A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXVII

24th December 1961, Monte Estoril, near Lisbon Felsen sat on the edge of a wooden chest with his back to the black, rain-lashed window which in daylight would have shown the grey ocean and, off to the right, the Fort of Cascais, squat, robust, taking on the waves. He was watching Pica's family leave after a Christmas Eve dinner. Pedro, Joaquim's eldest son, was in amongst the guests, kissing and shaking hands. Manuel leaned against the wall, feet crossed at the ankle, hands in pockets, watching. Confident in his watching.

The party broke up, Pica went upstairs, Pedro and Manuel disappeared into the house. Abrantes and Felsen poured themselves some pre-war Armagnac and lit a Cuban cigar apiece. Abrantes sat down in his favourite piece of furniture, a high-backed leather armchair with an arched hood. He liked to gently and absentmindedly slap the arm of this chair, and there was a dark patch where the natural grease of his palm had been kneaded in.

You don't look well,' said Abrantes. 'You're not eating properly.'

It was true Felsen hadn't had any appetite for some weeks. He felt as if there was a big moment pending, and to be ready for it he wanted to be sharp, hungry, concentrated. He looked out of the black window watching Abrantes' reflection.

'You put alcohol on an empty stomach, you'll ruin yourself,' said Abrantes, demonstrating his all-round expertise, as if his visits to Harley Street with Pica had been part of his education, and allowed him to pontificate on all things medical. Felsen puffed on his cigar, the coal at the end sending Morse code back to him.

'Smoking's bad too… unless you eat,' added Abrantes, which tempted Felsen to announce a midnight swim to see if his partner would say that that would kill him too. 'Everything's all right as long as you eat properly.'

Felsen paced the length of the window looking out across the other houses to the ocean.

'You're nervous too,' said Abrantes. 'You can't sit still any more. You're not working. You're spending too much time with too many different women. You should calm down, marry…'

'Joaquim?'

'What?' he asked, looking up from his chair, innocent, put-upon. 'I'm just trying to help. You haven't been yourself since you came back from Africa. If you had a wife I wouldn't have to worry about you… that's what wives do.'

'I don't want to get married,' said Felsen, for the first time out loud.

'But you have to, you have to have children or… or…'

'Or what?'

'It all stops. You don't want to be the end of the line.'

'It's not as if I'm the last male Hapsburg, Joaquim.'

Abrantes wasn't sure what a Hapsburg was. It shut him up. They drank. Felsen refilled and went back to the window. He saw Abrantes reflected, craning his neck to see what was worth looking at.

'Manuel is doing very well in PIDE,' said Abrantes.

'You told me.'

'They say he has a natural ability for the work.'

'A suspicious mind, maybe?'

'An enquiring mind,' said Abrantes. 'They tell me he likes to know everything… they're going to make him an agente de i° classe.'

'Is that impressive?'

'After less than six months in the job? I think so.'

'What does he do?'

'You know… he checks up on people. He talks to informers. He finds the worms in the apple.'

Felsen nodded, hardly listening. Abrantes writhed in his favourite chair unable to get comfortable.

'I meant to ask you this,' said Abrantes. 'I meant to ask you this months ago.'

'What?' said Felsen, turning away from the window, interested for the first time that night.

'Did you see the Senhora dos Santos about your problem in the summer?'

'Of course I did.'

Abrantes sat back, legs spread, relieved.

'I was worried,' he said. 'That you wouldn't take it seriously. It's a very serious business.'

'She didn't do anything,' said Felsen. 'She said it wasn't her type of magic.'

Abrantes came out of his chair as if a mechanism had thumped him in the back. He took Felsen by the elbow, squeezed it hard to impress upon him the gravity of the matter.

'Now I know,' he said, his eyes staring and wide. 'Now I know why you're behaving in this way. You must see someone. Immediately.'

Felsen eased his elbow out of the man's mechanical grip. He threw back the Armagnac remaining in his glass and left the house.

