M
any of the houses in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter are nothing more than their façade, kept in order to preserve the city’s visual harmony. Behind that, most of them are empty, or have collapsed, and the façades are shored up to await the final curtain. This one was different. It was a noble building, with silversmiths’ signs, the smell of money and efficient offices. Carvalho walked up two floors. He reached a door lit by strip lighting. In the centre of it was a brass plate: Mr Cooplan, Import & Export. Without taking his eyes off the door, Carvalho stretched out his left arm until it was touching a big Delft flowerpot. He lifted it a few inches with his fingertips, until he had room to feel what he was looking for. A key.
He thrust it in the lock without hesitation. He found himself in a brightly-lit corridor the colour of eau de Nil. The figure of a man dressed like a mannequin on the Champs-Elysées appeared from behind a frosted-glass door at the far end. As he came towards Carvalho, his features also took on the painted, stiff appearance of a mannequin. Although obviously taken by surprise, he walked confidently up to the detective, and stopped only a couple of metres from him. Even his few grey hairs seemed deliberately put there to show off a bronzed, youthful face.
‘What are you doing here?’
The man’s gaze dropped to Carvalho’s hand holding the key.
‘You still have a key?’
‘No, this is the one that was under the pot outside.’
The mannequin raised an eyebrow – just one, but with the practised ease of an actor at a crucial moment. He turned on his heel, then set off back down the corridor.
‘Follow me.’
Carvalho ignored him. He started to open the doors into the offices lining the corridor. They were all neat and tidy, ready for the next working day. He stepped inside one that was full of filing cabinets. All the drawers were locked.
‘You’re wasting your time.’
The mannequin was in the doorway. The expression on his face must have been irony.
‘Time is what I have most of.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Information.’
‘There’s no reason I should give you any. You don’t work with us any more.’
As ever, Max Blodell spoke to Carvalho in a mixture of Harvard English and Colombian Spanish, reflecting the two countries where he had found it necessary to learn the language.
‘Let me put it this way. Get out of here right now, Pepe. You’re not welcome here. They don’t like people who storm out like you did. Now what are you doing?’
Blodell closed in on Carvalho. Pepe had a gun in his hand, and was aiming it at the lock on a filing cabinet. Blodell thought about wrestling the gun from the Spaniard, but decided instead to go for his own in his shoulder-holster.
Carvalho did not give him time to reach it: he stuck the barrel of his automatic in the other man’s stomach.
‘Overreacting as usual, Max. Is Cor here?’
‘No, he’s working in Indonesia.’
‘How could you bear to be separated from your great love?’
‘That’s all over and done with.’
‘Didn’t you succeed in setting up a homosexual branch of the CIA?’
Max took two steps back. He looked upset.
‘I’ll forgive you that, Pepe, if you leave right now.’
‘I won’t be long. But I need some information.’
‘I can’t give you any.’
‘One good turn deserves another.’
‘What good turn?’
‘The one I always did you and Cor by not telling headquarters that you loved each other until death did you part.’
‘Private lives …’
‘You know that’s nonsense. You know that as soon as headquarters finds they have a homosexual on their books they treat him differently, and sometimes even use him for that.’
‘You always were a creep.’
‘I need just a few things, and no one will ever know I got the information here. It’s not a very important case. Are you still in charge of Latino immigrants?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’m on the trail of a Spaniard who worked at the Philips factory in The Hague. All I know about him is that he had a tattoo with the motto:
Born to raise hell in hell
.’
‘Sounds like a verse from Milton.’
‘It isn’t.’
Max signalled for him to follow, and they went into the next-door office. Max looked in a file devoted to strange identifying marks.
‘Your tattoo isn’t here.’
Pepe mechanically checked some of the faces in the file, until he realised he was returning to his old habits, when he was in charge of this CIA office in Amsterdam together with Max and Cor.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you.’
‘But you can. You might not know, but someone else could. Some former colleagues who might have seen the tattoo.’
