Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll talk soon enough. Look at the state of your face. What’s it going to look like after a good kicking? We’ve had guys in here who thought they were heroes, but they always end up singing like canaries, and I’m not going to have a dirty little bitch like you trying to bullshit me.’

  A man who looked like he could handle himself and the world came into the office to tell Contreras that somebody was outside wanting to see him.

  ‘Watch this girl. Make sure she doesn’t move. Not even to lean her arse against the wall.’

  On the other side of the opaque glass door he found Camps O’Shea and Carvalho waiting for him. He greeted the detective with a grunt, and his companion with a handshake that suggested they were both veterans of a war that only the two of them remembered.

  ‘You’ve come at an interesting moment. That’s the way it is in police stations. Days and days of routine, and then all of a sudden a case that makes the headlines. It’s a shame that our man only played for a third-rate team, because if he’d been a big-time player, then we’d have an interesting case on our hands. I wanted to speak to you, very seriously. As for you, Carvalho, I really don’t care one way or the other. I’ll be happy as long as you just listen and take note.’

  Having ushered them into an office, he sat down and waited for them to do the same. Carvalho did, but Camps remained standing until Contreras offered him a seat.

  ‘Right, now. I probably wouldn’t have bothered you if it wasn’t for the fact that we’ve got a curious coincidence here. We have a centre forward who was killed at dusk. But the centre forward who was killed at dusk wasn’t the same centre forward as the one in the letters, was he? So the question is, what is the connection here? Perhaps you can supply an answer?’

  Carvalho and Camps looked at each other, but exchanged nothing more than the sense of expectation that the inspector had succeeded in creating in them. Thereupon Contreras resumed his role as the lead actor in the proceedings.

  ‘Do you see a connection?’

  ‘The stars?’ Carvalho ventured.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The conjunction of the stars?’

  ‘I don’t know why I bother talking to you, and I find it even harder to understand why anyone ever wastes their money hiring you. The answer is, there is no connection. There can’t be. The purpose of the anonymous letters was to generate confusion in a particular powerful club and the cross-section of society that it represents. The actual killing, on the other hand, was a gutter killing in which the principal characters were not much better than sewer rats. Coincidence required that the dead man in this instance was a centre forward. But this was pre-destined. Something guides the destiny of men, to be winners or losers. And once that has been established, agreements need to be arrived at. At this moment it is particularly important that the business of the anonymous letters is kept secret. Nobody must know, even if they continue arriving. In my opinion they’re being written by some poor bastard who couldn’t kill a fly. But imagine what would happen if the news about the anonymous letters got out, and the gentlemen of the press started weaving fanciful notions around the fact that Palacín happened to be a centre forward. This would be less than useful to you, and less then useful to me too, because I have my foot on the neck of the woman who killed him. She, incidentally, also managed to involve a young lad from a very good family in her dirty dealings. Anyway, the anonymous letters must continue to be precisely that — anonymous. All right?’

  Camps nodded in agreement, and was about to accede to the police chief’s obvious intention of dissolving their meeting.

  ‘Who gave you the tip-off?’

  ‘That’s no business of yours, Carvalho. It’s all sewn up now. And the press has been informed.’

  ‘Can I see your two prisoners?’

  ‘Are they clients of yours? Is señor Camps paying you to worry about them?’

  ‘Maybe they’re something to do with the anonymous letters. Maybe I’ve seen them around the stadium.’

  ‘Don’t complicate our lives, Carvalho. What do you think, señor Camps?’

  ‘Señor Carvalho is very professional.’

  ‘I’m keeping the pair of them apart. For the moment I don’t want to bring them face to face. You’ll see the boyfriend first.’

