A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXXIX

20.30 Wednesday, 17th June, Luisa's apartment, Rua Actor Taborda, Lisbon We were lying on the bed. She was at right-angles to me, with her head on my stomach. We were both naked, not even a sheet over us. The windows were open and the faintest cool breeze and late light were coming into the room. We smoked and shared a heavy glass ashtray which sat in one quarter of the bed and a glass of whisky which lay in another. We stared at the ceiling. I'd spent the last forty minutes telling Luisa Madrugada everything I knew about the murder of Catarina Oliveira. We hadn't exchanged a word for the last quarter of an hour. I fingered a small pool of whisky spilt between her breasts and put it in my mouth.

'I've been interested in the Banco de Oceano e Rocha for the past couple of months,' she said.

'Don't open an account there.'

'I've been trying to find a link between them and Nazi gold.'

'Leave your money under the mattress like a good peasant.'

'Listen to me.'

'I am listening,' I said, fingering more whisky into my mouth. 'Why are you looking at Nazi gold?'

'Because it's a hot topic. All these commissions are forcing banks to open up their archives all over the world. It'll look good in my thesis if I can pull something off here in Portugal. And anyway, a study of Salazar's economy without looking at wartime gold transactions would be a serious omission.'

'Carlos read a piece out to me on Sunday about our reserves going up sevenfold during the war.'

'On the back of sales of wolfram, tin, sardines, olive oil, blankets, hides… you name it, we sold it. To both sides.'

'Some people see a problem in that, or are surprised by it,' I said. 'To me, it's just the way business works. There's no morality in money.'

'My theory is that all Salazar's public building works-the motorways, the roads, the 25th April bridge, the national stadium, all the urbanization in and around Lisbon-I think it was funded, not: just by his successful playing of the market during the Second World War, but also by his acquiescence towards the end of the war in allowing the Nazis to move their loot out of Europe. And somewhere in all that is the Banco de Oceano e Rocha.'

'That could be a dangerous conclusion,' I said. 'Maybe you should tell me how you got there.'

'Just on the other side of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha building, near the Anjos Metro, in Rua Francisco Ribeiro, is a very ugly building belonging to the Banco de Portugal. In there they have all the bank and company information, all the statutes from all the companies registered in Portugal since the nineteenth century. If you're a really boring, sad person you can go in there and leaf through all the statutes of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha and you'll find that the three original directors of the bank were Joaquim Abrantes, Oswald Lehrer and Klaus Felsen.'

'When was this?'

'During the war,' she said, taking another sip of whisky. 'By 1946 there were only two directors-Joaquim Abrantes and Klaus Felsen with a fifty-one/forty-nine split in the shareholding.'

'I thought they confiscated all German assets in Portugal after the war.'

'They did. But Joaquim Abrantes' share was fifty-one percent. He was the owner. It was a Portuguese bank,' she said. 'Another interesting thing is that I've been looking through an old archive which belonged to a Belgian businessman. I'm a friend of the granddaughter. Guess whose name turns up there?'

'Klaus Felsen.'

'He was a wolfram exporter.'

'So you think you've nearly got something,' I said. 'What happened to Klaus Felsen after the war?'

'He's there in the company statutes right up to 1962 when he disappeared for good… never to rise again. So I asked my father if he'd ever heard of the name, and he said it was a bit of a scandal in the Lisbon business community. Christmas Eve 1961, Klaus Felsen shot dead a German tourist in his home and he spent nearly twenty years in the Caxias prison for murder.'

'Interesting.'

'And do you know who the company lawyer was?'

'I think I do,' I said. 'Dr Aquilino Oliveira.'

'He completely rewrote the statutes of the bank… excluding our friend Klaus Felsen.'

'How long was he their lawyer for?'

'Until 1983.'

'And then what?'

'He stopped being their lawyer. These things don't go on for ever, but maybe it had something to do with the fact that Pedro Abrantes, who'd taken over from his dead father, died in a car accident.'

'Even I remember that. Those children.'

'And Miguel da Costa Rodrigues became the new Director and major shareholder of the bank. Things change when that happens. Lawyers for one.'

'There's something, but I'm not really seeing a connection here. I'm not seeing a motive for killing Catarina. I don't see how this can…'

'You want to question Miguel da Costa Rodrigues?'

'I want to hit him hard and fast so that he doesn't have time to hide behind his big friends, so that he has to come down to the Policia Judiciaria and face me and a tape recorder.'

'Then you have to get public opinion behind you.'

'Through the media,' I said. 'But I haven't got a story. You should see this guy Jorge Raposo, he's ex-PIDE and the most pathetic, seedy human being in Lisbon.'

'But what about Klaus Felsen?'

The guy's got to be a hundred and ten years old.'

'Eighty-eight in fact.'

'He's still going?'

