Tattoo (6 page)

‘That’s right, laugh! Laugh if you want to, I’m not going to charge you!’

Carvalho paid her no attention. He was considering the situation. One trail led to Holland, a specific job, a specific place. Another led to a woman on the game who had probably put away all her creams and pillows until the storm had passed.

‘Charo, I’m off to Holland. Look for this Frenchy for me while I’m gone, will you? Be calm and patient about it, and make sure you take no risks.’

By now Charo was giving him short pecks on his shoulder-pad. Carvalho could feel her kisses penetrating this layer of protection and exploding all over his skin.

T
he plane landed at Nice for a stopover. Carvalho feasted his eyes on the spectacle of the mountains above the Côte d’Azur. Kilometre after kilometre of hills with villas nestling among well-tended vegetation. Carvalho compared this rational speculation of tiny paradises with the unbridled destruction of the Spanish coastline. His mind began to fill with the old logic that sought links between cause and effect, between good and evil. But as soon as this logic became demanding and insistent, an alarm bell went off in his head, and he dismissed all the arguments. He wanted nothing more to do with any analysis of the world he lived in. He had long since decided he was on the journey between childhood and old age of a personal, non-transferable destiny, of a life that nobody else could live for him, no more, no less, no better, no worse. Everybody else could go get stuffed. He had deliberately restricted his capacity for abstract emotion to what he could get from the landscape around him. All his other emotions were immediate, skin deep.

Ten new passengers boarded the plane at Nice, and the blue-uniformed stewardesses of the Dutch airline distributed them in the remaining seats. A leathery old woman sat next to Carvalho. She was wearing a typical flowery hat and looked neat and well turned out. She was in talkative mood, and Carvalho soon found himself immersed in an absurd discussion about why the salinity of the Mediterranean was
dropping alarmingly year after year. When the stewardesses started bustling up and down the cabin, he realised they must be in the last stages of the journey. He stood up and headed for the lavatory. He checked his papers. He had his Spanish private detective permit and the out-of-date ID the San Francisco police had given him eight years earlier. He made sure his Star revolver was fitting snugly in his shoulder holster. He took two switchblades out of his jacket pocket. One belonged to the pimp he had beaten up in Charo’s apartment. He threw it into the lavatory bowl. The other was his, a magnificent Mexican blade he had carried with him ever since his adventures in Baja California.

He pulled up his trouser leg and slipped the knife into a sheath hidden in his shoe lining. Then he returned to his seat. The old French lady had dozed off. Carvalho took advantage of this verbal truce to consider what had brought him on this journey. He could not get out of his mind the image of the faceless corpse of the man who was ‘bold and blond as beer’. Sometimes he found himself filling the blank with other people’s faces: Jean-Pierre Aumont in
Scheherazade
, or Tab Hunter. Or a blond Yves Montand with less clown-like features. All of a sudden, the words of the song Bromuro had mentioned came back to him, although they were still rather jumbled:

That was it, more or less. He remembered how the song began:

The song was sung by a woman who had fallen in love with this handsome foreigner. With this handsome sailor who had spent one night, just one night, with her. Did that woman exist in the case of the tattooed man? He certainly had enough mystery about him for a woman to be caught like a bird in the branches of a tree.

Men of mystery tend to attract women, Carvalho told himself, almost out loud. Could the woman be Frenchy? It was significant that the man went with the same prostitute several times. Carvalho was sure that somewhere there was a woman, the singer of the song, who could tell him all or nearly all the secrets of the man who was ‘bold and blond as beer’. The motto on the tattoo was surprising as well. One thing was a veteran of the Spanish Legion, full of scorn and literature, setting off between the wars on another adventure with his gun and some verses by Apollinaire. That would never happen nowadays, thought Carvalho, now that people have discovered they can only do what’s possible. Nobody invents their life as though it were a novel.

