Southern Seas (28 page)

‘Get back or I’ll kill him.’

‘Kill him, Pedro, kill him!’

The Hulk tried to speak, but Carvalho’s arm was choking him.

‘Get the brat out of here. You, you little arsehole, beat it!’

Pedro signalled to him to obey. The kid disappeared from the pool of light and began throwing stones from the darkness.

‘Don’t do that, idiot, you’ll hit us!’

The stones stopped. Carvalho loosened his grip, rolled the Hulk over and began battering at his face, chest and stomach. When he had him on his knees, he pummelled his head into the ground. Then he leapt over the body and stood facing Pedro. The boy retreated, using his knife to mark a distance between them. As he moved forward, the detective shed his knuckledusters and pulled the gun from his pocket. Legs astride, he steadied the gun across his right forearm and targeted Pedro’s face. He wanted to speak, but for some time his gasping lungs wouldn’t let him.

‘Down! Get on the ground or I’ll blow your head off! Throw the knife over here. Careful what you do.’

The knife detached itself from Pedro’s hand. The boy sprawled to the ground, supported on one arm so as to watch Carvalho’s movements.

‘Kiss the ground, baby! Kiss it! Spread your arms and legs.’

Pedro stretched out beneath the streetlamp. The Hulk hobbled off in search of darkness. Carvalho let him go. Then he drew slowly closer to Pedro, trying to calm his breathing. He kicked at Pedro’s legs.

‘Spread them wider.’

The prostrate Pedro obeyed, and Carvalho began kicking at him furiously. The body wriggled like an electrocuted animal, but the blows homed in on his stomach and kidneys and feverishly sought out his face. From the ground, Pedro heard the wild and weary animal-panting coming from Carvalho’s half-open mouth. A kick to the temple stunned him. The impact of the blows that followed seemed duller and somehow ineluctable. Carvalho pulled Pedro’s head up by the hair. He made him kneel down, and then forced him to his feet.

Pedro had a moment to see the detective’s face at close quarters, with blood flowing from the cheek, before he was dragged to a wall and battered against the brickwork. The detective was again panting like a weary animal, as if the air was shouting with pain as it left his lungs. Pedro heard him cough and retch violently. He
tried to turn round, but his body wouldn’t obey the command. His legs were trembling, and his brain told him that he had lost. Once more, he felt the damp heat given off by Carvalho’s body. The detective’s voice sounded almost calm.

‘Now get going to the place where your sister lives. Don’t forget the gun. It’s a miracle you’re not a stiff by now.’

Pedro began to walk. When they reached the main streets of San Magín, he followed Carvalho’s softly spoken instruction to keep close to the shopfronts. This was what his instinct already told him, because he knew he looked pretty bad and he didn’t want to create a stir.

‘It’s not very deep.’

Ana Briongos applied a small amount of antiseptic cream to Carvalho’s wound. She had told her flatmates to make themselves scarce. Her brother lay curled on a folding bed, and Carvalho told her not to let him fall asleep. Ana bent over to listen to what her brother was saying. She felt his finger joints, and Pedro let out a scream.

‘This finger’s broken, and the rest of him looks like mincemeat. Did you do this all alone? You’re a big man when you’re dealing with kids.’

‘He was with his pals.’

Ana didn’t know where to start. She cleaned the swellings on Pedro’s face with hydrogen peroxide. She tried to remove his jacket, but he groaned for her to stop. The door opened, and their father appeared.

‘Pedro! What have they done to you, boy?’

He stopped dead at the sight of Carvalho.

‘Good evening.’

‘Good evening.’

The man’s voice was choking.

‘I told you, Pedro. I told you, boy.’

He began to weep, and moved neither forward nor backwards, as if all his faculties were required for the business of crying.

‘You didn’t need to come.’

‘Is he badly hurt?’

‘A good beating. He asked for it.’

The father looked at Carvalho as if he were a god on whom his fate depended.

‘What will you do with him?’

Carvalho sat down. For a few moments, he saw the scene as from a distance. He saw Ana from afar, as she nursed a wounded man who was not Carvalho but somebody else. The old man seemed to be standing in someone else’s doorway, not daring to ask if he might enter. Carvalho was thirsty and heard himself asking for water. Ana brought him some. It was cold, but it tasted of chlorine.

‘Give a glass to the gentleman. It’ll bring him to.’

Briongos senior was still waiting for Jove’s decision.

Carvalho stood up, took hold of a chair, and went to sit beside Pedro’s bed.

‘If you can’t talk, just listen and answer yes or no.’

‘I can talk if I want to.’

‘Fine. So, you three went after Stuart Pedrell to kill him. You and your two pals.’

‘We didn’t know that was who he was.’

‘You went out to kill him. Why?’

‘Don’t you know what he did to my sister?’

‘You idiot!’ shouted Ana Briongos, momentarily exasperated.

‘They didn’t mean to do it,’ added Briongos senior. ‘They didn’t mean to go that far.’

‘We only meant to put the wind up him. But then he started getting all excited. The dirty bastard put his hand on my shoulder
and started lecturing me. The Shrimp—the kid whose arm you broke—let him have it with his knife. And then I got angry, and I had a go too.’

Briongos senior covered his face with his hands and was shaking visibly. Ana looked at her brother.

‘You’re a fool. Nobody asked you to do it!’

‘You’re my sister.’

‘You see, sir, she’s his sister.’

Briongos gestured expansively, as if to express the depth of the family bond that united his two children.

