A Small Death in lisbon (36 page)

Filho da puta!'
I roared.

'Cabrão!'
Carlos shouted back.

I lunged at him again, taking the barman with me and we all went down in a pile by the glass door of the bar. God knows what anybody would have made of it from the outside looking in—another football argument that had got out of hand.

The barman got to his feet first. He kicked Carlos out into the night and hauled me away to the toilets at the back of the bar. I sat down shaking, blood streaming down my wrist, soaking into my shirt cuff. I washed the wound out in the sink. The barman gave me some napkins.

'Never in my life,' said the barman, 'have I seen you like that. Never.'

He went back behind his counter. I picked my jacket up and opened the door.

'Shit!' said the barman, back at the TV, 'how did it get to be 2–1?'

I crossed the road to the
Policía Judiciária
building and did some first-aid on my hand. I drove home, my blood still fierce, rocketing around my system with bigger and better arguments ripping though my brain. I was approaching a choppy version of calm by the time I parked up in Paço de Arcos and walked to the house.

Olivia was out and the door locked. I searched my pockets for the keys.

'Inspector?' said a female voice behind me.

Teresa Oliveira, the lawyer's wife, was standing a couple of metres down the street, looking different, her hair tied back and wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with the word GUESS on the front. I tried to summon some gentleness from the corner of my brain where it was still cowering.

'Is this important,
Dona
Oliveira?' I asked. 'It's been a long day and I don't have any news for you I'm afraid.'

'It won't take long,' she said, but I thought it might.

We went into the kitchen. I drank some water. She upset herself over my bloody shirt. I changed and offered her a drink. She went for Coke.

'The medication, you understand,' she felt the need to explain.

I poured myself a glass of whisky from an old bottle of William Lawson's that hadn't seen the light for the last six months.

'I've left my husband, Inspector,' she said, and I lit a cigarette.

'Was that wise?' I asked. 'They say it's better not to make traumatic changes immediately after a tragedy.'

'You might have realized that it's been coming for some time.'

I nodded without commenting. She fumbled in her bag for her own cigarettes and lighter. Between us we got one going for her.

'It never worked, right from the start it didn't work,' she said, referring to her marriage.

'How long ago was that?'

'Fifteen years.'

'That's a long time for a marriage not to be working,' I said, looking for angles here and seeing none.

'It suited us to keep it going.'

'And now you're leaving him,' I said, and shrugged. 'Was your daughter's death the catalyst?'

'No,' she said, flatly, the hand with the cigarette shaking so badly she had to hold it with the other. 'He was abusing her ... sexually.'

Her Coke fizzed in its glass.

Now we're getting to it.

'That's a very serious allegation,' I said. 'If you're going to make a formal complaint I would suggest you get a lawyer on your side and establish some strong evidence. And, if it's true, it could also have an impact on my murder enquiry, but I am not the person you should be talking to.'

I laid it out for her so that she knew I knew.

'It
is
true,' she said, feeling stronger. 'The maid will corroborate it.'

'How long had this been going on for?'

'Five years, that I know of.'

'With you tolerating it?'

Her hand still shook as the cigarette went to her mouth.

'My husband has always been a powerful man, both publicly and privately. He extended that power into his relationships ... with me and his children.'

'Was that the attraction in the first place?'

'I never went for men my own age,' she shrugged. 'My father died when I was young ... maybe that was it.'

'You were twenty-one when...'

'I was only ever interested in established men,' she cut in. 'And he took an interest in me. He can be very charming. I was flattered.'

'How did you meet?'

'I worked for him. I was his secretary.'

'So you know everything there is to know about him?'

'I used to know,' she said, 'when I was his secretary. As you might know, wives are not so well informed.'

'So you don't know who these few clients are he's working for now?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I want to know who I'm up against.'

'I only know who he used to work for, fifteen, sixteen years ago.'

'Who were they?'

'Big people.'

'For example?'

'Químical, Banco de Oceano e Rocha, Martins Construções Limitada.'

