A Necessary Action

by Per Wahlöö

  ‘Policia Secreta, the secret police,’ said the man contemptuously. ‘I can recognize the swine anywhere and anytime, even if they dress up as nuns or priests.’

  ‘Perhaps mostly then,’ he added, spitting on the floor.

  ‘Careful,’ said one of the men sitting opposite him.

  He made an almost imperceptible movement of his head towards the civil guards still doing their football coupons.

  ‘Huh, we needn’t bother about them,’ said the toothless man. ‘They’re locals and they’re deaf when they’re not on duty. What’s so special about them? Nothing, just ordinary peasants and workers like us—who’ve taken on a shitty job to be able to live. But those other snooping swine … just think, did you hear … do you sell cigarettes here too … oh, only Ideales … give me a cigar then …’

  He looked round wildly and shouted to the proprietor: ‘Juan, you’ve got cigarettes here, haven’t you? Supposing they’d looked under …’

  He stopped and nervously bit his thin lips.

  The café-owner gave him a long look and put his hand on the tap of the vermouth keg. He poured out two generous drinks, put them on a tray and carried them over to the table by the door. Neither of the civil guards looked up from their task, but one took his glass immediately and emptied it.

  The proprietor went back towards the bar, but on the way stopped behind Willi Mohr, gently striking his leg with the tray.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘They’re looking for contraband, coffee and foreign cigarettes.’

  The man on Willi Mohr’s right chewed at his bottom lip with his toothless gums and said wildly: ‘To hell with that. They’re after one of us, or some other poor bastard. I know them, I know …’

  ‘Calm down,’ said the man sitting on Willi Mohr’s left.

  He was a black-haired man in a ragged faded overall, with large gnarled hands.

  ‘Calm, careful,’ said the toothless man in a hoarse whisper. ‘I don’t know anyone who’s as calm and careful as we are and this is what we get in thanks. Fifteen pesetas a day and nothing when the weather’s bad or when they stop the work to hold their damn manoeuvres up there. I’ve a woman and three kids who’re starving to death and yet I’ve got to be calm and careful. And grateful for my three duros a day. I met someone who worked at some swanky spa hotel where there wasn’t even a well and the water had to be carted there in a truck. Formentor, the hotel was called, and he said people staying their paid four duros for every glass of water they drank and most of them weren’t foreigners, but Spaniards … d’you hear that … Spaniards …’

  He fell silent and hunched up a little, perhaps because none of the others seemed to be listening to him.

  They were sitting as before, silent and immobile.

  They had presumably heard all this many times before and were satisfied that the conversation had become sufficiently low-toned that what was said could not be heard over by the door. A couple of them moved a little nearer to the brazier as the warmth from it began to decrease.

  After a while the man in the overall turned his head towards Willi Mohr and said quietly: ‘Have you any children?’

  He spoke with a strange dialect, making an effort to speak clearly and understandably.

  Willi Mohr shook his head.

  ‘I’ve two,’ said the man, ‘a son of nine and a daughter of five.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No, far away, near Bilbao. I come from there; Basque, that’s my home country.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then he put two fingers up in the air and said:

  ‘My son’s already done two years in school and he’s learnt to read and write. Look at this. My wife sent me his first writing book.’

  He thrust his hand inside his overall and pulled out a folded much-thumbed exercise book with a dog-eared yellow cover.

  ‘Would you like to look?’

  Willi Mohr nodded and took it.

  ‘I never learnt to read and write myself,’ said the man seriously, ‘but my son can already, although he’s only nine. It’s a pity I can’t read what he’s written and see if he writes well.’

  Willi Mohr weighed the thin exercise book in his hand without opening it.

  ‘Why do you do nothing?’ he said suddenly and quite unpremeditatedly.

  ‘I work,’ said the man in surprise. ‘Work and send home the money I earn.’

  After a moment’s silence he added: ‘Though someone has to help me with the envelope.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Willi Mohr quietly.

