The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) (24 page)

‘Pilar,’ Cámara said in surprise. ‘You look lovely.’

‘I’m going,’ Pilar repeated. ‘I want my wages for the month and then I’m leaving, and I’m not coming back. And if you don’t like it I’ll just go to the police and tell them about what you’ve got growing on the patio back there. Don’t think I don’t know. I should have gone years ago. It’s a disgrace, you being a policeman.’

‘Pilar, what’s happened? What’s the matter?’

Hilario had got up and was rinsing his hands under the tap, not looking at his house helper.

‘I’m getting married,’ she announced.

Cámara almost dropped his mug.

‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ he coughed. ‘Congratulations. Who’s the lucky man? Do we know him?’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘And I don’t ever want him to meet anyone from this house of sin.’

‘I see.’

Hilario moved away from the sink and made to step out of the kitchen. Pilar was barring his way.

‘You’ll have to let me pass if you want me to get your money,’ he said.

Pilar looked shocked, as though he’d insulted her, then finally stepped to the side to let him through. She watched him as he walked down the corridor. Cámara thought he could see tears welling up in her eyes.

‘Do you want to sit down?’

She appeared not to have heard.

‘Pilar?’

‘No, I’m all right,’ she snapped, lifting a handkerchief to her face. She blew her nose like a trumpet, then sniffed.

Cámara stood up as Hilario came back into the room with an envelope, which he gave to her without a word.

She looked at him expectantly.

‘Was there anything else?’ Hilario asked.

She raised the handkerchief to her face again.

‘Look, this is all very sudden,’ Cámara said. ‘Does it have to be immediate, like this? Couldn’t you stay on for a few days at least? Hilario’s not very well.’

‘Oh, he’s fine,’ she said. ‘Nothing wrong with him. Only in his soul. May God pity him. I gave up praying for him long ago.’

There was a pause, as though she expected one of them to say something, but there was nothing to add.

She uttered a disgusted ‘humph’ as she tossed her keys on to the kitchen table and turned to go.

‘
¡Adiós!
’ she said sharply. And she marched down the corridor.

‘Bye,’ Cámara said.

The whole building shook as she slammed the front door shut behind her.

Hilario poured himself some more coffee and sat back down at the table with something approaching a grin on his face. Cámara glanced at the pile of dishes again.

‘What
did
happen last night?’ he said. ‘You invited her to stay for dinner, didn’t you?’

Hilario shrugged

‘I was feeling lonely.’

‘You’ve been smoking on your own again, you mean.’

‘No, certainly not. There was plenty of food, it didn’t look as though you were coming back any time soon, so I merely suggested she joined me.’

‘And you had a few drinks together?’

‘A few.’

‘And then what?’

‘What?’

‘Look, the woman who’s been looking after you since the beginning of time has very suddenly just stormed out on us. Something must have happened.’

Cámara stopped, a look of horror on his face.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You didn’t. I can’t believe it. You didn’t—’

‘She only had a couple of bites.’

‘You fed her marihuana cake!’

‘It came out very well this time. There’s some left. Do you want to try?’

Cámara sat down next to his grandfather, the strength seeming to ebb from him.

‘I don’t believe it.’

Hilario was chuckling.

‘How did she react?’

The chuckling turned into laughter.

‘You’re still high, aren’t you. What happened? How did she react?’

‘She loved it,’ Hilario managed to splutter. ‘She asked for more.’

‘You said she only had a couple of bites.’

‘All right, a couple of slices, then.’

‘Pilar ate two slices of
your
marihuana cake! I’m amazed she could even stand this morning.’

‘Oh, she was full of beans last night. Really began to relax.’

Cámara gave his grandfather a look. Hilario was in his mid-eighties; Pilar was in her late fifties.

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, no.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘No no no no no. You’re not telling me you—’

‘No, of course I didn’t,’ Hilario said. ‘I’ve got some scruples you know.’

‘So what, then?’

‘It was her. Started saying she was feeling hot, despite the window being open. And starts loosening her blouse, unbuttoning it, unfastening the belt round her skirt.’

