Southern Seas Read online

  ‘Pepe Carvalho. I’m a private investigator.’

  ‘Oh. I suppose it’s about Daddy. Can’t you people let him rest in peace?’

  The glamour-girl façade crumbled. Her voice quivered, and her eyes flashed at him, full of tears.

  ‘It was Mummy and that dreadful Viladecans who started all this.’

  The sound of the door closing suggested that the butler had heard as much as he wanted to hear.

  ‘Dead people don’t need to rest, because they don’t get tired.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Do you know otherwise?’

  ‘My father is alive—here in this house. I can feel him around me. I talk to him. Come here. Look what I found.’

  She took Carvalho’s hand and led him to a lectern in a corner of the room. A large photo album was lying open on it. The girl slowly turned the pages, one after another, as if they were fragile between her fingers. She placed a grey-framed photograph in front of Carvalho. It showed Stuart Pedrell as a dark-skinned young man in shirt-sleeves, flexing Mr Universe muscles.

  ‘He’s handsome, isn’t he.’

  The room smelt of marijuana, and so did she. With her eyes closed, she smiled ecstatically at the vision in her mind’s eye.

  ‘Did you have a close relationship with your father?’

  ‘Not before he died. When he left home, I’d been studying in England for about two years. We used to see each other in the summer, but not for long. I only got to know my father after he’d died. It was a beautiful escape. The South Seas.’

  ‘He never reached the South Seas.’

  ‘How would you know? Where are the South Seas?’

  There was a will to fight in her wild eyes, her pursed lips and her whole body that seemed turned in on itself.

  ‘OK, let’s agree that he went to the South Seas. Did he ever try to get in touch with you or any of your brothers?’

  ‘Not with me. I don’t know about the others, but I don’t think so. Nene has been in Bali for months. The twins were almost strangers to him, and the little one is only eight.’

  ‘But the Jesuits are throwing him out.’

  ‘So much the worse for them. It’s crazy to send a kid to the Jesuits in this day and age. Tito is too imaginative for that kind of education.’

  ‘When your father appears to you, does he say where he was, all that time?’

  ‘There’s no need. I know where he was. In the South Seas. In a wonderful place where he could make a fresh start. The same young man who went to make his fortune in Uruguay.’

  The girl’s account was a bit wide of the mark, but Carvalho had a soft spot for emotional myths.

  ‘Jésica …’

  ‘Jésica … No one ever calls me that. Nearly everybody calls me Yes. Some say Yésica, but no one says Jésica. It sounds nice. Look. My father, skiing in Saint-Moritz. Here he’s giving someone a prize. You know, he looks like you.’

  Carvalho had tired of the sentimental journey through the album. He waved aside the possibility of any resemblance, and half sank back into a black leather sofa. This position of forced relaxation allowed him to contemplate the girl as she bent over the album. Her jeans were unable to conceal the strong, upright legs of a sportswoman, just as her short-sleeved woollen jumper failed to hide two firm breasts with immature nipples. Her neck served as a long, flexible column for the continual leftward and right-ward movement of her head. The ponytail trickled down slowly like honey from some wonderful pot. Sensing that Carvalho was looking at her, she took the swinging ponytail in one hand and turned to face him. He met her gaze. They stared into each other’s eyes until suddenly she ran towards the sofa and sat on Carvalho’s knee. She put her arms around him and buried her blonde head in his chest. The detective reacted without haste. He allowed the girl to let herself go, and slipped in an embrace that went a little beyond calming a young girl’s secret terrors.

  ‘Let him sleep. He’s gone to sleep. He went looking for purification, and now he’s asleep. The only reason they keep chasing him is because they’re jealous.’

  The Ophelia type, thought Carvalho, and he was unsure whether to shake her or sympathize with her. In the end, he gently stroked her head, suppressing an urge to embark on an artful exploration of her neck. Irritated by his own indecision, he moved her away with a gesture that was sudden but controlled.

  ‘When you get the marijuana out of your system, I’d like to come back and talk with you.’

