He turned away and strolled back along the arm until he came to the fishing boats. A single fisherman was mending a net, weaving his stubby shuttle in and out of the small mesh with bewildering speed. Alvarez stopped. ‘How’s life with you?’
The fisherman looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand that was calloused from years of work on boats. ‘What’s brought you down to the Port? Has somebody robbed one of the banks?’
‘Quite possibly. But so far no one’s woken up enough to discover the fact.’ Alvarez hunkered down on his heels. ‘How’s the fishing going these days?’
‘If it got any thinner, there wouldn’t be any.’
‘You know, old man, you’re worse than any farmer with all your moans.’
‘Spit in the eye of the Virgin if I’m lying when I tell you that it’s a good day now if we catch a quarter of the fish we’d’ve caught when I was a nipper.’
‘You’ll get paid a lot more for what you do catch.’
‘And what’s it buy at a time when prices rise between merienda and supper?’
‘Enough booze and baccy to have kept you out of your coffin.’
The fisherman chuckled. ‘Aye, I can still empty a glass or two, even if I did spit out the last of me teeth the other day over a crust. And I can still do a day’s work. Not like you. You’ve got fat, like a sow in litter. Too much sitting around.’
‘I work much too hard,’ agreed Alvarez. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it. ‘I’m looking for Pedro. He’s on the boats.’
‘Pedro?’ The fisherman struck a match.
When Alvarez leaned forward to light his cigarette from the match in the seamed, cupped hands, he gained an acrid smell of stale fish. ‘That’s right. Pedro,’ he answered, as he leaned back.
‘Take your pick.’ The fisherman laughed shrilly. ‘The boats are filled with Pedros.’
‘He baits his hooks with more than squid and catches more than fish.’
‘He’s lucky, ain’t he?’
‘And full of initiative. He smuggles.’
‘Smuggles? What are you on about? Who around here would smuggle?’
‘Anyone who reckoned to get away with it.’
The fisherman hawked and spat. When he spoke, he seemed unaware of any contradiction with what he’d just said. ‘There’s nowt to a bit of smuggling. It’s in a man’s bones, like the salt water.’
‘I know that, but my boss doesn’t.’
‘Then he’s a silly bastard.’
‘I’m not arguing.’
‘A bloke brings a few cigarettes and watches ashore — in times of few fishes, he’d starve if he didn’t.’
‘My boss hasn’t heard about the watches yet.’
‘Then he’s a silly deaf bastard,’ said the fisherman and cackled with laughter until he choked and Alvarez had to lean forward to thump him on the back. ‘It’s me tubes. The quack said as I ought to be dead, they’re in such a state.’
‘You’ve a few years yet, by the look of you, before they plant you out.’ Alvarez tapped his cigarette and the lazy breeze spilled the ash into the water. Several tourists strolled past, looking at them with open curiosity. Assimilating all the local colour they could, he thought. ‘Where will I find the Pedro I want to talk to?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Old man, you’re so old you know everything about everybody.’
The fisherman moved his knees, which caused the shuttle to tumble down the side of the net: he retrieved it. He drew on the cigarette, holding it into his palm as a seaman did in a gale to shield the burning end. He looked briefly at Alvarez, then beyond the nearest building at the bay. He waited, but Alvarez’s calm, endless patience, bovine in its intensity, convinced him that the detective would wait for ever for an answer. He cleared his throat. ‘There’s Pedro the bull.’
‘A strong bloke?’
‘I’ve seen him lift as many baskets as two other blokes put together.’
‘I’d better be polite to him, then. Where’s he live?’
‘Calle Bunyola.’
‘What’s the name or number of his house?’
‘Never heard it.’
‘OK — someone’ll tell me.’ Alvarez stood up. ‘Keep working hard, old man. Maybe the fish’ll come back in their millions and make your fortune.’
The fisherman shrugged his shoulders. ‘It doesn’t worry me no more.’
Alvarez left and walked to the road end of the harbour arm. He waited for the stream of traffic to pass, then crossed.
When he came abreast of a memento shop he stopped and stared at the medley of carved figures, egg-cups, egg-timers, nutcrackers, and corkscrews in wood, belts of wood and leather, pottery figures, glass animals, postcards … In the old days, he thought, there had been on the island a few men who created beauty in wood with skill and devotion so that their Virgin Marys had been women who suffered for all mankind: now, many men created with machines and their endless Don Quixotes were ugly works of commerce. The tourists destroyed even as their money built.
Calle Bunyola led off to the right of the Llueso road and was two hundred metres long. Beyond it was an urbanizacion in the early stages of development with a large number of empty plots where an earlier lush growth of weeds had been dried by the sun so that now the area looked a parched wasteland.
An elderly woman, dressed in widow’s black, was sitting out on the pavement in the shade of her house. She directed him to the house with green shutters.
He opened the front door, stepped inside, and called out. As he waited he looked round the room, part hall, part sitting-room: it was spotlessly clean and in one corner was a large colour television set.
