Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Supposing they say no? Supposing they start collecting money in the barrio? “Centellas must be saved!” People love saving things that are at death’s door.’

  ‘What do you mean, barrio, Dosrius? What barrio? How many years is it since you were last in our part of town? It’s not a barrio any more, it’s not anything. People these days don’t know whether they’re in Pueblo Nuevo, Barcelona or Timbuctoo. People these days are worried about finding jobs, not about saving fossilized football clubs — particularly if it’s going to cost them money, because they’re not prepared to spend money on nostalgia, Dosrius.’

  ‘What happens if the local reds turn up and start campaigning about “loss of cultural identity”?’

  ‘What cultural identity, Dosrius? Are you telling me I’m the president of a library or something, and I never even realized it?’

  ‘Football is popular culture, Juanito. For the commies, everything is culture.’

  ‘Football, culture?’

  ‘Don’t be naive, Juanito. You know how commies love to stir the shit. Commies stir the shit because they love giving the authorities a hard time — until they get into power, that is, and then they start giving everyone else a hard time.’

  ‘What commies? What are you talking about, for God’s sake? I wouldn’t give you tuppence for communists today. You can buy them with a handful of sweets. Real communists are a thing of the past. The people who used to shout their mouths off have all ended up as city councillors, or directors of this and that. The architects who used to measure the height of houses by the centimetre are now building skyscrapers, Dosrius. You’re a man of culture, of course you are, you know how things are going …’

  Dosrius had finished his breakfast, and was keeping his thoughts to himself. He remained silent while Sánchez Zapico began talking himself round in circles.

  ‘Everything’s under control. Really, Dosrius, believe me.’

  ‘I believe you, partly because I know you, partly because I’m involved in all this, and partly because there are a lot of interests at stake in this. You should think the worst about the business with the lift. Do you really think I knew about it, Juanito? Hand on your heart, do you really think that I would do anything to harm you?’

  ‘The thought never even crossed my mind.’

  ‘I should hope not. It must have been some lone operator, just as it was with the fire in the warehouse. But you have earned a lot of money from the bits of subcontracting that we’ve passed your way, and now these people are wanting results. You’re going to earn a lot of money when they start building on the Centellas pitch.’

  ‘My cousin’s going to earn a lot, and my brother-in-law.’

  ‘And you, Juanito.’

  ‘Sure, and me. So obviously I’ve got a personal interest in everything turning out right.’

  Dosrius looked sad for a moment and reached across to look Sánchez Zapico in the eye as he grasped him firmly by the arm.

  ‘You’re a man after my own heart, Juanito. But don’t go playing tricks on them, and don’t try to fool yourself either. Today it was the lift. The other day it was the warehouse. What about yourself? And your family? There are some very honest people involved in this operation, professional investors, and so on, but there are also criminal elements, and let’s not kid ourselves. I’m sure you know what I mean. I can answer for the honest people, but I can’t answer for the criminals.’

  Sánchez Zapico looked as pale as the morning and as overcast as the sky overhead.

  There was something not quite right about his room. Somebody was in it. Even before he opened his eyes he knew he wasn’t going to like what he saw. He was surprised to find Bromide standing by his bed with his eyes fixed on the floor, and behind him a tall, thin man who looked like an expensively dressed Andalusian from the hills, or an equally expensively dressed Moroccan from the city. And on the other side of the bed, another character, of more ambiguous appearance, perhaps a mixture of an Andalusian from the hills and a Moroccan from the city, but also dressed expensively. This was his bed. This was his house. This was Vallvidrera. An October morning in 1988, one thousand years of Catalonia, two thousand years of Barcelona, four hundred and ninety six years since the defeat of the Arabs, the expulsion of the Jews and the discovery of America. And he was he, Pepe Carvalho.

  ‘Make yourselves at home. Are these friends of yours, Bromide?’

  Bromide looked as if he’d been turned to stone.

  ‘Do you mind … I sleep with no clothes on.’

