A Small Death in lisbon (34 page)

The waiter laid a bread roll on her side plate with a pair of silver tongs.

'So what did you learn from Eva?'

'What men want,' she said, and left it at that, so that Felsen began to think that she'd learnt other things from Eva, like leaving things unsaid. It excited him.

The waiter gave them the menus. They ordered instantly.

'You lost your Brazilian accent,' said Susana.

'I've been in Africa.'

'Doing what?'

'The bank. Minerals. Logging.'

'You should come to Brazil. You're not in Brazil yet, are you?'

'We're thinking about it.'

'Well, I'll be there ... if you need any help.'

'With your friends,' he said, and she smiled at him without volunteering what he wanted to know.

The soup arrived. A crab bisque. They sipped through it. The wind shuddered against the dining room windows and the rain thrashed the petals off the roses in the gardens.

'I wanted to ask you,' he said, 'if you ever came across someone called Lehrer, in Berlin? Oswald Lehrer.'

She put her glass down. The waiter removed the soup plates.

'I didn't like him,' she said, looking above his head. 'He had very unpleasant tastes.'

'He gave me a job down here in the war. He knew I spoke Portuguese.'

'That was Lehrer's way,' she said. 'He always liked to know everything.'

A piece of turbot in a white sauce appeared in front of her, a swordfish steak before Felsen. Felsen found himself wanting to smoke, drink, eat and everything else humanly possible. Susana opened up her fish. Felsen tore a roll apart. They'd touched on all their history. Each point with its pain and pleasure. He felt welded to her in spots.

'You're looking good, Susana,' he said, confirming his notion out loud.

'Even after two children,' she said, looking to see how he took it.

'A mother,' he said.

'But not a wife,' she said. 'And you?'

He laid down his cutlery and opened his hands.

'I didn't think so,' she said.

'And why not?'

'A powder-blue suit and a yellow tie doesn't say "Daddy" to me.'

He smiled. She laughed. The sun came up in the room like theatre lights zoomed to the maximum. They ordered more wine and talked about her two children who were with her mother in'são Paulo. She didn't elaborate on the absent father.

They took coffee in another part of the hotel and Felsen smoked one of the slim tan-coloured cheroots which Susana preferred. They went wordlessly up to her room. She unlocked the door. They kissed. Her hand went to the front of his trousers, firm, expert, gripping.

Felsen stripped and was naked before she'd stepped out of her underwear. He fell on her. Her suspendered thighs rasped on his. They made love with only marginally less urgency than they had done sixteen years ago. The only difference—after Felsen had come shuddering to a halt—she pushed his head down into her lap and drew him to her. He wasn't sure about it. He hadn't done that before. He didn't like it. But she held him there until he felt her trembling in his hands.

Susana had a week left of her stay. She'd wanted to go to Berlin but couldn't get a visa and that had left her with spare time in Lisbon. They spent most of the week together. Felsen moved into her room at the Hotel Palácio for the duration. They spent the time driving out to his house, the westernmost house on mainland Europe—only heather, gorse, the cliffs and the lighthouse at Cabo da Roca between it and the ocean. They walked through the empty rooms which still smelled of paint and the musty humidity of drying plaster. They bought two chairs and sat in the enclosed terrace on the roof and drank brandy and watched the storms out at sea, the deranged clouds and the blood-orange sunsets. They talked. They renamed the house—Casa ao Fim do Mundo—House at the End of the World. Together they furnished the house from the contents sale of an old
palácio
on the Serra da Sintra, Susana bidding wildly for a pair of old rose-coloured divans which they 'christened' the next afternoon and lay under rough blankets telling each other their own plans and then, eventually, making one together.

Felsen bought a ticket on the same plane to'são Paulo. He spent an afternoon talking things through with Abrantes about the opening of the'são Paulo branch, how Susana would introduce him to her friends, get the business started. The three of them had lunch the next day, Abrantes on one side of the table, impressed by Susana and nearly jealous of Felsen.

On the day of the flight Felsen woke with a teak-hard erection and his head full of the future. He pressed himself against Susana and felt her stiffen. She rolled. He grinned over the monolith. She flicked the tip. The menhir toppled.

