Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'You're making the front page in Lisbon,' said Felsen.

'Murder,' said the chefe looking out of the window at the clearing sky, 'is very common now in this area.'

'This is the third murder in two weeks. The bodies were all found in the same area and they were all stripped, bound and bludgeoned to death.'

'It's the wolfram,' said the chefe, as if it was nothing to do with him.

'Of course it's the wolfram.'

'They've all gone crazy Even the wild rabbits are collecting wolfram.'

'How is your investigation coming along?'

The chefe shifted in his seat and drew on the strange Turkish tobacco. The fire hissed in the chimney.

'There's since been a fourth death,' he said.

'One of your officers?'

He nodded his head and refilled the glasses. The absinthe was smoothing the creases out in his fat face so that the schoolboy was beginning to come back into it.

'Are you pursuing the matter?'

'A state of lawlessness exists in the land,' he said, dramatically, sweeping his hand over his desk. 'We have found the body.'

'In the same area?'

The nod was slower this time.

'Where did the officer start his enquiries?'

'In a village called Amêndoa.'

'Perhaps you will be going up there with a larger force?'

'The area I have to cover is large. The present circumstances-difficult.'

'So you'd like this lawlessness to stop without using up your manpower.'

'This is unlikely,' he said, sadly, 'there's a lot of money at stake here. These people have been living on five tostoes here, five there. For them a single escudo is a fortune. When a small rock of wolfram is worth seventy-five, eighty, a hundred escudos, it's like a fever in their brains. You can't imagine. They go mad.'

'If I could ensure that your law is upheld, that there'll be no more violence, perhaps you'd be able to help me with some of my difficulties?'

'No more violence,' he said, repeating this back to his glass of absinthe as if it had put the idea to him. 'None?'

'None,' said Felsen, repeating the lie.

'What would be the nature of your difficulties?'

'As you know, there'll be a lot of my trucks moving product around the mining areas and out to the border at Vilar Formoso.'

'Customs is a separate organization.'

'I understand that. Where you can help is with the papers, the guias that we have to present when we're moving the product around.'

'But the guias are very important for the government. They have to know what's going where.'

'That is true and ordinarily there would be no problem… but the bureaucracy.'

'Ah, yes, the bureaucracy,' said the chefe, suddenly feeling trussed in his uniform. 'You're a businessman. I understand. Businessmen like to do what they want, when they want.'

They lapsed into silence. From the chefe's facial expressions it appeared that there was some internal struggle going on, as if there was something indigestible going down or a painful wind ballooning in his bowel wanting to get out.

'I'll find out what happened to your officer too,' said Felsen, but that wasn't it. The chefe was not wildly overconcerned at that.

'The guias are a very important government mechanism. This would be a serious breach of…'

'There will, of course, be a commission for you on every ton we move,' said Felsen, and he realized he'd hit the point. The creases unfurled. The belly quietened. The chefe took another of Felsen's cigarettes and skewered him with a look at the same time.

'But without the guias, ' said the chefe, 'how will I know how many tons you have moved? How will my commission be calculated?'

'You and I will have a meeting with customs once a month.'

The chefe' s smile was extended another foot by the joy of his moustache. They shook hands and finished their drinks. The chefe opened the door for him and clapped him on the shoulder.

'If you go up to Amêndoa,' he said, 'you should talk to Joaquim Abrantes. He's a very influential man in that area.'

The door closed behind Felsen, leaving him in the gloom of an unlit corridor. He walked slowly out of the building contemplating his first lesson in underestimating the Portuguese. He got into his car and instructed the driver to take him up to Amêndoa in the foothills of the Serra da Estrela.

There was no road up to Amêndoa. It was a rough track of beaten earth with slabs of granite showing through, lined on either side by broom and heather, and then later and higher, pine forest. The rain had stopped but the cloud was still hanging and drifting lower down the mountains to the treetops until it sucked in the car itself. The driver rarely got out of second gear. Men appeared on the track. Cowled like monks, they wore split sacks over their heads. Grey and silent, they moved to the side, without turning.

Felsen sat in the middle of the back seat feeling every metre between himself and the rough civilization of Guarda lengthening behind him. He'd mentioned the Middle Ages in the conference but this was more like the Iron Age or earlier. He wouldn't have been surprised to see people hoeing with bone. He hadn't seen a mule or a donkey yet. All the carrying was done on the shoulders by men, and on the head by women.

The car came up on to the flat. There was no sign announcing Amêndoa. Granite block houses appeared out of the mist, a woman in black shuffled across the road. The driver pulled over at the only house on two levels in the village. They got out. There was an open door at street level. An old woman was working amongst sacks of grain, boxes for salting hams, cured cheeses, racks of potatoes, bunches of herbs, buckets and tools. The driver asked for Joaquim Abrantes. The woman left her work, locked the door with knobbed and crooked fingers, and took the two men up the granite steps on the outside of the house to a porch supported by two granite pillars. She left them there and went into the house.

A few minutes later she reopened the door and Felsen ducked into the dark house. The driver went back to the car. A fire was smoking heavily in a large fireplace emitting no heat. As his eyes got used to the lack of light he began to pick out an old man sitting in the fireplace. There were chouriços hanging along a pole above his head. The woman had taken a rag out of her pocket and was wiping the old man's eyes. He moaned quietly as if disturbed from sleep and coming into a world of pain. She left the room. A throat, somewhere in the house, coughed and spat. The woman returned with two small clay lamps burning olive oil. She put one on the table and pointed Felsen into a chair. Some of the slate tiles were visible through the laths between the rafters of the roof. She left the other lamp in a wall niche, wiped the old man's eyes again and left. The two windows in the room were permanently closed up to the weather by heavy wooden shutters.

After some minutes the double doors behind Felsen shuddered open and a short and very wide man engineered himself through the gap sideways. He roared something to the back of the house and then offered his hand which gripped Felsen's with a mechanical hardness. He sat resting his forearms across the table, the rough hands, with split nails, hung off square wrists. The body under the heavy jacket was thick-boned and powerful. Felsen recognized something in him, and knew from that first moment, that this was the man who was going to help him control the Beira.

A girl in a headscarf brought in a bottle of aguardente and two glasses. The Portuguese's face was still in the glow from the oil lamp and as big as a landscape opencast-mined. His hair was swept back in a thick black and grey lava flow, his brow and nose like an escarpment with an exposed ridge of granite, his eye sockets and cheekbones like craters. The whole geography of the face was hardened to bleakness by years of cold dry wind. It was impossible to tell his age-anything from thirty-five to fifty-five. But whatever the minerals he had in the bones of his face, they were not extended to his teeth, which were blackened and worn, sheered off and yellowing or just missing. Joaquim Abrantes poured the pale alcohol into the glasses. They drank.