A Small Death in lisbon (33 page)

'I'm at the aftermath of your party, Jamie. I've got a pretty good idea of the scenario. So why don't you tell me about you and Catarina and what you had in mind?'

'I'd been seeing her.'

'Seeing her. Is that like knowing someone in the biblical sense?'

'Your English is pretty fucking good for a cop,' he said. 'All right, I was sleeping with her.'

'Did she ever stay the night?'

He took a deep breath.

'I'd been seeing her pretty regular for six months until a couple of weeks ago. And no, she didn't stay the night. Ever.'

'Did you ever give her money?'

He eyed me from the side of his head.

'When she asked to borrow some, yes.'

'And she gave it back?'

'No.'

'What happened a couple of weeks ago?'

The couple next door reached the end of the road—the man groaning and hissing as if he was being hosed down with cold water, the girl whimpering.

'I told her I was in love with her.'

'So there was more to it than sex as far as you were concerned?'

'It was great sex. We hit it off in bed.'

'But you talked as well.'

'Sure.'

'What about?'

'Music.'

'Anything personal?'

'Music is personal.'

'What about families, relationships, friends ... feelings, emotions.'

He didn't reply.

'Did she talk about her parents?'

'Only to say she had to get back to them.'

'What did she say when you told her you were in love with her?'

'She didn't.'

'Nothing?'
'Nada.'

'Wasn't that disappointing?'

'Of course it was fucking disappointing.'

'Let's go back to Friday afternoon. You're outside the school talking. You've asked her to your party What does she do?'

'She turned me down. She said she had to get back to Cascais. Her parents were expecting her. I told her to call them, tell them that she wanted to stay in town and go to the
festa de Santo António
in the Alfama. She wasn't interested. I told her I was in love with her again and she started to walk off. I grabbed her by the wrist. She twisted it out of my hand.'

'Where are you by now?'

'Just up from the school on Duque de Ávila.'

'On your own?'

'Yes. Most of the other kids had gone, or just hanging around on the corner.'

'And?'

He squeezed his forehead and took a fierce drag of one of my non-cigarettes.

'I hit her.'

'What with?'

'I slapped her face.'

'How did she take that?'

'Well ... it was weird ... because she just fucking smiled at me. She didn't put her hand to her face. She didn't say anything. She just smiled.'

'As if she was saying "That's how much you love me"?'

He nodded, without thinking that.

'I cracked. Said I was sorry. Asked her to forgive me. All that...'

'What did she do?'

'She turned on her heel and fucked off down the street. I slumped against a car. The alarm went off. She didn't turn round. At the end of the street, by the traffic lights, a car pulled up. She looked at it, stepped off the pavement, talked to the driver for a minute, the light changed, she got in and the car drove off.'

'Tell me about the car.'

'I don't know anything about cars.'

'You haven't got one?'

'I don't even drive.'

'Let's start at the simple end. Was the car big or small?'

'Big.'

'Dark or light?'

'Dark.'

'Any insignia?'

'It was way down the end of the street.'

'Do you think she knew the driver of the car?'

I couldn't tell.'

'Exactly how long did they talk for?'

'Shit. Less than a minute. Forty seconds, something like that.'

'Where did the car come from?'

Down the street somewhere, I don't know. The fucking car alarm was going and I was, you know, upset.'

'You're going to have to do better than that, Mr Gallacher.'

I don't know whether I fucking can.'

You're going to have to, and I'm going to make you,' I said. 'You're coming down to the
Policía Judiciária
with me and write it all down.'

'Jesus. You're going to make me write a statement? What is all this?'

'Catarina's dead, Mr Gallacher. She was murdered yesterday afternoon about six o'clock and I want to find out whether you did it.'

He didn't look as if he'd done it. He looked as if a trapdoor had just opened up underneath him and he was on his way down into the abyss. When he stood his legs were shaking.

'What about those two in there?' he asked.

'They're leaving.'

