'Nothing,' said Lehrer, straightening himself with a belch. 'The loss of a great air battle. What does that mean to you?'
'But we haven't been bombed in Berlin for nearly two months.'
'Berliners,' said Lehrer, despairing, 'even new Berliners, my God, man, believe me, we lost it. Now come on, tell me what that means.'
'If it's true, then we are exposed.'
'In the west and in the air.'
'So if we open up on an Eastern...'
'That's enough. I think you've understood something.'
'What is England with the Channel in between,' said Felsen. 'They're no threat.'
'I'm not being defeatist,' said Lehrer, 'no, no, no. But listen. We let them get away at Dunkirk. If we'd smashed them on the beaches then we'd be having this meal in London and we'd have nothing to worry about. But the English are determined. They have a friend across the Atlantic. The biggest economic force in the world. The Führer doesn't believe that, but it's true.'
'Perhaps we'll all join forces and smash the Bolsheviks.'
'That's a hopeful reading of the situation. Here's another,' said Lehrer putting down his glass and screwing his cigar in between his teeth. He chopped down his left hand on the table and said: 'The United States and England.' He removed his cigar, chopped down his right hand and mouthed the word: 'Russia.' He pressed them together. 'And all that's left is a thin scraping of liverwurst in the middle.'
'Totally and utterly fantastic,' said Felsen. 'You're forgetting...'
Lehrer guffawed.
'That's the thing about intelligence. It's not always what you want to hear.'
'But do you believe that?'
'Of course I don't. It's just a thought. Don't trouble yourself with it. We will win the war and you will be in a perfect position to become one of the most powerful businessmen in the Iberian Peninsula. Unless, of course, I've misjudged you and you're a complete fool.'
'And if we lose, as you've suggested we possibly might?'
'If you're in Berlin and you listen to the Berliners, you'll be jam in the bottom of a bomb crater. But out there on the edge of the continent you will be far away from the disaster...'
'Then I have every reason to thank you for forcing this job on me, Herr Gruppenführer.'
Lehrer raised his glass and said: 'Prosperity.'
They'd drunk the best part of half a bottle of cognac and when the fresh evening air hit the older man he breathed it in deeply, backed himself into the rear of the Mercedes and collapsed with his head thrown forward on to his chest. Felsen tried to think his way through their conversation while listening to the air whistling in and out of the other man's nose. It was like piecing together a jig-saw with too much sky and it wasn't long before his cheek was picking up the indent of the piping round the leather upholstery.
They woke up in the Bundesplatz in central Bern. Lehrer was groggy and on the verge of ill temper. They passed the parliament building and the Swiss National Bank before leaving the square and pulling up outside the Schweizerhof. A doorman and two bellboys rushed the car.
Their rooms were on different floors and as they went up in the lift Lehrer told Felsen he had business to attend to that night and he could have the evening to himself.
'You'll need it to read these,' he said giving him a folder from his briefcase.
'What are they?'
'Your orders. I go back to Berlin first thing in the morning. You may have some questions. Prepare them. Goodnight.'
Felsen ran a bath and flicked through his orders which started at the Swiss National Bank at 8.00 a.m. He soaked in the bath but still felt dull from the lunch. He dried off, redressed and went out into the sub-zero temperature to walk off his head. In a few short minutes he was freezing. A bar next to the railway station looked warm and he saw it contained Lehrer's driver.
He bought two beers and joined the driver.
'I envy you,' said Felsen, chinking glasses. 'You'll be back in Berlin by tomorrow night.'
'Not quite.'
'You've got the whole day, once you get on the autobahn...'
'We go down to Gstaad first for a few days. He likes the mountain air and ... other things.'
'Oh yes?'
'When they're away they always like to play ... even Himmler and you wouldn't think anyone would want to play with him. Power,' said the driver staring into his beer, 'it does it for the ladies, I can tell you.'