  ‘No, I understand what you mean. You mean the other, but that’s over a long time ago. It was no good. When we were to fight against … them. We were at it a whole year and everyone said the whole world would help us but I didn’t see anyone. We were going to be independent, we were, but we weren’t all that many, although we had rifles and a few old guns and tanks. Then those … those … they had awful great aeroplanes and bombs and tanks; it was many years ago, in March 1937, and we had nothing but our rifles, and we fought up in the pass in the mountains and every day they rained their bombs down on us, and there was something in the bombs which set everything on fire, thermite, I think it was called, and everything burnt all round us. They went on all through May and June and we got orders to counter-attack and retake a mountain, and we did too, and then they came with more aeroplanes and more bombs and more guns. Urquiola Pass … that’s the name of the place where I was. They took Bilbao from us later, when there weren’t so many of us left, and then the end came. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  The man in the overall sat in silence for a while. Then he laughed roughly and said: ‘It’s not so strange that I’ve never learnt to read, because I never had a chance. But you see, we who were in on that then can’t do it again, as that’s the kind of thing you only do once. Someone else has got to try next time, the younger ones, who’ve learnt more. We went on for a whole year and we gave the bastards what for many times, although they came with their aeroplanes and bombs and tanks. And I was a prisoner-of-war later and when the war was over, I couldn’t go home after all, and that didn’t matter all that much because nearly all of them were dead, but I wanted to all the same. But then they put me in Formentera for six years and we dug salt there. You don’t do that again, even if you are still starving and have to look at those bastards on the streets.’

  Willi Mohr knew very little about the Basque tragedy, but it was not the first time he had heard about the concentration camps in Formentera.

  He said: ‘In the salt mines? Were you a Communist?’

  The man in the overall started and although he had been whispering all the time, he looked round anxiously and licked his lips.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, not that … no, you mustn’t think that …’

  In this case the teacher had evidently succeeded in his task without the need to kill his pupil. Willi Mohr was ashamed that he had even begun the conversation and even more that he had been the one to continue it, forcing the other man to reveal himself and talk about things he did not want to remember. He lowered his gaze and looked at the yellow exercise book.

  ‘My son wrote that,’ said the Basque. ‘You can read it if you like.’

  Willi turned the pages of the book. It contained three compositions, printed in laborious childish handwriting. The first was about Francisco Franco Bahamonde, the second about José Antonio Primo de Rivera and the third about Jesus. With each composition was a coloured illustration which the children had been allowed to copy from some publication. The first was the best, and despite various irregularities, one could distinguish the General’s egg-shaped head, high curved hairline and small triangular moustache. The picture had probably been copied from the same original as the portrait in Sergeant Tornilla’s office.

  Willi Mohr shut his eyes for a few seconds and then he opened the book at random and read:

  ‘José Antonio Primo de Rivera was a youth with more courage than any mature man, who sacrificed
his life for the sake of the fatherland, its greatness and perpetuation, in the great just struggle for liberation against the bestial red hordes. This noble young Falangist …’

  He shut the book again and handed it back.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very well written.’

  ‘He’s only nine,’ said the man in the torn overall.

  Before putting the book back, he looked at it tenderly and lovingly.

  Willi Mohr straightened up and went across to the bar and paid. He still had a few duros in his trouser pocket and wondered for a moment whether to offer the Basque a couple of bottles of wine. Then he decided against. It would be a meaningless gesture, almost an insult. He put on his hat and thin plastic coat and walked away. The men round the rapidly cooling brazier had begun to sing melancholy and sentimental songs about their home country, the words indistinct and incomprehensible and all he could catch was the refrain:

  No somos de aqui—somos de Bilbao …

  We are not from here—we are from Bilbao …

  The civil guards had left unobtrusively, but at the doorway he had to make way for two more just coming in from the square. As they folded back their pointed hoods, he recognized one of them, the middle-aged man with a grey moustache, who had already fetched him twice from the house in Barrio Son Jofre. He was now looking very tired, his eyes swollen and bloodshot, but he smiled in recognition and shook his head, saying as he jerked his thumb out towards the rain:

  ‘Terrible.’

