'She fronts a band ... that needs something.'
'It wasn't a very successful band,' she said, and switched. 'Yes, it's true, she can appear older than she is.'
'Is that what you meant by competing?'
Our eyes connected but she couldn't hold mine for more than a few seconds. She seemed to steady herself against the coffee table, rapping it with her ringed fingers.
'I didn't ... I'm wondering what he's told you now,' she said, glancing at the door.
'Just tell me what happened.'
'Did he tell you I found Catarina in bed with my brother?'
'Why would you see that as competitive?'
'He's thirty-two years old.'
'But he's your brother.'
'I don't see any reason to be discussing middle-age female paranoia with someone investigating my daughter's disappearance. The fact is if she can get him she can...'
'Your husband said that too.'
'This is hopeless.'
'Maybe your brother's the one to help us with...'
'I don't know why he has to do this ... now of all times.'
'He?'
'I didn't find Catarina in bed with my brother. She was with my lover,' she said, coolly, now that she'd given up the pretence.
'Do you still see this man?'
'Are you insane, Inspector?'
'And your daughter?'
Silence.
'I don't know,' she said, after a while.
'I'll need to speak to him,' I said.
Carlos handed her the notebook. She scribbled fiercely and finished with a pile-driving dot that must have gone through to the cardboard.
'How did your husband find out?'
She pushed up her chin like a boxer who could take anything now. Truth, part truth and lies passed behind her eyes.
'You can imagine the atmosphere in this house ... between me and Catarina. My husband talked to her. He's good with words. He wrung it out of her.'
'Did she seduce your lover ... Paulo Branco?'
'The delicacy of young flesh is difficult to resist so I'm told.' She said it in a way that particularly pained her.
'She was a drug-user. Your husband knows about hashish. Were you aware of her taking anything stronger?'
'I wouldn't know the difference. I've never taken drugs.'
'But you know how you feel when you've taken a sleeping pill, Senhora Oliveira?'
'I go to sleep.'
'In the morning, I mean.'
She blinked.
'Doesn't it give you an insulated feeling, the real world kept at a distance? Did you ever notice Catarina in that state or perhaps the opposite, nervous, hyperactive, wired ... I think they call it?'
'I really don't know,' she said.
'Does that mean you didn't notice or...'
'It means that, of late, I haven't cared.'
It was a long silence in which the unheard air conditioning made its presence felt.
'How did she get her money?' I asked.
'I gave her five thousand escudos a week.'
'What about clothes.'
'I used to buy her clothes until ... until last year,' she said.
'Did you buy the clothes she was wearing?'
'Not the skirt. I wouldn't have bought her anything that short. It barely covered her knickers but then that's the fashion so...'
'Was she doing all right at school?'
'I didn't hear anything to the contrary.'
'No attendance problems?'
'We would have been told, I'm sure. Whenever I dropped her off she walked in there like a lamb.'
'One minute,' I said, and left the room.
I found Dr Oliveira in his study smoking a cigar and reading the Diário de Notíocias. I told him I wanted to break the news to his wife and asked him if he'd prefer to do it. He said he'd leave it to me. We went back into the room. Senhora Oliveira was talking animatedly to Carlos. She was sitting sideways on the sofa and her skirt had crawled up her legs. Carlos was as stiff as his hair. She saw us and froze. Her husband sat next to her.
'At a quarter-to-six this morning, Dona Oliveira,' I started, and her eyes looked into me avid and horrified. 'The body of your daughter, Catarina Oliveira, was found on the beach in Paço de Arcos. She was dead. I am very sorry.'
She said nothing. She stared into me hard enough to see the texture of my organs. Her husband took her hand and she absentmindedly removed it from his grip.
'Agente Carlos Pinto and myself are conducting the investigation into your daughter's death.'
'Her death?' she said, astonished and coughed out an appalled laugh.
'We are very sorry for your loss. I apologize for not telling you earlier but there were certain questions I had to ask which needed a clarity of mind.'
Her husband made another attempt on the hand. She left it there this time. She was speared rigid by what I'd said.