Felsen finished his drink and headed back to the Schweizerhof. Lehrer was still in his room. Felsen sat in the bar until he saw him coming through the reception and going out into the night. He decided to gather his own intelligence, rather than let Lehrer serve it to him in portions, and fell in behind him. They walked through the streets of the old city. There were few people about but it was easy to follow him down the dark pavements overhung by the green sandstone houses. Finally Lehrer turned down a street and when Felsen arrived at the corner there was nothing but a single lit sign which said Ruthli in red. He felt foolish. It meant nothing that Lehrer had a girlfriend in Bern. But curiosity drew him on.
He went into the club, handed over his hat and coat and took a table in the dark. A fat man with black brilliantined hair was playing the piano while a girl with a long red wig stood in a spotlight and sang something sad in Swiss German. He ordered a cognac. He couldn't see Lehrer. The cognac arrived and a few minutes later a girl sat down next to him. They spoke in French. His eyes got used to the dark and he found Lehrer sitting at a table close to the stage with a woman who was blocked out by the big man's shoulders.
The club filled up. The girl asked him to buy her a drink. It arrived in a bucket of ice. She was very young and too thin for his taste. She moved closer with her drink and stole one of his cigarettes. The red-wigged girl slipped off the stage with her sad song and fat pianist. There followed a drum roll and spotlights flashed around the club catching people unawares. One spot hit Lehrer's companion fall in the face. She closed her eyes to it and turned her head but not quick enough. It brought Felsen out of his seat and tipped the girl's glass across the table. Cymbals clashed. The audience faded to black. The spotlights stilled on a red curtain which split and revealed a man in a top hat and tails. But there was no mistaking what Felsen had seen. The white face in the spotlight had been Eva Brücke's.
Chapter VI
Saturday, 13th June 199–, Paço de Arcos, near Lisbon
We worked the boatyard next to the harbour and came up with nothing. We crossed the Marginal using the underpass and talked to the people who were clearing up last night's mess in the Bombeiros Voluntarios tent but none of them had been working the night shift. The restaurant/café in the gardens was closed. We walked up to the pine woods to see how the PSP men were getting on. They had the usual array of used condoms, syringes and bleached and tattered pornography. No such thing as an innocent pine wood in this area. I told them to bag the lot and send it up to Fernanda at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Lisbon. Carlos and I went back to António and had some toast and more coffee.
At 08.30 I put a call in to Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira who I assumed was the girl's father and, given his two addresses in Lisbon and Cascais, was not engaged in the great financial struggle that the rest of us were. It was a Saturday so I tried the Cascais number first and thought I was wrong until he picked it up at the twelfth ring and groggily agreed to see us in half an hour's time. We got into my black 1972 Alfa Romeo, which was not, as many thought, a classic car, just an old car, and it started without having to draw on any reserves of bravery. We headed west on the Marginal with Carlos pinned to his seat by the belt that was stuck at one length and for a girl Olivia's size.
There were big fans of Cascais but I wasn't one of them. It used to be a small fishing village with houses falling down steep cataracts of cobbled streets to the harbour and port. Now it was a townplanner's nightmare, unless you were one of the townplanners who'd passed the numerous development projects in which case you'd be living in a dream elsewhere. It was a tourist town with
an indigenous population of women who dressed to shop, and men who shouldn't be allowed out of a nightclub. Real life had been stripped out and replaced with an international cosmopolitanism which appealed to a lot of people who had money, and about as many again who wanted to ease it away from them.
We rolled in past the supermarket, the railway station and an electronic signboard which told us that it was 28°C at 08.55 and we should get some insurance. The fish market was wrapping up for the morning. The lobster and crab pots were piled high in front of the Hotel Bahia. The fort, square and ugly, out on the point, dominated. I drove up a cobbled street at the back of the town hall and turned into a tree-lined, heavily shaded square, cool and sombre with wealth, in the old part of town. Dr Oliveira's traditional villa on two floors was large and silent in the breathless morning. Carlos Pinto sniffed like a dog that's picked up the whiff of the first possible scrap of the day.
'Pine,' he said.
'The pine needle angle could be a lot of work in this area, agente Pinto.'
