About the Book

A daring fraud makes one man a titan, and brings a nation to its knees.

The son of a failing undertaker, Alves Reis learned early on that death comes quickly and a man must make his fortune while he can. In 1916, Reis left Portugal for Angola, where the hardships of colonial life dashed his dream of easy riches. In desperate straits, Alves discovers his true talent: forgery.

With an unerring hand, Alves begins to counterfeit. He falsifies diplomas, government documents, currency, and countless checks on his way to perpetrating one of the greatest frauds of the twentieth century. Inspired by the true story of a master swindler, Gifford brings to life a breathtaking international scam. Before Bernie Madoff, before Frank Abagnale, there was Alves Reis - a forger with talent, vision, and an uncompromising drive to succeed, no matter what man, bank, or nation stood in his way.

Review Quote:

“Explodes with continent-spanning financial intrigue and irresistible romance.” - Paul Erdman, author of The Billion Dollar Sure Thing

About the Author

Thomas Gifford (1937–2000) was a bestselling author of thriller novels. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, he moved to Minnesota after graduating from Harvard. After eight years as a traveling textbook salesman, he wrote Benchwarmer Bob (1974), a biography of Minnesota Vikings defensive end Bob Lurtsema. The Wind Chill Factor (1975), a novel about dark dealings among ex-Nazis, introduced John Cooper, a character Gifford would revisit in The First Sacrifice (1994). The Wind Chill Factor was one of several books Gifford set in and around Minneapolis.

Gifford won an Edgar Award nomination for The Cavanaugh Quest (1976). The Glendower Legacy (1978), a story about an academic who discovers that George Washington may have been a British spy, was adapted for the film Dirty Tricks (1981), starring Elliott Gould. In the 1980s Gifford wrote suspense novels under the pen names Thomas Maxwell and Dana Clarins. In 1996 he moved back to Dubuque to renovate his childhood home. He died of cancer in 2000.

The Man From Lisbon

Thomas Gifford

BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT

Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG

Copyright © 2014 by Bastei Lübbe AG, Schanzenstraße 6-20, 51063 Cologne, Germany

For the original edition:

Copyright © 2012 by The Mysterious Press, LLC, 58 Warren Street, New York, NY. U.S.A.

Copyright © 1977 by Murray Teigh Bloom

Project management: Lori Herber

Cover adaptation: Christin Wilhelm, www.grafic4u.de

Cover design by Michael Vrana

E-book production: Jouve Germany GmbH & Co. KG

ISBN 978-3-95859-296-4

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www.bastei-entertainment.com

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this e-book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Julian Bach

I am not I;

he is not he;

they are not they.

It really happened

PART ONE

THE EDUCATION OF ALVES REIS

ARTUR VIRGILIO ALVES REIS. His earliest boyhood memory was as much a recurring dream as it was the recollection of actual events. Yet he supposed, as the years went by and his life took its final shape, that he remembered it pretty much as it had happened. It came often, haunted him like the phrase of an old tune; perhaps because the occasion itself had marked his first venture into the tightly wound complexity of human existence, into the area of refined, obstinate truth where Alves realized for the first time that everyone was not alike.

The year was 1904 and he was eight years old. A Sunday morning in the spring: it seemed to Alves that it was probably Easter. But every Sunday had been a dress-up, go-for-a-walk day. The family, turned out in its only finery, went to the church that morning—the glorious, magical Church of Sao Rocque with its priceless gold altars and tons of brilliant lapis lazuli—and then for a long walk in the feathery weightlessness of the sunshine, through the fragrant streets of Lisbon, a promenade far from the dark, narrow street where his father’s mortuary catered to the people who had to scrimp enough together to launch a loved one into the great beyond.

There was Alves’ faintly mustachioed mother with her short legs thumping out the pace; his short, stringy father; the older son who was afflicted with a squint; and young Alves with the innocent eyes he would never outgrow. His father had once possessed a similar innocence and a small inheritance, both of which he lost in a slightly shady deal involving inferior cork. With what was left he’d set himself up in the funeral parlor, scraped by with two worn black suits and a shiny pair of black shoes. He lived under a terrible strain that Alves understood only much later, long after his father had died. Having once enjoyed a degree of status, however slight, the elder Reis had been forced to accept his own diminution, a particularly galling fate for a Portuguese invested with the customary measure of national and personal pride. Years later he still saw his father cursing impatiently at his fate. By then Alves knew what had really been the trouble: there simply hadn’t been enough money. Money, money, money.

