A Small Death in lisbon (47 page)

António waited for the courtyard to empty before he moved Alex out into a freedom neither of them had known for nine years. They skirted the euphoria and walked down the hill into Caxias. They didn't have to go far. They got a free ride to Paço de Arcos from a tearful cab driver.

The cab dropped them off at Alex's bar next to the public gardens. The tiled sign set into the wall was still there. It showed a blue line-drawing of the Búgio lighthouse and underneath
O Farol.
Alex tapped the lighted window of the house next door. A woman sounding old and tired answered.

It's me,
Dona
Emília,' said Alex.

The toothless woman, dressed in black, opened the door and peered out into the night, her eyes not so good any more. She saw Alex and grabbed his face with bent and twisted fingers and kissed him on both cheeks, harder and harder as if she was kissing him back into existence. She produced the key to the bar from her front apron as if she'd been prepared nine years for this moment. She brought them candles from her kitchen.

Alex unlocked the bar door and António sat him down on a metal chair next to a wooden table in the dark. They lit the candles.

'There should be something behind the bar,' said Alex. 'Nice and mature by now.'

António found a bottle of
aguardente
and a couple of dusty glasses which he blew into. He poured out the pale yellow liquid. They drank to freedom and the alcohol set off a coughing fit in Alex.

'We'll go to the notary tomorrow,' said Alex.

'What for?'

'I want to make sure that when I go, this place is yours.'

'Eh,
homem,
don't talk like that.'

'There's one condition.'

'Look, forget it, you're...'

'Pour another drink and listen to me,' said Alex.

'I'm listening.'

'You have to change the name of the bar to
A Bandeira Vermelha.
That way nobody will forget.'

***

On 2nd May 1974 Joaquim Abrantes, Pedro, Manuel and Pica had lunch in a small restaurant in the centre of Madrid. It was agreed that Manuel would fly to'São Paulo in Brazil and open a branch of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. Joaquim and Pedro would go to Lausanne and track the political situation in Portugal from there. Pica wanted to know why they couldn't do it from Paris, but nobody paid any attention to her.

On the 3rd May 1974 just as Manuel Abrantes' flight from Madrid to Buenos Aires was leaving the West African coast, thirty-six ex-PIDE/DGS
agentes
made themselves available to the new regime for traffic control and vehicle registration.

Tuesday, 16th June 1998, Polícia Judiciária, Saldanha, Lisbon

There was a rush on at the office that morning which did not include me. Narciso's secretary was waiting for me in the corridor and led me straight up to see him but, of course, he wasn't ready and the five minutes that his secretary had promised turned into twenty. She wouldn't let me leave.

At 08.30 I was standing in front of Narciso on the other side of his desk. He was standing too, with his chair pushed back to the wall, his hands spread wide apart gripping the edge of his desk as if he was going to tip it over me. Emotions made rare appearances in his face but that morning there was one—anger. Not the eruptive, volcanic type, more the penetrating, gelid variety.

'I haven't seen your revised report yet.'

'I haven't had the opportunity to get behind my desk this morning.'

'I also haven't seen the report on what happened yesterday.'

'For the same reason,
Senhor Engenheiro.'

'But I
have
already heard things,' he said, 'about you and
agente
Pinto putting yourselves at risk and the destruction of all evidence in a fire.'

'That was unfortunate.'

'What have you learnt from the fire department?'

'I haven't...'

'I've heard a taped interview with the suspect of such glaring incompetence that I can't believe the two of you have got your minds properly on the job.'

'Our minds are very firmly on the job,
Senhor Engenheiro.'

'What time did you leave this building yesterday?'

'Something like quarter-past-four, we were working the bus queues on Avenida Duque de Ávila, which was where the girl was last seen, getting into...'

'And you didn't come back to the office.'

'I sent
agente
Pinto...'

'And where did you go?'

'I had nothing further...'

'You were seen going into an apartment building just up the road here in Rua Actor Taborda.'

'The victim's teacher lives there.'