  They made no concessions to this fact, so he was forced to emerge naked from under the sheets and go in search of a half-forgotten dressing gown which he found hanging behind the door. He was preoccupied with how he looked. He wasn’t exactly fat but he was certainly putting on weight. He needed to go into training. Something not too strenuous, of course. The two Arabs followed Carvalho’s movements. Now that he had the dressing gown as a second skin, Carvalho felt surer of himself and went to put his hands into his pockets, to wait for further instructions. But he barely got his fingertips in before the Arab closest to him suddenly showed great interest in the movement, and leaned over to grab his wrists and force him to take his hands out of his pockets again. The Arab searched the pockets to make sure that they were empty, and then resumed his initial static position.

  ‘You speak English?’

  They didn’t find this amusing, and Bromide shot him a warning glance. It arrived too late. A heavy sideways swipe struck Carvalho on the cheek and knocked his head to one side. As he tried to tense his body, a kick sent him flying against the wall, where he froze, so as not to provoke his assailant further. There was a gun in the hand of the man standing behind Bromide, and he waved the gun to indicate that Carvalho should leave the room first. They followed him to the front room, and Carvalho went and sat on a chair in the corner, to be able to keep a clear view of the proceedings. His personal guard took up a position behind him, and the other Arab shoved Bromide forward. When everyone was in place, the man with the gun said: ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ Carvalho replied, with a slight bow of his head.

  ‘You wanted to see us.’

  ‘I don’t even know who you are, so how should I know if I wanted to see you?’

  ‘The shoe man said you wanted to see us. We don’t like people wanting to see us. Everyone mind their own business. That’s best.’

  ‘Insha’ Allah …’

  He expected another slap from behind, but the man with the gun glanced at his partner, and the expected attack didn’t materialize.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Somebody is planning to kill someone. He’s started sending anonymous letters, to say so.’

  ‘Anonymous letters?’

  ‘Letters without a signature. Letters with no name, where he says: “I’m going to kill Mr So-and-so.” ’

  ‘So and so?’

  ‘Another way of saying someone particular.’

  ‘Very stupid, all this. Don’t you think it’s stupid? These letters, nothing to do with us … We aren’t stupid.’

  ‘Somebody has written letters threatening the life of a football player, a centre forward.’

  ‘Meier? Hassan?’

  He seemed alarmed.

  ‘I don’t know those two. No. It seems it’s an English centre forward, who’s just been signed.’

  ‘Mortimer. Very good. Very good, Mortimer.’

  The man standing behind him also said that Mortimer was very good. So they obviously knew something about football.

  ‘Why come to us? We know nothing about it. We don’t go round killing English people. This stupid old man came bothering us for nothing, and you were stupid to send him.’

  Any minute now they’d end up talking like Indians in some cowboy film. But the one with the gun was in a talkative mood, and he continued: ‘We keep out of trouble with the law. We don’t get involved with stupid things. We don’t write letters. We have nothing against Mo
rtimer.’

  ‘But we know that something’s brewing, and seeing you’ve got so many contacts, I’m sure you could find out something.’

  ‘And supposing we find out something, what’s in it for us?’

  There was no answering a question like that. He could hardly give them a thousand pesetas, like he gave Bromide, or even five thousand, when the information he required was obviously worth a lot more. Carvalho was walking on shifting sands, and he began to feel restless and irritated. The price of information these days was a price he couldn’t afford. He would have to ask Charo to find him a job in her boarding house when she set up — making beds, cleaning toilets, maybe. A frugal, peaceful old age; who knows, maybe even happy …?

  ‘We don’t get involved in stupid things. Get that straight. Stupid. And this old man is stupid too. One stupid person plus another stupid person makes two stupid people. You have come bothering us. We get on with our work and don’t poke our noses in where they don’t belong. Why did you send the old man? Look.’ He cocked the pistol and pointed it at Bromide’s head. ‘If I kill this stupid man, nothing will happen to me. And if I kill you too, nothing will happen to me. I kill one stupid person, and then another stupid person. What happens?’

  There was a moment’s silence as he waited for the answer to this conundrum.

