A Small Death in lisbon (2 page)

'Me?' I said to her quietly. 'I think it was the past all tangled up in it.'

She licked a finger and wiped the lipstick off my cheek, her eyes brim-full for a moment.

'You're right,' said António, suddenly between us, 'history's a weight, a dead weight too ... isn't that right
Senhor
Rodrigues?'

Senhor
Rodrigues belched politely into his hand, not used to proletarian drink.

'History repeats itself,' he said and even António laughed—the communist who can smell the pork meat of a capitalist when they're roasting him as far away as the Alentejo.

'You're right,' said António. 'History's only a weight to those that
lived it. For the next generation it's no heavier than a few school books and forgotten with a glass of beer and the latest CD.'

'Eh, António,' I said, 'have a beer yourself. It's Friday night, tomorrow's your saint's day, the poor people of Paço de Arcos are nearly six million better off and I'm back on the drink. The new history.'

António smiled and said: To the future.'

We all went out to eat that night, even
Senhor
Rodrigues who might not have been used to the metal tables and chairs but appreciated the food. It was the meal my stomach had growled over for six months.
Ameijoas à Bulhão Pato,
clams in white wine, garlic and fresh coriander,
robalo grelhado,
grilled sea bass caught off the cliffs at Cabo da Roca that morning,
borrego assado,
Alentejo lamb cooked until it's falling apart. Red wine from Borba. Coffee as strong as a mulatto's kiss. And to finish
aguardente amarela,
the yellow fiery one.

Senhor
Rodrigues left for his house in Cascais at the
aguardente
stage. Olivia went to a club in Cascais with a bunch of her friends soon after. I gave her the taxi fare home. I drank two more
amarelinhas
and went to bed with a litre of water inside me and two aspirins, the pillow soft and cool against my naked burning cheeks.

I woke in the night for ten seconds, confused in the darkness and feeling as big and as solid as the central pillar in a motorway bridge. I'd dreamt luridly but one image stuck—a cliff-top walk in the dark of an evening, a sheer drop close by somewhere, the sea roar out there, its saltine prickle bursting up from the rocks below. Fear, apprehension and excitement rose up and I fell into more sleep.

It was at about that time that a girl started to make her dent in the sand no more than a few hundred metres away from where I was sleeping. Her eyes wide open, she moonbathed to a night full of stars, her blood slack, her skin cold and hard as fresh tuna.

Saturday, 13th June 199–, Paço de Areas, near Lisbon

Plates were crashing on to a marble floor. Plates were crashing and smashing and endlessly shattering on the marble floor. I surfaced into the brutal noise, the harshest reality there is, of a phone going off in a hangover at 6.00 a.m. I wrenched the handset to my ear. The blissful silence, the faint sea hiss of a distant mobile. My boss Eng. Jaime Leal Narciso gave me a good morning and I tried to find some moisture in my beak to reply.

'Zé?' he asked.

'Yes, it's me,' I said, which came out in a whisper as if I had his wife next to me.

'You're all right then,' he said, but didn't wait for the reply. 'Look, the body of a young girl's been found on the beach at Paço de Arcos and I want...'

Those words trampolined me off the bed, the phone jack yanked the handset from my grip and I cannoned off the door frame into the hall. I thundered down the distressed strip of carpet and wrenched the door open. Her clothes lay in a track from the door to the bed—clumpy big-heeled shoes, black silk top, lilac shirt, black bra, black flares. Olivia was twisted into her sheet face down, her bare arms and shoulders spread, her black hair, as soft and shiny as sable, splashed across the pillow.

I drank heavily in the bathroom until my belly was taut with water. I snatched the phone to my ear and lay down on the bed again.

'Bom dia, Senhor Engenheiro,'
I said, addressing him by his degree in science, as was usual.

'If you'd given me two seconds I'd have told you she was blonde.'

'I should have checked last night but...' I paused, synapses clashed painfully, 'why are you calling me at six in the morning to tell me about a body on the beach? Throw your mind back to the weekend roster and you'll find I'm off duty.'

