“Thank you very much. That’s all we needed to know.”
“I’ll give you my telephone number, Deputy-Inspector, in case you want to meet and continue this conversation,” said the Director of Studies, giving her a card. “Or if you ever come here as a tourist and want a dining partner.”
“Thank you, but I’m married.” The Deputy-Inspector blushed a deep red.
“So am I, don’t worry. Monogamy is so boring…”
The Deputy-Inspector made it clear she was angry, but deep down she felt gratified. That maths teacher wasn’t to be sniffed at. There was something interesting about him, and he was handsome into the bargain. She knew she’d never see him again, but she hoped his less than subtle insinuations came to the attention of her very busy husband. Her Jaume was always much more passionate when he had a reason to be jealous.
“Heavens, Maria del Mar, that guy wanted to date you…” said Serra as they went to get into the car.
“You men are a bunch of rogues…” she smiled back at him. “Come on, Serra, time for lunch.”
They went to a restaurant with a set menu. While they waited for their lunch to be served, the Deputy-Inspector told her colleague the Vic police had reported that an old man diagnosed with Alzheimer’s had disappeared five months ago and was still missing. A nineteen-year-old girl who lived at home and wanted to be a model had also disappeared, but she’d taken a couple of suitcases and made off with her parents’ savings, a couple of conservative reactionaries who reckoned the Liberal Democrats were on the extreme left and tried to avoid contact with immigrants lest they be de-Catalanized. The Deputy-Inspector was whispering, because she was aware the other diners were staring at her with their antennae on full alert.
“I don’t think there can be any connection between these two disappearances and our suspect,” she added, “but you never know. Maybe he turned them into sushi…”
Their first course was boiled cauliflower, followed by butifarra and beans. As they were on duty, they had to stick to mineral water. Deputy-Inspector Maria del Mar ordered ice cream for dessert and Serra, who was slightly sweeter-toothed, went for the home-made cake. Before they left the restaurant, while Serra was finishing the camomile infusion he had ordered to help his digestion, and was the object of the quizzical glances of the locals, the Deputy-Inspector went to the lavatory to change her Tampax.
“What about a little glass of something for the road, sir? On the house,” asked the bar-owner.
“No thank you! I’m on duty,” Serra answered, pleased by the suggestion.
“I guess you’re investigating the case of that writer murdered in Barcelona?”
“Well… no… I mean, yes…”
“Amadeu didn’t seem such a bad lad,” the bar-owner continued casually. “Rather full of himself, perhaps, but I’d never have said he could do anything like that. Obviously, appearances can deceive, can’t they?”
“Yes… I mean, no… Well… In fact, it’s all rumours really,” Serra was starting to sound nervous. “I mean we’re not sure the other disappearances have anything to do with any crime or the suspect.”
“That’s right, the Valls’ daughter. Good people… In other words, the police suspect that maybe…”
“No, not at all, all I said was…”
At that moment the Deputy-Inspector emerged from the lavatory and walked emphatically towards their table. The bar-owner knew he wouldn’t extract any more information from the mosso with her around and decided to retreat to the bar. He’d realized the woman was in charge and that her colleague was very green.
“Well, Serra? How about it?”
“Right you are!” responded Serra, standing up, relieved because he was sure the Deputy-Inspector wouldn’t have approved of that rather rash conversation he’d just been having with the bar-owner. “You see, Maria del Mar?” he began euphorically when they reached the door. “I didn’t drop us in it this time. Nobody’s realized we came to Vic to investigate whether Amadeu Cabestany is a cannibal!”
The silence that descended on the bar would have been sepulchral if the television hadn’t been switched on. Every head turned and Deputy-Inspector Maria del Mar Alsina-Graells felt her back being pierced by the gaze from four dozen bulging eyes. Luckily, it was her spirits that sank to her feet and not the Tampax, although it was a close thing. The Deputy-Inspector automatically closed her eyes and began to pray, begging the earth to swallow her up or to go back in time. It couldn’t be. Within hours Cabestany’s cannibalism was the talk of the town.