'Very big people,' I said. 'Do you think you, your maid and whatever lawyer you can find for the money are up to taking on this kind of person?'

'I don't know,' she said, her thumb flickering over the filter of her cigarette.

'Is that why you came here tonight?'

She looked up with charcoal-smudged eyes in deep sockets, her face not puffy as it had been in the morning, gravity taking over from fluid retention.

'I'm not sure what you mean by that?'

'I have my work cut out for me in this case already,
Dona
Oliveira,' I said, shying away from a small but unpleasant truth. 'Your daughter was very promiscuous.'

'Wouldn't you expect that from a girl who'd been abused?' she said, getting a handkerchief out and wiping her eyes.

'The behaviour's been noticed in girls who haven't been abused,' I said. 'But that's your point, not mine. As the day's gone on we've discovered that she's had sex with your ex-lover and she's had sex with two boys from the band in a group session in a
pensão
in Rua da Gloria. The landlord of that rooms-by-the-hour
pensão
had seen her before on Friday lunchtimes with other men who he thinks were paying customers. And I've just finished interviewing one of her teachers, who had a six-month involvement with her. Catarina could have gone with anybody and I've got to the point in my investigation where I need some luck to move it on.'

'I know all that,' she said. 'I'm trying to help. I'm trying to show you that there were psychological...'

'I'm not on anybody's team,
Dona
Oliveira,' I said, quiet and firm.

She stood and chased the ashtray around the table, crushing her cigarette out. She shouldered her handbag. I followed her to the door with half a mind to ask my burning question. Was Catarina your daughter? But I was too exhausted for the reply. The front door clicked shut. I opened it again to call after her, but she was already halfway down the street, walking into the yellow glow of the municipal street lighting, having trouble with her heels on the cobbles.

23rd August 1961, Casa ao Fim do Mundo, Azoia, 40 km west of Lisbon

Felsen looked down into the courtyard from the verandah on the roof of his house. It was full of people he didn't know, friends and business contacts of Abrantes. Some of them were standing, some sat at tables, some picked over the decimated buffet with the bald disappointment of vultures late at the kill.

The day was hot with hardly a breath of wind, which happened about once a year on this weather-blasted point of Cabo da Roca. The sea was in a flat calm, slow and viscous under the sun. Felsen smoked and sipped champagne from a shallow glass. The party was to celebrate his permanent return from Africa. He'd gone back there in the middle of June 1955 and spent almost the entire six years out there. But it was over now. Angola had exploded into war and business had collapsed.

Felsen looked across to the walled garden on the south side of the house. One of his current girlfriends, Patricia, the only one he'd invited, was standing next to Joaquim Abrantes in a group consisting of Pedro, Abrantes' eldest son, Pica, Abrantes' wife, and the Monteiros, Pica's parents. Abrantes had one hand in the small of Patricia's back and the other resting on his wife's waist. He was leaning forward listening to Pedro who, as usual, was charming everyone with one of his long, amusing stories which Felsen had probably heard before but never managed to grasp the humour.

He had no desire to be down there with them. He was used to Pedro's brilliance and, like good brandy, he didn't need too much of it. He looked around for Manuel, the second son, the one with his eyes. He found him there, in the walled garden, but four metres back from the group, standing on his own under the shade of a bougainvillea, perhaps hiding, merging into the shadows, ignored by all, invisible to them, waiting for something to happen of particular interest to him. Felsen had seen him in that position before at another party he'd thrown. Some of Pedro's friends had been standing near the bougainvillea, one a girl with blonde hair. Manuel's hand had stretched out from the shade, touched her on the head and half-frightened her to death.

Where Pedro was the tall, confident, light-haired, brown-eyed, football-playing eldest son, leader in his economics class at Lisbon University, the nineteen-year-old Manuel was shorter, fatter, and already losing his dark hair in a strange way that had left a straggling fuzz across his brown scalp. His jaw had merged into his neck, his breasts pouched in his shirt, and his trousers were inexorably drawn up the crack of his arse, however big he bought them. He had a magnificent moustache though. Compensating for what he was losing on top, it was thick, luxuriant, shining, as if all the energy in his head was drawn to it. And there were the eyes—long-lashed, blue with the faintest green in them from his mother. His best feature.

