Southern Seas (17 page)

‘Don’t get carried away, Cifuentes,’ shouted a young man from the back of the hall. His friends joined in the laughter.

‘Don’t be so stupid. And mind your manners. To think that even you have turned out a bunch of bums!’

‘Come and have a joint, Cifuentes.’

Or maybe you’d prefer half a kilo of plastic explosive?’

‘Just listen to them. It’s all just a joke for them. But if the class enemy got to hear them, can you imagine what he’d make of it? It’s the thoughtlessness of youth. You have to be on your guard as you go through life, and you have to wait for the right conditions.’

‘The right conditions … ’ The phrase struck an ideological chord in Carvalho’s memory. The conditions may be right objectively or right subjectively. The conditions …

‘When the Accountant suddenly disappeared, didn’t anyone think it strange?’

‘No. He went the same way as he’d come. If we had to worry about all the people who move in and out of the workers’ movement, we’d all end up in the loony bin. Especially nowadays. At the start, everyone was high as kites and new members were flocking in. Now the commissions have a good presence in the workplace, but you won’t find a lot of people around here. The only time there’s any action here is when the labour lawyers come here for their advice sessions. The Franco years miseducated us, you know. When I read that Spanish people are mature enough for democracy, it drives me up the wall. Mature, my arse!’

‘Don’t get steamed up, Cifuentes!’

‘I’ll get steamed up if I want to, you little sod. Hold your noise. I’m talking to this gentleman, not to you.’

He accompanied Carvalho to the door.

‘They’re good kids, but they do like getting me worked up. They’d give me the shirts off their backs, but they do love teasing me. That’s life, I suppose. I put up with it because I’m retired. I just come here to save the Commission having to pay someone wages. I’ve been in prison six times in my life. The first was in ’34. Then, each time we tried to organize the commissions again, there’d be a bust-up at the Graphic Arts faculty and Cifuentes would be off to the Vía Layetana cells again. Once, I told Superintendent Creix that if he’d rather, I’d happily move in there. And
the old cynic laughed. What a nasty piece of work! Someone told me he’s retired now.’

‘Who?’

‘Creix. It may be true. He must be my age. And you don’t know the best part of it.’ He took Carvalho by the arm, led him into the street, and said in a low voice: ‘Creix and I are colleagues.’

He stood back, to savour the surprise which he expected to see on Carvalho’s face.

‘You don’t understand? I’ll explain. During the civil war, I went on a course for officers at the Party school in Pins del Vallés. Some of us were to end up as political commissars at the front, and some would go into the police. I was told that I should join the Republic’s police force. It was Comorera himself who advised me. “Look, Cifuentes,” he said. “We’ve got as many political commissars as we need, but we don’t have reliable policemen. The force is full of fifth columnists.” So I went into the police. Then it all turned out the way it did. I was based as a station in Hospitalet, and my boss was Gil Lamas. Do you know the name? He must have already been a fifth columnist, because after the war he still stayed on in the force.

‘Anyway, when I got out of prison in ’46, I bumped into him on the Ronda—the bit where the Olimpia used to be. I don’t know what they call it nowadays. And he pretended not to recognize me, right? Anyway, I went through a great deal after that. But a couple of months ago, I received a letter informing me that I could claim my rights as a policemen in the Republic. So I go to see this official, a very polite, very professional gentleman. It goes before a committee, and that’s that. No problem at all. They could have dreamed up all sorts of complications, but no, it went straight through. It’s incredible. Look.’

He took a well-worn sheet of folded paper from a plastic wallet. ‘ “Your rights have been recognized as a retired police officer with the rank of Inspector.”

‘An inspector! Me! With a pension of thirty thousand pesetas
a month. What do you say to that? As a retired doorman from a high-class store, I used to get fifteen thousand pesetas. And now another thirty on top! I feel rich. And what’s more, I’m an inspector. It was about time something good happened to me. My wife still can’t believe it. All our bad luck has made her a bit distrustful. I showed her the letter. I show her the thirty thousand every month. But she’s still as obstinate as ever. “Evaristo”—that’s my name, “Evaristo—nothing good will come of this.” What do you think?’

He was seeking an opinion from a man of the world, who lived in the city-beyond from which he had been expelled.

‘Cifuentes, once you’re down in the books as a public servant, no one can take it away from you. Don’t worry.’

‘It’s not the money that I care about. It’s the principle. One of these days I’m going to go and visit Creix, and all the others who flayed me alive, and I’ll stick this piece of paper right up their noses.’

The back room of a pharmacy for giants: fifty-litre flagons made for who knows what unmentionable potions; flasks; test tubes; glass containers packed in straw and woodshavings; bare wooden shelves stained by damp and darkness; carpets; sawdust on the floor; jumpy cats; bare light bulbs; an ageing white-moustached athlete juggling with cardboard boxes; a sad-eyed alsatian sniffing at each newcomer; at the end of a corridor, amid obsolete and abandoned giant-sized glass goods, a stern man using a calculator; beside him, a boy checking emery-polished syringes; Alfredo Kraus singing
The Pearl Fishers
through a loudspeaker perched in
one corner of the ceiling. Above their heads, the sound of high-heeled shoes clicking across the mezzanine floorboards.

