asked Quintela to return to headquarters, write up our preliminary report about the murder, and get it over to the Prosecutor’s Office. I also told him to call Coutinho’s office and get a list of all his employees’ names in Lisbon and their phone numbers.
As soon as they’d left, I headed off without a destination in mind, craving a few minutes of purposelessness. I ended up sitting on a bench in front of the National Assembly, under a mammoth tree – was it a beech? – that must have sprouted almost a hundred years earlier, into the city of horse carriages and sailing ships that Fernando Pessoa must have known in the 1920s. Could the intersections of our lives be predicted? Would what I learned about Coutinho’s murder today give shade to someone fifty years from now, or create more suffering?
I leaned back on my worm-eaten green bench and took off my shoes and socks. My only neighbour – lying on another of the benches – was a homeless man, bearded and shirtless, with filthy, swollen, doughy hands, like potatoes just pulled from the soil. He was snoozing with his head on an overstuffed Lufthansa bag. I played my high-speed game with him, living out his life, from newborn to death, in just a few seconds.
When I turned my phone back on, two SMSs lit up, the first from my wife: Drink! she wrote, since I became dehydrated when I was upset and often ended up with a sore throat. The other was from Ernie: Dreamed of you last night.
Eased by their concern, I closed my eyes to better feel the breeze playing over my hair and shoulders. The Valium had left me nearly weightless by then, and as I listened to the cars zooming past, Ernie gazed down at me from high up in a cottonwood tree, grinning because he had reached the topmost branch before me. I gave him the thumbs-up sign until fear leapt inside my chest. ‘You might fall!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t move!’
As though he hadn’t heard me, he waved, and, through an alchemy beyond the laws of waking reality, the back and forth movement of his hand became the ringing of my cell phone. It was Fonseca. He told me that Susana and Sandra Coutinho had arrived at their home, and that he’d already obtained a full set of their fingerprints.
Chapter 8
Susana Coutinho stood in the kitchen, leaning back against the refrigerator, barefoot, holding a glass of whisky with ice up to her temple. A nearly full bottle of Glenlivet was sitting on the table by the last quarter of Senhora Grimault’s sponge cake. I introduced Luci and myself, but when I reached out my hand, but she made no move to shake it.
‘Tell me where your aspirin is and I’ll get you some,’ I said.
‘Thanks, I just took three,’ she replied in a hoarse voice. She smiled good-naturedly – a very generous gesture under the circumstances – then stepped to the back window and gazed out while standing on her tiptoes. She was blonde and tan – the colour of cinnamon. ‘Just checking on our dog,’ she told me. ‘We only stopped once for him on the car ride up. Poor thing got frantic.’
She wore three golden bangles around her left ankle and a fourth – encrusted with red and yellow gemstones – on her right; India must have been in fashion among the Portuguese jet-set. A grass stain by the back pocket of her shorts convinced me that she’d grabbed the clothes she’d last worn before driving up to Lisbon. When she turned back to me, it was with a pained expression. ‘I’m sorry, but if my headache gets any worse, I’m going to have to lie down.’
Her eyes were silver-green, and they had that lost, weary, impoverished look I nearly always saw in the wives and husbands of murder victims. Either she hadn’t been involved in Coutinho’s death, or she was a standout actress.
She grabbed a pack of Marlboro Lights from a small leather bag dangling from the back of one of the kitchen chairs and lit a cigarette with abrupt gestures. Her cheeks hollowed out dangerously when she drew in on the smoke.
As soon as they’d left, I headed off without a destination in mind, craving a few minutes of purposelessness. I ended up sitting on a bench in front of the National Assembly, under a mammoth tree – was it a beech? – that must have sprouted almost a hundred years earlier, into the city of horse carriages and sailing ships that Fernando Pessoa must have known in the 1920s. Could the intersections of our lives be predicted? Would what I learned about Coutinho’s murder today give shade to someone fifty years from now, or create more suffering?
I leaned back on my worm-eaten green bench and took off my shoes and socks. My only neighbour – lying on another of the benches – was a homeless man, bearded and shirtless, with filthy, swollen, doughy hands, like potatoes just pulled from the soil. He was snoozing with his head on an overstuffed Lufthansa bag. I played my high-speed game with him, living out his life, from newborn to death, in just a few seconds.
When I turned my phone back on, two SMSs lit up, the first from my wife: Drink! she wrote, since I became dehydrated when I was upset and often ended up with a sore throat. The other was from Ernie: Dreamed of you last night.
Eased by their concern, I closed my eyes to better feel the breeze playing over my hair and shoulders. The Valium had left me nearly weightless by then, and as I listened to the cars zooming past, Ernie gazed down at me from high up in a cottonwood tree, grinning because he had reached the topmost branch before me. I gave him the thumbs-up sign until fear leapt inside my chest. ‘You might fall!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t move!’
As though he hadn’t heard me, he waved, and, through an alchemy beyond the laws of waking reality, the back and forth movement of his hand became the ringing of my cell phone. It was Fonseca. He told me that Susana and Sandra Coutinho had arrived at their home, and that he’d already obtained a full set of their fingerprints.
Chapter 8
Susana Coutinho stood in the kitchen, leaning back against the refrigerator, barefoot, holding a glass of whisky with ice up to her temple. A nearly full bottle of Glenlivet was sitting on the table by the last quarter of Senhora Grimault’s sponge cake. I introduced Luci and myself, but when I reached out my hand, but she made no move to shake it.
‘Tell me where your aspirin is and I’ll get you some,’ I said.
‘Thanks, I just took three,’ she replied in a hoarse voice. She smiled good-naturedly – a very generous gesture under the circumstances – then stepped to the back window and gazed out while standing on her tiptoes. She was blonde and tan – the colour of cinnamon. ‘Just checking on our dog,’ she told me. ‘We only stopped once for him on the car ride up. Poor thing got frantic.’
She wore three golden bangles around her left ankle and a fourth – encrusted with red and yellow gemstones – on her right; India must have been in fashion among the Portuguese jet-set. A grass stain by the back pocket of her shorts convinced me that she’d grabbed the clothes she’d last worn before driving up to Lisbon. When she turned back to me, it was with a pained expression. ‘I’m sorry, but if my headache gets any worse, I’m going to have to lie down.’
Her eyes were silver-green, and they had that lost, weary, impoverished look I nearly always saw in the wives and husbands of murder victims. Either she hadn’t been involved in Coutinho’s death, or she was a standout actress.
She grabbed a pack of Marlboro Lights from a small leather bag dangling from the back of one of the kitchen chairs and lit a cigarette with abrupt gestures. Her cheeks hollowed out dangerously when she drew in on the smoke.
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