'Maria Antonia Medinas,' he said, each name separate.
'Is that what this is all about? Is that why you killed the girl?'
'He murdered her. That PIDE bastard… he murdered her.'
'And what was Maria Antonia Medinas to you?'
'She was my wife,' he said, viciously. 'And he killed her and he killed our child inside her.'
'Let me call the ambulance, Antonio. It can still be all right, if you let me call the ambulance.'
I moved. He tensed the hammer in his hand.
'Are you a girl-killer, Antonio? Is that what you do? How did they get you to kill the girl?'
'She was his.'
'Did she kill Maria Antonia Medinas?'
'She was his.'
'She was an innocent.'
'She was his.'
'Just let me call the ambulance.'
He ran at me, the hammer raised, his teeth bared, the eyes now dead, black, lightless. I shut the door on him. His hammer smashed through the glass. Blood ran down his wrist. He wrenched the door open. I fell back into the street, half at a run, half staggering. He swerved away from me and ran to his car.
He pulled away in the rusting Renault, the boot still open. He crashed across the public gardens, through the flower beds, over the grass and directly on to the Marginal. The oncoming traffic screeched and squirmed. The Renault slashed straight across two lines of cars into the Lisbon lane. The PSP came running. I told them to call for an ambulance and to get a hospital prepared to receive a policeman with a serious head injury. I ran across the gardens, through the underpass and got into my car. I ran every red light on the way into the city.
I saw the Renault's boot flapping up and down as it went over humps in the tarmac around Caxias. I pulled in tight behind him and flashed my lights. He put his foot down.
Our two ancient cars roared through Belem and thundered under the whining 25 th April bridge. He swung to the left, up towards the Largo de Alcantara where there was a sliproad to the bridge, but not accessible from our direction. Antonio crashed through the lights which had just changed to red and swerved across the two cars and a truck which had just taken off. The two cars missed him and slewed to a halt, but the truck clipped him on his rear wing and the car was jolted sideways a full metre. I stormed over the crossroads after him with my forearm on the horn and one hand raised out of the window. People were already out of their cars. We hit the ramp up to the bridge. Antonio crunched through the gears and found one low enough to get him up the steep turn. I stuck on his tail. We were going slower and slower.
The Renault hit the main road to cross the bridge. We couldn't have been going more than fifty kilometres per hour and I saw the problem. His back tyre was flat, and the stoved-in rear wing was derinding the rubber, until the tyre was entirely stripped off and he was running on his wheel rim, sparks showering off it into the night. He stopped and got out, the hammer still in his fist. He started running.
The cars howled over the expandable metal lanes in the centre of the bridge and horns blared behind us. The ice wind, even stronger up here, blustered from the west and whistled at a high-pitched scream through the support cables. I ran after him. He turned occasionally, his face lit up-white with two black eye sockets-by the lights of the oncoming traffic. Suddenly he got up on to the bridge's rail and jumped over the edge as if it was nothing, as if he had no statement to make. I bellowed after him but my voice went nowhere over the hellish noise.
I got to the point where he'd jumped and saw him pacing about on a small platform a few metres below. What did I want from him? Did I want to catch him, bring him in? Was that what I wanted? And I realized that it hadn't been police work making me run. I had to talk to him. I had to tell him. I had to make him believe. He was part of the cycle. We were all part of the damaging cycle.
I swung my leg over the rail, my foot searched for the first rung. The platform was all that remained of the bridge works. It was for the men painting the new rail link. There was a lift that ran on a box rail down one of the concrete support columns to the docks below. The lift wasn't operating. Antonio was contemplating climbing down the box rail. I shuddered as trucks crashed past, their weight undulating the road like a sea swell, the wind booming against their sheer sides. It was high enough up there that I could feel myself flying and, with that strong, knifing wind, I felt I could be at any moment. I screamed his name at him.
He responded by climbing over the rail of the platform and fitting his foot into the box rail. He dropped down a few rungs. I jumped down on to the platform. The wooden sheets bounced me and I fell to my knees. I crawled towards the lift and pushed my face over the edge. Antonio was three metres down the rail. To the west the lights along the Marginal stretched out into the blackness. We were as good as night gliding.
'Antonio!'
I yelled at him to come back up, but the wind whipped my voice away and shutded it through the girders of the new rail link.
Antonio looked up at me with the terrible religious eyes of a suffering saint, or a tortured sinner on his way down to the next circle of hell. His face seemed to be broken up into pieces now, just shards of pottery miraculously floating together in a deep purple light. He looked over his shoulder and saw what I'd seen. The lights curving away over the black planet. The sea and the sky dense and empty and only the dark, cold wind calling.
The hammer went first, a silver speck into the night. His other hand disengaged from the rail and he fell backwards. The wind caught him to begin with and shored him back up, but then quickly let him have his weight. He stretched his arms out and shouted something that the wind tore off him. His foot caught in the rung of the rail, the ankle snapped and then he was on his way, dropping through the howling dark, gravity making an ant of him in seconds, and then nothing of him in a few more.
The sirens came. Steel light revolved in the night. I rolled away from the edge and felt like a man who'd momentarily had everything-friends, family, love and then just as quickly lost them all.
Chapter XLIV
05.30 Wednesday, 25th November 1998, Hospital Egas Moniz, Santo Amaro, Lisbon Carlos was in Intensive Care, his head and neck supported by some strange contraption that would keep it totally rigid and the back of his head free from any contact. Everything was functioning normally, all his organs, even his brain showed normal activity, but he hadn't regained consciousness, and there wasn't a neurosurgeon in Lisbon who would tell us when he would come out of his coma.
We watched him. His mother joined on to his father, who was set in stone, staring his will into his son. Olivia in shock over Carlos' state, but also in tears because she'd known Antonio Borrego all her life. And me, tarred and feathered with guilt. If Carlos didn't make it, if he didn't make a full recovery, it would be the end of all possibilities. I would be, as Klaus Felsen had said, a man with no prospects.
They'd taken him off the ventilator after a few hours, once they were sure he was breathing properly. Now he was wired and tubed up and, with the blood transfusion over, he had only a saline drip in his arm. He was silent and still. The monitoring machines made noises for him. His muscles didn't twitch. His closed eyes didn't flicker. His face was relaxed. His body at peace, while his consciousness repaired itself. Where did they go, these coma people? Over what dark landscapes did they travel? Was there any light there at all, or was it a pothole with no light, not even an inkling of ambient light, only what your brain imagines as light?
At seven o'clock I left Olivia with Carlos' parents. I went to my office and sat at my desk. My colleagues came in to see me, to ask after Carlos, even though none of them had liked him, and I answered all of them. At 08.30 I went to see Narciso who made the expert, correct, nearly human sounds. I told him I was opening up an investigation into the disappearance of an ex-Pohaa Judiciaria detective called Lourenco Goncalves. He didn't respond.