‘Great, golden information, inspector. My congratulations.’
A surprising informer. A nugget dropped by chance. An angry person’s betrayal of trust. These were the sources the officer turned over in his mind. Fins should have revealed the true story behind platform B-52. The hours upon hours of poring over registers. Analysing operations for buying and selling rafts. Grouping suspicious cases in a ‘grey area’. Unravelling the front man and real owner. Use, output, repairs to the structure. A whole series of dead hours and occasional living ones. And there it was, B-52. Real owner, Leda Hortas.
Somebody leaps from the speedboat on to the platform’s wooden arbour. Inverno, thinks Fins, because of the way he moves. He opens a trapdoor in one of the platform’s large floats. These used to be old drums, hulls or boilers. Now they’re made of plastic or metal and look like submersibles. On one of them is Inverno or whoever it is. He climbs into the float with a torch.
‘Full speed ahead! Let’s go get ’em!’ exclaims the customs officer.
This gives rise to shouts of alarm.
The smuggler emerges with a bundle. Skips across the wooden structure. Throws the sack to one of those on board and jumps after it.
A megaphone on the patrol boat orders them to stop. The agents point their weapons. They’re in such an advantageous position the pilot will have no problem cutting them off. What they don’t expect is such a rash manoeuvre. The speedboat’s sudden acceleration, the violent lifting of the nose so that it’s almost vertical, almost capsizing, the obvious suicidal wish, impervious to persuasion, to pass straight through the patrol boat.
‘The guy’s crazy!’
‘That bastard’s going to kill himself and us!’
The use of their weapons would only make matters worse. The officer orders an immediate about-turn. The speedboat glances past. Just enough time for Fins to aim his camera. And shoot the flash. A trembling, violent exchange of looks.
It was Brinco, yes, steering the Sira III.
24
HE USED TO take her there himself. To Bellissima. The hair salon. The name had been his idea. He would take her to work every day. And go and fetch her. He hadn’t changed, God damn it, those loudmouths always holding forth. Swiss accounts. Tax havens. Then the rumours got published in the press: money has no homeland. Well, that’s right. Statu quo. The point is Guadalupe, his wife, didn’t want him to take her any more. She drove herself. Though the car was one he’d bought. A present. A safe vehicle. Listen, girl, you spend half your time with your head in the clouds. A 2002 turbo. A palindrome.
She was sitting down, her feet bare. Her assistant, Mónica, was giving her a pedicure. You could see the two of them got on well. It was still early in the morning, a day like any other, and there weren’t any customers. So they were using the time to make themselves look pretty. Quite right. A hairdresser needed to look like a superstar. Or so he thought. They were married. She’d abandoned the canning factory and he’d asked her one day, ‘Listen, Guadalupe, what do you want?’ She had answered, ‘I want to have a trade.’
‘Wouldn’t a business be better?’
‘A business might be better, but I want to have a trade.’
There were tangos playing on the cassette player. Guadalupe’s nails. ‘Tinta roja’ sung by Goyeneche the Pole. It should be fairly straightforward.
‘Go out for a while, would you, girl?’ he said to Mónica.
No, it wasn’t a lack of trust. But today he preferred to be alone with Guadalupe. He never forgot an anniversary.
‘“Red ink in yesterday’s grey…” How well you used to sing tangos! Remember? The factory foreman shouting, “Sing! All of you, sing!” So you wouldn’t put mussels in your mouths. “Sing! Sing!” How pathetic!’
He gave her a jewellery box.
‘Well, aren’t you going to open it? Go on then…’
Guadalupe opened it. Inside was a diamond ring. She closed the box. A little smile. A painful smile. Something was something. A diamond, a tear, etc., etc.
‘Our silver wedding anniversary. Twenty-five years. Who’d have thought it?’
He looked at her feet again. Her feet always turned him on. Whenever he mentioned this, there were always idiots who laughed. Well, if they didn’t understand, he wasn’t going to explain. The two most erotic things in the world? The feet. First the left foot. And then the right.
‘You’ve wonderful feet. I’ve always been crazy about your feet.’
He was able to touch them. Pass his hand along the instep. Curve the curve. A stroke of bad luck. He didn’t know when it happened. When the wind kicked up. She realised he was seeing more than one woman. Or did she?
She got up and put on her sandals. ‘Do you need something?’
‘A few calls. Just a few calls.’
They weren’t so few. Mariscal passed her a ream of handwritten sheets, with numbers and messages. Those things that sounded so absurd to her. Which she read automatically.
‘If you want, we could have dinner somewhere tonight. Some shellfish. Some invertebrates!’
Guadalupe turned to look at him, that itching of the eyes, and took an age to say, ‘I don’t feel so well. But thanks for thinking of me.’
‘Listen, girl. Don’t be hard on me. I’ve only got three or four haircuts left. Maybe less. Do you think I should dye my grey hair? You women are lucky. One day you’re blonde, the next you’re dark. I like you more with black hair. Because of your skin. You always were a bit swarthy. But we men… If I turn up looking blond all of a sudden, I lose my authority. And I was blond, you know. More than blond. I was downright golden, like the setting of the sun. My hair on fire. Like that guy Oliveira introduced to me. Remember? The guy from the PIDE. Mr Arcada. The Legate. Dead Man’s Hand. Along came a gust of wind and disturbed his wig. The ugly ones are always the vainest. The worse the wood, the more it grows. So along came this wind and shifted his hairpiece, and there went his authority. Oh, I don’t know. He consumes everything, dirty money, weapons, drugs, and still he gives us that sermon about authority, sacred ground. Bloody hell! The twenty-fifth of April, if they’d left it to him, there wouldn’t have been a carnation revolution or any other kind. A few cannon blasts in the Terreiro do Paço, a few more in the Carmo, when Captain Salgueiro was there with his megaphone, and things would soon have gone back to normal. I said to him, “Velis nolis, Mr Arcada. People have to eat, to have shoes on their feet, not to get beaten, if they’re going to be happy, have money in their pockets. If people are fed and in possession of some cash, if they have liquidity, that’s good for business. That’s my philosophy, Mr Legate. I like knocking these leeches around. Half the country out working abroad and all day long holding forth about the motherland and empire. That’s slandering the communist enemy! Listen, everywhere goes up and down, but I know something about emigration. Half of Galicia is on the outside.”
‘Then I thought about it. Did a U-turn. This guy was a bastard, but he was our bastard. So there and then I came out with a laudation for Salazar and Franco, the two pillars of Western civilisation. Shame about their successors. Marcelo Caetano, a coward. The ones here, traitors. He said the PIDE hadn’t been so into torture as other political police forces, such as the Spanish force, to give an obvious example. “I was a Viriathus,” he declared. “Nineteen years of age and I left as a volunteer, like thousands of others, to give those reds a beating. I was an out-and-out Crusader. But what I saw, to tell you the truth, made me afraid. A colleague said to me, ‘This is dangerous land, Nuno.’ And he was right. God was nowhere to be seen. So, being practical, I replied, ‘What happened happened.’ But he stayed firm. What the PIDE did to detainees was cause them a certain ‘absence of comfort’. That was the term. Well, I was taken aback. Torment? No. Absence of comfort.” I liked that expression. I took note. Shame I wasn’t around to give it to Lame for his dictionary. “Look what I have here, Basilio. What do you make of this one? ‘Absence of comfort’.” “What does that mean?” “It means torture, Basilio, torture.”