It was 10.30 P.M. He was drunk but not too drunk to drive himself back out to Cabo da Roca. He drove his Mercedes through the silent streets, black and glistening from the rain. He slowed past a couple of addresses in Cascais but each time moved on-not lacking in any physical appetite, just the talk necessary to get him to that point. He smoked the remains of the cigar and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and it occurred to him out there, in the blustery darkness on the Guincho road with the storms stacked up over the Atlantic waiting to come in, that in a fit of madness Maria might have told Abrantes thai: Manuel was not his child. Was that why she was back up in the Beira? Was that why Abrantes talked about continuing the line, and in the next breath mentioned Manuel and his success in PIDE? Abrantes had made a remark at that party in the summer too, about Manuel not having the same parents as Pedro. He shook his head at the indecisive windscreen wipers, at the rain gusting across the road, slashing and buffeting the car. His thoughts unnerved him. He began to feel uncomfortable between his shoulders and up the back of his neck, suspicious suddenly that the back seat of the car was not empty.

Drunk again, he sighed.

A car approached on a long straight section of the road. They dipped their headlights at each other. As the car drew nearer he took advantage of the light to check the back seat in the rear view. Nothing. He reached behind him and swept his hand across the seats. Stupid drunk.

Red lights receded into the blackness, quickly obliterated.

The road climbed up through the dense darkness of the pine trees, past Malveira da Serra, the road winding, cutting back on itself, the steering wheel shooting through his hands, a little sweat on his top lip from the drink oozing out of his system.

He turned off at the top and dropped down through the village of Azoia and out towards the lighthouse where his house, huddled in its own courtyard, shouldered the weather. He got out to open the gates. The wind inflated his lungs, the rain battered his hot ear. He drove the car up to the garage and went back to close the gates. He'd left a lamp on outside the house on the corner and in the light that shone off the hard wet mud in the courtyard, he saw footprints going to the side of the house.

He put his own foot down over one of the footprints. His were smaller. He squeezed his chin and swallowed. The GNR had warned him that bandits were operating on the roads around the Serra da Sintra. He drove the car into the garage. He opened the glove compartment and removed an old Walther P48 he'd kept from the war. He checked the magazine and tucked it into his waistband. His mind worried over ammunition corroded by the sea air, and he tried to remember when he'd last cleaned and oiled the damn thing. Still, having it in his hand was the important thing.

He stumbled into the house and saw his rubbery face in the hall mirror. Maybe, that was it. He was just drunk and they were the gardener's footprints. That must be it. He took off his coat, shook the rain off it and hung it up. The gardener was small, didn't even come up to his shoulder, had the feet of an elf. His ears strained for movement and returned to him the tinnitus that had developed since coming back from Africa.

He wiped his feet and moved down the corridor. His leather soles sounded loud against the wooden flooring. He turned on the kitchen light. Empty. He crossed to the living room. Flicked that light on. The Rembrandt looked down on him. He went to the sideboard and poured himself a shot of aguardente from an unmarked bottle. He sniffed it, the raw alcohol unstuffed his head, the paranoia backed off a notch. He lit a cigarette, took two fast drags and crushed it out. He removed the gun from his waistband and turned.

A man was standing by the door, grey hair swept back, blue raincoat, the wet shoulders glistening in the light. He had a gun in his hand.

'Schmidt,' said Felsen, surprisingly calm, given that the name had come into his head like a lobbed grenade.

Schmidt adjusted his grip on the.38 revolver, and the four-inch barrel performed a small circle. He was surprised that Felsen wasn't thrown against the wall in astonishment at the sight of him. He was surprised to see the Walther in the man's hand. How could he be armed and ready? Did he know things?

'You should put that down,' said Schmidt.

'You could do the same.'

Neither of them moved. Schmidt breathed loudly through his broken nose, his mouth sealed, the stress of the situation working his jaw muscles, his brain calculating as hard as a chess grandmaster's but without the clarity.

'Smoke?' said Felsen.

'I gave up,' he said. 'My lungs didn't like the tropics.'

'A drink then?'

'I had a brandy earlier.'

'I didn't think you drank.'

'I don't usually.'

'Have another then, see if you can get a taste for it.'

'Put the gun down.'

'I don't think so,' said Felsen, his heart pounding in the roof of his mouth. 'Why don't we both put our guns down over here on the sideboard.'

Schmidt moved through the furniture, his gun leading. As he came closer the greyness in his face became more apparent. He was a sick man and more dangerous for it. With a nod they laid their guns down simultaneously on the polished wood. Felsen poured drinks.

'I'm surprised,' said Felsen, not sounding it, a day's drinking and the burst of adrenalin having a curious effect on him. 'I was told you were lying in a river with your pockets full of rocks and a bullet in your head.'

Felsen handed him a glass of the aguardente. Schmidt sniffed it.