I went into the corridor and threw open the door. The black guy was lying collapsed on his back, still breathing heavily, slick with sweat in the airless room. The girl lay face-down with her legs apart. I kicked their clothes at them. The girl twisted round, her cheeks flushed, her eyes unfocused.

'You two. Out!'

15th April 1955–, Abrantes' office, Banco de Oceano e Rocha, Rua do Ouro, Baixa, Lisbon

'Absinthe eats the brain,' said Abrantes. Abrantes suddenly knowing everything about everything these days, full of his success in the Lisbon business fraternity. Felsen took another sip of the green liquid in his glass and watched the platoons of black umbrellas in the rain-lashed street below. It was ten o'clock in the morning and the second absinthe of the day. Felsen fingered his head wondering where the rot would start and why Abrantes had dragged him out of his apartment before lunch.

Felsen had been back from Africa for two weeks, having spent most of the last decade out there setting up branches of the bank in Luanda, Angola and Lourenço Marques in Mozambique. He was at a low point, as he always was whenever he set foot back in Europe and its unfolding history.

Berlin had been isolated by the Reds, the Iron Curtain was rusting into place across the middle of the continent and the whole of the Iberian Peninsula was as good as cut off and adrift out in the Atlantic with Salazar and Franco, madmen on the bridge, flying their old-fashioned fascist flags. The great empires were breaking up. The British lost India. The French lost Morocco, Tunisia and Indo-China culminating in the humiliation of Dien Bien Phu in May last year. World power transferred to the Americans while Europeans contemplated their own nations, bleakened by the expense of war, their nails torn and bloody from the last desperate attempt to hold on to world domination.

To Felsen the whole place had the stink of death about it, the rotten odour of decline and to keep that stench out of his nostrils, during the second coffee of the morning, he'd let the absinthe trickle greenly into his glass.

After the war the Allies had moved into Portugal. The Americans had set up shop in the Nazi legation's old
palácio
in Lapa. But Felsen and Abrantes had been lucky. Their wolfram mines had been sealed, but: wolfram had little value. Their stocks of cork, olive oil and canned sardines had been confiscated because they were perceived as future German goods. But the bank, with its curious management structure, had survived several attempts at having its assets frozen by the men in dark suits sent by the Allies. It was Abrantes' connections in the Salazar government that had saved them. As the war ended, construction boomed in Portugal and Abrantes was there, sitting at the table, knowing nothing about building but everything about graft. Officials in the Ministry of Public Works received plots of land and had houses built for them, their sons earned jobs they didn't deserve, planners and municipal architects in Lisbon town hall, the mayor, all suddenly began to find life more affordable. The Banco de Oceano e Rocha developed a property company, a construction arm, eased projects towards friends and earned protection from the highest offices in government.

And the gold was still there, ten metres below Felsen's feet, sitting in the underground vaults with the traffic on the Rua do Ouro thundering above it.

Abrantes sat over his third small half-cup of tar of the morning. He drank these until he moved his bowels which normally happened around number five or six. After a successful movement he'd take an
anis,
after a poor one, more coffee. He smoked cigars now. They too seemed to help loosen his guts, constipation a problem since he'd moved away from the Beira to worry at a desk, and eat too much meat.

'Haven't they finished that house of yours yet?' he asked Felsen, knowing they had.

'I suppose you need my apartment for one of your mistresses,' said Felsen, turning away from the window, quick to find the acid that morning.

Abrantes sucked on his cigar knowing something Felsen didn't. He stared up at the ceiling looking for inspiration. A stain was developing up there after the winter rains and these April showers. It was fat and broad at the corner where a crack ran through it like a river and tapered off to something like Argentina, and Tierra del Fuego close to the ceiling rose.

'Have you thought any more about Brazil?' asked Abrantes.

'You can have the apartment, Joaquim,' said Felsen. 'I'll move out, really. There's no problem.'

They grinned at each other.

'Brazil's a natural step,' said Abrantes. 'Maybe we should have gone there first. The Brazilians, they...'

'We didn't know anybody ... we still don't.'

'Ah!' said Abrantes and took a flamboyant drag of his cigar, enjoying himself, grinding Felsen down. He blew the smoke out extravagantly.

