Tattoo (12 page)

He was annoyed that nothing more was going to come of it, so stopped playing the game. He left the restaurant, still savouring the taste and aroma of sage. After walking around aimlessly for half an hour he found himself on the steps of the Rijksmuseum. These days he was allergic to museums, perhaps to compensate for the way they had enchanted him in the past, the way he had once adored their cathedral-like silence and the ecstasy produced by all the painters held in such high esteem. He would give the whole of Rembrandt for a shapely woman’s arse or a decent plate of spaghetti
a la carbonara
.

He walked to the Paradise Club. He had to renew his membership, as the previous card had been ruined by the canal water. This time he did not head for the apse, but went up to the first floor. There in a big room a few youngsters were reading magazines or trying to make collages out of cut-up photos. A few more were standing at a counter with the same world-weary look of all those he had seen downstairs the night before. He walked across the library and reached the counter, where a hippy couple was selling cakes. Hash cakes. Carvalho saw it as a dreadful reflection on the state of the art of cooking. What hope was there for young people who did not know or want to know how to eat properly? In order not to die before he had yielded to this devilish temptation, Carvalho bought a vaguely Arab pastry. It tasted of aniseed, almond, flour and something strange that could just as easily have been mare’s sweat or divine ambrosia. He cursed the miserable motherfuckers who could have perpetrated such a
monstrosity, then went on with his exploration of the upper floor of the sanctuary. In another room they were showing a Gregory Peck film to another bunch of hippies, sitting on folding stools or slumped on the floor. The film was
To Kill a Mockingbird
. By Gregory Peck’s fourth facial tic, Carvalho had seen enough. He went back down the staircase and into the main nave. It was exactly the same scene as on the previous night: the same music, the same psychedelic effects, the same shit leading to the same nothing. And all the while the cops kept watch on them inside and out, as though they were sheep being led to the fold. For a moment, Carvalho considered scanning the room with his one good eye to see if he could spot Buffalo Bill and his flock. He could not help thinking that someone was deliberately fooling all these poor people who thought they had heard the bells of freedom. Where exactly were they headed?

The next morning he got up late. He looked at his eye in the mirror. The swelling had almost completely gone. It was not so much a punch as a cut that now appeared clearly in between his eyelid and eyebrow. He used a piece of cotton wool to try to get rid of as much iodine as possible. His eyebrow still felt uncomfortable, but it was not really a black eye.

The journey to Rotterdam seemed endless. Unusually for him, he had bought newspapers: the
New York Times
and
Le Monde
. He had not read a paper in two months, but it looked as though not much had changed. If he had not been on the receiving end of all the nonsense he read about, he would have dismissed it as a freak show of madmen and crooks: all the rich and powerful deserved to be locked up and the key thrown away. He did not even get to the
New York Times
: the three front pages of
Le Monde
were more than enough.
He preferred to stare out at a landscape that repeated itself endlessly, or to study the faces of the other passengers, who also seemed endlessly the same. For hours now, he had not been able to get the image of Señor Ramón sitting on the other side of his desk out of his mind. His sallow, freckled skin, the sly look in those small hard eyes of his, like some predatory animal. He had found out all that Señor Ramón had asked of him, and yet there were lots of questions he still wanted answered for his own satisfaction. If the journey to Rotterdam seemed so endless, it was because he had the feeling that most of the answers to these new questions were no longer to be found in Holland. Carvalho was obsessed by this investigation in the same way as in the past, whenever he was trying to find the answers to a puzzling case. It was as if he were regaining an old, disturbing ability: the capacity for enthusiasm.

Coosingel Street started from close by Rotterdam central station. It went straight down to the port. The entire centre of Rotterdam had been rebuilt after the war, drawn in straight Dutch lines that emphasised how new it all was. Carvalho took a taxi to the port. He wanted to take a trip on one of the small boats that took people round the endless docks, and while he was doing so mull over the crazy logic of the case. He climbed aboard a Spido launch and found he was sharing it with a group of noisy schoolchildren, eager to discover as many new worlds as there were piers and warehouses in the docks, where ships from all over the planet were anchored. The colour of rust alternated with whitewashed hulls and the jumble of thousands of cranes that were all settling like birds for their noonday rest. An old, smoothly running port where what was most impressive was the size and how smoothly it ran. A port without the legends of a Hamburg or a New York.

