A Small Death in lisbon (62 page)

'We've come to tell you to drop your investigation into the disappearance of Lourenço Gonçalves.'

'He used to be a detective with the
Polícia Judiciária.
I have a duty...'

'You have a duty, Inspector Coelho,' he said, quietly, agreeing with me that far. 'You have a patriotic duty, which now, is to keep quiet. A result has been achieved and it is the correct one and you must leave it that way.'

'I missed that result,' I said. 'I wasn't aware of anybody winning anything. Did I lose? I feel as if I lost.'

They leaned forward on their elbows and looked at each other across me. The one who didn't speak closed his eyes momentarily.

'We have a scapegoat,' said the talker.

'The Banco de Oceano e Rocha?'

He nodded to see if that was going to be enough.

'There's a police officer in there who might never wake up again,' I said. 'I think his parents might want to know what patriotic duty their son has been involved in.'

'You're the
Inspector Dourado,'
he said, sticking it in. 'You should know what it's about.'

'I'll start then,' I said. 'Nazi gold ... now you finish.'

He sighed and looked around the dark patch of lawn.

'All the neutral countries during the Second World War,' he said, clasping his hands, 'are being asked to give their pound of flesh. You might have noticed that some Swiss banks recently awarded $1.25 billion to the victims of the Holocaust. The Banco de Oceano e Rocha has an estimated worth of $2.3 billion. We think we now have the potential to be generous.'

'Miguel Rodrigues,' I said, 'there's a guy who ran out of friends.'

The man unclasped his hands and showed me they were empty.

'Those gold bars,' he said, 'with their little swastika stamp on them, next to your sweet face. That wasn't just a publicity stunt for the
Polícia Judiciária.
That has saved us a lot of grief. That showed the world that we'd found the pound of flesh and we were prepared to surrender it. You've got to admit, Inspector Coelho, there's some justice in it.'

'In that it's come full circle, through the Nazis who stole it in the first place, through Lehrer, through Felsen, through Abrantes and right the way round to ... if not the original owners of the gold, then their families at least,' I said. 'Yes, I can see the justice in that but I'm concerned about the method.'

'Nothing in this world is what it seems,' said the man, touching
my shoulder and indicating with a look that, as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

'And Lourenço Gonçalves?' I asked, to clear up that loose end for JoJó Silva.

'He's a happy man, Inspector, but he won't be coming back to Portugal.'

'Sold his soul to the devil ... or shall we call him Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira?'

'You have to leave Dr Oliveira alone, otherwise it could all go very badly wrong,' he said, severely, meaning it.

'The sacred cow,' I said.

They looked at me with the dead eyes of men who have made things go very badly wrong before.

'I'd like to speak to him.'

'I don't think so.'

'I'm not going to
do
anything to him,' I said. 'I'd just like to speak to him ... clear a few points up.'

'Have we reached an understanding?'

'We have as long as I can speak to him for ten minutes.'

The silent one got up, took a mobile out of his pocket and walked off. He made two calls, packed up his phone and we left.

They drove me to the lawyer's office in the Chiado in a black Mercedes. We parked and walked down some steps of
calçada
under dry, rustling trees. They buzzed on an unmarked door and we were let in. We walked up to the first floor. They searched me very intrusively and fed me through the door.

I went into a dimly-lit anteroom and on to a corridor. Dr Oliveira was standing at the end of it smiling, immaculately suited. He had his hand out showing me the door of his office, as friendly as if he was my lawyer and I still owed him a big bill.

His office was wood-panelled, with English hunting prints of red-coated men dashing about with great futility and bugling. I sat in a black leather chair which put me at a marginal height disadvantage to him on the other side of his green leather inlaid desk. He leaned back and waited.

'Where is Lourenço Gonçalves by the way?' I asked, just to get started.

'California,' he said. 'He wanted to be somewhere where the sun always shines.'

'I suppose he could have ended up in the foundations of an apartment building around the Expo site. There might have been some propriety in that.'

Dr Oliveira breathed in and closed his eyes as if he was thinking beautiful thoughts to keep the nasty ones away.

