The girl brought in a thick stew of pork, liver and black pudding. She put more bread on the table and a jug of red wine. The two men ate alone. Abrantes told Felsen the dish was called Sarrabulho and that it was the best thing the girl had learnt from her mother.
Joaquim Abrantes might have been a peasant once but he wasn't one any more. This didn't mean, as Felsen found out during their discussion towards an agreement on volumes and percentages, that he could read or write. It meant that his father had farmed land and between them they'd acquired more. He had the house which was joined to two others at the back and to the side. They had livestock. He appreciated good food and drink. He had his young wife. He was a strange brute. On the few occasions that their eyes met, Felsen had the same feeling as he did looking into a bull's head. There was something big, private and planetary going on inside the man's brain. He understood surprising things about business and numbers but had no concept of maps or distances unless he'd travelled them. He had an instinct for power. He didn't like anybody except his old, half-blind father. Women did not speak to him.
After lunch he excused himself. Felsen stood and stretched. Through the double doors he saw into a parlour where the mother was crocheting and beyond that into the kitchen. Abrantes was standing behind the girl who was leaning with both hands on the table. He had his hand up her skirt. He straightened the front of his trousers and looked down as if he might mount her there and then. He thought better of it and went outside and down the back stairs.
Chapter XI
3rd July 1941, Guarda, Beira Baixa, Portugal Felsen was sweating at his small table by the shuttered window in the airless restaurant, which had fans but not working ones. The shutters kept out the devastating heat, which blasted off the cobbles and stone facades of the buildings, but did not improve the stuffiness in the room. The restaurant contained fifteen men split between two tables near the door, and him alone at the other end. The men were loud, volframistas, with too much money from their mineral finds and too much brandy in their guts. They all had chapeus ricos, which were the same as poor man's hats but more expensive and they all had pens in their jacket breast pockets even though they were illiterate to a man. The restaurant had been quiet enough until they'd run out of the best wine in the house and the volframistas had taken to drinking brandy in the same quantity as wine. Their rivals on the next table matched them bottle for bottle. The insults were piling high, like washing-up in the sink, and they were threatening to soak blood into the bare, rough wooden floors.
Joaquim Abrantes came in and shouted at the table of fat sweating men nearest the door. They calmed. The other volframistas continued a one-way trade in insults. Abrantes turned his head slowly on them and gave them a smile with some brand-new dentures. They were more sinister than the wrecking rocks he'd had before and the men shut up.
Abrantes sat down opposite Felsen in his new suit. He was learning the value of a smile in business with northern Europeans, but he hadn't quite mastered the new dentures he'd had fitted in Lisbon at Felsen's expense the month before.
Felsen had just flown back from Berlin having had a meeting with the uglier side of Gruppenfuhrer Lehrer. On the 20th June Lehrer had been to see Fritz Todt, the Armaments Minister, who had been sick and grey with worry at the consequences for his production line of the invasion of Russia, which was due to start on 22nd June. Lehrer had told Felsen that the wolfram stocks were pitiful and gave him a vivid description of another meeting he'd had with the SS-Reichsfuhrer Himmler, who'd trampled his balls into the carpet. Felsen doubted this. He'd seen Himmler at a rally in Munich before the war. The man was more of a bean-counter than a ball-trampler.
There was a net result of this bad lunch meeting. Wolfram was required at any price. He was to look at tin as well and there were other markets-sardines, olive oil, cork, hides, blankets for instance.
'Does that mean we're going to take on the Russians in their own winter?' Felsen had asked.
'Russia is a large place,' Lehrer had replied, slowly and quietly. 'Our little delay was not… timely.'
'It takes time to conquer Yugoslavia, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria…'
'The champagne has been flowing in the Hotel Parque no doubt,' said Lehrer, cutting him off savagely.
'I wouldn't know, Herr Gruppenfuhrer.'
The Riesling had gone down like acid.
Felsen had flown back to Lisbon and looked to the Abwehr for some intelligence help that would give him an edge against the British, who had matched his new prices and taken a fifty-ton contract from under his nose. They were not helpful. Felsen was now back in the Beira looking to do some kicking himself.
Abrantes sucked the soup between his new dentures. Felsen, two courses ahead, toyed with a large lump of pork but had no appetite.
'There's going to be a car,' said Abrantes, 'on a small road between Melos and Seixo tomorrow afternoon between two and four o'clock.'
'With a British agent?'
Abrantes nodded.
'Do we know anything else?'
'No. Except the road is in pine forest.'
'Who told you?'
'The driver.'
'Is he reliable?'
'He cost a thousand and he wants a job. We'll have to look after him.'
'Reliability's getting expensive.'
Abrantes nodded over his shoulder at the volframistas.
'They won't eat bread any more, it's too cheap. They have wristwatches, but can't tell the time. They cap their rotten teeth with gold, but still sleep over their sheep. The Beira's a place for madmen now. A whole village came to see me yesterday. A whole village! Four hundred people from somewhere outside Castelo Branco. They've heard the prices. Two hundred escudos for a little rock and they earn fifty times their daily wage. They're calling it black gold.'
'It can't go on.'
'They'll buy cars next, then you'll see. We'll all be dead men.'
'I mean Dr Salazar won't allow this to carry on. The government won't let people leave their homes, stop tending their crops. They won't let wages and prices get out of control. Salazar knows about inflation.'
'Inflation?'
'It's a plague of the pocket.'
'Tell me.'
'It's a disease that kills money.'
'Money is paper, Senhor Felsen,' said Abrantes, flatly.
'Do you know what cancer is?'
Abrantes nodded and stopped working on his bacalhau.
'Well, there's cancer of the blood too. It looks the same, it's still red, but there's something growing inside it. You look at your ten-escudo note one day and the next day it's a hundred escudos and the day after that a thousand escudos.'
'And this is not good?'
'The money still looks the same but it has no value. The government is printing money just to keep up with price and wage rises. Your thousand-escudo note buys you nothing. We know about inflation in Germany.'
Joaquim Abrantes' knife and fork still hovered over his bacalhau. It was the only time Felsen ever saw him scared. 4th July 1941, Serra da Estrela, Beira Baixa, Portugal It was hot. Unbearably hot and still. Even up in the foothills of the serra where there should have been some breeze there was only this bleaching, drying heat so dense that Felsen could feel it searing his throat and lungs. He sweated in the back seat of the Citroen with the window open and the furnace air bellowing over him. He drank warm water from a metal flask. Abrantes sat next to him with his jacket on, not a drop of sweat on him.
They'd driven up from Belmonte where there'd been crowds of people out in the baking wilderness. So many people that Felsen had thought that there must have been some miracle, another vision such as the one outside Fatima in 1917, and people were hurrying to catch their sight of the Blessed Virgin. But it was wolfram that had brought them out. Black, shiny crystallized magma blasted up from the centre of the earth a million years ago.