A Small Death in Lisbon. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ and a few minutes later a girl sat down next to him. They spoke in French. His eyes got used to the dark and he found Lehrer sitting at a table close to the stage with a woman who was blocked out by the big man’s shoulders.

      The club filled up. The girl asked him to buy her a drink. It arrived in a bucket of ice. She was very young and too thin for his taste. She moved closer with her drink and stole one of his cigarettes. The red-wigged girl slipped off the stage with her sad song and fat pianist. There followed a drum roll and spotlights flashed around the club catching people unawares. One spot hit Lehrer’s companion full in the face. She closed her eyes to it and turned her head but not quick enough. It brought Felsen out of his seat and tipped the girl’s glass across the table. Cymbals clashed. The audience faded to black. The spotlights stilled on a red curtain which split and revealed a man in a top hat and tails. But there was no mistaking what Felsen had seen. The white face in the spotlight had been Eva Brücke’s.

Chapter IV

      Friday, 12th June 199–, Paço de Arcos, near Lisbon.

      ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the mayor of Paço de Arcos, ‘may I present to you Inspector José Afonso Coelho.’

      It had been a hot day with a perfect blue sky and now a soft lick of a breeze was coming off the ocean to mess with the poplars and pepper trees in the public gardens. The faded pink disused cinema’s walls drank in the evening light, a small girl squealed, rocking on a happy dinosaur, a big man smoked and sucked beer next to her, women greeted each other with kisses, their dresses rippled in the cool. Cars flashed past on the Marginal, a light aeroplane sputtered out to sea over the sand bank. The air was redolent of grilled sardines and a bureaucrat had a microphone.

      ‘Zé Coelho,’ said the mayor, using my more recognized name, but still not squeezing out much more interest from the festa de Santo António crowd which included my sixteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, my sister and brother-in-law and four of their seven children.

      The mayor talked on, elaborately explaining the event in rococo Portuguese to a robustly inattentive public consisting mostly of my neighbours, who were well apprised of the bare facts which were: my wife died a year ago, I put on weight, to encourage me to take it off my daughter arranged this charity event with money pledged against each kilo lost and if I was a single gram over eighty kilos I was to have my perfect, neatly-clipped beard of twenty years shaved off in front of this rabble.

      My daughter waved at me, my brother-in-law gave me a thumbs-up. I weighed in that morning at seventy-eight kilos, my stomach hadn’t been as hard and flat since I was eighteen and I’d been cycling 250 kilometres a week with the police trainer. I was feeling supremely confident . . . until the mayor had started talking. There was something mannered about the crowd’s insouciance, something insincere about my brother-in-law’s encouragement, even my daughter’s wave. I had a part to play, I knew it at that moment.

      A fat man, balding with a heavy moustache, wearing a blazer, grey slacks and a wild tie arrived at my daughter’s table. He kissed her on both cheeks and squeezed her shoulder. One of my nieces made room for him and after shaking everybody’s hands he sat down.

      There was a sudden silence. The mayor had arrived at the money. There was respect for the money.

      ‘Two million, eight hundred and forty-three thousand, nine hundred and eighty escudos.’

      The crowd went up like a flight of fantails. That . . . even I had to agree, was a hell of a lot of money for seventeen kilos of lard. I held up my hand and took the applause like a returning monarch.

      The band on the stand behind me cut in on my dignity and played a jaunty little number as if I was a toureiro who’d just executed a blinding move against the bull, and a group of small girls in traditional costume broke out into disorganized, elephantine dancing. Two local fishermen lifted a set of scales up on to the platform. The crowd left their seats by the bar and rushed the stage. The fat man sitting next to my daughter had his pen out and was writing. The mayor was fighting people off who wanted a go with the microphone which he’d stuffed inside his suit and the speakers were carrying the crunching explosions from his armpit.

      Calm was restored by my doctor mounting the podium. He balanced a pince-nez on his nose and explained the rules like an oncologist who’d been asked to give a terrible prognosis without holding back on the details. He introduced my barber who’d crept up behind me with a cloak and scissors.

      I stepped out of my shoes and on to the scales. The doctor adjusted the top scale to eighty and counted down from eighty-nine. The crowd joined in. I held my head up, gave them the full force of my brand-new bridgework, closed my eyes and thought: – soufflé, helium-filled soufflé.

      At eighty-three I heard the crowd wavering. I was levitating like a Brahmin. At eighty-two, my eyes snapped open, the scales middled out and the doctor gravely announced major surgery. I was outraged. The crowd roared.

      The two fishermen pressed me into a chair. I lashed out. The girls in national costume fled. Did I overdo that? I remonstrated and allowed myself to be pinioned. My barber stropped his razor and looked at me out of the half-closed lids of a casual killer. The mayor shouted his eyes clean out of his head until he remembered the microphone.

      ‘Zé, Zé, Zé,’ he said, bringing forward the fat, bald, moustachioed man who’d been sitting with my family, ‘this is Senhor Miguel da Costa Rodrigues, Director of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha. He has something to tell you.’

      The man’s skin texture clearly indicated he was earning five times my monthly salary per hour even when he was eating lobster on the beach.

      ‘It gives me great pleasure, on behalf of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha to make the following offer. If Inspector Coelho will accept the doctor’s ruling and allow his beard to be shaved, this cheque made out for a total of three million escudos will join the sum already pledged for charity making a total fund of nearly six million escudos.’

      You’d have thought Sporting had lifted the European Cup by the noise the crowd made. There was nothing to be done. Grace was imperative. Fifteen minutes later I looked like that rare thing – a Portuguese badger.

      I was pretty well passed overhead to the bar A Bandeira Vermelha which was run by an old friend, António Borrego, who billed himself as the last communist in Portugal. The bank director was pressed in there with me, along with my daughter and the rest of my family and even the mayor found his way to my side with the microphone still in his top pocket.

      António assembled the beers in glass-frosted ranks. He was a man who needed a meal, a lifetime of meals. The sort who couldn’t put on weight if you sat a pig in his lap. He had a concave, white, hairy chest, eyes sunken deep into his head and untrained eyebrows off the leash. His forearms were as wiry and covered in hair as a monkey’s and he had a past I didn’t know the half of.

      Olivia, the fat man and myself took a beer each. António had his Polaroid out to record the event for his wall of bacchanalia.

      ‘I wouldn’t know you any more,’ he said to me. ‘I need a reference.’

      I raised my glass. Tears rolled down the side. The emotional beer.

      ‘With my first drink for 172 days,’ I said, ‘I propose a toast to the health and generosity of Senhor Miguel da Costa Rodrigues of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha.’

      Olivia told me how she knew the banker. She was at school with his daughter СКАЧАТЬ