'You said, let me get this right, "Nobody's going to have their trousers down in any magazine I publish." I think that was it, wasn't it?'
'That's your end of the story, my end is that one of Portugal's largest international banks was funded directly by Nazi gold,' she said. 'You can do the trousers-down stuff ... I'll let you tag that on the end.'
'You think Klaus Felsen's going to tell you everything ... all on your first date?'
'See if he's alive first,' she said, nodding at the piece of paper.
I picked up the telephone and dialled the number. A woman answered speaking in German. I asked for Klaus Felsen.
'He's sleeping,' she said.
'What's the best time to speak to him?'
'What is it concerning?'
'The Banco de Oceano e Rocha.'
Silence.
'And who are you?'
'I'm a detective with the Polícia Judiciária in Lisbon. I'm investigating the murder of a young girl. I think Senhor Felsen might be able to help us with our enquiries.'
'I'll talk to him. But you know he doesn't keep regular hours. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, other times in the late morning, sometimes he sleeps all the way through. If he agrees to speak to you, you must come when I say.'
I gave her Luísa's telephone number and put the phone down. I paced the room naked, chewing my thumbnail. Luísa smoked at the ceiling. I called Olivia on her mobile and told her I'd be late, and possibly wouldn't come home at all, and that she should get a meal at my sister's.
'Don't worry about me,' she said.
'Are you in a car?' I asked, the signal breaking into static.
'I'm with Sofia and her mother. We're going back to Cascais. They're going to take me out to dinner and I'll stay the night. OK?'
'No.'
'What? I can't hear you.'
'No, that wouldn't be OK,' I said.
'Why ... can ... please ... bloody thing ... ga...'
'I want you back at home.'
'But you just said you wouldn't be there.'
'I know what I just said.'
'Then don't be unreasonable. Why should I go back to...'
'Because...'
'I can't hear you.'
'Olivia.'
'The line's breaking up ... bye.'
The line went dead.
'Trouble?' asked Luísa.
The telephone, still in my hand, rang. I yanked it to my ear.
'Olivia.'
'Inspector Coelho?' asked a German-inflected voice.
'This is me,' I said.
'Herr Felsen is available now. He will speak to you. Do you know the house?'
'No.'
'It's the last house in Portugal. Just before the lighthouse.'
'It could take us up to an hour to get there.'
'Come as quickly as you can.'
We got into the shower together and dressed. I tried Olivia's mobile again but she'd turned it off. Luísa told me not to worry about it, that nothing was going to happen tonight, but the tension crept into me and stiffened a ridge across my shoulders. My daughter could be spending the night with a murderer, a murderer of young girls.
Luísa drove and talked me down on the way out of Lisbon. I sat with her laptop and camera on my knees and kept the lid on my panic. What could we do? Trawl through every restaurant in Cascais? I didn't even know where the Rodrigues' weekend house was in Cascais, and when I checked the phonebook there was nothing under his name—the property was probably his wife's and the phone still in her maiden name.
We came off the end of the motorway and headed west, through Aldeia de Juzo and Malveira. We climbed the twisting road, the end of the day dying now behind the high chapel of Peninha. The lights of isolated houses suspended in the black velvet of the heather. The ships on the dark Atlantic heading for the last blue-grey moment. We turned off left to Azóia at the highest point of the road, past old windmills transformed into bars, through the village of barking dogs and out again into the heather and gorse, the blades of light from the lighthouse slashing through the now complete darkness.
We came off the tarmac on to a length of beaten track, which took us up to a low walled house, with an enclosed roof terrace on the top in which a little light was burning.
A woman bent into our headlights, opening the gate. A chained German shepherd was barking madly in the courtyard. When he saw us, he took long, pelting runs right to the limit of his chain.
'I am Frau Junge,' she said, in a sweet voice on the brink of a yodel. She shushed the dog, who liked the voice and sat down with his head cocked to one side.
Frau Junge took us up the outside steps to the enclosed roof terrace. By the little light was a huddle in a wheelchair, head down near his chest—not a lively-looking person. One of the blades from the lighthouse swept above the roof of the house.
Frau Junge spoke into the ear of the heavily-blanketed man in the wheelchair. His head came up. Frau Junge dragged two chairs across from the wall and placed them near the wheelchair. A single hand came out from under the blankets and beckoned one of the chairs closer. She sighed as if he was a pesky child and moved the chair closer.
'He wants the girl to sit next to him, that's all. Watch his hand. It's the only one he's got and it can be fast and ... intrusive,' she said and left us in the room.
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.
