A Body in Barcelona: Max Cámara 5

by Jason Webster

  He had barely seen much of Daniel these past days, they had both been so busy. The radical new direction he had proposed appeared to have been parked for a while, but he had given him the task of printing up some more flyers and leaflets to keep around the collective. Dídac had designed them on the computer, and they used their simple little inkjet printer to do batches of around fifty at a time. But the damn things ran out of ink so quickly – another capitalist trick – and they had drained them dry. Now he would have to pop out to buy some more – there was a guy around the corner who stayed open late and sold bootleg ones for a third of the price if you took back your empties.

  He drank a large glass of water, dressed, checked that he had enough money on him and headed out. If he had anything left over from the cartridges he would buy something to eat at on his way back.

  But he did not even get to the end of his street.

  It was as he was passing the Chinese knick-knack shop that he first overheard something.

  ‘Just the beginning. It’s going to get much worse.’

  ‘I feel sorry for his widow.’

  ‘If we’re not careful there’ll be many more widows in this country soon.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘In the middle of the road as well. Shot to the head.’

  Outside the lottery shop he stopped and pulled out his phone. After a few seconds, he had managed to open a news app. The assassination of Segundo Pont was the only story.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘That’s right, kid.’ An elderly man walking past caught the expression on his face. ‘I don’t want you lot to have to go through what we went through. It needs to be stopped. Someone has to stop it. But I don’t know if it’s already too late.’

  And he shuffled on, mumbling to himself, to no one, to everyone.

  Dídac’s mind accelerated rapidly, his breath caught in his throat. He knew exactly what he had to do.

  He turned and headed back towards the flat. Not running, just walking quickly and with determination. He tried to remember the things that Daniel had taught him. Don’t draw attention to yourself: everyone remembers the unusual. If you want to be invisible, be normal.

  After a couple of minutes he was skipping up the stairs two steps at a time back to the top floor. The key shook in his hand as he tried to make it fit the lock.

  Inside the flat, he shut the door behind him and took a deep breath. If he was going to do this quickly and efficiently he needed to calm himself.

  First, the bags they would need to carry their stuff in. He pulled them down from the top of a wardrobe: two large holdalls and a couple of rucksacks. Everything they needed would have to fit in there. The rest of it would be rejected.

  And Daniel’s words rang in his mind: ‘No sentimentality, no emotion – practicality is the watchword. You take only what you need to carry out the job. Anything else is superfluous and could compromise the mission.’

  Soon, perhaps within hours, he felt sure they would be leaving this place. And Daniel would be pleased that he had already made a start on packing.

  Valencia was over for them. The assassination had changed everything. Daniel would want to go to Barcelona as soon as possible. He felt the certainty of it flow through him like mercury, quickening his thoughts, clarifying everything. He would be sorry to leave the food bank behind, but this was the moment that Daniel had been talking about, the moment when everything would change, the moment for action, not words.

  And at the fringes of his mind a new emotion, one that he had never felt before, began to develop within him: soon he would become someone, someone of consequence – someone at the centre of the new beginning.

  Quickly stuffing socks into the bottom of a rucksack, he felt thrilled, vibrant and alive.

  NINETEEN

  TORRES WENT HOME shortly afterwards, but Cámara stayed and by using the information available on the police intranet and what was coming through on the media, spent much of the night piecing together the events in Barcelona.

  Segundo Pont was having an early dinner at Casa Leopoldo. The place was well-known – politicians of all kinds frequented it and it had been one of the favourite restaurants of author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Tucked down a side street on the western side of the Ramblas, it existed in a curious grey area of the city between the touristy old quarter of the Barri Gòtic and the scruffier Raval district, where immigrants and drug dealers had only recently begun to give way to an influx of moneyed bohemians and rising gentrification.

  Segundo Pont was accompanied by a group of younger members of his party – half a dozen interns and assistants mostly straight out of university who were starting out on their political careers. It was a chance to get to know this leading light, now a member of government, at this exciting time in Catalonia’s history. According to their witness statements, Segundo Pont painted a picture of the future for them: soon there would be new challenges to be met, new posts to be filled, and he was looking for new people he could rely on.

  They all ordered fish – what Casa Leopoldo was best known for – and before the main course, as they were waiting for drinks to be brought, Segundo Pont nipped outside. None of the youngsters smoked, and so he went on his own. (‘Good for you. It’s the only vice I allow myself.’)

  Several moments after he stepped out through the door, they heard the shots. Some thought there were two; others heard three. First outside from the group were Teresa Balaguer and Toni Sants, who found Segundo Pont’s bleeding, dying body face down, his legs sprawled over the pavement and his head in the gutter.

