A Small Death in Lisbon

  'You wouldn't have thought...'

  I read the article. It was the facts of the case—where her body was found and when, the time of death, the school she went to, her Friday routine after school, the way she was killed, and most surprising of all, I got a mention.

  'What do you make of it?' asked Carlos.

  ][ shrugged. I didn't know. It was very unusual. If I was of a suspicious mind I might think it was Dr Aquilino Oliveira telling his friends to be careful who they talked to. I began to sense a higher profile to the case, a public face.

  'It might throw up something we can use,' I said. 'What else?'

  'There's a long article about this gold business.'

  'I wasn't aware there was any gold business?'

  'We're setting up a commission to look into it. There's been a lot of pressure from the United States, the European Community and Jewish organizations and we've been trying to squirm away from it but: now, finally, we've got to do something about it.'

  'We? Who? What?' I said. 'You sound like a Portuguese reporter, they say everything except the nugget you want to hear.'

  'The government has set up a commission to look into Portuguese complicity in accepting looted Nazi gold in exchange for raw materials during the Second World War and, towards the end of the war, laundering the gold out to South America.'

  'The government?'

  'Actually no,' he said spreading out the newspaper, 'it's the governors of the Banco de Portugal. They've appointed a guy to look into their archives.'

  'Who?'

  'Some professor.'

  'That's going to be a carefully managed exercise,' I said. 'Who's making us wash our linen in public?'

  'The Americans. One of their senators says he has proof of Portuguese involvement ... listen ... our gold reserves in 1939 were nearly fifteen hundred million escudos, by 1946 they were nearly eleven thousand million. How about that?'

  'So we sold a lot of raw materials in the war. That's not laundering. Where did all this gold come from?'

  'Switz...' he started and stopped.

  I followed his eyes. Olivia had come into the kitchen and sat down sideways on a chair at the table. She was in her shortest mini-skirt and a pair of her mother's strappy high heels. Her legs were long and honey-coloured already from a day on the beach. She crossed them and poured herself a cup of coffee. Her hair was brushed to a glossy blue blackness. Her lips were chilli-red. Her young breasts strained against a midnight-blue top which ended two inches above the waistband of the skirt showing the taut, brown skin of her belly.

  'Going somewhere?' I asked.

  She tossed her hair over her shoulder as if she'd been practising.

  'Out,' she said. 'Later.'

  'This is my new partner, Carlos Pinto.'

  Her head turned as if there was a very expensive mechanism in her neck for smoothing things out. Her tongue was attached to her top lip.

  'We met at the door.'

  Carlos cleared his throat. We looked at him. He hadn't intended to draw attention to himself but he had to say something now. Remember the holding pattern.

  'I had a fight with your father last night,' he said.

  Never mind.

  'Brawling in pubs,' she said in her fanciest English accent, 'I thought you were the police,' she finished in Portuguese.

  'It was just the two of us,' he said.

  'What about the barman?' I said. 'Don't forget the barman.'

  'My father was fighting with everybody last night. You, me, my dead mother, the barman ... did I miss anybody?'

  'It was my fault,' said Carlos.

  'What were you fighting about?' she asked.

  'Nothing,' I said quickly.

  'What about you?' asked Carlos.

  'Me?' she said, and somehow stopped a blush from creeping along her jawline. 'Nothing too.'

  'It was important at the time,' I said.

  'And what was all that noise up in the attic last night?' she turned on me.

  Carlos frowned. The cat loped in.

  'I fell over in the dark,' I said. 'Where did you say you were going ... later?'

  'I've been invited to lunch by Sofia's parents.'

  'Sofia?'

  'The banker's daughter. The guy who gave you all that money for your beard.'

  'You see a lot of them ... the Rodrigues?'

  'Sofia's in my class. She's...' Olivia hesitated, looked across at Carlos, whose eyes hadn't left her face. 'She's adopted. The past year we've been getting on. You know how it is.'

  Carlos seemed to.

  'I'll be in Lisbon this afternoon,' I said.

  'I'll be going home,' said Carlos.