'We believe that she had been murdered elsewhere and her body taken to the beach in Paço de Arcos and left there.'
'Catarina has been murdered?' she said, incredulous, as if this was what happened to riffraff on television only. She slumped back into the sofa, stunned. She tried to swallow but couldn't, couldn't gulp down the dreadful news. I realized we weren't going to get any further today. We shook hands and left. At the garden gate we heard a long unrestrained wail from the house.
'I'm not sure I understood all of that,' said Carlos.
'It was ... very disappointing.'
'I thought it was...'
'It was very disappointing for someone of your youth and optimism to have to look at that sort of behaviour.'
'Why did we have to know anything about this affair with the brother or the lover ... what was Dr Oliveira's game with all that?'
'That was what was so disappointing,' I said. 'He was using us ... he was using our investigation into his daughter's murder to punish his wife's infidelity. What we saw in there was a master class in humiliation. Now you've observed the intelligence of the lawyer.'
'But the wife,' said Carlos, agitated, 'the wife ... when you left the room she didn't ask one question about her daughter's disappearance. Not one. She chatted. She asked me things about the stupid paintings, how long I'd been in the Policía Judiciária, did I live in Cascais...'
'Yes, well, there were a couple of things about those two in there. First, Dr Oliveira kept a photograph of his previous family on his desk while Catarina was up on a bookshelf with some dog-eared paperbacks. The second was that both of them had brown eyes.'
'I didn't notice,' he said writing it down in his notebook.
'And brown eyes plus brown eyes don't often make blue, and Catarina Oliveira had blue eyes.'
Chapter VIII
2nd March 1941, South-west France
It was a perfect morning. The first perfect morning for days. The sky was pristine, cloudless and of such a blue that only pain could come from looking at it. To the south the mountains, the snowcapped Pyrenees, were just catching the first rays of the rising sun and the thin, spiky cold air up there sharpened the white peaks and deepened the blue of the sky close to them. Felsen's two Swiss drivers couldn't stop talking about it. They were from the south and spoke Italian and they knew mountains, but only the Alps.
They didn't talk to Felsen unless he spoke to them first which was infrequently. They found him cold, aloof, abrupt, and on one occasion brutal. In the few moments he fell asleep in the cab they heard him grinding his teeth and saw the muscles of his jaw bunching under the skin of his cheek. They called him 'bone-crusher' when he was visible and at some distance. That was the only risk they were prepared to take after witnessing the excessive kicking he'd given a driver who'd accidentally reversed into a gatepost in the barracks outside Lyons. They were Italian-Swiss after all.
Felsen hadn't noticed. He didn't care. He was treading a well-trodden circle, going over and over the same ground so that if he'd walked his thoughts he'd have been in a circular trench up to his shoulders. He'd
smoked hours of cigarettes, metres of them, kilos of tobacco while he dissected his every living moment with Eva searching for the moment. And when he couldn't find the moment, he came at Eva from a different angle sizing all the sentences, all the phrases, weighing every word she'd ever said to him and all the ones she hadn't as well, which was a bigger task because Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it.
He played over the scene of the first time she ended up in his bed after four years of knowing each other, after four years of being friends. She'd sat astride him in her black silk stockings and suspenders running her hands over and over his chest.
'Why?' he'd asked.
'Why what?'
'After all these years ... why are you here?'
She'd pursed her lips and looked at him out of the corner of her face measuring the question for its long-term prospects. Then she'd suddenly gripped his penis with both hands and said:
'Because of your big Swabian cock.'
They'd laughed. It hadn't been it, but it would do.
Now as he came to that point, for the hundredth time, where Eva had diminished him, he all but writhed in his seat with the torment of his sexual jealousy. He saw the heavy-waisted, pink-skinned, uncontoured-buttocked Gruppenführer squeezing and pumping between her slim white thighs, her heels encouraging him, her breath coming out in jolts, his trembling grunts into the corner of her neck, her clawing fingers on his flabby back, his greedy hands, her rising knees, his deeper thrusts ... Felsen would shake his head. No. And he would go back to Eva again sitting astride him in her black ... Why?