A man, very tall for a Mallorquin, with broad shoulders, a heavy beard, dark brown eyes that were noticeably lively, an unruly mop of black and very tight curly hair, came out of the room to the right.
‘Good morning,’ said Alvarez, in Mallorquin.
Collom stared at him, a slight frown on his piratical face. Then he nodded. ‘You’re the copper from Llueso?’
‘Right for one.’
‘Who likes cognac?’
‘Right for two.’
‘So how d’you like it?’
‘In a large glass.’
Collom laughed, a deep, belly laugh, then returned into the room from which he’d come. He brought out two balloon glasses, half filled with brandy, and he passed one over. ‘Here’s damnation to all teetotallers.’
Alvarez drank, noting with pleasure that the brandy was a good one, and he went on drinking until all that remained in the glass was the small amount it was customary and polite to leave.
‘You really do like cognac!’ said Collom, a note of reluctant respect in his voice. His own glass still had some brandy in it and he drank this quickly. ‘Let’s have your glass. Life’s too short to waste time.’
When he came back into the room with the glasses refilled, Alvarez took one of the glasses from him and then said: ‘How d’you like colour telly?’
‘It’s great. Come and watch it sometime when you’ve nothing better to do.’
‘I’ll maybe take you up on that … You must be doing all right if you can afford to buy a colour set at over ninety thousand?’
Collom spoke carelessly. ‘I took an old Kraut out fishing one day and he caught so many big fish he reckoned he’d had the finest day of his life. He was going back to Germany to live there and couldn’t be bothered to take the set back with him so he gave it to me as a thank-you.’
‘A real slice of luck.’
‘I get lucky sometimes.’
‘I don’t,’ said Alvarez lugubriously. ‘I’ve a boss who comes from Madrid and can’t grow a crop of ulcers fast enough. He makes sure I don’t get lucky. He doesn’t understand us islanders.’
‘Spaniards!’ said Collom contemptuously. ‘They ought to ship the bloody lot of ’em back to the Peninsula.’
‘He gets all excited over things that don’t really matt
er. Like cigarettes being smuggled ashore.’
Collom fiddled with his beard. ‘Silly bugger! There’s been smuggling since anyone’s ever lived here. What the hell’s the use of living on an island if not to smuggle?’
‘I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen. All get up and go, that’s him. Says that if the smuggling isn’t stopped right away, he’s going to send a detachment of Guards into the Port to search every house to see who’s living it up rich.’
‘That could be interesting.’
Alvarez finished his drink.
Collom said: ‘Anyone who can drink like you’d make a bloody good fisherman.’ He held out his hand for the other’s glass.
When Alvarez was given his glass back, he held the bowl in the palm of his hand to warm it. ‘As I’ve always said, a little bit of smuggling’s good for the soul and the pocket.’
Collom, broad shoulders slightly hunched, stared at him, his eyes watchful and hard.
‘But things get different when it’s done on a big scale and that’s when my boss hears about it and worries. And what worries my boss, worries me. There’s another thing: when it gets real big, in come the foreigners.’
‘Foreigners?’ said Collom roughly. ‘There’s never been a foreigner out at night. The lads’d tip him into the sea and leave him for the crabs.’
‘I don’t mean actually out on the boats: where’d you find a foreigner with the guts to do that?’
‘Then what?’
‘Professional smuggling needs big money and if the foreigners haven’t got anything else, they’ve got plenty of that. Someone’s been putting up big money.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I want his name.’
‘You won’t find it here.’
Alvarez drank. He held his glass at the level of his mouth and looked at Collom over the rim. ‘You know something? If my boss came in here and saw that colour telly set and tasted this cognac, he’d have you marched off to the clink so fast your throat wouldn’t have time to dry out.’
‘I don’t know nothing.’
‘Who’s the banker? The Englishman called John Calvin?’
‘Who the hell’s he?’ But Collom couldn’t quite hide his expression of shocked surprise.
Alvarez finished his brandy.
CHAPTER V
Meegan stood in the garden — since he loathed gardening, it was a garden only in name — and stared up at the house being built four hundred metres away, on the rising slope of the mountain which backed the urbanizacion. Rumour had it that this house — an odd mixture of arches and roofs at different levels — was being built for a Frenchman. He could never understand why any Frenchman should want to build a holiday house on an urbanizacion on Mallorca when he could choose the South of France.
He turned and crossed to one of the deck-chairs on the small patio. Once he was sitting, he looked at his watch. Twenty minutes to drinking time. He sometimes mocked himself for adhering to a six o’clock ‘sundown’ since he was a person who detested routine, but he was certain that if ever he allowed himself a drink whenever he felt like it, without reference to the clock, he would soon become as alcoholically inclined as so many of the retired English who couldn’t find enough to do to occupy their time.
