A Small Death in Lisbon

by Robert Wilson

  '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.

  Chapter XI

  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.

  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.