Southern Seas Read online

‘What are you working on at the moment?’

  ‘A missing corpse.’

  ‘Someone’s stolen a corpse?’

  ‘No. A man disappeared and showed up dead a year later. He wanted to find a new life, a new country, a new continent, a new world … and he ended up dead on a pile of old cans and rubble. Stabbed. A stiff. A rich stiff.’

  ‘He was rich?’

  ‘Rolling in it.’

  Carvalho took out his notebook, and started to recite:

  ‘Tablex Incorporated, specialists in the manufacture of plywood; Argumosa Dairy Industries; Iberia Construction Inc.; advisor to the Banco Atlantico; member of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry; consultant to Privasa Construction and Demolition. Plus fifteen other companies. The most surprising thing is that two of them are pretty low-key publishing outfits. One brings out volumes of poetry, and the other a left-wing cultural magazine. Looks like he used to dabble in charity.’

  ‘You mean flinging his money around. Just look at the number of magazines there are nowadays, boss. And books. If you go to a bookstall, there’s nothing worth reading.’

  ‘It’s all rubbish,’ Charo commented, as she lifted a forkful of tuna with garlic and parsley.

  ‘Full of women and blokes with no clothes on.’

  Biscuter left as soon as he had finished eating. He was sleepy, and he had to get up early to tidy the office and go to the market. Carvalho pictured him a few minutes later sleeping alone on the office’s folding bed.

  ‘Or wanking.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Biscuter.’

  ‘Why does he have to be wanking?’

  Carvalho waved his hand as if to erase what he had said, and gave Charo a look that suggested she finish her meal quickly. He had the feeling that she would want to go back with him to his house in Vallvidrera, and he didn’t see how he could stop her. She polished off the ice cream in three or four mouthfuls and attached her arm to Carvalho’s. She got into the detective’s car, whereupon Bleda began barking loudly and licking every bit of flesh within reach. The drive was silent, as was the ritual of checking the mailbox, climbing the stairs to the front door and turning on the lights. The garden vegetation absorbed some of the lamplight and cast patches of darkness onto the gravel. Carvalho breathed in the air, looking at Vallés far off in the distance and listening indifferently to Charo’s chatter from inside.

  ‘My house is nice and warm. While yours … I presume you’re going to light the fire today. You’re so crazy that you only light it in summer.’

  Carvalho went into the bedroom, took off his shoes and sat on the bed. His hands were clamped between his legs, and his eyes were fixed on an empty, twisted sock.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?’

  Carvalho stirred himself and played for time by wandering around the bed a few times. Then he left the room, brushing past Charo, who was trying to light the fire with all the copies of Vanguardia she could find in the house. He went to the kitchen and took from the refrigerator one of the ten bottles of blanc de blancs that had been waiting for him. Maybe it’s not as good as I think, Carvalho said to himself, but one small obsession never did anybody any harm.

  ‘More wine? You’ll ruin your liver like that.’

  Charo also drank, while Carvalho stopped his aimless meandering and lit a blazing fire with the help of one of the books from his tatty library: Forster’s Maurice.

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘It’s quite extraordinary.’

  ‘So why are you burning it?’

  ‘Because it’s garbage, like all books.’

  Charo reddened slightly in the glow of the flames. She said she was going to make herself comfortable, and returned wearing the loose-fitting Chinese dress that Carvalho had brought her from Amsterdam. He remained sitting on the floor, his back propped against the corner of the sofa and a glass of white wine in his hand.

  ‘When you give in, you certainly do it in style.’

  Charo stroked his hair, and Carvalho took her hand, meaning to push it away. But he kept hold of it instead, and gripped it with a certain fervour.

  ‘What’s come over you?’

  Carvalho shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly he jerked to his feet and hurried across to open the door. Bleda entered like a whirlwind.

  ‘Poor thing. I’d forgotten all about her.’

  Charo sank resignedly into the sofa, and all but bit into her wine glass. Carvalho resumed his former position and busied himself stroking the animal’s neck and Charo’s leg.