'There's a pine tree in the back garden,' he said looking down the side of the house.
We let ourselves in by the front gate and went past a pillar of red bougainvillea to the back of the house. The pine tree was huge and shut out the light to the garden. The floor beneath it was a perfect brown carpet of dried needles.
'Put your foot on that,' I said.
Carlos' foot crunched through a couple of inches of needles.
'I don't think you could kill someone on that and leave it...'
'Bom dia, senhores,' said a voice behind us. 'And you are...?'
'We were admiring your pine tree,' said Carlos, electing to be the idiot.
'I'm going to cut it down,' said the thin, tall, erect man with white brilliantined hair, combed in rails off a high forehead and curling at the collar. 'It kills the light in the back of the house and makes the maid feel gloomy. You are the Policía Judiciária, I take it?'
We introduced ourselves and followed him into the house. He wore a lightweight, English chequered shirt, grey slacks with turnups and brown loafers. He walked with his hands behind his back and stooped a little like a thoughtful priest. The parquet-floored corridor was lined with portraits of ancestors depressed at being cooped up in the dark. His study had more parquet flooring and Arraiolos carpets of some quality and antiquity. His desk was large and made out of walnut and had a brown leather chair behind it which was shiny where he'd buffed it with his back. Four lamps, supported by polished women carved from jet, provided light. The red bougainvillea outside had eclipsed the sunshine. He sat us down at a three-piece suite in a book-lined corner of the room. Only a lawyer would have so many books in the same bindings. An ormolu clock ticked as if each tick was going to be its last.
Dr Oliveira was in no hurry to talk. As we sat down he fitted his dark-skinned face into a pair of bifocals and searched his desk for something he didn't find. The maid came in and laid out coffee without looking at us. There was a photograph of the dead girl on a shelf squeezed in between some old paperbacks, thrillers, written in English.
Catarina Oliveira was smiling at the camera. Her blue eyes were wide open but they didn't match what her mouth was doing. Something tightened in my chest. I'd seen the same look in Olivia's eyes after I'd told her that her mother was dead.
That's her,' said Dr Oliveira, his white eyebrows jumping over the frames of his bifocals.
He was old for the father of a fifteen-year-old girl—late sixties in his body and more than that in the lines and creases of his face and neck. He should have been trying to remember the names of his grandchildren. He leaned forward and picked out a small cigar from a jade box on the desk top. He licked his lips which became the colour of pig's liver and screwed the cigar between them. He lit it. The maid rattled a coffee cup down in front of him and reversed out of the room.
'When did you last see her?' I asked, putting the photograph back.
'Thursday night. I left my Lisbon house early on Friday morning. I had to get to my office to prepare for a day in court.'
'What sort of law do you practise?'
'Corporate law. Tax. I've never done criminal work if you think that's relevant.'
'Did your wife see Catarina on Friday morning?'
'She dropped her off at school and came down here. It's what she does in the summer at the weekends.'
'And Catarina makes her own way here after school ... on the train ... from Cais do Sodré?'
'She's usually here by six or seven o'clock.'
'She was reported missing at nine.'
'I got back here at about half-past-eight. My wife had been here about an hour worrying, we phoned everybody we could think of and then I reported her missing at...'
'Does she have any particular friends? A boyfriend?'
'She sings in a band. She spends most of her spare time with them,' he said, leaning back with his coffee. 'Boyfriends? None that I know of.'
'Is that a school band?'
'They're all at the university. Two boys—Valentim and Bruno—and a girl. The girl is called ... Teresa. Yes. Teresa, that's it.'
'All of them a lot older than Catarina.'
'They must be twenty, twenty-one, the boys. The girl, I don't know. Probably the same but she wears black and uses purple lipstick so it's difficult to tell.'
'We'll need all their details,' I said, and Dr Oliveira reached for a pad and began leafing through his address book. He scribbled down names and addresses. 'Is she your only child?'
'From this marriage, yes. I have four grown-up children. Teresa...' he let the name drift with his cigar smoke, his eyes glanced at a photograph on his desk.