  She smiled, with her eyes closed. Her hands were loosely clenched between her legs.

  ‘I’m fine now. If only you could see what I see!’

  Carvalho went towards the door, and turned to say goodbye. She sat there, still in ecstasy. Once before in his life he had slept with a girl like that—twenty years previously in San Francisco. She was a paediatrician whom he had been trailing in connection with Soviet infiltration of the early American counter-cultural movements. There was something missing from Señorita Stuart, though: the kind of imperial presence which only a North American body could express. Instead, she had that measure of frailty which, however small, clings to every southerner in the world, whatever their social class. Without thinking, he jotted down his name, address and phone number on a piece of paper, and walked back to hand it to the girl.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Why? What for? What’s the point?’

  ‘In case you remember anything else when your head has cleared.’

  He virtually ran from the room. Large steps that faked a sense of purpose.

  Planas had agreed to meet him at one of his companies, the Central Beer plant where he had to attend a board meeting. He would be able to spare twenty minutes at the most. Then he had to leave in order to prepare his speech as the incoming vice chairman of the Employers’ Federation.

  ‘The elections are this evening, and I’m bound to win.’

  Carvalho had not been expecting this outpouring of self-confidence, but he accepted the appointment and prepared to meet Stuart Pedrell’s partner with the same enthusiasm that one might go to play tennis with someone determined to win in straight six-love sets. Carvalho’s prompt arrival deprived Planas of the pleasure of an irritated consultation of his watch.

  ‘A punctual man. A miracle!’

  He took a notebook from his back trouser pocket and wrote in it.

  ‘Whenever I meet someone who is punctual, I note it in my little book. You see? I’m writing your name and the date. It makes a lot of sense. If ever I need a private detective, my first consideration is whether I know him, and the second is whether he’s punctual. The rest looks after itself. Do you mind if we walk as we chat? It gives me a bit of exercise between meetings. Afterwards I have to give an interview about my garden city on the Melmató Heights.’

  The lines of his body were Roman. Classical. Not an ounce of surplus fat. His head had been shaved almost clean, as if in a pre-emptive strike against inevitable baldness. Planas walked beside Carvalho, with his hands behind his back. He looked hard at the ground as he gave carefully considered answers. No particular problems in Stuart Pedrell’s business life. All the projects were going splendidly. He stressed that they had never gone in for dramatic speculative ventures. Everything had full cover and very sound backing. Most of the initial capital belonged neither to him nor to Stuart Pedrell, but to their other partner, the Marquess of Munt.

  ‘Have you not met him yet? Alfredo’s a rare type, a truly great man.’

  Their largest operation was in San Magín—the creation of a completely new neighbourhood, new down to the last lamp post. There had been times when the appropriate authorities had been willing to provide facilities, but not any more. It’s as if capitalism were a sin, and capitalists were Public Enemy Number One.

  Why had Stuart Pedrell gone off like that? ‘He couldn’t face the trauma of reaching fifty. He found it hard enough passing forty, and then forty-five. But he cracked when he came to fifty. He’d made too big a thing of it. And he’d turned his
work into a parody. He’d distanced himself from the business side of things. He was like two people, one who worked, and one who was a thinker. A certain amount of distancing is all right, but not if you pull right out of things. In the end, he was becoming a nihilist, and nihilists can’t run companies. A good businessman has to have a pretty thick skin. He’s got to be able to soak up punishment. Otherwise he’ll never get anywhere—or get other people anywhere.’

  ‘But Stuart Pedrell was a rich man.’

  ‘Very rich. Rich from birth. Not quite as rich as Alfredo Munt, but rich all the same. My case is very different. My family was not badly off but, at the age of forty, my father went under. The bankruptcy was a big scandal. He had tried to set up a bank with the Busquets, and they went bust. My father had to pay over seventy million pesetas to the creditors. Seventy million pesetas. In the 1940s, that was a very large amount of money. He was left without a cent. I was at university at the time, but I was fully aware of everything that was happening. What was your youth like, Señor Carvalho?’

