A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XLIV

05.30 Wednesday, 25th November 1998, Hospital Egas Moniz, Santo Amaro, Lisbon Carlos was in Intensive Care, his head and neck supported by some strange contraption that would keep it totally rigid and the back of his head free from any contact. Everything was functioning normally, all his organs, even his brain showed normal activity, but he hadn't regained consciousness, and there wasn't a neurosurgeon in Lisbon who would tell us when he would come out of his coma.

We watched him. His mother joined on to his father, who was set in stone, staring his will into his son. Olivia in shock over Carlos' state, but also in tears because she'd known Antonio Borrego all her life. And me, tarred and feathered with guilt. If Carlos didn't make it, if he didn't make a full recovery, it would be the end of all possibilities. I would be, as Klaus Felsen had said, a man with no prospects.

They'd taken him off the ventilator after a few hours, once they were sure he was breathing properly. Now he was wired and tubed up and, with the blood transfusion over, he had only a saline drip in his arm. He was silent and still. The monitoring machines made noises for him. His muscles didn't twitch. His closed eyes didn't flicker. His face was relaxed. His body at peace, while his consciousness repaired itself. Where did they go, these coma people? Over what dark landscapes did they travel? Was there any light there at all, or was it a pothole with no light, not even an inkling of ambient light, only what your brain imagines as light?

At seven o'clock I left Olivia with Carlos' parents. I went to my office and sat at my desk. My colleagues came in to see me, to ask after Carlos, even though none of them had liked him, and I answered all of them. At 08.30 I went to see Narciso who made the expert, correct, nearly human sounds. I told him I was opening up an investigation into the disappearance of an ex-Pohaa Judiciaria detective called Lourenco Goncalves. He didn't respond.

I took a pool car and drove out to Odivelas and sat outside Valentim's apartment block. He surprised me by not keeping me waiting long-another man, perhaps, who wasn't sleeping so well at nights. He banded up his swag of ringlets and I rolled down the window and told him to get in the car.

I cruised into the heavy traffic heading south into town.

'Did you ever meet a guy called Lourenco Goncalves?' I asked.

He repeated the name to himself and frowned, preparing to lie. I stopped the car in the traffic. Space built up in front of us and noise behind. I gave him the photograph of Goncalves.

'He was a Security Consultant,' I said, 'which is a perfumed word for Private Investigator. He followed people around. That kind of thing.'

'Why should I know him?'

'Wasn't he the one who told you to put on an interesting little sex show in the Pensao Nuno? You know, something unusual like you, Bruno and an underage blonde…' I said. 'Do you remember what happened to her after that, after you made sure she was in the Pensao Nuno having sex with two guys at the same time?'

'She… she,' he faltered, as a guy from the car behind came and hammered on my window. 'She went back to school.'

I slammed my foot on the accelarator, floored it, and kept looking at Valentim. I threw his seat belt off. He put his hands out. I slammed on the brakes. His forearms buckled against the dashboard, his head smacked into the windscreen. Blood appeared in a line on his brow. He slumped back into the seat, his fingers feeling along the split skin. I picked up the photograph, pulled his hands away from his face.

'Tell me, Valentim and you're out of here.'

'He offered me money.'

'How much are we talking about?'

'Initially it was a million escudos.'

'Your new computer edit suite.'

He nearly looked ashamed, but that would have drawn on reserves he didn't have.

'Then he told me that I'd probably have to take some heat from your people and… and I doubled it.'

'Nice job, Valentim,' I said. 'Tell me your conscience is clear.'

'I thought…'

'You thought it was an interest-free gift?' I said. 'You should take a look at the cost of money these days.'

I pulled up and kicked his bony arse out of the car. He cringed over the pavement like a village cur.

I turned round and went back up to the 2 0 Circular and took the motorway out to Cascais. I drove to Cabo da Roca, to the last house on mainland Europe. The wind was stronger up there and the house looked sharpened, honed clean in the freezing air.

Felsen was in his enclosed terrace, his head folded down on to his chest like a dead bird. He came to as I sat down.

'Ah,' he said, but he couldn't quite place me.

'Inspector Coelho,' I reminded him, and gave him a few seconds to digest it. 'Who's your lawyer, Senhor Felsen?'

