Tattoo

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘I would never have forgiven you if you’d left without saying goodbye. Even if only for old time’s sake. I’ve heard from Inspector Israel here that you don’t work for the Americans any more. You’re on your own. Is it worthwhile?’

  ‘Every Spaniard dreams of setting up on his own. Let’s just say I work the way I want. My only responsibility is to my client.’

  ‘I think you’re wasting your talent. I’ve thought a lot about this, Carvalho, my friend, and it seems to me that if you stayed on here in Amsterdam you could be very useful to us. People still think highly of you, and there are lots of youngsters here who learnt all they know thanks to you.’

  ‘That’s nice to know.’

  ‘But this time it would be different. Have you any idea how many Spanish workers there are in Holland? More than twenty thousand. Our aim is to make their stay here as trouble free as possible, but it’s not always easy. They have a different mentality. We don’t see things the same way. You could ask to have a department of your own – an unofficial one, of course – and use it to keep a quiet eye on your compatriots. To protect them. They don’t always make the transition successfully from such a protectionist society as yours to our permissive one. We live in a permissive society, as the sociologists call it these days, Mr Carvalho. Have you given up sociology for good?’

  ‘I live off it.’

  ‘Is that metaphorically speaking?’

  ‘It could be. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a metaphor. And a very appropriate one. What is a policeman if not a sociologist?’

  Inspector Israel agreed. He stepped into the footlights for his moment of fame.

  ‘That’s true. A sociologist and a psychologist.’

  ‘You see? Well, a permissive society like ours is bound to cause some mental confusion in your compatriots. They suddenly find they have sex and politics within easy reach.’

  ‘But sex is expensive for all immigrants.’

  ‘Exactly right. It’s within their reach, but they can’t always get their hands on it. That creates a great sense of frustration, which unfortunately it is not our job to resolve. And then there’s the political question. You know that here in Holland we are extremely tolerant towards any attitude that does not directly go against our constitution. We even have Trotskyists here, Mr Carvalho. But a Dutch Trotskyist has the immense advantage of being born in Holland. So first and foremost he is a Dutchman, and his Trotskyist behaviour does not go beyond acceptable limits. But can you imagine a Spanish Trotskyist, anarchist or even a communist in Holland? Can you imagine him trying to convert his politically starved comrades? We have to keep a much closer eye on every Spanish, Greek or Turkish activist than we do on a hundred Dutchmen. It would make a fascinating job for you. Above all, classifying the different ideologies and tendencies. Assessing how important they are: that way we would know exactly how your compatriots are evolving politically. Once we knew that, we could make sure they were pointed in the right direction, and that they came to no harm by doing things out of context.’

  Carvalho mechanically accepted the second cheroot Israel was offering him at his shoulder. Kayser was still talking, but Carvalho had succeeded in blocking him out mentally and was thinking of other things based on what the inspector had already said. Then he realised Kayser had come to a halt and was waiting with an expectant smile for his response.

  ‘No. It doesn’t interest me. I prefer to work for myself. I get hired to follow a woman cheating on her husband, or to find a missing relative. Or to get proof that a business associate is involved in double dealing. All nice and peaceful. I wouldn’t change it for any big, transcendental stuff like ideas or politics. They require either a laudable curiosity for new techniques or an authentic ideological position. I don’t have either of those any more. I work enough to live. I’m not interested in the technological advances of the profession. I don’t even read about them. I’ve changed a lot. As for politics, I couldn’t give a damn about Trotskyism or anarchism or communism, or the permissive society for that matter. I’m not even neutral. I’m aseptic.’

  ‘You’re making a big mistake. We’re not trying to strangle your compatriots’ new-found political freedom, merely to point it in the right direction.’

  ‘You can strangle it or point it wherever you like, but don’t count on me. I quit the CIA when I had a brilliant career ahead of me. I’d done three tours of duty, and was in line for a very important post in Colombia. But I said no, and left. I had had a whale of a time, but I hadn’t saved a cent. Now I’m putting a bit by each month because I’m already nearing forty and you have to start thinking about your old age.’