There was as much about the relation between Singel and Señor Ramón that did not fit as there was about the relation between Ramón and Queta’s hair salon. An old man did not have his aura of power without there being something bigger behind him than a ladies’ hairdresser. The most logical conclusion was that he was part of the same network in which Singel and Chesma also figured. In Amsterdam Singel hid behind the Patrice Hotel sign, just as in Barcelona Señor Ramón concealed his activities behind Queta’s Hairdressers. The two men obviously used the same front. But how were they linked to Chesma? Why did Chesma have a face and name for people in Holland, while he remained a question mark for Señor Ramón?

The launch was passing in the shadow of a huge Japanese liner. The schoolboys made slanty eyes and called out to the seamen on board in a language specially made up for the occasion. Then there was a succession of dry docks where they could all reflect for a few moments on how dead ships were being transformed. They stared in silent respect at the rusting hulls or their hasty skeletons, as if they were attending an autopsy. Even the schoolkids fell silent at the sight of how they were being gutted. Beyond the ships, the July sun made white shirts blaze. Carvalho had seen how the Rotterdam locals liked to sunbathe, stretched out on the wide green banks of the canals or enjoying the lunchtime peace and quiet on public benches. Charo had probably gone for a swim at Castelldefels or the Swimming Club. A tan was useful in her line of business, and Carvalho himself loved the contrast between the brown parts of her body and the surprising white of the rest. Perhaps Señor Ramón had hired him when he already knew the answer. But why? Why take such an interest in a return journey whose start and finish he already knew?

By the time the tour was over, there was already a photo waiting for him of the moment he had stepped on board. Carvalho bought it, and then headed for the watchtower standing high above the warehouse roofs. He followed instructions, and stayed on the observation platform beneath the top floor. Rotterdam stretched out to left and right in a maze of docks and piers, a forest of cranes which from this vantage point looked like small threads on some vast tapestry conceived by a pointillist painter anxious to convey his sense of the still life composed by trade and industry. Green, blue, white and red ships. Black ships that seemed destined for evil. Ships heading north, but mostly ships heading south. Carvalho could feel the urge to set sail rushing through his veins.

He was early for his appointment. He was almost alone on the platform apart from a Japanese couple in one corner busy photographing each other with the port as backdrop. Then he saw a woman in her thirties walking along the platform. One gloved hand followed the rail round, while she continued to stare out to sea as though she wanted to have a constant panorama of all that was going on down below. A pair of binoculars hung from her well-endowed chest. She had a long nose, a broad, freckled face and a mass of shoulder-length red hair. She was wearing a green sleeveless dress, and her skin looked as though the tan was artificial, or perhaps it was just the characteristic bright pink that redheads suffer from. Her legs were inviting, although her ankles betrayed the passage of time or the fact that she had bad circulation. Carvalho felt a passing desire, but almost at once it seemed crass and destructive to start to want a woman he would never see again. The woman reached the point where Carvalho stood leaning against the rail. To carry on with her tour of the platform
she would have to walk round him. She came to a halt. Only a few inches from Pepe’s body. She turned and looked up at the face of the man who was standing in her way. Her lips moved and she said in hesitant Spanish:

‘Are you the man Singel sent?’

S
he said her name was Salomons. The widow of Cees Salomons, she explained. They took the lift down to the ground. While the attendant was busy with his levers, she whispered in Carvalho’s ear:

‘Is it true Julio is dead?’

‘So it seems.’

‘That’s dreadful.’

She seemed genuinely upset. She strode out of the lift in front of Pepe and led him towards a Volvo parked at the foot of the tower. On their way to one of the least new districts of Rotterdam neither of them said a word. She came to a halt in a tree-lined street. At the far end a canal was visible. She opened the front door to an apartment block, then they went across an internal garden where a few girls in bikinis, bearded young men and straw-blond kids playing with a rubber ball were all out enjoying the sun. The widow Salomons opened her apartment door, and Carvalho found he was directly in a light kitchen-cum-dining-room. A staircase led directly off it up to another floor. She gestured for him to take a seat on one of the stools that went with a high white lacquer table. She sat opposite him. In the centre of the table between them sat a wicker fruit bowl full of glistening Mediterranean fruit. The widow Salomons seemed to be lost in thought: she sat staring at a stainless-steel kettle on the unlit stove.

