by Per Wahlöö
Willi Mohr shook his head and Pedro Alemany stood silent for a moment.
Then he threw out his arms and said with exaggerated diction: ‘Probablemente Villanueva.’
Villanueva was a little fishing settlement several miles farther south, considerably nearer for those coming from the islands. Fishermen who were caught in bad weather often sought shelter there.
‘Telephone,’ said Willi Mohr.
‘Telefono cascado,’ said Pedro Alemany.
He realized that the last word had not sunk in and made a movement with his hands as if he were tearing something apart.
The fisherman pointed out to sea and put up a finger as if he were listening.
Willi thought at first he really was listening to something special, but then realized that the man just wanted to emphasize how bad the weather was out there.
‘Malo, malo,’ said Pedro Alemany, shaking his head.
The word needed no further explanation.
The fisherman thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a turnip watch. He opened the front and held out the watch, putting his thumbnail on the large Roman two. With his other hand he pointed first at the boats by the quay and then towards the sea, while making violent wave movements with his arm.
‘A las dos,’ he said.
Willi Mohr nodded. At two o’clock they were evidently thinking of going out to search, if nothing happened between now and then.
The father of the Alemany brothers turned round and walked away.
Willi Mohr watched him until he disappeared into one of the alleyways. Then he crossed his legs and lit another cigarette.
A dirty little girl was standing a short distance from the table, staring at the roll and jam the dog had not eaten.
A civil guard cycled diagonally across the quay. He was wearing a dark green rubber raincape over his uniform and his carbine was fastened with straps along the frame and carrier. As he cycled past, the barrel of the carbine was for a moment pointing straight at the man at the table.
Willi Mohr went on sitting in the damp basket chair for more than five hours, watching the meagre life in the puerto. He drank two cups of coffee and left the table once, to go into the estanco and buy another packet of cigarettes. The dog lay at his feet and occasionally he bent down and patted her. She then rolled over on her side and begged for more affection, which at once made him withdraw his hand.
He did not feel nervous or anxious, but he was incapable of doing anything else but just this, sitting and waiting. At half-past eleven, the green mail bus rolled down on to the quay towards the small group of black-clad old women waiting there. They gathered up their bundles and baskets, climbed on and remained sitting in the bus until the driver came back and started up again, three-quarters-of-an-hour later. Before the bus left, the driver repeatedly blew the horn, which moaned a shrill lament. A number of ragged small girls sauntered by with great bundles of brushwood on their backs. Then it was silent and empty again on the quay.
About half an hour later the bus returned laden, as far as could be seen, with the same old women and the same bundles.
Shortly before three o’clock, Pedro Alemany came down to the quay together with three civil guards, all wearing dark green oilskins. The guards went across to the grey police barque, jumped down into it and indolently began to undo the cover over the well of the boat. After a while the cabo came cycling up.
The puerto had acquired another police-chief since Dan Pedersen and Siglinde and Willi Mohr had been expelled four months before. The new one was small and squat and older than his predecessor. He stood with one foot on a bollard, talking to Pedro Alemany. Now and again, he interrupted the conversation and mumbled some instructions to the men in the boat.
Willi Mohr rose and walked over to the group on the quay. He had been sitting still for so long that his back was aching and his joints stiff. At first the others took no notice of him, but then the father of the Alemany brothers looked in his direction and shook his head, saying: ‘Villanueva … no.’
He turned back to the cabo at once, and the conversation continued, while the men in the barque slowly got ready to depart.
When the civil guards tried to start the engine they found that they had run out of gas. One of them hunted out a tin can and jumped up on to the quay. He walked slowly away towards the houses and it was twenty minutes before he came back.
What a sea-rescue operation, thought Willi Mohr scornfully.
