A Small Death in lisbon (16 page)

'But without the
guias,
' said the
chefe,
'how will I know how many tons you have moved? How will my commission be calculated?'

'You and I will have a meeting with customs once a month.'

The
chefe'
s smile was extended another foot by the joy of his moustache. They shook hands and finished their drinks. The
chefe
opened the door for him and clapped him on the shoulder.

'If you go up to Amêndoa,' he said, 'you should talk to Joaquim Abrantes. He's a very influential man in that area.'

The door closed behind Felsen, leaving him in the gloom of an unlit corridor. He walked slowly out of the building contemplating his first lesson in underestimating the Portuguese. He got into his car and instructed the driver to take him up to Amêndoa in the foothills of the Serra da Estrela.

There was no road up to Amêndoa. It was a rough track of beaten earth with slabs of granite showing through, lined on either side by broom and heather, and then later and higher, pine forest. The rain had stopped but the cloud was still hanging and drifting lower down
the mountains to the treetops until it sucked in the car itself. The driver rarely got out of second gear. Men appeared on the track. Cowled like monks, they wore split sacks over their heads. Grey and silent, they moved to the side, without turning.

Felsen sat in the middle of the back seat feeling every metre between himself and the rough civilization of Guarda lengthening behind him. He'd mentioned the Middle Ages in the conference but this was more like the Iron Age or earlier. He wouldn't have been surprised to see people hoeing with bone. He hadn't seen a mule or a donkey yet. All the carrying was done on the shoulders by men, and on the head by women.

The car came up on to the flat. There was no sign announcing Amêndoa. Granite block houses appeared out of the mist, a woman in black shuffled across the road. The driver pulled over at the only house on two levels in the village. They got out. There was an open door at street level. An old woman was working amongst sacks of grain, boxes for salting hams, cured cheeses, racks of potatoes, bunches of herbs, buckets and tools. The driver asked for Joaquim Abrantes. The woman left her work, locked the door with knobbed and crooked fingers, and took the two men up the granite steps on the outside of the house to a porch supported by two granite pillars. She left them there and went into the house.

A few minutes later she reopened the door and Felsen ducked into the dark house. The driver went back to the car. A fire was smoking heavily in a large fireplace emitting no heat. As his eyes got used to the lack of light he began to pick out an old man sitting in the fireplace. There were
chouriços
hanging along a pole above his head. The woman had taken a rag out of her pocket and was wiping the old man's eyes. He moaned quietly as if disturbed from sleep and coming into a world of pain. She left the room. A throat, somewhere in the house, coughed and spat. The woman returned with two small clay lamps burning olive oil. She put one on the table and pointed Felsen into a chair. Some of the slate tiles were visible through the laths between the rafters of the roof. She left the other lamp in a wall niche, wiped the old man's eyes again and left. The two windows in the room were permanently closed up to the weather by heavy wooden shutters.

After some minutes the double doors behind Felsen shuddered open and a short and very wide man engineered himself through the
gap sideways. He roared something to the back of the house and then offered his hand which gripped Felsen's with a mechanical hardness. He sat resting his forearms across the table, the rough hands, with split nails, hung off square wrists. The body under the heavy jacket was thick-boned and powerful. Felsen recognized something in him, and knew from that first moment, that this was the man who was going to help him control the Beira.

A girl in a headscarf brought in a bottle of
aguardente
and two glasses. The Portuguese's face was still in the glow from the oil lamp and as big as a landscape opencast-mined. His hair was swept back in a thick black and grey lava flow, his brow and nose like an escarpment with an exposed ridge of granite, his eye sockets and cheekbones like craters. The whole geography of the face was hardened to bleakness by years of cold dry wind. It was impossible to tell his age—anything from thirty-five to fifty-five. But whatever the minerals he had in the bones of his face, they were not extended to his teeth, which were blackened and worn, sheered off and yellowing or just missing. Joaquim Abrantes poured the pale alcohol into the glasses. They drank.