‘It’s dreadful.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Yes, I knew him well.’

She raised her head to the ceiling. Tears were welling up in her eyes. As she stretched, he could see she had a thick but beautiful white throat.

‘Very well.’

The tears poured down. Carvalho started to play with a grapefruit that seemed to have been polished with a cloth. The oranges and lemons were just as shiny. The widow raised her head again, and Carvalho sank his visual fangs into her beautiful white throat. He had the fleeting impression that she must have taken a course run by the Actors’ Studio in Rotterdam. She wept like Warren Beatty in
Splendour in the Grass
. It was all so staged that to Carvalho her grief seemed to be delicately poised between the theatrical and the cinematographic. It takes all sorts, he said to himself, and began to peel an orange. The widow Salomons got up to fetch him a plate to put the peel on. Carvalho remembered an old joke he had heard from a professor of French literature, Juan Petit: ‘Imagine that one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s angst-ridden characters is in mid-crisis when he hears his doorbell ring. He goes and answers: it’s the man from the electricity company. If he has enough money to pay, he’s fine. He can go back to his metaphysical angst. But if he can’t, his metaphysical angst goes out the window and an everyday angst takes its place.’ Professor Petit had been as lucid as he was scary, sitting there clutching the vaporiser he used all the time to control his asthma attacks.

‘I’m sorry. I’m making a fool of myself.’

Carvalho made an ambiguous gesture which she interpreted as giving her permission to carry on sobbing her heart out. There they were again, huge, heavy teardrops racking her body. Carvalho finished the orange and got up to
wash his hands under the kitchen tap. Through the window he could see the sun-worshippers curing all their bodily and spiritual ills thanks to the oldest and most reliable god of all. He leant his backside against the sink, gazing at the picture of desolation that the widow Salomons and the bits of orange peel on a small Delft plate offered him.

‘So you knew him well?’

‘Yes, as I already told you. I can’t help it, I’m upset.’

‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m interested in learning a few things about my friend. His relatives are worried. They haven’t heard from him in almost two years. The last letters they got were from Amsterdam.’

‘After that he lived here in Rotterdam nearly all the time.’

‘Here?’

‘Here.’

‘Was he still with Singel?’

‘Yes. No, I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know what?’

‘I don’t know if his friendship with Singel did him any good. But it did give him the chance to make a break. Do you follow me? He was someone who was born to be something more than a factory worker at Philips.’

‘Nobody is born to be a factory worker.’

‘You know what I mean. He was naturally intelligent. He had a quick mind. Come and see.’

The widow Salomons got up and climbed the staircase. Carvalho followed. At the top was a landing lined with books, prints and real paintings. Off the landing was a bedroom that was also full of books. Under the window was a work desk. Out of the window Carvalho could see the sun-worshippers still performing their silent rites.

‘He read almost all of these. And don’t think that they’re easy books. He could read English almost fluently: he had
taken an intensive course in Amsterdam. How could I describe him? He was … deep.’

‘Profound.’

‘Yes, that’s it. Profound. He reflected a lot on things. He always thought everything over a lot. And he was a rebel.’

As she talked about Julio Chesma, the widow Salomons paced up and down the room, cupping her elbows in her hands. Within ten minutes Carvalho had an excellent picture of him. He was born in Puertollano (province of Ciudad Real). A polluted, horribly polluted town, insisted the widow. Dreadful pollution. Naturally, he was an orphan, perhaps in fact because of that pollution. Raised in an orphanage, naturally. Everywhere he had been he had left traces of his brutal, useless sense of rebellion. The Spanish Legion, naturally. Petty crime and prison, naturally. He had found a girlfriend in Bilbao and that was the first time his feet had been on the ground. He studied at evening classes, then decided to work outside Spain so he could see something of the world, to discover what lay beyond the horizon.