  Kayser laughed almost sincerely.

  ‘It’s a big mistake, I’m telling you. Somebody has to do this job, and there aren’t many who have your talent or knowledge. You know the difference between a mere policeman and one who can link theory and practice. Someone who can do that is a real professional. A humanist. The others just blunder about. Do you want your compatriots to have to deal with that kind of person?’

  ‘I don’t have any compatriots. I don’t even have a cat.’

  Kayser laughed once again. He had stood up, and so had Israel. Carvalho got the message. Kayser was showing him out down the corridor when all of a sudden he slapped himself on the forehead and took Carvalho to one side.

  ‘I forgot to ask how you are feeling. Inspector Israel told me about your unfortunate incident. As you see, we haven’t asked you any embarrassing questions. We’ve respected our old friendship. But it won’t be like that a second time.’

  Kayser was still smiling affably.

  ‘I trust you understand,’ he went on. ‘You could have died in the canal, and then we would have had a lot of explaining to do to our bosses.’

  ‘I’m here as a tourist.’

  They carried on towards the exit.

  ‘We’re all just passing through, my friend.’

  Carvalho shook hands with him and Israel and rushed out of the police station. He was in a hurry to take advantage of the remaining daylight so that he could revisit all the hidden corners and sensations that Amsterdam had to offer, exactly like a tourist returning somewhere he once thought he knew.

  Carvalho’s neighbour on the plane did not want to talk. Carvalho also felt tired because of everything that had happened in such a short space of time, and so spent the flight dozing and reflecting. As soon as he landed at Barcelona airport he knew what he had to do. This was Charo’s busiest time of day, so it was not a good idea to call her. But if she was busy with a client she would have taken her phone off the hook, so he called anyway. He was lucky. Charo herself answered.

  ‘It’s me. I need you to come up to my place tonight. It doesn’t matter what time. I can’t come down to you.’

  ‘It’s not exactly convenient.’

  ‘I’ll expect you. I’ve brought you something.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come and you’ll see.’

  He had left his car in the airport car park. He had been abroad for only three days, but it felt like an eternity. His car was the first friendly thing he came into contact with, and he was surprised to find he felt tender even towards a machine. As he drove across the city towards Tibidabo his capacity for surprise gradually diminished. The sights around him clung to his body like an old, well-worn garment, so that it was not long before he found himself completely at home. His letterbox was full of junk mail. He left it there to enjoy the evening breeze. He felt an urgent need to relax and light a fire. He opened the windows wide so that the cool July night air would compensate for the heat from the fire. Once again he had the problem of finding paper to light the fire with. He still had the copy of Suck carefully folded in his inside pocket, but he did not want to sacrifice that after all the effort he had gone to, smuggling it through Spanish customs. He preferred to burn a book, and this time he headed straight for an edition of Don Quijote published by Editorial Sopena. It was a work he had always
detested, and he felt a thrill of pleasure at the mere thought of consigning it to the flames. His only regret, quickly pushed out of his mind, were the illustrations that accompanied the adventures of that idiot from La Mancha.

  He took off his jacket. He built an elaborate tepee of kindling and logs, then pushed the open Don Quijote underneath and lit its pages. The scene reminded him of an old story by Hans Christian Andersen in which the anxious reader follows the evolution of a flax flower from its birth to its death as part of a book that is burnt in a jolly Christmas fire. Carvalho still had three thousand five hundred books on the shelves enclosing his living room like the bars of a cage. That meant he could light fires almost every day for another ten years.