  The boy was sitting next to a lawyer who had been sent in by his family. He was in the process of dictating the statement which had earlier been dictated to him by the self-same inspector who was now taking it down on the typewriter. He was freshly shaved and looked more circumspect than evasive, although his eyes seemed to run a mile when you tried to read anything in them. The woman, on the other hand, was still on her feet. The huge weight of tiredness in her body proclaimed the way she had been mistreated for the whole of a lifetime. Carvalho recognized her as the young prostitute who had offered him a literary screw, but she didn’t recognize him, and she gave him a desperate look full of fear and hatred.

  ‘How have they been treating you, kid?’

  Contreras leapt up behind him. ‘Don’t ask stupid questions, Carvalho,’ he said.

  ‘How do you expect them to treat me? Cops are shit.’

  ‘I’ve got a good memory, girl. When these gentlemen have gone you won’t be sitting down for a week. You hear?!’

  Once they were out in the corridor again, Contreras exploded at Carvalho. He grabbed him by the lapels, and shook him so violently that it looked as if he was trying to shake his head off.

  ‘You think you’re pretty smart, eh, crutch-sniffer?’

  Camps tried to intervene, but he received a verbal knockback: ‘Who asked you to interfere?’

  ‘What’s this cocksucker trying to prove?’

  The semiologist Lifante advanced on Carvalho, aggressively.

  ‘He’s trying to wind us up, sir. As per usual.’

  ‘You’ve got what you wanted out of the boy. I doubt that the girl’s going to come so cheap.’

  ‘For your information, this young man has just signed a statement to the effect that she was the one who set it all up, and that the events in question didn’t start at the football club, but with an earlier attack on a woman who owns a boarding house in the Barrio Chino, in calle de San Rafael. We know the kind of people we’re dealing with here. They’re garbage, and the best thing you can do for them, and for society, is to bury them as fast as possible. You’re just here on a visit, Carvalho. We’re the ones who have to clear up this shit every day. We’re stuck with this garbage day after day, and we risk our lives, and we get small thanks from certain people who think that a policeman is as much shit as a criminal. Get out of here, before I stick your constitutional rights right up your arse.’

  When Carvalho emerged onto the street in the company of a furious Camps O’Shea, he tried to rationalize his sudden intervention. He decided it was all to do with the morning’s papers, and the separation between good and evil which had reduced the young man’s name to his bare initials, while the girl’s name had been proclaimed to the four corners of the earth. He explained all this to Camps, not expecting him to understand, but Camps was anyway in the midst of yet another obsessional, self-pitying dialogue with himself.

  ‘It’s just not right. It’s fundamentally unfair.’

  ‘It sounds like you’ve only just discovered that there’s no justice in this world. What test-tube did you escape from, friend? Sooner or later that boy’s going to be let out on bail. The girl, on the other hand, is in for a beating, although if you ask me the business in the dressing rooms sounds very much like a frame-up. They arrive at the club, murder the man, and they’re immediately arrested. Reads more like a cheap thriller.’

  ‘It’s so unfair, what they’re doing to me.’

  So he was the victim of the injustice! Carvalho stopped in his tracks and waited for Camps to do the same so that he could look him in the eye, but Camps walked on, muttering to himself every variant on the word ‘justice’.

  ‘Wha
t are you talking about, “unfair”? Who’s been unfair to you?’

  ‘I created a little marvel there. An expectation. And now we have this grotesque denouement. It’s sickening, and that disgusting police inspector just wants to sweep it all under the carpet. The whole business has ended up in the hands of sinister, sordid criminals … It’s so … mean …’

  He spat out the word ‘mean’ as if it was stinging his lips.

  ‘They seem incapable of seeing the difference between a work of art and a botch-up by a couple of no-hopers. For these idiot police it’s all the same. It’s all the same to Basté too. Did you see how he treated me this morning? Do you remember what he said? Carvalho, when you have a moment, take another look at the anonymous letters. I think the first one was the best. But the other two have their good points. They have a certain strength. And they should be seen as part of a crescendo. A poetic crescendo, I mean. I would say that the first one perhaps expressed me best, expressed what I’m all about. But the others are not bad. Did you notice the touch of Espriu in the first one, and the touch of Borges in the second?’

