The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara)

by Webster, Jason

  But the plaque had stayed the same. In fact much had, despite what he told himself. Pinpointing what he didn’t like, what needed to go, was one thing; becoming and replacing were something else. Things only changed once he joined the police.

  For a moment he wondered if he would ever come here again; there was a sense of terminality about it. And he thought about kissing the plaque. Farewell, you piece of metal covering a hole where something – barely anything – remains of the body my sister once lived in.

  No matter – this truth, that truth: at that instant an emotional self needed to make contact, to kiss Concha goodbye.

  He got back on to his feet. And thought of Alicia. She would be almost halfway to Madrid by now. He felt a strong urge to hold her, press her tight to him, to kiss her powerfully, completely. He’d been cold with her that morning. She was leaving, going back to Madrid, her home. She’d been here, seen him, a greater part of him – his world, his life, his Albacete. A place which, no matter how hard he tried, he never quite managed to leave.

  Was he ashamed? The metropolitan journalist coming to terms with her lover’s provincial background? No, it wasn’t that. There was as much of that in her as there was in him. Valencia, her home town, could be as provincial as anywhere else in the country.

  No, it was something else. They’d shared an intense experience – driving away from Pozoblanco, getting shot at – almost getting killed. There was no need to get overly dramatic – they’d both survived: you either died or you didn’t. But she’d seen that side of his existence – the violent side, the danger. The police side of him. And it was something he’d felt close to walking away from. Yet here it was, claiming him once again, like a tide pulling down on a drowning man. She’d seen it, lived through it with him for a brief moment, and then gone.

  Could she still love him now?

  He tried to look beyond the confusion kicked up inside him like dust, and see more clearly the link between them. She was there, with him, inside him, but would she stay? Would he himself end up pushing her away?

  The truth was that he’d never had a relationship like this before. Already in his mid-forties and it was strange to think that – you were expected to have had a wealth of experiences by that age, to be settling down, or coasting along. Yet his past was populated by women who had only ever seemed to penetrate his thoughts and emotions at the time, but who then had slipped away with greater ease than he had imagined. With one, perhaps two, he had even convinced himself that he had been in love. Yet once the relationships ended the pain of separation was no more than transitory, a process of – relatively swift – adaptation.

  None of them had sunk into him like Alicia had.

  Which, if he admitted it to himself, made him almost afraid.

  He wasn’t certain which disturbed him most, however: the events at Pozoblanco, or Hilario’s story of the night before.

  It had felt like a revelation; it was a revelation. His grandfather, the person he loved most in the world, had fought and killed for Hitler. The irony of it was almost absurd, were it not that he had done it trying to save his own father – and failing.

  No self-pity – it had been the one message Hilario had managed to get through to him during those first years after he had moved in with him. And Cámara had kicked against it: he’d lost his sister, his mother and his father in less than a couple of years. He had a right to feel self-pity. Yet for all that time he never stopped to think that Hilario had lost a son, a granddaughter and a daughter-in-law. There was no space in Cámara’s own grief to allow for someone else’s. Besides, Hilario didn’t grieve – or didn’t show it. So it was easier to get angry with him.

  Cámara had never known, however, that it wasn’t the first time his grandfather had lost close family members. Anyone looking at his life – father executed, granddaughter murdered, son dead from drink, daughter-in-law a suicide, wife dead from liver cancer – would think he had a curse on him.

  Yet . . . he was Hilario. And now, not only was he a priapic marihuana-growing anarchist OAP, but gun-toting Blue Division infantryman and Siege of Leningrad veteran had to be added to complete the picture.

  Was there any more?

  The surprising thing was that none of this had changed Cámara’s opinion of him, or rather, he didn’t think any less of him. He’d been surprised, shocked by the story. But he himself had shot and killed another man, at the end of his last case, in Valencia. Not in anger, but to survive, and hoping to save others.

  And he understood how much more Hilario understood him than he’d ever realised.

  Even his being a policeman, a detective. There was a parallel there, of sorts, with Hilario joining the Blue Division. If you saw it from an anarchist perspective.

  Was that why it had disturbed his grandfather so much, when he’d joined? Not for purely ideological reasons to do with tyranny and power, but because Hilario had seen something of himself in him?

  Hilario had joined the Blue Division to save his father, and failed.

  Cámara had joined the police to solve his sister’s murder, as though that might in some way bring her back from the dead.

  Both in organisations of violence and authority trying to undo what will be done, or already has been done.

  Both struggling against events, against a world that twists and kicks and bites with scarcely a warning.

  Hilario’s solution was to choose to be the person he wanted to be, in the face of what life threw at him. He couldn’t control the world, the events that struck him, but there was one thing he could take decisions on – himself. He could be Hilario, and nothing could change that.

  Cámara’s solution?

  He had no idea. He’d only just identified the problem.