  The detective shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Mine was sad, very sad,’ Planas continued, his eyes fixed on the uneven tarmac of the yard through which they were walking.

  ‘Stuart relied on us, on the security of Munt’s financial backing, and on my capacity for hard work. He contributed “the general perspective”, as he called it. I never quite knew what he meant, but he maintained that it was absolutely fundamental. He spent too much time contemplating his navel and chasing after women, here, there and everywhere. I haven’t had a proper holiday since 1948. Seriously. Just the occasional trip, to please my wife. Oh, and every May I go to a German clinic in Marbella. It’s designed to clear the toxins from your body. They start you with a day on a diet of fruit, and then a litre of some revolting purgative. That’s when the torture really begins: a fortnight of almost total fasting! Every other day, they give me an enema, which seems to go on forever. But, my friend, just when you think you’re going to collapse—pow! Your body starts to flow with new energy. You play tennis, you climb mountains. You think you’re Superman. I’ve been going for five years now, and I always come out feeling as if I could float on air.’

  He drew closer to Carvalho, and lightly touched the rings under his eyes.

  ‘Those rings. You must have a tired liver.’

  He walked ahead of Carvalho to an office on high ground overlooking the warehouse. He asked a secretary for the address of the Buchinger Clinic in Marbella, and gave it to Carvalho. With a brisk glance at his watch he invited the detective to follow him back into the yard.

  ‘One must try to grow old with dignity. You’re younger than I am, but not much. I can see that you don’t look after yourself. I thought private detectives did gymnastics or ju jitsu. Every morning, I go jogging near my house in Pedralbes. I choose a path, and off I go, up the hill to Vallvidrera.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘Seven in the morning.’

  ‘I’m just getting up then. Frying up a couple of eggs with chorizo.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that! Anyway, as I was saying, I run up the hill, and then I run back down again. And then there’s the water massage twice a week. Have you ever tried it? Fantastic. It’s as if some water pressurizer were pounding your whole body. A jet of water, at full pressure. You stand like you were going to be shot. Try standing like that yourself.’

  Planas moved three metres away from Carvalho and aimed an imaginary hose at him.

  ‘From this distance, they shoot a stream of lukewarm water at you, concentrating on the parts of your body you want to slim down. Then they do the same with cold water. By the end, your blood is circulating incredibly well. And that helps to break down the fat. You have a splendid figure, but I can see pockets of fat that you ought to get rid of. Around your kidneys and your stomach. Here. Yes, this is where it hurts. A good jet of water—whoosh … Discipline, that’s the key. And don’t overdo it with the drinking. Hell! It’s two o’clock … The publicity people are waiting … Was there anything else?’

  ‘During the period when he dropped out of sight, did Stuart Pedrell ever make contact with you?’

  ‘Never. It wasn’t necessary for the business. And he had given authority to Viladecans for any decisions that had to be made on his behalf. Also, Mima started to work herself, and she proved much better than her husband.’

  ‘What about the personal side of things?’

  ‘We never had much to say to each other. Probably our only long conversation was the first one, twenty-five years ago when we decided to become partners. We must have seen each other thousands of times since then—but never to talk, never just for a chat. Munt had a different kind of relationship with him, though. You should ask Munt.’

  He held out his hand as if he were shooting and offering his condolences at the same time.

  ‘Don’t forget what I said about the clinic. There’s nothing so healthy as a good enema.’

  ‘Bye-bye, Planas,’ thought Carvalho. ‘I hope you have a healthy death.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re out of that one.’

  ‘What else do you have by way of chilled whites?’

  ‘Viña Paceta.’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  He ordered some sea snails as an appetizer. For his next course, the proprietor offered a choice: a mixed seafood platter that would include more snails or a dish of baked dorado fish. Carvalho chose the dorado, both because he wanted to stay on the white wine, and because the fish would help him reduce the swelling under his eyes and improve the state of his liver. He liked to eat at Leopoldo’s from time to time. It was a restaurant he had retrieved from the mythology of his adolescence.