Manuel was a morose boy. He'd suffered from his mother's absence more than his brother had. School was torture. The reports on his academic ability were poor. He couldn't kick a football without sending a clod of turf after it, and the memory of his attempt at roller hockey still brought tears to people's eyes. He didn't even have the distinction of being very unpopular. He was just mildly so—not reviled, just overlooked.

If there was harsh treatment coming from his father's hand, and there was plenty of it at school report time, it found its way to the back of his head or his backside and never to Pedro's. This didn't make him hate his brother. He liked him too much, as everybody else did, and his brother always stood up for him. He didn't hate his father either, but he became watchful and sly to avoid confrontation. It was women that he found difficult. He had no way of talking to them, couldn't find anything inside himself that might interest them and, as a result, they didn't like him. He wanted to learn about them and underwear drawers seemed as good a place as any to start.

These investigations developed, in Manuel, an adolescent passion for spying on people. He found it thrilling to observe without being seen, to soak up information that people would never know he knew. It empowered him against their unconcern and it taught him things about people, and about sex.

His sex education started with the next-door neighbour's maid and his father's chauffeur. He'd let himself in to the neighbour's house and was wandering about, rifling through drawers, poking about in cupboards, when he heard them come in. He hid in the laundry room, and waited for them to leave but they followed him in there. He wasn't sure what he was watching at first as the man and woman tussled gently, making strange scoffing noises. He was only twelve at the time. But as soon as he saw the girl's skirts go up, her bare legs and a coppery bush at their apex, his own excitement told him that this was a thrill in a totally different category to Pica's underwear drawer.

He was shocked by the chauffeur's behaviour, the man dropping his trousers as if he was going to do
caca
in front of the girl, who he'd picked up and placed on the table. It was repellent. But when he saw the man's equipment, the state of it, the size of it, where he put it, the way he rammed it up against the girl's shiny bush, her strange, fearful gratitude, the increased savagery of the chauffeur's thrusts, and the confusion followed by the man's semen spraying everywhere—he realized he was on to something extraordinary. The state of his own pants told him so. His mind told him something different—part thrilled, part disgusted, with a strange overhanging calamity that this was what would be expected of him.

Part of the mystery was clarified two days later (the laundry room was now one of his permanent hideouts) when his father burst in with the same maid. Manuel realized that only lower-class people sprayed their semen everywhere, whereas proper people, more politely he thought, and less messy, left it all in the girl's bush.

It was a number of years later, and a succession of maids later, that he fully understood the situation and even then it took a visit to a prostitute around his eighteenth birthday to completely demystify the procedure. It was she who, with a well-positioned knee, demonstrated that the withdrawal technique was a cross-class practice in a Catholic society.

Felsen moved to get a better view of what was fascinating Manuel. Was it Pica's bottom? If so, it was a healthy sign as his own eyes had frequently drifted over that region. She'd kept her figure. She hadn't had any children. Abrantes had offered to take her up to see the
Senhora dos Santos
in the Beira and been met with a pitying silence. Instead he'd taken her to London several times and spent large amounts of money in Harley Street but she'd never even been pregnant, let alone miscarried. This was why her parents were excessively polite whenever they came to Abrantes' house or his parties. It made for dull conversation.

Felsen drifted back to Manuel who, in that instant, straightened as if he'd seen what he'd come for. His father's hand had slipped off Patricia's back and was now definitely cupping a buttock while, with the other hand, he was playing with the suspender clip beneath the material of Pica's dress. The old dog, thought Felsen, as Pica turned and saw the white of Manuel's shirt beneath the bougainvillea. She shrugged her husband's hand off her bottom. Abrantes' other hand shot off Patricia's buttock quick as a lizard.