'Tell me,' said Felsen, bored.

'You were always the German who spoke Portuguese with a Brazilian accent. That's how I first heard about you.'

'I told you about that, a Brazilian girl in Berlin taught me.'

'Susana Lopes,' said Abrantes, 'wasn't that her name?'

An image flashed in Felsen's brain—Susana hooking her legs over the back of his knees and pressing her pubis down on to him. He cleared his throat. His penis lumbered in his trousers.

'Did I tell you about her?' said Felsen.

Abrantes shook his head. We're getting to it now, thought Felsen.

'I don't think I told you her name even.'

'I had a phone call last night. Susana Lopes, looking for her old friend Klaus Felsen who she'd heard had become a director of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha.'

Felsen's heart leapt forward and he had to press himself back into the chair.

'Where is she?'

'A very charming woman,' said Abrantes, toying with his cigar clipper.

'She's here?' he said, possibilities suddenly opening up.

'We talked about Brazil.'

'Did I tell you how I met her?'

'No, she did,' said Abrantes.

'She was a girl in a club...' Felsen faltered as a huge chunk of complex history broke off the glacier of his memory and crashed into his mind.

'Those kind of girls know everybody,' said Abrantes.

'What?' said Felsen, still mid-avalanche.

'She seems to have done well over there. She owns a beachside club on an estate outside'são Paulo ... place called Guarujá.'

'You covered some ground,' said Felsen, cooling to him now.

'They're different to us, the Brazilians. They like to talk, have fun, they always look ahead. The Portuguese, well, you know the Portuguese,' he said, flapping his hand at the squally weather, the dark street, the stain blooming across the ceiling to the size of Russia.

Felsen sat back, not wanting to give Abrantes any more sport. His partner saw it was over.

'I said you'd meet her for lunch ... in Estoril ... Hotel Palácio.'

Felsen sat in the dining room of the Hotel Palácio. He was wearing a powder-blue suit and a yellow silk tie. The light outside darkened and brightened as clouds crashed across the clearing sky, bringing showers which dashed through the gardens and wrestled with the palm trees in the square. He was feeling sick, then hungry, then sick again. His life came back to him in waves, in big, thumping Atlantic rollers. He gulped back another glass of white wine and reached for the bottle in the ice bucket, already three-quarters gone. He ordered another.

Felsen watched the diners arrive, watched all the women settle into their chairs until he found one who just kept coming and coming at him. She was taller than he remembered. Her youth had gone—the long black, shiny hair was cut short, the whippy slenderness of a girl in her late teens had filled out but had been replaced by what an American would have called 'class'. She wore a figure-hugging, crisp, white square-necked dress which looked as if it had some material in it, and her nyloned thighs swished like a mating call. Male heads strained to keep their eyes from drifting over to her.

Susana knew the effect she was having. She'd designed it. But there was only so much time she'd allow a man to get his slack jaw working.

'Well?' she said, and cutlery resumed on china.

Felsen got to his feet. The waiter appeared with another bottle of wine. They danced around each other, kissed, sat, manoeuvred closer.

'How long's it been?' asked Felsen, at a loss for a moment.

'Fifteen years...'

'No, no, sixteen, I think,' he said, and was annoyed at himself for being so German about it.

He held up his glass. They chinked and drank without taking their eyes off each other.

'My partner says you're a big success,' he said.

'That's only what I told him.'

'You
look
successful.'

'I've just been to Paris and bought some clothes.'

'That proves something.'

'I've been lucky,' she said. 'I've had good friends. Rich men who wanted somewhere to go...'

'...to get away from their wives?'

'I learnt a lot in Berlin,' she said. 'From Eva. Eva taught me everything I needed to know. Do you still see her?'

The name shot past him like a wild animal in the night, leaving him stunned, shaky. The dining room darkened. Rain raked the windows, turning heads in the room.

'She died in the war,' he said, blurting it a little, sinking his face into the wine. Susana shook her head.

'We heard about the bombing.'

'You got out just in time,' said Felsen.