Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'She said that? She made the proposal to you. A fifteen-year-old to a twenty-one-year-old?'

'Twenty-two,' he said, and waited two beats. 'That's made you think, hasn't it, Inspector?'

'That your mother was fifteen when she had you? So what? That's not three in a bed. That's a young girl's mistake.'

The hate came across the room in slivers from the boy who'd started life as a mistake. He dropped his head and when it came back up again his eyes were smiling.

'Maybe girls are older these days,' he said. 'You wouldn't know, Inspector.'

'I have a daughter… not much older than Catarina.'

'And you know what runs through her perfect virginal head?'

'It's not three in a bed.'

'You must have talked about it to be that certain.'

'Shut up,' I said, feeling my lid boiling.

'At least you must know that girls aren't so confused these days… about what they want.'

'What did they used to think they wanted?' asked Carlos, rescuing me.

'Romance.'

'And now?'

'Now they know that sex can happen without love and they're interested in it,' said Valentim. 'I'm not a pre-revolutionary kid like the Inspector. I wasn't spoon-fed Catholicism, Salazarist family values, no women in the workplace, no tits and bums on the street…'

'If this is a justification,' said Carlos, 'get to it.'

'It's not a justification, just an opinion as to why girls these days, a girl like Catarina, who was not by any means a virgin, could make the proposal she did, and also why the Inspector should doubt it.'

'Why is it that the next generation always believe they invented sex.'

'Not invented it, just revolutionized it.'

I had a trickle of sweat at the back of my neck inching under the collar, ready to careen down my spine. Valentim, like the best mango fly in Guinea, was getting under my skin.

'So what was it that you heard in Catarina's voice that made you run after her?'

'Talent.'

'There must have been something else for the great Valentim, who's always pursued by girls, to go running after…'

'She had blonde hair and blue eyes. That's not a common Portuguese look. I was interested in something different.'

Silence for some time. Valentim raised his eyebrows.

'I want you to think about that question a little more while you tell us what happened in this room. You're clever enough to do that, aren't you?'

'Where do you want me to start?'

'When did you take the drugs?'

'As soon as we got in here. Bruno had a joint. We smoked it. I had some pills. We took a tab each. E… to save you from asking.'

'Where did you get the E?'

'Off the street.'

'Not Teresa,' I said.

'Well, I'm sure Teresa has been helpful to you in your enquiries already so I'll give her to you. Yes, Teresa supplied.'

'What effect did the E have?' asked Carlos.

'It makes you uninhibited, in love with the ones you love.'

'So you end up fucking yourself,' said Carlos, happy with that resolution.

'Maybe you would, agente ,' said Valentim.

'Does the room look the same now as it did yesterday?'

'That chair was ten centimetres to the right,' he said.

Silence, while I rolled up my sleeve to bare a brown-skinned, pointed elbow.

'OK, OK,' he said, holding up his hands, 'we moved the bed.'

'Show us.'

He manoeuvred the bed in front of the mirror.

'Your idea?'

'She said she wanted to see herself.'

'Did she?'

'See herself?'

'Did she say that that was what she wanted?'

'I just told you.'

'I'm having trouble believing you.'

He shrugged.

'Carry on.'

'We took our clothes off.'

'How did that happen?'

'We took our shoes off first, like good little boys.'

That got Carlos off his chair, thin-lipped with rage.

' Eh pá,' said Valentim, ' calma .'

'Did you strip her?' I asked.

'She was naked by the time we'd moved the bed.'

'Now she's running the show.'

'I told you it was her idea,' he said. 'She knelt in the middle of the bed. She told Bruno to kneel in front and me behind. She told me to use a condom. She had to work on Bruno… he was nervous. I put on the condom and that was it.'

'You forgot something.'

'I don't think so.'

'The lubricant.'

'She didn't need any.'

'I believe it's normally used to sodomize someone and the pathologist said there were traces of it in her rectum.'

'I did not sodomize her. No way. That is not my kind of thing at all.'

'That's not what Bruno said.'

'What did he say?' said Valentim. 'Tell me what he said.'

I nodded at Carlos who leafed through his copy of Bruno's statement. He read:

'…she masturbated me and sucked my penis while Valentim had sex with her from behind. I did not penetrate her vaginally nor anally and I did not ejaculate.'

'That doesn't mean I sodomized her… and I didn't. What Bruno says is true. He was nervous, and I did have sex with her, and I was behind her, but I penetrated her vagina. You can use your famous elbow on me all you like, Inspector, but I won't say anything different.'

'So how do you explain the pathologist's report?'

Silence while Valentim shifted the swag of his heavy hair and passed a finger across his forehead. He flicked a hank of sweat on to the floor.

'There must have been somebody else,' he said.

'When did you leave here?'

'Around two o'clock.'

'Bruno says he went home and you walked off towards the funicular with Catarina.'

'That's true.'

'Where did you go?'

'We walked down to Avenida da Liberdade and took a 45 bus. She got off at Saldanha to go back to school. I stayed on until Campo Grande and went to the Biblioteca Nacional.'

'How long did you spend there?'

'I was there until well after seven. Plenty of people saw me.'

'Have you got a car?'

'You're joking, Inspector.'

'Have you got access to one?'

'My mother's boyfriend has one. Do you think he'd lend it to me?'

'Let's go back to my first question about why you took Catarina into the band.'

'I told you.'

'What was special about her, Valentim? What did she have that particularly interested you?'

He licked his lips which had dried on him. He didn't seem to have any spit.

'She wasn't a happy girl was she, Valentim?'

'Happy?' he asked, sneering, as if this was a questionable state.

'Did you like that, Valentim? Did you like a bit of vulnerability to work with, some real suffering to get your teeth into?'

'Next you'll be telling me I hate my mother,' he said, on the end of a high-pitched laugh. 'Do they teach Freud at police college now?'

'Ask agente Pinto, I haven't been in police college for some time,' I said. 'I wouldn't be needing Freud anyway, after eighteen years talking to people like you.'

He looked at Carlos sniffing for a softer target.

'Have you got any bullshit for me, agente?'

'You're not a nice guy,' said Carlos, quietly on the end of a direct look.

'If you were a nice guy,' I said, 'and a fifteen-year-old girl proposed three in a bed with some sodomy thrown in…'

'I did not sodomize her!' he shouted.

'…you wouldn't go ahead with it, would you? You'd think there was something wrong with the girl. You're a psychology student. You'd know that it wasn't normal behaviour. If you were a nice guy you'd help the girl. Talk to her parents. Get her some therapy. But you're not, are you, Valentim? You're a piece of shit. You look at someone like that and think: I can use that. I can abuse that… and it'll make me feel better.'

'And all because I didn't say I loved my mother… you're a radical, Inspector. You're a fucking radical.'

'But that's why you arranged this little rendezvous yesterday wasn't it, Valentim? To bring Catarina down to your own level, suck her into your own swamp. Now all I've got to find out is whether you wanted to take it one step further and kill the girl.'