A Small Death in Lisbon

A few minutes later she reopened the door and Felsen ducked into the dark house. The driver went back to the car. A fire was smoking heavily in a large fireplace emitting no heat. As his eyes got used to the lack of light he began to pick out an old man sitting in the fireplace. There were chouricos hanging along a pole above his head. The woman had taken a rag out of her pocket and was wiping the old man's eyes. He moaned quietly as if disturbed from sleep and coming into a world of pain. She left the room. A throat, somewhere in the house, coughed and spat. The woman returned with two small clay lamps burning olive oil. She put one on the table and pointed Felsen into a chair. Some of the slate tiles were visible through the laths between the rafters of the roof. She left the other lamp in a wall niche, wiped the old man's eyes again and left. The two windows in the room were permanently closed up to the weather by heavy wooden shutters.

After some minutes the double doors behind Felsen shuddered open and a short and very wide man engineered himself through the gap sideways. He roared something to the back of the house and then offered his hand which gripped Felsen's with a mechanical hardness. He sat resting his forearms across the table, the rough hands, with split nails, hung off square wrists. The body under the heavy jacket was thick-boned and powerful. Felsen recognized something in him, and knew from that first moment, that this was the man who was going to help him control the Beira.

A girl in a headscarf brought in a bottle of aguardente and two glasses. The Portuguese's face was still in the glow from the oil lamp and as big as a landscape opencast-mined. His hair was swept back in a thick black and grey lava flow, his brow and nose like an escarpment with an exposed ridge of granite, his eye sockets and cheekbones like craters. The whole geography of the face was hardened to bleakness by years of cold dry wind. It was impossible to tell his age-anything from thirty-five to fifty-five. But whatever the minerals he had in the bones of his face, they were not extended to his teeth, which were blackened and worn, sheered off and yellowing or just missing. Joaquim Abrantes poured the pale alcohol into the glasses. They drank.

The girl returned with bread, cured ham, cheese and chourico. She laid a knife in front of Abrantes. The girl's face was very young, her eyes light-coloured, blue or green, it was difficult to say in the yellow oily light. A strand of blonde hair hung down from her headscarf. She was prettier than anything Felsen had seen since leaving Lisbon, but young, no older than fifteen, but strangely, with the body, the full form, of a grown woman.

Abrantes watched the German looking at the girl. He moved the ham in front of him and handed him the bread and knife. He ate. The ham was perfectly sweet.

'Bolotas,' said Abrantes, acorns. 'They make the meat sweet, don't you think?'

'I haven't seen many oak trees around here. It's all broom and pine.'

'They have them away from the mountains. I bring them up here. I have the sweetest pigs in the Beira.'

They ate and drank more. The chourico was lumpy with chunks of fat. The cheese soft, sharp and salty.

'I heard you were coming to see me,' said Abrantes.

'I don't know how.'

'News gets through to us up here. We've even heard about your war.'

'So you know why I'm here.'

'To investigate murder,' said Abrantes, his shoulders shaking, metal chinking in his jacket. The man laughing.

'Murder interests me, that's true.'

'I don't know why you should be interested in the death of a few Portuguese peasants.'

'And the GNR officer.'

'That was an accident. He fell off his horse. These things happen on difficult terrain,' said Abrantes. 'And anyway, what's interesting? Isn't there enough killing in your war to keep you occupied without having to come to the Beira?'

'It's interesting because it means that someone is controlling the situation.'

'And this is a situation you would, perhaps, like to control yourself.'

'This is your country, Senhor Abrantes. They are your people.'

The glasses were refilled. Felsen offered a cigarette. Abrantes refused, not ready to accept anything yet. Felsen admired the psychology.

'Senhor Abrantes,' said Felsen. 'I'm going to make you a very rich man.'

Joaquim Abrantes turned his glass on the wooden table as if he was screwing it in. He didn't respond. Maybe he'd heard it before.

'You and I, Senhor Abrantes, are going to corner the market in every scrap of uncontracted wolfram in this area.'

'Why should I work with you when I do very well myself and… if you can make me rich, can't the British do the same? Perhaps I'd prefer to play the market. It has only one direction as far as I can see.'

'The British will never be in the market for as much tonnage as us.'

'They still buy. They buy to close you out.'

'What do you think of the wolfram price now?' asked Felsen.

'It is high.'

'Are you buying?'

Abrantes rearranged himself in his seat.

'I have stocks,' he said. 'The price is going up.'

'If, as you say, the wolfram price has one direction, then you're going to sell high to buy higher… that is, if you want to stay in the market.'

Abrantes' darker eye, the one away from the light, looked over the granite ridge of his nose.

'What are you proposing Senhor Felsen?'

'I'm proposing to increase your capacity to trade wolfram for my account.'

'You have the money, I have no doubt, but do you have any idea how you can do it?'

'Perhaps you know the country better than I do.'

Abrantes thumbed a lump of bread and cheese into his mouth and swilled it back with the aguardente.

'A lot of the wolfram that's brought to me is not pure,' he said. 'There's always quartz and pyrites in it. If we set up companies to clean the wolfram we will attract more of the mineral and guarantee the quality.'

Felsen nodded.

'I'd want financial control,' said Abrantes. 'I don't want to have to ask permission for every rock I buy and I'd want a share of the profits and if there are no profits a guaranteed percentage of the turnover.'

'How much?'

'Fifteen percent.'

Felsen stood and went towards the door.

'You might be able to make that on your own account with small volume but I can't offer anywhere near that for the volumes I'm talking about.'

'What are these volumes?'

'Thousands rather than hundreds of kilos.'

The Portuguese balanced that in his head.

'If I go with you I'm out of the market…'

'I'm not stopping you from trading for your own account.'

'How long will you be in the market? I have no guarantee that you'll…'

'Senhor Abrantes. This war… this war that we need all this wolfram for, will change everything. Do you know what's happening in Europe? Germany controls everything from Scandinavia to North Africa, from France to Russia. The British are finished. Germany will control the economy of Europe and, if you work with me, you will be a friend of Germany. So to answer your question, Senhor Abrantes, we will be in the market for your lifetime, the lifetime of your children and theirs and more.'

'Ten percent.'

'That's not a percentage that the business can bear,' said Felsen and reached for the door.

'Seven.'

'I don't think you understand where this business is going, Senhor Abrantes. If you did, you'd know that a single percent would make you the richest man in the Beira.'

'Come, sit down,' he said. 'We can discuss this. We must eat. You must know how important it is for us to eat by now.'

'I know it,' said Felsen and sat down.