A Dead Man in Barcelona

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Can I talk to them?’

  ‘You had better talk to Dolores.’

  He signalled with his hand and a waitress came over.

  ‘Dolores, this is a friend of mine. He would like to talk to you.’

  ‘Señor?’

  ‘I am an Englishman and I would like to talk to you about an Englishman. His name is Lockhart.’

  ‘I knew Lockhart,’ she said.

  ‘I knew ‘Well?’

  ‘Too well. He was my husband.’

  ‘Dolores!’ said the elderly man reprovingly.

  ‘Well, almost. That’s what he used to say. As good as. He always used to stay with me when he came to Barcelona. And he used to say that one day he would take me back with him.’

  ‘To Gibraltar?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Dolores,’ protested the elderly man, ‘he had a wife already.’

  ‘I know, but there would have been room for another. I wouldn’t have made any fuss. We could have managed.’

  ‘Dolores, he was spinning you along.’

  ‘Don’t all men do that?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mind. It was nice to think of him in that way. That’s the way he thought of me, too. As his wife. Almost.’

  ‘He was staying with Dolores that night,’ said the elderly man.

  ‘When –?’

  ‘When it happened,’ said the elderly man, pulling up a chair for her to sit down. ‘Tell him.’

  ‘We heard shooting,’ she said. ‘There had been trouble. Those boys. They were making them go on the ships. There had been shooting before but this time it was close, just outside, in the street. “This is the stuff!” he said. He was quite excited. And then he wanted to go out. “You’d do better to stay in,” I said. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this. You stick to business.” “Ah, but this is business,” he said.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know what he was talking about.’

  ‘What was his business?’

  ‘Something to do with the docks. He had an office down there. Just past the church. But I never quite knew what his business was. We didn’t talk about it. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? In bed? Anyway, that night he insisted on going out. And then he didn’t come back.

  ‘There was more shooting, not just in our street but in all the streets, and I got frightened and ran back here to the café. And Manuel – he’s the boss, he owns the café – and said, “You stay right here until it’s all over.” He said that to all of us, and we all stayed. “There’s no point in getting mixed up in it,” he said. “It’s not your fight.”

  ‘But Inez – she’s another of the waitresses – said it was – her fight. She’s Catalan, you see. Well, I am, too, but not like her. I mean I wasn’t sure it was my fight. But she said it was our boys, and she went out. And she didn’t come back, either.

  ‘I was in a hell of a state, I can tell you. We were all in a state. But Manuel said, “Just stay here. You’d be all right here.” Although it didn’t seem so.

  ‘It was hours before the shooting stopped. But then Manuel went out. There were a lot of bodies, he said, but hers wasn’t among them. He came back and said we should stay inside.

  ‘But I wanted to see. I mean, he had looked for Inez but I wanted to look for Lockhart. So I went out and another of the girls came with me. But I couldn’t find anything. He wasn’t among the bodies. “That’s good,” Marie said. “It means he’s alive.” But I couldn’t believe that. Not until I’d really seen him. They said a lot of people had been taken to the prison so I went along and asked to see him. But they wouldn’t let me, they wouldn’t let anybody. And then Manuel said to come home and he would fix it when things had settled down. So I went back to the café.

  ‘And a couple of days later he did fix it and I went to see him.’

  ‘You saw Lockhart when he was in prison?’ said Seymour.

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t see him really properly, though, it was so dark. He was lying in a corner and I thought maybe he had been wounded, but he said not. He told me to go away and not come again. “Don’t get mixed up in this!” he said. I said I could bring him things, food, perhaps. I wasn’t sure that they’d fed him and I’m damned sure they weren’t giving him enough water, but he said keep out of it. “Don’t come back,” he said. But I would have gone back. But then we heard that he was dead. Those bastards had killed him – killed him in the prison!’

