Off Side (8 page)

‘Do you believe, señor Félix de Azúa, that if we made admission to football grounds free, soccer violence would disappear?’

‘I think it very likely.’

‘Do you have other forms of substitutive aggression on your list?’

‘Yes. Nationalism. Excessive patriotism, in the negative sense that it necessitates the existence of an external enemy. Also deaths in road-traffic accidents, and motorway deaths in particular. Industrial societies are willing to take on themselves the costs of deaths resulting from the use of motor cars, but not the cost of deaths arising from religion, politics or sex. Some deaths are permitted, others are not. Urban culture generates a scenario in which laws are able to distinguish between violence which is acceptable and violence which is not.’

‘Do you share this point of view, señor García Nieto?’

The communist Jesuit agreed with the theory and the general scenario, and agreed that double standards were applied, but said that the causes of the violence and the disorder lay in the mystified values of wealth and the inability of the majority of people to achieve that wealth, a sense of powerlessness which was becoming increasingly widespread in society.

‘Thirty per cent of Spanish society lives below the poverty line. How can it avoid being violent?’

‘And fewer and fewer people are going to football matches,’ the interviewer concluded, philosophically.

Carvalho switched off the radio. Faced with the choice of either going to the office or examining once more on foot what his mind’s eye had reconstructed with the aid of the radio debate, he opted for the latter, parked the car, and headed off towards
Arco del Teatro to examine the future path of the bulldozers, zigzagging down alleys that had an air of expectant mourning, and saying goodbye to buildings that had suddenly become ennobled by the death sentence hanging over them, because even the Boston Strangler inspired compassion and acquired dignity in the hours preceding his execution. Going up San Oligario, he emerged onto calle de San Rafael. On the left, Casa Leopoldo, an honest restaurant in the process of preparing its daily offerings; in front, pasaje de Martorell; to the right, calle de Robadors, with its now defunct bars for cheap prostitutes, and a couple of boarding houses, including one which announced itself as belonging to a certain ‘Conchi’, but whose neon sign evidently reserved its electric energies solely for the night. All the bars were more or less shut, except for one which reproduced a tropical environment reminiscent of some Third World country definitively ruined by foreign debt. Three ageing, early rising prostitutes were staring contemplatively into their coffees, and his presence as the only man in the place failed to arouse their interest. Carvalho went up to the bar and ordered a coffee, and instantly sensed a human warmth hovering by his right shoulder. He turned round to see a girl in such reduced circumstances that she looked more like a memory of her former self. The skin of her face was grey, and the way it was distributed over bones that were well proportioned but meagre reminded you of a skull. She sported a black eye, and a bruise on her forehead.

‘Excuse me, sir. Would you be interested in enjoying a literary screw this morning?’

‘Any particular type of literature?’

‘Type or genre?’

‘It’s all the same to me.’

‘We could screw like a Baudelaire poem.’

‘Poetry doesn’t turn me on.’

‘What the poetry doesn’t do, I’m sure I can.’

‘What faculty did you graduate from?’

‘The Faculty of Fellatio. Do you know what fellatio is?’

‘It’s a long time since I was at university …’

‘A blow-job.’

‘A blow-job,’ Carvalho mused as he grappled with the hidden etymology of this mysterious word.

‘At this time of day, you’ll get it cheap. The price goes up later.’

‘That’s a terrible way to do business. At this time of day you should be charging more. There’s less competition about.’

The would-be intellectual retorted sharply: ‘Do you want it or not?’

Her eyes flicked intermittently to a corner of the bar where Carvalho just about made out a young man with a pigtail, who was watching them in a vacant sort of way.

‘Is that your pimp?’

‘No. My father. What are you after, here?’

‘A coffee.’

‘Do you want coke?’

‘Do you have coke?’

‘No. But I know where you could get some.’

‘And that way you get some too. Are things really that bad?’

‘Things are as good or bad as my cunt happens to feel like.’

‘A professional prostitute would never have said anything so vulgar.’

‘What do you know about prostitutes?’

‘My girlfriend’s a prostitute.’