'Your partner. He never even came after me. I saw him. He stayed close to the house as if he was giving me time to get away, and when he thought I was well gone, he walked out into the poppy fields and let off a round into the air. Not a brave man, but not a stupid one either. I'd have killed him.'

'Why didn't you come into the house after us?'

'Like they do in the films,' said Schmidt, canting his head to one side, sardonic. 'I thought about it, but I decided it was too dangerous, and anyway, killing the two of you wasn't the point at that time.'

'Was that why you sent Eva after me?'

'Eva?'

'Susana. I meant Susana Lopes… from'sao Paulo.'

'Susana got close. She made a beginner's mistake, but then, that was what she was.'

'Are you working for someone, Schmidt?'

'This is a personal thing,' he said.

'Why don't we start with what you want,' Felsen said. 'Let's get that out into the open. You're not after the gold, are you?'

'Gold,' he said, not a question, not an answer.

'You're sick,' said Felsen, disturbed by the man's lack of direction. 'I can see that.'

'Fibrosis of the lungs,' said Schmidt.

'Where are you living now?'

'Back in Germany, Bayreuth,' he said, sipping his drink. 'I was from Dresden. Did you know that? You know what they did to Dresden. I haven't been back.'

'Did your family survive?'

'They're in Dortmund,' he said.

'Children?'

'Two boys and a girl. They're quite grown-up now.'

'I see,' said Felsen, feeling oddly like a bank manager. 'That's an American gun you have there.'

'A souvenir.'

'Does it fire the Stars and Stripes?'

Schmidt smiled. The stress eased. Felsen edged him away from the guns. He sat on the arm of a leather sofa with Schmidt on the arm of one of the chairs, their knees almost touching.

'That painting looks familiar,' said Schmidt.

'Another souvenir.'

'It doesn't look like a cheap print.'

'I bought it on the Bayswater Road in London.'

'Is it a copy of…?' asked Schmidt, starting to get up.

Felsen rested his hand on the man's shoulder.

'It's a Rembrandt, Schmidt. Now tell me the purpose of your social call. I've had a long dinner and I'm tired.'

Schmidt's creased neck turned in its frayed collar. He had a patch of grey bristles visible under the jawline missed in the morning shave. A thicket of dark hair protruded from his ear.

'I'm not the only one with a sensitive past,' he said.

'Ah,' said Felsen, the angle revealed. 'Another of your American imports, Schmidt. I've heard blackmail's very popular over there now.'

Schmidt's eyes switched back to the guns on the sideboard, the old man in the Rembrandt watching.

'They're very interested in certain circles,' he said, his mind not on it.

'You don't think they've got their hands full with the Russians?'

'They've got plenty of hands when it comes to a multi-million-dollar corporation established with wartime SS funding.'

'There's a risk, of course, that it could all blow up in your face, Schmidt. You've got no evidence except your own colourful past.'

Schmidt threw himself at the sideboard. Felsen, who'd been half-waiting for this moment, found that the other half wasn't as alert as it should have been. He lashed out with his foot and caught Schmidt on the shin. Schmidt's arms flailed but his hands managed to come down on the sideboard. A gun clattered across the uncarpeted edge of the floor. Schmidt fell and twisted on to his back. Felsen found himself kneeling and looking down the barrel of his own gun held in Schmidt's hand.

'I thought we were talking, Schmidt.'

'We were, but I changed my mind,' he said. 'Blackmail's a complicated business… a lot of things can go wrong in it.'

'So is burglary and fencing an old master.'

'I was thinking about murder.'

'Murder?' asked Felsen. 'What do you get from murder? Your health's gone, you should be thinking about your children's future.'

'They don't know me. I've seen them… but they don't know me.'

'What is this?' asked Felsen. 'I don't know what this is about any more.'

'This is about loyalty,' he said.

Felsen gasped as Schmidt pulled the trigger. There was a dry click. Schmidt racked the slide. Felsen leapt towards the corner of the room, his hand reaching out for Schmidt's gun. There was a head-ringing explosion, far louder than a detonating bullet in a confined space, and Felsen's ear and arm burnt white hot. The next sound he heard was the horror sound from Prinz Albrechtstrasse, the sound of a man on the brink of orgasm. He picked up the gun and rolled over.

Schmidt was slumped against the sideboard, his legs out in front of him, his eyes wide and staring at the bloodied stump at the end of his right arm. Blood covered his chest and lap. His raincoat was torn open, his face and grey hair flecked with red. Schmidt wanted to scream but, like a man having a nightmare, his mind shuddered but his voice only whimpered.