'And there was an address in the old company statutes. So I did the easiest thing first. I looked in the phone book to see if he still lives in the same place. Klaus Felsen, Casa ao Fim do Mundo, Azoia, and you see that piece of paper on the bedside table? That's his phone number.'

'Have you called him?'

'I didn't really know what I wanted to ask him about. I thought I'd have to do a lot more work to be able to have a decent conversation with him.'

'And now?'

'I think we should both see what he's got to say.'

'Ah,' I said. 'Now I've got it.'

'What?'

'This is your launch story isn't it?'

'Could be.'

'No, no, no.'

'Why not?'

'You said, let me get this right, "Nobody's going to have their trousers down in any magazine I publish." I think that was it, wasn't it?'

'That's your end of the story, my end is that one of Portugal's largest international banks was funded directly by Nazi gold,' she said. 'You can do the trousers-down stuff… I'll let you tag that on the end.'

'You think Klaus Felsen's going to tell you everything… all on your first date?'

'See if he's alive first,' she said, nodding at the piece of paper.

I picked up the telephone and dialled the number. A woman answered speaking in German. I asked for Klaus Felsen.

'He's sleeping,' she said.

'What's the best time to speak to him?'

'What is it concerning?'

'The Banco de Oceano e Rocha.'

Silence.

'And who are you?'

'I'm a detective with the Policia Judiciaria in Lisbon. I'm investigating the murder of a young girl. I think Senhor Felsen might be able to help us with our enquiries.'

'I'll talk to him. But you know he doesn't keep regular hours. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, other times in the late morning, sometimes he sleeps all the way through. If he agrees to speak to you, you must come when I say.'

I gave her Luisa's telephone number and put the phone down. I paced the room naked, chewing my thumbnail. Luisa smoked at the ceiling. I called Olivia on her mobile and told her I'd be late, and possibly wouldn't come home at all, and that she should get a meal at my sister's.

'Don't worry about me,' she said.

'Are you in a car?' I asked, the signal breaking into static.

'I'm with Sofia and her mother. We're going back to Cascais. They're going to take me out to dinner and I'll stay the night. OK?'

'No.'

'What? I can't hear you.'

'No, that wouldn't be OK,' I said.

'Why… can… please… bloody thing… ga…'

'I want you back at home.'

'But you just said you wouldn't be there.'

'I know what I just said.'

'Then don't be unreasonable. Why should I go back to…'

'Because…'

'I can't hear you.'

'Olivia.'

'The line's breaking up… bye.'

The line went dead.

'Trouble?' asked Luisa.

The telephone, still in my hand, rang. I yanked it to my ear.

'Olivia.'

'Inspector Coelho?' asked a German-inflected voice.

'This is me,' I said.

'Herr Felsen is available now. He will speak to you. Do you know the house?'

'No.'

'It's the last house in Portugal. Just before the lighthouse.'

'It could take us up to an hour to get there.'

'Come as quickly as you can.'

We got into the shower together and dressed. I tried Olivia's mobile again but she'd turned it off. Luisa told me not to worry about it, that nothing was going to happen tonight, but the tension crept into me and stiffened a ridge across my shoulders. My daughter could be spending the night with a murderer, a murderer of young girls.

Luisa drove and talked me down on the way out of Lisbon. I sat with her laptop and camera on my knees and kept the lid on my panic. What could we do? Trawl through every restaurant in Cascais? I didn't even know where the Rodrigues' weekend house was in Cascais, and when I checked the phonebook there was nothing under his name-the property was probably his wife's and the phone still in her maiden name.

We came off the end of the motorway and headed west, through Aldeia de Juzo and Malveira. We climbed the twisting road, the end of the day dying now behind the high chapel of Peninha. The lights of isolated houses suspended in the black velvet of the heather. The ships on the dark Atlantic heading for the last blue-grey moment. We turned off left to Azoia at the highest point of the road, past old windmills transformed into bars, through the village of barking dogs and out again into the heather and gorse, the blades of light from the lighthouse slashing through the now complete darkness.

We came off the tarmac on to a length of beaten track, which took us up to a low walled house, with an enclosed roof terrace on the top in which a little light was burning.

A woman bent into our headlights, opening the gate. A chained German shepherd was barking madly in the courtyard. When he saw us, he took long, pelting runs right to the limit of his chain.

'I am Frau Junge,' she said, in a sweet voice on the brink of a yodel. She shushed the dog, who liked the voice and sat down with his head cocked to one side.

Frau Junge took us up the outside steps to the enclosed roof terrace. By the little light was a huddle in a wheelchair, head down near his chest-not a lively-looking person. One of the blades from the lighthouse swept above the roof of the house.

