The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Six

NO, DONA ROSA’S plat du jour that day was rojoes à la mode de Minho. Perhaps it was not a dish particularly suited to the heat of Oporto, but Firmino was crazy about those hunks of pork fillet sautéed with potatoes.

There he was in the dining-room for the first time since his arrival at the pension. Three tables were occupied. Dona Rosa came in and wanted to introduce him to the other guests, she was determined on it. Firmino followed. The first, one Senhor Paulo, was a man of about fifty, who imported meat into the Setabal district. He was bald and robust. The second, Signor Bianchi, was an Italian who spoke no Portuguese but expressed himself in halting French. He owned a firm which bought boletus mushrooms, both fresh and dried, for export to Italy, because the Portuguese cared very little about mushrooms. He declared with a smile that trade was flourishing and that he hoped that the Portuguese would continue to care very little about boletus mushrooms. Finally there was a couple from Aveiro who were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary and making a second honeymoon of it. Firmino wondered why they had chosen this pension.

Dona Rosa then told him that the Editor had been trying to reach him and wanted him to call back urgently. Firmino decided to keep the Editor waiting for a while, otherwise all those goodies doing the rounds of the table would get cold. He ate slowly and with relish, because the pork was absolutely exquisite. He ordered coffee and only when he had drunk it did he resign himself to calling up the paper.

The telephone was in the lounge, for the bedrooms only had house phones connected with the reception desk. Firmino put in his money and dialed. The Editor was out. Senhora Odette put him through to Senhor Silva, whom Firmino immediately called Huppert, to put him in a good mood. Silva was solicitous and paternal.

“We’ve had an anonymous call,” he said, “he won’t talk to us, he wants to talk directly to the special correspondent, which is you, we’ve given him the number of the pension and he’s going to ring at four o’clock, in my opinion he was calling from Oporto.”

Silva paused.

“Are you enjoying your nice tripe?” he asked perfidiously.

Firmino replied that he had just finished eating a dish that he, Silva, could not have imagined in his wildest dreams.

“Don’t leave the pension,” entreated Silva, “it could be a mythomaniac, but he didn’t give me that impression, treat him well, he may have important information for you.”

Firmino glanced at his watch and took a seat on the sofa. Dammit, he thought, now even that ass Silva took the liberty of giving him advice. He picked a magazine out of a wicker basket. It was called Vultos, and was devoted to the Portuguese and international jet-set. He settled down to read with interest an article about the claimant to the throne of Portugal, Don Duarte de Braganca, who had just become the father of a son. The claimant, wearing a mustache in the nineteenth-century manner, was sitting bolt upright in a high-backed leather chair and holding the hand of his consort, who was buried so deep in a low chair that only her shins and neck were visible, as if she had been sawn in half. Firmino concluded that the photographer was totally incompetent, but he had no time to finish the article because the telephone rang. He waited for Dona Rosa to answer it.

“It’s for you, Senhor Firmino,” said Dona Rosa amiably.

“Hullo,” said Firmino into the instrument.

“Look in the yellow pages,” murmured the voice at the other end of the wire.

“Look for what?” asked Firmino.

“For Stones of Portugal,” said the voice, “under Import-Export.”

“Who are you?” asked Firmino.

“It doesn’t matter,” answered the voice.

“Why don’t you telephone the police instead of me?” inquired Firmino.

“Because I know the police better than you do,” replied the voice. And the line went dead.

Firmino set himself to thinking. It was a young voice with a strong Northern accent. Not an educated person, that was plain from his pronunciation. And so? And so what? The North of Portugal was full of uneducated young men with strong Northern accents. He picked up the telephone directory from the little table and looked through the Yellow Pages for the section Import-Export. It said: Stones of Portugal, Vila Nova de Gaia, Avenida Heróis do Mar, 123. He looked in his guidebook but it wasn’t any help to him. There was nothing to do but ask Dona Rosa. Dona Rosa very patiently unfolded the map of Oporto once more and showed him the place. It certainly wasn’t just round the corner, it was right on the other side of town and practically not in Oporto at all. In fact Vila Nova was a town of its own, with a town hall and everything else. He was in a hurry? Well in that case the only thing was to take a taxi, because by public transport he wouldn’t get there until dinner-time, and how much a taxi would cost him she simply couldn’t say, she’d never been to Vila Nova by taxi, but of course luxuries have to be paid for.

“And now goodbye young man,” she said, she was going to have a short siesta, yes, that’s just what she needed.