  Her voice had risen. Everyone else in the café had stopped talking. Then a man’s voice said soothingly, ‘It’s okay, Dolores, it’s okay. You come here now. Get back into the kitchen.’

  Dolores got up from the table.

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘Or Manuel will have my ass.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘Only to tell Nina.’

  ‘Who’s Nina?’

  ‘She’s a girl in Barcelona. He always used to go and see her when he was over here. Why, I can’t think, because she’s a real pain in the ass. I used to wonder if he had a thing for her but I reckon not. It wouldn’t be easy to get a thing going with Nina. It would be like being in bed with a hedgehog.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘No. Just told me to tell her. Well, I did, but that was a waste of time. She knew anyway. She just looked at me with those cold eyes and nodded. That was all. A hard bitch. As well as prickly.’

  She set off across the room.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  She was back, however, after two steps.

  ‘Why do you want to know about Lockhart?’ she demanded.

  ‘Friends are interested in what happened to him,’ he said. ‘Friends in England,’ he added with emphasis.

  ‘Tell them to go on being interested,’ she said fiercely. ‘Tell them to ask questions and go on asking questions. In the end someone’s got to answer.’

  The conversation in the café resumed.

  ‘You see?’ said the elderly man. ‘You see now how it was?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Seymour. ‘I did not mean to upset her.’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘She’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘It may even help her.’

  He got up from the table and put out his hand.

  ‘Marques,’ he said. ‘Ricardo Marques.’

  ‘Seymour.’

  ‘Do what she says: go on asking questions. Perhaps we will be able to help you.’

  He shook Seymour’s hand once more.

  He shook Seymour’s hand once ‘We shall meet again,’ he said.

  An hour later Seymour was walking up Las Ramblas with Chantale. As it left the port area the street opened up and became an airy boulevard crowded with people. They seemed in no particular hurry, stopping frequently to chat with acquaintances or study the great bunches of flowers hung above the flower stalls. There were flowers everywhere, not just on the stalls but spread out in swathes of colour along the side of the road and bunched in miniature fields at the foot of the trees: roses, sweetpeas, carnations, chrysanthemums and great streaked tiger lilies whose powerful scent reached out right across the boulevard.

  Everywhere, too, there seemed to be street performers, fire-eaters, jugglers, acrobats, dancers, and strange figures straight from a carnival, huge figures sometimes on stilts with grotesquely large papier-mâché heads. A Spanish word came into his mind: cabezudos. That’s what they must be, cabezudos, the bizarre, capering figures that were part of every procession at carnival time.

  The whole street was like a carnival. There were floats, there were musicians, there were clowns. From the floats people in bright costumes were throwing sweets for the children. The children dashed in among the cabezudos to retrieve the sweets and the cabezudos affected to trip over them. Everyone was laughing. Surely this must actually be a carnival? But no. He learned later that every day was like that on Las Ramblas.

  Chantale, responding to the mood, had unbound
the headscarf she normally wore in Tangier, even when she was in European dress, and let her hair fall down on to her shoulders.

  If she had done that in Morocco it would have caused a riot. For some reason a woman’s hair seemed especially sexually inflammatory to Arabs.

  But here, on Las Ramblas, Chantale suddenly felt a great expansion of personal freedom, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She let her hair fall and felt as if she had come out into the sunshine.

  Seymour had been recommended a hotel in a small square off Las Ramblas. The square was little more than a patch of baked mud surrounded by apartment blocks. The blocks were three or four storeys high and many had rooms with little balconies fenced in by a kind of iron fretwork. Children played on the balconies and from time to time women dressed in black would come out and pick one up. Then they would lean on the balcony and monitor events in the plaza below. There was a play area in one corner of the plaza and perhaps they were keeping an eye on other offspring.