  Nothing had changed outside. The rain was still falling straight down, just as heavily as before. The dog splashed round his feet. During his visit to the Central he had not noticed her, but she had almost certainly been there, lying flat under one of the tables.

  He would be wetter than ever when he got back, but that did not matter.

  On the way home he saw two people and a car. The people were two half-naked children yelling and shrieking as they played about in a deep puddle, yellow with stirred-up mud, and the car a covered gas-powered army truck which drove along the Avenida so close to him that the camouflaged side-flaps brushed his sleeve in a shower of spattering drops of water.

  There were no civil guards at the cross-roads.

  When he had covered three-quarters of the alleyway up to Barrio Son Jofre, the dog began to bark and run on ahead. He realized that someone was waiting for him up at the house.

  The fish-van was parked beside the camioneta. Santiago was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring out at the rain. He was wearing a sou’wester and a short oilskin jacket, and he needed both, as the Ford had no doors and the windscreen was shattered. It must have happened recently as there were still bits of glass between the wooden beading and the metal frame. Santiago had unbuttoned his jacket and was holding his large sheath-knife in his right hand. He seemed irritable and restless, and had evidently been sitting whittling away at a wet piece of wood, for the floor of the van was covered with long fresh shavings.

  When he saw Willi Mohr, he got down from the van and said: ‘I’ve been waiting for you for a whole hour.’

  ‘I was at the Central. You could have gone there.’

  ‘No, I didn’t want to meet you there.’

  Willi Mohr stood on the steps and looked irresolutely at his visitor, who was still holding his knife in his hand.

  ‘Open the door. I don’t want to have to wait any longer,’ said Santiago impatiently.

  Willi Mohr shrugged his shoulders and turned round to stick the key into the lock.

  He thought: Now he’ll lift the knife and plunge it into my back, but I don’t care any longer.

  2

  The door swung open on its creaking hinges and nothing had happened.

  Willi Mohr stepped to one side to let Santiago Alemany walk past. Santiago put his knife back into its leather sheath and buttoned it down as he stepped over the threshold.

  Before following him into the room, Willi Mohr turned round once more and looked at the small Ford van, with its high load of fish-boxes. The boxes were securely tied down and covered with a worn tarpaulin.

  ‘What happened to the windscreen?’ he said.

  ‘They shot at me,’ said Santiago.

  ‘The civil guards?’

  ‘No. Policia Armada. Two idiots in a jeep. They could have turned the jeep and overtaken me instead.’

  ‘Why did they shoot at you?’

  ‘I didn’t stop at their halt-signal. For that matter, I never even saw it.’

  His voice was tense and impatient and it seemed as if he thought the episode incidental, hardly worth mentioning.

  Willi Mohr did not say anything more, but kicked off his sandals and hung his hat and plastic coat on the nail inside the door. Then he sat down on the stairs and wrung out his soaking trouser legs before rolling them up.

  Santiago was walking uneasily back and forth across the floor, hunting in his pockets for something, presumably tobacco, and he looked irresolutely at the man on the stairs several times.

  ‘There are some cigarettes over there by the rucksack,’ said Willi Mohr, without looking up.

  Santiago took an Ideales and lit it. His hands were shaking and he stood staring for a long time out into the rain, as if trying to regain his composure.

  Finally he said: ‘Do you like things as they are in this town and this country?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Willi Mohr.

  ‘I was thinking of asking you to do something.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Santiago turned violently and flung the half-smoked cigarette out into the rain.

  ‘Do you see what I’ve got on the van out there?’

  ‘Yes, fish.’

  ‘Fish, yes. There are some funny fish there too, not much like the usual ones.’

  Willi Mohr said nothing. He was still busy with his trouser legs.