  He took Charo’s Chinese jacket out of his bag and draped it over an armchair. In the refrigerator he found dried cod, tins of beans, peppers and tomatoes, as well as some salted pork chops. He could make the special rice and cod dish that Charo liked so much. He found some Mallorcan sausage in his meat tray. A slice or two of that would go nicely with the other ingredients. He also had some beer in the cellar, and just in case had bought four cans of Dutch beer at Amsterdam airport. He got them out, along with the smoked salmon he had bought at half the price he would have paid in Spain. He prepared canapés as starters. He chopped up onion, cucumber and capers. He made a paste from this and a wedge of butter, then spread it on slices of black bread. He cut slices of salmon and laid them on top.

  He heard Charo’s car drawing up outside as he was busy laying a cloth on top of the stove. He put the boiled rice on it so that the damp cloth would prevent any grains of rice sticking to the bottom of the pan as it settled. Charo found him drying his hands on a kitchen towel.

  ‘What a surprise. Cooking. And a fire in the hearth. Anyone who saw a fire blazing like that in July …’

  ‘I think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘So you want to spend the night thinking? Is that why you asked me here?’

  Carvalho sensed an erotic overtone behind Charo’s initial gruffness.

  ‘I’ve made you rice with cod.’

  ‘That’s more like it. Oh, did you buy yourself that?’ said Charo, pointing admiringly at the Chinese waistcoat.

  ‘It’s not for me.’

  Charo had picked it up and was holding it against herself.

  ‘Is it for me?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Thanks, you’re a sweetheart.’

  She gave him two loud smacking kisses full on his lips. Carvalho could hear the erotic drumbeat starting up, but a calmer part of his brain weighed up the disastrous consequences for his rice if he let passion take over and postponed the dinner. They would simply have to eat quickly.

  Charo, who by now was wearing nothing more than the Chinese jacket, declared herself delighted with the meal.

  ‘Is the jacket from Peking?’

  ‘Look at the label.’

  ‘OK, but is it really Chinese?’

  ‘From Hong Kong.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what it says.’

  Charo always wolfed down food like a growing adolescent. It was one of the things Carvalho most liked about her. He knew that nobody who is indifferent to food is trustworthy. Charo somehow sensed the exact moment to stop eating and start lovemaking. Carvalho even felt rather in love with her, perhaps because he knew what the outcome would be, and was not faced with all the problems of satisfying his desire in journeys to cities that never fulfilled their promises of adventure.

  They collapsed on to the floor in front of the fire. Carvalho quickly answered Charo’s questions about Holland. He knew he had to if he was to be able to ask her all that he wanted to.

  ‘What happened to your eye? It looks like someone scratched you.’

  ‘It was a punch.’

  ‘It looks like a scratch.’

  ‘How have things been here?’

  ‘Even worse. They’ve shut absolutely everything. Brothels, bars, everything. Hundreds of girls are in La Trinidad jail, and they’ve taken more to Alcalà de Henares. Lots of other people have been arrested.’

  ‘Are your friends still staying with you?’

  ‘Only the girl from Andalusia. The other one was upset at what you did to her boyfriend and has gone somewhere else. Be careful of that kid. He’s not really bad, but he’s out for revenge.’

  ‘Did you find Frenchy?’

  ‘She was one of the first they put inside. Even before the raids started.’

  ‘I need you to do me a favour. Well, not you exactly. Your friend. If you went they would recognise you and could be suspicious. Do you have your hair cut at Queta’s?’

  ‘Me, go there? You must be joking. They leave your hair like rats’ tails. I go to a decent hairdresser. One on the Avenida Mistral, not one of your celebrities, but someone who does a good job. See how pretty it looks.’

  ‘Pretty as a picture.’

  ‘No, take a good look. Look how well it’s layered. Do you think Queta could layer it like that?’

  ‘Lovely. Listen, I need your friend to go to Queta’s and take a look round. That’s all. She should observe what goes on. Who comes in. Who goes out. What Queta says. What she does. And Fat Nuria. What does she get up to? And Señor Ramón. What do they say in the neighbourhood about him and Queta?’

  ‘Not a lot. That’s odd in itself. He’s regarded as a real gent. They say he was married and came from a good family, but that he threw it all up for Queta when he was already well into middle age. But I haven’t heard anything about whether they get on or not.’

