A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XLIII

Tuesday, 24th November 1998, Banco de Oceano e Rocha, Estefania, Lisbon We went for a late lunch in a small seafood restaurant on Avenida Almirante Reis. I had grilled squid, Carlos went for the cuttlefish in its own ink, which my wife had always referred to as the tarry gym shoe. We drank a half-bottle of white and finished with coffee.

'Maybe you should have told Miguel Rodrigues who the woman in the photograph was,' said Carlos, meaning Teresa Oliveira.

'I'd have had to spell it out for him,' I said, 'and prison is a lonely place full of nothing but the smell of men cooped up together and empty time. Miguel Rodrigues is serving a minimum of twenty years for a crime he did not commit. I don't like him. I don't think he's a good man. He's possibly a sick man. But I am not going to be the one to inflict on his mind the fact that he sodomized his own daughter.'

There was a prolonged silence while Carlos stirred his coffee up to the required syrup.

'If he raped her, why didn't she report it?' he asked.

'She was a young woman on the brink of a brand-new life. A week away from getting married. And that's quite apart from it being 1982. The feminist movement hadn't exactly built up a head of steam in Portugal by then. You'd have had a job to find women anywhere, even in England, prepared to report rape in those days. Think about it. It would have had an impact on her marriage, it would have destroyed a large chunk of her husband's business, there would have been a long, intrusive investigation, perhaps with a trial at the end of it. No… she just hoped it would go away and maybe it would have done, if she hadn't got pregnant. When that baby was born with those blue eyes… that must have been a hard day.'

We paid the bill and walked back up over dry, dead leaves to where we'd left the car. The kids had come out in the Arroios park to run screaming through the pigeons which swooped over the old boys playing cards in their woollen hats.

'So, we have a motive now,' said Carlos.

'I don't think we've got all of it yet. This was just the obsession of the man-he was going to bring Miguel Rodrigues down. But I think there's something else in this.'

'And the killer?'

'We'll find the killer.'

'You don't think Dr Oliveira paid someone to kill her.'

'Like Lourenco Goncalves?'

'Possibly.'

'I don't think so. I think his obsession was a little more refined.'

We stopped under a shop's awning while a blast of freeze-dried air shot through the Largo Dona Estefania.

'And what now?' asked Carlos.

'We go to Paco de Arcos and find Faustinho Trindade.'

'You don't sound happy about this.'

'I'm not.'

'If you think some justice has been done, why don't you leave it?'

'Don't you want to nail Dr Oliveira?' I asked, hating myself for asking it.

'We'll be interfering, won't we?'

'We will.'

'They've achieved some kind of result.'

'Are you including the Minister of Internal Administration in "they"?'

'I think I might be.'

'And all those big men who came to watch my first interview with Miguel Rodrigues… those spectators at the coliseum, who enjoy the smell of blood as long as it's not their own?'

He swallowed hard, disgusted by it. I put my arm around his shoulder.

Let's go to Paco de Arcos,' I said. 'And take it from there.'

The traffic was terrible in Lisbon and out on the Marginal there'd been a four-car smash, the blood fresh and bright on the tarmac under the setting sun. It was early evening by the time we arrived in Paco de Arcos, the sea already dark, but choppy in the wind with white caps still visible in the failing light. The horizon was just a crack of light with two long, grey melancholic streaks of cloud. I did a small circuit through the town and came back on to the Marginal heading for Lisbon. We pulled into the car park by the boatyard of the Clube Nautico.

There were a couple of anglers out on the stone quay. I didn't know what they were expecting to catch in this weather but then fishing doesn't always seem to be about catching fish. The lighthouse on Bugio was already flashing. Three ships sat off the Costa do Estoril, their cabin areas lit. Faustinho was in his work shed, wearing a pair of blue overalls and a heavy jacket, working with very little light on a stripped-down outboard motor. His hands were dry and scaly with the cold. His dog got up and sniffed us over.

'When did you get out, Faustinho?' I asked.

'Just under a week ago and I'm not talking about it, Ze. I'm sorry if I caused trouble for you, but I'm not going to say anything. It's finished.'

'You should find a workshop to do this,' I said.

'It's too expensive.'

'You remember that kid…'

'Look, Ze… I told you,' he stopped. 'The kid… what kid?'

'You remember that kid you told me about, who saw something that night before the girl's body was found on the beach?'

'I never saw him again,' he said. 'He used to spend quite a lot of the summer out here… but this year…'

'Is this the one?'

Carlos handed him the photograph of Xeta.