‘I bet your girlfriend’s a slag.’

And she turned on her heel, but her legs were too skinny for the stylish exit she’d intended. She disappeared into the half light at the back of the bar and sat next to her boyfriend. From that moment on, two pairs of venomous eyes drilled into the back of Carvalho’s head until the moment when he finally finished his coffee and turned to glare sufficiently menacingly for the two of them to pretend to be scanning other horizons.

Dorothy arrived with six suitcases in tow and an aunt who had reared her like a mother. The aunt was drinking Irish whiskey from a silver hip flask and assuring everyone within earshot that she would only be staying in Barcelona long enough to make sure that her niece was well installed and that the city had good specialists in liver complaints. Since the onset of puberty Dorothy had been afflicted by a delicate liver. This, however, had not prevented her from becoming a good sportswoman and a star dancer at Soho parties until the moment she met Jack, whereupon she had been forced to cool her arse, so to speak.

‘Thus spake Zarathustra,’ Camps O’Shea announced, as he concluded his unasked-for report on Dorothy’s impending arrival. ‘Have you heard of Sarah Ferguson? A daughter-in-law of the Queen of England.’

‘I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.’

‘You must have read about her in the papers. Oh no — I forgot — you don’t read newspapers.’

‘I know the name.’

‘Well, Dorothy is like Sarah Ferguson, but a bit less chunky. For my taste the Ferguson woman has always seemed a bit on the fat side.’

The word ‘fat’ was a serious insult when it came from the lips of the fastidious Camps.

‘And as for the aunt, let’s hope that she leaves as soon as possible, because she insists on sticking her nose in everywhere. She even wanted to see the dressing rooms where Jack will be changing. I told her that Aids is running rampant in Spain, and particularly in club changing rooms. Speaking of changing rooms, we’ve hired a company to put security guards at all the entrances to the ground, on the pretext that there’s been a lot of thieving at the
club recently, and we’re concerned for the security of our players. Have you made any progress?’

‘Yes and no. To tell you the truth, I’m at a bit of a loss. I used to know where I was with Spanish criminals, but with this new breed of imported criminal I don’t know if I’m coming or going. The message I get from them isn’t capable of being translated. It’s very weird.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The contacts that I’ve made have so far led me to a non-Spanish Mafia, and from talking with them it’s obvious that they know nothing about what we’re hoping they know about, but they certainly know something that they don’t want
us
to know about.’

‘Isn’t the one the same as the other?’

‘No.’

Camps had arranged to meet him at the gates of the Montjuich stadium, and they were strolling like a pair of sightseers past the building site where the rebuilding was taking place: the perimeter of the place was to be maintained intact, with the original façade, but the inside of the stadium was to be rebuilt entirely. A homage to memory, as Camps commented unenthusiastically.

‘It’s not that I think that all museums should be burned and the Parthenon knocked down once and for all. But I do think you can go too far in conserving heritage. If humanity had spent all its energies on conserving its heritage, we’d still be living in caves. Do you find anything particularly striking about this stadium?’

‘I couldn’t imagine walking through Montjuich without expecting to see it there.’

‘Imagine the scene here seventy years ago — what a surprise this building would have been for travellers who happened to come across it. I’m more interested in what our new buildings are going to look like, though. Barcelona is going to be a showcase for world architecture. The new is generally less banal at the start, although sometimes the new is already dead at birth. When I was in France this year, I visited a nuclear power station which is
apparently never going to be operational. It was a frightening experience. Rather like walking round some abandoned ancient city. Palenque. Pompeii. Machu Picchu. Spoleto. Have you ever been to Spoleto? The city began life around a temple to Diocletian, and its subsequent growth has maintained that original logic. It’s as if the town is growing out of the temple itself. Extraordinary, it is. Here, take this.’

He casually handed Carvalho a piece of paper containing the latest anonymous letter, which was equally menacing and parallelistic as the one before: ‘Centre forwards have heads of stone, and bodies of pink coral, and that is why they shatter when they hurl themselves against cliffs.