  ‘What happens is you’ve killed two stupid people.’

  He gave the man behind him a charming smile, and in return the speaker gave out a hint of a laugh, but then immediately restrained it.

  ‘This old man is good for nothing. Just brings problems. We don’t like problems. What about you?’

  ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. You give me information today, and maybe tomorrow you’ll be needing information from me …’

  ‘We don’t need information. We know everything we need to know. So why don’t you stop bothering us? You made us come here and waste time. This is a warning to you. Remember, you’re not even safe in your own house.’

  ‘I’ll have to report this conversation to Inspector Contreras.’

  ‘Report it to anyone you want. Contreras doesn’t want trouble, and we don’t make trouble. You make trouble. And this stupid old man makes trouble. When nobody makes trouble, then everyone’s OK. Everyone sticks to their job. Contreras is a clever man. Only stupid people make life complicated.’

  He poked his gun against Bromide’s head to force it over to one side, and gestured to the man behind Carvalho to come round and take up a position by the door. The one with the gun took a look round the room and noted what he saw. As he was leaving he said: ‘You have many books. What do you do with so many books?’

  ‘I burn them.’

  ‘That is why you are stupid. If you read more, you would not be so stupid. You have been warned.’

  And off they went. He heard them opening doors but not shutting them, and then the sound of a departing car, down on the street. He went to the window, and saw the city spread out below him. Then he looked to find the car, and saw it disappearing off towards Rabassada. It was a big car. Powerful. German. Bromide had not shifted position, and stood there looking like he had a broken neck. He had a scratch on one cheek, and a bruise over one eye. There were tears in his eyes. Carvalho went off to the kitchen and poured a glass of wine for Bromide and a glass of chilled aqua vitae for himself. By the time he returned to the front room, Bromide had sat down.

  ‘There you go. It’s good stuff.’

  ‘Thanks, Pepe.’

  And he raised his arms as if to absolve himself of responsibility. ‘I warned you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m more sorry than you. Someone suggested I went to the Arabs, so I did what you asked me to. They know what’s going on. Nothing happens in this city that they don’t know about, and it put them in a bad mood as soon as I opened my mouth. What put them in a bad mood was that I knew that they were the people that I had to talk to. A very bad mood. It’s like I told you the other day. They look at us as if we’re garbage. We’re nothing to them. You saw the way they brought me here at gunpoint. If I’d had my machete from the Legion, Pepiño, they wouldn’t have looked so clever. But look at the state of me now. Look at me.’

  ‘Stop it, Bromide. I said, it was my fault.’

  Bromide yawned.

  ‘They kept me up all night, in a house somewhere down calle de Valldoncella, and then they hauled me over here. I haven’t had a wink of sleep.’

  ‘Come on, get your head down. You can sleep in my bed.’

  ‘In your bed?’

  He lay down on his side, as if trying to occupy the smallest space possible, and gave out pathetic little yawns, like a man drowning in his dreams and gasping for the air that will wake him. Carvalho went to the kitchen. He was hungry, and made himself a sandwich with the finocchiona that he’d bought the previous day from an Italian delicatessen. Since he was feeling irritated by his inability to move decisively in any direction, he sat down at the phone with a view to getting the unmovable moving. His first mission was to locate Camps O’Shea and to confirm that he was inviting him to dinner at his house that night. He had a curious, empty sort of feeling inside him, but he didn’t give it too much thought. He decided that the next person to be disturbed was Basté de Linyola, on the pretext of urgently needing to meet him, to clarify a few things.

  ‘I don’t see what clarification I can offer that couldn’t have come just as well from señor Camps.’

  ‘I can’t carry on crashing around in the dark like this.’

  ‘I’ve a very busy day ahead of me. If you like we could meet for a drink at eight, at the Club Ideal.’