‘No no no no no.’

‘And then she pounced.’

‘She pounced?’

‘Threw herself on me. Declared that she’d always loved and wanted me, and that it was so hard working all these years in the flat, hoping that one day I might take notice of her.’

‘Was it just marihuana you put in the cake?’

‘And that she never received so much as a kind word from me.’

‘Well, that’s true.’

‘And she had to have me.’

Cámara looked at him.

‘So what did you do?’

‘I did what any man of honour would do.’

‘Which is?’

‘I called a taxi and sent her home.’

‘That’s not like you. Giving up a chance like that.’

‘We’re talking about Pilar, for God’s sake.’

‘Still, you are over eighty, you know. Might not get any more offers.’

‘Shut up.’

Cámara paused, then sighed.

‘I just can’t believe she’s gone.’

Yago’s phone was diverting to voicemail. Cámara left a message asking him to call back.

Finding a used padded envelope, he placed the samples he’d picked up from the warehouse at Pozoblanco and put them inside. Then he cut out a sheet of paper, stuck it over the front with sticky tape, and wrote Maragall’s name and home address on it. On a second sheet he wrote where the samples had come from, and the date, and signed it. Placing the note inside the envelope as well, he stuck it closed with more tape and left it on the side. He’d go out later and get a stamp to send it.

He didn’t mention Reza, or the million’s worth of saffron that had blown out of the warehouse, scattering over the fields. Reza was hurt, which meant he would probably stay at Pozoblanco until the very end of his visa. And that suited Cámara well. Reza had tried to kill him twice now, and was obviously involved in the saffron scam. But there was still nothing to link him definitively to Mirella’s murder. Only Estrella had talked of a Moroccan new on the drug scene. Was that Reza, posing as a Moroccan again? Had Reza fuelled Mirella’s drug habit? Then raped and killed her?

After a shower, Hilario went for a lie-down on the bed.

‘All this excitement.’

So Pilar was gone. It would take a while to get used to. But there was another question to think about now. Who would look after Hilario? Yes, he was an independent-minded and relatively fit eighty-four-year-old. But living on his own, with no one coming in to check up on him, help him with the housework?

Perhaps they could find someone else. But no sooner had the thought formed itself than Cámara knew it could never happen. Who else could put up with Hilario in the way Pilar had? He could see a stream of women coming into the flat, none of them staying for more than a month, then leaving in a rage, before a new one could could be found and it started again.

What could he do? Leave him on his own? Not really. Put him in a home? Forget it. Stay in Albacete himself to look after him? He’d rather die.

A solution will present itself, he thought as he picked up the envelope and walked to the door.

His phone gurgled at him as he went to open the door. It was Eduardo García, the historian.

‘Can you meet? This morning? It’s quite urgent.’

CÁMARA DROPPED OFF
the samples for Maragall at the yellow postbox at the end of road and started walking towards the city centre. The winds of the night before hadn’t properly abated, and he looked up into the sky, half-expecting to see saffron stigmas floating in the air.

He thought about giving Alicia a quick call, to see how she was, to tell her about Pilar, about Hilario, about the saffron scam, the FBI investigation and Reza Amini the Iranian pretending to be a Moroccan. There was material there for an article, more than enough, and he would have called her – he really would have – if it hadn’t been for the noise in the street. Just as he stepped out the city taxi drivers decided to stage a protest, driving in convoy through the streets, blaring their horns to demonstrate against a recent spate of attacks by late-night passengers. Beside him other pedestrians were walking with their hands over their ears against the noise, while police motorcycle escorts flashed blue lights in front and behind the taxi cavalcade, herding them along.

‘No more violence against taxi drivers!’

‘We have a right to make a living too!’

If this were taking place in Valencia, Cámara thought, someone would be setting off some firecrackers about now as well, adding a few extra decibels to help get the point across.

He smiled to himself. Valencia. He almost missed the place.

And the phone stayed in his pocket, unused.