  ‘I want your Andalusian friend to tell me about everything she sees. I don’t want her to ask any questions, just to keep her eyes peeled and tell me. Well, there is one thing. She could ask what hours the girls there work and where they live.’

  The caretaker told him that Señorita Marsé would not be back until six o’clock that evening. He would be sure to find her then because her boy would have been brought back on the school bus and she was always there to meet him, give him a bath and dinner, all that kind of thing. The boy, the caretaker went on unprompted, so that Carvalho would get a proper picture, spent the weekends with his father and his paternal grandparents. The other five days he lived with his mother. But if it was really urgent and he needed to get in touch with Señorita Marsé before then, she would be in her shop. A boutique in Calle Ganduxer. No more than a block farther up. The boutique, the caretaker explained so that Carvalho would not get the wrong idea, was already hers when she lived with her husband. Her husband’s family was well off, but so was hers. Although not quite as rich.

  Carvalho had no further need of her, so he said goodbye quite brusquely.

  ‘Are you from the social services? She’s an excellent mother. The boy has everything he could possibly want. He adores her!’

  ‘No, I’m not from social services.’

  The shop was called Trip. The decor was a heady mix of modern, Moroccan and Nepalese. It would have been exactly right for that kind of area in a city such as Strasbourg. In this quiet island of a broad, clean Barcelona street, where gardens had survived all the building frenzy, Trip fulfilled its function of disguising an indeterminate number of middle-class women. It offered them a fleeting new skin, a change of decor in the cages of their bourgeois souls usually dominated by the straight lines and pure white of functionalism. Instead, it allowed them to adopt the colours and textures of a more exotic world. At the very least, Trip gave its bourgeois customers the chance to feel they were the equal of their counterparts in Strasbourg and close, oh so close! to those who lived in Paris, London or San Francisco.

  Teresa Marsé was wearing one of her own disguises. The apparent attack of measles disfiguring her face turned out to be a careful scattering of artificial freckles. Over a blue-eyed baby-doll face burned the slow flame of the inevitable blonde Angela Davis wig. Her body’s invisible charms were covered by a bluish viscose tunic made in Marrakesh. She demonstrated that geisha-like submission so typical of those liberate
d young middle-class women who had invested their pre-matrimonial enthusiasm in these consolation prizes for unfulfilled ambitions. The ancestral tradition of setting up a girl who had brought shame to her family with a corner shop had been modified to leasing a boutique for unhappily married women suffering from existential angst. Teresa Marsé had been lucky enough to find a husband who understood this. Carvalho immediately saw that beneath the look of a geisha in a djellaba she looked quite level headed, and decided to dive straight in.

  ‘I’m looking for someone called Julio Chesma. A common acquaintance in Amsterdam suggested I might try here.’

  The baby-doll look was immediately wiped from Teresa Marsé’s face, to be replaced by one of anguished doubt. Where was Julio? She had not heard any news of him for a couple of weeks. He had gone missing for longer before, but he always called.

  ‘I know less than you. I need to find him urgently. I’ve just got here from Amsterdam and have to talk to him. There’s a problem. You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, what do you mean?’

  ‘Have you no idea what Julio does for a living?’

  ‘He imports Edam cheese.’

  The verbal blow hit Carvalho somewhere in the pit of his soul. As he tried as hard as he could not to laugh, his face took on an ambiguous expression that could have meant anything. Teresa Marsé scrutinised him and decided it meant bad news.

  ‘Something’s happened to Julio,’ she said.

  Carvalho chose a limited sincerity.

  ‘I think you could help me if you know anything about it. But perhaps this isn’t the proper place. Should we have lunch together?’

  ‘I’m supposed to see someone. But I’ll put that off. It will have to be somewhere close. I have to do some fittings this afternoon, and I need to be home by six o’clock. So let’s make it somewhere where we can eat any old thing.’