‘Who was that fourth one?’
‘That fourth what?’
‘The hairdresser at the back of the room.’
‘That’s Queta,’ said Fat Nuria without looking round as she climbed the wooden stairs up to a small office bathed in neon light. Behind an office desk that pre-dated the Korean War, a man raised his head when he saw them come in. He made the most of the sparse hair that grew round the sides of his head, while his white, freckled face allowed a few wrinkles to betray his age. He was wearing a grey suit, but he had a pair of leather slippers on his feet under the desk.
Fat Nuria left as soon as the man at the desk and Carvalho had acknowledged each other’s presence with a stare. Carvalho accepted the other’s silent invitation and sat in a narrow green plastic armchair. The man did not look the type to be in a business like this, or to be wearing slippers. Carvalho could sense that he was being studied, weighed up, assessed. The man finished his examination and looked away as though searching for something on the desk. It was a newspaper cutting, which he handed to Carvalho. The detective read it, and kept it between his fingers, but said nothing and went on staring at his host’s peculiar complexion.
‘Did you hear about it?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you read the news?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘What do you make of it?’
‘What about you?’
‘I asked first.’
Carvalho shrugged. The other man had leaned back in his wooden swivel chair and seemed content to await developments. Carvalho took his time, studying this small office in a small local business, similar to any small office in any small local business. The only thing out of place was this elegant, well-preserved man sitting opposite him.
‘I’m interested to know who this man is, and what he did in life.’
Carvalho looked down at the press cutting.
‘I don’t think that would be too hard. The police must have identified him by now.’
‘I’m not interested in asking the police.’
‘That would be the quickest, cheapest and most reliable way.’
‘I’m not interested in how quick or cheap it might be. And everybody has their own idea about what might be reliable. I prefer not to lie to you, which is why I prefer not to tell you why I’m interested in finding out who that man is.’
‘Perhaps you’re interested in collecting stories about drowned men. This one is quite interesting. You don’t see a tattoo like that every day of the week.’
‘If you need to know my motives, make them up for yourself. I want to know the identity of that body.’
‘I can’t go into this blindly. The cops take this kind of thing seriously, and if I stumble around blindly I’m bound to trip over them.’
‘I’ve heard very good things about you.’
‘I’m sure you have.’
Carvalho let the cutting fall on to the paper-strewn desk, and resumed his silent contemplation of the other man.
‘You know who I am. My name is Ramón, and I run this business with my wife. Let’s just say it’s aroused my curiosity, and I don’t mind spending money on a whim. I want to know who that man was. All we have to go on is that from the description he was a young man, and he had that tattoo.’
‘Have you nothing else to say to me?’
‘Yes. I’ll pay you a hundred thousand pesetas.’
‘Plus expenses.’
‘So long as they’re reasonable.’
Carvalho was already on his feet. The other man had also stood up for the first time, and was leaning his weight on his hands on the desk. Carvalho saw he was wearing a huge gold signet ring in the shape of a Red Indian chieftain’s head.
‘Fifty thousand up front.’
No sooner had the word ‘fifty’ left his mouth than the man’s hand skulking behind the Red Indian chief delved into a wooden drawer and pulled out a bundle of notes. He counted out thousand-peseta notes until he reached fifty, then pushed them across the desk at Carvalho. The detective stuffed them in his pocket and went back to the staircase. His feet brought out the music of the wooden steps, and when he reached the salon he looked round for the same backside that had impressed him so much on the way up. This time, however, Queta was facing him: the round, pleasant face of a woman of about forty, perhaps a little too much make-up, the eyes perhaps a little large.
By the time he was out in the street again, Carvalho was thinking he had missed an opportunity. Señor Ramón had given him fifty thousand, but there were at least another fifty still in the desk drawer. Which meant he had been prepared to pay him the whole lot there and then.