The guards filled the tank with gas and manipulated the engine for a while. Then all three climbed out of the boat and walked up to the bar, where they drank a small cup of coffee each. Pedro Alemany was still talking to the cabo. Willi Mohr noticed that the fisherman’s tone of voice had grown more and more irritable and that the cabo was frowning and making lively gestures, sometimes towards the boat, sometimes towards his subordinates and sometimes out to sea.
The three civil guards came back, received yet another stream of instructions from their superior and climbed on board. Then they started the engine and cast off.
The barque was broad and steady and made of riveted metal sheets. It had rope fenders along its side and in the bows there was a machine-gun covered with a tarpaulin. The boat steered in a wide curve across the harbour basin and in the strange light looked as if it were swirling through the mist. The men on the quay watched it until it disappeared behind the breakwater.
Willi Mohr stood a short distance from the others, quite still, his hands in his pockets.
The cabo seemed to notice him for the first time. He stared for a moment and then flung a question at Pedro Alemany.
When the fisherman answered, he spoke so clearly that Willi Mohr understood what he said.
‘A friend of the Scandinavians.’
‘Aha,’ said the cabo. ‘Poor man, his friends …’
‘They’re my sons,’ said Pedro Alemany.
Willi Mohr went back to the bar and sat down in the same basket chair as before.
He drank yet another cup of coffee and looked indifferently at the proprietor’s daughter who was serving him. She was perhaps sixteen years old and quite fresh, with small round breasts, clear skin and lively eyes. She still had a couple of years before child-bearing would begin, and then would come the fat, the dirt and the frustration.
A nun walked by and vanished behind the jalousies. When Willi Mohr went in a few minutes later to fetch some more sugar, she was standing by the bar testing the point of a hypodermic syringe on the tip of her forefinger. A small child, its backside bare, was sitting on the counter, staring at the syringe with large, dark eyes. The nun went and stood under the oil lamp and pushed back her coif to be able to see better, and he saw that she was young and had straight features. Her neck was dirty and she had a large pimple on her forehead, just above the nose. She glanced at him swiftly and timidly.
When Willi Mohr sat down in the chair again outside, he heard the child cry out shrilly from inside the bar.
Half an hour later a boat-engine could be heard chugging in the mist and the barque appeared from behind the lighthouse. Even from a long way away he could see the silhouette of the three civil guards, one sitting bent low over something, and to his surprise, Willi Mohr felt a contraction in his diaphragm as he got up and walked down towards the water. The boat was approaching very fast.
The gendarmes were alone in it. Their oilskins shone from the wet and one of the men had lifted the bilge-boards and was bailing out the boat with a scoop. The sound of the boat’s engine died away and the bows gently touched the quay. The civil guard flung out his arms in gesture of hopelessness and pointed out to sea. They had taken off their sou’westers and the face of the one sitting in the stern was pale and sweaty. They all talked at once and Pedro Alemany listened. Then he spat out the chewed yellowish cigarette-end, turned round and quickly walked away. The civil guards shrugged their shoulders and climbed up on to the quay. One of them looked at Willi Mohr and shook his head.
‘Terrible
,’ he said, making violent wave signs with his arms.
Willi Mohr went back to the bar.
He sat in the basket chair and watched as Pedro Alemany and his men got the trawler ready to leave. They hauled down the nets and took a number of boxes ashore. The engine was warmed up and started. The cabo was there, as was another official in a blue uniform and a white cap, the harbour-master. Two other civil guards went on board.
The preparations did not seem to be either hysterical or panic-stricken, but were carried out with a professional calm which inspired a certain amount of confidence. Pedro Alemany stood up in the bows and supervised the work, only once losing his temper, when a middle-aged woman with grey hair and a shawl round her shoulders cautiously approached the boat. Then he shouted shrilly and uncontrollably and the woman at once hurried back up to the houses. Willi Mohr guessed that she was his wife.
It took less than an hour to get the trawler ready for departure and then it was already a quarter to five. Once or twice Willi Mohr considered going down to help, but he had a feeling that he could not do anything and no one bothered about him. And neither did he understand what they were saying.