The quantity of blood that had spurted from his severed brachial artery was creating a creeping stain through the carpet towards the leather furniture.

'I'm going,' he said in a strange polite voice, as if he'd got what he'd come for and he'd be running along now.

Felsen got to his feet. His reflection in the window showed dark streaks across his face. The mirror showed him that he'd lost half an ear. His left arm burned from shoulder to wrist. He eased the fingers of his right hand around there and they disappeared into a deep wound in his triceps. His knees went and he nearly fainted.

He stripped off his jacket in the bathroom and washed himself as best he could. He ran water over his arm. It made no difference. It felt as if he had a white hot lump of charcoal in there. He hung his head over the sink. Not only did he have Schmidt to move, but he also had furniture and a large antique Arraiolos carpet to shift. He wrapped a towel around his arm.

He went back to the living room. He reached over Schmidt and uncorked the aguardente bottle and drank heavily from it. He sat on the divan with the bottle in his crotch and with the most westerly telephone in Europe put a call through to Abrantes. The operator connected him.

The maid answered and refused to disturb Abrantes. Felsen worked on her for half a minute. He knew what Abrantes was doing. He drank again and found a new packet of cigarettes. Abrantes finally picked up the telephone.

'I need your help,' said Felsen.

'Can't it wait?' he said, irritated.

'I need help from your friends… the ones Manuel works for.'

Silence now. He had the man's attention. He gulped more spirit, blinked back the tears.

There's been a development from that situation I had with Susana Lopes. There's a man dead up here.'

'That's enough,' said Abrantes. 'Shut up now. I'm sending somebody. Are you hurt?'

Felsen's face was burning from the alcohol. His lips, with the cigarette stuck to the bottom one, itched. Sweat sprang from the sandpaper of his moustache.

'My arm.'

'Leave the door open,' said Abrantes.

Felsen raided the phone back. He made it to the front door and halfway back. He fell across the threshold to the living room, Schmidt's white face was his last image.

He was vaguely aware of people in the room. Shadows and light in his eyes, furniture scraping, voices remote and indistinct and the wind still driving into the house, rattling the windows. He was being moved. Something flashed in the dome of his cranium and he floated out again, his raft creaking under the heave of a big sea.

He woke up several times over a period he could not judge. Each time the heat inside him was tremendous as if his body was burning fossil fuels. On the last occasion there was a smell, a terrible smell, one that frightened him and left him as weak as the runt cub in a litter of twelve.

There was morning light when he came round. The very first inch of the day when the earliest grey seeps out of the black. His head was too heavy to lift off the pillow. Was he awake this time? Was he conscious? He waited to see where he was, to make sure that he wasn't still inside his own head. More light leaked into the room, a little white, the colour of bone. He felt cool. Not so much pain in his bad arm, a saline drip in the other. Not parched as before. He heard voices talking in the corridor about a coup attempt in Beja, the name of General Machedo, but it was too much effort to listen and he tuned out.

He lifted his right arm. It was secured to the bed frame by a pair of handcuffs. He lifted his left, gingerly, the pain still there. The arm came up easily. He looked down his chest at it, but it wasn't there. It felt there. But it wasn't. The hand was there but it wasn't. The wrist. The elbow. The biceps. All there, but not. He yelled loud enough to split the two sacs of his lungs.

Two guards, both with rifles, crashed into the room.

'What the hell's going on?' said the first and older one.

'My arm,' roared Felsen. 'My arm's gone.'

They looked at him dumbly from across the room.

'That's right,' said the younger one. 'They cut it off.'

The older guard nudged him with his elbow.

'What?' said the younger one.

'He's lost his arm, for God's sake.'

'He smells a lot better now than when they brought him in.'

The older guard gave him a dead-eyed look and went to get a doctor. The younger one paced the room.

'Why am I chained to the bed?' asked Felsen.

'You killed a guy,' said the guard. 'You were completely drunk and you killed a guy. As soon as you're fit to move we're taking you back to Caxias.'

'I don't remember the trial.'

'That'll come.'

Felsen dumped his head back on the pillow and did some blinking at the ceiling.

'Will you do something for me?'

'You don't look as if you've got much money on you.'

'If I give you a number will you call Joaquim Abrantes? He'll give you money.'