  Two other niches demanded attention before he left. Ricardo Cámara Gutiérrez and Ana Reyes Albayzín lay side by side next to their daughter. It was a municipally controlled cemetery – suicides were allowed, although there had been grumblings at the time. Had his mother taken her life a few years earlier, before Franco had finally died, things would have been more complicated. There were no flowers for her or her husband, however. Cámara had placed some once, when he finally decided not to be angry with her any more. Or at least to try. Forgiveness was easy to talk about, even to understand and accept on an intellectual level. The problem was getting that to work its way through all of him, to forgive her with his emotions as well as his mind. He’d felt abandoned by her, that her sadness over Concha had taken precedence over her duty to him as a mother.

  But he’d lost as well, like her. Not a grown child like Concha, but the promise of one. And it had struck him harder than he could have imagined at the time.

  To forgive you needed to imagine. And imagination fed on experience.

  He knelt and touched both the plaques, his father on his right, his mother on his left. This was who he was – a combination of the two, and the actions they had taken, with all the repercussions rippling over the years.

  It was time to move on.

  He checked his phone again and stood up.

  He had to go; Yago would be waiting.

  TWENTY

  YAGO LOOKED EVEN thinner than he had a couple of days before.

  ‘Take any more of those pills and you’ll start falling through the cracks in the pavement.’

  ‘Come on, let’s walk.’

  He looked down at Cámara’s leg.

  ‘You got a limp, or something?’

  They strolled along the lanes of the dead, birds chirping overhead as they flapped from tree to tree. Yago was wearing a pale-coloured suit that hung loosely from his body, with a strong, spicy smell from his cologne.

  A white tent had been erected in one of the squares that made up the cemetery, covering a piece of ground that was normally left barren.

  ‘That’s where they’re digging up the remains of people shot after the Civil War,’ Yago said. ‘Perhaps you heard about it.’

  Cámara said nothing, but looke
d over to see if Eduardo García, the historian, was there. The area was deserted: perhaps they’d gone for coffee.

  Was that where Maximiliano lay?

  ‘It’s all very well,’ Yago said, ‘to let people mourn their dead. After all these years, I mean. To be able to do it properly. But are we ready for this? The country? It just throws up old wounds. We got past all that. Now you see these kids wandering around with Republican flags.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘We should move on – pasar página. With the amount of people there are out of work you’d think there were better things they could do with public money.’

  Cámara pulled out his cigarettes, half-heartedly offering one to Yago out of politeness, knowing somehow that this time he’d refuse. Smoke streamed away from him in a quickly vanishing cloud as it got caught up in the wind and blown up and out beyond the cemetery walls.

  ‘Pozoblanco,’ Cámara said at last.

  ‘Yes. You went, then?’

  ‘Yeah. I went. Interesting place.’

  Yago snorted.

  ‘Say that again. I like the fact that places like that can exist – the anomaly of it all: a little communist enclave in the middle of a capitalist state. I mean, who’d have thought? But I’m not sure I’d want to live there.’

  ‘Faro Oscuro’s quite a character.’

  ‘Oh, so you met him, then? Rules the place like it was his own.’

  ‘I got that impression. There’s something a bit . . .’

  ‘Sectarian?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. He’s the boss, everyone loves him – or so it seems. And together they’ve built this amazing utopia.’

  ‘No, I don’t buy it either. So what did you find?’

  ‘Lots of saffron.’

  ‘It’s the season.’

  ‘But not really enough fields to produce the amount we saw being processed.’

  ‘What did he say they have?’

  ‘Five hundred hectares.’

  ‘Doesn’t figure.’

  ‘No, not for that quantity. Not even by the figures he gave us.’

  ‘How did he explain it?’

  ‘Said they got saffron from other villages around. Not just Pozoblanco.’

  ‘I can check that. But it sounds like a bluff. Production around here is way down on what it was even ten years ago. People moving to the city. Masses of bulb stocks got sold off. But if the saffron isn’t from here, where’s it coming from? Or is it really saffron at all? That’s the question.’

  An elderly man tapping a walking stick on the paving stones passed them as they crossed the main avenue from one half of the cemetery to the other. He nodded to them as they drew close, a melancholy smile on his thin, cracked lips. Cámara nodded in return; Yago kept his eyes looking ahead.

  There was a bench a little further on, protected from the wind by a high wall of niches behind. They sat down on it, Yago crossing his legs, Cámara stretching both arms out along the back. He breathed in deeply, then blew the air out, as though expelling some unwanted thought from his body.

  ‘Anything else?’ Yago asked.

  ‘There was another man there. Faro Oscuro referred to him as Ahmed the Moroccan.’

  ‘We came across him as well. Our checks threw nothing up, though. It may be a false name.’

  ‘Head of security, Faro Oscuro said.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I think he may have tried to kill me.’

  Yago turned towards him and looked him hard in the eye.

  ‘You’re serious.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Driving away from the village. Bullet smashed the back window. Another went into the bodywork of the car.’

  Yago glanced down at Cámara’s leg.

  ‘The limp?’

  ‘The last shot was closer than I would have liked.’