The stewardess tapped Carvalho on the shoulder and brought him out of his daydream. She pointed to his seat belt. Her smiling, healthy face with a touch of rouge framed by auburn, almost red hair gave her a look hardly ever seen in Spain. Carvalho watched as she continued on her rounds, telling passengers about their belts, asking them to
stop smoking or to raise their seat-backs. She was superb. Carvalho began to feel the kind of erotic urge foreigners feel when they identify a new city with new women. Every journey should lead to a surprising woman, a grand finale, the best terminus. Why not the stewardess? Carvalho tried to catch her eye, but she was surveying the passengers with a neutral, professional glance, and skipped over Carvalho like an object she had already checked and stored away.

Carvalho forgot about his erotic impulse and instead stretched his head so that he could look out of the window beyond the old French woman and see the orderly green fields of Holland getting larger and larger as the plane began its descent. Awake again, his neighbour tried to engage him in talk about Holland. Carvalho told her he knew Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Leiden. The old French woman was going to her daughter’s house in Rotterdam. She was married to the foils teacher for the Dutch Olympic team. Was Carvalho going to Rotterdam?

‘No, Amsterdam.’

Despite the fact that his real destination was The Hague, Carvalho had chosen Amsterdam as his base. Firstly because distances do not exist in Holland, above all the distances between Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. Secondly because Amsterdam was one of the cities in the world he adored, and something told him that the man as bold and blond as beer did not exactly fit into the mould of a Spanish worker stuck in the Philips factory at The Hague. His passage must have left some traces in the splendid city of Amsterdam, and in particular in the night-time red light district.

The plane landed at Schiphol airport, only a stone’s throw from Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Carvalho knew where to go in the airport, and headed straight for the bus station. His bus soon filled up with workers coming back tanned,
moustachioed and loud voiced from holidays spent back in their home countries. Turks, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese: a whole alphabet of poor European countries where life was hard. It was growing dark, but Carvalho still had time to take in the green, watery geometry of the Dutch landscape between Schiphol and Amsterdam. Fugitives from a dry country, the Turks had lost their initial boisterousness and gradually accepted the convention of silence imposed by this part of Europe, where everything looked as though it were drawn with a ruler.

For Carvalho, the old Schiller hotel was one of the attractions of Amsterdam. From the window of one of its slightly shabby rooms he looked out over Rembrandtplein. In the centre stood a statue of the heavyweight painter, displaying a serenity he would never have shown in his lifetime. If the Dutch could, thought Carvalho, they would turn Rembrandt’s tortured paintings into eighteenth-century French pastels. Above the rooftops he could see the gilded figure of an angel with a trumpet on top of a clock tower in a nearby square. He decided to postpone his visit to The Hague until the next day. It was growing dark with Nordic rapidity, and he wanted to make use of the last daylight to reacquaint himself with paths he had traced on previous visits along the canals down to the red light district, the Central Station and the port. Also, he did not want to miss having dinner in an Indonesian restaurant. He knew Amsterdam boasted two outstanding choices: the Indonesia or the Bali. The first of these was only two or three blocks from his hotel, and its Rysttafel was unbeatable.

Nothing in the world could stop him enjoying two glasses of genever, washed down with an equal number of mugs of beer, in the first tavern he found. Places like this in England
and Holland appealed to their customers with the warmth of their wooden panels and well-worn tables, the space they offered for people to sit and talk, the time allowed for beer to settle into the contours of stomachs. Carvalho realised yet again that it is the small details that create the overall meaning of something. One of the things he had been most looking forward to on his journey to Holland was to be able to drink those two glasses of Dutch gin, washed down with mugs of beer. Genever, made from grain and juniper berries, is unclassifiable, much less refined and elaborated than English dry gin. You have to ask especially for it from the waiters, because they consider it too rough for palates that are not accustomed to it, and prefer to offer English gin instead. There was a time and a place for everything. Carvalho remembered the ghastly amontillado he had been forced to drink so often in California because there was no real Spanish sherry to be had, the Californian burgundy of those Californian whites which were as similar to his white wines from Galicia as celery is to asparagus.

