A Small Death in lisbon (17 page)

There was a net result of this bad lunch meeting. Wolfram was required at any price. He was to look at tin as well and there were other markets—sardines, olive oil, cork, hides, blankets for instance.

'Does that mean we're going to take on the Russians in their own winter?' Felsen had asked.

'Russia is a large place,' Lehrer had replied, slowly and quietly. 'Our little delay was not ... timely.'

'It takes time to conquer Yugoslavia, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria...'

'The champagne has been flowing in the Hotel Parque no doubt,' said Lehrer, cutting him off savagely.

'I wouldn't know, Herr Gruppenführer.'

The Riesling had gone down like acid.

Felsen had flown back to Lisbon and looked to the
Abwehr
for some intelligence help that would give him an edge against the British, who had matched his new prices and taken a fifty-ton contract from under his nose. They were not helpful. Felsen was now back in the Beira looking to do some kicking himself.

Abrantes sucked the soup between his new dentures. Felsen, two courses ahead, toyed with a large lump of pork but had no appetite.

'There's going to be a car,' said Abrantes, 'on a small road between Melos and Seixo tomorrow afternoon between two and four o'clock.'

'With a British agent?'

Abrantes nodded.

'Do we know anything else?'

'No. Except the road is in pine forest.'

'Who told you?'

'The driver.'

'Is he reliable?'

'He cost a thousand and he wants a job. We'll have to look after him.'

'Reliability's getting expensive.'

Abrantes nodded over his shoulder at the
volframistas.

'They won't eat bread any more, it's too cheap. They have wristwatches, but can't tell the time. They cap their rotten teeth with gold, but still sleep over their sheep. The Beira's a place for madmen now. A whole village came to see me yesterday. A whole village! Four hundred people from somewhere outside Castelo Branco. They've heard the prices. Two hundred escudos for a little rock and they earn fifty times their daily wage. They're calling it black gold.'

'It can't go on.'

'They'll buy cars next, then you'll see. We'll all be dead men.'

'I mean Dr Salazar won't allow this to carry on. The government won't let people leave their homes, stop tending their crops. They won't let wages and prices get out of control. Salazar knows about inflation.'

'Inflation?'

'It's a plague of the pocket.'

'Tell me.'

'It's a disease that kills money.'

'Money is paper,
Senhor
Felsen,' said Abrantes, flatly.

'Do you know what cancer is?'

Abrantes nodded and stopped working on his
bacalhau.

'Well, there's cancer of the blood too. It looks the same, it's still red, but there's something growing inside it. You look at your ten-escudo note one day and the next day it's a hundred escudos and the day after that a thousand escudos.'

'And this is not good?'

'The money still looks the same but it has no value. The government is printing money just to keep up with price and wage rises. Your thousand-escudo note buys you nothing. We know about inflation in Germany.'

Joaquim Abrantes' knife and fork still hovered over his
bacalhau.
It was the only time Felsen ever saw him scared.

4th July 1941, Serra da Estrela, Beira Baixa, Portugal

It was hot. Unbearably hot and still. Even up in the foothills of the
serra
where there should have been some breeze there was only this bleaching, drying heat so dense that Felsen could feel it searing his throat and lungs. He sweated in the back seat of the Citroën with
the window open and the furnace air bellowing over him. He drank warm water from a metal flask. Abrantes sat next to him with his jacket on, not a drop of sweat on him.

They'd driven up from Belmonte where there'd been crowds of people out in the baking wilderness. So many people that Felsen had thought that there must have been some miracle, another vision such as the one outside Fatima in 1917, and people were hurrying to catch their sight of the Blessed Virgin. But it was wolfram that had brought them out. Black, shiny crystallized magma blasted up from the centre of the earth a million years ago.

He'd been the start of this new cult, and it fascinated and horrified him. People had left their lives on one side. Small-town mayors, bureaucrats, lawyers, cobblers, stonemasons, charcoal-makers, tailors ... they'd all left their work to go scratching at the hills, tearing at the heather, gouging up the earth, their minds teeming with the virus of wolfram. If you'd wanted to die, there was nobody to organize your funeral for you, no one to make a coffin for you.

