The meeting was set at a “piso patera,” one of those spaces shared by workers on rotating schedules, in Poble Nou, a longtime manufacturing neighborhood whose factories were now only empty shells. As illegal immigrants from all over the world arrived, the old buildings were recycled into housing for eight or ten people per room. It was good business for a few.
Most pisos pateras aren’t mixed, and this one housed black people. It smelled just like Chester Himes would have wanted for one of his Harlem novels: a hot and swampy mix of rotting food, dirty laundry, and life at its most primal. The windows, overlooking an interior courtyard, were covered with cardboard.
It’s tasteless to say it’s hard to see a black person in the dark, but that was the problem. When we arrived, a man greeted us with a nod and a slight gesture, which provoked an African parade to file out the door; he spoke in a low, expressionless voice. It was nearly impossible to tell if he was lying.
“Ma’am,” he said, “they tried to kill one of our sisters. They raped her, they tortured her, and they choked her. They wanted to kill her but she survived. It’s a hate crime and you have to help us.”
“Can I speak with the girl?” asked Paty.
The man took his time to consider this. I lit a cigarette so I could get a look at his face in the light of the flame. He was over thirty and he stared at us with cold, disdainful eyes. Sweat made his skin shiny.
“Maybe you’ll get her to talk. She hasn’t talked to anyone.”
He opened another door inside the apartment. I managed to see a small shadow on one of the mattresses on the floor before my friend went in and closed the door behind her.
“Where did they attack her?” I asked, just to say something.
“Near Parallel, in the plaza with the three chimneys.”
“Those streets are always packed with people.”
He moved away, irritated, as if talking to me was a waste of his time, but I trudged on. My relationship with Paty had cooled recently and I needed to score a few points.
“I don’t know why but I think you know who attacked her.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you report it to the police?”
Silence followed that idiotic question. An illegal immigrant never goes to the cops.
“Why don’t you give me a clue? I promise I’ll leave you out of whatever investigation follows.”
“There’s a guy who sleeps in the back of the electric company, next to the plaza with the three chimneys. Do you know the place?”
“There are a few guys who sleep back there.”
“White trash,” he said venomously, and he was right: there were no blacks among the homeless who hung out there. “It was one of them. The one who seems German. The big one. The one who sleeps in a camouflage sleeping bag.”
“His name?”
“Ask for El Delgado. I’m not saying any more.”
He kept his word, and I shut my trap. I lit another cigarette because in that darkness the red tip was something to hold on to, and I drowned myself in the stink of crocodiles and resentment. I kept to myself the fact that I might know the Delgado he was talking about. I kept it to myself because Cavalcanti’s friend, the decorated hero from whatever war, might have simply provoked this black man’s paranoia. He had all the key elements to do that: he was an animal with a crazy look, and white too. I would see what I could find out.
Then Paty stepped out of the room and, after a very brief exchange of promises and phone numbers, we went back out to the street.
She was walking like she wanted to break a speed record.
“The black guy says they attacked her near the three chimneys, around Parallel. That’s still Montjuic, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“What? What did you find out?”
“That guy’s a fucking liar!”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because he’s covering his own ass! Because he’s a pimp!”
“Ah … the girl’s a prostitute.”
“Oh, you Argentines are so kitschy, of course you had to say prostitute.”
“First, I’m Uruguayan, and second, don’t start with me. I actually got him talking and I think I might have something.”
She looked at me like she wanted to kill me, and then told me the story as if speaking to someone mentally challenged.
The girl had been attacked by two men because she’d gone into Russian territory, just outside the Fútbol Club Barcelona Stadium; they’d grabbed her and thrown her in a car. It had been easy because the girl didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds and couldn’t put up much of a fight.
“Do you know how old she is? Fourteen! That fucking asshole, or his buddies, brought her over from Guinea with fake papers and put her out on the streets!”
“So why did he tell me it happened at the plaza with three chimneys?”
“Why do I give a fuck what he said? Why don’t you go back and ask him why he’s lying? Fucker! They raped her, they choked her, and they left her for dead … and you’re asking why that piece of shit is lying? Mother of God!”
“But—”
“She’s just a girl! Do you get that? A little girl!”
I wanted to argue with her but Paty raised her hand, opened the door of a taxi, and left me gazing at it as it disappeared up the street. I have no idea how she does it; I never have any luck with taxis.
Later that week, there was an anonymous call. A body had been found in the trash at a building in Poble Nou. It was a girl.
She was Chinese, very young. They’d tortured her before strangling her. Her torn vagina and anus indicated a vicious sex crime but the police actually thought it might be worse, and they’d shut down the block. They didn’t even want to think about the possibility that it was gangland revenge.
The ghosts of Eastern European immigration nourished the fears. Russians, Chechens, Serbians, and Bosnians all arrived marked by war, and their methods were especially brutal. They weren’t afraid of anything and only the Chinese competed with them, except when it came to exploiting the homeless, which was dominated by the Romanians. It’s possible that in Europe no one would have taken a Chinese beggar seriously.