If there is room in the human body for two genevers and two mugs of beer, there is room for four. In a spirit of great self-sacrifice, Carvalho put this theory to the test, then went out for a walk, happy to concede that the world, or at least the Dutch corner of it, was as it should be. The waters and the trees of the canals were dark, but the blood flowing through his own veins was lit up by the alcohol he had consumed. He walked along several streets, catching the first glimpses of darkness in the bowl of night. Slow cyclists drifted lazily past him, while cars sped along, trusting to the survival instincts of anyone on foot.

The evening was cool, so Carvalho decided to return to his hotel for his coat. The receptionist gave him his key, and told him to wait a moment. From the far end of the foyer
an immense trench-coat appeared, topped by a tiny green Tyrolean hat sporting a grey feather. A pure Ayran quickly showed Carvalho his police badge. He spoke in English, and asked whether he minded answering a few questions. Carvalho went to sit with him in the same corner he had emerged from. As if by magic, the man’s hand suddenly sprouted a small wooden box with two rows of tiny cigars the size of toothpicks. Carvalho took one.

‘We remember you well.’

‘It’s been a long time.’

‘Not long enough. You were here for two years as a security expert.’

‘That was a political appointment.’

‘Yes, I know. My colleague Rinus Kayser told me. He sends his regards. He could not come in person. How many days will you be in Holland?’

‘Not many. Three or four.’

‘The reason for your trip?

‘A sentimental one.’

‘A girl?’

‘Amsterdam. It’s a city I love.’

‘Hmm. Are you sure there is no professional reason for your visit? We could help you.’

‘I don’t work much these days, and when I do it’s as a private investigator, as you would call it. I live in Spain now, and all the work there concerns investigating unfaithful wives.’

‘You don’t investigate unfaithful husbands?’

‘In Spain it’s the men who have the money to investigate their wives’ infidelity.’

‘Is it one of those cases that’s brought you to Holland?’

‘We also have motels in Spain. Adulterous couples don’t have to travel as far as Holland.’

‘OK. Anyway, you know where we are. We would be very upset if we thought you didn’t trust us.’

Carvalho said goodbye to the cop with all the warmth of his Celtic ancestors. He even accompanied him through the revolving doors and out into the street. Afterwards he went up to his room to go over the interview in his mind. He had not expected things to move this quickly. Of course he knew where to find them. In Holland you never see a cop in the street, but there are as many police stations as there are chestnut sellers in winter. He wondered whether they would keep watch on him during his stay. He didn’t think it was very likely, unless the Spanish police had sent a report before he had got here, linking what he was doing to their anti-drugs operation. That did not seem likely either: most probably it had just been an indirect warning from the Polizei. We know you’re here, and by the way you no longer have any of the privileges of a security expert sent by the US government. OK, message received. Carvalho thought that was probably the end of it.

His determination to eat in an Indonesian restaurant put an end to his deliberations. With every step he took towards the Indonesia he could feel his appetite increasing. The short ride up in the lift to the restaurant did nothing to diminish it. Faced with the huge choice on the menu he was offered, he decided there was only one option: the most expensive Rysttafel. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been heresy not to accompany it with wine. But in Holland it was heresy not to have a couple of glasses of chilled beer. When the small candles under the hot plates for the Rysttafel were lit, Carvalho suddenly felt depressed. It was nothing more than the typical sense of being let down that anyone dining on their own tends to feel. Faced with the implications of that, there was nothing for it but to eat a lot and well. Within five
minutes, the stomach starts its psychological warfare with the brain. And as always happens on these occasions, it is the practical intelligence which wins out over the theoretical. The tongue serves as intermediary between spirit and flesh, and brings the two together with all the art of a pander with a first-class degree. The sauces were based mostly on peanut, as ingredient or on the side. The wide range of stews and fried dishes combined perfectly with the white, bland taste of the long-grain Indian rice. And whenever Carvalho’s palate began to suffer from an overload of spices or sticky sauces, half a glass of beer washed it clean and fresh, ready to undertake further magical research.