Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

Felsen banged on the door at the back of the house with the heel of his hand. No response. He made Alvaro Fortes hammer continuously, and they heard the old man's voice from inside.

'Calma, calma, já you ,' he said. I'm coming.

The rain was slanting across the yard as he opened the door on the German standing in a thick leather coat with his hands clasped behind his back. He knew he was in trouble well before a hand came out and put a gun in his face.

'No mules,' said Felsen.

'They're out working.'

'Who's with them?'

'My son.'

'Anybody else?'

The old man's eyes flicked across to Alvaro Fortes who was no help.

'Have you got the key to that warehouse?'

'It's empty.'

Felsen put the barrel of the gun right up to the man's eye so that he could smell the oil, see the narrow, dark, escape route from life. The old man produced the key. They walked across the puddled yard. He opened the padlock and ripped the chain out. Alvaro Fortes opened the doors. The warehouse was empty Felsen went down on his haunches and pressed his finger on to the dry floor and came back up with fine black chips embedded in his skin. He stood up.

'Kneel, both of you,' he said.

He fitted the gun barrel under the occipital bulge at the back of the old man's head.

'Who is with your son and the mules?'

'Senhor Abrantes.'

'What are they doing?'

'Running wolfram to Spain.'

'Where do they take the wolfram?'

'A warehouse in Navasfrias.'

He pressed the gun into Alvaro Fortes' head.

'What happens to the wolfram?'

'He sells it.'

'To who?'

'To the highest bidder.'

'Has he sold to the British?'

Silence. The rain lashed the yard and the roof overhead.

'Has he sold to the British?'

'I don't know who he sells to. Senhor Abrantes doesn't talk of such things.'

Felsen went back to the old man.

'When will he return?'

'The day after tomorrow.'

'Will you tell him I have been here?'

'No, Senhor, I will not… if you don't wish it.'

'I don't wish it,' said Felsen. 'If you do tell him I will come back here and kill you myself. I will shoot you in the head.'

To show a level of seriousness he let off a round past the old man's ear that would leave him deaf for a week. The bullet ricocheted around the slate and granite warehouse. Alvaro Fortes threw his hands over his head and fell to one side. Felsen grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into the yard.

They went back to the car. Felsen sipped liquor from his bottle while Alvaro Fortes shivered with his hair plastered to his white forehead.

He ordered the driver to take them back to Améndoa and as the wind drove the rain over the hills and through the chestnut trees and oaks and on to the granite walls, rather than wolfram or Abrantes he found himself thinking of Eva. A few nights ago he'd been a civilized man sitting with a woman in a Berlin club. She'd lied to him. There'd been a betrayal before the lie, but he hadn't been able to drag up any anger. Out here in this rock-shambled, wind-blasted place, where the houses were carved out of the ground, he could only find a single-minded brutality to drive him through to the next day. He was a primitive, a man stripped down to the essentials.

And now he was going to have to kill Joaquim Abrantes.

It was dark when they arrived back in Améndoa. The girl and Abrantes' parents were eating. He joined them. The rain had stopped and only the wind was left, shifting the tiles on the roof. The old man wouldn't eat. His wife brought the food to his mouth but he wouldn't take it. She ate her own food, wiped her husband's eyes and took him to bed. The girl waited on Felsen. She wouldn't sit with him. He asked after the baby. The baby was sleeping. She offered him apples, but he hadn't finished the stew. He listened to her skirts as she moved around him. He thought about Abrantes grunting over her and that hissing sound she made.

She looked at him while he was eating. Every chance she had. Even when she was behind him he knew she was looking. He was different to look at. He asked for coffee, which they'd never had in the house before the German came. He drank it and poured aguardente on to the grounds and sank that. He said goodnight. She brought him a flat, metal pan of hot coals to take the edge off the cold in his bare room across the courtyard where they used to keep the hay for the animals.

He lay on his bed and smoked cigarettes by the light of the hurricane lamp. After an hour he got up and crossed the courtyard. He went to the girl's room which had just a curtain across the door. She was sleeping. He put the lamp on the floor. She woke up with a gasp. He clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled back the covers. The baby was sleeping at her back. He eased the child to one side. He rolled her on to her back trapping her arms underneath. He pushed his hand up her woollen-stockinged legs. Her thighs were clamped shut. He jammed his hand between them and prised them open by making a fist. Her eyes darted left and right over his hand. He tugged her drawers down to her knees and undid his trousers. He was surprised to slide into her easily and their eyes connected in the leopard light from the lamp on the floor. He was slow and gentle with the baby in the bed. After some minutes she closed her eyes and he felt her heel on his left buttock. He took his hand away from her mouth. She began to tense and shudder against him and the other heel began to kick at his right buttock. He quickened. Her eyes sprang open and he emptied himself into her and stayed there, rammed to the hilt and quivering.

The next day she gave him breakfast. It was no different to any other day except that she looked at him straight, with no shyness.

He stayed out all day, overseeing the loading of a cargo of wolfram into rail cars. He went back to Abrantes' house at nightfall. After dinner the old couple went to bed. The girl remained sitting at the table with Felsen. They didn't talk. He got up to go to bed. She gave him the pan of coals. He asked her name, and she told him Maria.

An hour later she joined him. This time, without the baby in the bed, he could be more robust with her but he was aware that she never hissed in the way that she did when Abrantes was covering her.

In the morning he dressed and checked the Walther P48, which he tucked into his waistband. Her muddy footprints had dried on the floor.

At breakfast he asked her to clean his room. Then he sat in the darkness of the main house, listening to the rain and waited for Abrantes.

Carlos and I stood outside the apartment block of the lawyer's wife's ex-lover. It was brand-new, finished in nasty yellow, with a sea view over the railway line, over the Marginal, over the car park of the supermarket. Not perfect, but good enough to be way beyond what a policeman could ever afford.

There was a chain across a forecourt of calçada on which was parked a brand-new jeep called something like a Wrangler, with chrome and black roll bars and a high polish finish. It was a lot of jeep to go pavement-hopping in Cascais. Under the apartment building there was a small garage with a silver 3 series BMW and a jet-black Kawasaki 900 motorbike. These all belonged to Paulo Branco, the ex-lover and only occupier of any of the apartments in the block. A salesman's foot wedged open the door to the building while he fitted in his last two metres of bullshit to a young couple leaving. We walked past them and up to the penthouse.

We got Paulo Branco out of bed. He came to the door in shorts and smelled of a recent sexual encounter although we didn't see much of her-a tanned arm over a sheet, a brown foot dangling. He was good-looking in a way that hundreds of guys are-black hair swept back, dark brown eyes, square jaw with regular cleft and a gym-worked physique. Bland but confident, until he saw our identification.