He'd been the start of this new cult, and it fascinated and horrified him. People had left their lives on one side. Small-town mayors, bureaucrats, lawyers, cobblers, stonemasons, charcoal-makers, tailors… they'd all left their work to go scratching at the hills, tearing at the heather, gouging up the earth, their minds teeming with the virus of wolfram. If you'd wanted to die, there was nobody to organize your funeral for you, no one to make a coffin for you.
The blond Englishman felt sick. He lay sprawled in the back seat of his wreck of a car, trying to get some coolness on his fair skin, on his red arms and pink face. It had been a long, brutal drive from Viseu with nothing going right. He'd stopped thinking about wolfram after the first puncture and drifted off into a mild delirium where he was married to a blue-eyed Dutch girl, having children and making wine.
The road jolted him out of his fantasy, the driver finding the deepest potholes with instinctive genius. Snatches of reality riddled through his brain. Why did she want to go to America? There was no talking to the woman. Should he feel guilty? Maybe he should. Maybe he should have at least gone to the U.S. consulate, at least tried to talk to the woman in the visa office, but why cut off your own nose to spite your face? God, this heat, this strange light. Dust from the desert, the driver had said. The man was a bloody idiot, and insolent too. These Beira people, he'd never get the hang of them. Why had they brought him down from the Minho? It never got that hot up there and the people were easier. Wolfram. And he'd never even kissed her.
Felsen's car dropped down the hillside into the pine forest, through the hairpins to the valley floor and then back up the other side. A small truck followed with four men and a driver. They reached the bend in the road they'd found the day before and got out. The car and the truck moved off further up the hill and stopped.
Two men dragged the pine tree, which they'd dug out and pushed over yesterday, across the road. Another with an axe set off round the hairpin and up the hill. Felsen, Abrantes and the rest went into the susurrating heat of the pine forest. Abrantes gave each of the men a wooden cudgel. They all sat on a crust of dried pine needles. Abrantes straightened a leg and eased out a Walther P48 from his waistband. Felsen lit a cigarette and hung his head between his knees. He'd drunk too much the night before and this heat was getting closer and the light was reddening at the edges as if something terrible was going to happen, something unnatural, like an earthquake. The men whispered behind him, their heels dug into the hillside.
'Shut up,' he said, to the ground.
The men fell silent.
Felsen tried to rearrange his undershorts around his genitals, which were sore from last night's whoring. He shuddered at the memory of the woman's vast, dimpled buttocks, her thick, black bush and her garlic, sewery breath. The disgust stuck in his throat and he couldn't swallow. Flies settled on his sweaty shirt and needled him so that he lashed out over his shoulder. He was hitting another low. He tried to let his mind drift off, but it came aground again on the same rocks. Eva, Lehrer, and the gold KF cufflinks the girl had stolen.
The men were whispering again. It maddened him and he leapt to his feet tearing his own gun from his pocket. He pointed it at each of them in turn.
'Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.'
Abrantes held up his hand.
They all heard the car on the valley floor at the same time. It changed gear and started up the gradient. The men were still as owls on a branch. Felsen sat down and looked through the trees to the man with the axe, who was waiting above them on the side of the road fifty metres up from the fallen tree. He held up his hand. The car worked its way up through the hairpins, the driver disdaining the clutch and crunching through the gears. The sharp stink of resin began to tickle the back of Felsen's dry throat.
'You're going to shred that gearbox if you don't use the clutch,' shouted the Englishman from the back seat.
The driver didn't turn a hair. He stirred the pudding with his gearstick and screeched the shift through the gate as if he enjoyed the sound of grating metal. The Englishman slumped back as the car shuddered round the next hairpin. What would it be like to kiss her lips? He'd felt the corner of it just on the edge of his lip once, and the newness of it had shot through him. Months ago. Would she still be there? He took out his wallet and eased her photograph out with his thumb. He felt the car slow down.
'What is it?'
'Fallen tree,' said the driver, revving the engine, desperate not to stall.
'Is it fallen or cut?' asked the Englishman looking around him through the pine forest, slipping his wallet back.
'It's fallen… you can see the roots.'
'How does a pine tree fall at this time of the year?'
The driver shrugged. No expert. No expert on anything, not even driving.
'Get out and take a look,' said the Englishman.
The driver blasted the accelerator again.
'No, wait,' he said, nervous now, suspicious.
Nobody got out of the car for a full two minutes. The driver gunned the engine until it died abruptly. They all sat in the cicada-broken, resinated silence of the forest. The driver got out and gave the tree the benefit of his indolence. He went to the back of the car, opened the boot and rummaged about without looking. He shut it and leaned into the rear window.
The English agent got out. He was tall, dressed in khaki trousers and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. A revolver hung from his right hand. He looked over the roof into the trees. He checked the base of the pine tree. He went back to the car, laid the gun on the roof, stripped off his shirt and tossed it through the rear window. He was in a white vest now, his arms red to his elbows and white above.
Felsen dropped his arm and the man with the axe over the crook of his elbow set off down the road to the tree.
'Boa tarde,' he said to the two men in the road.
The agent tore his gun off the roof and pointed it at the peasant whose hands shot into the air. The axe clattered to the floor. The agent beckoned him over the tree. The peasant looked at his axe. The Englishman shook his head.
'Nao, nao, anda ca, anda ca,' he said.
The peasant told him in a thick accent that he didn't want to leave his axe there on the floor. The driver repeated it for the agent's benefit. The agent told him to pick it up and hand it over. The peasant held out the smooth wooden handle. The agent gave it to the driver and told him to get on with it.
'Let him do the work,' said the driver.
'I want you to do it. We don't know him.'
The driver shook his head and walked away. The Englishman was angry but in a situation now. He shoved the revolver in his waistband and set to work on the tree. The driver sat on the front bumper and wiped the sweat off his forehead. The peasant looked at the agent with the mildness of expression that a working man's face takes on when he sees someone who doesn't know how to use a tool. The agent was in a lather in seconds. At first he stopped to wipe the sweat, then he just flicked his head to keep it out of his eyes. The peasant's hands itched.
'Leave him be,' said Felsen under his breath, easing himself down the hillside to the edge of the road. 'Let him do it.'
Felsen and Abrantes walked on either side of the car past the driver on the bumper. Felsen nodded to the peasant.
' Posso? ' the peasant asked the Englishman. May I?
The agent handed him the axe and felt Felsen's warm Walther P48 in the hollow behind his right ear. Abrantes removed the Englishman's revolver. The agent's legs were trembling in his trousers. He turned slowly and couldn't stop the flicker of recognition across his eyes as he saw the German.
This one, thought Felsen, whose eyes were hot in his head, Laura van Lennep's friend. The one who wouldn't shake his hand. What was this one's name? Edward Burton.