AVENIDA HERÓIS DO MAR was a long street on the outskirts lined with a few stunted trees and small building sites, half-finished buildings, warehouses and brand-new little villas with gardens full of effigies of Snow White and ceramic swallows on the walls of the verandas. Number 123 was a white, single-story building with an undulating wall in the Mexican style. In its rear rose a large warehouse with a corrugated-iron roof. On the wall a brass plaque read: Stones of Portugal. Firmino pressed the electronic button and the gate clicked open. The building itself had a little portico along the front, like the other villas in the street, and on one of the columns was a sign saying “Administration.” Firmino went in. It was a little office equipped with modern furniture, but not devoid of good taste. At a glass-topped table cluttered with documents sat an elderly, bald, bespectacled gentleman tapping away at a typewriter.

“Good afternoon,” said Firmino.

The old chap stopped typing and looked up. He returned the greeting.

“The reason for your visit?” he asked.

Firmino felt caught unprepared. He had really been an idiot, he thought, because all through the long taxi-ride he had thought about Manolo, and then his fiancée whom he was already missing, and thereafter how Lukács would have reacted if instead of being confronted by a text of Balzac’s he had had to face the naked reality of things, as he himself was doing at the moment. He had thought of all this, but had neglected to think of how he should explain his presence.

“I was looking for the boss,” he mumbled.

“The boss is in Hong Kong,” said the old boy, “he’ll be away till the end of the month.”

“Who can I talk to then?” asked Firmino.

“The secretary has taken a week’s holiday,” was the answer, “so there’s just the warehouseman and me, I’m responsible for the accounting, is it a matter of urgency?”

“Yes and no,” replied Firmino, “but as I’m passing through Oporto I wanted to make a proposal to your boss.”

Then, as if to make his presence a little more convincing, he added: “I’m in the business myself, I have a small firm in Lisbon.”

“Ah,” replied the employee without the least vestige of interest.

“May I sit down for a moment?” asked Firmino.

The man waved a hand at the chair facing the desk. It was a buff-colored canvas chair with arms to it, such as film directors use. It struck Firmino again that whoever had furnished Stones of Portugal had pretty good taste.

“What is your exact line of business?” he enquired with the most charming smile at his disposal.

The old man at last raised his eyes from the papers on his desk. He lit a Gauloise from a packet on the table beside him and inhaled an avid puff.

“Curse it,” he said, “these Chinese accounts are hell on earth, they send their statements in Hong Kong dollars and I have to turn them into Portuguese escudos, and the hitch is that the Hong Kong dollar never fluctuates a red cent one way or the other whereas our currency goes up and down like a yo-yo, I don’t know whether you follow the Lisbon stock exchange.”

Firmino nodded and spread his arms as if to say: ah yes, I know it only too well.

“We began with marble,” said the old man, “seven years ago it was just the boss and me, an Alsatian dog and a tin shack.”

“Ah yes,” said Firmino to urge him to further confidences, “marble really goes, here in this country.”

“If it goes,” returned the old man, “if it goes. But you have to find the right market. The boss has an extraordinary flair for these things, maybe he’s had a bit of luck as well, but I can’t deny he’s got a real business sense, and that’s why he thought of Italy.”

Firmino’s face took on an expression of wonderment.

“It seems to me a pretty queer notion, exporting marble to Italy,” he said, “the Italians are up to their eyeballs in marble.”

“So you think, my dear sir,” exclaimed the old man, “and so I thought myself, but this means that we don’t have a flair for these things and don’t know the laws of the market. I’ll say one thing: do you know which is the most highly prized marble in Italy? That’s easy enough, it’s the marble from Carrara. And what does the Italian market demand? Easy again: marble from Carrara. But it so happens that Carrara is no longer able to satisfy the demands, my dear sir, I don’t know the exact reasons, let’s say because labor is too expensive, the quarrymen are anarchists and have very demanding trade unions, that the environmentalists are making life hell for the government because the Apuan Alps have been riddled with holes, things of that sort.”

The old fellow drew greedily at his cigarette.

“Well then my dear sir,” he resumed, “do you by any chance know anything about the marble of Estremoz?”

Firmino gave a vague nod.

“Same characteristics as Carrara marble,” said the old man complacently, “same porosity, same veining, same reaction to machine polishing, the same in every way as Carrara marble.” And the old man heaved a sigh as if he had revealed the secret of the century.

“Do I make myself dear?” he asked.

“Perfectly,” said Firmino.

“Please explain,” said Firmino.

“Good,” continued the old man, “it’s like Columbus’s egg. The boss sends Estremoz marble to Carrara and they resell it on the Italian market as Carrara marble, and so there you have the atriums of Roman apartment houses and the bathrooms of wealthy Italians tiled with fine Carrara marble which comes from Estremoz in Portugal. And it’s not that the boss has to do the thing on a vast scale, you know, he has simply subleased a firm in Estremoz which cuts the blocks and ships them from Setúbal. However, with the cost of labor in Portugal being as low as it is, do you realize what that means to us?”

He waited with an air of impatience for Firmino’s answer, which never came.