Besides, the saffron thing had been a sideline, a diversion. What he was really interested in, what made him stay, apart from Hilario’s health, was the Mirella Faro case. And on that he’d made little progress. Should he try and talk to Inspector Jiménez? He wouldn’t react too well to another homicide policeman trying to barge in on his murder.

Too many questions unanswered, too many unknowns. Tying things up, making the world neat again – he knew it was one of the urges that drove him, that made him a policeman. And it was a never-ending task: messiness, chaos, came at you again and again, like a barking dog in the night. And he’d pushed against that for as long as he could remember – tidying up, trying to clean and reorder, force things into place, unravel the knots, bring a semblance of meaning to a universe that forced the questions on you: Why her? Why him? Why us? Why me?

But to ask ‘why’ implied a belief that some kind of ‘because’ existed in the first place. And he’d always needed that – he’d needed to believe in a reason, a cause, something he could point to, something he could blame, and hopefully fix.

Yet was it any more than that? A need, an emotional need? It made so many things easier to cope with to believe in ‘something’ – even if it was just a target for his anger and frustration. From the first moment that he’d woken to the world, from the moment he’d discovered his sister’s rotting body on the rubbish tip, he’d needed to believe that something was responsible. First it was the murderer himself – but no one had ever been found guilty. Then it was his parents in some way, and their own rapid exit from life following Concha’s murder. Later it became a collection of people and ill-focused concepts: Hilario, Albacete, Destiny, the world itself. All of them potentially guilty and responsible for his mess, his fucked-up life.

And so he’d gone about fixing it, mending what was broken: joining the police and working his way as quickly as possible to
Homicidios
. It was what he’d always wanted to do – where he was ‘destined’ to be.

Then the murder cases came, and he started having some success – big investigations, his name even in the newspapers – although not always for the right reasons. But he was becoming a name at the Valencia Jefatura – he could tell by the number of enemies he seemed to develop of a sudden.

It felt good for a while – he was fulfilling an ambition, he was doing what he’d dreamt of, what he was meant to be doing. And he thought of himself as a policeman – that that was his true identity, that he was realising himself in some profound way, although he wasn’t entirely sure what the phrase exactly meant. He brought healing to a torn, bleeding world. He couldn’t stop a murder taking place, but he could help clean up afterwards and perhaps – yes, definitely – in some cases prevent more killings taking place by arresting a murderer before he could reach his next victim.

And he was kicking against whatever it was that brought pain and fear. The chaos. It was as if he believed in it like a force of nature – it was there, a kind of evil. It had touched his own life and it circled through the world, its fingers reaching out to cast blackened spells. It was his job to slow it down, to restrict and restrain it, to slap it round the face, to chain it down, to curtail it. Wasn’t that what he was doing every time he apprehended someone, every time he brought them in for questioning, interrogated them, brought charges, sent them to jail?

They were individuals, yet somewhere in his mind they were merely actors, puppets of the destructive force he struggled against every day – the cause, the void.

Now, though, there was a change in him. He couldn’t see it clearly yet – it was more a sense, a feeling – but it was there. For the first time he was becoming aware of this belief in himself. Before, it had simply been how he thought, how he saw things, and so it had been all but invisible.

So what had happened? Did he not need that belief any more?

La pera dura con el tiempo madura
. A hard pear ripens with time.

For the first time in his life he could almost grasp the concept – emotionally, not just intellectually – of a world where cause and meaning did not exist, or if they did were beyond ordinary understanding: a world that did not provide reasons for his or anyone else’s suffering.

The truth is only ever what you perceive it to be.

For some reason he could hear Hilario’s voice inside his head, as though he’d been listening in on his thoughts.

Yes, that was probably what he would say. He wondered how much longer he’d have his grandfather around to talk to. Perhaps he’d never really listened to him. Not properly.

Eduardo García had a pile of papers next to him on the table at the bar where they’d arranged to meet. Cámara sat down next to him, ordering a
café solo
from the waiter. García had already started on a
café con leche
.

‘Bring me another one as well,’ he called out to the disappearing waiter.