Off Side (12 page)

‘There you go. It’s good stuff.’

‘Thanks, Pepe.’

And he raised his arms as if to absolve himself of responsibility. ‘I warned you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m more sorry than you. Someone suggested I went to the Arabs, so I did what you asked me to. They know what’s going on. Nothing happens in this city that they don’t know about, and it put them in a bad mood as soon as I opened my mouth. What put them in a bad mood was that I knew that they were the people that I had to talk to. A very bad mood. It’s like I told you the other day. They look at us as if we’re garbage. We’re nothing to them. You saw the way they brought me here at gunpoint. If I’d had my machete from the Legion, Pepiño, they wouldn’t have looked so clever. But look at the state of me now. Look at me.’

‘Stop it, Bromide. I said, it was my fault.’

Bromide yawned.

‘They kept me up all night, in a house somewhere down calle de Valldoncella, and then they hauled me over here. I haven’t had a wink of sleep.’

‘Come on, get your head down. You can sleep in my bed.’

‘In
your
bed?’

He lay down on his side, as if trying to occupy the smallest space possible, and gave out pathetic little yawns, like a man drowning in his dreams and gasping for the air that will wake him. Carvalho went to the kitchen. He was hungry, and made himself a sandwich with the
finocchiona
that he’d bought the previous day from an Italian delicatessen. Since he was feeling irritated by his inability to move decisively in any direction, he sat down at the phone with a view to getting the unmovable moving. His first mission was to locate Camps O’Shea and to confirm that he was inviting him to dinner at his house that night. He had a curious, empty sort of feeling inside him, but he didn’t give it too much thought. He decided that the next person to be disturbed was Basté de Linyola, on the pretext of urgently needing to meet him, to clarify a few things.

‘I don’t see what clarification I can offer that couldn’t have come just as well from señor Camps.’

‘I can’t carry on crashing around in the dark like this.’

‘I’ve a very busy day ahead of me. If you like we could meet for a drink at eight, at the Club Ideal.’

With the phone call over, Carvalho began planning for supper. He was looking forward to the liberating sensation of handling tangible materials and working towards that magic that occurs in the transformation of meat and its ancillary elements — the magic which turns a cook into a ceramicist, into a wizard, who, by the application of fire, turns matter into sensation. What he needed was the self-confirmation of something that he could make with his hands and then give to others. To others. Not to
an
other. The prospect of a supper
a deux
with Camps O’Shea made him nervous, so he decided to phone his neighbour, Fuster, the commercial agent.

‘I was just on my way out. Are you phoning to sort out your tax?’

‘Not at all. I’m inviting you to dinner.’

‘You really ought to think about your taxes. Your second instalment is due next month. What’s on the menu?’

‘Peppers stuffed with seafood. Stuffed shoulder of lamb. Fried milk.’

‘Too much stuffing, if you ask me, but it sounds good. I’ll be there.’

When Bromide finally awoke two hours later, he popped his head into the kitchen to find Carvalho preparing the infrastructure for the evening’s meal.

‘That smells good, Pepiño.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m aching all over.’

‘Charo can take you to the doctor. I’ll have a word with her.’

Bromide handed Carvalho a crumpled thousand-peseta note.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Take it. I didn’t earn it.’

Carvalho pushed his hand away and poured him another glass of wine.

