Carvalho shrugged.
‘Why does my private life interest you so much?’
‘Normally, it wouldn’t. Not at all. But now it may have some bearing on my work. You were seen recently in black motorcycle gear, riding a powerful Harley Davidson. You were with a male lookalike on an equally powerful Harley Davidson.’
‘So, I like motorbikes …’
‘Who’s the rider you go with?’
‘How did you find out about all this?’
‘It may seem hard to believe, but you people don’t have private lives. Everything about you is common knowledge.’
‘What do you mean by “you people”?’
‘You know very well. All I have to do is knock on the door of someone who has even a half-acquaintance with you, and they know all there is to know. For instance, is the bowler-hat story true?’
‘Which story?’
‘Is it true that Stuart Pedrell arranged to meet you some years ago in a London park? And that he turned up as a City gent, bowler hat and all?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘So, will you tell me the name of the rider?’
‘You must know already.’
‘I do.’
‘Well then.’
Biscuter was sitting in the corner, on the edge of a chair. As soon as he saw Carvalho arrive, he jumped up.
‘There’s this girl waiting to see you, boss.’
‘So I see.’
Carvalho slipped a glance at Yes and ignored her movement towards him. His mission accomplished, Biscuter disappeared behind the curtain. Carvalho sat in his revolving chair and contemplated Yes’s frozen gesture in the middle of the room.
‘Are you annoyed that I’ve come here?’
‘Annoyed isn’t the word.’
‘After you left, I started thinking. I don’t want to go back home.’
‘That’s your business.’
‘Can I stay at your place?’
‘No.’
‘Just for two or three days.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘My duties as your mother’s employee and your companion in bed go only so far.’
‘Why do you always have to talk like a private detective? Why can’t you say normal things, give normal excuses? That you’re expecting relatives, or that you don’t have room?’
‘Take it or leave it. I’m sorry. Anyway, it’s bad to see each other so often. I’m planning to have a quiet meal here, by myself. I wasn’t thinking of inviting you.’
‘I’m lonely.’
‘Me too. Please, Jésica. Don’t use me up all at once. Keep me for when you really need me. I’ve got work to do. Go away.’
She didn’t know how to go. She gesticulated with sadness, whilst looking for the door.
‘I’ll kill myself.’
‘That would be a pity. But I don’t prevent suicides. I only investigate them.’
Carvalho busied himself opening and closing drawers, putting his desk in order, and making a phone call. Yes closed the door gently behind her. Her exit coincided with Biscuter’s reappearance, ladle in hand.
‘You were too hard on her, boss. She’s a decent kid, even if she is a bit loopy. Do you know what she asked me? If I’ve killed anyone. And then she asked whether you have.’
‘What did you say?’
‘What do you think? But she went on asking questions. She never stopped. Don’t worry. I kept mum. Is she dangerous?’
‘Only to herself.’
So saying, Carvalho slammed down the phone and raced towards the door.
‘You’re not going, are you, boss? Aren’t you staying to eat?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve made you some potatoes and chorizo à la Rioja.’
Carvalho stopped, with one foot outside the door. Potatoes and chorizo à la Rioja.
‘They’re hot,’ Biscuter insisted, when he saw him waver.
‘Later.’
He took the stairs two by two, and emerged onto the Ramblas. Straining his neck, he glanced from one distant head to the next in search of Yes’s honey-coloured hair. He thought he saw her, and ran towards the arches of the Plaza Real. It wasn’t her. Perhaps she’d gone north to where she lived, or maybe south, to sink her thoughts in the harbour waters and the bustle of the golondrinas that carry trippers out to the breakwater. Carvalho strode off southwards, his arms accentuating the physical effort and his eyes scouring the street. He kept telling himself he was a fool. He darted across the big intersection at the Christopher Columbus monument, and became the instant target for malevolent stares and occasional insults from passing cars. The Puerta de la Paz seemed drained of people, although the sun was warming a few old folk on the benches, and street photographers were pursuing the occasional passing tourist.