The girl returned with bread, cured ham, cheese and
chouriço.
She laid a knife in front of Abrantes. The girl's face was very young, her eyes light-coloured, blue or green, it was difficult to say in the yellow oily light. A strand of blonde hair hung down from her headscarf. She was prettier than anything Felsen had seen since leaving Lisbon, but young, no older than fifteen, but strangely, with the body, the full form, of a grown woman.

Abrantes watched the German looking at the girl. He moved the ham in front of him and handed him the bread and knife. He ate. The ham was perfectly sweet.

'Bolotas
,' said Abrantes, acorns. 'They make the meat sweet, don't you think?'

'I haven't seen many oak trees around here. It's all broom and pine.'

'They have them away from the mountains. I bring them up here. I have the sweetest pigs in the Beira.'

They ate and drank more. The
chouriço
was lumpy with chunks of fat. The cheese soft, sharp and salty.

'I heard you were coming to see me,' said Abrantes.

'I don't know how.'

'News gets through to us up here. We've even heard about your war.'

'So you know why I'm here.'

'To investigate murder,' said Abrantes, his shoulders shaking, metal chinking in his jacket. The man laughing.

'Murder interests me, that's true.'

'I don't know why you should be interested in the death of a few Portuguese peasants.'

'And the GNR officer.'

'That was an accident. He fell off his horse. These things happen on difficult terrain,' said Abrantes. 'And anyway, what's interesting? Isn't there enough killing in your war to keep you occupied without having to come to the Beira?'

'It's interesting because it means that someone is controlling the situation.'

'And this is a situation you would, perhaps, like to control yourself.'

'This is your country,
Senhor
Abrantes. They are your people.'

The glasses were refilled. Felsen offered a cigarette. Abrantes refused, not ready to accept anything yet. Felsen admired the psychology.

'Senhor
Abrantes,' said Felsen. 'I'm going to make you a very rich man.'

Joaquim Abrantes turned his glass on the wooden table as if he was screwing it in. He didn't respond. Maybe he'd heard it before.

'You and I,
Senhor
Abrantes, are going to corner the market in every scrap of uncontracted wolfram in this area.'

'Why should I work with you when I do very well myself and ... if you can make me rich, can't the British do the same? Perhaps I'd prefer to play the market. It has only one direction as far as I can see.'

'The British will never be in the market for as much tonnage as us.'

'They still buy. They buy to close you out.'

'What do you think of the wolfram price now?' asked Felsen.

'It is high.'

'Are you buying?'

Abrantes rearranged himself in his seat.

'I have stocks,' he said. 'The price is going up.'

'If, as you say, the wolfram price has one direction, then you're
going to sell high to buy higher ... that is, if you want to stay in the market.'

Abrantes' darker eye, the one away from the light, looked over the granite ridge of his nose.

'What are you proposing
Senhor
Felsen?'

'I'm proposing to increase your capacity to trade wolfram for my account.'

'You have the money, I have no doubt, but do you have any idea how you can do it?'

'Perhaps you know the country better than I do.'

Abrantes thumbed a lump of bread and cheese into his mouth and swilled it back with the
aguardente.

'A lot of the wolfram that's brought to me is not pure,' he said. 'There's always quartz and pyrites in it. If we set up companies to clean the wolfram we will attract more of the mineral and guarantee the quality.'

Felsen nodded.

'I'd want financial control,' said Abrantes. 'I don't want to have to ask permission for every rock I buy and I'd want a share of the profits and if there are no profits a guaranteed percentage of the turnover.'

'How much?'

'Fifteen percent.'

Felsen stood and went towards the door.

'You might be able to make that on your own account with small volume but I can't offer anywhere near that for the volumes I'm talking about.'

'What are these volumes?'

'Thousands rather than hundreds of kilos.'

The Portuguese balanced that in his head.

'If I go with you I'm out of the market...'

'I'm not stopping you from trading for your own account.'

'How long will you be in the market? I have no guarantee that you'll...'

