‘How long you been washing for the judge’s wife?’
‘A dozen years, give or take. I started with my mother.’
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘My mother’s dead. And I’m going to leave it.’
‘Why you going to leave it? Something happen?’
‘They bought a washing machine. Washerwomen are a thing of the past.’
‘What about your father?’ asked the dandy. ‘He alive?’
‘Yes. He digs graves.’
‘Good one,’ said Harmony. ‘That’ll show them. Now look up at the sky. So they see it’s going to rain.’
‘What do you know about the Portuguese architect?’ asked Ashen Hat.
There he had me. Judith. Portuguese architect. Ashen hat. Invisible toothpick. My heated voice told me, ‘Pretend you’re crazy. These people don’t like dealing with nutcases. They move away, prefer not to know. Nutcases make them nervous. This woman, they’ll say, has a screw loose. It’s like she’s possessed, one of those women who go to Pastoriza to get cured and, when they reach the church, start writhing about, spitting out iron coins that stick in the door. Pretend you’re possessed. Spit out iron nails, breathe out fire.’
What about you, Harmony? And Harmony tells me I have to be clever. Cleverer than they are. ‘They know who’s crazy and who’s only pretending. They’ll take you down the station and give you a record. Once you’ve a record, you won’t be able to get a certificate of good conduct. And without a certificate you won’t be able to go abroad. They’re searching for something, but they’re not sure what it is. As well as you, they’ll have questioned the other women who carry things on top of their heads. The women who appear in the paintings. It’s obvious they don’t know what they’re after. And they don’t like the orchestra of dogs.’
‘What do you know about the Portuguese architect?’ asked Ren.
And O replied straight off, without thinking, ‘Tell me, sir, what’s a Portuguese architect?’
‘Go on, off with you,’ said Ren. ‘Before it starts raining.’
I don’t know what it is today, what they see in me. Here’s another car pulling up. Smaller though. It’s a coupé.
‘Good morning. I’m from the police. Can I ask you a few questions?’
At least this one bothered to show me his badge. He was handsome, though a little too sad for my liking. A little lost. Like he was searching for someone in a cloak in Santiago.
‘Please don’t worry. My name’s Paúl Santos and I’m from the Brigade of Criminal Investigation.’
‘You’re from Crime?’
Hardly something to calm me down.
‘You wash for Mrs Vidal, don’t you?’
‘I do, sir.’
When was the last time you saw her?’
Good question.
‘Ages ago. I deal with the maid.’
‘But there’s a portrait of you in the sitting-room. The paint’s still fresh, it’s recent.’
Your legs. Hold on to your legs. What now, Harmony?
‘I looked so ugly, sir. I was ashamed!’
‘Does the name Judith mean anything to you?’
‘Judith?’
Judith
‘NOW IT’S ALL starting to fit together,’ said Mancorvo.
He acted as Ren’s analyst and memory when Ren was confused, stuck in a kind of chronological niche. The subinspector made for a strange second. Tall and thin, with aquiline features, his hair held in place with hair cream, wearing fancy clothes, cufflinks and matching tie-pin, he was quite different from Ren. You only had to see how their handkerchiefs were folded in their jacket pockets. Mancorvo’s was of immaculate triangular perfection, like a medal; Ren’s was just stuffed in.
Paúl Santos had noticed another discrepancy. Mancorvo’s hands were very fine, he kept them visible, his elbows on the table, moving his fingers in a constant manicure, as if filing and polishing his nails. Ren’s characteristic gesture was to dig with the nails of one hand in the cracks of the other. He rarely took his hat off and, when he did, a coloured mark remained on his forehead for a time, as if the hat had been screwed on.
Together they made for a kind of catlike, alternative creature. A fearful creature, thought Santos.
From the way he talked, Mancorvo sounded like the more intelligent. But Santos knew he had to treat such impressions with care. Like his character, Mancorvo’s intelligence was complementary. Dependent. Lacking in initiative. At the more difficult bits, he’d always seek the inspector’s approval. He then came across as an affected lackey next to a coarse foreman who would answer his questions with a slight grunt. From time to time, he’d come out with a refrain of nostalgic resentment:
‘So it was her. It had to be her!’
‘We suspected her briefly,’ said Mancorvo in his role as spokesman. ‘But she was the first one we rejected. We looked into it, but reached the conclusion the hypothesis was absurd. The same thing happened with other women in her position. We followed clues to places you wouldn’t imagine, where shit is gold. The higher you go, the more exciting is the darkness. There are classes in crime as well, why deny it? You’re better off higher up instead of dealing with wild cattle. But there was nothing about Judith. Nothing. After a while, we thought she didn’t really exist. She’d been invented by the enemy. That idea of an infiltrator, a perfect mole. A myth created in exile, both to feed the rebels and to waste our time and make us nervous.’
Mancorvo wasn’t improvising. He kept consulting notes, some of which had been typed on light blue quartos.
‘In 1936, she’s in France with a grant to study Fine Art. Unlike the other students, who decide to stay abroad and take part in Republican propaganda, she returns at the start of 1937. Disembarks here, in Coruña. Now we’ve reason to believe it was then she was trained and made a network of contacts. Judith was born back then. She was meant to last. Very cleverly thought out. Smart as a red squirrel. In 1939, after victory in April, she joins a group of Carlist women travelling with a Galician aristocrat to the welfare service in Barcelona.’
‘When did you start to suspect that Chelo Vidal, the woman who joined a Carlist trip to Barcelona, was Republican Judith?’
Ren cleared his throat. With his arms crossed, he leant on the table and hid Mancorvo from view. Stared at Santos. Seemingly surprised he’d used that professional tone with him here, in the police station.
‘Shortly afterwards,’ he replied. ‘In 1940, when I joined certain special services it’s not necessary to mention now. The war in Spain was over, but the Second World War had started. Officially we were no longer at war, but that was just an appearance. I don’t suppose I need to explain myself, right?’
He paused. Inhaled. Santos didn’t stop looking at him either. Seemed to be calculating the amount of air Ren consumed and pumped around his body.
‘I knew Ricardo Samos,’ continued Ren. ‘Till then, from the moment she came back from her travels, they were formally engaged, but she kept putting off the marriage. She was very young and what have you. Samos was included in a group that would go on a training course to Italy and Germany, stopping in Paris, which was occupied. These were good times for the Axis. She was the one who asked him then to get married. She wanted to go on this trip. It would be their honeymoon. I didn’t say anything to Samos, but I noted down that detail. In the end, women were ordered not to join the expedition.’
‘And you noted that down?’
‘In my head. You note these things down in your head.’
‘I see.’
‘The judge is taking it badly,’ said the station chief. ‘He’s completely beside himself.’
‘The judge is a fool!’ exclaimed Ren. There was unusual bitterness in the way he talked about Samos. Paúl Santos decided his hidden gland of resentment was working very well and may have made him more intelligent.