15
The news of Amadeu Cabestany’s alleged habits was splashed over the following day’s front pages and began to stress everyone out. First, Amadeu’s lawyer and his wife, who was already flat out on their sofa after downing potent tranquillizers, and, naturally, the prosecution, the judge responsible for the case and the police. The stress translated into a series of furious calls to the Director of the Model demanding he find out where the fuck – to quote verbatim – that macabre story had come from and how it had got out. The forensic declared there wasn’t the slightest sign of any cannibalistic practices on Marina Dolç’s corpse, and the fact that the population of Vic were adamant one of their ranks was a depraved cannibal had a reasonable enough explanation if one considered how an aspiring mosso had blurted out and kick-started the rumour, as more than a dozen eyewitnesses could confirm. Amadeu, who’d also glanced at the story in the paper before a disgruntled inmate took it and graphically indicated what he used the dailies for when going to the lavatory, thought the description of cannibal was a metaphor referring to his use of tradition and literary sources, which hardly made his day. It was fine to say he was inspired by his favourite authors but not that he devoured them like a cannibal, as the article suggested.
Everybody in the Model had seen Amadeu Cabestany’s photo on the front pages and it had created a real fuss. The director had shut himself away in his office at dawn and had ordered his minions to open an investigation to find the source of a rumour that, judging by the judge’s hysterical screams from the other end of the line, could cost him his career. Two hours later, his minions were unanimously agreed that all the evidence pointed to Paquito Expósito, a prisoner in the fifth gallery.
“Bring him to my office immediately,” spat out the director.
The director was aware that all that mess was his fault, and was very worried. If he had bitten his tongue, rather than rushing to ring the judge in order to impress her… But that was ancient history and perhaps there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Anyway, he ruminated while waiting for Paquito, perhaps the cannibal story was true and he might get out of this shit almost unharmed. It was too much to believe that that bunch of brainless fools had invented the whole thing, and he was hoping Paquito Expósito would explain himself and help clear up the mystery.
“Come in, Paquito, sit down, please,” the director began, trying to be pleasant when the latter knocked on his door.
“Very sorry, Director,” responded Paquito limply. “I didn’t know what it was all about, except that I’d put my foot in it.”
Paquito Expósito had been in the Model five years. He was around fifty but looked ten years older. All his teeth were decayed and he was a former heroin addict inside for drug trafficking and the illegal possession of firearms. He had one year to go until his release, if he was lucky and didn’t land himself in it. The director knew he was playing with an advantage.
“Come on, Paquito, tell me where the fuck this story about Amadeu Cabestany being a cannibal came from. I’ve heard it was you who spread the rumour…”
“You mean Hannibal? The lad in the fifth?”
“Yes, he’s hardly been inside a fortnight,” the director continued.
“But I ain’t spread nowt, Director, sir. I swear I ain’t. I just told a mate what I’d read in the newspaper.”
“Paquito, the newspaper didn’t say Amadeu Cabestany was a cannibal.” The director knew he had to be patient with Paquito.
“Oh, yes, it did, Director, sir! Maybe not like that, but that’s what it said: that he’d bashed a woman to death with an apple. I read that. And the guy ate the apple.”
“What do you mean, he ate the apple? Where did you get that from?”
“The photo,” responded Paquito, as if it were self-evident. “You could see from the photo that he’d bitten a chunk out.”
“But Paquito, it wasn’t a real apple. It was a statue. A prize.”
“Nah. How could he bite it if it woz a statue? Besides, excuse me, Director, sir but the prize woz wine.”
“Wine? What do you mean, wine?” the director frowned.
“The paper said it plain enough: wine’s the prize. And it must have been a good’un because it woz in capitals,” Paquito wriggled his way out.
“This is beyond me.”
Although the air-conditioning was blasting away, the director began to sweat. He now had an inkling it was all one massive misunderstanding that had snowballed and snowballed because no one had bothered to stop it in its tracks.
“Director, sir,” the minion who was standing by the door interrupted his flow of thought, “perhaps Paquito is referring to the fact it was the sixth Golden Apple award, which was written in Roman letters and could be read as ‘VI’ in capitals.” This minion was a marine biologist who had rashly returned from the States a couple of years ago, hadn’t found a decent job anywhere and had ended up getting a post in a prison.