  With the phone call over, Carvalho began planning for supper. He was looking forward to the liberating sensation of handling tangible materials and working towards that magic that occurs in the transformation of meat and its ancillary elements — the magic which turns a cook into a ceramicist, into a wizard, who, by the application of fire, turns matter into sensation. What he needed was the self-confirmation of something that he could make with his hands and then give to others. To others. Not to an other. The prospect of a supper a deux with Camps O’Shea made him nervous, so he decided to phone his neighbour, Fuster, the commercial agent.

  ‘I was just on my way out. Are you phoning to sort out your tax?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m inviting you to dinner.’

  ‘You really ought to think about your taxes. Your second instalment is due next month. What’s on the menu?’

  ‘Peppers stuffed with seafood. Stuffed shoulder of lamb. Fried milk.’

  ‘Too much stuffing, if you ask me, but it sounds good. I’ll be there.’

  When Bromide finally awoke two hours later, he popped his head into the kitchen to find Carvalho preparing the infrastructure for the evening’s meal.

  ‘That smells good, Pepiño.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m aching all over.’

  ‘Charo can take you to the doctor. I’ll have a word with her.’

  Bromide handed Carvalho a crumpled thousand-peseta note.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Take it. I didn’t earn it.’

  Carvalho pushed his hand away and poured him another glass of wine.

  For Carvalho, the cocktail trail through Barcelona meant starting at the Boadas, near the Ramblas, with the lady of the house looking beautiful against a backdrop of drawings by Opisso, a nostalgic landscape of a city which by now was definitively nostalgia. He had already explored a route which took in the Gimlet, the Nick Havana and the Victory Bar in search of the perfect dry Martini; sometimes he would arrive at the Ideal in the middle of the afternoon, when the place was half empty, and anybody who felt like it could get drunk with the full complicity of the barmen or in the company of the bar’s owners — father and son — each equally expert in purveying cocktails both ancient and modern, and the nostalgia or modernity that went with them. At lunchtime and during the early evening, the Club
Ideal tended to be full of well-heeled Barcelona señores, or heterosexual couples made up of aggressive (and aggressed) executives, and their emancipated three-timing wives, for whom the executive himself represented at best only the third in the line of possibilities. By eight o’clock the bar had a broader range of flora and fauna, and from his particular corner Basté de Linyola could enjoy a degree of anonymity thanks to the noise of conversation, the numbers of people, and the subdued lighting as he sat below a portrait of the bar’s owner in the uniform of some old seawolf of the English admiralty. Basté de Linyola was a politician in transit, en route to his own nothingness, and the new glories looked somewhat askance at him. His face did not entirely fit with the most powerful football club in the world, in the same way that it would look odd to have Gorbachev as world president of the Rotary Club. It was only a matter of time before Carvalho caught up with Basté, looking relaxed and master of his corner, and consuming a low-alcohol cocktail which Gotarda senior had purveyed with a literary flourish. Carvalho ordered a Martini, looking forward to the prodigy of absolute taste, the chimera which Martini offers as a Platonic ideal, conscious that the secret of its perfection will never be entirely discovered.

  ‘I have to tell you that this encounter is rather ill-advised.’ Nevertheless he was smiling. ‘Wasn’t Sito a good enough go-between?’

  ‘Who’s Sito?’

  ‘Sito Camps O’Shea. His real name is Alfonso, but they’ve called him Sito ever since he was a kid. His father is a good friend of mine. And I am honoured by that friendship. Camps y Vicens. Do you know the name? Building constructors.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. I had to meet you, though. This business is beginning to look like an optical illusion. It only exists in the fact of the anonymous letters. There’s nothing that suggests that Mortimer is actually going to be killed. Don’t you have some other centre forward that they might want to kill?’

  ‘We have others, but not really in the assassination league. If they do end up killing Mortimer, it’s going to make real problems for us. The club is just coming out of a difficult period and we’ve had to work hard to win back the confidence of the fans and the public. This is the most powerful club in the world, but only for as long as it has a hundred thousand members. If its membership were to fall to seventy thousand, it would be a giant with feet of clay. It’s dependent on the money that those hundred thousand pay at the start of each season. If our annual income took a downturn, it could be disastrous.’