Robert Wilson: A Small Death in Lisbon

'He was the key,' he said, eyes back on me, riveting. 'I knew a lot from having worked with Joaquim Abrantes but I never knew about the gold. He never spoke about it and Pedro, like a good son, didn't either.'

'So you didn't know about the two remaining bars.'

'Luck…' he said.

'He also told you about Maria Antónia Medinas.'

Dr Oliveira chewed on his thumbnail and nodded.

'How did you approach António Borrego?'

'Like we did everybody… through Lourenço Gonçalves.'

'When did you decide to use your daughter as bait?'

'My daughter?'

'Catarina… Oliveira,' I added.

'Gonçalves reported that they were using the same pensão. He investigated further and found that Abrantes was always in the adjacent room when she was in the pensão. Later on he went into that room and found the mirror. The plan evolved from that situation.'

'Didn't Gonçalves find it difficult to persuade António to kill the girl?'

'I was surprised he killed her. I can only think that something went wrong, that she must have seen his face and he was forced to strangle her. I'm not sure how Gonçalves put the plan to Borrego in the first place, but he told me that once Borrego knew who she was, once he knew the girl's connection to Miguel Rodrigues, then I think Borrego became a difficult man to control. I don't think he was quite balanced. Manuel Abrantes had killed his wife and unborn child.'

'Did anyone speak to Borrego afterwards?'

'Gonçalves… when he went to pick up the clothes.'

'Didn't he ask Borrego what had happened?'

'Borrego's version of events was that he'd followed them into the Monsanto park. He saw the Mercedes leave the road. He parked up and walked through the trees. He saw the car rocking, heard…' he cleared his throat, '…heard the girl shouting out. Then Abrantes got out of the car, opened the passenger door, dragged her out and left her on the ground. Borrego waited for the car to leave and…'

'And what?' I asked, determined to make him say it, make him say everything.

'And he hit her.'

'With what?'

'He hit her on the head with a hammer, Inspector. You know this. Now let's…'

'In the fifteen years that you shared the same house as Catarina you didn't once feel any paternal…'

'She was a constant reminder, Inspector,' he said, slowly.

'Of what… your disappointment, your…?'

'Let's move along, Inspector. I agreed to ten minutes.'

'If you didn't expect Borrego to kill Catarina, what did you expect of him?'

He played the edge of the table with his fingertips… a sonata to clear his mind.

'And the Minister of Internal Administration,' I said, 'what did… what does he know?'

'He's a politician and a very successful one. Results, like getting elected for instance, are important. How they are achieved… not so interesting. He was only concerned with the delivery of Miguel Rodrigues' disgraced head.'

'Yes, I suppose that was an important factor… that he was disgraced.'

'We didn't want him to have anywhere to hide.'

We sat in silence while I tried to heave the question over my larynx. Dr Oliveira doodled with his mind.

'You asked about Felsen before,' he said. 'About his involvement. He wasn't involved in any of this… business. He was important, of course, because you had to find him. You had to extract his story but he… he's a very old man now. His mind's only really up to telling and retelling the story of his life in its many versions.'

'He had the documents though…, they were important.'

'Yes, I knew that… he'd shown them to me.'

'So he was very important to this… this intrigue of yours. Very important.'

'Yes,' he said, and looked at me. 'Is there a question here, Inspector?'

'How could you guarantee that I'd find Felsen?' I asked, my palms running with sweat, my heart batting against my ribs.

A frown shot across his brow, faster than a lizard across a hot road.

'You tell me,' he said, his brain rattling through the permutations.

I tried again, a little more direct this time.

'How did Luísa Madrugada make the Felsen connection?'

'Ah!' he said, grasping the matter now. 'Now I see. No, Inspector, she was not involved. Don't worry yourself on that score. Ask her… ask her about some interesting notes… pointers she found in the books that she was reading at the Biblioteca Nacional, but…'

'Was that luck as well? That the investigating officer should have an affair with…'

'You don't have to believe me. It's no concern of mine,' he said. 'I would have made sure you found Felsen, whether it was in Luísa Madrugada's bed or not. And, Inspector, don't blame her for not telling you about those… ah… vital clues. I'm sure she loves you-and lovers, especially in the beginning, want to look at their best for each other.'

'Something that you would know about, Senhor Doutor ,' I said.

'I?'

'A woman always wants to look at her best on her wedding day, Teresa was no exception.'

It shut something down in him. Lights went out in his face, the source of his mild affability dried up and was replaced with that fierceness, that intellectual fierceness I'd seen in his study in Cascais.

'It's easily forgotten, Inspector, that history is not what you read in books. It's a personal thing, and people are vengeful creatures, which is why history will never teach us anything.'

'You got your revenge, I can see that, and you… facilitated the revenge of others-António Borrego, Klaus Felsen, even Jorge Raposo had his half-hour…'

'… and the Jewish people,' he said. 'Don't forget them. They will finally get their property back.'

'If you think that that is any justification for you, Senhor Doutor Oliveira, to conduct your own, personal balancing of the vagaries of history by punishing your late wife and murdering her illegitimate daughter, then you must be one of two things-evil or mad. Which are you?'

He leaned forward across his desk, neck dipped, eyes as bright and all-seeing as an eagle's over its territory.

'We are all mad,' he said.

'I only feel it when I'm in your company,' I said, walking to the door.

'We are all mad, Inspector, for the simple reason that we don't know why we exist and this…' he waved his hand at the tissue of existence before him, 'this life is how we distract ourselves so that we don't have to think about things too difficult for us to comprehend.'

'There are other ways of distracting yourself, Dr Oliveira.'

'Some of us, perhaps, have more recherché tastes.'

'Yes, I suppose the frisson was quite substantial for you-the knowledge that Miguel Rodrigues had sodomized his own daughter before António Borrego cracked her skull open and strangled her.'

He swivelled his chair away from me and faced the window. The leather scoop rocked him.

I closed the door, went down the lighted corridor, down the wooden stairs and out on to the bone-dry calçada. The night was piercingly clear with the freshest air Lisbon would ever smell. There was a thin paring of wind-shaved moon and chestnuts were roasting in the square.

Agente Carlos Pinto came out of his coma on Friday 2 7th November. Two weeks later they inserted a steel plate in the back of his cranium. On a clear day he's sure that he can hear the Bee Gees coming over the Atlantic. I've assured him it's tinnitus. He was lucky to have a thick skull and, I like to think, that his short, dense, unmanageable hair cushioned the blow.

The only thing Carlos couldn't remember was why António Borrego had hit him. I told him that after Felsen had given me his story I'd gone to A Bandeira Vermelha and asked António about Maria Antónia Medinas. He'd stalled me. So when, five and a half months later, and after our brittle exchange in the street by the rusted wheel-arch of the white Renault 12, Carlos appeared in the bar on his own to ask about the same woman-the one person who could motivate António to murder Catarina Oliveira-Borrego's paranoia did the rest. He wouldn't have known that Carlos and I had never discussed Maria Antónia Medinas. He wouldn't have known that to us it was just a name that needed some light shed on it. He thought he was finished.