'Am I being charged with something?' he asked, confused for a moment. 'I don't know that I have one any more.'

'Did you have a lawyer in prison?'

'I didn't need one. The damage was done. Once you're in… it's the devil to get out.'

'And when you got out?'

'Not for some years. Then one came to the house. Or did I go to him? His name was…' a shaky finger came out to place the name, but didn't find it.

'Dr Aquilino Oliveira?'

'Yes, that was him. He was my lawyer for… maybe ten years. I don't know. He may still be now.'

'Did you tell him your stories?'

'He was a very good listener… unusual for a lawyer. They always like to tell you how it is, don't they? With the law and that-how damned complicated it all is and how much you need them.'

'You never mentioned that you knew a political called Antonio Borrego in Caxias prison.'

'A political cleaned out my cell for several months. He asked me about this woman… I used to know her name too.'

'Maria Antonia Medinas,' I said. 'The last time we talked you couldn't get her name out of your head. Can you tell me what Antonio Borrego wanted to know about her?'

'He asked if I'd seen her or heard anything about her.'

'Had you?'

Well, I knew she was dead.'

How?'

'She'd been murdered… if that's what they call it in prison.'

'And did you see who did it?'

'I saw him. I called out to him. Manuel. He was my son, you know, illegitimate son. But he didn't hear me, and the next morning they carried her out,' he said, and he looked as if he might cry, until I realized he was, in fact, disgusted. 'There was so much blood in her skirt, the weight of it… it dragged along the ground. It left a brown trail.'

He drifted back into sleep. I sat for a moment looking at the brilliant clarity, the purity of cold winter sunshine. The visibility was stunning but hard-edged, unforgiving.

I asked Frau Junge about the lawyer. She said he'd looked after a few things for Senhor Felsen back in the early eighties, but it wasn't for very long.

'He said it was for ten years.'

'He's an old man, but he still draws on his vanity,' she said.

I'd made the connections, now I was brisding for a fight. The lawyer's Cascais house was empty, closed up for the winter. I called at his Lisbon home but nobody was there either. It was late afternoon when I dropped back in at the hospital. Olivia and Carlos' parents were still sitting almost where I'd left them. There was no news, except that two men had been looking for me.

They found me in the corridor outside the toilets, two men in dark blue raincoats. At a glance you might have thought they were clones-something to do with the way they'd been trained.

'Can we talk?' said one of them. 'Outside would be better.'

'Who are you?'

'We're from the Ministry.'

'Which one's that?'

'Let's go outside.'

The three of us, hands jammed into our coat pockets, sat on an ice-cold bench in the dark courtyard of the hospital with lights all around. Only one of them spoke. The other looked around with the wary eye of a hen that knows what's happened to other hens.

'We've come to tell you to drop your investigation into the disappearance of Lourenco Goncalves.'

'He used to be a detective with the Policia Judiciaria. I have a duty…'

'You have a duty, Inspector Coelho,' he said, quietly, agreeing with me that far. 'You have a patriotic duty, which now, is to keep quiet. A result has been achieved and it is the correct one and you must leave it that way.'

'I missed that result,' I said. 'I wasn't aware of anybody winning anything. Did I lose? I feel as if I lost.'

They leaned forward on their elbows and looked at each other across me. The one who didn't speak closed his eyes momentarily.

'We have a scapegoat,' said the talker.

'The Banco de Oceano e Rocha?'

He nodded to see if that was going to be enough.

'There's a police officer in there who might never wake up again,' I said. 'I think his parents might want to know what patriotic duty their son has been involved in.'

'You're the Inspector Dourado,' he said, sticking it in. 'You should know what it's about.'

'I'll start then,' I said. 'Nazi gold… now you finish.'

He sighed and looked around the dark patch of lawn.

'All the neutral countries during the Second World War,' he said, clasping his hands, 'are being asked to give their pound of flesh. You might have noticed that some Swiss banks recently awarded $1.25 billion to the victims of the Holocaust. The Banco de Oceano e Rocha has an estimated worth of $2.3 billion. We think we now have the potential to be generous.'

'Miguel Rodrigues,' I said, 'there's a guy who ran out of friends.'

The man unclasped his hands and showed me they were empty.