'Is that your current wife?' I asked, and looked at the same photograph, which was of the four children from his previous marriage.
'My second wife,' he replied, annoyed with himself. 'Catarina's her only child.'
'Is your wife here, Senhor Doutor?' I asked.
'She's upstairs. She's not well. She's sleeping. She takes ... she's taken something to help her sleep. I don't think it would be a good idea...'
'Is she a nervous woman ... ordinarily?'
'When it comes to Catarina, when it comes to her only daughter missing the whole night, when it comes to a phone call from the Policía Judiciária first thing in the morning ... then yes, she becomes...'
'How would you describe their present relationship? Catarina and your wife.'
'What?' he said, looking across to Carlos as if he might be able to clarify this sort of question.
'It's not always a simple relationship—mother and daughter.'
'I don't know what you're driving at,' he said, coughing a half-laugh.
'The Chinese character for "strife" is represented by two women under the same roof.'
Dr Aquilino Oliveira supported himself with the heels of his palms on the edge of the desk and looked out at me over the rims of his glasses. His dark brown eyes reached in.
'She's never run off without a word before,' he said, quietly.
'Does that mean they have been known to disagree?'
'Strife,' he said, ruminating over the word. 'Catarina has been practising at being a woman, yes, I see what you mean. That's very interesting.'
'By "practising", Senhor Doutor, you mean sexual experimentation?' I asked, easing myself down on to some of my own eggshells.
'It has been a concern of mine.'
'Do you think she might have got out of her depth?'
The lawyer sucked himself in and then sagged to one side of his chair. Was it acting or real? It was surprising the number of people who resorted to soap in times of stress ... but a lawyer of this calibre?
'Last summer, Teresa, my wife, doing the usual Friday routine forgot something in the Lisbon house. She drove back around lunchtime and found Catarina in bed with a man. There was a big fight...'
'Catarina would have been fourteen then, Senhor Doutor. What did you make of it?'
'I think that's what kids do given h
alf the chance ... less than half the chance. But, for me, it's different. I've had four children already. I've been through all that. I've made mistakes. I've tried to learn. It's made me more understanding ... more liberal. I didn't get angry. We talked. She was very straight, very candid, even brazen as they are, kids, these days ... showing off that they're adult too.'
Carlos had been sitting with his coffee cup ten centimetres from his mouth for the last two minutes, transfixed by the exchange. I shot him a look and he ducked into his coffee.
'When you said "man", your wife "found Catarina in bed with a man", that sounds as if her companion was older than ... than one of the "boys" in the band for instance. Was that the case?'
'You're a careful listener, Inspector Coelho.'
'How old was he, Dr Oliveira?' I asked, volleying his flattery straight back at him.
'Thirty-two.'
'That's very precise. Did Catarina tell you that?'
'She didn't have to. I knew the man. He was my wife's younger brother.'
The ormolu clock nearly missed a tick.
'Didn't that make you very angry, Dr Oliveira?' I said. 'You don't have to be a lawyer to know that your brother-in-law broke the law—that's child abuse.'
'I'm hardly going to run him in, am I?'
'I didn't mean that.'
'I'm a mixture, Inspector Coelho. I was an accountant before I became a lawyer. I'm sixty-seven years old now and my wife is thirty-seven. I married her when I was fifty-one and she was twenty-one. When she was fourteen...'
'But she wasn't, Senhor Doutor, when you knew her. You weren't taking advantage of a minor.'
'That's correct.'
'Perhaps, after this incident, Catarina, in your talk with her, gave you some reason to be tolerant with your brother-in-law?' I said, struggling with the sentence as if it was a giant octopus.
'If, by that, you mean, she wasn't a virgin, Inspector Coelho ... you would be right. You might also be shocked to know that she admitted to seducing my brother-in-law,' he replied, copying my syntax.
'Do you think she was telling the truth?'
'Don't imagine that they're thinking like we were when we were fourteen.'
A Small Death in Lisbon Page 7