The blond Englishman felt sick. He lay sprawled in the back seat of his wreck of a car, trying to get some coolness on his fair skin, on his red arms and pink face. It had been a long, brutal drive from Viseu with nothing going right. He'd stopped thinking about wolfram after the first puncture and drifted off into a mild delirium where he was married to a blue-eyed Dutch girl, having children and making wine.

The road jolted him out of his fantasy, the driver finding the deepest potholes with instinctive genius. Snatches of reality riddled through his brain. Why did she want to go to America? There was no talking to the woman. Should he feel guilty? Maybe he should. Maybe he should have at least gone to the U.S. consulate, at least tried to talk to the woman in the visa office, but why cut off your own nose to spite your face? God, this heat, this strange light. Dust from the desert, the driver had said. The man was a bloody idiot, and insolent too. These Beira people, he'd never get the hang of them. Why had they brought him down from the Minho? It never got that hot up there and the people were easier. Wolfram. And he'd never even kissed her.

Felsen's car dropped down the hillside into the pine forest, through the hairpins to the valley floor and then back up the other side. A
small truck followed with four men and a driver. They reached the bend in the road they'd found the day before and got out. The car and the truck moved off further up the hill and stopped.

Two men dragged the pine tree, which they'd dug out and pushed over yesterday, across the road. Another with an axe set off round the hairpin and up the hill. Felsen, Abrantes and the rest went into the susurrating heat of the pine forest. Abrantes gave each of the men a wooden cudgel. They all sat on a crust of dried pine needles. Abrantes straightened a leg and eased out a Walther P48 from his waistband. Felsen lit a cigarette and hung his head between his knees. He'd drunk too much the night before and this heat was getting closer and the light was reddening at the edges as if something terrible was going to happen, something unnatural, like an earthquake. The men whispered behind him, their heels dug into the hillside.

'Shut up,' he said, to the ground.

The men fell silent.

Felsen tried to rearrange his undershorts around his genitals, which were sore from last night's whoring. He shuddered at the memory of the woman's vast, dimpled buttocks, her thick, black bush and her garlic, sewery breath. The disgust stuck in his throat and he couldn't swallow. Flies settled on his sweaty shirt and needled him so that he lashed out over his shoulder. He was hitting another low. He tried to let his mind drift off, but it came aground again on the same rocks. Eva, Lehrer, and the gold KF cufflinks the girl had stolen.

The men were whispering again. It maddened him and he leapt to his feet tearing his own gun from his pocket. He pointed it at each of them in turn.

'Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.'

Abrantes held up his hand.

They all heard the car on the valley floor at the same time. It changed gear and started up the gradient. The men were still as owls on a branch. Felsen sat down and looked through the trees to the man with the axe, who was waiting above them on the side of the road fifty metres up from the fallen tree. He held up his hand. The car worked its way up through the hairpins, the driver disdaining the clutch and crunching through the gears. The sharp stink of resin began to tickle the back of Felsen's dry throat.

***

'You're going to shred that gearbox if you don't use the clutch,' shouted the Englishman from the back seat.

The driver didn't turn a hair. He stirred the pudding with his gearstick and screeched the shift through the gate as if he enjoyed the sound of grating metal. The Englishman slumped back as the car shuddered round the next hairpin. What would it be like to kiss her lips? He'd felt the corner of it just on the edge of his lip once, and the newness of it had shot through him. Months ago. Would she still be there? He took out his wallet and eased her photograph out with his thumb. He felt the car slow down.

'What is it?'

'Fallen tree,' said the driver, revving the engine, desperate not to stall.

'Is it fallen or cut?' asked the Englishman looking around him through the pine forest, slipping his wallet back.

'It's fallen ... you can see the roots.'

'How does a pine tree fall at this time of the year?'

The driver shrugged. No expert. No expert on anything, not even driving.

'Get out and take a look,' said the Englishman.

The driver blasted the accelerator again.

'No, wait,' he said, nervous now, suspicious.