For Carvalho, the cocktail trail through Barcelona meant starting at the Boadas, near the Ramblas, with the lady of the house looking beautiful against a backdrop of drawings by Opisso, a nostalgic landscape of a city which by now was definitively nostalgia. He had already explored a route which took in the Gimlet, the Nick Havana and the Victory Bar in search of the perfect dry Martini; sometimes he would arrive at the Ideal in the middle of the afternoon, when the place was half empty, and anybody who felt like it could get drunk with the full complicity of the barmen or in the company of the bar’s owners — father and son — each equally expert in purveying cocktails both ancient and modern, and the nostalgia or modernity that went with them. At lunchtime and during the early evening, the Club Ideal tended to be full of well-heeled Barcelona señores, or heterosexual couples
made up of aggressive (and aggressed) executives, and their emancipated three-timing wives, for whom the executive himself represented at best only the third in the line of possibilities. By eight o’clock the bar had a broader range of flora and fauna, and from his particular corner Basté de Linyola could enjoy a degree of anonymity thanks to the noise of conversation, the numbers of people, and the subdued lighting as he sat below a portrait of the bar’s owner in the uniform of some old seawolf of the English admiralty. Basté de Linyola was a politician in transit, en route to his own nothingness, and the new glories looked somewhat askance at him. His face did not entirely fit with the most powerful football club in the world, in the same way that it would look odd to have Gorbachev as world president of the Rotary Club. It was only a matter of time before Carvalho caught up with Basté, looking relaxed and master of his corner, and consuming a low-alcohol cocktail which Gotarda senior had purveyed with a literary flourish. Carvalho ordered a Martini, looking forward to the prodigy of absolute taste, the chimera which Martini offers as a Platonic ideal, conscious that the secret of its perfection will never be entirely discovered.

‘I have to tell you that this encounter is rather ill-advised.’ Nevertheless he was smiling. ‘Wasn’t Sito a good enough go-between?’

‘Who’s Sito?’

‘Sito Camps O’Shea. His real name is Alfonso, but they’ve called him Sito ever since he was a kid. His father is a good friend of mine. And I am honoured by that friendship. Camps y Vicens. Do you know the name? Building constructors.’

‘I’m afraid not. I had to meet you, though. This business is beginning to look like an optical illusion. It only exists in the fact of the anonymous letters. There’s nothing that suggests that Mortimer is actually going to be killed. Don’t you have some other centre forward that they might want to kill?’

‘We have others, but not really in the assassination league. If
they do end up killing Mortimer, it’s going to make real problems for us. The club is just coming out of a difficult period and we’ve had to work hard to win back the confidence of the fans and the public. This is the most powerful club in the world, but only for as long as it has a hundred thousand members. If its membership were to fall to seventy thousand, it would be a giant with feet of clay. It’s dependent on the money that those hundred thousand pay at the start of each season. If our annual income took a downturn, it could be disastrous.’

‘I thought the police told you there’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Quite right. And we’re not worrying. You’re a “just in case”. My experience in the world of business and politics has taught me that it’s always a good idea to have a few “just in case” people around. We live in a society that is falling apart. Everything appears to be balanced and under control, but chaos is just around the corner. People don’t believe in anything. They don’t even believe in pretending to believe in something. And societies that have lost their beliefs are the kind of societies where you get crazed killers running around.’

‘Are you suggesting that we’re going to start seeing irrational, motiveless killings, like in the United States?’

‘Why not? We already have psychiatrists and private detectives, so I don’t see why we can’t have mad murderers too. And here it could be even worse, because at least in the USA they still put up an appearance of believing in God. They go to church on Sundays, and feel themselves part of a chosen people. But you don’t have that in Spain. Religion of any kind, whether political or otherwise, has disappeared. The only thing that we have left, by way of communion of the saints, is nationalism.’

‘Is that what makes you a nationalist?’

‘It’s the most gratifying thing that a person can be, and the least concrete, particularly if you are, as I am, a non-independentist nationalist. Politics is a curious thing in Catalonia. We have a situation where power is shared between socialists who
don’t believe in socialism, and nationalists who don’t believe in national independence. The whole thing’s ripe for lone operators to take over, and when you look at the likes of young Camps O’Shea, the prospect becomes even more alarming. That man has no conscience, no epic memory, no life-project other than going out and winning, without even knowing what he wants to win at, or whom he wants to beat.’

‘And how are we supposed to deal with these lone killers?’

‘Arrest them while they’ve still got their guns in their holsters, or if they’ve got them out, shoot them before they get the chance to shoot first.’

‘And what if they manage to do their killing?’

‘Turn up for the funeral.’

‘You’re a big man in this city. Big men in big cities get there because they have more information at their fingertips than the rest of the population.’

‘I gather you’re implying that I haven’t told you everything I know. Don’t be naive. I know that you have to buy people, and I know whom to buy. And that’s the extent of it.’