There was an air of excitement that Sunday, almost palpable, and a fresh, ceremonial flower bloomed in his father’s buttonhole. His mother’s flowered shawl fluttered transparently in the breeze. His brother peered anxiously through his thick, magnifying spectacles: his eyes floated like dark olives on either side of his broad nose.

Block after block went by, past blue tiled courtyard walls, skipping beneath a glassy pale-blue sky, until finally his father pulled up abruptly, uttered a brief exclamation, and gestured down what seemed to be only another pleasant avenue, tree-lined, coolly shaded, unremarkable. He pointed excitedly at the name of the street discreetly lettered on the pink courtyard wall of a large three-story house. Young Alves was at a loss.

“This avenue,” his father declaimed, “with all its grand houses and fine trees—” he swept his hand in a broad arc, building the suspense—“Avenue Francisco da Silva Reis, is named in honor of a great man, my sons … a man who was an admiral of the Portuguese fleet!” He fixed the boys with a slightly mad gaze as if a candle were flickering in the depths of his dark, onyx eyes. Alves instinctively reached for his mother’s warm hand.

His father embarked on another of his frequent disquisitions on the role of the sea and sailors in the life of the Portuguese. The sea, he pointed out, was the highway used to establish the most magnificent empire in the history of the world, the most far-flung, the most powerful … He summoned up the names of the greatest of all navigators, men like Henry the Navigator and Bartolemeu Diaz, Vasco da Gama and the mighty Magellan, who had sailed off from the mouth of the Tagus River to circumnavigate the globe! He may have glossed the surface of history a trifle, but the fact was that little glossing was needed: the two boys listened, swept on by their father’s eloquence. He told them of how the Portuguese crown had rejected Christopher Columbus’ requests because they had no need of yet another great seaman, sent him packing back to Queen Isabella … otherwise, Portugal would have sponsored the voyage to discover North America.

“And, my sons, Admiral Francisco da Silva Reis was your great-uncle! Yes, your great-uncle! The blood of da Silva Reis flows in your veins! You must never forget that—never.” He leaned down and placed his arms around their shoulders. “You are not the sons of an undertaker, my boys—you are the great-nephews of the great Admiral da Silva Reis … after whom a great avenue of Lisbon is named.” It was a very long time before Alves Reis, a grown man, realized what a price his father must have paid as he spoke. Humility, he knew by then, came hard to a Portuguese.

The blood of da Silva Reis flows in my veins … It was a peculiar idea for little Alves to cope with, an abstraction that made precious little sense. What did it mean?

He pondered the possible implications of his father’s claim as he and his brother skipped ahead of their parents on the walk home to the Sao Tiago district. They trampled the jacaranda leaves on the paving stones and the purple stains spread, leaving a trail. And Admiral da Silva Reis, grand as he may well have been, faded from their minds as they ran, faded as they crumpled the leaves of the orange and tangerine trees in their tiny fists, inhaling the released essence, pungent, intense, concentrated. The scents clung to Alves, like his memory of the day, as the years multiplied.

Although the sky was still vividly blue when they turned toward home, the street itself was engulfed in deep shadow, the structures on either side seeming to tilt forward, as if trying to lean against one another for support above the slippery smooth cobblestones. Alves smelled his grandmother’s cooking before he reached the doorstep: fish stew—and, having gone without lunch, he was ravenous.

Grandmother was a short, stumplike woman with thick gray hair, shapeless dresses, a deeply lined face the color of stained oak, and she spoke a dialect he only partly understood. He did not realize then just how primitive her life had been, how much a product of the Middle Ages she was; but he knew that her grandmother had survived the earthquake of 1755 that had destroyed much of Lisbon. Through her he had glimpsed for the first time his Portuguese past, the days of the limitless empire when Portuguese seamen ruled so much of the globe. … Even as a boy of eight he had learned those lessons. And such a grandmother made the lessons take on the pulse of life. At times it seemed that, surely, she must have marched to the Tagus to watch Henry the Navigator set sail.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!