  ‘But you got away?’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  Yago stood up, thrusting his hands into his pockets, pacing backwards and forwards in front of the bench.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I asked too much of you.’

  He kicked at a loose piece of paving stone, sending it scuttling into a patch of dead grass.

  ‘Me cago en la puta!’ For fuck’s sake!

  ‘It’s all right,’ Cámara said, not moving from the bench.

  Yago looked down at him, lines of incomprehension on his brow.

  ‘You weren’t to know. It’s not your fault. The question is why? Why try and kill me? I was there as a journalist, just doing a report. What made them so worried that they thought they had to take me out all of a sudden?’

  ‘Where did it happen?’

  ‘On the road out of Pozoblanco. I said.’

  ‘I can check that.’

  ‘Nothing of this makes sense, though. First of all, why try to kill me? And secondly, why botch it up like that? It was hardly professional. It’s as though Ahmed, or whoever it was, was making it up as he went along. There was something almost casual about it.’

  ‘Me cago en la puta. Where’s the car now?’

  ‘I borrowed it from a friend.’

  Cámara put his hands up.

  ‘I’ve given him enough problems. Don’t make him hand it over to your lot.’

  ‘We might need it.’

  Cámara sniffed.

  ‘Look, before we do that, we need to check out what’s really going on in Pozoblanco. You don’t take pot shots at journalists for no reason. Or did they know I’m police? Who else knew I was going?’

  ‘No one. Just me, you idiot. You don’t think I was going to tell anyone with the kind of problems I’ve got at the Jefatura.’

  ‘Jiménez? Did he know you were meeting me the other day?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Someone might have seen us, and told him.’

  Yago stopped pacing.

  ‘Possible. But unlikely. It was dark. Unless . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. You can get paranoid in situations like this. Not knowing who you can trust. It’s why I got you to go in the first place.’

  ‘And I want to go back.’

  Yago shook his head.

  ‘Out of the question.’

  ‘I’m not working for you, remember. You asked me a favour.’

  ‘All right. And I’m asking you, as a friend, not to go. You really want to get killed? Give that Ahmed or whatever his name is another shot? I can’t do that, Max. I can’t let that happen. You’re on my watch, however you want to look at it.’

  Cámara stroked his chin; he hadn’t shaved that morning and nascent stubble dragged against his fingertips.

  ‘You pulled me back in,’ he said. ‘I was fine, getting along, getting a taste of what it’s like outside, not doing this. And then you came and threw me back into it.’

  Yago turned on his heel and stared at him.

  ‘It was you, remember. You were the one snooping around a murder scene, getting yourself locked up for the night. Don’t give me that.’

  Cámara grinned.

  ‘All right. But it was worth a try.’

  He got up and punched Yago on the arm.

  ‘Come on. You’re taking this too seriously. Stop thinking about it too much. It’s driving you mad, I can see. You’ll end up getting paranoid, then it’ll be me coming round to see you locked up in the loony bin.’

  Yago shook him off.

  ‘You’re a bastard. You should be dead.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. So get over it.’

  They started heading towards the exit, away from the pregnant, stagnant calm of the cemetery and towards the noise and movement of the streets outside.

  ‘I need to think this through.’

  ‘It’s what you always did. Not sure if it gets you anywhere, though. You’re worried about a leak, about some bent cop on your team? Listen to your guts, your instinct. It might be the last person your thinking would ever consider.’

 
Yago looked at him and sighed: he was hopeless.

  ‘And please don’t go back to Pozoblanco.’

  ‘I want you to do something for me,’ Cámara said. ‘Something I want to check out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That suspect from Concha’s case, years back. Juan Manuel Heredia.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Torrecica,’ Yago said, nodding his head in the direction of the city prison. ‘He got done for murder a while back. Some thing between Gypsy families. It caught my eye when I got back here. I’ve been watching him. You want to go over all that again?’

  ‘Loose ends. I want to go and see him.’

  They stepped out into the street. A bus blew its horn loudly at a car blocking the road as it waited for a parking space to become available.

  ‘I can sort that out for you,’ Yago said.

  They shook hands.

  ‘Be careful, though, Max. Just be careful.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Wednesday 4th November

  HE STEPPED DOWN on to the platform and joined the stream of passengers making their way towards the exit to the cicada-like accompaniment of a hundred wheeled suitcases being dragged along the ground. Passing under arches decorated with mosaics of orange trees and fertile fields, he stepped out into the square: bullring to his right, Plaza del Ayuntamiento straight ahead.

  Valencia, again. Familiar territory.

  It was raining and all the taxis were taken, so he ran to the metro station and dived for cover underground. The green line would take him almost all the way to the port, then he could catch a tram for the last section.

  Almost four months had passed since he’d last been here. At the time, when he left, he thought he might never return. His former home was a pile of rubble, his career was sinking . . . Valencia already felt like the past by the time he’d boarded the train to Madrid and a new life with Alicia. Yet here he was again.