'That's him,' he said, taking it down to the light, looking at it more closely. 'He's dead, isn't he? This is a photograph of a dead person.'

I nodded. Carlos took the photograph back.

'What does that mean?' he asked.

I looked across the Marginal, the town dark behind the trees in the park.

'It means that maybe we're going to have to look closer to home,' I said.

We went through the underpass and up into the public gardens. They were empty. The wind buffeted the trees. The paths were covered in their dry, scratching detritus. I wiped a bench off and we sat down. Antonio's bar was shut, no lights on, and we could have used a drink.

'Remember what I said to you that first morning,' said Carlos, 'about the significance of the body being here, and you living nearby?'

'We've come full circle,' I said. 'We lost sight of that. I lost sight of it.'

A white car pulled up outside A Bandeira Vermelha. Antonio Borrego got out and opened the boot. He lifted out a box of fruit, vegetables and a separate one of meat. He put them back in, opened the door to the bar and turned the light on. He went back to the boot.

'It's nice to see one of those still running,' said Carlos.

And now, finally, you start talking about cars,' I said.

'That,' said Carlos, 'is a Renault 12. Car of the Year back in the 1980s some time. My father had one… but his was a pile of shit. I spent a lot of my youth working on one of those.'

The two ventricles of my heart iced up. Suddenly the blood was only going through in thin spurts and the oxygen in my breathing hard to find.

'Come with me,' I said.

We walked out of the gardens towards where the old faded pink cinema had been, which was now the beginnings of an office block. We turned left and left again and came up behind Antonio's car.

'You remember your handwritten notes. What did the guy say? The one who saw Senhor Rodrigues' Mercedes. What else did he see?'

'I don't remember.'

'What he saw in front of the Mercedes was a brand-new metallic grey Fiat Punto and behind…'

'Was a white Renault 12 with a rusted wheel-arch.'

'Rear wheel-arch.'

In the poor street lighting and with the light coming from the open bar the corroded edges of the rear wheel-arch were visible. Antonio came out to pick up whatever else he had in his boot. He saw us. I waved.

'How is it?' he asked.

'It's fine,' I said.

'You want something to eat? I've got some beautiful spare ribs already marinated.'

'Sounds good.'

Antonio picked up another box and went into the bar.

'When Faustinho took me to meet Xeta and he wasn't there,' I said, almost talking to myself now, 'we went back to A Bandeira Vermelha and Faustinho described the kid in detail in front of me and Antonio.'

Carlos' head didn't move, his eyes stayed fixed on the light coming from the bar. I told him to go in there and talk to Antonio about anything except the obvious while I phoned the local PSP. If he'd already killed Catarina and Xeta, there was no reason why he shouldn't go down fighting. I went round the corner to make the call. It took me a couple of minutes to explain the situation to them, how I didn't want them sprinting in there and provoking him into an attack. By the time I walked back to the bar I was feeling sick, cold and tired, not ready for this, not wanting this.

I walked into the wedge of light coming from the door. Lying face-down on the bar floor, in a pool of blood that I couldn't imagine having got to that size in the short few moments I'd been away, was Carlos. The collar of his shirt showed red above his jacket and coat. The back of his head looked all wrong, his hand twitched, the thumb splashing in his own blood. Antonio was standing between Carlos' feet with the hammer raised above his head. It was the hammer he kept behind the bar, next to the sickle. His relics. His workers' tools. His weapons.

I stepped into the doorway. He turned to me.

'What have you done, Antonio? What the hell have you done?'

His eyes had gone. There was still the tiniest light in them, but it was a pinprick at the end of a four-mile tunnel, as if I was seeing straight through to some nicks of bone on the inside of his cranium.

'Let me call an ambulance,' I said.

He turned to me with his hammer raised and took one step forwards.

'What did he say to you, Antonio? What did he say to make you hit him?'

'Maria Antonia Medinas,' he said, each name separate.

'Is that what this is all about? Is that why you killed the girl?'

'He murdered her. That PIDE bastard… he murdered her.'

'And what was Maria Antonia Medinas to you?'

'She was my wife,' he said, viciously. 'And he killed her and he killed our child inside her.'

'Let me call the ambulance, Antonio. It can still be all right, if you let me call the ambulance.'

I moved. He tensed the hammer in his hand.

'Are you a girl-killer, Antonio? Is that what you do? How did they get you to kill the girl?'

'She was his.'

'Did she kill Maria Antonia Medinas?'

'She was his.'

'She was an innocent.'

'She was his.'