The guard shook his head. Not worth the bother.

Two weeks later Felsen was moved back to the Caxias prison. A week after that he was taken out of his cold damp cell to a room with a table, an empty sardine tin for an ashtray and two chairs. Abrantes was shown in by a prison officer. He and Felsen shook hands. Abrantes clapped him on the shoulder and tried to nod some encouragement into him. Felsen tried to keep the coldness out of his eyes-Abrantes the only man on the outside who could help him. They sat down. Abrantes produced some of Felsen's favourite Turkish cigarettes and a hip flask of brandy. They lit up and drank to each other.

'So what's happening?' asked Felsen.

'A very difficult and now, bureaucratic, situation.'

'I don't remember very much after I called you.'

'That was the first problem. You came through to an operator in Cascais. By the time I'd contacted my friends in PIDE another squad had already been advised by the telephone exchange that a death had occurred and that you weren't phoning the police to report it. Suspicious. Very suspicious.'

'He broke into my house. He was armed.'

'So were you. Your fingerprints were on the unregistered gun. A bullet from that was found in the dead man.'

'I don't…' Felsen drifted, and chewed on his remaining thumbnail.

'You see how complicated it has become.'

'That wasn't my gun. He had my gun. My gun blew up in his face.'

'What was he doing with your gun, what were you doing with his?'

Felsen closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He told Abrantes as best as he could remember what had happened. Abrantes listened, glancing at his watch and drinking more of the brandy than was his share. He nodded and murmured to keep Felsen going.

'You know,' said Abrantes, once he was sure the German was finished. 'I don't think you can say any of that in court.'

'In court?'

'There has to be a trial.'

'What about your PIDE friends?'

'As I mentioned… a very difficult and now, bureaucratic, situation. You're in the system. It's not so easy to get you out.'

'I don't remember being charged.'

'The charge, my friend, is murder.'

Felsen dabbed the sardine tin around the table with the end of his cigarette.

'You know who he was, don't you?'

'Who?'

'The dead man.'

'According to his papers he was a German tourist called Reinhardt Glaser.'

Felsen shook his head, his eyes so intense, they grabbed Abrantes around the throat.

'You owe me,' he said.

'I owe you?'

'The dead man was Schmidt… you remember him?'

'Schmidt?'

'The one you told me you shot that night in the Alentejo. You said you put him in the river…'

'No, no, no, no.'

'Yes, Joaquim,' said Felsen, easing the hip flask from Abrantes' grip. 'It was him. You lied to me. He said you didn't come after him. He said you fired a shot out in the poppy fields. He saw you. Schmidt saw you.'

'No, no, no… his name was Reinhardt Glaser. You made a mistake.'

'I didn't make a mistake. You know I didn't.'

'Me? How? I never saw him.'

It was quiet enough to hear the tobacco crackling in their cigarettes.

'You owe me for that, Joaquim.'

'Look,' he said, 'you lost your arm, I'm sorry for that. You've had a bad experience. You're still in a state of shock. Your memory is playing tricks with you. This is what I'm going to do for you. I'm getting one of the best criminal lawyers to help you out of this mess. If he can't get you an acquittal nobody can. Now drink. I have to be going. Pica is waiting for me in the Chiado. The later I am, the more she spends. Forca, amigo meu.'

That was the last Felsen saw of Abrantes. The lawyer never appeared. His old partner didn't attend the trial nine months later, and he wasn't present to see Felsen sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for the murder of the German tourist, known from his passport details as Reinhardt Glaser.

As Felsen began two decades of imprisonment in Caxias he had a short, vivid dream. It featured four horseshoes which gradually straightened out into a lattice of metal strips, and behind the strips was a live lizard with its head mashed to a bloody pulp, front legs braced, bobbing. He woke with a jerk and into his head came the memory of a dark stretch of road out to Guincho on a squally Christmas Eve night. He knew then, that even in his drunken state, his instinct had been right-Maria had told Abrantes that Manuel was not his son. He replayed that last meeting with Abrantes. The man seemed to have come with drink and cigarettes and the possibility of hope, but Felsen now realized that he was there to enjoy his satisfaction, to rub his hands over the warm fire of completed vengeance.

Two weeks after the trial on November 18th 1962 Joaquim Abrantes sat down with his new lawyer, Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira, and rewrote the statutes of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. Amongst the shareholders and directors there was no mention of the convicted murderer, Klaus Felsen.