  Seymour suspected that a good deal of monitoring went on in the square. He knew that his arrival in the square earlier that day had been noticed and now Chantale’s arrival with him was registered too. When he had asked for a room he had wondered whether to make it a double room but the suspicious eye of the proprietor suggested that it might be unwise. She was one of the landladies, he felt sure, who could tell at once whether a woman was married or unmarried: and he sensed that even in Barcelona that could still make a difference. In the end he had booked a separate room for Chantale.

  After she had checked in they returned to Las Ramblas. There seemed to be more people there even than before. It was growing dark and the lamps had been lit. The street entertainers were out in force, often performing around braziers where they could be seen better.

  In one place there were several braziers together and a space had been cleared where gypsy-like figures were dancing the flamenco. There was the click of castanets and someone was tapping on a small drum.

  Cabezudos were stalking round the edges of the cleared space chatting to the spectators in Catalan.

  ‘Does that cabezudo know you?’ asked Chantale.

  ‘Does ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it seems to be wanting to speak to you.’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  The cabezudo, which was about eight feet tall, loomed over him.

  ‘Señor, Señor!’

  ‘Si?’

  ‘Lockhart,’ it said quietly, and then capered away.

  He followed it to the edge of the crowd.

  ‘You want to know about Lockhart?’ it said in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘I do; but how did you know that?’

  ‘Ricardo told me.’

  ‘Ricardo Marques?’

  ‘Si.’

  Seymour nodded. ‘You’re right, I do.’

  ‘Talk to Nina.’

  ‘Who is Nina?’

  ‘A teacher. She teaches at the school in your square.’

  Your square? He had moved into the hotel only the day before. How did they know about him?

  ‘Just a minute!’ he said.

  But the cabezudo had danced away into the crowd, the huge head jerking comically as it chatted to people, throwing a gigantic, grotesque shadow as it emerged for a moment into the light of the braziers.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Nationalists?’ said the Chief of Police, looking at him blankly. ‘There are no Nationalists in Spain. Catalonian or otherwise.’

  Seymour had gone to the police station early the next morning to present his credentials.

  ‘But, surely, what happened in Tragic Week –’

  ‘Tragic Week? Ah, terrible, terrible! But that was nothing to do with the Nationalists.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Riff-raff. Criminals. Arabs. Anarchists. But –’ The Chief of Police shook his head. ‘Nationalists, no.’

  ‘But I thought –’

  ‘The Señor has been misinformed.’

  The Chief of Police relented slightly.

  ‘Of course, it’s easy to get a wrong picture,’ he said. ‘The situation was very confused. I was confused myself. It all happened so suddenly! There was I, having breakfast on the patio, when the phone rings and my wife comes rushing out. “Alonzo,” she said, “you’d better get off your ass. Things are happening.”

  ‘And then I heard it: shooting. “What the hell’s that?” I said.

  ‘“It’s down by the docks,” she said. “Those filthy Arabs again.” (We’ve got a lot of Arabs in the docks, you see, Señor.) “Oh, is it?” I said. “I’ll soon sort them out.” And I went back into the bedroom to get my gun.

  ‘And while I was there, there was a knock on the door, and it was Pedro, one of my inspectors. “Chief,” he said, “you’d better come. There’s trouble down at the docks.” “It’s those bloody Arabs again, is it?” I said. “No, Chief, I don’t think it is this time,” he said. “It’s more general. All hell is breaking loose.”

  ‘And when I got there, Christ, all hell was breaking loose! There was fighting everywhere. Shooting, burning, stones flying – stones flying everywhere! It was bloody mayhem. And after a bit of this I thought, this is not for us. You need the bloody Army. So I pulled my people out. And then I thought I’d better ring my bosses.

  ‘But you can do that from home as well as from the office, can’t you? And I felt in need of a drink. So I went home. And after a bit my wife said, “Come on Alonzo, you’ve got to do something.” “Why?” I said. “Because if you don’t, Madrid will be on to you.” And, Christ, the next minute there was Madrid on to me. “What’s going on, Alonzo?” they said. “It’s bloody war,” I said. “There is fighting, there’s shooting. The docks are in flames.”

