Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

Luísa had the look of a woman who wished she'd worn a longer skirt.

'I suffer from the cold now,' said Felsen in a cracked-china voice, small shards missing.

The bones of his skull, the plates of his cranium, seemed painfully obvious under the thin stretched skin, under which veins operated close to the surface. His eyelids were gathered in swags close to the lashes so that the corners slid down towards the cheekbones, making him look inconsolable. His nose was sharp, pointed and scraped raw.

We introduced ourselves and he hung on to Luísa's hand.

'Do you know why we're here?' asked Luísa.

'You can smoke if you like. I don't mind people smoking near me.'

'Frau Junge told you why we're here.'

'Yes, yes,' he said, 'but please smoke. I like the smell.'

I lit a cigarette. Luísa lit one of her own.

'I'm half the man I was. I'm shrinking and they keep cutting bits off me. I lost an arm in prison and half an ear. When I came out they cut off my right leg up to the knee. I don't remember why. Too much lying down in prison… or was it the smoking? That might have been it.'

Luísa stubbed out her cigarette and scratched her calf.

'Of course they don't take the bad one,' he said. 'I've had a limp since I was a child. No, that's the one that stays. They take the good one. I told the surgeon, I said: "This hospital is eating me alive." What does he care?'

He laughed which strained his voice to shattering point.

'The bank,' he said, 'that's why you're here, you want to talk about the bank. I've been waiting fifteen years to talk about the bank, but you're the first people who want to listen. Nobody looks back any more. Nobody knows where they come from. They only want to know where they're going.'

'I need my hands to write while you're talking,' said Luísa, withdrawing her hand and arranging her laptop.

'I'll rest it on your shoulder?' he said.

Klaus Felsen told his story in two parts. The first part, with breaks, took nearly four hours. He faltered twice. The first when he recounted the ambush on the car of the British agent. He seemed to stop short. He fell silent for some minutes and I thought he'd run out of steam again and needed to rest. But when he restarted, his tone of voice had changed. It was confessional. He described how savagery had got off the leash and he'd killed the driver and then in more chilling terms what he'd done to the English agent, Edward Burton. Luísa stopped typing.

The second time he faltered was over his last meeting with Eva Brücke. He gave two versions. The first was a noble one of love torn asunder by war and he quickly dried up when Luísa's hands stopped moving over the keys of the laptop. We waited. He gathered himself and he told the real version.

The killing of Obergruppenführer Lehrer seemed to take something out of him. His head dropped and he fell asleep. We waited for a few minutes, twenty or thirty turns of the lighthouse. Luísa eased herself out from under his hand and we went downstairs.

Frau Junge was still awake watching satellite television, eating apple pie and drinking camomile tea. She told us to wait, that he would probably come round again in an hour. She offered us some apple pie. We wolfed it down.

'Normally it's me listening to his endless stories,' she said. 'Ach, the war, it's all such a long time ago. My parents… they never talked about it. Never. This one… he talks about it all the time, as if it was yesterday. Has that hand of his been behaving properly?'

'The hand's been fine,' said Luísa, still dazed from the work and the horror of it.

'If he takes your hand, be firm. Don't let him put it where he wants.'

I tried Olivia again on her mobile which was still turned off. Luísa called her father, spoke to him briefly and plugged the computer into the telephone jack and squeezed the first half of the story down the line. Thirty minutes later he called back and Luísa gave him more background about my murder investigation. She hung up.

'He wants some supporting documents. He's not prepared to publish unless it's backed up with some kind of documentary proof.'

I looked at Frau Junge who sipped her tea and shrugged.

'I have photographs, but documents… you'll have to ask him.'

A red light flashed on the wall by her head with a faint buzzing sound.

'He's awake,' said Frau Junge.

The second half of the story was shorter, but took longer to tell. He needed more breaks. His mind drifted and resettled on details we'd already heard. He kept coming back to a woman called Maria Antónia Medinas, who he was convinced had been killed by Manuel Abrantes. I told him it fitted in with what Jorge Raposo had told me, but we couldn't get him to tell us what she was to him. Was she a fellow-prisoner, a criminal or a political? Had he known her before?

He held things back, whether on purpose or because his brain slid over things, we couldn't tell. It was close to the end before he stunned us with the revelation that he'd been set up by Joaquim Abrantes' PIDE friends, who'd put him inside for twenty years, and that Manuel Abrantes was his son. We asked who the mother was and he couldn't remember her name, but he thought she might be still alive, up in the Beira somewhere.

Dawn came up unspectacularly. The lighthouse stopped flashing and became a foghorn, as a dense sea mist rolled in over the cliffs and submerged the house, so that the gate on the other side of the courtyard was only occasionally visible.

'We have days like this,' said Felsen. 'It wouldn't be so bad if you knew the whole country was like it, but I know that a hundred metres around the corner the sun is shining.'

'There's one last thing,' said Luísa. 'We need some documents if this story is going to mean anything. Have you got documentary proof that the gold existed?'

His hand disappeared under the blankets and came back with a warm key.

'Everything you need is in the metal filing cabinet in the study. Frau Junge will show you.'

We stood up. His hand went out for Luísa's, which she gave him and he pressed it to his lips which made her shudder.

'You've had an extraordinary life, Senhor Felsen,' she said, to cover herself.

'We all had big lives then,' he said, looking out at the fog-filled morning. 'Even an SS-Schütze could have a big life then, but it might not have been the one he wanted. The twenty years I spent thinking about this in Caxias I wouldn't have minded a smaller life. I wouldn't mind some of my regrets being smaller.'

'And what is your biggest?' asked Luísa.

'Perhaps you are the romantic type. You might think…' he said, and hesitated for a response which Luísa didn't give him. 'Perhaps, after all I've told you, you can tell me what my biggest regret should be?'

She didn't respond. He seemed to deflate.

'It wasn't Eva. It was regrettable that she despised me in the end, but that came about by my own inaction,' he said, and struggled in his blankets for a moment, like a baby. 'The action I most regret was what I did to the English agent, Edward Burton. I don't know why it happened. Over the years I blamed Abrantes for it, I blamed the drink, I've even blamed the Dutch girl for stealing my cufflinks. But after twenty years in Caxias with nothing much else to think about I still couldn't find any reason for it and I've had to come to the conclusion that I had a visit from pure evil.

'I am not, Senhora Madrugada,' he said, finally, 'a man with prospects.'

His head went down and we left. In the filing cabinet we found copies of the documents showing the gold's origination. There were also photographs showing Felsen and Joaquim Abrantes and other members of the Abrantes family, including the young Manuel.

Luísa dropped me off in Paço de Arcos. She continued to Lisbon. I had breakfast with António Borrego in his bar, which was empty apart from the two of us.