  'If you're going to the station,' said Olivia, with a grab in her voice, forgetting that 'later' hadn't quite arrived. 'You could walk me up there.'

  Olivia kissed me on the cheek and rubbed the lipstick in, something she liked doing, something she saw as grown-up.

  'Don't forget to shave,' she said, rubbing her fingers together.

  They left. I shaved and went down to the café and drank a bica widi António Borrego. I felt relaxed after Olivia's performance. If a sixteen-year-old can manipulate two grown men then I might as well deliver myself into the hands of Luisa Madrugada and let her make a monkey or a man out of me.

  I drove into Lisbon wrestling with my octopodial conscience. Should I really be taking a possible witness out to lunch when I didn't know her level of importance to the case? It was an ugly argument. That word possible became very important, and for once I let the impetuous personal beat the responsible professional into the ground.

  I spent twenty minutes in Rua Actor Taborda sitting in my car waiting for the time to get less embarrassingly early. I was watching the entrance to a porno cinema, faintly interested in the type of people who would have the strength for sessões contínuas on a Sunday lunchtime. Apparently no one.

  I rang the bell at 1.00 P.M. and to my slight disappointment Luísa came down to meet me. I didn't know what my subconscious had been hoping, but my stomach was telling me it wasn't to miss lunch. I wanted her to grab my arm, as Olivia would, and march down the street, which finally made me rein in on hope and instigate some equanimity. We went to a cervejaria on Avenida Almirante Reis, one in a chain well-known for their seafood. I wanted to stand at the bar because I liked to eat seafood in an informal way, but the bar area felt cheap and sleazy even with the magnified tanks of puzzled crayfish and lobster.

  The waiter sat us in the window of the restaurant. There were two other couples and the rest of the cavernous interior was empty. We ordered a plate of large prawns and a couple of dressed crab and two beers.

  'I have to admit you surprised me,' she said.

  'By calling you up? I surprised myself, too.'

  'Well, yes, that ... but I meant you surprised me by being a policeman.'

  'I don't look like one?'

  'The ones you see are taken over by their jackboots and sunglasses. The ones you don't, people like you in the Policía Judiciária, I don't know. I imagined them to be stern, hard men ... weary too.'

  'I was weary.'

  'Weary of life ... weary of the worst aspects of life. You were tired.'

  The beers arrived. I offered her a cigarette and she sneered at the Ultralights and took out a pack of full-strength Marlboro. She lit the cigarettes with a petrol Zippo, which she buffed on the tablecloth as she looked into the tree-lined street outside. She rested her chin on the heel of her hand and smoked and thought about something that made her eyes greener.

  'I've always thought,' she said, 'that if you want to be sad, Lisbon is the place to do it.'

  'And you're sad?'

  'I meant melancholy.'

  'That's better, but...'

  'I'm sad too, sitting up there in front of my computer on the first beautiful Sunday afternoon of summer.'

  But you're not ... any more.'

  'You're right,' she said and shook her head to get rid of it. Her strange and large earrings bou
nced off her cheeks.

  'The earrings?' I asked.

  I have a friend who makes jewellery out of restaurant detritus. These were made out of the gold netting from a wine bottle.'

  'I saw the spoons yesterday.'

  'The spoons,' she said, her mind still elsewhere ... on the beach with somebody else maybe. She went back to the window.

  'You know why Lisbon's a sad place,' I said. 'It's never recovered from its history. Something terrible happened here which marked the place for ever. All those shaded, narrow alleyways, the dark gardens, the cypresses around the cemeteries, the steep cobbled streets, the black and white calçada in the squares, the views out over the red roofs to the slow river and the ocean ... they've never shrugged off the fact that almost the entire population of the city was wiped out in an earthquake that happened nearly 250 years ago.'

  Silence. Her chin pivoted on the heel of her hand. She blinked at me twice. What had I done?

  'Poetic police,' she said.

  'The Igreja do Carmo. Can you think of anywhere else in the world where they've left the skeleton of a cathedral in the heart of the city as a monument to all those that died?'

  'No,' she said after a moment's thought.