'Those gold bars,' he said, 'with their little swastika stamp on them, next to your sweet face. That wasn't just a publicity stunt for the Policia Judiciaria. That has saved us a lot of grief. That showed the world that we'd found the pound of flesh and we were prepared to surrender it. You've got to admit, Inspector Coelho, there's some justice in it.'

'In that it's come full circle, through the Nazis who stole it in the first place, through Lehrer, through Felsen, through Abrantes and right the way round to… if not the original owners of the gold, then their families at least,' I said. 'Yes, I can see the justice in that but I'm concerned about the method.'

'Nothing in this world is what it seems,' said the man, touching my shoulder and indicating with a look that, as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

'And Lourenco Goncalves?' I asked, to clear up that loose end for JoJo Silva.

'He's a happy man, Inspector, but he won't be coming back to Portugal.'

'Sold his soul to the devil… or shall we call him Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira?'

'You have to leave Dr Oliveira alone, otherwise it could all go very badly wrong,' he said, severely, meaning it.

'The sacred cow,' I said.

They looked at me with the dead eyes of men who have made things go very badly wrong before.

'I'd like to speak to him.'

'I don't think so.'

'I'm not going to do anything to him,' I said. 'I'd just like to speak to him… clear a few points up.'

'Have we reached an understanding?'

'We have as long as I can speak to him for ten minutes.'

The silent one got up, took a mobile out of his pocket and walked off. He made two calls, packed up his phone and we left.

They drove me to the lawyer's office in the Chiado in a black Mercedes. We parked and walked down some steps of calcada under dry, rustling trees. They buzzed on an unmarked door and we were let in. We walked up to the first floor. They searched me very intrusively and fed me through the door.

I went into a dimly-lit anteroom and on to a corridor. Dr Oliveira was standing at the end of it smiling, immaculately suited. He had his hand out showing me the door of his office, as friendly as if he was my lawyer and I still owed him a big bill.

His office was wood-panelled, with English hunting prints of red-coated men dashing about with great futility and bugling. I sat in a black leather chair which put me at a marginal height disadvantage to him on the other side of his green leather inlaid desk. He leaned back and waited.

'Where is Lourenco Goncalves by the way?' I asked, just to get started.

'California,' he said. 'He wanted to be somewhere where the sun always shines.'

'I suppose he could have ended up in the foundations of an apartment building around the Expo site. There might have been some propriety in that.'

Dr Oliveira breathed in and closed his eyes as if he was thinking beautiful thoughts to keep the nasty ones away.

'You have some questions, apparently,' he said.

I wrestled with the one question which would give me what I wanted to know, but I couldn't get it out. I was the rummy player who didn't know which cards my opponent was collecting. I came in on a tangent.

'You knew about Senhor Felsen from your first job working for Joaquim Abrantes… writing him out of the bank's statutes. Did you know why you were doing that?'

'He was a convicted criminal.'

'But did you know why Abrantes had him put away?'

'Not at the time.'

'That only came out when you went back to Senhor Felsen?'

'He came to me after he got out of prison. Pedro wouldn't talk to him. He found out that I was the lawyer who'd drawn up the new statutes. He told me his story which I dismissed as fantastic at the time.'

'But you went back to him after…'

'Yes,' he cut in hard.

'When did you find out that Manuel Abrantes had raped your wife?'

'Raped her?' he said, digging deep into the question.

'Isn't that what happened, Senhor Doutor?'

'If he'd raped her, Inspector, she would have told me, wouldn't she? She wouldn't have waited until I looked down on a child I knew instantly was not my own to… surely she would have told her husband, Inspector.'

I couldn't tell if there was some madness at play here. Did he actually believe that his wife had consented or was he using the skewed logic of the cuckold to justify his actions?

'Did your wife say she'd been raped?'

'Pah!' he said, and threw his head round to one of the hunting prints, refusing to look at me-not accepting any more questions on that subject.

'What did Senhor Felsen know about your… scheme?' I asked.

'He was the key,' he said, eyes back on me, riveting. 'I knew a lot from having worked with Joaquim Abrantes but I never knew about the gold. He never spoke about it and Pedro, like a good son, didn't either.'

'So you didn't know about the two remaining bars.'

'Luck…' he said.

'He also told you about Maria Antonia Medinas.'