The man with the calculator said: ‘Can I help you?’ He didn’t even turn his head until Carvalho held the photograph of Stuart Pedrell before his nervous eyes and twitching nostrils. He concluded his calculation, gave the boy a couple of orders about what needed to be done before closing time, and walked across the shop floor, his arms and high-set shoulders moving as if they were separate from the rest of his body. As he led the way up the wooden stairs to the mezzanine floor, Carvalho noticed a little office in which a girl was typing a letter and a short-sighted, heavily built woman with sad, narrowed eyes had stopped work to make a telephone call.

‘Auntie,’ she was saying in Catalan, ‘Mother asked me if you’ll be coming up to Garriga this Sunday.’ She stopped at the sight of Carvalho and then continued in a lower voice. The boss sent the girl to do something, and sat down on an office table that was jammed up against metal filing cabinets. Next to the wastepaper basket a cat was eating a piece of liver. A spaniel looked at the newcomer with all the imperturbability of a Buster Keaton. A younger spaniel, the image of Lauren Bacall, imprudently sniffed him and tried to take a lump out of his ankle before the boss’s shout drove her under a table. In a cage, two demented canaries were dancing the dance of servitude. The boss flicked a switch, and Alfredo Kraus faded away. They sat in the half-silence of a warehouse submerged between one of the hundred and seventy-two apartment tower blocks of San Magín.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘What would you make of a man who knows Placido Domingo’s recordings by heart and gives a perfect description of the final scene of Strauss’s
Salome
, as interpreted by Caballé? I’m very keen on opera, and I rarely get the pleasure of meeting a real connoisseur. He was one.’

‘Did you only talk about opera?’

‘Opera and business. But in fact we didn’t see much of each other. I manage the warehouse from downstairs, and my wife runs the office up here …’

‘… Míriam’s fiancé will be there too. Look, Inès. Haven’t you had a letter from uncle in Argentina …?’

‘Where did he live?’

‘Very near here, but I don’t know exactly where. Why? Has something happened to him?’

‘He’s a relation of mine, and he’s gone missing.’

‘I have to admit, it did all seem rather mysterious to me, but I don’t like meddling in other people’s lives. As long as they do their work properly. “Hello. Good morning. Goodbye. See you tomorrow.” That’s my idea of an ideal relationship.’

‘In general?’

‘Yes. And in particular. Especially with staff.’

‘May I have Señor Vila’s address? The man who recommended him.’

‘I don’t know it. He lives at the edge of town, in a little old tower. You can’t miss it. It’s got a garden at the back. Is there likely to be trouble? Like I said, he was a casual worker; I paid him by the hour, and he got on fine here. That’s all there was to it.’

Lauren Bacall had left her hideout and cocked a cheeky eye at the stranger. Carvalho made a half-gesture to demonstrate a dog-owner’s solidarity, but she started barking. Another crack of her owner’s tongue sent her scuttling back to her refuge.

‘I see you’re running a zoo here.’

‘You start by accepting a friend’s puppy, and you end up with Noah’s Ark. We’ve also got a hamster at home.’

‘… By the way, Inès, did you know that Piula thinks she’s pregnant …?’

The woman gestured goodbye to him without detaching herself from the phone. The man then saw him to the door and watched him as he went down the street. He must have switched on again, because Kraus’s voice drifted out onto the road. It
glided along the towering walls, tapped on closed windows, lifted the dust from melancholy geraniums, and, like a gentle breeze, fluttered several sunshades hunched on tiny balconies. Mercury street lamps as tall as palm trees cast circles of light that contrasted ever more sharply with the darkness gradually enshrouding San Magín, while a cold damp rose from the Prat and filled Carvalho’s head with thoughts of blankets and a glowing fire. His steps carried him from one pool of light to the next, towards a distant floodlit banner stretched across the street. It announced the outer limits of this paradise:
You are now leaving San Magín. Come again soon
.

It had the air of a chalet designed by a top-notch architect and built during weekends by a team of immigrant workers on piecework. The owner, and their employer, could well have been a 1940s black-marketeer who had decided to invest his profits in a house with a garden, where he could pass an occasional day of rest far from the bustle of post-war life in the distant city.

The door was opened by a broad-shouldered, grey-haired man wearing a quilted dressing-gown and a pair of slippers lined with rabbit fur. The house smelt of bechamel. There was a sound of whining children and an angry mother. Vila took him up to his little study, where the arrangement of objects gave the impression that the room was never used. They sank into two brown leatherette sofas. Vila was visibly surprised at the photograph that Carvalho held out to him.

‘Señor Stuart Pedrell.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Of course I knew him. I was in charge of building work in
the area, first as foreman for one of the blocks, and then, after I had earned Señor Planas’s trust, as general supervisor. I never had any dealings with Señor Stuart Pedrell, though. He didn’t come near the building sites. What a horrible death! I read about it in the papers.’

‘Does the name Antonio Porqueres mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

‘It seems that you recommended him to work for a local wholesaler.’

‘Oh yes. But I never actually met him. It was Señor Stuart Pedrell who recommended him in the first place. He called me one day and said he needed to find work and accommodation for an old childhood friend. He asked me to be very discreet about it. I never got to see Señor Porqueres.’

‘Did you say accommodation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you find him something?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘The company sets aside five or six flats on the estate, in case they’re needed for company personnel. I handed one of them over to Señor Porqueres.’

‘Without even seeing him?’

‘Yes. Señor Stuart Pedrell’s wish was my command. I left the keys at the caretaker’s lodge, and I don’t even know if the gentleman is still living there. Señor Stuart Pedrell told me he’d settle the rent directly with head office.’