Southern Seas (13 page)

‘Tonight we can eat with my friend Beser, at his San Cugat flat. I’ll call for you. Be ready. This year you decided not to come to my place in the country for the slaughtering of the pig, so if Mohammed won’t go to the Maestrazgo, then the Maestrazgo will just have to come to Mohammed.’

Fuster’s phone call put him in a good mood. He went through the notes he had taken during his conversation with Teresa Marsé. He had circled the name of Nisa Pascual, the last teenager in Stuart Pedrell’s known life. In the afternoons, she frequented an art school halfway along the road to Vallvidrera. The school was in a modernist tower which rose from the luxurious vegetation of a stream bed and looked conspicuously artificial amid the neatly kept greenery of mature and stately trees. Students were strolling on the grass, idly chatting and soaking up the moist fragrance with which the rain had endowed this earthly paradise. The first
lights of evening were shining from refurbished classrooms that had once been the bedrooms of a private mansion. The retinal colours of primitive painting had taken possession of doors, windows, frames and windows, revealing a playful house given over to a life and culture of imagination.

Nisa was at an art-meditation class. The students seemed to be observing a minute’s silence for someone or something. But the minute stretched into four … five … ten. Through the window, Carvalho watched the silence and the meditation and he had his doubts. Finally the bodies came to life again. A woman teacher dressed in more or less oriental style moved her lips and arms as if she were administering the last rites. There was a round of questions, and then the students made for the exit. Nisa came out with two other girls, as tall and fair-haired as herself. She wore long, plaited hair that cascaded down her slim back almost to her buttocks. There was a look of virgin innocence in those large blue eyes surrounded by freckles. Carvalho beckoned to her, and she came over with an air of curiosity.

‘Can I have a word with you?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’m a private detective.’

‘Have they hired you here? That’s too much!’

She laughed with delight at her lucky find. So loudly that her two companions drew closer to ask her the reason.

‘I’m just coming. I’ll tell you all about it. Today’s my lucky day!’

Carvalho met the girls’ inquisitive stare with a look that was part admonitory and part provocative.

‘A necklace has been stolen. It was very valuable. Are you meant to be looking for it?’

‘Carlos Stuart Pedrell has been murdered, and I’m meditating on the case. By the way, what were you meditating about in there?’

‘It’s a new way of studying. It’s as important to think about painting as it is to actually paint. Do you know how to think?’

‘Nobody ever taught me.’

‘It’s something you have to learn for yourself. What were you saying about Carlos?’

A smile hovered on her pursed babyish lips.

‘He’s dead.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ve been told you were a good friend of his.’

‘That was a long time ago. He went off on a trip and showed up dead.’

‘Didn’t he ever contact you after he disappeared?’

‘No. To tell you the truth, he was very angry with me. He’d asked me to go along with him, and I’d refused. If it had been a short trip, for a couple of months or so, then I’d have gone. But there was no time limit. I was very fond of him. He was so kind of soft and helpless. But it wasn’t my scene to go chasing after Paradise Lost.’

‘Didn’t he change his plans when you decided not to go with him?’

‘He even began to say that he wouldn’t go. But then he suddenly vanished, and I assumed that he’d finally made his mind up. He needed that trip. It was an obsession with him. There were days when he was quite unbearable. But he was a wonderful companion. One of the people who’ve most influenced me. He taught me a lot of things. He was so restless and full of curiosity.’

‘At last! Someone with something good to say of Stuart Pedrell!’

‘Has everybody else spoken badly of him?’

‘Let’s say that no one took him seriously.’

‘He was well aware of that, and it hurt him.’

‘During his long absence, did he never get in touch with you?’

‘It would have been hard for him. I was pretty shaken up. I couldn’t believe it was all over, that a whole part of my life was behind me. I got a grant to study art in Italy and I spent nearly a year there. In Siena, Perugia, Venice …’

‘Alone?’

‘No.’

‘The king is dead, long live the king.’

‘I’ve never had a king. Are you a moralist?’

‘It’s my role. I always have to be suspicious of people’s morality.’

‘Oh, I see … Fascinating! I’ve never met a private detective before. I saw one once on TV, and he wasn’t at all like you. He spent the whole programme talking about all the things he couldn’t do under the present state of the law.’

‘Under the present state of the law, we can’t do anything.’

‘I’ve got to go to my project class.’

‘Do you project projects? Or do you think about projecting projects?’

‘I enjoy it a lot here. Why don’t you enrol. You could bring a bit of mystery into the place. Maybe we could plan a crime, and you’d investigate it.’

‘Who would you like to kill?’

‘No one. But we could sell the idea to the victim. The people here are very imaginative.’

‘Did your refusal leave Stuart Pedrell very disappointed?’

‘Very. Almost desperate.’

‘But he still …’

‘But he still what?’

‘… still left you.’

‘The relationship was already over. If he needed to go off, it was basically because he no longer needed anything from any of us: not from his family, nor from anyone else. If I’d gone with him, it would only have lasted a few weeks before he discovered my doubts … Our doubts.’

‘The class has started,’ said one of her friends as she passed by.