'You have some questions, apparently,' he said.

I wrestled with the one question which would give me what I wanted to know, but I couldn't get it out. I was the rummy player who didn't know which cards my opponent was collecting. I came in on a tangent.

'You knew about
Senhor
Felsen from your first job working for Joaquim Abrantes ... writing him out of the bank's statutes. Did you know why you were doing that?'

'He was a convicted criminal.'

'But did you know why Abrantes had him put away?'

'Not at the time.'

'That only came out when you went back to
Senhor
Felsen?'

'He came to me after he got out of prison. Pedro wouldn't talk to him. He found out that I was the lawyer who'd drawn up the new statutes. He told me his story which I dismissed as fantastic at the time.'

'But you went back to him after...'

'Yes,' he cut in hard.

'When did you find out that Manuel Abrantes had raped your wife?'

'Raped
her?' he said, digging deep into the question.

'Isn't that what happened,
Senhor Doutor?'

'If he'd raped her, Inspector, she would have told me, wouldn't she? She wouldn't have waited until I looked down on a child I knew instantly was not my own to ... surely she would have told her husband, Inspector.'

I couldn't tell if there was some madness at play here. Did he actually believe that his wife had consented or was he using the skewed logic of the cuckold to justify his actions?

'Did your wife say she'd been raped?'

'Pah!' he said, and threw his head round to one of the hunting prints, refusing to look at me—not accepting any more questions on that subject.

'What did
Senhor
Felsen know about your ... scheme?' I asked.

'He was the key,' he said, eyes back on me, riveting. 'I knew a lot from having worked with Joaquim Abrantes but I never knew about the gold. He never spoke about it and Pedro, like a good son, didn't either.'

'So you didn't know about the two remaining bars.'

'Luck...' he said.

'He also told you about Maria Antónia Medinas.'

Dr Oliveira chewed on his thumbnail and nodded.

'How did you approach António Borrego?'

'Like we did everybody ... through Lourenço Gonçalves.'

'When did you decide to use your daughter as bait?'

'My
daughter?'

'Catarina ... Oliveira,' I added.

'Gonçalves reported that they were using the same
pensão.
He investigated further and found that Abrantes was always in the adjacent room when she was in the
pensão.
Later on he went into that room and found the mirror. The plan evolved from that situation.'

'Didn't Gonçalves find it difficult to persuade António to kill the girl?'

'I was surprised he killed her. I can only think that something went wrong, that she must have seen his face and he was forced to strangle her. I'm not sure how Gonçalves put the plan to Borrego in the first place, but he told me that once Borrego knew who she was, once he knew the girl's connection to Miguel Rodrigues, then I think Borrego became a difficult man to control. I don't think he was quite balanced. Manuel Abrantes
had
killed his wife and unborn child.'

'Did anyone speak to Borrego afterwards?'

'Gonçalves ... when he went to pick up the clothes.'

'Didn't he ask Borrego what had happened?'

'Borrego's version of events was that he'd followed them into the Monsanto park. He saw the Mercedes leave the road. He parked up and walked through the trees. He saw the car rocking, heard...' he cleared his throat, '...heard the girl shouting out. Then Abrantes got out of the car, opened the passenger door, dragged her out and left her on the ground. Borrego waited for the car to leave and...'

'And what?' I asked, determined to make him say it, make him say everything.

'And he hit her.'

'With what?'

'He hit her on the head with a hammer, Inspector. You know this. Now let's...'

'In the fifteen years that you shared the same house as Catarina you didn't once feel any paternal...'

'She was a constant reminder, Inspector,' he said, slowly.

'Of what ... your disappointment, your...?'

'Let's move along, Inspector. I agreed to ten minutes.'

'If you didn't expect Borrego to kill Catarina, what did you expect of him?'

He played the edge of the table with his fingertips ... a sonata to clear his mind.

'And the Minister of Internal Administration,' I said, 'what did ... what does he know?'

'He's a politician and a very successful one. Results, like getting elected for instance, are important. How they are achieved ... not so interesting. He was only concerned with the delivery of Miguel Rodrigues' disgraced head.'

