“Monsanto.”
They call it a park, the “Parque Florestal” or forest park. They like to think of it as Lisbon’s source of oxygen, and it is perhaps one of the reasons why Lisbon, even densely packed with cars as it is today, has no problem with smog. It’s twelve or fifteen square miles of forest, right in the middle of the city, spread out over more of those steep hills, some of them seven hundred feet high, some of them so densely packed with trees and vines that it resembles a jungle. There are sandy roads through them, and half a dozen broad, asphalted highways too; but only a hundred yards from any of those roads, a man can lose himself as surely as he can in the middle of the densest African bush. It’s only five miles from north to south, but in those five miles there are hills and valleys, mountains and gorges—and a lonely, primeval silence.
And then, for the second and penultimate time, we saw the Buick; and it was heading straight for us. I’d already swung round on Avenida Restelo, and I saw him less than a hundred yards ahead, coming our way. Restelo is a wide, wide street, and there was little traffic on it, and there was plenty of room to pass. But I knew what he was going to do even before he began to swing the wheel over to ram us.
We were both going more than seventy, maybe eighty miles an hour, and a head on collision at that speed would have been the end of everything for all of us.
I pulled over hard to the left, to full lock, slammed on the brakes again, and missed him by half an inch. There was still barbed wire trailing from under his wheels, locked around the axle no doubt, and it wrapped itself round the edge of my rear bumper, the bumper that had shaved past him, and snapped with the sound of a broken violin string. I heard him hit the police car, a glancing blow that sent the Buick spinning out of control across the road, facing the wrong way, righting itself, side-swiping the wall of a house, and then careening on again. The police car was knocked clear across the road to crash into a lamppost there and wrap itself untidily around it. There were flames coming up from under the hood.
I left the Jensen where it had landed, and yelled to Fenrek: “Stay there!”
It took me ten seconds to get the door of the police car wrenched open and to drag out the officer and his driver. And only just in time. It exploded before I’d got them halfway across the road, dragging both of them by their collars, and the force of the explosion knocked me off my feet and sent me slamming into the adjacent stone wall of a fine old house, highly decorated in the style they call there Manueline, after the gaudy, rococo taste of Portugal’s King Emmanuel the First, whose only claim to fame is that he was responsible for the peculiarly flamboyant Gothic style that has become synonymous with Portuguese architecture and decoration, surcharged as it is (those were the great seafaring days of Vasco da Gama and Alfonso de Albuquerque) with marine and nautical designs.
It was a most painful collision. That beautiful wall seemed to lift itself up and hurl itself at me, knocking the wind out of my body and sending bright stars across my vision. I staggered to my feet and looked at the two unconscious policemen, both still breathing and not badly hurt; and then a motorcycle came roaring in and four more cops came running, and I went over to see how the Jensen had fared. Some fragments of metal had damaged the bodywork slightly, and a piece of sharp steel had sliced through the leather of the front seat and opened a new gash in Fenrek’s shoulder, but it wasn’t very serious; he merely said: “As if I didn’t have enough problems already.”
I yanked open the door for him. I said: “He practically tore a front wheel off the Buick, he won’t get far now.”
He hobbled beside me, still on his homemade crutch, round the comer; and there, a front tire burst and the grill smashed in with the radiator steaming, was the Riviera.
Loureiro came running up and stared at the mess, and said: “They tried to stop him at the entrance to Monsanto, to the Parque Florestal. But he turned the car round and came racing back. Why would he want to go into the Park?”
The car was a wreck, and the shotgun was gone. And of Loveless, there was no sign at all.
◆◆◆
We were in the suburbs here, in the suburb of Belem, which the Portuguese pronounce as though it were spelled Bleng. It grew from the strand called the Restelo, now a main street, which once was an inlet of the river, the narrow harbor the Adventurers used when they sailed off, in the Fourteen Hundreds, to discover new worlds and bring great wealth to their homeland.
The ornate and startling Tower of Belem, surely the most beautiful military fortification in the world, stood watch over the Docks of Success, less than half a mile to the south of us.
Closer still, at the nearest edge of the sea—or rather, the broad river Tagus which they call the Straw Sea—the huge marble caravel of the Discoveries stood like a symbolic stone vessel headed out for strange horizons, with Prince Henry at the prow, pointing the way, and all his sailors and fighting men, cartographers and chroniclers clambering up behind him with the sun on their finely-carved stone faces. Henry the Navigator, they call him, though he never went farther afield than Tangier. But the nobility was remembered there, carved in stone for the world to see, with the sunlight gilding them all beyond the tall masts of the blue and yellow yachts at anchor in the little dock.
To our north, a little over a mile away, the great forest of Monsanto began, with the steeply-winding road leading through the crowded trees up to the Heights of Help, where the old flares once burned that guided the mariners home from their long and hazardous voyages.
You could not forget the sea here; even the lovely old houses, many of them fallen from grace now, with laundry hanging from their iron balustrades, were faced in brightly-colored Faience tiles depicting scenes of the sea, bright in the hot light of the morning.
Fenrek found a police officer and was already giving orders to close the roads into the forest; within minutes, thirty police cars would be covering every entrance on the south, or speeding along the Avenida da Ponte to the north. And in the immediate area, a hundred men, the local police reinforced by the army, would be closing off every road, every alley, every tiny beco. A radio truck was already coursing the streets, giving out orders to the patrolling men, and I saw three men carrying a long ladder and running to climb to points of vantage on the rooftops. Two officers were hurrying into the Cathedral; heading for its high towers.