'Power does it for the ladies,' Lehrer's chauffeur had said, 'even Himmler...' That's what Felsen had thought as he watched Lehrer eat his breakfast the morning after he'd seen him in the club with Eva. That's what he'd thought as he strolled through the dark morning to the Swiss National Bank, as he'd signed the release documents, as he'd supervised the loading of the gold, as he'd shaken hands with Lehrer and watched him walk back to the Schweizerhof, to his three days in Gstaad with Eva.
He could barely remember crossing the border. He couldn't think of any moment in France apart from the stupid driver. He'd lived inside his head until the cloud had lifted off the Pyrenees that morning and the Swiss wouldn't stop talking about it.
He got drunk that night with a Standartenführer of a Panzer division in Bayonne who'd told him his tanks would be in Lisbon before the end of the month.
'We got to the Pyrenees in four weeks. We'll reach Gibraltar in two, Lisbon in one. We're just waiting for the crack of the Führer's starting pistol.'
They drank claret, a Grand Cru Classé from Château Batailley, bottle after bottle of it as if it was beer. He slept in his clothes that night and woke up in the morning with his face hurting and his throat sore from snoring like a hog. They crossed the border into Spain and picked up an army escort sent with a personal instruction for their safety from General Francisco Franco himself. By nightfall they were still grinding up the hairpins of the Vascongadas as if they were dragging Felsen's hangover behind them.
Now that there was no threat of Allied air attack they drove through the night and they were glad to be able to keep the engines running because once they came out of the mountains and on to the meseta there was nothing to stop the wind which drove a bleak mixture of freezing rain and ice into the sides of the trucks. The drivers stamped their feet on the metal floors to keep them from going numb. Felsen, hunched behind the collar of his wool coat, stared into the darkness, the swerving road, the headlights arcing across the trees. He didn't move. This had become his kind of temperature.
They refuelled in Burgos, a bleak and frozen place with disgusting food laced, no, swimming in the acrid urine of the poorest quality olive oil which burnt through the bowels of the drivers so that they shat all the way to Salamanca. They shat so frequently that Felsen refused them permission to stop and they just hung their bare arses out of the doors and let the icy wind take it wherever.
Refugees appeared on the road, most of them on foot, some with a cart between them and occasionally an emaciated mule. They were dark people with faces hollowed out by fear and hunger. They walked automatically, the adults grim, the children blank. These people silenced the drivers, who stopped complaining about the food and the cold. As the trucks ground past them not a head turned, not a single homburg altered its course. The Jews of Europe tramped through the empty wilderness of Spain with their cardboard suitcases and knotted sheets, seeing no further than the next wind-blasted oak on the skyline.
Felsen looked down on them from the cab. He'd expected to find some pity for them as he had for the two men from Sachsenhausen who'd swept his factory floor after their release at the time of the Berlin Olympics. He found nothing. He found he didn't have room for anything else.
They drove through Salamanca. The golden stone of the cathedral walls and the university buildings was dull under the white dome of the frozen sky. There was no fuel. The drivers managed to buy some chorizo and weevil-riddled bread. The convoy moved on to Ciudad Rodrigo and the border town of Fuentes de Oñoro. The Spanish army escort harassed the columns of refugees who shifted off the road on to the barren rock-strewn plain without even a raised gesture.
The twenty whitewashed hovels on the rocky treeless site that made up Fuentes de Oñoro were frozen in a piercing wind that kept the inhabitants indoors and the refugees huddled behind boulders and upturned carts. The drivers blundered amongst them looking for food and found everyone in a worse state than themselves. A woman in the only shop offered them lumps of pork fat in what looked like the same rancid oil they'd had in Burgos. They named the dish Gordura alla Moda della Guerra and didn't touch it.
