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A Small Death in Lisbon
Robert Thomas Wilson
This stunning, atmospheric thriller set in war-torn Europe won the CWA Gold Dagger and has now been reissued with the Javier Falcon series.A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals.Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.1941. Klaus Felsen, SS, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the bleak mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg.Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Ze Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl with a disturbing sexual past. As Ze digs deeper he overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Ze must face the most chilling opposition.
ROBERT WILSON
A Small Deathin Lisbon
Copyright (#ulink_ed77963e-e8e6-5a07-8ac9-075fef07689b)
HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Robert Wilson 1999
Robert Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007322152
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007378142
Version: 2014-09-24
Dedication (#ulink_b098741a-941a-5f16-b50a-1cacd10d85e9)
For Janeandmy mother
Note (#ulink_e8c22766-8a36-571c-8e6d-6f35474a9b74)
Although this novel is based on historical fact the story itself is complete fiction. All the characters and events are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to any event or to any real person, either living or dead.
Contents
Cover (#u5c20a755-fb7e-59d3-a6e8-a3295de025dd)
Title Page (#ua251977f-1a83-52f9-b865-903022227589)
Copyright (#ulink_0085aa6a-2d59-589b-8087-e52cc8170953)
Dedication (#ulink_54777742-498b-5624-90c1-8c2c9820615d)
Note (#ulink_4bf228a3-3892-5fd9-a107-60faa85eaefa)
Map (#ulink_7216c31e-8be7-58b7-bd80-220157f21e01)
Prologue (#ulink_0d73e46d-6b91-51d6-8f97-1d3c7a1821ab)
Part One (#ulink_864d91c8-bef0-5033-a28b-df818f8d2512)
Chapter I (#ulink_7437d597-b31b-5958-8376-42b9749d216e)
Chapter II (#ulink_ce4eb9a7-c849-5d64-b70f-c203b633805a)
Chapter III (#ulink_d4086a2a-43f0-5f53-a5dd-ceb1a57e8525)
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Part Two
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Keep Reading (#ulink_2f218e62-5483-5626-97ce-33786ec3cd31)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
Map (#ulink_718cd375-0c8e-5890-b5e6-986cef86dac4)
Prologue (#ulink_f476e8cd-c9b5-56d1-900e-2476f9a19794)
She was lying on a crust of pine needles, looking at the sun through the branches, beyond the splayed cones, through the nodding fronds. Yes, yes, yes. She was thinking of another time, another place when she’d had the smell of pine in her head, the sharpness of resin in her nostrils. There’d been sand underfoot and the sea somewhere over there, not far beyond the shell she’d held to her ear listening to the roar and thump of the waves. She was doing something she’d learned to do years ago. Forgetting. Wiping clean. Rewriting little paragraphs of personal history. Painting a different picture of the last half-hour, from the moment she’d turned and smiled to the question: ‘Can you tell me how . . .?’ It wasn’t easy, this forgetting business. No sooner had she forgotten one thing, rewritten it in her own hand, than along came something else that needed reworking. All this leading to the one thing that she didn’t like roaming loose around her head, that she was forgetting who she was. But this time, as soon as she’d thought the ugly thought, she knew that it was better for her to live in the present moment, to only move forward from the present in millimetre moments. ‘The pine needles are fossilizing in the backs of my thighs,’ was as far as she got in present moments. A light breeze reminded her that she’d lost her pants. Her breast hurt where it was trapped under her bra. A thought tugged at her. ‘He’ll come back. He’s seen it in my face. He’s seen it in my face that I know him.’ And she did know him but she couldn’t place him, couldn’t name him. She rolled on to her side and smiled at what sounded like breakfast cereal receiving milk. She knelt and gripped the rough bark of the pine tree with the blunt ends of her fingers, the nails bitten to the quick, one with a thin line of drying blood. She brushed the pine needles out of her straight blonde hair and heard the steps, the heavy steps. Boots on frosted grass? No. Move yourself. She couldn’t get the panic to move herself. She’d never been able to get the panic to move herself. A flash as fast as a yard of celluloid ripped through her head and she saw a little blonde girl sitting on the stairs, crying and peeing her pants because he’d chased her and she couldn’t stand to be chased. The rush. The gust of terrible energy. The wind up the stairs, whistling under the door. The forces winding up to deliver. Doors banging far off in the house. The thud. The thud of a watermelon dropped on tiles. Split skin. Pink flesh. Her blonde hair reddened. The cranial crack opened up. The bark bit a corner of her forehead. Her big blue eye saw into the black canyon.