“You see? VI, I told you so.” Paquito’s self-image was immediately boosted. “The prize woz wine. You’re Catalan, ain’t you? You should know what ‘VI’ means!”
“My God, how idiotic!…” muttered the director. “But what about Cabestany eating brains? Don’t tell me you read that in the newspaper too?”
“Oh, I don’t know nowt about that,” Paquito retorted. “I reckon that’s Cigala. He read the paper as well.”
“You mean Raimundo Pérez, in the fourth gallery,” clarified the minion.
“I know who you mean…” The director was starting to lose his patience and noticed how his blood pressure was momentarily going crazy. “But Paquito, that’s impossible because Cigala is illiterate.”
“And so what? That ain’t no reason to be ashamed. The psychologist told us that,” responded Paquito, proud that his therapy had come in useful at last.
“I mean, Paquito, that he’s illiterate, he can’t read the papers,” answered the director, appealing to his common sense.
“Oh, yes, he can! Everybody can read the papers, Mr Director. It’s a duty. Or a right. Or the duty of a right…” Paquito responded, getting into a tangle. “A constitutional right. And what about Knocksie, Mr Director, he did him in. You know he did.”
“Knocksie died of a heart attack, Paquito.”
“Yeah, course he did, because he told him summat like in the film, and Knocksie copped it. That caused the attack. I saw that ’appen.”
“The doctor said Knocksie’s heart was in a bad state and he could have had a heart attack at any time. It was a coincidence,” retorted the director, trying to get Paquito to follow the logic of his argument.
“Right, it woz also a coincidence they nobbled me in the airport with that suitcase and that pistol that supposedly didn’t belong to yours truly and I ended up in jug, right? Well, coincidences don’t exist, the lady psychologist told us that as well. I mean to say Hannibal is like the guy in the film. The two is queer sods,” he declared. “Besides, they’ve got the same name.”
“Paquito, films are one thing and life…”
“But it’s all in the papers today, Mr Director!” protested Paquito, who was going from strength to strength.
“The papers” – the vein in the director’s neck had swollen and was about to burst – “are full of it, you invented it and the story got out!”
“But if the papers say it’s true, Mr Director…” insisted Paquito, now in a shrill voice.
He’d definitively blown it. A man with progressive ideas whose bedside reading was Crimes and Punishment by Cesare Beccaria, had given in to temptation and accused Amadeu Cabestany before the judge on the basis of a rumour, thus denying him his presumed innocence. All he could do was to try to turn the situation round.
“That’s enough of this nonsense, Paquito. Amadeu Cabestany is no cannibal. He is suspected, I repeat, suspected for the moment of killing a woman and no more than that. So this had better be the story circulating around here. Got it, Paquito? Because I understand you’ve only got one year to go before you’re out on conditional release, right? I wouldn’t want that lengthened for any reason.” The director had decided to change his strategy and have recourse to the tried and tested methods of old. “And I don’t think you’d be very happy if in the year you’ve theoretically still got to spend with us your ‘intimate time’ was eight on a Monday morning, would you?”
“Fuck, no! That would be a bastard, Mr Director! My girlfriend can’t do it at that time of day.”
“Right, so you’ll go straight from here and tell your colleagues it was all a joke, or a misunderstanding or whatever you want. But this rumour must stop. You got that, Paquito? The judge is very annoyed and quite right too.”
“Whatever you say, Mr Director. I expect I can fix that. Course if you could give me extra ‘intimate time’, I’d go for it even better…” Paquito tried to negotiate.
“You do what I told you to and then we’ll talk.”
Paquito wrinkled his eyebrows – something he knew you were supposed to do when you were thinking. He was at a loss.
“All the same, is or ain’t Hannibal a cannibal?” he asked, wanting to be clear.
“Look, Paquito, that’s enough of that rubbish. Don’t make me angry, because I’m at the end of my tether. Clear off and remember what you’ve got to do.”
