The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Thirteen

LEONEL TORRES, TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF age, no criminal record, married with one child nine months old, born in Braga, resident in Oporto, a friend of Damasceno Monteiro. They were together on the night of the murder, he has already made a deposition to the examining magistrates. He has agreed to grant an exclusive interview to our paper. His statements open a new chapter in the story of this murky case and cast disquieting doubts on the conduct of our police. From your special correspondent in Oporto.

— How did you come to know Damasceno Monteiro?

I met him when my family moved to Oporto. I was twelve years old, at that time his parents lived in the Ribeira. But not in the same building as they do now, his father was a basketmaker and earned good money.

— We know that in recent months you were very close friends.

He was in trouble and often came to my house for a meal, he had very little money.

— But he’d found a job not long before.

He’d been taken on as errand-boy at the Stones of Portugal, an import-export firm in Gaia, most of his work was with the containers.

— And what had Senhor Monteiro found unusual, so to speak, about his work?

Well, inside the containers, along with electronic instruments, there were also packets of drugs, in plastic bags embedded in stearin.

— So you think that Damasceno Monteiro knew too much?

I don’t think it, I know it.

— Could you explain more fully?

Damasceno realized that the receiver was the night watchman, the old man who died a few days ago. Of course the firm knew nothing about this traffic, but the night watchman was in cahoots with these peddlers in Hong Kong, where the containers came from. He received the packets and unloaded them in Oporto.

— What kind of drugs were involved?

Heroin in its pure state.

— And where did it end up?

The Green Cricket came by and picked up the packages.

— Excuse me, but who is the Green Cricket?

He’s a sergeant in the local commissariat of the Guardia Nacional.

— And his name?

Titânio Silva, known as the Green Cricket.

— Why do they call him the Green Cricket?

Because when he gets angry he stammers and hops up and down like a cricket. Also he has an olive-green complexion.

— And what happened next?

A few months ago Damasceno worked as an electrician at the ‘Borboleta Nocturna,’ a nightclub belonging to the Green Cricket, though he’s got it registered under his sister-in-law’s name. That’s the base he uses to peddle all the drugs in Oporto. The big dealers come there to buy it and then they distribute it to the mules.

— The mules?

The retail-pushers, the guys who sell their asses unloading the stuff around the streets, to junkies.

— And what was it that Monteiro found out?

Nothing special, he’d simply realized that the Green Cricket was receiving consignments of heroin from Hong Kong through an import-export firm. Could be that he’d got on their track, who knows, for the fact is that soon afterwards he got a job as errand-boy at Stones of Portugal, in whose containers the stuff arrived from Asia, and he came to realize that the receiver was the night watchman.

— Who, it appears, has died of a stroke.

Yes, the old man had a sudden apoplectic fit and kicked the bucket. It was such a unique opportunity: the firm’s boss was abroad, the secretary on holiday and the accountant a cretin.

— So what happened?

So in the evening, soon after the night watchman had his stroke, Damasceno came to my house and told me that the astral conjunction had arrived, in fact, that it would be the coup of our lives, after which we could go off to Rio de Janeiro.

— How was that?

Because the containers loaded with stuff had just arrived from Hong Kong, as Damasceno Monteiro well knew, and since the Green Cricket and his gang would only be coming to pick them up the next day, as arranged with the night watchman, we would rip them off and take all the stuff.

— And how did you react to that?

I told him he must be mad, that if we screwed the Green Cricket like that he’d have us bumped off. And apart from that, where the hell would we have sold all that stuff?

— And what did Monteiro have to say to that?

He said that he’d see to the sales side, he knew a good base in Algarve where they could dispatch it to France and Spain, and that it was just millions for the taking.

— Go on.

Well, I told him I wouldn’t go with him that night, that I had a wife and baby and could get by on my pay at the garage, he told me that he was in the shit, that his father took Antabuse and was sick as a dog all night long, and that he, Damasceno, couldn’t stand that life any longer and wanted to go and live in Copacabana, and since I had a car and he didn’t I had to drive him there.

— And so you drove him?

