Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

It was 10.00 P.M. There was a light on in the kitchen and voices. Olivia was tucked tight under the kitchen table listening to Faustinho, a local fisherman, who was sprawled on a chair well back from the table barely within reach of his beer. He was working himself up into a lather about the government, the European Union's fishing quotas and Benfica in ascending order.

He struggled to his feet when I came in. Olivia looked relieved, tired. We kissed.

'You smell different,' she said and went to bed.

Faustinho, grey as a wolf, tossed his beer back and put an arm around my shoulder.

'Come,' he said, 'you have to see this boy. He saw something the other night. It'll help with your investigation. You must talk to him. Have you got any money?'

We walked to the gardens and through the underpass to the car park on the other side of the Marginal. Faustinho strode ahead, looking under boats, in the sheds. I lagged behind, enjoying some purposelessness.

'What's the rush?' I shouted after him.

'It's been an hour already,' he said.

'I thought you said he was bedding down for the night.'

'He's a street kid, anything could have happened. Maybe he got scared.'

'You didn't tell him I was the police.'

'No, no, but I've been gone an hour and maybe he starts thinking.'

'You know this kid?'

'I've seen him before. Skinny little bugger. He's got some black in him too. Wears a jacket two sizes too big for him.'

We searched the boatyard and car park. Nothing. I sat on the keel of a boat and smoked and looked out to sea, feeling useful. We went back to A Bandeira Vermelha and drank aguardente distilled from vinho verde that António had brought down from the Minho in five-litre flagons.

Faustinho gave another longer description of the kid, having persuaded himself that I didn't believe him. António and I leaned into each other on either side of the bar and looked impassively on as Faustinho measured the kid up with the aid of his own shoulder.

I strolled home in the warm night. I hovered at the bottom of the attic stair, tempted. I went into the bedroom, stripped and got between the sheets naked, still with her smell on me.

Manuel Abrantes woke up with a jerk, staring at the threadbare central panel of the bedside carpet. His moustache was full of sweat, his head confused by alcohol gone bad in his brain. He didn't know the room until the smell of cheap perfume made it through his dense nasal hair and a light snoring at his back reminded him some more. He looked over his shoulder trying to remember a face or a name. Neither came to him. She was young and a little fat. She was lying on her back, the sheet down around her waist. Her breasts were widely spaced and had slipped down her ribs under her armpits. She had a light moustache. Her Alentejana accent came back to him.

He got up, wiped the sweat out of his moustache and was repelled by the smell of the girl still on him. He found a towel and went down the corridor to the bathroom. He showered under a trickle of tepid water standing up in a cast-iron bath. A small headache had emerged which didn't bother him, and a sore penis which did. They always tell you they're clean, but…

He dressed. His shirt was in a ghastly state. Yesterday the weather had been torrid and he'd drunk too much and that had made him sweat doubly. He'd have to go to work via the family house in Lapa and pick up a fresh shirt. A suit, too. This one was trampled to death. He looked like a broken salesman rather than an agente de i° classe in the Polícia International e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) and still not even twenty-two years old.

He clicked a coin down on the bedside table and left. He looked for his car in the Praça da Alegria, until he remembered he'd left it up in the Bairro Alto. He walked down Rua da Gloria and caught the funicular up the hill and found his car parked on Rua Dom Pedro V. He drove to Lapa. The house was silent. The rest of the family were in the Estoril villa for the summer. He shaved, showered, moved his bowels massively and changed into fresh clothes which felt cool around his chafed penis.

He straightened himself up in the mirror, pulled his shirt loose over his gut and then tucked it back in again, undecided which looked better. He had wanted to be at his best for this day's work and it had all started badly, but he hoped he'd pulled himself back on track now.

He drove out on to the Marginal and noticed for the first time on the outskirts of the city that the air was fresher and purer. After five days of brutal swelter, the sea was blue again, the sky clear and the twin steel towers of the Ponte Salazar, the new suspension bridge being built across the Tagus, were pin-sharp in the flat calm of the estuary. The workmen were already out on the massive concrete ramp, preparing to string the first cable across the river.

He stopped off in Belem to take a coffee and a pastel de nata in the Antiga Confeitaria. He ate three and smoked a cigarette. Now that his body was clean and his stomach sweetened he began to relish his work. He'd been with the PIDE for two and a half years and hadn't regretted a moment. He'd spent his first year in the PIDE headquarters in Rua António Maria Cardoso in the Chiado district of Lisbon, where he'd demonstrated to his superiors a natural talent for the work. They didn't even have to tell him how to recruit informers. He knew. He found out people's weaknesses, he implied PIDE interest in their activities, and then saved them from arrest and the dreaded Caxias prison by bringing them into his network. It surprised him that his most significant weapon was charm. He'd thought he was devoid of it, but he'd learnt more than he'd thought from his elder brother, Pedro, and now that he was in a new world, where he had no history, he could use what previously he'd only observed. It was so facile. Charm was just a question of demeanour. If he smiled people liked him. The smiling made his long-lashed, blue-green eyes shine, which attracted their attention, while his moustache made him appear genial, and his thinning hair gave him an air of vulnerability so that, overall, people trusted him. He never made the mistake of despising people for this because he was so glad to be liked. He just made sure that his superiors knew that this carefully crafted exterior concealed a ruthless persistence, an unflinching severity, and an unswerving relish for following through.

Manuel asked the barman at the Antiga Confeitaria to make up a packet of six pastels de nata. He crushed out his cigarette, paid and drove to the Caxias prison.

In his first year at the PIDE headquarters he'd been particularly successful at rooting out dissent in the university. It had been easier than he'd expected. His brother was at the university. He was very popular. His friends were constantly in the house. Manuel listened. He took down names and fed them into his network. He did more recruiting. He cajoled, threatened and manipulated until by the end of 1963 he had compiled dossiers on two professors, who would never work again, and eight students whose futures were over before they'd even begun. His superiors were impressed. His father wanted him to root out all the union men and communists from his factories, and was annoyed to find that he didn't have the influence over this institution that he'd come to expect elsewhere. Manuel was moved to the interrogation centre in the Caxias prison where the Estado Novo detained their more serious, more politically active dissidents. These people needed more persuasive methods to encourage them to help PIDE uncover the network of communist cells threatening not just the stability of the government, but the country's whole way of life.