Paquito returned to the fifth gallery awash in a sea of doubt. He didn’t know what to think. Nevertheless, he only had a year until his conditional release and wasn’t going to risk losing that, so he decided to do what the director had ordered him to do: namely, to persuade his colleagues that their Hannibal, however much his name was the same, was no cannibal. However, Paquito continued to keep his distance from Amadeu Cabestany. As the psychologist giving him therapy used to say, better not tempt fate.
After Paquito left his office, the director picked his phone up to try to tell the judge it had all been one big misunderstanding, an unfortunate joke played by the inmates. He felt unable to reproduce his surreal conversation with Paquito Expósito and mumbled all kind of apologies. He then wrote a short press release saying it was all a rather dud joke that had unhappily prospered and that, consequently, the rumour concerning Amadeu Cabestany’s peculiar culinary habits had no basis in fact. A few hours earlier, the papers had received another release from the Mossos d’Esquadra’s press unit. They regretted that a group of citizens of Vic had misinterpreted a comment made by an aspiring mosso as he left a restaurant. The following day, some papers – but only some – published a retraction, but lamentably by that stage, Vic was already a city besieged by vultures. Luckily for Amadeu and his family, the butchers and shopkeepers of Vic, gathered at an emergency meeting, agreed that publicity about the alleged cannibalistic tastes of one of their townsfolk might damage their sausage industry, so they organised an on-the-spot demonstration to scare off the press with a show of carving knives while a unit of Mossos d’Esquadra looked the other way. The journalists, mostly trainees on temporary contracts, decided not to wound local sensibilities and turned tail, mostly because someone had told them that pig farms and slaughterhouses are, as everybody knows, a perfect place to get rid of snoopers. The news item gradually cooled off and the papers ceased to mention it.
There was a degree of unease among the mossos. The Deputy-Inspector had to put up with being bawled at for an hour and a warning on her file, and the aspiring mosso Marc Serra received a kick in the balls delivered by a Deputy-Inspector who allowed him to enjoy the virt
ues of chastity for a while. It turned out the judge was bilingual, and that, if necessary, she could swear like a trooper in more than one language, while the director of the Model decided to take flight and take a few days’ leave for private business and thus avoid having to give further explanations. Paquito Expósito came out of it rather well; he finally succeeded in getting an extra “intimate time” with the prostitute who’d recently been doubling as his girlfriend.
Unluckily, the rot had set in, as far as it impacted on the dusty carpets of the literary Parnassus where Amadeu Cabestany aspired to tread.
16
Ernest Fabià had been in Tarazona a little over a week and his morale had lifted noticeably. It wasn’t geographical distance by itself which had helped put things into perspective, and not balloon recent events out of proportion. It was the fact that he was now living in the micro-cosmos of the Translators’ House and its peculiar micro-universe of the picturesque city of Tarazona that made him feel as if he were infinitely more distant from the hustle and bustle of Barcelona than the four hundred kilometres actually separating him from his problems. Tarazona was a frontier city, close to the provinces of Soria, Navarre and La Rioja, and it was a challenge to get there by public transport. To begin with, as he felt no desire to sit behind the driving wheel again, Ernest was obliged to take the Talgo to Saragossa from Sants station. Then he had to get a much more rickety train that left him in the small station of Tudela in Navarre, and from there a local bus that finally dropped him in Tarazona. Because of the delays, which he was told were quite normal, whether a result of snow, rain, accidents or striking workers, he’d failed to make his connections and spent hours and hours waiting in each station. He’d left home at eight a.m. and had reached the Translators’ House just before eight p.m., as the sun was setting in a riot of blazing colour that took Ernest’s breath away. The imbalance between geographical distance and his twelve-hour journey to Tarazona had plunged him into a state of mental confusion akin to jet lag. When he finally did arrive, he was floating in a dream, as if the strange but familiar world surrounding him wasn’t entirely real. Nevertheless, Ernest didn’t find the sensation entirely unpleasant. Remorse effectively began to fade into the background four hundred kilometres away from Barcelona, and the anguish consuming him also began to ebb, swept away by the warm wind blowing from the peaks of Moncayo.
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