“Millions,” he said in answer to his own question, and then went on: “And as one thing leads to another the boss started looking for another market, and he found Hong Kong, because the Chinese also are mad for Carrara marble, and since a thing that leads to another leads to another again, the boss thought that since we were in the export business the moment had come to import as well, so we became an import-export firm, it doesn’t show on the surface, we have these modest premises, but that’s only so as not to flaunt the fact that we have one of the biggest annual turnovers of any firm in Oporto, you who are in business can understand that the financial police have to be kept at arm’s length, but you know my boss has two Ferrari Testarossas, he keeps them out at his farm in the country, and d’you know what he did before this?”

“I have no idea,” replied Firmino.

“Worked for the Council,” said the old man with great satisfaction, “in the stewarts’ office, at the Town that means having a flair for business, of course he’s had to play at politics a bit, it’s only logical, without politics you can’t get anywhere in this country, so he got himself made election campaign manager of the aspiring candidate for the mayorship of his town, took him by car to every political meeting in the province of Minho, the mayor was elected and as a reward gave him this piece of land for thruppence and arranged for the license to start up the business. Speaking of which, what exact line is your firm into?”

“Clothing,” replied Firmino craftily enough.

The old man lit another Gauloise.

“And so?” he asked.

“We’re opening a chain of shops in Algarve,” said Firmino, “mostly jeans and T-shirts, because Algarve is a place for young people, all beaches and discotheques, and we’ve decided to market the most bizarre T-shirts, because the kids nowadays want them as bizarre as you please, if you try and sell a T-shirt saying Harvard University no one would buy it, but with T-shirts like yours maybe they would, and we could mass-produce them.”

The old man got up, made his way to a closet with a folding door, rummaged around in a big box.

“Is this what you mean?”

It was a blue T-shirt bearing the words Stones of Portugal. The very thing described by Manolo.

The accountant gave him a look and then handed it to him.

“By all means take it,” he said, “but have a word with the secretary about it next week, I can’t tell you anything.”

“What is it you import?” asked Firmino.

“High technology instruments from Hong Kong,” replied the old man, “equipment for hi-fi and for hospitals, and that’s the reason I’m in trouble.”

“Why is that?” asked Firmino in the most tactful of tones.

“We had a robbery five days ago,” came the answer, “it was during the night, they disconnected the alarm system and made straight for the container with the equipment in it as if they knew exactly where to look, and they only stole two highly sophisticated components for CAT machinery, do you know what the CAT is?”

“Computerized axial tomography,” answered Firmino.

“Our guard dog,” continued the old man “the Alsatian, didn’t notice a thing, and the thieves certainly didn’t drug him.”

“They’d have some trouble selling components for CAT,” objected Firmino.

“You’d be surprised,” said the old man, “what with all the private clinics springing up in Portugal like mushrooms, forgive me but do you know anything about our health services?”

“Vaguely,” said Firmino.

“It’s sheer piracy,” said the old man with conviction, “that’s why medical equipment is so expensive, but the fact is this theft was really odd, as odd as could be. Just imagine, two electronic switches for CAT machines smoothly removed from our containers and abandoned on the roadside only half a kilometer away.”

“Abandoned?”

“As if they’d been chucked out of a car window, but reduced to pulp, as if a car had run over them.”

“Have you notified the police?” asked Firmino.

“Of course,” said the accountant, “because though it’s a matter of two tiny little components, they’re worth a lot of money.”

“Really?” said Firmino.

“And what’s more with the boss in Hong Kong and the secretary on holiday,” grumbled the old boy with some exasperation, “the whole thing falls on my shoulders, even the errand-boy seems to have fallen ill.”

“What errand-boy?” asked Firmino.

“The errand-boy who make deliveries,” replied the old man, “at least I had an underling to send off on errands, but he hasn’t come to work for five days.”

“A young fellow?” asked Firmino.

“That’s right,” confirmed the old man, “a temporary, he came here a couple of months ago looking for work and the boss took him on as an errand-boy.”

Firmino had a sudden mental short circuit.

“What’s his name?” he asked.

“What’s that to you?” the old man asked.

In his eyes there was a hint of suspicion.

“Oh, just a question, it isn’t important,” said Firmino in an attempt to pass it off.

“Well, he likes to be called Dakota,” said the old man, “because he’s mad about anything and everything American, and I’ve always called him Dakota, but I don’t know his real name, in fact it doesn’t even appear in the register, as I said he’s a temporary. Excuse me asking, but why are you so keen to know?”

“No particular reason,” replied Firmino, “just a question.”

“Very well then,” concluded the old man, “now you must forgive me but I have to get back to these accounts, this evening I have to get off a fax to Hong Kong, it’s an urgent invoice, if you want further information come back in a week's time, I can’t guarantee that the boss will be here but the secretary will have definitely come back.”