So he remained sitting where he was and the trawler backed away from the quay, watched by the cabo and the harbour-master and several other people who had gathered there. He leant his chin on his hand and watched the fishing-boat until it had vanished round the lighthouse. It had begun to rain and the drops broke up the polished surface of the water with small, sharp pinpricks.
Willi Mohr listened to the sound of the engine and after a while discovered that he could not hear it any longer, but only the light sound of the rain falling and the pulsating in his own body. He got up and went over to start up the camioneta. When he climbed up on to the seat he noticed that the dog had disappeared, but he had hardly driven more than a hundred yards or so along the quay when she caught him up and ran alongside the truck. He did not bother to stop.
At the end of the quay, a winding road ran on along the rocky shore. At first it was smooth and relatively wide, but then it quickly narrowed and became rougher. Willi Mohr drove past a row of square villas, built by summer visitors, now standing empty and closed up, then the houses came to an end and the road ran up the mountainside. He could just see the grey water of the bay between the pine trees on his right. The higher he got the more primitive the road became. The camioneta bounced and rocked, but it was constructed for just this kind of country and the wheels were so high that it could clear even quite large boulders without difficulty. The rain was beating down on to his face and once he nearly drove straight into a couple of civil guard who were cycling towards him.
A couple of minutes later, he passed a woman with her shawl over her head, who had stepped to one side and was standing quite still with her face turned away. He recognized Pedro Alemany’s wife and stopped. He jumped down and pointed at the truck, saying: ‘Please get in.’
But she stared stubbornly in the other direction and when he approached her, she took a step back among the stones. For a few seconds Willi Mohr stood irresolutely with his hand stretched out. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went back to the truck.
By this time, the dog had caught up and was panting exhaustedly, wagging her tail. He picked her up and drove on.
Up on the mountain he met the wind coming whistling straight at him, wild and capricious. He pulled down his hat and peered carefully out from under the brim, but although he slowed down, it was difficult to keep the camioneta on the road. Here he had to drive mostly over smooth rock slabs, where the road was marked with scraped white stones and one or two rusty iron pipes. In the dips they had built up primitive banks of macadam and cement during the summer, but in a number of places these had already collapsed into shapeless heaps of rubble. The road ended at a deeply eroded ravine, across which lay a few planks of wood and on the other side, the mountain rose in a gentle, smooth slope.
Willi Mohr stopped and got out. He wedged the wheels of the camioneta with stones so that it would not blow away and walked across the primitive wooden bridge, which creaked and shook. Then he struggled on upwards and although the slope gave some lee, the rain whipped into his face. The dog followed him for the first bit, but soon turned back and lay down under the truck.
He was right at the top of the highest point and could feel the merciless force of the storm. It was impossible to stand upright, so he was forced to crouch down and hold on to a rock. Below him the cliff fell almost perpendicularly and far down below he could see the sea heaving in long dark green waves. But the distance made the waves appear astonishingly small and still. The trawler was already quite a way out, heading south-east. It was rolling violently, at intervals the green colour showing below the dirty yellow boarding, and after a while its contours blurred in the rain and swirling foam.
Willi Mohr stayed there, not looking at his watch, so he had no idea how long for. It stopped raining, but the heavy salt wind still seemed full of small, swirling particles of water. His clothes were wet and he began to find it hard to see. He tried lighting a cigarette, but the waxed-paper matches refused to burn. When the box was empty, he threw it away and sat with the unlit cigarette in his mouth until it soaked through and disintegrated.
He turned round once and saw the woman standing about fifty yards away, leaning against the wind, her shawl tightly wound round her body.
About an hour or an hour-and-a-half had gone by when the trawler again appeared in the mist, at first an indistinct blur and then with sharper contours. It had the wind behind it and was not rolling so badly as before. Willi Mohr focused sharply and although his eyes were aching, he could see that the fishing-boat was towing something. A moment later the calamary boat was quite distinguishable, and he got to his feet and had stretched out his neck quite instinctively.