Frau Junge spoke into the ear of the heavily-blanketed man in the wheelchair. His head came up. Frau Junge dragged two chairs across from the wall and placed them near the wheelchair. A single hand came out from under the blankets and beckoned one of the chairs closer. She sighed as if he was a pesky child and moved the chair closer.

'He wants the girl to sit next to him, that's all. Watch his hand. It's the only one he's got and it can be fast and… intrusive,' she said and left us in the room.

Luisa had the look of a woman who wished she'd worn a longer skirt.

'I suffer from the cold now,' said Felsen in a cracked-china voice, small shards missing.

The bones of his skull, the plates of his cranium, seemed painfully obvious under the thin stretched skin, under which veins operated close to the surface. His eyelids were gathered in swags close to the lashes so that the corners slid down towards the cheekbones, making him look inconsolable. His nose was sharp, pointed and scraped raw.

We introduced ourselves and he hung on to Luisa's hand.

'Do you know why we're here?' asked Luisa.

'You can smoke if you like. I don't mind people smoking near me.'

'Frau Junge told you why we're here.'

'Yes, yes,' he said, 'but please smoke. I like the smell.'

I lit a cigarette. Luisa lit one of her own.

'I'm half the man I was. I'm shrinking and they keep cutting bits off me. I lost an arm in prison and half an ear. When I came out they cut off my right leg up to the knee. I don't remember why. Too much lying down in prison… or was it the smoking? That might have been it.'

Luisa stubbed out her cigarette and scratched her calf.

'Of course they don't take the bad one,' he said. 'I've had a limp since I was a child. No, that's the one that stays. They take the good one. I told the surgeon, I said: "This hospital is eating me alive." What does he care?'

He laughed which strained his voice to shattering point.

'The bank,' he said, 'that's why you're here, you want to talk about the bank. I've been waiting fifteen years to talk about the bank, but you're the first people who want to listen. Nobody looks back any more. Nobody knows where they come from. They only want to know where they're going.'

'I need my hands to write while you're talking,' said Luisa, withdrawing her hand and arranging her laptop.

'I'll rest it on your shoulder?' he said.

Klaus Felsen told his story in two parts. The first part, with breaks, took nearly four hours. He faltered twice. The first when he recounted the ambush on the car of the British agent. He seemed to stop short. He fell silent for some minutes and I thought he'd run out of steam again and needed to rest. But when he restarted, his tone of voice had changed. It was confessional. He described how savagery had got off the leash and he'd killed the driver and then in more chilling terms what he'd done to the English agent, Edward Burton. Luisa stopped typing.

The second time he faltered was over his last meeting with Eva Brucke. He gave two versions. The first was a noble one of love torn asunder by war and he quickly dried up when Luisa's hands stopped moving over the keys of the laptop. We waited. He gathered himself and he told the real version.

The killing of Obergruppenfuhrer Lehrer seemed to take something out of him. His head dropped and he fell asleep. We waited for a few minutes, twenty or thirty turns of the lighthouse. Luisa eased herself out from under his hand and we went downstairs.

Frau Junge was still awake watching satellite television, eating apple pie and drinking camomile tea. She told us to wait, that he would probably come round again in an hour. She offered us some apple pie. We wolfed it down.

'Normally it's me listening to his endless stories,' she said. 'Ach, the war, it's all such a long time ago. My parents… they never talked about it. Never. This one… he talks about it all the time, as if it was yesterday. Has that hand of his been behaving properly?'

'The hand's been fine,' said Luisa, still dazed from the work and the horror of it.

'If he takes your hand, be firm. Don't let him put it where he wants.'

I tried Olivia again on her mobile which was still turned off. Luisa called her father, spoke to him briefly and plugged the computer into the telephone jack and squeezed the first half of the story down the line. Thirty minutes later he called back and Luisa gave him more background about my murder investigation. She hung up.

'He wants some supporting documents. He's not prepared to publish unless it's backed up with some kind of documentary proof.'

I looked at Frau Junge who sipped her tea and shrugged.

'I have photographs, but documents… you'll have to ask him.'

A red light flashed on the wall by her head with a faint buzzing sound.

'He's awake,' said Frau Junge.

The second half of the story was shorter, but took longer to tell. He needed more breaks. His mind drifted and resettled on details we'd already heard. He kept coming back to a woman called Maria Antonia Medinas, who he was convinced had been killed by Manuel Abrantes. I told him it fitted in with what Jorge Raposo had told me, but we couldn't get him to tell us what she was to him. Was she a fellow-prisoner, a criminal or a political? Had he known her before?

He held things back, whether on purpose or because his brain slid over things, we couldn't tell. It was close to the end before he stunned us with the revelation that he'd been set up by Joaquim Abrantes' PIDE friends, who'd put him inside for twenty years, and that Manuel Abrantes was his son. We asked who the mother was and he couldn't remember her name, but he thought she might be still alive, up in the Beira somewhere.