'Yes, I suppose that was an important factor ... that he was disgraced.'

'We didn't want him to have anywhere to hide.'

We sat in silence while I tried to heave the question over my larynx. Dr Oliveira doodled with his mind.

'You asked about Felsen before,' he said. 'About his involvement. He wasn't involved in any of this ... business. He was important, of course, because you had to find him. You had to extract his story but he ... he's a very old man now. His mind's only really up to telling and retelling the story of his life in its many versions.'

'He had the documents though.., they were important.'

'Yes, I knew that ... he'd shown them to me.'

'So he was very important to this ... this intrigue of yours. Very important.'

'Yes,' he said, and looked at me. 'Is there a question here, Inspector?'

'How could you guarantee that I'd find Felsen?' I asked, my palms running with sweat, my heart batting against my ribs.

A frown shot across his brow, faster than a lizard across a hot road.

'You tell me,' he said, his brain rattling through the permutations.

I tried again, a little more direct this time.

'How did Luísa Madrugada make the Felsen connection?'

'Ah!' he said, grasping the matter now. 'Now I see. No, Inspector, she was not involved. Don't worry yourself on that score. Ask her ... ask her about some interesting notes ... pointers she found in the books that she was reading at the Biblioteca Nacional, but...'

'Was that luck as well? That the investigating officer should have an affair with...'

'You don't
have
to believe me. It's no concern of mine,' he said. 'I would have made sure you found Felsen, whether it was in Luísa Madrugada's bed or not. And, Inspector, don't blame her for not telling you about those ... ah ... vital clues. I'm sure she loves you—and lovers, especially in the beginning, want to look at their best for each other.'

'Something that you would know about,
Senhor Doutor
,' I said.

'I?'

'A woman always wants to look at her best on her wedding day, Teresa was no exception.'

It shut something down in him. Lights went out in his face, the source of his mild affability dried up and was replaced with that fierceness, that intellectual fierceness I'd seen in his study in Cascais.

'It's easily forgotten, Inspector, that history is not what you read in books. It's a personal thing, and people are vengeful creatures, which is why history will never teach us anything.'

'You got your revenge, I can see that, and you ... facilitated the revenge of others—António Borrego, Klaus Felsen, even Jorge Raposo had his half-hour...'

'... and the Jewish people,' he said. 'Don't forget them. They will finally get their property back.'

'If you think that that is any justification for you,
Senhor Doutor
Oliveira, to conduct your own, personal balancing of the vagaries of history by punishing your late wife and murdering her illegitimate daughter, then you must be one of two things—evil or mad. Which are you?'

He leaned forward across his desk, neck dipped, eyes as bright and all-seeing as an eagle's over its territory.

'We are all mad,' he said.

'I only feel it when I'm in your company,' I said, walking to the door.

'We are all mad, Inspector, for the simple reason that we don't know why we exist and this...' he waved his hand at the tissue of existence before him, 'this life is how we distract ourselves so that we don't have to think about things too difficult for us to comprehend.'

'There are other ways of distracting yourself, Dr Oliveira.'

'Some of us, perhaps, have more recherché tastes.'

'Yes, I suppose the
frisson
was quite substantial for you—the knowledge that Miguel Rodrigues had sodomized his own daughter before António Borrego cracked her skull open and strangled her.'

He swivelled his chair away from me and faced the window. The leather scoop rocked him.

I closed the door, went down the lighted corridor, down the wooden stairs and out on to the bone-dry
calçada.
The night was piercingly clear with the freshest air Lisbon would ever smell. There was a thin paring of wind-shaved moon and chestnuts were roasting in the square.

Agente
Carlos Pinto came out of his coma on Friday 2 7th November. Two weeks later they inserted a steel plate in the back of his cranium. On a clear day he's sure that he can hear the Bee Gees coming over the Atlantic. I've assured him it's tinnitus. He was lucky to have a thick skull and, I like to think, that his short, dense, unmanageable hair cushioned the blow.