  One summer, when his mother was in Galicia, his father had invited him out to a restaurant. This was a rare event in itself, because his father was the kind of man who believed that all restaurants fleeced their customers and served up garbage. But someone had told him about a restaurant in the Barrio Chino which offered huge portions at reasonable prices. It was there that he took Carvalho. The young man stuffed himself on squid alla Romana—the most sophisticated dish he knew—while his father stayed with more familiar dishes.

  ‘It’s certainly good. And there’s lots of it. Now let’s see what it’s going to cost us!’

  A long time passed before he set foot in a restaurant again. But he always remembered Leopoldo’s as the place where he had been initiated into a ritual that was to become a passion. He returned many years later, when the restaurant was no longer run by the attentive man who had taken their order and treated them with all the courtesy due to regular and discriminating customers. Now it was merely a good-quality fish restaurant, where a local petit-bourgeoisie mingled with people from the north of the city who had heard of the restaurant by repute.

  Carvalho had chosen a diet of fish and chilled white wine. Whereas once he used to fight off anxiety attacks by diving into snack bars and restaurants and ordering with a combination of greed and good taste, he now tried to overcome them by consuming the country’s reserves of white wine.

  The proprietor was surprised at the modesty of his choice for dessert, and his omission of a liqueur after coffee. ‘I’m in a hurry,’ Carvalho said, by way of excuse. But on reaching the door, he decided that he had acted against nature, against his nature. He sat down again, called over the proprietor and asked for a double measure of ice-cold brandy. After the first sip, he knew he was returning to his normal self. My liver? To hell with it! It’s mine, after all. It’ll do what I tell it. He ordered another double brandy and decided that the transfusion that he had needed for several days was now complete.

  He left the restaurant and walked down Calle Aurora in search of the lost scenery of his adolescence. He passed a building whose modern appearance was surprising in a street that dated from the assassination of Noi del Sucre. He saw a group of people hovering around a doorway, and noticed a poster advertising a series of discussions on the roman noir. With alcoholic
self-assurance, Carvalho joined the people waiting for one of the sessions to begin. He knew these types. They had that look of hard-boiled eggs which was common to intellectuals everywhere, although among Spaniards it had a particular inflection: the hard-boiled eggs seemed less solid than in other latitudes. They had an awareness, born of underdevelopment, that the egg was in danger. They were divided into tribes, according to background and affinity. There was one tribe that enjoyed a higher intellectual status than the others. This could be seen in the way they were regarded in the eyes of others. Seemingly casually, people went out of their way to cross their paths, and felt a need to greet them and be recognized in return.

  The session finally got under way, and Carvalho found himself in a blue auditorium, together with a hundred or so people who were eager to demonstrate that they knew more about the roman noir than the seven or eight experts on the platform.

  The platform contribution began with a ‘confidence-boosting’ operation in which the several brains limbered up by identifying the function, the place and the precise identity of the object under discussion. The process was then repeated according to post-Vatican Council rites. Two round-table participants, having appointed themselves senior members, proceeded to play a private game of intellectual ping-pong over whether or not Dostoyevsky had written romans noirs. Then they moved on to Henry James, via an obligatory allusion to Poe, and finally announced their discovery that the roman noir was invented by a French book-jacket designer who used the colour black for Gallimard’s series of detective novels. Someone else on the platform tried to break into the monopolistic duologue being conducted by the bearded contributor and the short-sighted Latin American. But he was invisibly, metaphysically elbowed aside by the senior members.

  ‘The point is …’

  ‘In my opinion …’

  ‘If you will allow me to …’

  They didn’t allow anything. For a few moments, he tried to squeeze in the sentence: ‘The roman noir was born with the Great Depression …’ But his voice only reached the first row and part of the second, where Pepe Carvalho was seated. The particular way in which the two soloists moved their Adam’s apples suggested that they were about to pronounce a final conclusion or enunciate some synthesizing formula.