Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'My name is Traudl,' said the girl.

'We met before,' he said and turned the brandy glass around on its coaster. He put it to his lips where Eva's had been. She still wore the same lipstick.

He took Traudl back to his apartment. She talked for the two of them. He hung his coat up, poured himself a drink and found that she'd gone. He was relieved until she called him from the bedroom. He told her to come back into the living room.

'It's cold,' she said.

She was naked walking on tiptoe across the polished floor, the tendons and sinews in her thin legs visible. The unfilled flaps of her breasts with shrivelled nipples hung off the racked ribs of her chest. She hugged them to herself. He took off his tunic and loosened the braces off his shoulders. She shivered with her fists under her chin. He saw her back view reflected in the glass doors of the bedroom-the sad bottom with hip bones protruding. He nearly lost all enthusiasm for the project. He sat down and asked her to massage the front of his trousers. Her teeth chattered. His penis wouldn't stir.

'You're cold, go back to bed,' he said.

'No,' she said, 'I want to.'

'Go back to bed,' he said, with a little blade in his voice and she didn't argue.

He sat in the dark and drank aguardente that he'd brought back with him for Christmas. It tasted like hell. He circled over his meeting with Eva looking for scraps. There were none. In the early hours he decided there was nothing left for him in Berlin and he'd take the next flight back to Lisbon.

He flew back the next day via Rome and spent only enough time in Lisbon for Poser to tell him that something had happened. He didn't know what it was, he had men working on it, but Salazar was not happy.

'He's frothing at the mouth,' said Poser, relishing it, 'completely rabid with fury. Magnificent rage. And the Allies are catching it… just in time for our negotiations with the Metals Commission.'

Felsen drove up to the Beira and spent the afternoon of the 19th December with the accountant in Guarda. He made a small circuit of his territory and three days before Christmas appeared in Amêndoa on a wind-whipped frozen morning. There was no sign of Abrantes. The old woman was there with her husband, Abrantes' father, sitting in his customary winter position in the fireplace, crying from the smoke. The girl was there too with her son, Pedro, who was four months old. Felsen asked her where her husband was, and she looked embarrassed, which she was only rarely in his company now that she was used to him. Her fingers were ringless. She wasn't married.

Felsen stroked the baby's downy head which fitted neatly into his palm. The girl offered him food and drink and flipped the baby on to her hip.

'Let me take him,' said Felsen.

She hesitated and searched the German's face with her lime-green eyes. Foreigners. She gave him the baby and went to the kitchen. She'd never regained her girlish form. Her bosom had stayed full and her hips swung in her calf-length skirts. When she turned she found Felsen looking at her in that way and she nearly smiled. He tickled the baby. Pedro grinned and Felsen had a cameo of Joaquim Abrantes with his dentures out.

She brought him some wine and chouriço. He gave her the baby who reached for her breasts.

'Is he out on his land?' asked Felsen, thinking Abrantes might be fossicking his twenty hectares now that the wolfram price had peaked.

'He left this morning. He didn't say,' she said.

'Do you expect him back?'

She shrugged-Abrantes didn't talk to any of the women in his house. Felsen drank two glasses of the rough wine and ate a couple of chunks of chouriço and went out into the cold morning. He drove into the next valley and found someone to take him to Abrantes' piece of land. He was right, they were working it. But no Abrantes.

There was a small granite and slate house on the property. Half its roof was fallen in, the unbroken slates stacked in rows on the floor, the shattered ones in a pile of grey shards. A woman was cooking in there out of the wind, stirring a pot on a rusted brazier. She was filthy and haggard, her face sunken with toothlessness.

The door was rotten on the other side of the house. People were living in there. There was a rag-covered pallet and some chipped clay jars. The place smelled of damp earth and urine. Something small was shivering under the rags.

One of Abrantes' peasants from Améndoa came around the side of the house and stopped, surprised to see Felsen. He removed his hat and came forward, bowing. Felsen asked after Abrantes.

'He's not here,' said the peasant looking at the ground.

'And the others? Where are they? Why aren't they here?'

No answer.

'And who are these people living out here on the land of Senhor Abrantes like this?'

The woman left her pot and began talking to the peasant in toothless Portuguese and at some length using her wooden spoon for emphasis.

'What is she saying?'

'It is nothing,' said the peasant.

The woman railed at him. The peasant looked away. Felsen directed his question at the woman. She gave him a very long answer during which the peasant cut in with the short words:

'She is the wife of Senhor Abrantes.'

'And this child in here?'

The peasant beckoned Felsen away from the old crone around to the back of the house where there were three mounds of grass unmarked.

'The children of Senhor Abrantes,' said the peasant. 'A sickness of the lungs.'

'And the one inside?'

The peasant nodded.

'All girls?'

He nodded again.

'Where is Senhor Abrantes?'

'Spain,' he said without taking his eyes from the mounds.

The peasant's name was Alvaro Fortes. Felsen put him in the front seat next to the driver and they went to the border at Vilar Formoso. Felsen drank aguardente from the same metal bottle he used for water in the summer and ran his thumb over the calculations he'd made-28 tons from Penamacor, 30 tons from Casteleiro, 17 tons brought over from Barco, 34 tons up from Idanha-a-Nova. All missing-which was why the Portuguese stocks were 109 tons lower than they should have been.

At the border he drank with the chefe of the alfândega who was pleased to give him the information that the British had been tracking German shipments through the border all last month, and there'd been rumours that Lisbon were going to issue orders to hold up his consignments of wolfram. Felsen gave the man a bottle of brandy and asked after Abrantes. The chefe hadn't seen him in a week.

It started to rain as they drove south along the border to Aldeia da Ponte and then on to Aldeia do Bispo and Foios at the foot of the Serra da Malcata, whose vast low, lynx-patrolled hills crossed the border. Here there was a contrabandista who was going to run a pack mule operation through the serra for him if Dr Salazar decided to make life difficult.

'Have you ever made the journey across to Spain?' he asked the back of Alvaro Fortes' head. No answer.

'Did you hear me?'

'Yes, Senhor Felsen.'

'Have you done it before?'

Again no answer.

'When was the first time?'

Alvaro Fortes answered by not answering. Felsen began to feel the heat of his missing tonnage as the wind strafed the car from the north. They drove through the village to the house and stables of the man who kept the mules. The serra was invisible under low cloud.

At the mule-owner's house Felsen went to the boot and unlocked a small metal trunk. He removed his Walther P48 and loaded it. He told Alvaro Fortes to get out of the car. They went to the back of the granite house, into the stableyard, which had a warehouse at one end, chained and padlocked. There were no mules. Alvaro Fortes jiggled about like a man with a full bladder.