Yes I drove him there, and to tell the truth I even went into the front yard with him, I did this of my own free will without him forcing me in any way, because I didn’t like the idea of hanging around outside the gates while he went off on that dangerous errand all alone.

— Excuse me, but put like that it sounds like a grand act of generosity on your part. Couldn’t it be that at the time you were thinking more of all the money you might get out of this robbery?

Maybe yes, I’ll be frank about it. I work all day long as an electrician and earn a pittance, my home is in a basement which my wife has tried to doll up with flower-patterned curtains, but in winter the walls ooze with damp, it’s an unhealthy place. And I’ve got a baby only a few months old.

— So how did your friend Monteiro make out?

He switched on the office lights as if he owned the place and told me to stay where I was, that he’d see to the rest of it. So I didn’t move and took no part in the robbery. He went through the drawers until he found the codes to open the containers and then went out into the yard. I sat at the desk, I was waiting for him and didn’t know what to do, so I thought I would make a free telephone call to Glasgow.

— Excuse me, but are you telling me you actually called Glasgow from the offices of the Stones of Portugal?

Yes, I’ve got a sister who emigrated to Glasgow and I hadn’t heard from her for five months. You know, to call Glasgow costs quite a bit, and my sister has a little mongoloid girl, which gives her a lot of problems.

— Please go on.

While I was on the phone I heard the noise of a car, so I hung up and nipped into the little storeroom with a folding door where the vacuum cleaner is kept. At that moment Damasceno came in from the back yard and the Green Cricket and his gang entered by the front door.

— What do you mean by “his gang?”

Two members of the Guardia Nacional who never leave his side.

— Did you recognize them?

One of them yes, his name is Costa, he’s got an enormous swollen belly because he has cirrhosis. The other I don’t know, a young kid, maybe a recent recruit.

— And what happened.

Damasceno was carrying four packets of drugs wrapped in plastic. He realized that I’d done a disappearing act and faced up to the Green Cricket.

— And what did the sergeant do?

He began to hop on one leg and then the other as he does when he’s mad, then he began to stutter, because as I told you when he’s angry he stutters, and you can’t understand a word that comes out of his mouth.

— Then what?

He stuttered away and said: “you son-of-a-bitch that stuff is mine.” I could see him through the crack in the screen door. Then the Green Cricket grabbed the packets of stuff and did an incredible thing.

— What was that?

He opened one of them with a clasp-knife, he literally ripped it open, and shook the whole contents out on Damasceno’s head. He said: son-of-a-bitch, I baptize you. Do you realize what that means? He was throwing away millions and millions.

— What next?

Damasceno was covered with powder, as if he’d been snowed on, and the Cricket was really nervous, hopping from side to side like a devil, in my opinion he’d had a fix.

— How d’you mean?

That he’d had a fix. The Cricket sells the stuff, but every so often he takes it too, and he has bad stuff, like some people have bad wine, and he wanted to bump off Damasceno there and then.

— Please make yourself clearer: bump off Damasceno in what sense?

The Cricket had pulled out his pistol, he was hysterical, he pointed it at Damasceno’s temple and then at his belly and yelled: son-of-a-bitch, I’m going to kill you.

— Did he fire?

He fired all right but the shot went high, it hit the ceiling, if you go to the offices of the Stones of Portugal I bet you’ll be sure to find a hole in the ceiling, he didn’t kill him because his men intervened and deflected the shot, and he put the pistol back in its holster.

— What next?

The Cricket realized he couldn’t kill him there on the spot, but that doesn’t mean he’d cooled off. He gave Damasceno a kick in the balls that doubled him up, then kneed him in the face, just like in the movies, and he started kicking him again and again. Then he ordered his gang to carry Damasceno to the car, they’d reckon up with him when they got him to the station.

— What about the packets of drugs?

They tucked them into their jackets, loaded Damasceno into the car and set off for Oporto. They were all mad with rage, like wild beasts that had smelt blood.

— Do you want to tell us anything else?

The rest is up to you. Next morning Damasceno’s body was found by a gypsy on a piece of waste ground, he had been beheaded as you know. And now it’s my turn to ask you a question: what conclusions can you draw from all this?

AND THIS IS THE question your correspondent wishes to put to all his readers.