Carvalho’s eyes lingered on the friend’s small waist, and on the mane of curly blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders.

‘Give me a ring one day and we can talk more about your job. If you like, I’ll ask my friend along. I see she’s taken your fancy.’

‘She’s my type.’

‘Shall I call her over and tell her?’

‘I’m expected at a meeting of veterans.’

‘Veterans of what?’

‘Of a secret war. It’s never been in the books. If I have to talk to you again, I’ll come back here and look her up.’

A few minutes later, he discovered that the art-meditation school was not visible from his house. Never mind—he’d get a good view from the Vallvidrera cable-car station. With a pair of binoculars, he could spend his time looking out the girl with the small waist and the curly hair. Until she finished her studies, that is, and set up a shop selling picture frames and decorated mirrors.

‘What are you doing with the binoculars?’ shouted Fuster, as he leaned from his car window.

‘I want to see a woman.’

Fuster looked towards distant Barcelona.

‘Where? On the Plaza del Pino?’

‘No. At the foot of the cable-railway.’

‘
Cherchez la femme
! Who’s she killed?’

‘She was a real stunner.’

On the hill, a woman was struggling under the combined weight of herself and her shopping basket. She stopped and listened as she got her breath back.

‘My fellow countryman is expecting us. Don’t forget your indigestion pills.’

As Carvalho went to get into the car, Bleda started barking behind the trellis gate.

‘Ha! You’ve bought a dog! What’s this—the male menopause?’

‘My menopause can’t be compared with yours. Where did your goatee end up, eh?’

Fuster stroked his lewdly bare chin.

‘As Baudelaire says, a dandy must aspire to be ever sublime. He must live and sleep in front of the mirror.’

Beser lived in San Cugat, in a flat that seemed to contain nothing but books and a kitchen. He was like a red-haired Mephistopheles with a Valencian accent. He scolded Fuster for their late arrival, which had placed the paella in jeopardy.

‘Today you’ll have a real
paella valenciana
,’ he informed Fuster.

‘Have you followed what I told you?’

Beser swore that he had followed his mentor’s instructions to the letter. Fuster began walking through the book-lined corridor towards the kitchen. Carvalho mused that with just half of such a stock, he could have a fire in his grate from now until the day he died. As if sensing what was in the detective’s mind, and without turning round, Fuster warned:

‘Careful, Sergio, this guy burns books. He uses them to light the fire.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘It must give extraordinary pleasure.’

‘There’s nothing to beat it.’

‘Tomorrow I’ll start to burn this shelf. Without even looking at what books are there.’

‘It gives even more pleasure if you choose them.’

‘I’m a sentimentalist, though. I’d be sure to reprieve some of them.’

In the kitchen, Fuster marched up and down like a sergeant major inspecting Beser’s work. The ingredients had been cut into pieces that were too large. He groaned, as if wounded to the quick.

‘What the hell’s this?!’

‘Onion.’

‘Onions in paella! Where did you get an idea like that! Onion makes the rice go soft.’

‘That’s ridiculous. They always use onions in my village.’

‘In your village, you’d do anything to get yourselves noticed! Onion can be used in a fish or salted-cod
arroz
cooked in a casserole. In a casserole, do you hear?’

Beser stormed out and returned with three books under his arm: the
Valencian Gastrosophic Dictionary, Gastronomy of Valencia Province
, and
A Hundred Typical Rice Dishes of the Valencia Region
.

‘Don’t come to me with any book that’s not written by someone from Villores. To hell with you Morellanos. I go by the memory of my people.’

Fuster raised his eyes to the kitchen ceiling and held forth:

Beser pored over his books, ignoring Fuster’s poetic outburst. Finally he closed them and laid them aside.

‘Well?’

‘You were right. Onion isn’t used in the paella of the people of Castellón. It was a lapse. A catalanism. I’ll have to go to Morella. I’m in urgent need of a refresher course.’

‘Ha!’ exclaimed Fuster, as he threw the onion into the rubbish bin. ‘I made myself quite clear. Half a kilo of rice, half a chicken,
a quarter-kilo of pork shoulder, a quarter-kilo of peas, two peppers, two tomatoes, parsley, saffron, salt, and nothing else. Anything else is superfluous.’

Fuster set to work, while Beser plied him with little pieces of fried bread with chorizo and Morella blood sausage. Beser took out a bottle of Aragón wine, and glass followed glass like a chain of buckets damping down a forest fire. Fuster had brought from the car a greasy cardboard box which he handled as if it contained precious objects. Beser, impatient to discover the contents, suddenly shouted with enthusiasm:

‘
Flaons
! Did you make these for me, Enric?’

They embraced like two compatriots meeting at the South Pole, and explained to the by now inebriated Carvalho that
flaons
are the absolute best patisserie to be had in all the Catalan lands. Throughout the Maestrazgo, they are made with oily dough, aniseed and sugar, and filled with curd cheese, ground almond, egg, cinnamon and grated lemon peel.

‘My sister sent them yesterday. Curd cheese is very awkward and goes off very quickly.’

Beser and Fuster caught the aroma coming from the paella.

‘Too much pepper,’ Beser suggested.