‘If he hadn’t started getting all wound up, nothing would have happened. But he began shooting his mouth off, telling me that I had to do this, that I had to do that, that my sister was a free woman, and that he wasn’t the only man in her life. That’s what he said, Ana, I swear it!’

‘So what, you idiot? It’s true, isn’t it?’

Carvalho looked at Ana and her father.

‘So, you found out what had happened and ended up becoming accessories to the fact.’

‘I wasn’t going to turn my own son in.’

‘And you?’

‘What was I supposed to do?’

Briongos senior summoned up his little remaining courage.

‘He didn’t belong here. He was an intruder. It was just a game to him.’

‘Shut up, Dad.’

‘So, you took him to a derelict building site at the other end of town.’

‘No one took him to no building site.’

Carvalho looked at Pedro, bemused. The faces of the other two seemed to testify to the truth of his statement.

‘Say that again.’

‘Nobody took him to no building site. We left him bleeding, and he must have scarpered.’

‘Pedro came home and told me that there’d been a fight and that he’d wounded Antonio badly. My father and I spent the night searching around, but we couldn’t find him anywhere.’

‘Sure. He took the subway, because he preferred to die on a patch of waste ground in Holy Trinity. You expect me to believe that?’

‘I don’t expect anything, but it’s the plain truth.’

Briongos junior’s eyes glimmered with one last hope.

‘So you’ve still got to find out what happened to him after that.’

‘Stuart Pedrell died from the two stab wounds that he got from these two trainee butchers. Don’t think you’ll get out of it that easily, Sunshine. That Shrimp of yours is a maniac who kills for kicks, and the Hulk’s got about as much guts as he has brains. Al Capone kept better company.’

‘Bad company, Pedrito. What has your father always told you?’

Pedro was still flat on his back. When his eyes met Carvalho’s, the detective saw in them a deadly and unrelenting hatred. Carvalho left the room, followed by Ana and her father.

‘Señor, please. Don’t bring any more misfortune onto this family. I’ll try to sort him out. I’ll tell him to go into the Foreign Legion. They make a man of you there. They’ll soon take him in hand.’

‘Shut up, Dad. Don’t talk rubbish.’

Briongos lingered while Ana went with Carvalho to the door.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I can’t work out what the man did with two stab wounds in him. He wouldn’t have lasted long. He didn’t have a car. He couldn’t get a taxi for fear of discovery. Why didn’t he ask someone to help him get to a hospital?’

‘Maybe he thought that by not asking he was helping me.’

‘The question is, who took him and dumped him on the building site?’

Carvalho didn’t wait for an answer. As he went down the
street, the evening cool soothed his aching face and body. He left behind him the cement islands of that Polynesia into which Stuart Pedrell had ventured to search out the far side of the moon. The natives he had found there were a hardened race—the same hardness that Gauguin had discovered in the Marquesas, where the natives had come to know that the world was a huge market in which they too were up for sale.

He crossed the frontier and drove at full speed back to his den. He stood, lost in thought, staring into the hot embers in the fireplace. He stroked Bleda’s velvet ears and scratched her belly, the dog pawed the air. Who did Stuart Pedrell turn to that night? He would have scanned his former kingdom to find a safe haven. He couldn’t have gone home. If he had, this investigation would never have been necessary. Nor could he have expected much help from Nisa. The choice must have been between his business partners and Lita Vilardell.

At three in the morning, he called Lita Vilardell. A man picked up the phone. It was the lawyer Viladecans.

‘Ask Señorita Vilardell if she has a piano lesson tomorrow.’

‘Is that why you’re calling at this hour?’

‘Just ask her.’

She came to the phone herself.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘That I want to see you tomorrow. Early, if possible.’

‘Couldn’t you have waited till the morning?’

‘No. I thought I’d give you all night to think about what we’re going to talk about.’

The woman pulled away from the telephone and had a whispered conversation with Viladecans. It was he who came back on the line.

‘Couldn’t you come round now?’

‘No.’

Carvalho hung up. He slept fitfully for brief spells, tangling up the bedclothes as he tossed and turned. During the times
when he was wide awake, he consoled himself with the thought that he was not the only one who wouldn’t be sleeping that night.

They had just finished taking a shower. They asked Carvalho casually if he would care to join them for breakfast. The detective declined with a wave of his hand. They proceeded to butter their toast and to spread the jam with a curious air of childlike absorption. Drinking white coffee as if it were the elixir of life. Taking obvious pleasure in breathing in the morning air that entered through the half-open balcony door.

‘Would you like a coffee at least?’

‘Yes, please. Black, with no sugar.’

‘Are you diabetic?’

‘No. When I was young, I fell in love with a girl who was a coffee addict. Black with no sugar. I got used to it out of love and solidarity.’

‘What became of the girl?’

‘She married an Austrian who had a little aeroplane. Now she lives in Milan with an Englishman. She likes Englishmen, and she writes surrealist poetry in which I sometimes appear.’

‘Just think. What an interesting life this man has had!’

Viladecans smiled broadly and lit up a cigarette.

Drawing deeply, as if bent on consuming the cigarette in a single puff, he immediately filled the room with smoke.

‘Do you often phone people at three in the morning to fix appointments?’

‘It seemed a reasonable time to me. One has returned home and just finished making love.’

‘You must lead a very orderly life. I prefer the afternoon, personally.’

‘So do I.’

Viladecans listened to their conversation in silence.