Nobody got out of the car for a full two minutes. The driver gunned the engine until it died abruptly. They all sat in the cicada-broken, resinated silence of the forest. The driver got out and gave the tree the benefit of his indolence. He went to the back of the car, opened the boot and rummaged about without looking. He shut it and leaned into the rear window.

The English agent got out. He was tall, dressed in khaki trousers and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. A revolver hung from his right hand. He looked over the roof into the trees. He checked the base of the pine tree. He went back to the car, laid the gun on the roof, stripped off his shirt and tossed it through the rear window. He was in a white vest now, his arms red to his elbows and white above.

Felsen dropped his arm and the man with the axe over the crook of his elbow set off down the road to the tree.

'Boa tarde
,' he said to the two men in the road.

The agent tore his gun off the roof and pointed it at the peasant
whose hands shot into the air. The axe clattered to the floor. The agent beckoned him over the tree. The peasant looked at his axe. The Englishman shook his head.

'Não, não, anda cá, anda cá
,' he said.

The peasant told him in a thick accent that he didn't want to leave his axe there on the floor. The driver repeated it for the agent's benefit. The agent told him to pick it up and hand it over. The peasant held out the smooth wooden handle. The agent gave it to the driver and told him to get on with it.

'Let him do the work,' said the driver.

'I want you to do it. We don't know him.'

The driver shook his head and walked away. The Englishman was angry but in a situation now. He shoved the revolver in his waistband and set to work on the tree. The driver sat on the front bumper and wiped the sweat off his forehead. The peasant looked at the agent with the mildness of expression that a working man's face takes on when he sees someone who doesn't know how to use a tool. The agent was in a lather in seconds. At first he stopped to wipe the sweat, then he just flicked his head to keep it out of his eyes. The peasant's hands itched.

'Leave him be,' said Felsen under his breath, easing himself down the hillside to the edge of the road. 'Let him do it.'

Felsen and Abrantes walked on either side of the car past the driver on the bumper. Felsen nodded to the peasant.

'
Posso?
' the peasant asked the Englishman. May I?

The agent handed him the axe and felt Felsen's warm Walther P48 in the hollow behind his right ear. Abrantes removed the Englishman's revolver. The agent's legs were trembling in his trousers. He turned slowly and couldn't stop the flicker of recognition across his eyes as he saw the German.

This one, thought Felsen, whose eyes were hot in his head, Laura van Lennep's friend. The one who wouldn't shake his hand. What was this one's name? Edward Burton.

Abrantes told the Englishman's driver to help the men move the tree off the road. The driver had different ideas. He wasn't a labourer any more, this wasn't his type of work, and where was his thousand escudos? Abrantes tightened his hat down on his head. Felsen, already on the brink, snapped. He ripped one of the men's wooden cudgels out of his hands and ran at the driver. The driver went on to
his back foot, his mind changing fast, but it was too late. Felsen fell on him like a pile of logs, swiping and slashing and chopping. The driver went down in the first mad chaos of blows from the cudgel. Felsen with his heart blasting in his chest, dropped to his knees and hammered, and hammered and hammered until he didn't know what he was hammering any more.

The other men stopped their work and watched him through their sweat.

Felsen wiped his forehead on his shoulder and stained it dark. He rubbed his eyes but couldn't get the dimmed edges of his vision to brighten. He was panting, still down on his knees, his head thumping and his vision pulsing with it. He looked down at the piece of meat in front of him and felt his guts rise. He got to his feet on shaky legs, the bloody club hanging loosely from his hand. The Englishman was vomiting.

The light sickened further, the high red dust scarfing the sun.

The men hadn't gone back to work and Felsen thought he might join the Englishman until he saw their faces. They were confused and afraid of the power of a man who could do such a thing for nothing at all. Felsen had seen them like this before, but only around Abrantes.

'Now you see,' he said, pointing at them with the cudgel, still breathing heavily. 'Now you understand the importance of obedience. Isn't that right
Senhor
Burton?'

The use of his name jerked the agent up straight from his retching, but he couldn't get any words out. His lips had gone white in his pale face. He sweated fatly from the forehead as if he'd been touched by cholera.