T
he restaurant smelled of kidneys cooked in sherry. Carvalho went over to a corner table from where he could survey the whole room, and allowed the smell to invade his nostrils, mouth and tongue. He ordered a ‘Castilian salad’ and kidneys. He tried to imagine what on earth the adjective ‘Castilian’ might mean when coupled with the noun ‘salad’. His imagination was far greater than the chef’s. It turned out to be no more than a few potatoes vinaigrette with some chunks of marinaded tuna strategically placed on top of the squares of soggy potato.
With one eye on the scarce chunks of tuna and the other scanning the restaurant tables, Carvalho soon sized up the place and its customers. He asked the waiter:
‘Is Bromuro around?’
‘He’s just finishing with a client down below. If you like, I’ll tell him to come over.’
‘Yes, do that.’
Bromuro arrived just as Carvalho was mopping up the kidney sauce with his bread. He was contemplating the chunk of bread smothered in brown gravy and then offering it to his expectant palate. A plate of kidneys is above all a pleasure for the senses of smell and touch, and Carvalho did not allow Bromuro’s arrival to spoil his enjoyment. Bromuro knelt down beside him, then lifted one of Carvalho’s feet on to his bootblack’s box.
‘Are you here to eat or to work?’
‘Both. The body of a dead man has been found on the beach. He had no face. It was eaten away by the fishes. But he did have a tattoo on his back:
Born to raise hell in hell
.’
‘Some people have all the luck.’
‘You said it.’
‘And was his sad voice filled with a yearning for rest?’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
The bootblack’s watery eyes sank still farther into the network of black lines that made up a face that was half wrinkles, half purple veins. He was laughing, or at least that was how Carvalho interpreted the seismic convulsion of the wrinkled mass down by his knees.
‘It’s an old song. It was called “Tattoo”. Concha Piquer used to sing it.’
All at once, Carvalho remembered it too. With Bromuro’s help, he started to hum it, uncertainly at first, but then with more emphasis. The bootblack sang it as though it were flamenco, but in fact it was a waltz. Carvalho let him get on with it. When he had finished, he bent down as if he wanted to see the results of the work on his shoes.
‘I need anything you can find out about this.’
‘For the moment I haven’t heard a thing.’
‘But now you know I’m interested. Tomorrow at one I’ll be in the Versalles to have my shoes cleaned again.’
‘Are you going whoring?’
Carvalho gave him an ambivalent smile and lifted his other foot. Through the few remaining strands of hair, he could see the flakes of dandruff on Bromuro’s skull. The bootblack made his living as a pimp, selling pornographic packs of cards or ingratiating himself by telling stories about how the occult powers used and abused bromides.
‘I tell you, they put bromide in everything we swallow,
just so that we won’t go crazy, so that women can walk in the street without fear. It makes me feel so bad! So bad! So many women and we have so little to satisfy them with!’
Bromuro knew he was on to a sure thing with his talk of the bromide conspiracies and the distance between reality and his desire. He had been entertaining the locals with his story for twenty years. He had started out using it as an example of his erudition, of how he knew all about the scientific progress of humanity. Then one day he discovered that people found what he was saying more amusing than troubling, and so he turned it into one of his main sources of tips. On this occasion, Carvalho slipped five hundred pesetas into the bootblack’s waistcoat pocket. Bromuro lifted his head to show his surprise.
‘Lots of dough involved?’
‘Enough.’
‘You don’t usually hand out five hundred pesetas like they were a glass of water.’
‘If you think it’s too much, you can give it back.’
‘No, I’ll see you tomorrow, OK, Pepe?’
He picked up his box and walked away down the central passageway of the restaurant, peering to left and right at the customers’ feet as though he were mushroom hunting. Carvalho left the money for the meal on the saucer and went out. He could not immediately remember where he had left the car the night before, but felt intuitively it must have been farther up the Rambla. He walked up the centre of the avenue, stopping here and there at newspaper kiosks and bookstalls, picking up envelopes with plant seeds in them, wondering about the fate of the birds and small monkeys in their cages. But the Rambla was quickly filling up with afternoon crowds, so Carvalho made his way under the hanging sign at the entrance to the Boqueria Market. He
wanted to eat well that night. He needed to be cooking while he mulled over the problem of the dead body in the solitude of his own home, and knew that the best way to end the day was with a good meal. He bought fresh monk fish and hake, a handful of clams and mussels, a few prawns. The white, treasure-filled plastic bags dangled from his hands as the market came to life again for the afternoon. A lot of the stalls were shut, and buying food this late in the day made it feel as though he were entering a different time zone, a strange ambience filled with almost total silence, disturbed only by the sounds of buying and selling.