  'Hiroshima,' I said. 'That was the scale of it. Do you think Hiroshima will ever be a happy place?'

  'Pensive police,' she said, and this time not joking.

  'I can do pitiless police as well,' I said, thinking Hiroshima was not date talk.

  'All right.'

  I gave her my dead-eyed look reserved for lying mother-murderers. She shuddered.

  'How many other police have you got in there?'

  'Pleasant police,' I said, giving her my born-again-Christian smile.

  'I don't believe pleasant police.'

  I slumped in my chair, head on chest.

  'And that?'

  'The police that everybody wants to see ... posthumous police.'

  'You've got a diseased brain.'

  'It helps with the job.'

  The waiter put the prawns and crab down. We ordered two more beers. We ate the prawns. I liked her. She sucked the heads out, ladylike or not, she didn't give a damn.

  'You don't look like a schoolteacher,' I said.

  'Because I'm not. I'm the worst teacher I know. I love kids but I have no patience. I'm too aggressive. Two more weeks and I'm out.'

  'Into what?'

  She sized me up for a second to see if I was worth telling what she had to say, whether she wanted to go that far yet.

  'I've been resisting it for some time, but now I'm going to do it. I'm going to run one of my father's businesses.'

  She sucked hard on a prawn head, smacked her lips, wiped them and drank three-fifths of her beer down in three gulps.

  'Just one of them?' I asked, and she stopped wiping her hands to check me for irony.

  'I'm ambitious,' she said, tossing her napkin to one side.

  The waiter lowered two more beers in front of us.

  'For what?'

  'For a life in which most, if not all, the decisions are my own.'

  'Is this a recent development?'

  She smiled and looked down at the shattered prawn shells on her plate.

  'Was that perceptive police?'

  I finished my first beer and started on the second.

  'Have you been in business before?'

  'I worked for my father for four years after university. We had a fight. We're the same type. I left and went to do a doctorate.'

  'On what?'

  'Was that deaf police? I told you yesterday, remember?'

  'I was concentrating on other things.'

  'I know,' she said, and suddenly quantum mechanics came back into my life. I was aware of every photon between us.

  'Your turn to be perceptive,' I said.

  'The Economics of Salazar,' she said, slowly. 'The Portuguese Economy from 1928–1968.'

  'We don't have to discuss it now, do we?'

  'Not unless you can do it on your own.'

  'Which of your father's businesses are you going to run?'

  'He owns a publishing company.'

  'What does it publish?'

  'Too many male writers. Not enough fiction. No genre fiction, like crime or romance. No children's books. I want to change all that. I want to get people who don't read to read. Get them hooked, grow them.'

  'The Portuguese take literature like their food—seriously.'

  'You're a policeman and you've never read a crime novel?'

  'I'm worried it's going to be as boring as the real thing, and if it isn't it won't ring true.'

  'You're missing the point. A thirteen-year-old will never read Jose Saramago but give him a crime novel and by the time he's seventeen he will.'

  'And then what'll happen to our great footballing nation?'

  'They'll be well-read footballers,' she said and laughed a deep, dirty laugh that probably came from smoking Marlboro but what the hell, it made my chest boom, my spine prickle. We ate the crabs, drank more beer and talked about books, films, actors, celebrities, drugs, fame, success and I ordered a lobster split and grilled and Luisa said she'd pay for a vinho verde Soalheiro Alvarinho 96 which had more spunk to it than any vinho verde I've ever tasted. So we ordered a second bottle and drank that down in flashing gulps and two and a half hours after we'd arrived we fell out of the air conditioning and into the hot empty street with no traffic, no people and the trees still in the siesta silence.

  We walked arm in arm. At the door of her apartment building she grabbed hold of my wrist and half-pulled me up the stairs. She only let go to get her keys out and then we were in the dark corridor, kissing, and she kicked the door shut with a bang so loud, glasses tinkled in the kitchen cupboards.

