A Small Death in Lisbon

  Lehrer's gun was pointed at neither man. Felsen hit it and a bullet ricocheted through Schmidt's open bedroom door. Felsen fired Wolff's Mauser low into Lehrer's body, just to get a round off, not bothering to bring the barrel up and get a killing shot in. Lehrer went down fast with a shout and his gun slithered across the floor. The hurricane lamp shattered and the paraffin burst into yellow flame.

  Lehrer was foetal holding on to his bloody knee, roaring. He had flames attached to his ankles, shins and shorts. Felsen stepped over the body and picked up the gun. He carried on into Lehrer's room, tore the sheet off the bed and smothered the flames. Lehrer gritted his teeth and hissed in agony. Abrantes stood over him, the knife in his hand. Felsen gave him Lehrer's Walther PPK and told him to find Schmidt.

  Felsen grabbed Lehrer under the armpit and hauled him up to the dining room, the man shouting out in pain all the way. He lit the candles on the table. He propped Lehrer up on a chair who collapsed across the table, gasping. One leg was badly burned, the flesh blistered and blackened. His other leg had a bullet below the kneecap. Felsen sat opposite him, the warm Mauser between them. He reached for the brandy and two used glasses. He filled them and slid one across to Lehrer.

  'Drink it, Oswald. It'll get you through the next ten minutes.'

  Lehrer's head came up, the sweat of pain and effort peeling down the side of his face, tears spreading across his cheeks. He drank. Felsen refilled.

  'There's some morphine in my room.'

  'Is there?'

  'A small leather case by the window. There's a syringe and four ampoules.'

  'What's that for?'

  'Just in case, you know.'

  Felsen didn't move. He lit a cigarette.

  'I didn't think that with your deep understanding of it, you'd be afraid of pain.'

  'By the window ... a small leather case.'

  Felsen sat back and smoked. Lehrer let out rhythmic grunts as if constipated.

  'What was the worst thing, Oswald?'

  'Get me the morphine, Klaus ... please.'

  'Tell me the worst thing.'

  'I can't say.'

  'What does that mean? There were too many or one was too awful?'

  'I can't ... I don't know what you mean.'

  'I just want to know if there was one thing that made you suffer ... I mean personally.'

  Just do me the kindness of shooting me, Klaus. I'm not going to play this...'

  'Not until you've tried.'

  Felsen lit another cigarette and handed it to Lehrer who took it and hid his face in the crook of his elbow, like a schoolboy faced with an ugly test.

  'I'll start you off, Oswald,' said Felsen, taking a gulp of brandy. 'There was a woman who used to be a whore, who got some money together and opened a club. Not much more than a bordello with drinks and bad acts, but a popular place with the military, because the woman could always find something special for her clients ... Your turn, Oswald.'

  Lehrer's head came up, bewildered to find himself in such a place. He knocked the brandy glass over. Felsen righted it and refilled. Lehrer tried to get the cigarette into his mouth. Felsen pushed it in.

  'One day she got a telephone call from a Gruppenführer in which she was asked to send two Jewish girls to an address on the Havel. They were taken into a beautiful high-ceilinged room with a view over the lake from tall windows. There were two officers in there. The Gruppenführer and his superior. The girls were told to strip naked and then to put their coats back on. The Gruppenführer's superior pinned a Star of David on each lapel. Do you remember this, Oswald?'

  Lehrer said nothing. The cigarette smoked in his lips. The sweat continued.

  'The girls were given a horsewhip each and told to administer a beating on the the bare buttocks of the superior officer. They were young girls and not very strong and the horsewhips were too short, so they were given canes instead. After they'd laid stripes across the officer's arse they were told to kneel down and, still with his trousers around his ankles, the SS officer shot them both in the head.'

  'Is this true?' asked Lehrer, as if he'd dreamt it.

  'You were there. You saw it. You told Eva. You had to tell her what had happened to her girls. That's why she started harbouring illegals. That's why the Gestapo called one day.'

  'Hah!' said Lehrer, leaning into the candlelight. 'That's what this is all about. Eva Brücke. You're a sentimental one after all, aren't you, Klaus?'