'How long did you spend with her?'

Silence.

'I can't hear you, Inspector.'

'Four hours.'

'Four hours! And what did you have to discuss over four hours?'

'I'm seeing her privately, sir.'

Narciso hardly missed a beat. He'd planned this through to the end.

'Do you have any idea of the pressure I'm under?' he asked.

'I'm sure it's considerable.'

'You asked me to make sure that Inspector Abílio Gomes found out where Dr Aquilino Oliveira was at the time of his wife's death.'

'It was just a thought.'

'He was having dinner in the private residence of the Minister of Internal Administration.'

I shut up. The situation was not calling for my observations on the friendship between the lawyer and the minister. Narciso dropped his head and stared into his desk top.

'I'm taking you off the case,' he said, quietly. 'Abílio Gomes will handle it from now on. I want you to go down to Alcântara and investigate a body that's been found in a rubbish bin at the back of the Wharf One club.'

'But
Senhor Engenheiro
Narciso, you haven't...'

'You are in no position to defend your professionalism on the Catarina Sousa Oliveira case. "Investigating officer has affair with witness",' he said, stretching his hand out into the possible banner headline in the
Correio da Manhã.
'Now take
agente
Pinto and go down to Alcântara.'

I sat in my office chewing various nails. Carlos had left a note with Lourenço Gonçalves' telephone number and a business address on Avenida Almirante Reis. I tried the number wondering why Narciso had praised me yesterday morning for looking in the wrong direction,
and frozen me out twenty-four hours later just when I was getting somewhere. There was no reply. Carlos came in and sat across the desk. I put the phone down.

'We've got a problem,' he said.

I know.'

'Traffic won't give me the information.'

'We're off the case.'

'Do
they
know that?' he asked, slumping back in his chair.

'Maybe,' I said, and picked up the phone.

I called one of my friends in Traffic who would do favours for me. He put me on hold. Five minutes later he told me the computer had crashed. I hung up.

'We have an internal problem here,' I said.

Carlos looked suddenly bewildered, cold, like a kid on the beach who'd lost his parents. I gave him a résumé of Narciso's conversation.

'What does it mean?'

It means that whereas before we were swimming close to the beach, now the tide has suddenly swept us out over the continental shelf and we've got ten fathoms of dark, cold water underneath us.'

Carlos leaned closer, serious as a headstone.

'What are you talking about?'

I don't know any more.'

It was hot and humid down in the Alcântara docks complex and the body in the rubbish bin was already high enough for people to be holding handkerchiefs to their faces. The photographer had been and gone, and the pathologist, a woman I didn't know, was struggling into a pair of surgical gloves. I took a quick look at the body which was of a male, about eighteen years old, dark-skinned, with black, wavy hair, no fat on him and only wearing a pair of brief burgundy underpants with a smiley face over the genital area. I felt his feet. Soft. The killer had stolen his shoes or somebody else had come along afterwards. The pathologist joined me.

A couple of the staff were finishing cleaning up the nightclub,' she said. 'They emptied the rubbish at five o'clock and by seven when they closed up to leave out the back there, the body was in place. They also told me he's a known male prostitute. Can I move the body?'

I nodded her on. She was fast and thorough. I briefed Carlos on what he had to do and we waited for the pathologist's initial report.

'Right. Cause of death,' she said. 'Severe cerebral haemorrhage caused by savage and multiple blows to the top, back and side of the head. The killer wanted this one unambiguously dead. I'll run an HIV test on the blood, that could be a possible motive. I had a quick look in his rectum and he'd been working. I'll be fuller once I've seen him in my lab.'

I left Carlos with his notebook and dark intelligence and walked to the Alcântara train station. I telephoned my friend in Traffic again while waiting for the train.

'Is your computer still down?'

'Sorry, Zé,' he said.

'Does that mean that it's always going to be down when I call?'

'I can't say.'

I telephoned the lawyer's house and the maid answered. I said I wanted to speak to her. She said she was alone in the house.