  ‘Would you like to see my fish?’ said Santiago Alemany sarcastically.

  ‘Why not?’

  Santiago laughed, and it sounded subdued and peculiar. Then he went out to the van and loosened the straps and pulled up a corner of the tarpaulin. Although it was the middle of the day and the distance from the van not more than six feet, Willi Mohr found it difficult to see and was not really able to distinguish what the other man was doing out there. The heavy rain softened the outlines and the more he stared the more blurred things became.

  Santiago had taken down one of the fish-boxes and dumped it on the floor inside the doorway. Without speaking, he went back to the van fetched another box and placed it beside the first one, at the bottom of the stairs.

  Willi Mohr sat still and looked at the fish.

  ‘Do you see what these are?’ said Santiago, kicking the first box.

  ‘Squids.’

  ‘Exactly, pulpo, the worst kind. They don’t look very edible, do they?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They aren’t either. If you boil them for ten hours they’re still just as tough as old rubber tyres. And these then?’

  He kicked the other box.

  ‘Sardines.’

  ‘Not even that. Alachas, the poorest fish of the lot. Hardly worth bringing them ashore. But people who’re really badly off eat them all the same. They salt them down in jars.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Santiago took the key out of the lock and shut the door from the inside.

  ‘Feel in the bottom of the box,’ he said.

  Willi Mohr leant forward and thrust his hand down the edge. The unappetizing-looking squids were cold and slimy and in amongst the flabby jumble of tentacles were lumps of sepia-coloured secretion.

  ‘No, not there. Try in the middle.’

  Willi Mohr was irritated by his feelings of distaste and did not want to show it too clearly. He shrugged and thrust his fingers into the cold, sticky slime. Then he raised his head and looked at Santiago standing over him in the dim light, black and shiny in his wet oilskins.

  ‘I didn’t ask you to stir around in that mess just for fun,’ said Santiago. �
��And that’s the best box. The other one’s even worse. Alachas have sharper fins than any other fish I know. And I’ve four boxes of butcher’s leavings too, entrails and half-rotten pig’s stomachs, and two boxes of sea-urchins. If you touch them without gloves they puncture your skin and if you use gloves they spoil them.’

  He knelt down and thrust both hands like a scoop into the mess and began to shovel the squids over into the other box. Not until he had scraped the rest away against the edges did Willi Mohr see that the box was unusually deep and stable.

  On the rough bottom boards, among the lumps of squid secretion and torn-off tentacles lay a dismantled machine-gun. Despite the bad light, he could see that it was covered with a thick layer of green small-grained grease.

  Neither of them said anything for a long time. Santiago had suddenly grown as calm as Willi Mohr, his breathing no longer uneven and panting, and he sat crouching with his elbows on his thighs, his filthy hands hanging loosely between his knees.

  ‘I’ve got four more like that and six automatic-pistols. Out there. And underneath are three hundred rounds of ammunition and two dozen hand-grenades.’

  ‘Where does all this come from?’ said Willi Mohr.

  ‘From the sea.’

  Outside the rain poured down with undiminished force.

  ‘Not in our boat. That used to happen, when there were two of us. My father would be mad if he knew about it. He believes in adapting himself, like most people of that age. They’re burnt out, and say they’ve given all they had once and for all.’

  ‘Who brings it ashore then?’

  ‘Someone else. Hardly anyone knows anything about it, only him and me. And you.’

  After a short pause he added:

  ‘Things are going wrong. I must have help. From you.’

  It grew silent again. They sat quite still and listened to the rain. Then Willi Mohr wiped his fingers on the stair and said: ‘And if I refuse?’

  The cat had come in through the hole in the door, wet and miserable, with a long bleeding scratch from its nose up to one eye. Santiago Alemany pulled out his knife and stirred round in the box of alachas until he found a flat red one among the other nickel-coloured fish. He lifted it out by the tail and put it down in front of the cat.