But I’d already added two plus two and I’d come up with El Delgado’s massive figure.
The dead girl had been found not too far from where the black pimp had told me the suspect was. That the girl was Asian also reminded me of the night at Clavié when, with that crazy expression, he’d muttered the cryptic phrase about the slender charm of Chinese women.
There was something to what that black guy had told me. It would turn into an article I could sell for a good price, or information with which I could barter.
As the morning wore on, I neared the plaza with the three chimneys, which is situated in a neighborhood that extends from the edge of Montjuic and blurs into Parallel, with its porno theaters and its ancient memories of sin.
Not even fascist bombers who used to aim at the three chimneys during the civil war could have recognized this place now. Each day, it got more and more crowded with skateboarders from all over Europe. If one were to go missing, nobody would even notice.
As if to compensate for all the skating noise and hot speed, the plaza was also packed with Pakistanis with their cricket sticks.
But the ones I was interested in were the homeless, the guys who slept up against the electric company building.
There were only two still around. A toothless drunken woman who laughed a lot and a tiny man, almost a dwarf, as dirty as she was, who was trying to win her favor with beer.
There wasn’t a trace of the so-called German. He could have been the nighttime tenant of any one of the folded cardboard sructures between buildings that served as precarious beds. Those two were the only ones around to question.
As I approached, the man puffed out a tubercular chest, just in case I wanted to challenge him for Julieta’s fleas. They lowered their guard a bit when I gave them some
money. She grabbed the bills with a fierce look directed at her suitor and shoved them in her bra.
I couldn’t get much out of them while they tried lie after lie to see which one could loosen more euros. The description of the so-called German coincided quite a bit with Delgado, but they hadn’t seen him in a while.
I didn’t have to be anywhere and the spectacle of the Pakistanis playing so British a game was a good enough excuse to sit in the shade for a bit.
I’d been there for some time, getting bored watching the formerly colonized swinging their bats, when a thin Moor with several bottles of beer in a sweaty bag approached me. I bought one and he immediately offered me hashish and coke.
I said no, because I never buy on the street, but he didn’t leave, he stuck around, smiling with just his lips.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I might have it.”
I was about to tell him to go to hell when it occurred to me this skinny guy might have seen me talking to the couple and might have a certain take on the neighborhood.
“El Delgado. What do you know about El Delgado?”
“A beer?”
I understood and passed him a few bucks, enough for five beers.
He made a vague head movement. “They say he went up,” he said, then turned his back and left, happily searching out other customers.
At that moment, I was certain he was pulling my leg. He was telling me Delgado was up in heaven with the angels. It took me awhile to realize I was wrong.
For a couple of weeks I did some media outreach for an ethnic music festival and I forgot about Delgado. I didn’t even think of him when the news hit about the Russian girl.
She wasn’t young but very small, with a body like a little girl, and they’d found her on the beach at Barceloneta. Her corpse had been left out in the open. Like a message for somebody. Raped and strangled. It was impossible to identify her, but her features suggested she was from the former Soviet Union, where they’re as much Slav as Mongolian: blond hair, high cheekbones, gray eyes that seemed vaguely Asian.
I didn’t think about Delgado again until early one morning when inertia took me to Clavié.
There were a couple of people at the piano, straining themselves singing “… estranyer indenai!” and Paty, who I hadn’t expected to find there, was tearfully killing her fourth gin and tonic.
“You men are all sons of bitches,” she said, warmly gesturing for me to sit with her.
She was in a stormy mood. That afternoon she’d interviewed the father and brothers of a girl who’d recently disappeared. Muslim Algerians with strict traditions, they struggled without news of the girl and became angrier and angrier with every passing hour.
“You must have seen the photos, the fliers. They’re on the lampposts,” she said.
“Maybe she ran off with somebody.”
“Or at this very moment, she’s being raped by twenty shitass machos,” she replied, pronouncing each syllable so as to pound it into my head. “Do you know what will happen if they find out who did it?”
“They’re going to cut him into little pieces?”
“Sweetheart …” she said, her eyes blurry from liquor, tears, and disdain, “he’s gonna hate his mother for ever having given birth to him.”
I was ordering a rum and Coke, which helps recharge the batteries at that hour, when I felt a hug and heard Cavalcanti’s voice.
“You’re exactly who I want to see,” he said. “I’ll buy you whatever you want; let’s talk business.”
“C’mon, man, I’m with my girlfriend. Why don’t we leave it for another day?”
The tango singer wrinkled his nose and, with a smile from golden times, bowed toward Paty.
“My dear lady, darling of Cupid and all gods with good taste, may I steal your intended for just a few minutes?”
Paty grinned from ear to ear because, curiously enough, she and Cavalcanti always got along quite well.
“Oh, noble gentleman,” she answered, “if you take him and lose him in some battle, this lady will be forever grateful.”
Since I had no choice, I followed him to a corner and drank his whiskey while acting like I wasn’t really listening.
