CHAPTER 6
That night, the street lights in the Alfama failed, which I thought was very fortuitous; until Fenrek told me he’d arranged to have them go off at just the right time.
The darkness was not quite absolute, and when the obscuring clouds drifted away from the bright moon, we could see the outline of the arcaded lodge that formed a bridge above our heads and traversed the incredibly narrow alley toward the door to the Lateria where they used to make sour cream and now, perhaps, were embarking on other schemes. Beco da Mosca, they used to call it, the Alley of the Fly, since only a fly, they said, could scale the steep slope of the tiny street, no more than a few yards long. It’s now called St. John’s Alley, and though its name is now more prosaic, the ancient charm is still there.
To our left, the winding staircase of Chafariz climbed up into the skies where the Generals house was, on top of the hill, and to the right the ground fell sharply away again down to Trigos Terrace, so steeply as to give the feeling that we were perched here on a narrow ledge, a ledge on which someone had had the audacity to build a row of tiny houses, walled with diamond-pointed bricks back in the sixteenth century when this was a ghetto.
In the darkness, it was easy to imagine all the twisting, turning, winding staircases and narrow alleyways that covered the slopes of the old quarter and made it one of the most picturesque corners of Europe.
We waited, the two of us, standing in deep shadow under the overhang of a three-storied house that on the other side was only one story high, with a balcony that projected so far out onto the street, a balcony only three feet wide, that it almost touched the building opposite, leaving just a narrow gap through which we could see the clouds and the deep night sky.
There was the sound of a train coming in to the station of Santa Apolinia which lay a few hundred yards to the east of us, at the end of the Street of the Tobacco Garden, and there were voices calling out in the darkness, calling for candles which soon lit up in dark windows everywhere. A phonograph was playing somewhere; a child was crying for its mother.
We beard the slight sound of rubber-soled footsteps, and a shadow moved in beside us, a shadow in police uniform. It spoke very low: “A man coming, Senhor Colonello, up from the terrace.”
Fenrek nodded, and the shadow glided away. We waited.
Soon, we heard the sound of the hesitant feet, saw the flash of a light shining on the house numbers, and then the footsteps stopped. The beam of the light swung round, and we withdrew deeper into the shadows, the recess of the lintel hiding us from anything out there on the road. The light moved past our doorway, traced a pattern on the opposite wall, and then we heard the footsteps again and a man walked past us, not hesitating but moving on as though he had found what he was looking for. He was wearing white shoes, and was carrying a small bag.
The spot of the light held on the tiny gate and moved up to the sign over it: Lateria Agosta. And then the man moved forward and knocked twice with the wrought-iron knocker, a gentle, not-too-overt sort of sound. We heard the creak of the hinges as the door swung open, and we heard a whispered murmur, too far away to be more than a susurration in the silence.
I said to Fenrek, very quietly: “He saw us.”
“Yes, I think so. But he can’t know we’re watching the place.”
“Can’t he? With no one else on the street?”
“All right.”
He moved out quickly, stepping briskly forward and whistling once, quite shrilly. From somewhere to our left, high above the steps, a police whistle sounded, drawn out and piercing, and the whole quarter was suddenly bright with a score of pinpoint lights, like cats’ eyes in the darkness, flashing here and there over the walls, the recessed doorways, the trailing vines and the flowerpots. There was the sound of hurrying feet, and Fenrek and I ran up to the man who had knocked on the door, and suddenly he was inside and the door was slammed shut in our faces.
I said to Fenrek: “Just give me room...”
I put my foot up against the lock, felt for its point of most resistance, drew back my leg and shoved hard forward, putting all of my weight into the blow. The door crashed off its heavy iron hinges and hung askew there for a moment, then twisted over and toppled to the ground. Three policemen brushed past us, filling the tiny courtyard with their lights; one of them was the shadow who had approached us out there in the archway, a soft-spoken young Lieutenant named Loureiro. I was up by the inner door already; a small wooden door that led into what we knew to be the main curing room of the little Lateria. I heard the heavy bolts being slammed home behind it, top and bottom, and Fenrek nodded to the Lieutenant, who knocked loudly and called out: “It’s the police, open up there!”