  ‘You’ll have to choose. Either the dog or me.’

  Charo was laughing. Carvalho hauled himself up onto the sofa, opened her Chinese dress and fondled two breasts browned by ultra-violet sunlamps and sunbathing on balconies. Charo’s hand slipped under the blue of his shirt, pinched his nipples and opened wide paths through the hair on his chest. But Carvalho stood up, poked the fire, and then turned round, as if surprised that Charo was still sitting there.

  ‘What are you doing there? Let’s go.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Bed.’

  ‘I fancy doing it here.’

  Charo’s hand fitted like a shell over Carvalho’s flies. As if responding to government propaganda on the need for growth, the bulge of his penis swelled to fit the mould. Carvalho stooped to pick up Bleda, took her next door and deposited her on the bed. When he returned to the fire, Charo was already naked. The half-light created by the fire outlined the features of a woman out of bloom.

  He was ushered in by a secretary who had the air of an ex-convent girl about to marry her fiancé after a twelve-year courtship.

  ‘Señora Stuart Pedrell told me that you were coming …’

  They were in the dead man’s sanctuary, the private office to which he retired for meditation—and the one he preferred above fifteen others maintained for him at his various other business addresses. The smooth Scandinavian style so fashionable in the mid-sixties was tempered by roughcast stonework set against a dark beige hessian wallcovering. Paper lampshades of vaguely oriental origins, a beige carpet, and, above the far office door, a curiously out-of-place traffic light. Its lamps extinguished, it was like a dead body, fixed to the wall like a gigantic butterfly in someone’s collection. Noticing Carvalho’s look of puzzlement, the secretary explained: ‘Señor Stuart Pedrell used it to signal whether people were or were not to be admitted to the main office—both us, and visitors.’

  Carvalho moved towards the signal, half expecting it to flicker miraculously. He even stopped for a moment before pushing the sanctuary door. But man and signal looked at each other without prompting a reaction. Finally, he pushed the door and went into the main office, while the secretary opened the venetian blinds.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse the state of the office. It’s shut nowadays, and it gets very dusty. It’s only cleaned once a month.’

  ‘Were you Señor Stuart Pedrell’s secretary?’

  ‘Yes. At least, I was here.’

  ‘What did he use this office for?’

  ‘For listening to music. Reading. And receiving intellectual or artistic friends.’

  Carvalho prepared to check through the books meticulously arranged on meticulous bookshelves, the signed paintings decorating the walls, the cocktail cabinet with its built-in refrigerator, and the Charles Eames reclining sofa, the nec plus ultra of reclining sofas in contemporary patriarchal society.

  ‘I’d like to be left alone.’

  The secretary left the room, pleased to have been ordered out so decisively. Carvalho looked through the books. Many of them were in English. American publishers. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Melville, various German theologians, Rilke, American counter-cultural theorists, Huxley’s complete works in English, Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and For Marx. A number of yellowing news clippings were stuck to the bookcase with drawing pins. Some were reviews of new books from the Times Literary Supplement. Others
seemed rather strange, at least for a man like Stuart Pedrell. For instance, Carrillo’s statements on the Spanish CP’s renunciation of Leninism … or an item on the Duchess of Alba’s marriage to Jesús Aguirre, editor-in-chief of Música.

  Pinned here and there to the shelves were postcard reproductions of Gauguin paintings. On the wall, sandwiched between them, was a series of ocean maps: a huge Pacific dotted with little flag-pins marking somebody’s idea of a sea cruise. On the rosewood table, an embossed ivory vase full of pencils, ball-points and felt-tip pens. On an antique bronze desk, a jumble of schoolboy paraphernalia: erasers in various colours, pens, nibs, penholders, razor blades, blue-and-red Hispania pencils, a Faber paint-box, and even pens for italic and round-hand script, as if Stuart Pedrell had been spending his time on calligraphy and handwriting exercises.