'I came on in the night,' she said. 'We're going to be late.'

The luggage was enough to make the bellhop straighten his cap. Felsen went down to pay the bill, which was enormous and came on several pages. He wrote a cheque with his mind on other things.

They sent the luggage in one taxi and followed in another. It was a bright, clear, blustery day and the sea, by the Marginal, was deep blue and white-capped. They didn't speak. Susana looked out of the window. Felsen drummed the upholstery, still smarting slightly from the morning's rejection.

At the airport Felsen organized a porter for the luggage. Susana paced around in tight geometry, her heels nervous on the pavement. They joined the queue at the check-in desk. Susana gave Felsen her passport and went to find the ladies' room. Felsen flicked through her passport, checked her photo, one taken a few years ago, the hair longer, the eyebrows denser, unplucked. He riffled the pages. A paper fell out which he picked up. It was a ticket stub for a return internal flight Frankfurt/Munich/Frankfurt dated 28th March 1955, just over three weeks earlier. Felsen turned over the stub. There was a telephone number written on the back, not a local one.

He went back to the passport and found the German visa and an entry stamp for the 24th March in Frankfurt. There was an exit stamp from Lisbon next to it and below it the stamps for the return dated 13 th April. On another page were the exit and entry stamps out: of'são Paulo and into Lisbon dated 20th March. There were no other stamps. There was no French visa. He looked at the telephone number again, thinking quicker than he had done for a month. He took out the hotel bill and noticed, this time, the colossal amount of the telephone bill. He turned the pages. Seven calls had been made to a number which matched the one on the ticket stub.

He went to one of the airline offices and asked to use the telephone. He called the operator and gave her the number and asked where it came from. She told him immediately that it was a Brazilian number and after a minute that it came from a town called Curitiba. His chest suddenly felt as a cold as a cathedral.

Susana appeared next to the luggage looking around for him. He crossed the highly polished floor on stiff legs, his thigh muscles feeling weak and cold. Susana asked if anything was the matter. He shook his head. They checked in. The flight was delayed until three in the afternoon. Susana fumed silently as she reclaimed her passport and boarding card. They went to the restaurant and sat opposite each other. The place was as crowded as Felsen's head. He ordered wine and looked out of the window as the four propeller engines of a cargo plane started up with a clatter followed by a long, unending howl.

The wine was poured into the palpable silence between them. Susana looked around, aware that the presence in front of her was not where she wanted her eyes to rest. Felsen relaxed his shoulders down from around his ears, leaned back.

'Saúde!'
he said, raising his glass, forcing some lightness.

She matched him.

'I never asked,' he said, lighting a cigarette, 'how you found me.'

'By accident,' she said. 'I was looking for the number of a friend of mine whose surname is Felizardo, yours was underneath. I didn't think it would be you but I called anyway. There was no answer. The next day I was in Lisbon I went to the address and found your apartment above the bank. My friend's father knew who you were. When I came back to Lisbon after my trip, with my extra week, I called again—this time the bank. They put me through to your partner.'

He nodded through the plausibility. The lengthy, well-thought-out, plausibility.

'But you didn't go to Paris, did you?'

'Is this...' she paused, '...an interrogation?'

He laid the ticket stub out in front of her.

'I was in Germany,' she said, coolly, eyes sliding to the right.

'That number on the back,' said Felsen, 'comes from Curitiba in Brazil. You've called that number every day since we've been in the Palácio. Whose is it? Your friends?'

'My family...'

'A different one to your mother and children in'são Paulo?'

The waiter came and reared away from Felsen who'd shown him the back of his hand.

'Yes,' she said, defiant now, teeth gritted behind her lips.

'You never showed me any photographs of your children,' he said, and lunged at her purse.

She snatched it away from him.

'You didn't ask.'

'I'm asking now.'

She tore out two photographs and held them to his face for a fraction of a second. The boy was dark, Brazilian-looking, but the girl, although dark-skinned, had blonde hair and blue eyes. Susana's mouth was bent into a sneer.