‘My informers won’t be of any help. If they had seen something like that, they would have told me.’
‘Yes, but it’s not only your informers who have that kind of information. Tell me the name of a leader, one of those Spanish workers who has authority and knows everything, someone who’s respected and asked for advice.’
‘A communist?’
‘Not necessarily. Almost better if he wasn’t. They tend to be suspicious, and I don’t have much time. A “born” leader who’s not that involved in politics.’
‘At the Philips factory in The Hague?’
‘Right.’
Max led him into another office. He took a folder out of a filing cabinet identical to all the others.
‘This man might help you.’
Carvalho noted down the name, age and place of birth of a gaunt forty-year-old with thin lips, square jaw and a high forehead exaggerated by a receding hairline. Max drew him a map of the factory and the workers’ exits.
‘This is where he comes out. He’s nearly always accompanied by another man. I think they come from the
same part of Spain. You’re sure to see him there at two minutes past twelve. That’s when they have lunch.’
‘Have you had him followed?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Is he a Red?’
‘No, but he collaborates with them when he thinks it’s a purely work-related matter. And the Reds seek him out too because he’s got so much prestige.’
‘Is he distrustful?’
‘Very.’
‘Anyone apart from him?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘How about asking prostitutes?’
‘That’s pretty impossible. There are so many of them and not all are registered with the police. There are private security people now who protect them and hide them. It was easy when they were just German or Italian, but now it’s gone completely haywire – there’s Turkish women, Greeks … even Spaniards.’
Max giggled at the thought. Carvalho put his notes in his pocket and headed for the door.
‘Leave the key where you found it. No, better still, give it to me.’
‘I’ll leave it where I found it.’
‘I hope this is the last time we meet.’
‘That’s not the sort of thing you should ever say.’
‘Well, I’m saying it.’
Carvalho walked down the corridor trying to take in all the offices and to remember exactly what he had been doing there four years earlier.
‘Cor was a good man.’
Something akin to emotion shone in Max’s eyes.
‘He’s doing very well in Jakarta.’
‘I remember he was there before, when all the Reds were being killed in ’65 and ’66. Why is he there now?’
‘Reds spread like weeds. And even renegades still bear some traces.’
Carvalho reached out and brushed Max’s cheek. Max recoiled as though he had been clawed at.
‘I was never a renegade, Max. I was a cynical apostate, no more.’
T
he northern sun proved Pio Baroja right. It softened colours rather than intoxicating them as the harsh brightness of the south did. This Nordic light brings out all the nuances in the sea of green, lends a sheen of age to the drunken roofs, and paints each leaf on the trees of Amsterdam with a different brushstroke. Carvalho had to make a great effort to leave the city for The Hague. For breakfast, he ate rollmops at a blue-and-white van outside the Central Station. As he munched his third slice of black bread with raw herring and onion, he could see the glass-sided boats manoeuvring into position as they set off to take tourists round the canals. He must not leave Amsterdam without taking the trip again himself, lying back and watching the city pass by above his head, a silent spectator at the ghostly parade of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century city.
Dutch trains always seem like suburban ones. They are more like an open-air metro than a proper railway. People get on and off as if they were on an underground train, and the towns go by in the same harmonious, uninterrupted style against the backdrop of an unvarying landscape. Carvalho remembered the story he had heard from Carrasquer, a professor of Spanish literature at Leyden University: Holland has only one mountain, and that’s only five hundred metres high, so to avoid wearing it out the Dutch do not climb it, but instead gaze at it like a national monument.
Carvalho’s carriage was filled with quiet, self-absorbed passengers. Every so often he caught the sound of a few words of Spanish, Italian or Greek, and some in another language he supposed was Turkish. But the placid Dutch seriousness seemed to impinge on the southern Europeans. In an environment where silence is so important, even Southerners are silent. Or perhaps, thought Carvalho, they are simply afraid of upsetting the Northerners’ psychological balance with the lewd phonetics of poor nations. In order to blend in better, and to enjoy some Dutch tobacco, Carvalho had brought a pipe. He soon noticed that the simple fact of smoking it made him more detached, and helped him look at other people and things with greater distance. He puffed on his obedient appendage and the rising smoke sealed his sense of well-being.