'You look tired, Zé,' he said, laying out the coffee and buttered toast.
'I had a long night.'
'You didn't eat properly.'
'No.'
'Maybe I should cook something for you.'
'No, this is fine.'
'What was keeping you up all night?'
'Work ... as usual.'
'I heard they raided your house and they've arrested Faustinho.'
I sank my teeth into the toast, sipped some coffee.
'You fell under a tram, too,' he said.
'Fell?'
'I was being diplomatic.'
I wiped molten butter from my chin.
'Is she a girlfriend, the woman who dropped you off just now?'
'The whole world passes before you in here, doesn't it, António?' I said. 'You don't have to go outside. It all comes to you.'
'It's the nature of running a bar,' he said. 'I wouldn't do it if it was just a question of serving drinks.'
I poured more coffee, added milk.
'You were in Caxias, weren't you, at the end there, in 1974?' I asked.
'That was when I used to go out and do things and look what happened.'
'Did you ever hear the name Felsen? Klaus Felsen.'
'We heard about him. He was in for murder. The politicals and the regulars didn't have much to do with each other. They kept us apart.'
'What about a woman called Maria Antónia Medinas?'
Silence. I looked up from my toast. He was pinching the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed.
'I was just thinking,' he said. 'Was she a regular?'
'I don't know. I don't know anything about her. Just the name.'
'She wasn't on the political side ... that I know of.'
'Have you still got friends you could ask?'
'Friends?'
'Well, comrades then,' I said, and he laughed.
I went back to the house and found Olivia in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.
'What happened to you?' I asked, in English.
'I did what my Daddy told me to do,' she said and looked back at the sink, annoyed.
'You spent the night here?'
'That's what you told me to do,' she said. 'Have I been a good girl?'
'How did you get back?'
'Senhor Rodrigues brought me back after dinner.'
'On your own?' I said, my hands suddenly ice-cold.
'The others didn't want to come,' she said. 'I felt a complete idiot.'
'What did you talk about with Senhor Rodrigues?'
'I don't know. Nothing much.'
'Try and remember,' I said. 'It would help.'
She spat the toothpaste out and swilled her mouth.
'Oh yes, he was asking me about the Smashing Pumpkins.'
'Smashing Pumpkins?'
'They're a band, Dad,' she said, saddened by my lack of cool. 'A popular singing group I think you used to
call them in your day.'
Then I told her, without telling her why, she shouldn't spend any more time with the Rodrigues family.
Chapter XL
05.30 Friday, 26th June 1998, Paço de Arcos, Lisbon
I was lying in bed unable to sleep, listening to the traffic, smoking cigarettes, reading Fernanda Ramalho's pathology report for the hundredth time. I was two hours away from a media storm that would change my life and now I didn't want it. I wanted the old life back.
It had been a terrible week. I'd assumed when Luísa had said her father, Vitor Madrugada, had a magazine on the blocks that everything was ready and all he had to do was press a button. But he didn't even have a printer and it cost him some very big money to get: one, because printers' presses don't hang around doing nothing waiting for a job—they're running all the time. It took a week. It meant he had time to think.
He'd wanted a big story to launch his new business magazine, and had ended up with something monumental that would stand for as long as the Marquês de Pombal had stood in his Praça. He had to be reassured. I had to make a presentation to him, his board of directors including Luísa, and his editor. I had to lay out my entire case against Miguel da Costa Rodrigues and my reasons for attacking him in this fashion.
The editor was nervous. He was an intelligent man, but one who'd come from an age when the media still had respect for public figures, a hangover, perhaps, from the days when journalists were told what to write. To him the Director-Geral of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha was a very important man with influential friends and a wife, also from an excellent family, and a very religious woman, whereas Catarina Oliveira...
'I'm not convicting him in this article,' I'd replied. 'I'm just making sure that Miguel Rodrigues also known as Manuel Abrantes comes down to the Polícia Judiciária to answer my questions. He's done everything he can to block this investigation. He's used his friends to make sure that I don't get the information I need about his car. He's had me removed from the case. He's had me pushed under a tram. I've had my home invaded by Narcotics agents and your boss's daughter has had hate messages plastered over her car. We do have some justification.'
The editor had looked at Luísa's father.
'I hope you're right,' Vitor Madrugada had said to me. This is a big story—important families, a dynasty based on Nazi gold, a PIDE murderer, sex, drugs and the killing of an innocent, or rather, a young girl who did not deserve to die. This is a story that will go through Portugal like a forest fire in summer.'
A Small Death in Lisbon Page 43