'Senhor
Abrantes. This war ... this war that we need all this wolfram for, will change everything. Do you know what's happening in Europe? Germany controls everything from Scandinavia to North Africa, from France to Russia. The British are finished. Germany will control the economy of Europe and, if you work with me, you will be a friend of Germany. So to answer your question,
Senhor
Abrantes,
we will be in the market for your lifetime, the lifetime of your children and theirs and more.'

'Ten percent.'

'That's not a percentage that the business can bear,' said Felsen and reached for the door.

'Seven.'

'I don't think you understand where this business is going,
Senhor
Abrantes. If you did, you'd know that a single percent would make you the richest man in the Beira.'

'Come, sit down,' he said. 'We can discuss this. We must eat. You must know how important it is for us to eat by now.'

'I know it,' said Felsen and sat down.

The girl brought in a thick stew of pork, liver and black pudding. She put more bread on the table and a jug of red wine. The two men ate alone. Abrantes told Felsen the dish was called
Sarrabulho
and that it was the best thing the girl had learnt from her mother.

Joaquim Abrantes might have been a peasant once but he wasn't one any more. This didn't mean, as Felsen found out during their discussion towards an agreement on volumes and percentages, that he could read or write. It meant that his father had farmed land and between them they'd acquired more. He had the house which was joined to two others at the back and to the side. They had livestock. He appreciated good food and drink. He had his young wife. He was a strange brute. On the few occasions that their eyes met, Felsen had the same feeling as he did looking into a bull's head. There was something big, private and planetary going on inside the man's brain. He understood surprising things about business and numbers but had no concept of maps or distances unless he'd travelled them. He had an instinct for power. He didn't like anybody except his old, half-blind father. Women did not speak to him.

After lunch he excused himself. Felsen stood and stretched. Through the double doors he saw into a parlour where the mother was crocheting and beyond that into the kitchen. Abrantes was standing behind the girl who was leaning with both hands on the table. He had his hand up her skirt. He straightened the front of his trousers and looked down as if he might mount her there and then. He thought better of it and went outside and down the back stairs.

3rd July 1941, Guarda, Beira Baixa, Portugal

Felsen was sweating at his small table by the shuttered window in the airless restaurant, which had fans but not working ones. The shutters kept out the devastating heat, which blasted off the cobbles and stone façades of the buildings, but did not improve the stuffiness in the room. The restaurant contained fifteen men split between two tables near the door, and him alone at the other end. The men were loud,
volframistas,
with too much money from their mineral finds and too much brandy in their guts. They all had
chapéus ricos,
which were the same as poor man's hats but more expensive and they all had pens in their jacket breast pockets even though they were illiterate to a man. The restaurant had been quiet enough until they'd run out of the best wine in the house and the
volframistas
had taken to drinking brandy in the same quantity as wine. Their rivals on the next table matched them bottle for bottle. The insults were piling high, like washing-up in the sink, and they were threatening to soak blood into the bare, rough wooden floors.

Joaquim Abrantes came in and shouted at the table of fat sweating men nearest the door. They calmed. The other
volframistas
continued a one-way trade in insults. Abrantes turned his head slowly on them and gave them a smile with some brand-new dentures. They were more sinister than the wrecking rocks he'd had before and the men shut up.

Abrantes sat down opposite Felsen in his new suit. He was learning the value of a smile in business with northern Europeans, but he hadn't quite mastered the new dentures he'd had fitted in Lisbon at Felsen's expense the month before.

Felsen had just flown back from Berlin having had a meeting with the uglier side of Gruppenführer Lehrer. On the 20th June Lehrer had been to see Fritz Todt, the Armaments Minister, who had been
sick and grey with worry at the consequences for his production line of the invasion of Russia, which was due to start on 22nd June. Lehrer had told Felsen that the wolfram stocks were pitiful and gave him a vivid description of another meeting he'd had with the SS-Reichsführer Himmler, who'd trampled his balls into the carpet. Felsen doubted this. He'd seen Himmler at a rally in Munich before the war. The man was more of a bean-counter than a ball-trampler.