When he arrived at The Hague he decided to walk for a while, from the station down to the main shopping centre. He recognised a restaurant he had enjoyed the last time he had been here: The House of Lords. He studied the menu outside and resolved to come back and eat here if he had the opportunity. Among the daily specials were snails from Alsace and roast gigot of lamb, which made him feel nostalgic. He had not eaten a proper gigot since he had been in Dijon for the wine festival. He knew he could trust The House of Lords to do it justice. He remembered a turkey with pomegranate stuffing he had eaten among wood-panelled walls imitating an English club. The chef had been from Galicia too, he seemed to recall.
The lunch hour was approaching, so he hurried on to the Philips factory. While he waited for the workers to emerge, he flicked through his copy of the porno magazine
Suck
. The front cover seemed to be a paean to the carrot and its uses. As soon as the first men came out of the factory gates,
Carvalho folded the magazine and put it in his pocket. He fell in with the labouring masses rushing in search of food, and soon heard Spanish being spoken. He discreetly followed two short, well-built men in their forties as they headed off determinedly towards the centre of town. He kept close behind, and as soon as they became separated from the others, caught up with them.
‘Excuse me. I heard you speaking Spanish. I’m passing through here and wanted to eat somewhere where they serve food from back home.’
The two men looked at each other and shook their heads doubtfully, as if Carvalho had met them in Madrid and asked whether it was far to Barcelona.
‘There’s not much choice here. It’s different in Rotterdam or Amsterdam. But not here.’
‘Perhaps in that social centre.’
‘Yes, perhaps you’ll find some in a centre where him and me eat sometimes. We’ve just got to go and do something, but if you come with us we can tell you where it is, and we might even have lunch there ourselves.’
Carvalho could sense the plate of six delicious Alsatian snails slipping away from him, but thanked them for the offer as though he had suddenly been granted a pardon. He tried to strike up a conversation based on food. The two men replied with all the parsimony of Iberian Comanches. From their accents, Carvalho deduced that one was from Galicia, and the other from not far away.
‘That’s right. My friend is from Orense, and yours truly from León,’ the less old and more talkative one told him.
They were walking in a hurry, with a precise destination in mind. They had already travelled several blocks, but still seemed to have a long way to go. All at once they came to a short, tree-lined street. Carvalho followed them across
it. They came to a halt in front of a nightclub window. The female attractions were displayed behind the glass. Five or six young women from exotic locations (from France to Kashmir) were showing off their breasts to passers-by. In a corner, a girl was showing only one breast. Her artistic name was Finita del Oro.
‘She’s one of us,’ said the man from León, choking with emotion.
‘From León?’
‘No, from Spain.’
‘She’s the best of them all,’ the Galician crowed. The two men looked at each other, then gazed one last time at their half-naked compatriot, and walked off back the way they had come. They had crossed most of the city just to ogle the charms of someone from home.
‘Have you got your families with you?’
No, they did not. The man from Galicia was not married; the other one was, but his wife was back in León. He went home every two years and managed to make up for it.
‘I behave myself here. For one, because I want my wife to behave herself in León, so I do the same. And also because it’s expensive to have fun and we’re here to save.’
The man from León had already bought a flat in his home town, and was giving his daughter a good education: she was studying French and typing.
‘Languages are very important. You realise that when you travel abroad.’
Now that his sexual itch had been satisfied, the man from Léon was talking freely. He had left Spain when he was already forty because the sugar industry in Léon where he had worked was in crisis. He thought you could live well in Spain, except in four or five provinces. ‘People have it easy
where you’re from,’ they both said when Carvalho told them he lived in Barcelona.
‘But I come from Lugo.’