  She led me through the living room, walking out of her sandals into her bedroom where she turned and yanked the shirt out of my trousers and ran her hands up my chest. She shrugged and the straps fell off her shoulders and the dress to the floor. She tore my jeans down my thighs. I wrestled out of my shirt. She gripped me through my undershorts and looked up with eyes that dared me. She pulled the shorts out and over and stripped down her own panties. I pulled her to me and she jumped and wrapped her legs around my waist, crooked an arm around my neck. She lowered herself slowly, her pubic hair scratching my belly, impossibly hot, heat beyond human tolerance, until we connected and she held herself there until we were both trembling, shuddering. She straightened her arms and leaned back smiling at me, smiling at my agony and, as we fell on to the bed, I felt like the surfer who feels the big wave hump underneath him, tons of ocean drawn up, the surge, the roll, the terrific speed and monumental collapse.

  The traffic woke us. The Lisboans coming home at dusk. Wordlessly, we crawled into each other and made love again. The mirror looked darkly on. A red light passed across the scrap of velvet sky visible from the open window, followed by the sound of thumping helicopter blades. The room smelled of sex—sweat, perfume and something sweet like berry juice smeared on skin. Life felt suddenly rich, the city ripe, the room wine-dark and full of easy, complex possibilities.

  I don't know how I got myself out of her apartment. There was a brief leaden moment and I was in the car, heading out of the city through the darkening Monsanto park, with her body smell still on me and something unfurling in my chest like the sails of a flotilla setting out.

  The earth felt solid under my feet in Paço de Arcos. As I let myself into the house I had that feeling of money in the bank and a fridge full of food, neither of which was true.

  It was 10.00 P.M. There was a light on in the kitchen and voices. Olivia was tucked tight under the kitchen table listening to Faustinho, a local fisherman, who was sprawled on a chair well back from the table barely within reach of his beer. He was working himself up into a lather about the government, the European Union's fishing quotas and Benfica in ascending order.

  He struggled to his feet when I came in. Olivia looked relieved, tired. We kissed.
>
  'You smell different,' she said and went to bed.

  Faustinho, grey as a wolf, tossed his beer back and put an arm around my shoulder.

  'Come,' he said, 'you have to see this boy. He saw something the other night. It'll help with your investigation. You must talk to him. Have you got any money?'

  We walked to the gardens and through the underpass to the car park on the other side of the Marginal. Faustinho strode ahead, looking under boats, in the sheds. I lagged behind, enjoying some purposelessness.

  'What's the rush?' I shouted after him.

  'It's been an hour already,' he said.

  'I thought you said he was bedding down for the night.'

  'He's a street kid, anything could have happened. Maybe he got scared.'

  'You didn't tell him I was the police.'

  'No, no, but I've been gone an hour and maybe he starts thinking.'

  'You know this kid?'

  'I've seen him before. Skinny little bugger. He's got some black in him too. Wears a jacket two sizes too big for him.'

  We searched the boatyard and car park. Nothing. I sat on the keel of a boat and smoked and looked out to sea, feeling useful. We went back to A Bandeira Vermelha and drank aguardente distilled from vinho verde that António had brought down from the Minho in five-litre flagons.

  Faustinho gave another longer description of the kid, having persuaded himself that I didn't believe him. António and I leaned into each other on either side of the bar and looked impassively on as Faustinho measured the kid up with the aid of his own shoulder.

  I strolled home in the warm night. I hovered at the bottom of the attic stair, tempted. I went into the bedroom, stripped and got between the sheets naked, still with her smell on me.

  Chapter XXIX

  16th July 1964, Pensão Isadora, Praça da Alegria, Lisbon

  Manuel Abrantes woke up with a jerk, staring at the threadbare central panel of the bedside carpet. His moustache was full of sweat, his head confused by alcohol gone bad in his brain. He didn't know the room until the smell of cheap perfume made it through his dense nasal hair and a light snoring at his back reminded him some more. He looked over his shoulder trying to remember a face or a name. Neither came to him. She was young and a little fat. She was lying on her back, the sheet down around her waist. Her breasts were widely spaced and had slipped down her ribs under her armpits. She had a light moustache. Her Alentejana accent came back to him.