  'You had her arrested.'

  'Schmidt told me what she was doing. I had no choice in the matter.'

  'Is that true?' asked Felsen.

  'You don't have to justify what you're doing,' said Lehrer. 'You don't have to try and ennoble your actions with some sentimental cause. Shoot me and take the gold, Klaus. You deserve it. You outplayed me. I chose too wisely and too well.'

  They sat there for a few more minutes in silence. Felsen not quite satisfied, wanting to draw something more from the situation. Lehrer stared into the wavering light of the candle and smoked another cigarette. A shot broke open the night. The echo cracked over the terrace. Felsen picked up the Mauser and walked around the table. He bent over Lehrer like a solicitous waiter. He put an arm around him and lifted him up. Lehrer hooked an arm around Felsen's neck. They walked out into the cool night, across the terrace, past the thick, rough green leaves of the fig tree, through the break in the wall, across a rutted track and out into a field of grass and wild flowers which were closed up for the night. After barely fifty yards Lehrer's legs gave way and Felsen lowered him to the ground. He lay on his side:, panting and blinking like a wounded animal which has retreated into itself. Felsen put the barrel to Lehrer's temple and fired once. The gun kicked back, the jolt ran through the body and there was a sharp cough as if there had been something inside that couldn't wait to get out.

  Felsen walked back to the house with a pre-dawn freshness in his nostrils. Abrantes was waiting for him drinking brandy, his face dirty and sweating.

  'You found Schmidt,' said Felsen.

  Abrantes nodded.

  'Where was he?'

  'Down by the river.'

  'You shot him.'

  'He's in the river ... I weighed him down with rocks.'

  Felsen went out to the truck and came back with a mattock and a shovel. In the dining room he gave the mattock to Abrantes and drank brandy from the neck of the bottle. Abrantes spat on his hands. They walked out across the terrace with the first light turning the darkness.

  Part Two

  Chapter XXII

  Saturday, 13th June 199–, Rua Actor Taborda, Estefânia, Lisbon

  It had been dark in the teacher's apartment. The evening had felt more advanced than it really was. I crossed the Largo Dona Estefânia, with Neptune riding his two dolphins to eternity in the fountain, and headed for Rua Almirante Reis and the Arroios Metro station. The streets were empty and there was no traffic. The tall trees were still in the evening heat, there wasn't a single child in the Arroios park, not even a couple of old boys playing cards, just pigeons. It was as if the population knew something I didn't and had skipped town.

  I telephoned Carlos who wasn't there and left a message that I was going to the Alfama to speak to Jamie Gallacher.

  I peeled my jacket off and walked the silent blue mosaicked corridor into the deserted Metro station and waited fifteen minutes in the strip-lit tunnel. Music was playing faintly on the sound system. I couldn't pick it up and it was broken anyway by the thunder and hiss of a train heading north. I thought about meeting Luisa Madrugada under different circumstances, but none of my conversations with her got very far, because the only thing I wanted to do was go back to the darkened room in her apartment with all its intimate possibilities. What would a different woman be like, after eighteen years? A different smell, shampoo, perfume, sweat?

  Wind thumped in the tunnel, pushing out the smell of burnt brake linings. As I got into the empty compartment the music became more distinct. It was Al Green and it was absurd, because he
was singing 'I'm so tired of being alone'. Why do these things happen? I looked at my blurred reflection, two images, slightly different, laid over each other until the door shut leaving a single sharp outline of my new face.

  I got off the Metro at Martim Moniz and took a number 12 tram full of Spanish tourists, all talking as if they were due to go on a Trappists' retreat for a month the next day. The tram groaned up the steep hill, bored to death. I got off early and walked to the Largo das Portas do Sol to catch the breeze and a beer perhaps, and to look out across the red roofs of the Alfama to the blue Tagus, wide as a sea at this point. The Spanish herd followed me, and sat down at the café that I'd wanted to and ordered fifty drinks between them. The barman soaked up the order without changing his expression.