Dr Oliveira chewed on his thumbnail and nodded.

'How did you approach Antonio Borrego?'

'Like we did everybody… through Lourenco Goncalves.'

'When did you decide to use your daughter as bait?'

'My daughter?'

'Catarina… Oliveira,' I added.

'Goncalves reported that they were using the same pensao. He investigated further and found that Abrantes was always in the adjacent room when she was in the pensao. Later on he went into that room and found the mirror. The plan evolved from that situation.'

'Didn't Goncalves find it difficult to persuade Antonio to kill the girl?'

'I was surprised he killed her. I can only think that something went wrong, that she must have seen his face and he was forced to strangle her. I'm not sure how Goncalves put the plan to Borrego in the first place, but he told me that once Borrego knew who she was, once he knew the girl's connection to Miguel Rodrigues, then I think Borrego became a difficult man to control. I don't think he was quite balanced. Manuel Abrantes had killed his wife and unborn child.'

'Did anyone speak to Borrego afterwards?'

'Goncalves… when he went to pick up the clothes.'

'Didn't he ask Borrego what had happened?'

'Borrego's version of events was that he'd followed them into the Monsanto park. He saw the Mercedes leave the road. He parked up and walked through the trees. He saw the car rocking, heard…' he cleared his throat, '…heard the girl shouting out. Then Abrantes got out of the car, opened the passenger door, dragged her out and left her on the ground. Borrego waited for the car to leave and…'

'And what?' I asked, determined to make him say it, make him say everything.

'And he hit her.'

'With what?'

'He hit her on the head with a hammer, Inspector. You know this. Now let's…'

'In the fifteen years that you shared the same house as Catarina you didn't once feel any paternal…'

'She was a constant reminder, Inspector,' he said, slowly.

'Of what… your disappointment, your…?'

'Let's move along, Inspector. I agreed to ten minutes.'

'If you didn't expect Borrego to kill Catarina, what did you expect of him?'

He played the edge of the table with his fingertips… a sonata to clear his mind.

'And the Minister of Internal Administration,' I said, 'what did… what does he know?'

'He's a politician and a very successful one. Results, like getting elected for instance, are important. How they are achieved… not so interesting. He was only concerned with the delivery of Miguel Rodrigues' disgraced head.'

'Yes, I suppose that was an important factor… that he was disgraced.'

'We didn't want him to have anywhere to hide.'

We sat in silence while I tried to heave the question over my larynx. Dr Oliveira doodled with his mind.

'You asked about Felsen before,' he said. 'About his involvement. He wasn't involved in any of this… business. He was important, of course, because you had to find him. You had to extract his story but he… he's a very old man now. His mind's only really up to telling and retelling the story of his life in its many versions.'

'He had the documents though.., they were important.'

'Yes, I knew that… he'd shown them to me.'

'So he was very important to this… this intrigue of yours. Very important.'

'Yes,' he said, and looked at me. 'Is there a question here, Inspector?'

'How could you guarantee that I'd find Felsen?' I asked, my palms running with sweat, my heart batting against my ribs.

A frown shot across his brow, faster than a lizard across a hot road.

'You tell me,' he said, his brain rattling through the permutations.

I tried again, a little more direct this time.

'How did Luisa Madrugada make the Felsen connection?'

'Ah!' he said, grasping the matter now. 'Now I see. No, Inspector, she was not involved. Don't worry yourself on that score. Ask her… ask her about some interesting notes… pointers she found in the books that she was reading at the Biblioteca Nacional, but…'

'Was that luck as well? That the investigating officer should have an affair with…'

'You don't have to believe me. It's no concern of mine,' he said. 'I would have made sure you found Felsen, whether it was in Luisa Madrugada's bed or not. And, Inspector, don't blame her for not telling you about those… ah… vital clues. I'm sure she loves you-and lovers, especially in the beginning, want to look at their best for each other.'

'Something that you would know about, Senhor Doutor,' I said.

'I?'

'A woman always wants to look at her best on her wedding day, Teresa was no exception.'

It shut something down in him. Lights went out in his face, the source of his mild affability dried up and was replaced with that fierceness, that intellectual fierceness I'd seen in his study in Cascais.