  Paramedics arrived in less than ten minutes and took the politician to the Hospital Clínic. He had received one shot in the chest and another in the top of the head. Initially, they managed to keep him alive – the bullet in the chest had destroyed much of his right lung but missed his heart and for a while, once they brought the haemorrhaging under control, there was hope that he might make it. But the damage to the brain was more severe than initially suspected; it was as they were preparing to operate that the doctors lost him.

  His wife was in there, watching everything.

  The Mossos d’Esquadra police force was alerted at the same time as the paramedics and the first unit arrived seconds before the ambulance. After talking to the staff and diners at the Casa Leopoldo and knocking on a few doors along the street to interview the neighbours, they concluded that Segundo Pont had been shot near the door of the restaurant by an unknown assailant who had then managed to escape. No one, at this early stage, seemed to have witnessed the actual attack, nor seen anyone trying to get away. A lorry parked on the other side of the street would have blocked the view from the square opposite, while many of the foreign immigrants in the area who might have seen something were reluctant to talk to the police. In addition, it was night-time, and the road was darker than normal on that particular stretch after two of the street lamps had failed. Barcelona, like the rest of Spain, was suffering from the economic crisis, and simple municipal maintenance tasks were taking longer.

  The Mossos had only one lead – a woman they interviewed in the early hours said she had seen a man on a motorbike driving down the Carrer de l’Aurora around the time of the shooting. She only noticed him because he seemed to be drunk, weaving down the narrow road and knocking the wing mirror off a parked car with his arm as he sped along, holding on to the handlebars with only one hand as he seemed to be stuffing something inside his jacket with the other. She could not remember anything about his motorbike or his appearance except that he was wearing a full-face helmet, possibly with the visor down.

  Within an hour the Mossos had found the parked car and a few metres further on the remains of the damaged wing mirror. Early analysis by the crime-scene unit suggested that the moped rider might have been wearing a black leather jacket. He would probably have suffered significant damage to his arm smashing off the wing mirror, possibly fracturing the lower section of the humerus.

  Beyond that, howe
ver, the Mossos had nothing, although a very large team was quickly assembled at their headquarters: this was one of the most important cases they had dealt with since they had taken over policing duties across the whole of Catalonia. They were determined to show the world that they were not going to screw it up.

  As they were a nominally Spanish law-and-order force, a certain amount of information about the Mossos investigations was available on the intranet shared among all the policing bodies in the country. From Madrid an order went out that the Guardia Civil, Policía Nacional and other regional forces were to cooperate at all levels with the case. The fact that such a directive was deemed necessary only underlined the lack of coordination and trust between the various groups. The Guardia Civil in particular would have liked nothing better than to be able to rub the Mossos’ noses in a policing failure.

  But it became clear that the order was issued more to cover up the fact that the interior ministry in Madrid was trying to turn the Segundo Pont case into a nationwide investigation, coordinated from the top and – more import-antly – from the centre, from Madrid itself. The move was immediately halted; Segundo Pont’s number two at the Catalan interior ministry was more hard-line and less willing to do deals to soothe political sensibilities. Enric Puig Casals’s first act was to issue a statement that night sending clear instructions to the Mossos: this was a purely Catalan case that would be solved by Catalan institutions; there was to be no tolerance of any attempted interference from Madrid.

  And so within hours of the attack, and with Segundo Pont’s body still warm, the bullets that had been fired at his body were turned into more shots in the intensifying political battle between Catalonia and the rest of the country. And soon the hunt for his killer was practically overwhelmed by the wave of emotion that erupted as people reacted to the news.

  The assassination in the streets of Barcelona of an admired and prominent politician was bad enough. But two factors served to make it worse. The first was the fact that Segundo Pont was seen as a moderate in a regional government of radical politicians. He had been regarded as a bridge builder, someone who commanded great support within Catalonia itself but who could also negotiate with the national government in Madrid. He was personable, respected and unsullied by any suspicion of corruption beyond the normal, expected level. If anyone could keep the two sides communicating, could prevent the head-on collision that many had been predicting for months, it was Segundo Pont. Now that he had gone, however, no one else was available to play that role. Without him, Barcelona and Madrid would be set on a path of collision.

  The second factor was historical, tapping into a collective memory that filled most with dread but a handful of extremists with hot-headed hope: the Spanish Civil War had begun in 1936 after a political murder, that of José Calvo Sotelo. The possibility that everyone denied but secretly feared was that Catalonia’s independence moves, and the political violence that now appeared to be breaking out, might be the prelude to something more serious.

  TWENTY

  IT WAS ALMOST dawn. Alicia would be at home, sleeping. He walked down his street, but rather than stepping to the door of his block of flats and going inside, he carried on. The decision, he knew, had been taken some time before, so why had he even bothered to come this way? He wanted nothing more than to be with her. But despite their living together, despite their sharing of a physical space, they had not truly been a couple now for weeks or even months. And the distance was getting wider.