Part One (#ulink_787830af-b6fa-5ee6-b546-51d491e76c6e)
Chapter I (#ulink_49b0b7fd-57f2-5ef3-8369-eb27df276200)
15th February 1941, SS Barracks, Unter den Eichen, Berlin-Lichterfelde.
Even for this time of year night had come prematurely. The snow clouds, low and heavy as Zeppelins, had brought the orderlies into the mess early to put up the blackout. Not that it was needed. Just procedure. No bombers would come out in this weather. Nobody had been out since last Christmas.
An SS mess waiter in a white monkey jacket and black trousers put a tea tray down in front of the civilian, who didn’t look up from the newspaper he wasn’t reading. The waiter hung for a moment and then left with the orderlies. Outside the snowfall muffled the suburb to silence, its accumulating weight filled craters, mortared ruins, rendered roofs, smoothed muddied ruts and chalked in the black streets to a routine uniform whiteness.
The civilian poured himself a cup of tea, took a silver case out of his pocket and removed a white cigarette with black Turkish tobacco. He tapped the unfiltered end on the lid of the case, gothically engraved with the letters ‘KF’, and stuck the dry paper to his lower lip. He lit it with a silver lighter, engraved ‘EB’, a small and temporary theft. He raised the cup.
Tea, he thought. What had happened to strong black coffee?
The tight-packed cigarette crackled as he drew on it, needing to feel the blood prickling in his veins. He brushed two white specks of ash off his new black suit. The weight of the material and the precision of the Jewish tailoring reminded him just why he wasn’t enjoying himself so much any more. At thirty-two years old he was a successful businessman making more money than he’d ever imagined. Now something had come along to ensure that he would stop making money. The SS.
These were people he could not brush off. These people were the reason he was busy, the reason his factory – Neukölln Kupplungs Unternehmen, manufacturer of rail-car couplings – was working to full capacity, and the reason why he’d had an architect draw up expansion plans. He was a Förderndes Mitglied, a sponsoring member of the SS, which meant he had the pleasure of taking men in dark uniforms for nights out on the town and they made sure he got work. None of this was in the same league as being a Freunde der Reichsführer-SS, but it had its business advantages and, as he was now seeing, its responsibilities as well.
He’d been living with the institutional smells of boiled cabbage and polish in the Lichterfelde barracks for two days, snarled up in their military world of Oberführers, Brigadeführers, and Gruppenführers. Who were all these people in their Death’s Head uniforms, with their endless questions? What did they do all day when they weren’t scrutinizing his grandparents and great-grandparents? We’re at war with the whole world and all they need is your family tree.
He wasn’t the only candidate. There were other businessmen, one he recognized. They all worked with metal. He had hoped they were being sized up for a tender, but the questions had been strictly non-technical, all character assessment, which meant they wanted him for a job.
An assistant, or adjutant or whatever these people called themselves came in. The man closed the door behind him with librarian care. The precise click and satisfied nod started the irritation winding up inside him.
‘Herr Felsen,’ said the adjutant sitting down in front of the wide, hunched shoulders of the dark-haired civilian.
Klaus Felsen shook his stiff foot and raised his hefty Swabian head and gave the man a slow blink of his blue-grey eyes from under the ridged bluff of his forehead.
‘It’s snowing,’ said Felsen.
The adjutant, who found it difficult to believe that the SS had been reduced to considering this . . . this . . . some ruthless peasant with an unaccountable flair for languages, as a serious candidate for the job, ignored him.