'It's easily forgotten, Inspector, that history is not what you read in books. It's a personal thing, and people are vengeful creatures, which is why history will never teach us anything.'

'You got your revenge, I can see that, and you… facilitated the revenge of others-Antonio Borrego, Klaus Felsen, even Jorge Raposo had his half-hour…'

'… and the Jewish people,' he said. 'Don't forget them. They will finally get their property back.'

'If you think that that is any justification for you, Senhor Doutor Oliveira, to conduct your own, personal balancing of the vagaries of history by punishing your late wife and murdering her illegitimate daughter, then you must be one of two things-evil or mad. Which are you?'

He leaned forward across his desk, neck dipped, eyes as bright and all-seeing as an eagle's over its territory.

'We are all mad,' he said.

'I only feel it when I'm in your company,' I said, walking to the door.

'We are all mad, Inspector, for the simple reason that we don't know why we exist and this…' he waved his hand at the tissue of existence before him, 'this life is how we distract ourselves so that we don't have to think about things too difficult for us to comprehend.'

'There are other ways of distracting yourself, Dr Oliveira.'

'Some of us, perhaps, have more recherche tastes.'

'Yes, I suppose the frisson was quite substantial for you-the knowledge that Miguel Rodrigues had sodomized his own daughter before Antonio Borrego cracked her skull open and strangled her.'

He swivelled his chair away from me and faced the window. The leather scoop rocked him.

I closed the door, went down the lighted corridor, down the wooden stairs and out on to the bone-dry calcada. The night was piercingly clear with the freshest air Lisbon would ever smell. There was a thin paring of wind-shaved moon and chestnuts were roasting in the square.

Agente Carlos Pinto came out of his coma on Friday 2 7th November. Two weeks later they inserted a steel plate in the back of his cranium. On a clear day he's sure that he can hear the Bee Gees coming over the Atlantic. I've assured him it's tinnitus. He was lucky to have a thick skull and, I like to think, that his short, dense, unmanageable hair cushioned the blow.

The only thing Carlos couldn't remember was why Antonio Borrego had hit him. I told him that after Felsen had given me his story I'd gone to A Bandeira Vermelha and asked Antonio about Maria Antonia Medinas. He'd stalled me. So when, five and a half months later, and after our brittle exchange in the street by the rusted wheel-arch of the white Renault 12, Carlos appeared in the bar on his own to ask about the same woman-the one person who could motivate Antonio to murder Catarina Oliveira-Borrego's paranoia did the rest. He wouldn't have known that Carlos and I had never discussed Maria Antonia Medinas. He wouldn't have known that to us it was just a name that needed some light shed on it. He thought he was finished.

It still hasn't rained. It's still dry and cold. The leaves are still scratching across the calcada. A Bandeira Vermelha is closed. I've had to find somewhere else to drink my bicas, someone else to make my toast.

Olivia still hasn't taught Carlos anything about clothes, he shambles about in that oversized thing, but he's reciprocated in his own way by telling her nothing of murder. He makes her happy in a way that she hasn't been for over a year.

Luisa Madrugada spares me the odd quarter of an hour from her publishing company and I occasionally look up from the book that she's been forcing me to write. Nothing about murder, of course, a children's story.

I've seen the untouchable lawyer too, Dr Oliveira in his Morgan, spanking down the Marginal with a blonde in the passenger seat. He didn't look bothered.

I'm getting out of this house. The landlord offered to sell me an apartment at a good price if I moved out and let him convert this old mansion. I thought it would be a difficult decision to make, but I agreed as soon as he proposed it. We looked at each other astonished.

And I bought a new car. The old one never forgave me for leaving her on the bridge that night. The new car's nothing special but the salesman, highlighting all the extras included, made it sound as if it could go into orbit and dock with Discovery. He knew everything, and I questioned him endlessly because it's in my nature, finally I asked him:

'How do they tint the windows so that they're clear in the shade and dark in the sunshine?'

'You know,' he said, without even a pause, holding up a finger. 'That's interesting. It's the only Portuguese element of this car.'

'Is that a selling point?'

'On the glass,' he said, ignoring me, 'they lay a very, very thin layer, less than a micron, a fraction of a micron of the finest Portuguese wolfram.'

I thought about that.

The obscure talent of wolfram.