The customs formalities on the Spanish side were brief. The officials left their less lucrative work of minutely inspecting the jittery refugees' papers and their reductions of a lifetime's possessions and came to get their bonuses. Felsen, who knew that this was the border post that would see most of his business, had prepared himself for the crossing with French brandy and jambon de Bayonne. His drivers were furious. The deal was sealed with shots of cheap aguardente and the convoy moved across to the Portuguese side at Vilar Formoso.
The Portuguese army escort had not arrived. There was a member of the German legation who'd already dispatched a messenger to Guarda. They arranged for the drivers to park the trucks in the square outside the ornately tiled railway station, which showed framed scenes of all the major towns in Portugal. The square was packed with more wild-eyed people. The drivers went looking for food again. They found a soup kitchen which had been set up by firms from Porto but it was for British passport-holders only. They tried talking to the refugees. The women, collapsed under coloured shawls, wouldn't look at them, and with the men, in long mud-rimmed coats with furry hats jammed down over thick black matted hair and faces blanked out and ragged with beards, they could find no common language. There were Poles and Czechs, Yugoslavs and Hungarians, Turks and Iraqis. They tried the less picturesque—men in creased three-piece business suits who stood above exhausted women and howling children but they were Dutch or Flemish, Rumanians or Bulgarians and in no mood for sign language, especially of the sort which involved pointing a finger into the mouth. Even the young were uncommunicative—the boys shifty, the girls cringing and babies either wailing or mute and vacant. When the engine of one of the approaching Portuguese army motorcycles back-fired, this massed driftwood of war ducked and flinched as one.
Felsen worked on the customs officials using charm and some supplies that the member of the German legation had brought with him. The Portuguese responded with cheese, choriço and wine and were very helpful with the reams of bureaucracy that needed to be filled out to allow the trucks to move freely in the country. When the convoy moved off the chefe of the alfândega, the customs, came out to wave and wish him a speedy return because he could see that this was the auspicious start of what could be years of graft.
They crossed the River Coa and spent a night at an army post in Guarda where they ate an enormous meal whose four courses all tasted the same and drank a lot of wine from five-litre flagons. Felsen had already begun to feel himself coming round. He knew because he was interested in seeing the women in the kitchens. Since moving to Berlin he'd barely gone forty-eight hours without sex and now it had been more than a week. When finally he saw the women he hoped they'd been especially selected to keep the soldiers' ardour at bay They were all tiny with no more than an inch of forehead between their dark eyebrows and the scarves around their heads. Their noses were sharp, their cheeks sunken and their teeth gone or rotten. He went to bed and slept badly on a flea-ridden mattress.
In the morning they began driving through some of the places they'd seen depicted on the blue and white azulejos in the station at Vilar Formoso. The drivers realized what had been missing from the designs, or perhaps bad roads, poverty and filth looked different in their own colours. They rounded the pine-forested, rock-strewn mountains of the Serra da Estrela on the northern boundary of the Beira Baixa which, as Felsen already knew, was going to be his home for the next years of his life. Where schist and granite meet was where the black, shiny crystalline wolfram occurred, and Felsen could see from the grey/brown block stone houses and slate roofs that this was the right country.
They crossed the Mondego and Dão rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria. The air changed. The dry cool of the mountains disappeared and a warm humidity took over. The sun was hot even in early March and they stripped off their coats. The drivers rolled up their shirt sleeves and looked as if they might sing. There were no refugees on the road. The representative from the German legation told them that Salazar was making sure that no more came into Lisbon—the city was already full. They spent a last night on the road at Vila Franca de Xira and got up early the next morning to deliver the gold to the Banco de Portugal before normal office hours.
It was first light as they turned away from the Tagus into the Terreiro do Paço and the trucks made their way behind the arcaded eighteenth-century façade into the grid system of the Baixa, purpose-built by the Marqués de Pombal after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. They drove along Rua do Comércio, behind the massive triumphal arch at the head of the Rua da Augusta, to the conglomeration of buildings including the church of Sâo Julilo that made up the Banco de Portugal. They waited for the gates to open in the Largo de'Sâo Juliâo and one by one the trucks reversed in to unload.
A Small Death in Lisbon Page 9