Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'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.

The other men stopped their work and watched him through their sweat.

Felsen wiped his forehead on his shoulder and stained it dark. He rubbed his eyes but couldn't get the dimmed edges of his vision to brighten. He was panting, still down on his knees, his head thumping and his vision pulsing with it. He looked down at the piece of meat in front of him and felt his guts rise. He got to his feet on shaky legs, the bloody club hanging loosely from his hand. The Englishman was vomiting.

The light sickened further, the high red dust scarfing the sun.

The men hadn't gone back to work and Felsen thought he might join the Englishman until he saw their faces. They were confused and afraid of the power of a man who could do such a thing for nothing at all. Felsen had seen them like this before, but only around Abrantes.

'Now you see,' he said, pointing at them with the cudgel, still breathing heavily. 'Now you understand the importance of obedience. Isn't that right Senhor Burton?'

The use of his name jerked the agent up straight from his retching, but he couldn't get any words out. His lips had gone white in his pale face. He sweated fatly from the forehead as if he'd been touched by cholera.

'Bury him,' said Felsen, and threw the cudgel at the feet of the men.

Abrantes led Burton to the back seat of his car while Felsen got behind the wheel. They stopped at Abrantes' house and picked up a chair, some rope, and a bottle of cool bagaço from the back of the cellar. They drove to a disused mine in the hills near Amêndoa, one where the wolfram vein had run out after about thirty metres. In the boot of the car was a brazier and some charcoal and a few chouriços. Abrantes sprinkled the raw alcohol of the bagaço over the coals and started a fire. In Burton's briefcase Felsen found bundles of notes amounting to 500,000 escudos and an unsigned contract for eighty tons of wolfram with a mining concession down in Penamacor. His throat still felt dry, but there was no water so he chugged the cold bagaço and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.