  Finally Camps appeared in his true colours. He was not so much a frustrated poet as a literary critic without a writer to engage with.

  *

  He slept badly, and he had a nightmare. Bleda. Bleda, his puppy, had returned home. He kept telling himself that someone had killed his dog, and that he himself had buried her, but no, Bleda had returned home, as playful as she had been as a puppy but much more mannered, as if during the ten years of her absence somebody had been training her as a circus dog. A proper little lady, walking up on her hind legs, with a cover-girl smile, her ears pricked, and her tongue lapping up her audience’s appreciation. When the show was over, the dog told him that she had wanted to come back earlier, but Amaro wouldn’t let her. Amaro must have been her trainer, and it seems that they were in love, but Amaro must have been more in love with Bleda than she was with him, because when Carvalho asked if she would come home, she said yes, enthusiastically, and Amaro conceded defeat. Look, Biscuter, Bleda’s back. She’s got thinner, boss. Charo, Bleda’s back! And Charo burst into tears — ten years’ worth of tears, held back, waiting for Bleda to return. And when he woke up he reached out his hand in order to stroke her — a reflex action that had remained frozen for a whole decade since they’d killed her and he had buried her. But she wasn’t there. Instead, reality stood at his bedside, an obscene reality which forced him repeatedly into the same pattern of life: paying his debts and burying his dead. But as he slowly resigned himself to accepting Bleda’s second death he became aware of other faces and cases from those years popping up in the memory box of his imagination: the case of the déclasśe entrepreneur, the builder of inner-city estates for immigrants. That sensation that everything had changed but had remained pretty much the same. Stuart Pedrell was whom he was thinking of — the rich man with the guilty conscience who, in 1978, had attempted to travel to the other side of the tracks, to what he saw as his ‘Southern Seas’; with ten years’ hindsight, he looked like not much more than a stupid, immature adolescent. Rich people with guilty consciences seemed to be a thing of the past now; perhaps the market had been cornered by those who have guilty consciences about not being rich. Basté de Linyola and Camps O’Shea were the most dangerous intelligent people he had ever known. They moved from the world of good into the world of evil, and back again, with no need to do anything other than change their language or their silence. Basté used philosophy and Camps used poetry, but the pair of them were none the less criminals — two quintessential Caucasian criminals, mixed in with all the rest of the quintessential Caucasian criminals, who stood out less in police line-ups than Arabs or blacks. So difficult, in fact, that nobody these days made the effort even to try. And on the marble morgue slab where once again he saw the body of Bleda with her throat cut he also saw the body of the dead centre forward. The body was wearing a football kit which was stitched together with knife-stabs — a visual contradiction which in no way suggested tragedy. It was the body of a puppet which owed its identity to the roar of the fans. Nobody seemed to claim possession of this body. It didn’t belong to anyone, even though they were trying to stick it on a couple of junkies, and most particularly on the girl, because she didn’t have a father who was one of those who were still a power in this city, or in any city, now, as it was in the beginning, and ever shall be … For Carvalho, Palacín was just the shadow of a memory, but he was less concerned about the broken memory than about the fact that the broken toy was lying there in front of him, and as his mind returned unerringly to his latest obsession he tried to distance himself from it. I know you, Pepe, and nobody invited you to this funeral. Let them sort it out for themselves. However, when he emerged into the autumn light of his unkempt Vallvidrera garden, it took just one glance over to the corner where he had buried Bleda, for an image to stamp itself on his mind — of Palacín, dressed in blood-spattered football kit and apparently floating, weightless, in space. He began to dress more quickly, putting on something warm, and drove down to the main square in Vallvidrera to buy the morning papers. The Palacín case hadn’t made the front pages, but it was in among the local news, and the young couple were named as the suspects. They were expected to be in court before too long, and speculation was tending to identify the woman as the instigator and material author of the crime and the young man as a helpless pawn in her hands. Sánchez Zapico had also contrived to put in an appearance, and his photograph appeared in the papers, over comments in which he reiterated his alarm at the serious threat to his club’s survival.