The trawler came nearer and nearer and rounded the point. He could practically see straight down into it and there were a number of people on deck, but the distance was too great to recognize anyone. The boat vanished under the point and all he could hear was the sound of the engine, weak and uneven, through the storm.
When Willi Mohr turned round, the woman had vanished and he was nearly halfway to the puerto before he passed her. She was walking swiftly, with long strides and her head bowed. This time he did not bother to stop.
Willi Mohr got down to the quay before the trawler. He parked about fifteen yards from the boat’s mooring-place and stayed seated in the truck, his forearms resting on the steering-wheel and his hat on the back of his head. His clothes were wet and his eyes smarted after the long wait on the top of the mountain. Then he heard the engine, weak and halting, through the suppressed roar from the sea, and then the top of the mast grew visible, a slim perpendicular line above the parapet.
The cabo and the harbour-master came out from one of the bars and crossed the concrete. They stood by the edge of the quay and waited. The cabo was searching for something in his jacket and there was a glimpse of an automatic pistol he was carrying under his rain cape.
The trawler rounded the lighthouse and was approaching swiftly, towing the calamary boat, and Pedro Alemany was already visible standing in the bows. At his side stood Santiago, his foot up on the side and one hand on the stay of the bowsprit.
So I’ve made a fool of myself, thought Willi Mohr.
The engine stopped and the trawler slid silently through the water. Before it touched the quayside, Santiago Alemany jumped up on to the bowsprit and then ashore. He fended off the boat from the quay as he fastened the rope round a bollard. Although he must have seen Willi Mohr in the camioneta, he did not once look in his direction.
On board the boat Pedro Alemany, the two civil guards and some of the crew were clearly visible. The others must be below decks. One guard jumped ashore, heavily and clumsily in his big boots, and began to report to the cabo. One of the crew dropped the anchor from the stern. The cabo listened and stroked his small moustache with the tip of his forefinger. Santiago was ta
lking somewhat subduedly to the harbour-master.
The doors to the cabin steps opened and Ramon’s head and shoulders appeared. He came up on deck, small and bandylegged, and looked for a moment past Willi Mohr. His face was quite expressionless, but down his left cheek he had a long coagulated scratch, running from the corner of his eye right down to his neck.
Some other people had come down to the quay, among them the bearded Finn who had fought in the bar.
The door down to the cabin steps was not opened again.
Someone hauled the calamary boat alongside. Some water was splashing about in the bottom of it, but not much.
The civil guard was still talking to his superior officer. Willi Mohr heard the word desastre over and over again. He knew it meant accident.
The cabo looked reluctantly towards the truck, then appeared to summon up his courage and walked over to Willi Mohr. He was poking thoughtfully at his moustache, as if hunting for suitable words.
‘Catastrofe,’ he said. ‘Vuestros amigos …’
He stopped and pointed down into the water with a finger stained yellow with nicotine. Then he made a quick sign of the cross.
He saw that he had succeeded in making himself understood and went on talking, but Willi Mohr no longer understood what he was saying, and indeed was not even listening.
He was looking over the cabo’s shoulder and he saw Ramon Alemany jump down on to the quay. Someone on board handed over a flat basket and when Ramon put it down on the ground, Willi Mohr could see a lot of small red fish and one which was large and greenish. Ramon lit a cigarette and picked up the basket again. The Alemany brothers walked across the quay and their father followed just behind them. Farther up, by the houses, stood the woman with the shawl, crossing herself continuously. When the men reached the house, she embraced them one after another and then all four vanished into an alleyway. Neither Santiago nor Ramon had even glanced at the man in the truck.
Willi looked at the cabo again. He had fallen silent and seemed irresolute and unhappy. He looked round for help and waved to the Finn, who hesitantly came up to the camioneta. The Finn spoke a little German.