Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'What was he doing with your gun, what were you doing with his?'

Felsen closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He told Abrantes as best as he could remember what had happened. Abrantes listened, glancing at his watch and drinking more of the brandy than was his share. He nodded and murmured to keep Felsen going.

'You know,' said Abrantes, once he was sure the German was finished. 'I don't think you can say any of that in court.'

'In court?'

'There has to be a trial.'

'What about your PIDE friends?'

'As I mentioned… a very difficult and now, bureaucratic, situation. You're in the system. It's not so easy to get you out.'

'I don't remember being charged.'

'The charge, my friend, is murder.'

Felsen dabbed the sardine tin around the table with the end of his cigarette.

'You know who he was, don't you?'

'Who?'

'The dead man.'

'According to his papers he was a German tourist called Reinhardt Glaser.'

Felsen shook his head, his eyes so intense, they grabbed Abrantes around the throat.

'You owe me,' he said.

'I owe you?'

'The dead man was Schmidt… you remember him?'

'Schmidt?'

'The one you told me you shot that night in the Alentejo. You said you put him in the river…'

'No, no, no, no.'

'Yes, Joaquim,' said Felsen, easing the hip flask from Abrantes' grip. 'It was him. You lied to me. He said you didn't come after him. He said you fired a shot out in the poppy fields. He saw you. Schmidt saw you.'

'No, no, no… his name was Reinhardt Glaser. You made a mistake.'

'I didn't make a mistake. You know I didn't.'

'Me? How? I never saw him.'

It was quiet enough to hear the tobacco crackling in their cigarettes.

'You owe me for that, Joaquim.'

'Look,' he said, 'you lost your arm, I'm sorry for that. You've had a bad experience. You're still in a state of shock. Your memory is playing tricks with you. This is what I'm going to do for you. I'm getting one of the best criminal lawyers to help you out of this mess. If he can't get you an acquittal nobody can. Now drink. I have to be going. Pica is waiting for me in the Chiado. The later I am, the more she spends. Força, amigo meu.'

That was the last Felsen saw of Abrantes. The lawyer never appeared. His old partner didn't attend the trial nine months later, and he wasn't present to see Felsen sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for the murder of the German tourist, known from his passport details as Reinhardt Glaser.

As Felsen began two decades of imprisonment in Caxias he had a short, vivid dream. It featured four horseshoes which gradually straightened out into a lattice of metal strips, and behind the strips was a live lizard with its head mashed to a bloody pulp, front legs braced, bobbing. He woke with a jerk and into his head came the memory of a dark stretch of road out to Guincho on a squally Christmas Eve night. He knew then, that even in his drunken state, his instinct had been right-Maria had told Abrantes that Manuel was not his son. He replayed that last meeting with Abrantes. The man seemed to have come with drink and cigarettes and the possibility of hope, but Felsen now realized that he was there to enjoy his satisfaction, to rub his hands over the warm fire of completed vengeance.

Two weeks after the trial on November 18th 1962 Joaquim Abrantes sat down with his new lawyer, Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira, and rewrote the statutes of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. Amongst the shareholders and directors there was no mention of the convicted murderer, Klaus Felsen.

Olivia was still sleeping when I looked in on her in the morning, face-down under her black hair. I went downstairs and ate fruit, drank coffee, and talked to the cat, who'd stretched herself out into the longest cat in Paço de Arcos. The time snipped round to 9.00 A.M. and I went to look at the telephone. The telephone had been mildly interesting years ago when we had a large Bakelite affair that was heavy enough to curtail young girls' conversations. Now we had a sleek graphite-grey push-button apparatus that looked absurd in the room's decaying décor, and was light enough for Olivia to tuck it behind her ear and cut a suit of clothes whilst talking about boys. I straightened the telephone on its table, checked the flex. Olivia came in wearing a T-shirt down to her knees, her eyes still puzzled by sleep.

'What are you doing?' she asked.

'I'm looking at the phone.'

She did, too.

'Is it due to perform?'

'I was thinking of making a call.'

The cat came in and sat beside her, paws neat, sensing a moment of possible interest. She yawned widely.

'Who are you going to call?'

I gripped my chin and looked up at her, suddenly feeling in need of something and not just a beard. My head was suddenly crowded-I was going to call a possible witness in a murder trial to ask her out to lunch, I was going to have to tell my daughter about her, I had to explain last night's madness.

The door bell rang.

'I wanted to talk to you about what happened last night,' I said, shif ting on to my back foot.

The door bell rang again. She left the room, fast. Glad to be out of there. The cat looked around to see if there was anything worth nicking and left too. I lunged at the telephone and dialled Luisa Madrugada's number. She picked it up before it had even rung.

'This is Inspector Zé Coelho,' I said, the words sprinting out, panic-struck. 'Would you like your work interrupted?'

'I always want my work interrupted, Inspector, we talked about that yesterday. It's by what and whom… that's the question.'

'Lunch,' I said. 'Would lunch…?'

'Inspector?' she asked, suddenly grave and chill. 'Is this business?'

Something cold ran through me. I felt sick with regret.

'Absolutely not,' I said, changing my original idea, forcing the words out.

She laughed and told me to come to her apartment at one o'clock.

Olivia came back into the room followed by Carlos with a newspaper under his arm and the cat still looking for the cocktail party.

'Progress,' said Olivia, still unimpressed.

I refitted the handset, reliving the rollercoaster moments of the start of something new-hope, despair, joy-all in ten seconds. I'd forgotten the stamina it took.

Carlos approached and held out his hand. I took it. He held on and, with his head bowed, uttered an extensive apology that must have kept him up all night. I looked at Olivia, who was transfixed until something more important occurred to her and she left the room.

I put my hand on Carlos' shoulder. He was suffering and still couldn't look me in the eye. My chest felt as big as a cathedral roof. If I'd opened my mouth there'd have been a chord from an organ with all the stops pulled out. I put an arm around his shoulders.

'You're a good man,' I said. 'Apologizing's never easy, especially when it wasn't entirely your fault.'

'I should never have said that about your father. It was unforgivable. It's my problem. I say things when they come into my head. I don't think about other people. I've tried to get my thoughts into some kind of holding pattern, but I can't. That's why they move me around. I upset people. You know that by now.'

'It's a sensitive subject… the revolution,' I said. 'We shouldn't have been talking about it after a day like that.'

'That's what my father said. He said it's not even a generation old. It's still raw.'

And you… your generation can be objective about it. I'm still… I was… involved,' I said. 'What about your father?'

'He was a communist, a union activist in one of the shipyards. He did nearly four years in Caxias.'