“What a woman, pibe, what a woman! You know what I’m saying? You don’t deserve her.”
“Cavalcanti, don’t mess with me. What do you want now?”
“Remember Delgado?”
“The Vietnam War hero who was tortured in the Gulf War?”
For a moment, the nocturnal tango clown disappeared and I felt I was caught in the gaze of a man who perhaps had a couple of corpses to his credit.
“Pibe, you’re never going to learn. You mustn’t believe everything you hear at night. The ones trying to figure things out are cops, or worse. Don’t be fooled by appearances. I come off like a fool because wise guys always lose. But don’t tell me you’re the fool and you haven’t heard yet.”
“If you’re going to make me listen to your philosophy lessons, then at least buy me another whiskey.”
“Fair enough,” he said, and with a wave of the hand he conjured a couple of double shots. “I don’t know if you’ve bumped into El Delgado lately …”
“Why would I?”
“Why would—No, you wouldn’t. But, since your girlfriend told me you’d been to an African ‘holding cell,’ I thought you might have run into him. Delgado is like God, he can show up anywhere, whether among junkies or barefoot Carmelites.”
“I’ve noticed. A black guy told me he sleeps up by the three chimneys and a Moor told me he’s gone to heaven … Why are you interested in Delgado?”
“If you come with me, I’ll tell you.” He took off, with his canine gait, toward the bathroom.
He carved three lines on the sink and after he sucked up two, he was more explicit.
“The Russians have it in for him, and I have to get along with the Russians. You follow me?”
I shrugged as I leaned on the sink.
“It seems he worked as a heavy in some whorehouse. Sometimes the customers … you know, they get out of line and have to be set straight.”
“I figured he worked with his hands somewhere.”
“Something like that. The problem is, he fell in love with the Russians’ little star. Some girl who had been an Olympic champion on the parallel bars. You know, one of those girls who spins in the air as if she doesn’t give a shit about the laws of gravity.”
“So?”
“Nothing. Except the girl was older, though she was so small she looked like a schoolgirl. So what can I tell you, some guys will pay a fortune to get into bed with a schoolgirl.”
“Right, and that animal surrendered to her slender charm—”
“It’s worse than that. The Russians are fuming, they say the idiot stole her from them.”
I don’t know if it was the coke or instinct, but I had a sudden illumination. “Cavalcanti, you’re talking in circles. It’s clear from your description that it’s the little Russian girl who was found on the beach, raped and strangled.”
He stared at me hard. “And what if it is? The Russians are looking for Delgado, and I’m going to hand him over.”
“The big guy killed her?”
“The big guy is obsessed with skinny women with Asian eyes.”
“That doesn’t mean much.”
“Since when are you judge and jury?”
“What am I getting out of this?”
“Now you’re talking,” he said, and mentioned a sum that, for my drooping pockets, was simply exorbitant.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Cavalcanti: I’ll look for him, but I don’t want anything to do with the Russians.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“I’ll look for him, but once I find him, what do you want me to do?”
He must have known how our conversation was going to go because he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a card with a phone number.
“I’ll be there anytime you need me. You tell me where he is and then forget about it. We never had this conversation.”
“And they’re gonna pay just for that?”
“I swear on my blessed little mother. Moreover, and so you won’t think I’m messing with you, I’ll put up the money myself. I have business with the Russians and I don’t want to fuck up the relationship. You have to be generous with investments in order to make the little coins multiply.”
“Cavalcanti …” I said sincerely, “you’ve never seemed as suspicious to me as you do now.”
“Young man,” he said sympathetically, “anybody who lives to be old is suspicious. I thought you already knew that.”
We had to interrupt the conversation because Paty came in all of a sudden and, before heading back out to the streets, handed me a napkin with a phone number scribbled on it and a flier surely taken down from a wall somewhere.
“The Algerians with the missing girl have offered a reward. I wouldn’t turn anybody in but you guys are cut from a different cloth. They’re looking for a big guy with a stupid face who sounds like a friend of yours. If you know where he is … I don’t want to know.”
The girl on the flier also had almond-shaped eyes.
I took the napkin, only to see Cavalcanti wink my way and shake his head with his index finger pointed at his own chest. “You call me first,” he said.
That’s when I remembered the skinny vendor with beer, hashish, and coke at the three chimneys. And that’s why, the next morning, I went back to the plaza where half of Europe’s skaters could be found; the skinny guy didn’t take long to make his appearance.
I repeated my question, doubled my bribe, and got the same answer and a gesture toward Montjuic. That’s when I understood he didn’t mean heaven when he said Delgado “went up,” and I gazed over at the rolling green that, indeed, went up behind the buildings.
The Montjuic has a military fort at the top where tourists have their pictures taken; its paths are crowded with trees and bushes. Those paths have always been the refuge of drug addicts and immigrants who are poorer than dirt. Every now and again, the cops raid and disperse them, but they come back like mushrooms after a rainfall.
Barcelona Noir Page 20