I boarded the Cascais train and by 10.00 a.m. I was walking up to the lawyer's house through the old village. I rang the bell. The maid opened the door but Dr Aquilino Oliveira was walking down the corridor behind her.

'Thank you, Mariana,' he said, and ordered her to bring us some coffee. He stood at his desk in his study. I remained standing too.

'I wasn't expecting you, Inspector,' he said. 'I called your office and they told me you were off the case. I was put through to Inspector Abílio Gomes. Not the same calibre as yourself, of course, but no doubt competent. What can I do for you?'

'I came to offer you my condolences. Your wife. It's hard to believe what you've had to go through in the last forty-eight hours.'

He lowered himself slowly into his chair. His eyes didn't leave my face.

'Thank you, Inspector Coelho,' he said. 'I didn't think policemen could afford to care.'

'One of my weaknesses ... but possibly a strength, too.'

'Is that what drives you, Inspector?'

'Yes,' I said, 'that ... and I still have a belief in the sanctity of the truth.'

'You must be a lonely man, Inspector,' he said, which shook me.

'There's the mystery, too,' I said, papering over my unease. 'Humans need mystery.'

'Speak for yourself.'

'Yes, perhaps lawyers and mystery don't go together.'

'Well, we love to mystify ... so I've been told by my clients.'

Mariana brought the coffee in. She poured. We waited. She left.

'Your wife came to see me the night before she died,
Senhor Doutor.
Were you aware of that?'

His eyes came up from his coffee, blinking but galvanized, searching the inside of my head.

'She'd tried to kill herself before, Inspector. Did
you
know that?'

'How many times?'

'Check at the local hospital. They've stomach-pumped her there twice before. The first time Mariana found her just in time. That was about five years ago. The second time I did. Last summer.'

'What did you put these attempts down to?'

'I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know how neuroses work on the human brain. I don't understand chemical imbalances, that kind of thing.'

'A neurosis usually results from an original trauma which the victim is trying to suppress.'

'That sounds about right, Inspector. How do you know such things?'

'My late wife was interested in the works of Carl Jung,' I said. 'Were you aware of anything that could have...'

'Did my...? What did my wife say to you that night?'

'She said your marriage hadn't worked from the beginning. I thought fifteen years was a long time for a relationship not to be working. She seemed to be scared of you and dependent on you. Your small exercise in humiliation at the beginning of the investigation confirmed that.'

'And you don't think
I
was humiliated by her having an affair with a boy ten years her junior, Inspector?' he said, fast and fierce, almost hissing it.

'When did you find out about the lover?'

'I don't remember.'

'Last summer possibly?'

'Yes, yes ... it was last summer.'

'How?'

'I found a receipt for a shirt from a shop I don't use.'

'Did you confront her with it?'

'I watched and waited. The shirt could have been for her brother, after all. I knew it wasn't, but my profession demands that I am certain.'

'So how did you confront her with it?'

The question knocked him back. He tried to cover his reaction by an elaborate alteration of position. It snapped him out of the cosiness of our dialogue. His finger had brushed the truth and found it razor-sharp. His surface temperature dropped quickly to sub-zero.

'None of this is relevant to the investigation of my daughter's death, Inspector. More especially now that you are no longer working on the case.'

'I thought we were just talking.'

He leaned forward and sipped his coffee. He removed a small cigar from a box on his desk. He offered me one. I declined and lit a cigarette of my own. He smoked and uncreased himself. My question burned inside me.

'You were telling me what my wife said to you that night,' he said.

'She said things, very important things, without explaining them and I was very tired after a long day. She said your marriage had never worked but not why. She said you were a powerful man and that you extended that power into your intimate relationships but she didn't say how. She made a very serious allegation but offered no evidence to back it up. It was not...'

'...a conversation with somebody of sound mind,' he finished.

'There were traces of the truth, I thought.'

'What was the serious allegation?'

'She said you were abusing Catarina sexually.'

'Do you believe that?'