A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson

Author:Robert Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Historical
ISBN: 9780007322152
Publisher: Harper
Published: 1999-07-19T05:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Chapter XXII

Saturday, 13th June 199–, Rua Actor Taborda, Estefânia, Lisbon

It had been dark in the teacher's apartment. The evening had felt more advanced than it really was. I crossed the Largo Dona Estefânia, with Neptune riding his two dolphins to eternity in the fountain, and headed for Rua Almirante Reis and the Arroios Metro station. The streets were empty and there was no traffic. The tall trees were still in the evening heat, there wasn't a single child in the Arroios park, not even a couple of old boys playing cards, just pigeons. It was as if the population knew something I didn't and had skipped town.

I telephoned Carlos who wasn't there and left a message that I was going to the Alfama to speak to Jamie Gallacher.

I peeled my jacket off and walked the silent blue mosaicked corridor into the deserted Metro station and waited fifteen minutes in the strip-lit tunnel. Music was playing faintly on the sound system. I couldn't pick it up and it was broken anyway by the thunder and hiss of a train heading north. I thought about meeting Luisa Madrugada under different circumstances, but none of my conversations with her got very far, because the only thing I wanted to do was go back to the darkened room in her apartment with all its intimate possibilities. What would a different woman be like, after eighteen years? A different smell, shampoo, perfume, sweat?

Wind thumped in the tunnel, pushing out the smell of burnt brake linings. As I got into the empty compartment the music became more distinct. It was Al Green and it was absurd, because he was singing 'I'm so tired of being alone'. Why do these things happen? I looked at my blurred reflection, two images, slightly different, laid over each other until the door shut leaving a single sharp outline of my new face.

I got off the Metro at Martim Moniz and took a number 12 tram full of Spanish tourists, all talking as if they were due to go on a Trappists' retreat for a month the next day. The tram groaned up the steep hill, bored to death. I got off early and walked to the Largo das Portas do Sol to catch the breeze and a beer perhaps, and to look out across the red roofs of the Alfama to the blue Tagus, wide as a sea at this point. The Spanish herd followed me, and sat down at the café that I'd wanted to and ordered fifty drinks between them. The barman soaked up the order without changing his expression.

I retraced my steps and followed the Rúa das Escolas Gerais around the corner and dropped into the medina of alleyways that made up the Alfama. The old Arab quarter wasn't smelling so fresh after the night of ¡santo António, after a night when half a million sardines have been grilled and consumed. Jamie Gallacher lived just off the Beco do Vigário, above a barber's shop in which an old boy was having his weekly shave, lying down on an old black leather hydraulic chair.

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