'Well, the point is you're two hundred metres from the situation and Abílio, who
is
on duty, lives in Seixal which as you know ... It would be...'

'I'm in no condition to...' I said, my brain still blundering around.

'Ah yes. I forgot. How was it? How are you?'

'Cooler about the face.'

'Good.'

'More fragile in the head.'

'They say it could get up to forty degrees today,' he said, not listening.

'Where are you, sir?'

'On my mobile.'

A good answer.

'There's some good news, Zé,' he said, quickly. 'I'm sending someone to help you.'

'Who's that?'

'A young guy. Very keen. Good for leg work.'

'Whose son is he?'

'I didn't catch that?'

'You know I don't like to tread on anybody's toes.'

'This line's breaking up,' he shouted. 'Look, he's very capable but he could use some experience. I can't think of anybody better.'

'Does that mean nobody else would have him?'

'His name is Carlos Pinto,' he said, ignoring my question. 'I want him to see your approach. Your very particular approach. You know, you have this ability with people. They talk to you. I want him to see how you operate.'

'Does he know where he's going?'

'I've told him to meet you in that communist's bar you like so much. He's bringing the latest missing persons printout.'

'Will he recognize me?'

'I've told him to look for someone who's just had his beard shaved off after twenty-odd years. An interesting test don't you think?'

The signal finally broke up. He knew. Narciso knew. They all knew. Even if I'd been a stick insect those scales would still have come out at eighty-two kilos. You can't trust anybody these days, not your own daughter, not your own family, not even the
Polícia Judiciária.

I showered and dried off in front of the mirror. Old eyes, new face looked back at me. Having just levered myself over forty maybe I was too old for this kind of change and yet, just as my wife had said I would, I looked five years younger without the beard.

Sunlight was beginning to colour the blue into the ocean just visible from the bathroom window. A fishing smack pushed through it and for the first time in a year I had that same surge of hope, a feeling that today could be the first day of a different life.

I dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt (short sleeves lack gravitas), a light grey suit and a pair of black brogues. I selected one of the thirty ties Olivia had made for me, a quiet one, not one that a pathologist would like to trap in a petri dish. I went to the top of the shabby wooden stairs and had a momentary feeling of a man who's just been told to take a grand piano down on his own.

I left the house, my crumbling mansion which I inherited from my parents at a peppercorn rent, and headed for the cafe. The plaster was flaking off the garden wall which was reckless with unpruned bougainvillea. I made a mental note to let the riot continue.

From the public gardens I looked back at the faded pink house whose long windows had lost all their white paint and thought that if I didn't have to go and inspect bludgeoned, brutalized bodies I could persuade myself that I was a retired count whose annuity was in a vice.

I was nervous, part of me willing this day not to proceed to my first meeting with a new person and my face naked—all that sizing up, all that accommodation, all that ... and no mask too.

A corner of pepper trees in the gardens whispered to each other like parents who didn't want to wake the kids. Beyond them, António, who never slept, who hadn't slept, he once told me, since 1964, was winding down his red canvas awning which sported only the name of his bar and no advertising for beer or coffee.

'I didn't expect to see you before midday,' he said.

'Nor did I,' I said. 'But at least you recognized me.'

I followed him in and he started the coffee grinder which was like a wirewool scrub on my eyeballs. Yesterday's Polaroid was already up on his memorial wall. I didn't recognize myself at first. The young-looking one between the fat man and the pretty girl. Except that Olivia wasn't looking very girlish either, more ... more of a...

'I thought you were off today,' said António.

'I was but ... a body's been found on the beach. Anyone been in yet?'

'No,' he said, looking out vaguely in the direction of the beach. 'Washed up?'

'The body? I don't know.'

Standing in the doorway wearing a dark suit which had been cut in Salazar's time and had knuckle-brushing sleeves was a young guy. He approached the bar stiffly as if it was his first time on TV and asked for a
bica,
the one-inch shot of caffeine which adrenalizes a few million Portuguese hearts every morning.

He watched the black and tan mixture trickle into the cups. António turned the grinder off and the golfball cleaner effect on my eyeballs eased.