Dawn came up unspectacularly. The lighthouse stopped flashing and became a foghorn, as a dense sea mist rolled in over the cliffs and submerged the house, so that the gate on the other side of the courtyard was only occasionally visible.

'We have days like this,' said Felsen. 'It wouldn't be so bad if you knew the whole country was like it, but I know that a hundred metres around the corner the sun is shining.'

'There's one last thing,' said Luisa. 'We need some documents if this story is going to mean anything. Have you got documentary proof that the gold existed?'

His hand disappeared under the blankets and came back with a warm key.

'Everything you need is in the metal filing cabinet in the study. Frau Junge will show you.'

We stood up. His hand went out for Luisa's, which she gave him and he pressed it to his lips which made her shudder.

'You've had an extraordinary life, Senhor Felsen,' she said, to cover herself.

'We all had big lives then,' he said, looking out at the fog-filled morning. 'Even an SS-Schutze could have a big life then, but it might not have been the one he wanted. The twenty years I spent thinking about this in Caxias I wouldn't have minded a smaller life. I wouldn't mind some of my regrets being smaller.'

'And what is your biggest?' asked Luisa.

'Perhaps you are the romantic type. You might think…' he said, and hesitated for a response which Luisa didn't give him. 'Perhaps, after all I've told you, you can tell me what my biggest regret should be?'

She didn't respond. He seemed to deflate.

'It wasn't Eva. It was regrettable that she despised me in the end, but that came about by my own inaction,' he said, and struggled in his blankets for a moment, like a baby. 'The action I most regret was what I did to the English agent, Edward Burton. I don't know why it happened. Over the years I blamed Abrantes for it, I blamed the drink, I've even blamed the Dutch girl for stealing my cufflinks. But after twenty years in Caxias with nothing much else to think about I still couldn't find any reason for it and I've had to come to the conclusion that I had a visit from pure evil.

'I am not, Senhora Madrugada,' he said, finally, 'a man with prospects.'

His head went down and we left. In the filing cabinet we found copies of the documents showing the gold's origination. There were also photographs showing Felsen and Joaquim Abrantes and other members of the Abrantes family, including the young Manuel.

Luisa dropped me off in Paco de Arcos. She continued to Lisbon. I had breakfast with Antonio Borrego in his bar, which was empty apart from the two of us.

'You look tired, Ze,' he said, laying out the coffee and buttered toast.

'I had a long night.'

'You didn't eat properly.'

'No.'

'Maybe I should cook something for you.'

'No, this is fine.'

'What was keeping you up all night?'

'Work… as usual.'

'I heard they raided your house and they've arrested Faustinho.'

I sank my teeth into the toast, sipped some coffee.

'You fell under a tram, too,' he said.

'Fell?'

'I was being diplomatic.'

I wiped molten butter from my chin.

'Is she a girlfriend, the woman who dropped you off just now?'

'The whole world passes before you in here, doesn't it, Antonio?' I said. 'You don't have to go outside. It all comes to you.'

'It's the nature of running a bar,' he said. 'I wouldn't do it if it was just a question of serving drinks.'

I poured more coffee, added milk.

'You were in Caxias, weren't you, at the end there, in 1974?' I asked.

'That was when I used to go out and do things and look what happened.'

'Did you ever hear the name Felsen? Klaus Felsen.'

'We heard about him. He was in for murder. The politicals and the regulars didn't have much to do with each other. They kept us apart.'

'What about a woman called Maria Antonia Medinas?'

Silence. I looked up from my toast. He was pinching the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed.

'I was just thinking,' he said. 'Was she a regular?'

'I don't know. I don't know anything about her. Just the name.'

'She wasn't on the political side… that I know of.'

'Have you still got friends you could ask?'

'Friends?'

'Well, comrades then,' I said, and he laughed.

I went back to the house and found Olivia in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.

'What happened to you?' I asked, in English.

'I did what my Daddy told me to do,' she said and looked back at the sink, annoyed.

'You spent the night here?'

'That's what you told me to do,' she said. 'Have I been a good girl?'

'How did you get back?'

'Senhor Rodrigues brought me back after dinner.'

'On your own?' I said, my hands suddenly ice-cold.

'The others didn't want to come,' she said. 'I felt a complete idiot.'

'What did you talk about with Senhor Rodrigues?'

'I don't know. Nothing much.'

'Try and remember,' I said. 'It would help.'

She spat the toothpaste out and swilled her mouth.

'Oh yes, he was asking me about the Smashing Pumpkins.'

'Smashing Pumpkins?'

'They're a band, Dad,' she said, saddened by my lack of cool. 'A popular singing group I think you used to call them in your day.'

Then I told her, without telling her why, she shouldn't spend any more time with the Rodrigues family.