Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'Did you ever see Laura again?' asked Felsen in English, flicking through the contract.

'The Chave d'Ouro,' said Burton on automatic.

'Did she get her precious visa?'

Burton stared into his past as if it was his own country disappearing over the horizon. Felsen took another blast of alcohol trying to stop the needle from scoring the inside of his cranium. The cool alcohol burnt all the way down.

'Did she?' he asked again, and Burton looked up wild-eyed but didn't answer.

Felsen frisked the Englishman's pockets and came up with the wallet. He fingered through the currency and came across the photograph. He held it up to the terracotta light of the afternoon.

'Did you get what you wanted?' asked Felsen. 'At least tell me that.'

'I didn't want her to get a visa.'

'In that case you probably didn't get what you wanted.'

'What did I want?'

'You mean…' Felsen stopped. 'To fuck her, Mr Burton. Didn't you want to fuck her?'

'Laura?' he said.

'Ah,' said Felsen. 'A misunderstanding.'

'I don't follow.'

'Laura's deal. You didn't know Laura's deal? You get me a visa. No. You look as if you can get me a visa… and you can fuck me. Just the word "visa" brought love into her eyes. It was there for everyone to see, Mr Burton. I was not the first, I can assure you, not by a long way.'

Felsen turned the photograph over.

'To Edward, with love,' he read, and for some reason it made Felsen crueller. 'Come on Edward, don't tell me… I mean she was doing things you'd be hard pressed to get a Friedrichstrasse whore to do…'

Burton was off his chair and on him, his scrawny arm around the German's bull neck. He drove his boy's fist into the man's kidney. Felsen's thick elbow kicked back like a steam piston. The boy went down. Abrantes fanned the charcoal white.

Felsen secured Burton to the chair. He took another shot of the bagaço. His head felt better, clearer, smoother. He shook the contract at the Englishman.

'You're on my territory, Edward. This is my wolfram you're taking. Who else are you talking to down there?'

Burton shut down his brain. He didn't listen to the German. He didn't smell the acrid charcoal. He didn't feel the hot pant of Abrantes' fan. He didn't see the red clouds boiling in the strange sky.

Felsen found a length of wire in the boot of the car. Abrantes began roasting the chouriços, turning them with fingers suddenly dainty. Felsen pushed more questions at the English agent, his tongue thick in his mouth, the alcohol telling now. The alcohol reminding him of Laura, the stolen cufflinks, Eva, Lehrer, the whore in Guarda last night. Burton was silent, forcing the gross smell of the spitting pork fat out of his mind.

'That fat Rumanian sow in the visa office told me Salazar's police were Gestapo-trained,' said Felsen. 'My colleagues told me it was Kramer. He's a KZ commandant now. They know how to treat you in a KZ. We all hear about it, Edward, we all know… but there's nothing like learning from actual experience. I've never been in one which means I've only learnt at second-hand, so you might find my methods a little unrefined.'

Felsen tucked the wire into the coals. He removed the agent's belt and using Abrantes' knife cut away the man's trousers and undershorts. He found a leather glove, fitted his hand into it and removed the hot wire. He stopped, feeling a rush of wind at his back, he looked out of the mine at the chemical sky, then stepped towards the Englishman.

The peasants who'd been burying the body of the driver in the pine forest arrived back in Amêndoa a little after five in the afternoon. The day was at its hottest. Their eyeballs stung in their sockets and their mouths were full of thick, rancid saliva. They went to the spring, drank heavily and dipped rags from their pockets into the water and cooled their necks and faces. They stopped only when they heard the animal for the first time. A strange animal, of a type they'd never heard before, and in terrible pain.

They walked to the edge of the village. A scream came from a hole out in the hills and suddenly they recognized it. They put their hats on and straightened them. They went back to the cool of their granite houses and lay down on their wooden cots, heads on elbows, the balls of their palms in their ears.

The weather broke. The thunder roused Felsen from his drunken sleep. He didn't know where he was. His head ached so that he thought he must have fallen, and his mouth tasted sour as cheese. He rolled over to see the Englishman slumped in his chair and it shocked him. He was going to check him, but he saw the gun on the floor and the blood over the man's chest and… how had that happened?

Rain began falling darkly. Felsen went out into it to wash his hands. He leapt back and fell staggering into the mine, crashing over Abrantes' supine body. His hands and shirt stained red, his arms flecked with more red. He kicked at the rocks on the floor to get away from the crude opening of the mine. It was raining blood out there. He roared at Abrantes who'd come awake and put his hand out into the rain and squeezed it in his fist.

'This happened before,' he said, and wiped his hand clean on his trousers. 'My father told me that it rained like this forty years ago. It comes through the red desert dust. It's nothing.'

They folded the agent's body into the boot of the car and backed up the track to Abrantes' house. They unloaded Burton into the yard. Felsen drove the car back and as deep into the old mine as it would go. The storm had brought night on early. When he dimmed the headlights in the mine there wasn't a scrap of ambient light. He gripped the steering wheel and pressed his forehead to it. The sound of shattering glass came to him, the bagaço bottle on the wall of the mine, the neck of it now forming the handle of a primitive tool. How could that have happened?

Abrantes was waist-deep in a hole in the yard, the girl watching him. She was big, pregnant, halfway through her term. She poured Felsen a glass of cool white wine and went into the house.

'Congratulations,' said Felsen, reconnected now with the world.

Abrantes wondered what he meant. Felsen nodded to the house.

'It had better be a boy,' said Abrantes.

'Isn't she young for children?'

'More likely to produce boys.'

'I didn't know that.'

'It's what the Senhora dos Santos says, our local wise woman.'

Abrantes shovelled earth, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

'How old is the girl?'

'I don't know.'

The girl came into the yard with olives, cheese and meats. She laid them on the table next to the wine.

'How old are you?' asked Abrantes.

'I don't know,' she said.

They buried the body and went to bed. Felsen dreamt vividly He woke up, his bladder swollen tight. He mistakenly stumbled into the main house to relieve himself and heard the sound of Abrantes' animal grunting and the girl making a kind of hissing sound as if she'd cut herself with a knife. He went back out into the yard and then to the edge of the village where the air was now fresh and the earth smelling rich after the rain. He pissed a twenty-metre length of barbed wire. Tears coursed down his face. That whore in Guarda. The pain was excruciating.

'So,' said Gruppenführer Lehrer, summarizing the wolfram campaign to Brigadeführers Hanke, Fischer and Wolff, 'we have received 2200 tons here in Germany. There's 300 tons in transit and there are 175 tons of stocks in Portugal. By my mathematics that makes a total of 2675 tons which is 325 tons below the 3000-ton target for the year.'

Silence from the four men. Felsen sat smoking in a chair about three metres adrift from Lehrer's desk.