  In the drawers, there were more cuttings from articles, and a poem from a poetry magazine: Gauguin. In free verse, it followed Gauguin’s path from the time he gave up his bourgeois life as a bank employee until his death in the Marquesas Islands, surrounded by the world of the senses that he depicts in his paintings:

  Exiled to the Marquesas

  he saw the inside of prison

  under suspicion of not arousing suspicion

  in Paris

  he was taken for an arrant snob

  only a few natives knew of his passing impotence

  and that the or de ses corps

  was a pretext

  for forgetting the black choir stalls

  the cuckoo of a Copenhagen dining room

  a trip to Lima with a sorrowful mother

  the pedantic chatter of the Café Voltaire

  and above all

  the incomprehensible verse of Stéphane Mallarmé.

  So ended the poem, by a writer unknown to Carvalho. He opened a desk diary bound in a fine leather adorned with acanthus leaves. Handwritten notes dealing with domestic economic matters. Receipts for personal effects ranging from books to shaving cream. A phrase in English caught Carvalho’s attention:

  I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  and underneath:

  Ma quando gli dico

  ch’egli è tra i fortunati che han visto l’aurora

  sulle isole più belle della terra

  al ricordo sorride e risponde che il sole

  si levava che il giorno era vecchio per loro.

  Finally:

  Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud.

  Carvalho made a quick mental translation:

  But when I tell him

  that he is among the fortunate ones who have seen day break

  over the most beautiful islands on earth

  he smiles at the memory and replies that when the sun

  rose the day was already old for them.

  and:

  No more will anyone carry me south.

  He racked his brains for a possible cabalistic meaning that might lie concealed in the three pieces of verse. He opened the cocktail cabinet and poured himself a glass of ten-year-old Fonseca port. He didn’t have bad taste, this Stuart Pedrell. Carvalho turned the lines over in his mind. Maybe they were indicative of the man’s frustrations or maybe they were the key to a project that had expired with his death. He put the paper in his pocket and searched every corner of the room, even behind the cushions of the three-piece suite. Then he turned to the wall displaying the map of the Pacific Ocean. He followed the route traced by the flags: Abu Dhabi, Ceylon, Bangkok, Sumatra, Java, Bali, the Marquesas … An imaginary voyage? A real voyage?

  Next he examined the audio-visual equipment in a corner of the office and on a desk to the left of where Stuart Pedrell would have sat. Ultra-high fidelity. A compact television incorporated in an American radiocassette player. He tried all the tape recorders, in case something had been left on them. Blank. He looked over the cassettes of classical music and modern rock. Nothing you could call a clue. He called the ex-convent girl, who approached with tiny steps as if not to disturb the sanctity of the place.

  ‘Did Señor Stuart Pedrell book a trip in the days before he disappeared?’

  ‘Yes. To Tahiti.’

  ‘Did he book it direct?’

  ‘No. Through Aerojet. It’s a travel agency.’

  ‘Had he already paid a deposit?’

  ‘Yes. He also ordered a very large sum in traveller’s cheques.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it would have been enough for a year or more abroad.’

  Carvalho looked at the canvases on the wall. Thoroughly modern painters. The oldest, Tàpies, was still no more than fifty years old, and the youngest, Viladecans, was around thirty. One signature was particularly familiar to him: Artimbau. He had known him during the years of the anti-Franco struggle, before he himself had fled to the United States.

  ‘These painters used to come here?’

  ‘A lot of important people used to come.’

  ‘Do you know them by name?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘What about this one, Artimbau?’

  ‘He was the nicest one. He used to come often. Señor Stuart Pedrell wanted to commission him to do a big mural on his estate at Lliteras. A huge wall was spoiling his view, and Señor Stuart Pedrell wanted Señor Artimbau to paint it for him.’