The walls around us were heavy with the tread of policemen’s boots as they clambered down into the courtyard, down the steep steps, down the high walls, down the drainpipes, down the grape vines even...On the other side of the building, we could hear the shouts as a sergeant checked the positions of his men. The place was surrounded, and on Fenrek’s orders they were making enough noise to make this obvious. There was the sound of a shot inside, a single shotgun blast, reverberating in the confined area and sounding like a mighty roar of thunder at such close quarters.
The young Lieutenant said quietly: “Com licencia, Senhor Colonelle...” and blew a short, sharp signal on his whistle. Immediately, three more police poured into the courtyard, armed with rifles. They began to batter hopelessly with their rifle butts on the door, and I said: “For God’s sake, let me do that.” I got ready to batter it down with my foot, but the Lieutenant said courteously: “Better not, Senhor, someone has a gun in there.”
I said to Fenrek: “For God’s sake, we’re wasting time...” But the young Lieutenant was politely insistent. He said smoothly: “Better a little time, Senhor, than a little carelessness.”
I shrugged and stood aside, and in a few moments the door was forced open. The Lieutenant stepped quickly inside, and in a moment the room was flooded with light. I saw him standing there with one hand sensibly still on the switch, ready to plunge the place again into darkness, his automatic ready in his other hand while he surveyed the room carefully. He flicked his eyes at us soon, and called out: “All clear, Senhores, I think.”
I murmured to Fenrek: “Nice to be looked after so carefully,” and we went inside.
It was the curing room of the factory. Eight big copper urns of milk, each holding maybe two hundred and fifty gallons or so, stood along the far wall, huge round-bottomed pots that looked like witches’ cauldrons in the yellow light that streamed from the bare bulbs. There’s something fascinating about a good copper cauldron. Maybe it’s the evocation of a time long past, when such things were more common, or maybe it’s the association with witches and sabbaths and tales of childhood ogres. These were huge, and immensely valuable, hand beaten into shape perhaps more than two hundred years ago, now shaded with the splendid green patina of time except where someone had made half-hearted efforts to polish them up a bit.
A long packaging machine, ready loaded with glass jars, took up most of the adjacent wall, and the other two walls were covered with shelves on which there were boxes and jars and rolled up sheets of paper, and packages of yeast and bottles of rennet, and some old cardboard containers and a few tools. In the center of the room was a long bare table of heavy wood, a butcher’s block kind of table, with a big copper tray on it.
And lying across the tray on his back, a dead man was lying with most of his head blown off; a shotgun lay on the floor under his dead hand, just as though he’d dropped it there. I looked at his white shoes, and said to Fenrek: “The man who passed us out there.”
Fenrek said tightly: “And he shot himself before he could be asked any awkward questions.”
I snorted: “Didn’t take him long to find a shotgun, did it?”
Fenrek stared and said nothing.
There was a single door leading out of the room, and the closed windows, two small ones, were heavily barred and dusty with ancient grime. The Lieutenant went to the door and opened it, and signaled to two of the others. He said briefly:
“Search, thoroughly.”
The two men, both sergeants, went hurrying through and mounted the stairs, narrow and tight and dark, that apparently led to another floor.
Fenrek was at the cupboards, opening them one by one and carefully inspecting everything he found inside. He pulled a cork-stopped test tube out from under a pile of loose papers, pulled the cork, and sniffed it suspiciously.
I said mildly: “If that should turn out to be the toxin were looking for, don’t come too near me, will you? There’s a good fellow.”
He said calmly: “Dust on it. It’s been there for a long, long time.”
“Oh. My apologies.” I took it from him and sniffed it, and said: “The Orla-Jensen thermobacterium yogurt, it’s quite harmless. One of the bacteria used for making yogurt.”
He snorted. “I had a feeling all along we’d not find very much here, Cain.”
I jerked a head at the dead man. “You had a feeling about that too?”
“No. What makes you so sure he didn’t shoot himself?”
“No reason, except that he couldn’t have known what the danger was he was up against.”