The young guy put two sugar sachets into his coffee and asked for a third. I flicked him one of mine. He stirred it lengthily to a syrup.

'You must be Inspector
Senhor Doutor
José Afonso Coelho,' he said, not looking at me but glancing up at the hammer and sickle António kept behind the bar. His relics.

'Engenheiro
Narciso will be pleased,' I said, glancing around the empty bar. 'How did you guess?'

His head flicked round. He must have been mid-twenties but he looked no different than he had done at sixteen. His dark brown eyes connected with mine. He was irritated.

'You look vulnerable,' he said, and nodded that into me for effect.

António's eyebrows changed places.

'An interesting observation
agente
Pinto,' I said grimly. 'Most people would have commented on the whiteness of my cheeks. And there's no need to call me
Doutor.
It doesn't apply.'

'I thought you had a degree in Modern Languages.'

'But from London University, and there you don't get called a doctor until you have a PhD. Just call me Zé or Inspector.'

We shook hands. I liked him. I didn't know why I liked him. Narciso thought I liked everybody but he had that confused in his mind with 'getting on with people' which he couldn't do himself because he was colder and rougher-skinned than a shark with blood on its radar. The fact was, I'd only ever loved one woman and the people I'd call close were in single figures. And now Carlos. What was it about him? That suit? Old-fashioned, too big and wool in summer said no vanity ... and no money. His hair? Black, durable, disobedient, short as a trooper's said, to me anyway: serious and dependable. His irritated look said: defiant, touchy. His first words? Direct, candid, perceptive said: uncompromising. A difficult combination for a policeman. I could see why nobody else would have him.

'I didn't know about London,' he said.

'My father was over there,' I said. 'So what
do
you know about?'

'Your father was an army officer. You spent a lot of time in Africa. In Guinea. You've been seventeen years on the force, eight of them as a homicide detective.'

'Have you accessed my file?'

'No. I asked
Engenheiro
Narciso. He didn't tell me everything,' he said, sucking in his thick coffee. 'He didn't say what rank your father was for instance.'

António's eyebrows switched back again and a glint of partisan interest came from deep in his eye sockets. A political question: was my father one of the younger officers who started the 1974 revolution, or old guard? Both men waited.

'My father was a colonel,' I said.

'How did he end up in London?'

'Ask him,' I said, nodding to António, no appetite for this.

'How long have you got?' he asked, gripping the edge of the bar.

'No time at all,' I said. 'There's a dead body waiting for us on the beach.'

We crossed the gardens to the Marginal and went through the underpass to a small car park in front of the Clube Desportivo de Paço de Arcos. There was a dried-fish and diesel smell amongst the old boats lying on their sides or propped up on tyres amongst rusted trailers and rubbish bins. A halved oil drum was smoking with two planks of wood burning to heat a pan of oil. A couple of fishermen I knew were ignoring the scene and sorting through the marker buoys and crab and lobster pots in front of their corrugated iron work shacks. I nodded and they looked across to the crowd that had already formed even at this early hour.

The line of people that had gathered at the low stone balustrade on the edge of the beach and along the harbour wall were looking down on to the sand. Some broad-backed working women had taken time out to distress themselves over the tragedy, muttering through their fingers:

'
Ai Mãe, coitadinha.
' O mother, poor little thing.

There were four or five
Polícia de Seguranza Pública
boys ignoring the total contamination of the crime scene and talking to two members of the
Polícia Marítima.
Another two hours and there'd be girls on the beach to chat up and then not even the
Polícia Marítima
would have had a look in. I introduced myself and asked them who'd found the body. They pointed to a fisherman sitting further along the harbour wall. The position of the body above the flattened sand of the highest tide mark told me that the victim hadn't been washed up but dumped, thrown, from just about where I was standing, off the harbour wall. It was a three-metre drop.

The
Polícia Marítima
were satisfied that the body hadn't been washed up but wanted it confirmed from the pathologist that there was no water in the lungs. They gave me authority to start my investigation. I sent the PSP men along the harbour wall to move the onlookers back to the road.