‘This is a delicate situation,’ murmured the station chief, with his back to them. He turned around and the verdict was more pronounced, ‘Extremely delicate. It can’t appear to be a political case. It can’t appear in any shape or form. None of this can come out. Absolutely nothing. No leaks. I talked to the censor’s office about dealing with the media. There’ll be nothing about the incident on the 18th of July. The celebration was, as always, a success, a demonstration of popular support. That’s what the newspapers will say. But the censors can’t muzzle every single mouth.’
‘Rumours are like the flow of a river,’ said Santos. ‘There’s no stopping them.’
Ren growled intriguingly, ‘Yes, there is. You create others.’
‘The best way to stop rumours is for there to be no reason for them,’ said the station chief less abstractly. ‘We have to act fast. Locate Chelo Vidal. And not get nervous. Right, Ren?’
‘Absolutely, boss. It’s fallen to us and there’s nothing we can do about it. And I always thought life in the provinces was meant to be peaceful.’
‘Those are the orders,’ concluded the station chief. ‘No political case. Imagine the scandal at home, not to say abroad. The wife of a judge, one of the regime’s most distinguished jurists, turns out to be a resistance hero. A clandestine myth from her youth. This scenario would please all our enemies. Make us an object of ridicule abroad. An international laughing-stock.’
Paúl Santos was thinking about that, the idea of being an international laughing-stock, when the station chief suddenly started talking obliquely, somewhere between light and shade, you could and yet you couldn’t understand what he was saying. It took Santos a little while to react because he had to switch on the Spirit of Contradiction.
‘Gentlemen, we’re not going to let this situation get out of control. It’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen. Everyone — that means everyone, Mr Santos — will have to contribute something.’
‘Right you are, sir,’ replied Santos. ‘You can count on me.’
‘Because we can’t start groping in the dark, now, can we?’ said the station chief.
‘No, of course not.’
‘We’ve spent too many years in the dark on this case. We have to find Chelo Vidal quietly, without turning the city upside down.’
In an attempt to understand the station chief’s meaning, Santos decided to look into Ren’s face as into a mirror. His expression was calm. Sarcastic.
‘Someone’s offered to collaborate,’ said the station chief. ‘We didn’t go after him, he came to us. It’s a service that on this occasion, however much it hurts us, we can’t do without. I know one of you, namely Mr Paúl Santos of the Criminal Brigade, has been working with admirable courage, unprecedented steps of great intelligence, to unpick the criminal network it would seem is directed by a certain Mr Manlle.’
Paúl Santos froze. Amazed by what was coming. But his hands took a decision. They started to write, to transcribe what the station chief was saying in shorthand.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Taking notes, sir.’
‘Then do it in your head. That’s enough.’
The station chief’s face was burning. His eyes were pouring out fire. Chief Ren was growing. Consuming and pumping most of the air in the office. He grinned at Santos.
‘Listen to me. We’re going to get this time bomb that is Samos’ wife. I don’t give a damn about the rest. The smuggling, the whorehouses, the intimidatory purchase of land, the gold business, the receipt of stolen goods. All of this is irrelevant compared to her. Compared to Judith. Got it? Everyone, from the top down, is after Judith’s head. I received a call from the governor’s office, they’re sending people from the Special Brigade. . What do they care about your progress with Manlle? Manlle won’t go anywhere. He’s part of the landscape. What we can’t allow is the Azor to appear on the horizon while that woman’s on the loose.’
‘But you know how difficult it was to get where we are now, with absolute discretion, sir,’ said Santos by way of reproach. ‘We’ve got everything. The structure of the empire and, for the first time, the witnesses we need to dismantle it. Let me try and get to Judith.’
‘There’s no time, Santos. It’s a done deal. The Caudillo can’t delay his holidays any longer. There are enough rumours. We’re on one side and amphibians will take us to the other. Manlle’s an amphibian. So you’re going to leave him alone for a while. And he’s going to help us.’
He was in his office. He decided to try and type it all up. He needed to see it in printed letters to understand that everything he’d heard was real. Pazos came in, the man he’d saved, the inspector in Crime he’d managed to pull out of the pit of scepticism. He dropped his jacket on a chair like someone shedding their last hope. Their final skin.
‘There’s no secret witness. Boa’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘Yep, our number one witness. She was found with a shot in the head, holding a small revolver, a Bulldog. A hole in her temple. Another sewer in history. Apparent suicide. Bullshit.’
‘Suicide? That woman would never have killed herself.’
Santos left, muttering, ‘Not even for the prize of immortality would she have killed herself.’
The Whale’s Belly
SADA TO DR Montevideo on the subject of boats, ‘To think I could bring them here and not depart on them.’ Suddenly his eyes blazed with St Elmo’s fire. Montevideo knew the painter had just discovered how to enter the mural and perhaps leave for ever. He felt the wall and remarked in surprise, ‘It’s only a thin membrane.’
The Tachygraphic Rose
HE’D BEEN THINKING about that moment for quite some time. He wasn’t at all sure. He was used to observing people, watching them, examining the smallest details. A hair. The prints left by fingers or lips. To reading the writing bodies leave behind them in a space. The extraordinary information that can be contained in a bin full of rubbish. He thought about it one day. Writing poems, each of which was about a rubbish bin. It would be both biography and geography. It was one of the aspects of his job that most attracted him. He wouldn’t tell anyone this. He’d tell her. A little later on. How the act of emptying a bin on a large table, sorting and arranging families of refuse, was a way of constructing a poetic place, a genuine, enthralling fiction. Catia was an intelligent woman. She’d be interested. For sure. In fact, being a policeman was like being a historian. And the search for clues, rummaging around in a rubbish bin, was a kind of archaeological dig. This position gave him security in front of the other, the one being observed, followed or watched. The biographee, so to speak. With Catia, he had the opposite impression. He was the one being studied. He was under her control, starting with her position in the class of speed typing. From the front, it was she who gave instructions that affected his whole body, who guided him with the invisible threads of words to achieve the goal of his fingers being as fast as his eyes. But it wasn’t just in this time he spent as an automaton, sitting in a row with other pupils. When he stood up, before this woman who was younger and shorter than he was, he felt the mandate continued. His techniques of self-control didn’t work. His desire to neutralise his muscles’ spontaneous joy when, for example, she came to advise him on the position of his elbows actually caused extreme rigidity. It was the same with his speech. He was like a lopsided pair of scales. So when he finally took the step of asking Catia out one Sunday afternoon, after she’d twice agreed to have coffee with him in Borrazás during the break, and when Catia said yes, OK, she’d be there the day after next, at five o’clock in the Beach Club, his typewriter got stuck because he pressed several keys at once.