Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

He drifted back into sleep. I sat for a moment looking at the brilliant clarity, the purity of cold winter sunshine. The visibility was stunning but hard-edged, unforgiving.

I asked Frau Junge about the lawyer. She said he'd looked after a few things for Senhor Felsen back in the early eighties, but it wasn't for very long.

'He said it was for ten years.'

'He's an old man, but he still draws on his vanity,' she said.

I'd made the connections, now I was brisding for a fight. The lawyer's Cascais house was empty, closed up for the winter. I called at his Lisbon home but nobody was there either. It was late afternoon when I dropped back in at the hospital. Olivia and Carlos' parents were still sitting almost where I'd left them. There was no news, except that two men had been looking for me.

They found me in the corridor outside the toilets, two men in dark blue raincoats. At a glance you might have thought they were clones-something to do with the way they'd been trained.

'Can we talk?' said one of them. 'Outside would be better.'

'Who are you?'

'We're from the Ministry.'

'Which one's that?'

'Let's go outside.'

The three of us, hands jammed into our coat pockets, sat on an ice-cold bench in the dark courtyard of the hospital with lights all around. Only one of them spoke. The other looked around with the wary eye of a hen that knows what's happened to other hens.

'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.