Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

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.

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.