A Small Death in Lisbon

'My arm.'

'Leave the door open,' said Abrantes.

Felsen raided the phone back. He made it to the front door and halfway back. He fell across the threshold to the living room, Schmidt's white face was his last image.

He was vaguely aware of people in the room. Shadows and light in his eyes, furniture scraping, voices remote and indistinct and the wind still driving into the house, rattling the windows. He was being moved. Something flashed in the dome of his cranium and he floated out again, his raft creaking under the heave of a big sea.

He woke up several times over a period he could not judge. Each time the heat inside him was tremendous as if his body was burning fossil fuels. On the last occasion there was a smell, a terrible smell, one that frightened him and left him as weak as the runt cub in a litter of twelve.

There was morning light when he came round. The very first inch of the day when the earliest grey seeps out of the black. His head was too heavy to lift off the pillow. Was he awake this time? Was he conscious? He waited to see where he was, to make sure that he wasn't still inside his own head. More light leaked into the room, a little white, the colour of bone. He felt cool. Not so much pain in his bad arm, a saline drip in the other. Not parched as before. He heard voices talking in the corridor about a coup attempt in Beja, the name of General Machedo, but it was too much effort to listen and he tuned out.

He lifted his right arm. It was secured to the bed frame by a pair of handcuffs. He lifted his left, gingerly, the pain still there. The arm came up easily. He looked down his chest at it, but it wasn't there. It felt there. But it wasn't. The hand was there but it wasn't. The wrist. The elbow. The biceps. All there, but not. He yelled loud enough to split the two sacs of his lungs.

Two guards, both with rifles, crashed into the room.

'What the hell's going on?' said the first and older one.

'My arm,' roared Felsen. 'My arm's gone.'

They looked at him dumbly from across the room.

'That's right,' said the younger one. 'They cut it off.'

The older guard nudged him with his elbow.

'What?' said the younger one.

'He's lost his arm, for God's sake.'

'He smells a lot better now than when they brought him in.'

The older guard gave him a dead-eyed look and went to get a doctor. The younger one paced the room.

'Why am I chained to the bed?' asked Felsen.

'You killed a guy,' said the guard. 'You were completely drunk and you killed a guy. As soon as you're fit to move we're taking you back to Caxias.'

'I don't remember the trial.'

'That'll come.'

Felsen dumped his head back on the pillow and did some blinking at the ceiling.

'Will you do something for me?'

'You don't look as if you've got much money on you.'

'If I give you a number will you call Joaquim Abrantes? He'll give you money.'

The guard shook his head. Not worth the bother.

Two weeks later Felsen was moved back to the Caxias prison. A week after that he was taken out of his cold damp cell to a room with a table, an empty sardine tin for an ashtray and two chairs. Abrantes was shown in by a prison officer. He and Felsen shook hands. Abrantes clapped him on the shoulder and tried to nod some encouragement into him. Felsen tried to keep the coldness out of his eyes-Abrantes the only man on the outside who could help him. They sat down. Abrantes produced some of Felsen's favourite Turkish cigarettes and a hip flask of brandy. They lit up and drank to each other.

'So what's happening?' asked Felsen.

'A very difficult and now, bureaucratic, situation.'

'I don't remember very much after I called you.'

'That was the first problem. You came through to an operator in Cascais. By the time I'd contacted my friends in PIDE another squad had already been advised by the telephone exchange that a death had occurred and that you weren't phoning the police to report it. Suspicious. Very suspicious.'

'He broke into my house. He was armed.'

'So were you. Your fingerprints were on the unregistered gun. A bullet from that was found in the dead man.'

'I don't…' Felsen drifted, and chewed on his remaining thumbnail.

'You see how complicated it has become.'

'That wasn't my gun. He had my gun. My gun blew up in his face.'

'What was he doing with your gun, what were you doing with his?'

Felsen closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He told Abrantes as best as he could remember what had happened. Abrantes listened, glancing at his watch and drinking more of the brandy than was his share. He nodded and murmured to keep Felsen going.

'You know,' said Abrantes, once he was sure the German was finished. 'I don't think you can say any of that in court.'

'In court?'

'There has to be a trial.'

'What about your PIDE friends?'

'As I mentioned… a very difficult and now, bureaucratic, situation. You're in the system. It's not so easy to get you out.'

'I don't remember being charged.'

'The charge, my friend, is murder.'

Felsen dabbed the sardine tin around the table with the end of his cigarette.

'You know who he was, don't you?'

'Who?'

'The dead man.'

'According to his papers he was a German tourist called Reinhardt Glaser.'

Felsen shook his head, his eyes so intense, they grabbed Abrantes around the throat.

'You owe me,' he said.

'I owe you?'

'The dead man was Schmidt… you remember him?'

'Schmidt?'

'The one you told me you shot that night in the Alentejo. You said you put him in the river…'

'No, no, no, no.'

'Yes, Joaquim,' said Felsen, easing the hip flask from Abrantes' grip. 'It was him. You lied to me. He said you didn't come after him. He said you fired a shot out in the poppy fields. He saw you. Schmidt saw you.'

'No, no, no… his name was Reinhardt Glaser. You made a mistake.'

'I didn't make a mistake. You know I didn't.'

'Me? How? I never saw him.'

It was quiet enough to hear the tobacco crackling in their cigarettes.

'You owe me for that, Joaquim.'

'Look,' he said, 'you lost your arm, I'm sorry for that. You've had a bad experience. You're still in a state of shock. Your memory is playing tricks with you. This is what I'm going to do for you. I'm getting one of the best criminal lawyers to help you out of this mess. If he can't get you an acquittal nobody can. Now drink. I have to be going. Pica is waiting for me in the Chiado. The later I am, the more she spends. Forca, amigo meu.'

That was the last Felsen saw of Abrantes. The lawyer never appeared. His old partner didn't attend the trial nine months later, and he wasn't present to see Felsen sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for the murder of the German tourist, known from his passport details as Reinhardt Glaser.

As Felsen began two decades of imprisonment in Caxias he had a short, vivid dream. It featured four horseshoes which gradually straightened out into a lattice of metal strips, and behind the strips was a live lizard with its head mashed to a bloody pulp, front legs braced, bobbing. He woke with a jerk and into his head came the memory of a dark stretch of road out to Guincho on a squally Christmas Eve night. He knew then, that even in his drunken state, his instinct had been right-Maria had told Abrantes that Manuel was not his son. He replayed that last meeting with Abrantes. The man seemed to have come with drink and cigarettes and the possibility of hope, but Felsen now realized that he was there to enjoy his satisfaction, to rub his hands over the warm fire of completed vengeance.

Two weeks after the trial on November 18th 1962 Joaquim Abrantes sat down with his new lawyer, Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira, and rewrote the statutes of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. Amongst the shareholders and directors there was no mention of the convicted murderer, Klaus Felsen.

Chapter XXVIII