  Artimbau’s studio was on Calle Baja de San Pedro. As usual, Carvalho felt a flicker of nervousness as he passed the police headquarters in Vía Layetana. He had only bad memories of the barracks-like building. However much they tried to give it a democratic face-lift, for him it would always be a grim fortress of repression. Vía Layetana itself, though, struck him differently—a first, hesitant step towards a Barcelona Manhattan that was never going to be completed. A pre-war street with the harbour at one end and the small industry of Gracia at the other, it had been extended through Barcelona to provide the city with a commercial nerve-centre. Over time, it had come to house trade unions and employers’ organizations, as well as policemen and their victims. It also housed a large branch of the National Savings Bank. In the forefront of an expansive, sub-Gothic public park stood a monument to one of the weightier members of the Catalonian aristocracy. Carvalho walked along Calle Baja de San Pedro until he came to a large doorway giving onto a courtyard. He picked his way across the yard and began to climb a narrow, time-worn staircase that gave access to a number of rickety landings. Opening onto these were the kind of small studios favoured by architects just embarking on their careers and craftsmen on the verge of retirement. Others merely provided storage space in which leather pelts, cardboard boxes and other bits and pieces were piled high. Stopping in front of a door painted with optimistic patterns of foliage coloured in green and lilac, Carvalho rang the bell and waited for an answer. A little old man, his apron covered with marble dust, opened the door wide with slow, silent gestures and nodded for the detective to enter.

  ‘Do you know who I’m looking for?’

  ‘It’ll be Francesc. No one ever comes to see me.’

  The old man disappeared into a little cubby-hole carved out of the vastness of the artist’s atelier. Carvalho advanced a couple of steps, and found Artimbau engaged in painting a girl in the act of removing her jumper. The painter turned round, surprised, and took time to read the past in Carvalho’s face.

  ‘You! Well I’ll be damned!’

  The dark, babyish face, circled by a black beard and a receding hairline, seemed to emerge from the tunnel of time. The model had lowered her jumper to conceal her white, waxen breasts: two firm, solid hemispheres.

  ‘That’s all for today, Remei.’

  The painter touched Carvalho for a moment, and then clapped him on the back, as if he had just rediscovered a part of himself.

  ‘You’ll stay and eat. If you like my cooking, that is.’

  He pointed to a covered earthenware casserole simmering on a butane cooker. Carvalho lifted the lid and was assailed by the aroma of a strange, potato-less stew in which vegetable
s vied with meat.

  ‘I have to watch my weight, so I don’t put in potatoes. And hardly any fat either. But it tastes OK.’

  Artimbau patted his paunch, which jutted out from his relatively slender body. The model murmured a goodbye and cast a long, slow look at Carvalho.

  ‘I wish I knew how to paint that look,’ laughed Artimbau when the model had left. ‘Nowadays I busy myself painting gestures. Body movements. Women dressing and undressing. I’ve gone back to the human body after spending a lot of time on society, social things … Spending time as a painter, I mean. I’m still in the Party. I go out and paint murals before elections. The other day I did one at the Clot. What about you?’

  ‘I don’t paint.’

  ‘I know. I meant are you still involved in politics?’

  ‘No. I don’t have a Party. I don’t even have a cat.’

  It was a stock reply which once upon a time might have been true. But not any more, Carvalho thought to himself. To start with, I’ve got a dog now. Am I going to end up with as many things as other people? Artimbau had things. He was married, with two children. Maybe the wife would come and eat with them, and then again maybe she wouldn’t. Artimbau showed him his paintings, and a book of drawings on the death agonies of General Franco. No. He knew that the climate still wasn’t right for it to be published. He tried to get Carvalho to reciprocate with some news about his own life. Carvalho summed up his last twenty years in one short sentence. He’d been in the United States, and was working as a private detective.

  ‘That’s the last thing I’d have expected. A private eye!’

  ‘In fact I’ve come to see you about a case. A client of yours.’

  ‘Somebody complaining that I’ve plagiarized a painting?’

  ‘No. He’s dead. Murdered.’

  ‘Stuart Pedrell.’

  Carvalho sat down and prepared to listen. But the usually talkative Artimbau became rather reticent. He laid plates and cutlery on a little marble table and produced a bottle of Berberana Gran Reserva. As always, Carvalho was happy to discover a new example of gastronomic corruption. The painter carefully removed the casserole from the stove. Then he phoned his wife. She wouldn’t be coming. He filled the plates with the low-calorie stew and was plainly delighted at Carvalho’s favourable comments.