Fenrek said: “As long as we keep him out of the forest, we’ve got him. Once in there...who knows? With maybe a knife in his pocket he can last for a year, even without the shotgun. I wonder how many shells he has in his pockets?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it matters, really.” He looked at me and frowned, remembering the near collision. I said: “You saw the kind of desperation that’s on him. The next step’s obvious—once he finds he can’t break through the cordon.”
I’d never seen so many police all together at one place. I’d forgotten, or never realized, that while we were going our own way, setting our own traps, worrying this thing out between the two of us, the whole weighty mass of the law was also there behind us. From the time the first poor fisherman had died, all the resources of the police and the army had been standing by, ready for just this moment. The sheer weight of it, the mass of it, was startling.
I said, brooding about it: “He started this hunt for a new weapon because of the odds against his mercenaries. Now, he’s on his own, and look at the odds stacked up against him now.”
Wherever you looked, there were men in uniform stringing barbed wire across the roads, climbing up ladders to lookout posts, shepherding people into their houses, clambering over rooftops, standing on balconies and at street corners, their officers giving out orders, quietly and authoritatively, on bullhorns. It seemed as if the whole of the City were mobilized against one man; but that one man was all that was left of a deadly and terrifying menace. I counted twelve official cars in this small street alone.
We heard the squeal of tires, and Estrilla’s bug came tearing in, a policeman closing a barricade behind her; even here, she was driving that potent little toy like a racing car. She braked to a skidding stop beside us and said: “I saw him once, driving like a madman.” She looked at the steaming Buick, down at the front now with the second tire leaking air, and said: “Do we know where he went?”
I shook my head.
Astrid climbed out and stood there, looking around at the highly-organized chaos, looking at Fenrek’s shoulder and worrying how many more wounds would be coming his way before this was over.
Estrilla said: “How big an area?”
I shrugged. “A square mile, two at the most. A hundred men combing it, it’s the end.”
A doctor, summoned, I learned, by Lieutenant Loureiro, had come to do something about Fenrek’s injuries, but he shook his head impatiently and said: “No, when this is all over...”
There was a large-scale map of the area spread out over the hot hood of one of the cars, and Fenrek was staring at it, leaning still on his shillelagh, frowning and unhappy. And then, from the roof across the street, a policeman shouted; he was pointing to the east.
I said to Fenrek: “I’ll go see.”
A dozen men were already running down Rua do Embaixador, running fast with their rifles unslung, three policemen and a squad of soldiers, a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me. I sprinted and overtook them, and found a long ladder set against the wall of a house, a wall of diamond-pointed bricks that caught the sunlight prettily and cast sharp shadows over the white stone; a woman was leaning over the rail of her balcony on the second floor, a balcony covered with pots of geranium and ageratum, with a long vine of rose-pink Antigonon Leptopus trailing handsomely over the wrought iron work, Someone shouted at her: “Get back, Senhora, into the house! There is danger!” She scurried back indoors.
I climbed up the ladder, two rungs at a time, and the man who had shouted was there, a very young corporal in khaki battle dress, camouflaged with patches of maroon and brown and yellow. He said excitedly: “There, Senhor, above the Chao Salgado...”
The Chao Salgado, the Salted Ground...I remembered the story:
Once, in the Seventeen Hundreds, there was the mansion of the Eighth Duke of Aveiro standing there, and the Duke, an angry and violent man caught up in the protests of the times, had planned an assassination of King Dom Jose, together with four members of a family named Tavora, if my memory is as good as it’s supposed to be. They’d all been executed for their pains. The Duke’s mansion had been razed to the ground, and the earth had been ceremonially strewn with salt, and cursed. There is a plain and simple marble column standing there to this day to mark the spot, topped by a flaming urn of stone, and decorated with only five stone rings, symbolizing the chains of the conspirators. Now the later-built houses have encroached upon Aveiro’s fine old estate, crowding close upon one another, cheek-by-jowl, in Lisbon style; but there is still a little corner the superstitious keep away from, and no one will ever build there.
Even now, two hundred years later, it’s as though the specter of the curse still haunts the place. Because of the steep hills, it’s hard to find building room within the confines of the City these days, and every inch is taken up; but not here.
There is just a little corner left, an empty corner that has become, as the hesitant houses were built around it, a tiny courtyard. The nearest house to the epicenter of the old curse is only a few feet away from the column, but it gives the impression of turning away from it, of hiding itself; no window overlooks the little monument; the houses seem to hide themselves, turning their backs, ashamed of their proximity. The inscription at the base of the monument, which is no more than twenty feet high, is eroded and scarcely legible; but if you’ve a curious mind for trivia, and struggle with it, you can still make out the words: This ground is cursed, and nothing shall live here.
It’s a tiny courtyard, no more than a few feet square, called the Blind Alley of the Salted Ground, with a plain and unpretentious column to tell of the tragic days when the scheming for power was on a much more simple basis. There hasn’t been much change in intent, really; the scheming is still going on all over the world, but now the means are more sophisticated, more deadly; and curses don’t do much good any more.
We were on a small fat roof, two stories high, abutting onto a fourth floor that was roofed in steeply-pitched red tiles. I found a pipe that would bear my weight, I hoped, and climbed up to take a look. I straddled a ridge and eased my way along. I found a chimney that would take me a few feet higher, and climbed to its top, wrapping my legs around the brickwork. I could see nothing.
