Sunday, 14th June 1998, Paco de Arcos, near Lisbon Olivia was still sleeping when I looked in on her in the morning, face-down under her black hair. I went downstairs and ate fruit, drank coffee, and talked to the cat, who'd stretched herself out into the longest cat in Paco de Arcos. The time snipped round to 9.00 A.M. and I went to look at the telephone. The telephone had been mildly interesting years ago when we had a large Bakelite affair that was heavy enough to curtail young girls' conversations. Now we had a sleek graphite-grey push-button apparatus that looked absurd in the room's decaying decor, and was light enough for Olivia to tuck it behind her ear and cut a suit of clothes whilst talking about boys. I straightened the telephone on its table, checked the flex. Olivia came in wearing a T-shirt down to her knees, her eyes still puzzled by sleep.
'What are you doing?' she asked.
'I'm looking at the phone.'
She did, too.
'Is it due to perform?'
'I was thinking of making a call.'
The cat came in and sat beside her, paws neat, sensing a moment of possible interest. She yawned widely.
'Who are you going to call?'
I gripped my chin and looked up at her, suddenly feeling in need of something and not just a beard. My head was suddenly crowded-I was going to call a possible witness in a murder trial to ask her out to lunch, I was going to have to tell my daughter about her, I had to explain last night's madness.
The door bell rang.
'I wanted to talk to you about what happened last night,' I said, shif ting on to my back foot.
The door bell rang again. She left the room, fast. Glad to be out of there. The cat looked around to see if there was anything worth nicking and left too. I lunged at the telephone and dialled Luisa Madrugada's number. She picked it up before it had even rung.
'This is Inspector Ze Coelho,' I said, the words sprinting out, panic-struck. 'Would you like your work interrupted?'
'I always want my work interrupted, Inspector, we talked about that yesterday. It's by what and whom… that's the question.'
'Lunch,' I said. 'Would lunch…?'
'Inspector?' she asked, suddenly grave and chill. 'Is this business?'
Something cold ran through me. I felt sick with regret.
'Absolutely not,' I said, changing my original idea, forcing the words out.
She laughed and told me to come to her apartment at one o'clock.
Olivia came back into the room followed by Carlos with a newspaper under his arm and the cat still looking for the cocktail party.
'Progress,' said Olivia, still unimpressed.
I refitted the handset, reliving the rollercoaster moments of the start of something new-hope, despair, joy-all in ten seconds. I'd forgotten the stamina it took.
Carlos approached and held out his hand. I took it. He held on and, with his head bowed, uttered an extensive apology that must have kept him up all night. I looked at Olivia, who was transfixed until something more important occurred to her and she left the room.
I put my hand on Carlos' shoulder. He was suffering and still couldn't look me in the eye. My chest felt as big as a cathedral roof. If I'd opened my mouth there'd have been a chord from an organ with all the stops pulled out. I put an arm around his shoulders.
'You're a good man,' I said. 'Apologizing's never easy, especially when it wasn't entirely your fault.'
'I should never have said that about your father. It was unforgivable. It's my problem. I say things when they come into my head. I don't think about other people. I've tried to get my thoughts into some kind of holding pattern, but I can't. That's why they move me around. I upset people. You know that by now.'
'It's a sensitive subject… the revolution,' I said. 'We shouldn't have been talking about it after a day like that.'
'That's what my father said. He said it's not even a generation old. It's still raw.'
And you… your generation can be objective about it. I'm still… I was… involved,' I said. 'What about your father?'
'He was a communist, a union activist in one of the shipyards. He did nearly four years in Caxias.'
We stood there nodding. The seriousness too big and awkward to be commented on. I felt like a man who'd joined hands with someone around the trunk of a massive tree. I steered him into the kitchen and sat him down with some coffee. He put the well-read newspaper down on the table.
'Anything interesting in that?' I asked.
'Catarina Oliveira's in there.'
'Is she?'
'You wouldn't have thought…'
I read the article. It was the facts of the case-where her body was found and when, the time of death, the school she went to, her Friday routine after school, the way she was killed, and most surprising of all, I got a mention.
'What do you make of it?' asked Carlos. ][shrugged. I didn't know. It was very unusual. If I was of a suspicious mind I might think it was Dr Aquilino Oliveira telling his friends to be careful who they talked to. I began to sense a higher profile to the case, a public face.
'It might throw up something we can use,' I said. 'What else?'
'There's a long article about this gold business.'
'I wasn't aware there was any gold business?'
'We're setting up a commission to look into it. There's been a lot of pressure from the United States, the European Community and Jewish organizations and we've been trying to squirm away from it but: now, finally, we've got to do something about it.'
'We? Who? What?' I said. 'You sound like a Portuguese reporter, they say everything except the nugget you want to hear.'
'The government has set up a commission to look into Portuguese complicity in accepting looted Nazi gold in exchange for raw materials during the Second World War and, towards the end of the war, laundering the gold out to South America.'
'The government?'
'Actually no,' he said spreading out the newspaper, 'it's the governors of the Banco de Portugal. They've appointed a guy to look into their archives.'
'Who?'
'Some professor.'
'That's going to be a carefully managed exercise,' I said. 'Who's making us wash our linen in public?'
'The Americans. One of their senators says he has proof of Portuguese involvement… listen… our gold reserves in 1939 were nearly fifteen hundred million escudos, by 1946 they were nearly eleven thousand million. How about that?'
'So we sold a lot of raw materials in the war. That's not laundering. Where did all this gold come from?'
'Switz…' he started and stopped.
I followed his eyes. Olivia had come into the kitchen and sat down sideways on a chair at the table. She was in her shortest mini-skirt and a pair of her mother's strappy high heels. Her legs were long and honey-coloured already from a day on the beach. She crossed them and poured herself a cup of coffee. Her hair was brushed to a glossy blue blackness. Her lips were chilli-red. Her young breasts strained against a midnight-blue top which ended two inches above the waistband of the skirt showing the taut, brown skin of her belly.
'Going somewhere?' I asked.
She tossed her hair over her shoulder as if she'd been practising.
'Out,' she said. 'Later.'
'This is my new partner, Carlos Pinto.'
Her head turned as if there was a very expensive mechanism in her neck for smoothing things out. Her tongue was attached to her top lip.
'We met at the door.'
Carlos cleared his throat. We looked at him. He hadn't intended to draw attention to himself but he had to say something now. Remember the holding pattern.
'I had a fight with your father last night,' he said.
Never mind.
'Brawling in pubs,' she said in her fanciest English accent, 'I thought you were the police,' she finished in Portuguese.
'It was just the two of us,' he said.
'What about the barman?' I said. 'Don't forget the barman.'
'My father was fighting with everybody last night. You, me, my dead mother, the barman… did I miss anybody?'
'It was my fault,' said Carlos.
'What were you fighting about?' she asked.