'I've heard of Curitiba,' said Felsen. 'There's a very large German community there. I know what they'd have been doing ... just three days ago, in fact. The 20th of April every year. The Führer's birthday. They raise the flag. Who sent you, Susana?'

She didn't answer.

'I can't think of anybody who would know about me, except perhaps ODESSA. They might have have had the resources, the information. The
Organisation der SS-Angehörigen.
.. was it them, Susana?'

'The most important thing I learnt from Eva,' she said, sitting back, chin up, the contempt radiating out of her, 'was that Klaus Felsen only ever thinks with his big, stupid, Swabian cock.'

That cut him, right through, and he hit her for saying it. He slapped her across her face with his big open hand. It went off like a tyre blow-out and everybody looked out of the window. Susana wheeled out of her chair and came up with the mark of his hand on her cheek. Her eyes were fixed and dark, flashing with anger, an intensity of hate. She muttered something at him. He'd have liked to smack her again, so raw was his humiliation, but the eyes of the restaurant were on them now. He turned and went to retrieve his luggage.

1st July 1955, Abrantes" apartment,
Rua do Ouro, Baixa, Lisbon, Portugal

Maria Abrantes sat at the arm end of the chaise longue in a blue pencil skirt and a white blouse with the suit jacket open. She had a tight string of pearls at her throat which was red with anger, right up to her earlobes and had infected her cheeks too. She smoked and listened as she had been doing for the last three-quarters of an hour, crossing, uncrossing and recrossing her legs once every three or four minutes, waiting for what was going on in the next room to come to an end.

She'd thought that it was over three times already and had braced herself, tightened her mouth, and clenched her fist. But each time it had resumed and she'd breathe in a slow, deep breath through her nose and unlock her jaws. In the hand that wasn't smoking she held a card of the type distributed by tobacco kiosks for the last ten or fifteen years. She tapped the arm of the chaise longue with it. The card was a photograph of an actress who called herself Pica but whose real name was Arlinda Monteiro. Maria looked at the card for the hundredth time—Pica the dyed blonde with large glossed lips trying to look American. She straightened her own true blonde hair as if it conferred a higher status.

The bedroom door opened a crack and shut. Maria Abrantes' foot started nodding and stopped. The bedroom door was flung open with a laugh and Pica, with her head thrown back over her shoulder, came into the living room. Her high heels were strict with the wooden floor. She didn't see Maria at first but the bristling presence in the room slowed her heels' progress. When she did see her, the heels took four little steps back and her shoulder hit the closed half of the double doors to the bedroom. She glanced into the bedroom and lengthened her neck to muster some drama-class dignity. She tilted her jaw and resumed her passage across the bare wooden floor, swinging her white handbag from her left hand.

'
Puta
' said Maria Abrantes, quietly.

The word thudded into the actress's back and turned her round. Her bosom inflated. Maria Abrantes was hoping for a spew of abuse but the hatchet she'd set her face into must have been too sharp. The actress only managed the kind of hiss she must have heard from the back stalls on a slow weekday night.

Joaquim Abrantes appeared at the bedroom door, sensing wildlife in his living room. He was in the grey trousers from a suit, a white shirt with cuffs already linked up, and a silk tie in his hands which Maria had never seen before.

'What are
you
doing here?' he asked.

Pica turned, her heels rapped the floorboards and the apartment door opened with a gust of wind and closed, gun-shot loud. Abrantes slowly made up his tie and stretched his neck free of his collar. Everything Maria had rehearsed scrambled and fled from her mind, leaving neat spite and no words.

'I thought you said you were going to be in Estoril today,' said Joaquim Abrantes, who left the doorway, went into the bedroom and came back in a grey suit jacket.

'I was...' she started.

'What brought you back into the city?' he asked, performing as if Pica had never been in the apartment. 'Shopping?'

He took a seat in front of her and shot his cuffs. He opened a silver box on the table and removed a cigarette, which he tapped on the lid. He lit it and sat back, inhaling the smoke grossly into his snarling mouth. It maddened her.

'No, it wasn't shopping,' she said. 'Oh?'

'It was because I can't stand any more talk in Estoril about the whores you're entertaining down here.'