and he felt her heel on his left buttock. He took his hand away from her mouth. She began to tense and shudder against him and the other heel began to kick at his right buttock. He quickened. Her eyes sprang open and he emptied himself into her and stayed there, rammed to the hilt and quivering.

The next day she gave him breakfast. It was no different to any other day except that she looked at him straight, with no shyness.

He stayed out all day, overseeing the loading of a cargo of wolfram into rail cars. He went back to Abrantes' house at nightfall. After dinner the old couple went to bed. The girl remained sitting at the table with Felsen. They didn't talk. He got up to go to bed. She gave him the pan of coals. He asked her name, and she told him Maria.

An hour later she joined him. This time, without the baby in the bed, he could be more robust with her but he was aware that she never hissed in the way that she did when Abrantes was covering her.

In the morning he dressed and checked the Walther P48, which he tucked into his waistband. Her muddy footprints had dried on the floor.

At breakfast he asked her to clean his room. Then he sat in the darkness of the main house, listening to the rain and waited for Abrantes.

Saturday, 13th June 199–, Cascais, Portugal

Carlos and I stood outside the apartment block of the lawyer's wife's ex-lover. It was brand-new, finished in nasty yellow, with a sea view over the railway line, over the Marginal, over the car park of the supermarket. Not perfect, but good enough to be way beyond what a policeman could ever afford.

There was a chain across a forecourt of
calçada
on which was parked a brand-new jeep called something like a Wrangler, with chrome and black roll bars and a high polish finish. It was a lot of jeep to go pavement-hopping in Cascais. Under the apartment building there was a small garage with a silver 3 series BMW and a jet-black Kawasaki 900 motorbike. These all belonged to Paulo Branco, the ex-lover and only occupier of any of the apartments in the block. A salesman's foot wedged open the door to the building while he fitted in his last two metres of bullshit to a young couple leaving. We walked past them and up to the penthouse.

We got Paulo Branco out of bed. He came to the door in shorts and smelled of a recent sexual encounter although we didn't see much of her—a tanned arm over a sheet, a brown foot dangling. He was good-looking in a way that hundreds of guys are—black hair swept back, dark brown eyes, square jaw with regular cleft and a gym-worked physique. Bland but confident, until he saw our identification.

We went into the open-plan living room with a floor-to-ceiling arched window and the view. We sat around a table scattered with photographs and four coloured mobile phones.

'You know
Senhora
Teresa Oliveira?' I asked.

He frowned.

'She's the wife of Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira, a lawyer. They have a house here in Cascais,' I reminded him.

'Yes, I know them.'

'How?'

'I sold him a computer last year.'

'Is that your business?'

'It was then. Now I'm at Expo. I installed most of the equipment there.'

'The stuff that didn't work?' asked Carlos, getting his needle in early.

'We had some teething problems.'

'Made some money though?'

The photographs on the table showed a farmhouse in the Alentejo by the look of the land—the cork trees and olive groves. Another fashion accessory.

'This yours too?' asked Carlos.

He nodded. So did we.

'We understand you became intimate with the lawyer's wife. When did that happen?'

He looked over his shoulder at the bedroom door, open a crack.

'May,' he said. 'I think it was May, last year. I'd like some coffee ... would you like some?'

'We won't keep you long,' I said. 'Why did you become intimate with Teresa Oliveira?'

'What sort of a question is that?'

'One of the easier ones,' said Carlos.

He leaned across the table to take us into his confidence.

'She wanted sex. She said the old guy wasn't up to it any more.'

'Where?' asked Carlos.

'In the usual place,' he said, pulling some cockiness together, now that he knew this wasn't a fiscal investigation.

'Geographically.'

He gave Carlos his best false smile.

'In her Lisbon house.'

'Not here?'

'Once or twice when I was home early on a Friday evening she'd come over ... but it was mainly in Lisbon. I'd go out on a sales call and drop by her house. That was it.'

'And the daughter,' I said, 'Catarina?'

He looked like a man whose parachute had just failed to open.

'The
daughter
?' he said.

'Her name was Catarina.'

Was?'

'That's what I said.'

'Now look, I haven't seen Catarina for ... for...'

'Go on ... for how long?'

He swallowed hard and put his hand through his styled hair.

'We heard you went to bed with her,' I said. 'When was the last time?'

He slapped his thighs, stood up, shouted something inarticulate and strode across the room gesticulating. Suddenly we were in soap opera.

'Sit down please,
Senhor
Branco,' I said, getting out of my seat and pointing at his.

He was stunned. The door to the bedroom clicked shut—the girl probably looking for her underwear by now. Paulo Branco sat down and viced his head between his hands, not wanting to hear any more.

'I want a lawyer,' he said.

'You've got the number of one here in Cascais,' said Carlos, enjoying himself too much.

'We're not going to charge you with having sex with an underage girl ... or child abuse as it's more commonly known,
Senhor
Branco,' I said. 'But if you murdered her. That's a different thing. Maybe you
should
get a lawyer.'

'
Me?
' he said, his sunny day suddenly gone very black. 'I didn't kill her. I haven't seen her for ... for...'

'When was that last time?'

'Months ago.'

'How did you meet her?'

'In the house in Lisbon.'

'How?
Senhor
Branco ... not where.'

'I came out of the bedroom...'

'Whose bedroom?'

'Her mother's ... Teresa's bedroom. She was standing in the corridor.'

'When?'

'It was a lunchtime ... June, July last year.'

'What happened?'

'I don't ... she had her shoes in her hand. She walked down the stairs. I was leaving. I looked back at her mother and followed her. We met again in the street. She was putting her shoes on.'