As he sipped his drink he seemed to enjoy having an audience. Carvalho was a new public for him, and he enjoyed surprising people with the variety of the elements comprising his intellectual and moral make-up. His English-style cynicism had acted as a point of reference for Barcelona society in the 1960s and 1970s, when the rich didn’t know what to do with themselves, and he shone as a prism with a thousand facets, capable of quoting German philosophers at the same time as getting rich without remorse, of flirting with Franco’s government and simultaneously negotiating with the clandestine leaders of the Commisiones Obreras in his various business operations.

‘So what’s your advice on whom and what to buy these days?’

‘The same as ever. You buy land, and you buy the planning people who are in a position to redesignate that land. That has been Barcelona’s stock in trade ever since the walls came down.
Do you want to invest a bit of money?’

‘I don’t have the sort of money to be able to start investing.’

‘What are you saving for, then?’

‘My old age.’

‘And I’d say that’s not far off. Don’t worry, though … By then there’ll be a lot of good charities around. Charity is back in fashion. Second-hand clothes shops, and soup kitchens for the poor. But if ever you do have any spare cash, put it into land. On the other side of Tibidabo, for when they build the tunnel. Or in the area beyond the Olympic Village. That’s going to be a goldmine.’

‘How long does my contract run for?’

‘Until we come up with the author of these anonymous letters. Does it bother you not to be earning your keep?’

‘That’s never been a problem for me. If anything my problem is that I don’t earn as much as I think I’m worth.’

Basté shrugged his shoulders and waited for further questions. The audience was beginning to bore him, although he still wasn’t sure why exactly Carvalho had been so keen to see him.

‘From what we’ve talked about so far, I don’t see why it was so urgent to meet.’

‘Camps is just a middle-man. I was interested to hear what you had to say.’

‘I shall be giving a lecture tomorrow, on “Urban Growth and our Olympic Future”. That’ll give you an opportunity to hear me in action.’

‘I don’t like lectures. The last one I went to was all about the art of the detective novel, and as far as I was concerned they were all talking bullshit. By the way, you’re pretty rich, aren’t you?’

‘Rich enough.’

‘So why do you want to be richer?’

‘Because that’s what gives meaning to my life. When I was younger I always felt I’d been cheated, because I would have loved to have been a first-rate artist. In those days I used to paint, and write, and play the piano. Then I decided that politics was what
would give meaning to my life, and I was on the point of taking it to the top, but the problem is that nowadays rich people don’t get a very good press, and even right-wing voters prefer their leaders to be of moderate means. People are willing to forgive stupidity, but not wealth. So now I run a football club, which is rather a lower order of power, but equally attractive. My intention is to remain rich, and maybe try to become a senator before I get too old for it. That’ll provide another couple of lines for my obituary in
La Vanguardia
. My descendants deserve an impressive obituary. I want at least two columns. Anything under two columns isn’t worth the effort.’

‘I’m cooking dinner for Camps tonight.’

This appeared to amuse Basté.

‘I know hardly anything about you, but I should warn you that Sito has no female friends. Or male friends, either, so far as I know.’

‘Peppers stuffed with seafood. Stuffed shoulder of lamb. And fried milk. How does that sound?’

‘It doesn’t do a lot for me, I’m afraid. I’m an everyday sort of eater.’

‘I feared as much. There had to be something wrong with you.’

‘When I need to eat well, it’s usually in order to seduce someone, and in that case I have three or four reliable restaurants that I go to. My father was the same, and my grandfather too. Restaurants may change, but family traditions don’t. I’ll tell you something which might interest you. My great-great-grandfather was a muleteer from Bages who came to Barcelona. In the nineteenth century Barcelona was only inhabited by riff-raff, Spanish soldiers, and rich people who were old and devoid of imagination and whose riches were about to run out. My great-grandfather became a moderate regionalist, and he was the first in our family to be what you would call rich. My grandfather used to hire gunmen to kill anarchists. My father went over to Franco during the
Civil War, and used armed police when his workers started giving him a hard time. For my part, I studied in Germany and the US, I’m a democratic nationalist, and I hire private detectives.’