  ‘“What are you doing about it?” they said. “Hadn’t you better get stuck in?” “I did get stuck in,” I said. “But I had to pull out. We were taking casualties. There are bloody hundreds of them. This isn’t a thing for the police,” I said. “It’s something for the Army.”

  ‘Well, they went quiet at that. And then they said, “All right, Alonzo, we’ll talk to Colonel Ramirez. And when you hear the Army’s guns, you go down there and pick up the pieces.”

  ‘Well, we waited until we heard the Army’s guns and then I said, “Right, we’d better get down there.” But my wife tapped me on the shoulder and said: “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get down there, Alonzo. Wait until the Army’s guns have stopped.” She’s got her head screwed on, my wife.

  ‘And it was as well we didn’t get down there too quickly, for the fighting went on for days. The best part of a week. But eventually the shooting stopped and I sent my lads in.

  ‘“Pick them up!” I said. “Don’t ask questions. Just bang them in. We can sort out the sheep from the goats later.” So that’s what we did. Picked up everyone in sight. Including, as it turned out, Señor Lockhart.’

  ‘Including Señor Lockhart?’

  The Chief of Police poured himself some water from a carafe standing on his desk, looked at the glass, a little disappointedly, it must be said, as if he had hoped that somehow the water had miraculously turned into wine, and sipped it. He put the glass down.

  ‘Including Señor Lockhart,’ he said. ‘You have to understand, Señor, that all was confusion. We had no time to get life histories. We just took everybody in, no matter what they were doing. And if you think about it, Señor Seymour, that is not so unreasonable. If bullets are flying all over the place, you’re not going to be just standing there, if you’re nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Bullets were still flying?’ said Seymour. ‘I thought you said you’d waited until –’

  ‘The occasional bullet was still flying. Enough bullets were flying,’ said the Chief of Police, wiping his mouth, ‘to make honest people want to keep out of the way.’

  ‘And that’s when you arrested Señor Lockhart?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  �
�That,’ said the Chief of Police, ‘is a good question.’

  ‘But haven’t you been able to answer it? Surely you’ve had enough time. All this happened two years ago!’

  ‘It is rather more complicated than that,’ said the Chief of Police. ‘To start with, normally we would take statements as soon as a person was admitted. But we took so many people in that week that we couldn’t. We were still working through them when we heard, alas, that Señor Lockhart had died.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Seymour, ‘I am coming to that.

  ‘I thought you might be.’

  ‘But even if Señor Lockhart died – especially since he died – surely an investigation was made?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course. And a report is being drawn up.’

  ‘Is being drawn up?’

  ‘The investigation has not yet been completed.’

  `After two years?’

  The Chief of Police was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Are you sure you want the investigation to be completed?’

  ‘Want it?’ said Seymour, taken aback. ‘Of course we want it!’

  ‘But are you sure? Even if it revealed something that perhaps was better not revealed?’

  ‘Surely in circumstances like this, an inquiry has to be made. And if it is embarked on, it has to be completed.’

  ‘And then?’ said the Chief of Police.

  ‘Well, what happens next depends on the circumstances. There will be several possibilities. A decision will have to be made by the appropriate authority.’

  ‘And you think that procedure has not been followed?’

  ‘I don’t know that it’s been followed. That’s the point.’

  ‘I don’t that it’s been followed. That’s the point.’

  ‘You don’t think the authority may have some discretion in this? Over the publishing of the findings?’

  ‘Well, in principle –’

  ‘And may have exercised that discretion?’

  ‘What are you saying? That there is some reason for hushing it up?’

  The Chief of Police held up a hand. ‘That there may be a reason. That discretion may have been exercised. There doesn’t have to be anything sinister here. The reason may simply be in order not to distress the family unduly. Or there may be some wider reason. That it might distress a Government, say. Or complicate an already complicated situation.’