Strolling aimlessly around the market was one of the few ways that this tall, dark-haired man in his thirties, who somehow contrived to look slightly dishevelled despite wearing expensive suits from tailors in the smartest part of town, allowed himself some spiritual relaxation whenever he left Charo’s neighbourhood and headed back to his lair on the slopes of the mountain overlooking Barcelona.
T
o reach Carvalho’s house you had to go up along a wide dirt road that wound between old, over-ornate villas, their white walls stained grey by rain over a period of fifty years. The house fronts were brightened up by a scattering of green or blue tiles, while clumps of bougainvillea or morning glory hung over their garden fences. Carvalho’s villa was not of the same pedigree. It had not been built when Vallvidrera was in its heyday, but during its second wave of popularity, when some of those who had made fortunes on the black market after the war had retired to the mountainside for the splendid view it gave them of the scene of their splendid achievements. They were small-time crooks who had got rich through small-time black-marketeering. People who saved their money and who still had the pre-war nostalgia for a house and a garden in the suburbs, if possible with a vegetable patch for their lettuces, potatoes and tomatoes, fascinating hobbies for those with free weekends and paid holidays.
Carvalho had rented a small villa built vaguely in the modernist style popular between the wars. The architects had obviously designed a starkly functional building, but the client must have wanted ‘a bit more colour’, or ‘something to soften it’, so they had allowed him a few courses of red bricks which looked like the gaps between teeth up on the cornices, and stuck some yellow tiles on the front, which
had once been ochre but now after thirty years had acquired a greenish tinge.
Carvalho took the mail out of the box and walked across the bare garden with its loose paving stones that led up to the front door steps. Carvalho’s neglect had allowed weeds to sprout everywhere, and on the porch rotten leaves from the previous autumn had formed a slippery light brown mulch that any visitor’s shoes invariably brought into the house. Carvalho’s feet trod their way across the geometric tiles of the entrance hall, and followed the trail of light his hand magically produced from the switches. July filled the evening sky with warmth, but Carvalho needed to light a fire if he was to be able to think in a relaxed mood. To compensate, he stripped off to the waist and opened shutters and windows to allow the drier outside air and the last sunlight into the house. As he pushed open the shutters, his eyes took in the green horizons to the north and east, as well as the urban geometry of the city laid out at the foot of the mountain. Today the cloud of pollution was reduced to a kind of polar ice cap hanging over the industrial, working-class districts down by the port.
Carvalho went to the basement to fetch firewood. He made several trips, and then had to clear out the remains of the fire from five days earlier. Four nights at Charo’s were too many. Carvalho was in two minds. On the one hand, he felt bad about abandoning his own home and a regular, more routine existence. On the other, he remembered Charo’s velvety skin, and the softness of her more intimate recesses. She had even caressed him tenderly.
He searched in vain for some newspaper to help light the pile of firewood he had built according to the manual of good fire-lighters. From bottom to top, the wood formed a strict pyramid from smallest to heaviest. But he had no paper to start it with.
‘I should read the news more often,’ he said out loud to himself.
In the end he had to go over to one of the bookshelves that lined the room. He hesitated, but finally chose a big green book with lots of pages. As he carried it to the funeral pyre, Carvalho read some fragments at random. It was entitled
Spain as a Problem
, written by someone called Laín Entralgo at a time when it was thought that Spain’s problems consisted simply of the problem of Spain itself. He pushed the open book under the sticks in the fireplace. As he lit it, he again felt torn: on the one hand, he did not like to see the book burn; on the other, he could hardly wait for the flames to shoot up and reduce it to a pile of obliterated words.