  I retraced my steps and followed the Rúa das Escolas Gerais around the corner and dropped into the medina of alleyways that made up the Alfama. The old Arab quarter wasn't smelling so fresh after the night of ¡santo António, after a night when half a million sardines have been grilled and consumed. Jamie Gallacher lived just off the Beco do Vigário, above a barber's shop in which an old boy was having his weekly shave, lying down on an old black leather hydraulic chair. A crew-cut kid stood beside him taking an interest, and the old guy ran his hand down the boy's shirt, reminding himself what it felt like to be young.

  I walked up a narrow staircase barely wide enough for my shoulders, and knocked on the only door at the top. It took some time for Jamie Gallacher to open it. He was unshaved with hair like an exploded mattress. He was wearing a wrinkled and faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and a pair of rucked-up boxer shorts gathered in a twist around his crotch. He had a joint, unlit, in his left hand.

  Yeah?' he said in English, with a very slight Scottish inflection, one eye gummed up. 'Who are you?'

  'Police,' I said and showed him my ID.

  He cupped the joint, ungummed his eye.

  'You'd better come in,' he said, polite, apologetic. 'Sorry about the mess. Bit of a session last night.'

  Every surface in the room was covered with empty bottles of wine and beer, plastic cups and glasses stuffed with cigarette butts, piled ashtrays, and empty packs of cigarettes. Pictures nose-dived down the walls. The carpet was freshly stained. A kitten nosed through the debris, looking for something non-alcoholic.

  I'll get dressed. Be with you in a sec.'

  He scooped up the kitten and left the room. Voices started up further in the apartment. I followed him to a door in the corridor open three inches. A naked girl with a mass of frizzy hair was sitting cross-legged on a mattress on the floor. She was rolling a joint and looking unconcerned. Slowly a black foot appeared in her lap and the toe rubbed up against her pubic hair. She breathed in sharply.

  'For fuck's sake,' said Jamie, and ripped open the door.

  The owner of the black foot was slumped across the mattress, eyes half-closed. The girl stroked the black leg. Jamie slammed the door shut behind him.

  'Fucking people.'

  'Friends of yours?' I asked in English.

  'Can't even sleep in my own bed without strangers fucking in there, all day and night.'

  We went back into the living room. Jamie searched the ashtrays for a usable butt. He found one, lit up and pulled a face.

  'Where did you sleep?' I asked.

  'Where I fell.'

  'Tell me what happened yesterday ... after you left school.'

  'I came back here about fiveish, had a few hours ziz.'

  'On your own?'

  'On my own, yes. I don't have a girlfriend at the moment.'

  'When did you last have a girlfriend?'

  He dragged on the butt, winced and stuck it into a half-glass of red wine with a hiss.

  'I'd call that a pretty unusual question, Inspector Coelho,' he said, spitting out the smoke. 'Zé Coelho. Good name that, for a detective. Joe Rabbit. Did you ever think of that?'

  'Tell me about the girlfriend.'

  'Depends on what you call a girlfriend. I had sex with a girl last night, but she wasn't my girlfriend.'

  'Where?'

  'What?'

  'Your bed was occupied ... where did you have sex?'

  He leaned against the wall, crossed his legs at the ankle and scratched his cheek with a nail.

  'In the bathroom. She knelt on the toilet seat. I'm not proud of it, Inspector, but you have to know and there it is.'

  'You were seen leaving the school with Catarina Sousa Oliveira yesterday afternoon, about four-thirty.'

  A rhythmic grunting came from next door.

  'Jesus Christ,' said Jamie, hammering on the wall. 'I bloody told them I've got the fu ... the police in here 'n' all.'

  'Come on, Mr Gallacher. Four-thirty, yesterday ... what happened?'

  'What the fuck's all this about? What do you want to know about Catarina for? What sort of police are you?'

  'Answer the question, Mr Gallacher.'

  'We were just talking, for Christ's sake.'

  'What about?'

  'I was trying to persuade her to come to the party.'

  'To practise her English?'

  He started poking in the ashtrays again. I gave him a cigarette. He sat in the single available chair and hunched over his knees. The pressure next door seemed to be rising. Skin slapped against skin. Jamie looked over his shoulder and back down again. The girl was shouting out.

  '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.'
r />   '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.