'Did she say anything?'

'She told me to be there the next Friday lunchtime.'

'You took that from a fourteen-year-old girl?'

'Fourteen! No, no. That's not possible. She said...'

'Don't waste our time, Paulo,' I said. 'Let's have the rest of it.'

'I turned up the next Friday. Teresa wasn't there. She went to Cascais on Fridays.'

'We know.'

'I had sex with her,' he said, and shrugged.

'In the mother's bed?'

He scratched the side of his head and nodded.

'Anything else?'

'She took five thousand escudos off me.'

'You allowed that?'

'I didn't know what to make of it. I wasn't sure what she could do.'

'Don't give me this shit,' I said. 'You're a grown man compared to her.'

'You didn't even have to turn up,' said Carlos.

He sized us up for the big schoolboy admission.

'We can take it,' I said.

'I got a kick out of it,' he said. 'Having sex with the mother and the daughter in...'

'Big deal,' I said. 'Now how many times did this happen before Teresa found out?'

'Three. She came in on the fourth.'

'Anything unusual about that day?'

His face weakened to a six-year-old's. He giggled with nerves.

'Shit,' he said, and squeezed the bridge of his nose, 'there was something different. That was the first time Catarina seemed to be enjoying it.'

'She didn't put it on all the time?' asked Carlos.

Paulo stared into the table determined not to rise to it.

'She was shouting, and kind of smiling, but not up at me ... over my shoulder. I looked round and Teresa was standing by the door.'

'What did Teresa do?'

'I got off the bed. Catarina sat up ... didn't even close her legs, just looked at her mother and smiled. Teresa ran at her and smacked her across the face, shit, it was like a rifle shot.'

'Did Catarina say anything?'

'In a baby-girl voice she said, "Sorry, mummy.'"

'And you?'

'I was out of there and down the stairs.'

'You never saw Teresa again.'

'No.'

'And Catarina?'

He glanced back at the bedroom door again and spoke quietly.

'She came round a few times. The last time was ... March. Yes, March ... a couple of days after my birthday, the seventeenth.'

'She came round for sex?'

'It wasn't conversation.'

'You didn't talk?'

'She walked straight in there and took her clothes off.'

'Do you think she was on drugs?'

'Maybe.' He ducked his head.

'Did she take money from you?'

'Yes, until I hid my wallet.'

'Did that annoy her?'

'She didn't comment.'

'How many times did she come here?'

'Ten, twelve times.'

'And why didn't she come back after the nineteenth of March?'

'She did. I just didn't let her in.'

He nodded back at the bedroom door and we looked over there too.

We left a little after that and sat in the car outside. The girlfriend came out a few minutes after us, taking strides far too long for her legs, her stacked heels wobbling on the
calçada.
Carlos nodded, satisfied that the girl had seen what he had.

'That guy,' he said, '
novo rico.'

We drove back to the lawyer's house. I had a couple of questions for Teresa but Dr Oliveira wouldn't allow it until she came into the corridor and beckoned us in. She was moving like an old woman and her speech was slow and drifting at the edges.

'The day you found Catarina in bed with Paulo Branco ... why did you go back to the house?'

'I don't remember.'

'Weren't you already here?'

'I was.'

'It must have been something important to go all the way back into Lisbon.'

She didn't say anything. I apologized and stood to leave. Her face had sagged. Pouches that hadn't been there before appeared below her eyes.

'I went back,' she said, so tired she could hardly get it out, 'because Catarina called me. She said she'd hurt herself at school.'

The three of us exchanged looks. She held her hands open to show us how life could be.

'That was the end of me and Catarina,' she said.

We drove back to the 2°
Circular
around Lisbon in silence. I liked Carlos for this. No need to ask questions for which neither of us had any answers. He was contemplative. A different man to the edgy one he'd revealed on the beach and in Paulo Branco's flat. I doubted he had many friends.

I was feeling sick at how a family like the Oliveiras could go so wrong. The family. The strongest unit of Portuguese currency. Our gold. Our greatest asset. The pure element that keeps our streets mostly clean. Nobody in Europe understands the value of family better than us and it's not just leftover Salazarist propaganda. Was this where society's cracks started to appear?

We were heading for a massive development on the north edge of Lisbon called Odivelas. We skirted one of our present glories—Colombo, the biggest shopping centre in Europe—opposite one of the older ones—Benfica stadium, toying with bankruptcy. We curved off and back under the
2° Circular
and headed uphill. At the top we had the best view there was of Odivelas—twenty square kilometres of distressed tower blocks, covered in a frazzled hair of clustered television aerials. It was a hellish vision, a construction company's Elysium. They built these things in weeks—concrete skeleton bones, skin walls with no fat—they were baking in the summer and freezing in the winter. I've never been able to breathe in them, the air's been re-used too much.

We walked up the stairs to the fourth floor of a block which was part of a development within another development. This block was one of the originals, the rest clones. The lift didn't work. Tiles were broken and missing underfoot, and the concrete walls had encrustations from
dried damp. Televisions squabbled between floors. Music and the smell of lunches piped down the stairwell. A couple of kids bounced off the walls and squeezed past us.

We knocked on a cardboard door where we were hoping to find the lead guitarist from Catarina's band. The man who opened the door was thin, with what looked like a badly applied moustache of the same lank texture as the dark hair on his head. He wore a purple short-sleeved shirt open all the way down. His hand was on his chest where he stroked the hair around his nipples with the two fingers he used for smoking. He knew we were police.