“Fernando Diogo Maria de Jesus de Mello Sequeira,” she said.
“Wow!” exclaimed Firmino, “what a name!”
“But if you call him that no one will know who you’re talking about,” added Dona Rosa, “you have to say Attorney Loton, that’s how he’s known to everyone in Oporto.”
“Is that a nickname?” asked Firmino.
“It’s a nickname,” replied Dona Rosa, “because he looks very like that fat English actor who often played lawyer parts.”
“Do you mean Charles Laughton?” asked Firmino.
“In Oporto we pronounce it Loton,” said Dona Rosa. Then she added: “He comes of an old aristocratic family which in centuries past owned almost the whole region, but has now lost nearly everything. He’s a genius. To judge by how he dresses you wouldn’t give two cents for him, but he’s a genius, he studied abroad.”
“Excuse me, Dona Rosa,” said Firmino, “but why should he agree to defend the interests of Damasceno Monteiro’s patents?”
“Because he’s the lawyer of the down-and-outs,” answered Dona Rosa, “in the whole of his life he has defended no one but the really poor, it’s his vocation in life.”
“Well if that’s how it is,” said Firmino, “where can I find him?”
Dona Rosa took a sheet of paper and scribbled an address.
“Don’t worry about the appointment,” she said, “I’ll see to that, you just go and see him at midday.”
At that moment the telephone rang. Dona Rosa went to answer it, looked across at Firmino, and beckoned to him in her usual way.
“Hullo,” said Firmino.
“The head has been recognized,” said the voice, “so you see I was right.”
“Listen,” said Firmino, seizing his chance, “don’t hang up, you need to talk to someone, I feel it in my bones, you have important things to say and you want to say them to me, and I would like you to do so.”
“Certainly not on the phone,” said the voice.
“Certainly not on the phone,” said Firmino, “just tell me where and when.”
There was silence at the other end.
“Tomorrow morning?” asked Firmino, “would nine o’clock tomorrow morning be all right?”
“All right,” said the voice.
“Where?” asked Firmino.
“At San Lázaro,” said the voice.
“What is that?” asked Firmino, “I’m not from Oporto.”
“It’s a public garden,” came the reply.
“How will I recognize you?” asked Firmino.
“It’ll be me who’ll recognize you, choose a bench a bit out of the way and hold a copy of your paper on your knees, if there’s anyone else with you I won’t stop.”
The telephone went click.
Ten
ON THE TRIM LAWN IN FRONT OF HIM was a grey-haired man wearing a track suit and doing gymnastics. Every now and again he set off on a timid trot, scarcely lifting his feet from the ground, and then trotted back to where a Doberman lying on the grass bade him festive welcome at each homecoming. He seemed very pleased with himself, as if he were performing the greatest feat in the world.
Firmino looked down at the newspaper prominently displayed on his knees. It was Acontecimento, with the headline of the special edition. Firmino folded it so as to hide the headline and leave only the name of the paper showing. He took a sweet out of his pocket, and waited. He had no wish to smoke at this hour, but for some unknown reason he lit a cigarette. In front of him passed an old lady with a shopping bag and a mother leading her child by the hand. Firmino calmly gazed at the man doing his gymnastics. And he was trying to keep his cool when a young man sat down at the other end of the bench. Firmino shot him a furtive glance. He was a youth of about twenty-five years old, wearing a workman’s blue overalls and looking calmly straight ahead. The youth lit a cigarette, just as Firmino trod his out.
“He wanted to rip them off,” murmured the youth, “but they ripped him off instead.”
The young man said nothing more, and Firmino remained silent. A silence that seemed endless. The grey-haired man doing gymnastics passed them by with a self-assured trot.
“When did it happen?” asked Firmino.
“Six days ago,” replied the youth, “at night.”
“Come a bit closer,” said Firmino, “I can’t hear you all that well.”
The young man shuffled along the bench.
“Try to tell the story logically,” Firmino begged him, “and above all in the right order of events, understand that I know absolutely nothing about it, so start from scratch.”
On the lawn the grey-haired man had started doing his gymnastics again. The youth said nothing and lit a second cigarette from the stub of the first. Firmino fished out another sweet.
“It was all because of the night watchman,” mumbled the youngster, “because he was in league with the Green Cricket.”
“Please,” repeated Firmino, “try to tell the story in order.”
Staring fixedly at the lawn, the youth began to speak in a low voice.
“At the Stones of Portugal, where Damasceno worked as an errand-boy, there was a night watchman, he died suddenly of a stroke, it was him who received the drugs in the containers and supplied them to the Green Cricket, and the Green Cricket sold them at the Butterfly, that is at the ‘Borboleta Nocturna,’ that was the circuit.”
“Who is the Green Cricket?” asked Firmino.
“He’s a sergeant in the Guardia Nacional,” replied the youth.
“And the ‘Borboleta Nocturna’?”
“Puccini’s Butterfly,’ it’s a discotheque down on the coast, the place is his though he’s registered it in the name of his sister-in-law, the Green Cricket’s a crafty one, and it’s from there that the drugs are peddled to all the seaside resorts near Oporto.”
“Go on,” said Firmino.
“The night watchman was in cahoots with some Chinese in Hong Kong who hid the drugs in containers of high-tech equipment. The firm knew nothing about it, only the night watchman knew and of course the Green Cricket, who used to come by at night once a month to pick up the packages. But Damasceno got to know about the racket too, I don’t know how. So when the night watchman had this stroke Damasceno came to my garage and said: it’s not fair that the Guardia Nacional takes all that dough, tonight we’ll get there first, and anyway the Green Cricket will only come by tomorrow, his day is tomorrow. I said to him: ‘Damasceno you’re out of your mind, you can’t screw that lot, they’ll get back at you, so count me out.’ He turned up at my house at eleven o’clock that night. He didn’t have a car so he asked me to drive him there, he was satisfied with that, for me to drive him there, and if I didn’t want even to go through the gate that was all right by him, he’d do everything on his own. And he appealed to me as a friend. So I brought him there. When we arrived he asked me if I really meant to leave him to go alone. So I followed him. He walked in as if he owned the place, as if it was the most natural thing to do. He had the keys to the office, he switched on the lights and everything. He rummaged in drawers to find the code for the containers. Each container has a code to open it with. It was dead easy, Damasceno went to open the container, he obviously knew exactly where the stuff was because he was back in five minutes. He was clutching three big plastic bags of white powder, I think it was pure heroin. And also two small electronic instruments. ‘Well, now that we’ve laid our hands on these,’ he said, ‘we might as well hang on to them, we’ll unload them on some private clinic in Estoril who need them?’ And at that moment we heard the sound of a car.”
The grey-haired man doing gymnastic exercises had met up with someone, a bob-haired woman who had greeted him as a friend, and together the two had crossed the lawn as far as the path right in front of Firmino’s bench. The mature woman with the bob hairdo was saying that the last thing she’d have expected was to find him doing gymnastics in the park, and the grey-haired man replied that running a bank like his was very bad for his cervical arthrosis. The youth had stopped speaking and was looking at the ground.