A Small Death in Lisbon

'But that's why you arranged this little rendezvous yesterday wasn't it, Valentim? To bring Catarina down to your own level, suck her into your own swamp. Now all I've got to find out is whether you wanted to take it one step further and kill the girl.'

'Then you've got a lot of work ahead of you.'

'In the meantime you can spend the weekend in the tacos… see if that refreshes your memory. And I'll get a search warrant for your room.'

Valentim ran a thumb and forefinger down his nose and flicked the sweat on the floor. He shook his head and I saw that he was worried and not about spending a few nights in the tacos.

Chapter XVI

Saturday, 13 th June 199-, Pensao Nuno, Rua da Gloria, Lisbon, Portugal A police car arrived to take Valentim. I sent Carlos with it to start work on the search warrant. Jorge stripped off the cellophane to what must have been his third pack of the day. I took out the photograph of Catarina.

'You're still not finished?' he said, lighting up a cigarette.

'You lost a lot of weight recently, Jorge?'

'I was sick. They thought I had lung cancer.'

'What was it?'

'Just some pleurisy.'

'Good to get the weight off though.'

'You don't have to be nice to me, nobody else is.'

'You know about people don't you, Jorge?'

'The whole world's been past this front desk.'

'Have you always done this work?'

'Probably.'

'Ever been inside?'

'If I was, it was before I can remember whether I've been doing this job all my life.'

'That memory of yours must be famous.'

'I've got a room full of industrial awards for it,' he said. 'You should drop by some time, when I'm not so busy, and I'll show them to you.'

'Do you remember this girl?' I asked, snapping the photograph down on the bar. 'She was in here with that kid and another one Friday lunch time.'

If anything Jorge's eyes got rheumier. He barely looked at the shot.

'Look, Inspector, I've got a reputation to keep up. If it gets out that my particular brain disease cleared up and I got on a quiz show with the Policia Judiciaria I'll have an empty place.'

'Emptier than this?' I said. 'The floors aren't exactly shaking.'

'You take my point.'

'Maybe this place is due an inspection.'

'Why's it so important that I remember her?'

'Five hours after she left this place she was dead. Murdered.'

Jorge's eyebrows left his head for a moment.

'When?'

'This is ridiculous… I just told you. Friday six, six-thirty in the afternoon.'

'Here in Lisbon.'

'Maybe. She was found dumped on a beach in Paco de Arcos.'

He nodded, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand feeling the rasp of the brisdes.

'She was in here Friday lunchtime. You must know that by now after talking to the kid. She was with another one as well… a student.'

'How do you know?'

'This is the gateway to heaven, Inspector. The whole world comes before me… even police officers.'

'Can I use your telephone?'

I called the home number of Catarina's teacher. She answered as if she'd been sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. I made an appointment for an hour's time. She said she wasn't going anywhere. I refitted the telephone, an old heavy Bakelite piece of work that took me back to my father's army headquarters in Africa. I headed for the stairs, Jorge's eyes on me all the way. I stopped two steps down and heard him sigh.

'The girl,' I said, 'had she been in here before?'

Jorge turned the page of his newspaper, kissed his cigarette again.

'Did you hear me, Jorge?'

'I heard you,' he said. 'I heard that phone call too. She's a schoolgirl.'

'Not even sixteen, Jorge.'

He shook his head, not that amazed at what the world had come to.

'She's been coming in here pretty regularly Friday lunchtimes, since March, April, something like that.'

'She was a hooker?'

'She wasn't going up there on her own for a nap, if that's what you mean,' he said, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the last. 'Girls these days, they're different. Clean, nicely dressed, polite. They come in here to make spending money for the weekend because they don't want to have to explain to daddy why they need 30,000 escudos for a decent Saturday night. The regular girls know it too. You go out there and watch. If they see a girl in a short skirt hanging around too long, they'll kick her half to death. If you ask me, and not many people do these days, Inspector, it's the heroin.'

'Did you know any of her clients?'

Jorge gave me a sad sorry look and tapped the side of his head.

'How many times have you been closed down?'

'Never… unless it was before…'

'That's enough, Jorge. You're boring me now.'

'Look, Inspector, I cooperate as much as I can… in the end.'

'How about doing some cooperating now?'

He thought about it, wanting to get me off his back.

'I'll tell you something, it's not much but if it'll get you down the stairs…'

'I won't promise you.'

'You're not the first guy to ask me about the girl… I mean in an investigative way.'

'What are we talking about… another cop?'

'Could be.'

'Get it out, Jorge. One go. Like pulling a tooth.'

'He looked like a cop but he wouldn't show me any ID and I wouldn't tell him anything.'

'What did he ask you?'

'He made out he was a punter and interested in the girl. I didn't believe him. He told me he was Policia Judiciaria. I asked for ID. He wouldn't show. I told him to stop wasting my time and he left.'

'When are we talking about?'

'Not long after she became a Friday lunch time regular.'

'April, May?' I asked, and he nodded. 'Tell me what he looked like.'

'Short, stocky, and the bit of hair I saw was grey. He wore a small, brimmed hat, black, which he never took off, a grey tweed jacket, white shirt, tie, grey trousers. No moustache, no beard. Brown eyes. That's it.'

'I'm going down the stairs now, Jorge.'

'Don't rush,' he said. 'I wouldn't want you to fall.'

I went out into the dark narrow street. It had been cool in Jorge's windowless reception and I stripped off my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. There were more girls outside now and I walked down the street towards the funicular asking the odd one here and there whether they'd seen Catarina. A couple of mulatto Brazilian girls remembered her, but not from yesterday. A bleach-blonde girl, standing on one leg while she repaired the heel of her shoe, tapped the photograph and nodded but couldn't remember when she'd seen her.

I asked the funicular driver, who I reckoned must take an interest in life around him rather than looking endlessly at the same old two hundred metres of rail up and down his hill, but he shrugged me off. I walked back down Rua da Gloria, got into my car and drove back to the bus stop at Saldanha. It was mostly newly developed office buildings around here and they were all shut but I found a few little places open to ask my question.

'Boa tarde, did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you. Adeus.'

It's a stomach thing for me, police work. For a lot of my colleagues it's brain work. They have the suspects, the clues, the statements, the witnesses, the motives, and they reason them all together. I do that too but I have something in my stomach as well, something that tells me if I'm right. Antonio Borrego once asked me what it was like and the only thing I could think of was 'love' and he told me to be careful because, as anybody knows, love is blind. Good point. It's not like love, but that's the strength of it.

'Boa tarde, did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you. Adeus.'

People ask me why I do this job, as if I have some choice in the matter, as if I could finish with it now and run off and be an avant-garde poet in Guatemala. I got into this thing because, back in 1978 when my father and I crept back into the country, that was the only job I could find, and in those days money was as scarce as a job. When I came out of the Rossio station after five years in London I knew what I'd been missing. The poverty bustle, I call it. There's a lot of it in Africa, which is why I recognized it. It's a nervous fireneticism brought about by insufficient economic activity to ensure that everybody gets fed. It's the agitation of hunger and it's gone now. The streets are calm like any other European city. Now there's only the stress left, but that's not the same as hunger, that's just neuroticism.