‘And you grow in their shadow, you invalids who will never pose for an epic portrait, and in the destruction of the centre forward you will be reborn, because on his corpse will grow your status as biological remains.

‘All these are the reasons why you deserve that the centre forward should be killed, and at dusk. And if you ask me why the centre forward must be killed at dusk, I will tell you that it must be before night comes, and before I am left, alone, in the house of the dead whom only I remember.’

‘I’m not so keen on this one.’

‘It’s got a quote in it, from a poem by Espriu. Basté de Linyola spotted it. Look at the last sentence, and compare it with this bit.’

Camps handed him another piece of paper, with two handwritten verses which he had presumably copied himself.

Maybe tomorrow

more slow hours will arrive,

of clarity for the eyes

of this greedy gaze

But now it is night

and I am left alone

in the house of the dead

whom only I remember.

‘How’s your Catalan?’

‘Fairly good.’

‘Our killer obviously has taste. Would you like to meet Dorothy?’

‘No. But I would like to have a quiet talk with you. I’d like to invite you to my house for supper. I live in Vallvidrera. I’ll be inviting a friend of mine too, a commercial agent. He collects autographs of PR men from famous football teams. I’ll be doing the cooking, so you’ll have the chance of being surprised at my practical abilities, since you were obviously impressed with my theoretical abilities the other day.’

‘I feel honoured by the invitation.’

He meant it.

‘You can bring a friend, if you like.’

‘I don’t usually take friends to this kind of revelationary encounter. Sometimes it’s better to go without. And why is your agent friend coming?’

‘He’s a good talker, good at breaking the ice, and he doesn’t have my inquisitorial tendencies. I seem to spend my whole life questioning people.’

‘So I noticed. By the way, I have to report another appointment, which we might not find so agreeable. Inspector Contreras wants to have words with us. Both of us.’

‘Contreras, eh?’

‘Do you know him?’

‘From years back. He’s one of my favourite enemies. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. He’s become more sophisticated over the years. He started life like a cop out of some low-budget Spanish film from the 1950s. Then he turned into a policeman from the American film noir. Recently he’s had more substance to him. I don’t know what his role model is this time, because I haven’t been to the pictures for years, but he’s not the
same Contreras that I once knew. When’s he expecting us?’

‘Whenever suits us.’

‘We could go right away.’

They each arrived separately, in their own cars. Carvalho in a Renault on which he was still paying the HP instalments, and Camps in an Alfetta. But they contrived to enter the via Layetana police headquarters together. Contreras raised an amicable eyebrow for Camps, and a disapproving one for Carvalho.

‘Parasites like our friend here will continue to exist for as long as they find gentlemen like yourself willing to foot the bill. This is the first time I see you when you’re not in trouble with the law, Carvalho. Lucky for you, nobody’s been killed yet. A private detective is allowed to investigate a threat. But just you remember, the moment there’s a drop of blood, if I see you snooping about, I’ll have you. Why don’t you retire?’

‘I’m a terrible spendthrift. I haven’t saved enough money to retire.’

‘Aren’t you with a pension fund?’

‘No.’

‘You’re making a big mistake. An old detective isn’t a detective any more — he’s just old. Take it from me. I’ve got the state standing behind me, but as far as I can see, you don’t have a penny to your name.’

‘I haven’t come here to talk about pensions.’

‘What do you think of this second letter? Damn stupid, if you ask me. That’s all we need, anonymous poets turning to crime! In the old days maybe we were less educated, but people were more honest. I’ve never seen such a load of drivel. I miss the old days, when anonymous letters were full of spelling mistakes, and used to start like the letters that people wrote before the war: “I hope that this letter finds you well. I am well too, thank the Lord”.’

Camps let out an entirely inappropriate guffaw, and then repeated it. So inappropriate that to Carvalho it indicated a lack of respect and a streak of hysteria. Camps sensed what Carvalho was
thinking, and this made him laugh even more, until by the end there were tears streaming down his face.

‘I’m glad you find me so amusing.’

In Contreras’s eyes you could almost see the handcuffs that he was mentally preparing for the impertinent Camps O’Shea. The latter was having some difficulty regaining his composure.