  ‘Maybe people are right when they say that Centellas has become an obsession with me. I’m going to throw in the towel. I want to spend more time with my business, and with my family. Being chairman of a football club is very time-consuming, especially in a small club where the chairman has to be all things to all people: the brains behind the scene, a father figure for the players, and an accountant into the bargain.’

  As regards Palacín, he could only say that he had done all that was expected of him, and that he was well liked by his fellow players. As regards the cocaine that had been found in the players’ lockers, Carvalho found his answer surprising: ‘I can’t be responsible for the private lives of my players. They are all grown men. This is a disastrous situation, but I shall have to accept it and act accordingly.’

  It seemed to Carvalho that this was not an attitude to be expected from a man eager to save his club at any cost. He was throwing in too many towels, and rather too eagerly, as if he was wanting to surrender before the fight had even started. In El Periodico there was an appreciation of Palacín, written by a certain Martí Gómez, who clearly had a soft spot for the player. ‘He lost the last game of his life by three stabs to nil, and now the officials of the Spanish Football Federation are attempting to contact members of his family so that arrangements can be made for the funeral. In her modest boarding house in calle de San Rafael, señora Concha declined to make a statement — or rather, she had only one statement to make: “Palacín always seemed to smell of liniment.” He had the smell of a beaten man. And Dóna Concha added: “Life is like the ladder of a chicken coop — short, and full of shit.” ’

  He drove his car as far as the parking-lot on the Ramblas and allowed his legs to carry him up to calle de San Rafael; researching locations, he told himself, like a film director. He scarcely paused for thought when the cavernous porch of the Pension Conchi opened before him, and he went up until he found a sign on a door that looked almost new, although perhaps the impression of newness was due to the neglected decrepitude of the surrounding hallway. The door opened a fraction, to reveal a spider-like eye belonging to Señora Concha. She blinked as she took in his severe look and his air of authority. The words ‘private detective’ prompted her to unhook the security chain on the door, and she patted her hair and smoothed her dress as if her hands were putting the finishing touches to a sculpture. Señora Concha was wearing a ban
dage on the top of her head, and she still had bruises on a face that was sporting more make-up than the statistical average would require, but the stranger had an air of authority about him, so she took on the smiling manner of a New Orleans brothel madam, as if between her and Carvalho there existed a degree of complicity that was as broad and deep but at the same time as narrow and shallow as the Mississippi river.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess, but at this time of the morning, and with everything that’s happened …’

  Carvalho pointed to her face, as if requiring her to abandon her role as the exquisite host.

  ‘Who did that?’

  ‘That’s a secret between Inspector Contreras and me. Who do you think did it? A bunch of bums. A little bitch.’

  ‘Does this have anything to do with the Palacín case?’

  She took a crumpled handkerchief from her pocket and raised it to her eyes. She really was crying.

  ‘I have such a tender heart, you know … What a lovely man. And what criminals … They should do like the ayatollahs, and chop their hands off.’

  ‘What do you know about Palacín? Did he have visitors? Did he like to talk? What did he tell you about his past, or what he was intending to do with his life?’

  Like to talk? Doña Concha reacted to these words as if she was the soloist in a symphony and the conductor had just signalled her entrée. Talk? Murdered, he was, and may the poor man forgive me, because he’s dead now, and may he rest in peace. She had given him a room here because he looked a decent sort of person, and he had no references, so he’d paid four months in advance, and as far as she was concerned football was boring, and in her opinion footballers were just little boys who had never grown up. As far as his relationships went, she had chosen to turn a blind eye, but she’d seen how that little whore had been hanging round the poor man, with that stupid nonsense about a literary screw, and her tongue hanging out, and her dirty little rat’s eyes — just like a rat, yes — and I don’t know why I didn’t cotton on sooner. I took pity on her because I felt sorry for her, and then she went and did what she did to me.