Abrantes told the Englishman's driver to help the men move the tree off the road. The driver had different ideas. He wasn't a labourer any more, this wasn't his type of work, and where was his thousand escudos? Abrantes tightened his hat down on his head. Felsen, already on the brink, snapped. He ripped one of the men's wooden cudgels out of his hands and ran at the driver. The driver went on to his back foot, his mind changing fast, but it was too late. Felsen fell on him like a pile of logs, swiping and slashing and chopping. The driver went down in the first mad chaos of blows from the cudgel. Felsen with his heart blasting in his chest, dropped to his knees and hammered, and hammered and hammered until he didn't know what he was hammering any more.
The other men stopped their work and watched him through their sweat.
Felsen wiped his forehead on his shoulder and stained it dark. He rubbed his eyes but couldn't get the dimmed edges of his vision to brighten. He was panting, still down on his knees, his head thumping and his vision pulsing with it. He looked down at the piece of meat in front of him and felt his guts rise. He got to his feet on shaky legs, the bloody club hanging loosely from his hand. The Englishman was vomiting.
The light sickened further, the high red dust scarfing the sun.
The men hadn't gone back to work and Felsen thought he might join the Englishman until he saw their faces. They were confused and afraid of the power of a man who could do such a thing for nothing at all. Felsen had seen them like this before, but only around Abrantes.
'Now you see,' he said, pointing at them with the cudgel, still breathing heavily. 'Now you understand the importance of obedience. Isn't that right Senhor Burton?'
The use of his name jerked the agent up straight from his retching, but he couldn't get any words out. His lips had gone white in his pale face. He sweated fatly from the forehead as if he'd been touched by cholera.
'Bury him,' said Felsen, and threw the cudgel at the feet of the men.
Abrantes led Burton to the back seat of his car while Felsen got behind the wheel. They stopped at Abrantes' house and picked up a chair, some rope, and a bottle of cool bagaco from the back of the cellar. They drove to a disused mine in the hills near Amendoa, one where the wolfram vein had run out after about thirty metres. In the boot of the car was a brazier and some charcoal and a few chouricos. Abrantes sprinkled the raw alcohol of the bagaco over the coals and started a fire. In Burton's briefcase Felsen found bundles of notes amounting to 500,000 escudos and an unsigned contract for eighty tons of wolfram with a mining concession down in Penamacor. His throat still felt dry, but there was no water so he chugged the cold bagaco and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
'Did you ever see Laura again?' asked Felsen in English, flicking through the contract.
'The Chave d'Ouro,' said Burton on automatic.
'Did she get her precious visa?'
Burton stared into his past as if it was his own country disappearing over the horizon. Felsen took another blast of alcohol trying to stop the needle from scoring the inside of his cranium. The cool alcohol burnt all the way down.
'Did she?' he asked again, and Burton looked up wild-eyed but didn't answer.
Felsen frisked the Englishman's pockets and came up with the wallet. He fingered through the currency and came across the photograph. He held it up to the terracotta light of the afternoon.
'Did you get what you wanted?' asked Felsen. 'At least tell me that.'
'I didn't want her to get a visa.'
'In that case you probably didn't get what you wanted.'
'What did I want?'
'You mean…' Felsen stopped. 'To fuck her, Mr Burton. Didn't you want to fuck her?'
'Laura?' he said.
'Ah,' said Felsen. 'A misunderstanding.'
'I don't follow.'
'Laura's deal. You didn't know Laura's deal? You get me a visa. No. You look as if you can get me a visa… and you can fuck me. Just the word "visa" brought love into her eyes. It was there for everyone to see, Mr Burton. I was not the first, I can assure you, not by a long way.'
Felsen turned the photograph over.
'To Edward, with love,' he read, and for some reason it made Felsen crueller. 'Come on Edward, don't tell me… I mean she was doing things you'd be hard pressed to get a Friedrichstrasse whore to do…'
Burton was off his chair and on him, his scrawny arm around the German's bull neck. He drove his boy's fist into the man's kidney. Felsen's thick elbow kicked back like a steam piston. The boy went down. Abrantes fanned the charcoal white.
Felsen secured Burton to the chair. He took another shot of the bagaco. His head felt better, clearer, smoother. He shook the contract at the Englishman.
'You're on my territory, Edward. This is my wolfram you're taking. Who else are you talking to down there?'
Burton shut down his brain. He didn't listen to the German. He didn't smell the acrid charcoal. He didn't feel the hot pant of Abrantes' fan. He didn't see the red clouds boiling in the strange sky.
Felsen found a length of wire in the boot of the car. Abrantes began roasting the chouricos, turning them with fingers suddenly dainty. Felsen pushed more questions at the English agent, his tongue thick in his mouth, the alcohol telling now. The alcohol reminding him of Laura, the stolen cufflinks, Eva, Lehrer, the whore in Guarda last night. Burton was silent, forcing the gross smell of the spitting pork fat out of his mind.
'That fat Rumanian sow in the visa office told me Salazar's police were Gestapo-trained,' said Felsen. 'My colleagues told me it was Kramer. He's a KZ commandant now. They know how to treat you in a KZ. We all hear about it, Edward, we all know… but there's nothing like learning from actual experience. I've never been in one which means I've only learnt at second-hand, so you might find my methods a little unrefined.'
Felsen tucked the wire into the coals. He removed the agent's belt and using Abrantes' knife cut away the man's trousers and undershorts. He found a leather glove, fitted his hand into it and removed the hot wire. He stopped, feeling a rush of wind at his back, he looked out of the mine at the chemical sky, then stepped towards the Englishman.
The peasants who'd been burying the body of the driver in the pine forest arrived back in Amendoa a little after five in the afternoon. The day was at its hottest. Their eyeballs stung in their sockets and their mouths were full of thick, rancid saliva. They went to the spring, drank heavily and dipped rags from their pockets into the water and cooled their necks and faces. They stopped only when they heard the animal for the first time. A strange animal, of a type they'd never heard before, and in terrible pain.
They walked to the edge of the village. A scream came from a hole out in the hills and suddenly they recognized it. They put their hats on and straightened them. They went back to the cool of their granite houses and lay down on their wooden cots, heads on elbows, the balls of their palms in their ears.
The weather broke. The thunder roused Felsen from his drunken sleep. He didn't know where he was. His head ached so that he thought he must have fallen, and his mouth tasted sour as cheese. He rolled over to see the Englishman slumped in his chair and it shocked him. He was going to check him, but he saw the gun on the floor and the blood over the man's chest and… how had that happened?
Rain began falling darkly. Felsen went out into it to wash his hands. He leapt back and fell staggering into the mine, crashing over Abrantes' supine body. His hands and shirt stained red, his arms flecked with more red. He kicked at the rocks on the floor to get away from the crude opening of the mine. It was raining blood out there. He roared at Abrantes who'd come awake and put his hand out into the rain and squeezed it in his fist.
'This happened before,' he said, and wiped his hand clean on his trousers. 'My father told me that it rained like this forty years ago. It comes through the red desert dust. It's nothing.'