'Just let me call the ambulance.'

He ran at me, the hammer raised, his teeth bared, the eyes now dead, black, lightless. I shut the door on him. His hammer smashed through the glass. Blood ran down his wrist. He wrenched the door open. I fell back into the street, half at a run, half staggering. He swerved away from me and ran to his car.

He pulled away in the rusting Renault, the boot still open. He crashed across the public gardens, through the flower beds, over the grass and directly on to the Marginal. The oncoming traffic screeched and squirmed. The Renault slashed straight across two lines of cars into the Lisbon lane. The PSP came running. I told them to call for an ambulance and to get a hospital prepared to receive a policeman with a serious head injury. I ran across the gardens, through the underpass and got into my car. I ran every red light on the way into the city.

I saw the Renault's boot flapping up and down as it went over humps in the tarmac around Caxias. I pulled in tight behind him and flashed my lights. He put his foot down.

Our two ancient cars roared through Belem and thundered under the whining 25 th April bridge. He swung to the left, up towards the Largo de Alcantara where there was a sliproad to the bridge, but not accessible from our direction. Antonio crashed through the lights which had just changed to red and swerved across the two cars and a truck which had just taken off. The two cars missed him and slewed to a halt, but the truck clipped him on his rear wing and the car was jolted sideways a full metre. I stormed over the crossroads after him with my forearm on the horn and one hand raised out of the window. People were already out of their cars. We hit the ramp up to the bridge. Antonio crunched through the gears and found one low enough to get him up the steep turn. I stuck on his tail. We were going slower and slower.

The Renault hit the main road to cross the bridge. We couldn't have been going more than fifty kilometres per hour and I saw the problem. His back tyre was flat, and the stoved-in rear wing was derinding the rubber, until the tyre was entirely stripped off and he was running on his wheel rim, sparks showering off it into the night. He stopped and got out, the hammer still in his fist. He started running.

The cars howled over the expandable metal lanes in the centre of the bridge and horns blared behind us. The ice wind, even stronger up here, blustered from the west and whistled at a high-pitched scream through the support cables. I ran after him. He turned occasionally, his face lit up-white with two black eye sockets-by the lights of the oncoming traffic. Suddenly he got up on to the bridge's rail and jumped over the edge as if it was nothing, as if he had no statement to make. I bellowed after him but my voice went nowhere over the hellish noise.

I got to the point where he'd jumped and saw him pacing about on a small platform a few metres below. What did I want from him? Did I want to catch him, bring him in? Was that what I wanted? And I realized that it hadn't been police work making me run. I had to talk to him. I had to tell him. I had to make him believe. He was part of the cycle. We were all part of the damaging cycle.

I swung my leg over the rail, my foot searched for the first rung. The platform was all that remained of the bridge works. It was for the men painting the new rail link. There was a lift that ran on a box rail down one of the concrete support columns to the docks below. The lift wasn't operating. Antonio was contemplating climbing down the box rail. I shuddered as trucks crashed past, their weight undulating the road like a sea swell, the wind booming against their sheer sides. It was high enough up there that I could feel myself flying and, with that strong, knifing wind, I felt I could be at any moment. I screamed his name at him.

He responded by climbing over the rail of the platform and fitting his foot into the box rail. He dropped down a few rungs. I jumped down on to the platform. The wooden sheets bounced me and I fell to my knees. I crawled towards the lift and pushed my face over the edge. Antonio was three metres down the rail. To the west the lights along the Marginal stretched out into the blackness. We were as good as night gliding.

'Antonio!'

I yelled at him to come back up, but the wind whipped my voice away and shutded it through the girders of the new rail link.

Antonio looked up at me with the terrible religious eyes of a suffering saint, or a tortured sinner on his way down to the next circle of hell. His face seemed to be broken up into pieces now, just shards of pottery miraculously floating together in a deep purple light. He looked over his shoulder and saw what I'd seen. The lights curving away over the black planet. The sea and the sky dense and empty and only the dark, cold wind calling.

The hammer went first, a silver speck into the night. His other hand disengaged from the rail and he fell backwards. The wind caught him to begin with and shored him back up, but then quickly let him have his weight. He stretched his arms out and shouted something that the wind tore off him. His foot caught in the rung of the rail, the ankle snapped and then he was on his way, dropping through the howling dark, gravity making an ant of him in seconds, and then nothing of him in a few more.

The sirens came. Steel light revolved in the night. I rolled away from the edge and felt like a man who'd momentarily had everything-friends, family, love and then just as quickly lost them all.