  His feet carried him down narrow, uncomfortable alleyways. The smell of urine got stronger, the expressions in people’s eyes more suspicious.

  ‘You looking for something?’

  The dealers sent out their feelers, the pimps stared him down.

  And he carried on walking: the feel of the place was wrong. Perhaps it was time to move. Again. This part of the city was dark and grubby and had an edge, and he had liked that at the beginning. Not least because it set him apart from other senior police officers, with their delusions of safety in the suburbs and satellite towns. The Barrio Chino was dangerous, and so was being a policeman. It was one of the main attractions of the job, if they could admit it to themselves. Imagining that you could leave that behind, that there was an oasis to escape to, was a fantasy most bought into because they could not cope with the truth.

  So vanity more than anything else – a sense that he saw things that other policemen did not – had brought him here. Now he wondered if he would ever find somewhere he could belong. Wondered what belonging meant in the first place.

  Everything felt shaken, as though about to crack and collapse around him. And the two pillars that he had relied on in the past to hold him together were no longer there. Hilario had died not only in the physical sense: Cámara could no longer find him within himself. And now Alicia was effectively gone as well.

  Was it his fault? Should he go back to the flat now, try to change things, to make another effort to reach out and hold her, to press her damaged body to him until something within her relented, gave way and they could become as one again?

  He had tried that before. More than once. It was not so much that Alicia had built walls to hide herself from him. It was more that she simply was not there, had disappeared so far into herself that she was no longer a presence. There were no barriers for him to break down. How do you tend a flower that, above the surface at least, has died? He could not even be certain any more that there were any roots. In his love life, as in his work, his intuition had gone silent.

  Everything changed with the assassination. Just as Carlos had predicted – as if he had already known. Fear of social conflict had stalked the country these last months. But a collective memory of the horrors of the past acted as a kind of security. Everyone understood the consequences of political violence. There had been false alarms recently – months before, a local politician in León had been shot dead in the street. And there had been a collective intake of breath, until the murderers – a mother and her daughter – were caught and confessed that personal grievance, not ideology, had made them pull the trigger. The country as a whole had sighed with relief.

  Yet now, with Segundo Pont, it felt as though a line had been crossed. Throughout the night, as he learned the details of what had happened in Barcelona, he thought back to the man he met at the medal ceremony. He was impressed and disturbed by him in equal measure: impressed by Segundo Pont’s warm, easy way with people; disturbed by what he had tried to propose, what he had known.

  ‘You haven’t gone unnoticed, Cámara.’

  And neither had he. Had his killer – or killers – already decided that he was to die when Cámara met him? Was he already a marked man? His sin was to be too nice, too moderate, too balanced, perhaps. A time of black and white had descended upon them. No more shades. Anyone who occupied the subtle centre would be got rid of. Were others now in the line of fire?

  He found himself in a small park area, with trees and a children’s playground. It was deserted now. He sat down on a bench at the far end, placing his arm on the rest and crossing his legs. And he stared out across the street, unseeing.

  Political violence. Only months before he had destroyed a gang of right-wing thugs working for the ruling party in the city, the same men who had scarred Alicia, tortured her and come so close to killing both of them. And he had thought at the time that he had done something, made a difference. The Legionaries of Order and Progress, as they called themselves, had murdered and terrorised in order to maintain the status quo, agents of the forces that wanted power to remain with the conservative, big business elite who had had a stranglehold on the city and the region for decades. It was he – Cámara – who had helped to bring them down. And at some level he thought that he had made a better world, removing an ill that had done so much harm.

  But now this: the assassination of Segundo Pont and the real sense that the country as a whole – not just his little sphere here in Valencia – might explode. He could easily imagine the tal
k in some circles: the Guardia Civil, the military, the far Right. Holding the country together, defending the unity of Spain, was a particular obsession of theirs. They would be whispering about bringing back order, imposing martial law. Just as they had done countless times before in the past. Did history in other countries, he wondered, repeat itself with such clear regularity?

  If ever there had been a time for far-sighted people to be in charge, it was now. Instead the Madrid government was populated with hesitators, people who liked to believe that most problems, in the end, simply blow over. That approach had already brought them this far.

  And so there he was, in the cold, dark grey before sunrise, alone, watching the occasional car drift by, afraid, like the rest of the country, for what might be about to come. And with a case that he was now beginning to feel that he could not solve. Not without some help. Not without a break.

  He could sit, and watch, and be swept up in whatever came next. Or he could take a step, be a part of the change, play his part, no matter how small. Stop things, at least, from becoming far worse. Everything would fall out of control, Carlos had said. And then what would happen? He despised Carlos and all that he stood for, but the CNI man had offered some kind of a solution. Could Cámara really walk away?