By the hut that sold tickets for the golondrinas, a dirty, ragged girl lay breast-feeding a half-sleeping baby. A piece of cardboard told how her husband had cancer, and that she had no money. Beggars. The unemployed. Followers of the Infant Jesus and the most sacred Mother who bore him. The city seemed inundated with fugitives from everything and everywhere. A boat passed by slowly, casting a heavy wash in the greasy waters. Carvalho was struck by the sight of a dignified pensioner, who was wearing an outsize jacket, an undersized pair of trousers, and a felt hat as tall as any worn by the Canadian mounties. One of those careful old men who move with terrifying resolve towards a grave that has been bought in instalments over the past forty years, with payments on the first Sunday of every month.
Who’s calling? Tell me, is an innocent person being strangled in this house? No, this is just a straightforward strangling. Where had he read that? Who’s that? Funeral insurance. Who’s that? The dead. Anyway, what’s the point of my looking for Jésica? She’s not my responsibility. She’ll screw fifteen guys in a month, and then she’ll be back to normal.
He retraced his steps to the office, but he still took an occasional look up the Ramblas, in case Yes suddenly appeared. He went into a bar near Amaya, where they only serve wine from the south. He downed three glasses of manzanilla. He gave five pesetas to one of the five little gypsy girls who swept in and held their hands under the noses of the customers as they sipped their drinks and discussed football, bullfighting, homosexuals, women, politics, and strange little deals involving scrap lead or a truckload of cloth bought cut-price from a bankrupt store on Calle Trafalgar. The cloth shops down there seemed permanently on the edge of bankruptcy, to the chagrin of proprietors, salesmen and old bachelors who measured old pieces of cloth with old rulers dating from when the metric system was first introduced. They had survived for decade after decade, since Carvalho’s childhood years, but now they had to face up to the realities of old age and death.
What about those chestnut-coloured rulers. Will they be sold off too? Pliant animals wrapped in yellow oilcloth; rigid, lignified serpents; coiled, cracking metal whips; folding rulers aware of their concentrated power to measure the world. Children play with rulers until they kill them. Rulers in the hands of children are measuring-animals which struggle in the clutches of their tormentors, gradually becoming aware that they will never again measure anything. With a folding-rule, one could measure a pentagon or the near side of the moon.
He went into the street. The girl was wearing a flimsy blue cardigan, a skirt more like a pair of trousers, but without enough style to make its shape clear, and a pair of shoes which raised her twenty centimetres above sea level. She seemed at once ugly and beautiful as she said: ‘Excuse me, do you fancy going to bed with me? A thousand pesetas plus the price of the room.’ Carvalho noticed her bruised eye and a little scratch on the thin, veinous skin of her forehead. She walked further down the pavement and repeated her proposition to another passer-by, who passed her by with a swift semi-circular movement, as if drawing a ring of suspicion round her. She practises her prostitution as if she was asking the time, Carvalho thought. Maybe it’s a new whoremarketing technique. I’ll h
ave to ask Bromuro and Charo.
He couldn’t make up his mind whether to go back to the chorizo and potatoes, or pay a call on Charo. She would just have got up. She would be irritated at his continued thoughtlessness and failure to contact her, and would be preparing her body for the afternoon’s telephone punters. They were mostly regular clients, who asked her advice on family problems and even on the best way to fix an abortion for a precocious daughter or a wife made pregnant after a five-glass binge on Aixartell champagne. Or maybe she’d be preparing reproaches for the increasingly absent Carvalho.
‘It won’t take a moment to heat it up, boss. Looks like mash. The potatoes should crumble a little, but not that much. The chorizo has completely disintegrated, but it’s very good. I managed not to overdo the chilli this time.’
Carvalho began to shovel down the potatoes and chorizo. But his palate gradually made him aware that he ought to pay more attention to the food.
‘It’s wonderful, Biscuter.’
‘One does what one can, boss. Some days things go right, and others … You know how it is.’
Biscuter’s self-satisfied explanation sounded like rain on sheets of glass, and he looked for the splashes produced by the words. It was raining. It was raining hard on the Rambla de Santa Mónica, and Carvalho felt a sudden shiver down his spine that made him nostalgic for sheets and blankets, for gentle bouts of flu and the muffled sounds of domestic bustle. Pepe, Pepe, shall I make you a lemonade? Treasure Island in his hands, and Fernando Forga reading The Adventures of Inspector Nichols on the radio.
‘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:
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