He heard a rustle of sound from his left and looked out at the boulder-strewn area of rough grass, cistus, spurge, dwarf fan palms, thistles, stunted prickly-pear cactus, and single century plant, but for quite a time couldn’t pick out what insect or animal had made the sound — then he saw an olive-brown praying mantis, reared up in its ‘praying’ position. Was the mantis one of the species of insects in which the female ate its mate after copulation?
Sometimes, when his mood was bitter as well as ironic, he’d tell himself that if only he’d been born with either less or more ability, he’d have been successful. Less and he couldn’t have hoped to make a living from writing so he’d have tried something else, more and his books would have sold enough to provide him with a real living. But as things were, success at writing stayed out of reach, yet unfortunately not out of sight.
Lacking any alteration in his ability, a different mental attitude would have been helpful. Ask nine men out of ten what made for the perfect marriage and their answers would be, an attractive, passionate wife with money. Helen was very attractive, very passionate, and she had quite a large private income. Yet only a fool or a blind optimist would call their marriage perfect.
Jealousy was one of the deadly sins. For his money, it was by far and away the most deadly. It crept up unidentified, even unseen, grabbed its victim with all the tenaciousness of a lamprey latching on to a stone, and then pumped out its poison day after day. But at first the victim didn’t realize he was being poisoned.
Everything Helen said or did was, for him, ambiguously natured. If she was in a very cheerful mood, was it because she had recently been with Calvin or merely because she was happy? If she was depressed, was it because she couldn’t visit Calvin, or merely because she was feeling sad? When in answer to his questioning she’d told him she’d met Calvin in the square and had had a couple of drinks with him at one of the outside tables — could anything be less compromising? — had she told him because that was the truth in full, or because she knew she’d been seen with Calvin and she was trying to disarm suspicion? Did she answer his questions because she always told him the truth, or because by doing so she could seem to be?
Calvin had a reputation Don Juan would not have scorned. Men couldn’t understand why women flocked around him, yet if even only half the stories were true, flock they did. One husband, who’d been told by his wife that she had committed adultery with Calvin, had drunkenly suggested he was a hypnotist. Meegan didn’t believe in hypnotism in this context, but he did believe in the power of a reputation. People tended to find what they expected to. And it was a fact that women were fatally attracted by a certain kind of infamous reputation. Because they were so certain they could resist the attraction, they had to put themselves at risk to prove their own strength? Or was it to discover and accept their own weaknesses?
The atmosphere of the island didn’t help. Although it seemed impossible to pin the cause down exactly, there was something about Mallorca which bred a moral breakdown. The sun, the distance from England, the kind of isolation from harsh reality which was also experienced on a ship at sea? Or was it, more prosaically, merely the fact that the foreigners who came to live on the island were, by the very fact that they had left their homelands, footloose? Whatever the reason, proportionately more marriage beds were dishonoured on the island than anywhere in the British Isles, even in Oxshott or Sevenoaks. Had Helen spat on their marriage bed? … If only he hadn’t such an active imagination, the ability to ‘live’ a dreamed-up situation so intently that when it was over he was as emotionally exhausted as if it had actually taken place … If only Helen hadn’t been quite so proudly independent that she bitterly resented being questioned about what she did, or if she had been ready to lie convincingly about what she had done …
His father had often quoted the infuriating saying, ‘If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands.’ His father had enthusiastically encouraged his taking up writing as a career. But then his father had been a low grade employee in an insurance office and he had visualized a writer’s life as containing all the excitement he had missed …
A car came along the spur road and he got up and walked across the patio and the baked earth to the end corner of the house. A Citroën Dyane, a battered and rusty wreck of a car, squeaked to a stop underneath the pine. Brenda Calvin opened the passenger door, which swung all the way back to clang against the bodywork, and climbed out. ‘Hullo, Jim, love,’ she shouted. ‘We had to come up this way and I was so thirsty I said to Steve, let’s take a drink off you.’
Adamson stepped out on to the drive. ‘Hi, Jim! How’s the world? Books doing well?’
‘Graham Greene’s still selling.’ Meegan didn’t dislike A
damson, yet neither did he really like him.
‘I loved his one about the Mafia,’ said Brenda.
‘A book by Graham Greene?’
‘It was a wonderful film. I mean the first one they made. I’ve seen it twice and each time felt so sad for the don.’
‘Who,’ said Adamson with exasperation, ‘was talking about Mario Puzo?’
‘I was, silly. If he wrote it. Why don’t you ever listen to what I say?’
Meegan smiled. Brenda amused him — perhaps because he didn’t live with her. ‘Let’s go and get those drinks. The sun’s just about hitting the yardarm.’
‘You and your stupid yardarm!’ Brenda came up and kissed him loudly on both cheeks. ‘You’re a real square, Jim, and not at all like a proper writer. You ought to be living in a garret, eating dry crusts of bread, and singing about your tiny hand being frozen.’
‘That would be a bloody silly thing to sing when the temperature’s kicking a hundred,’ said Adamson.
‘Take no notice of Steve, Jim, he’s in a terrible mood. It’s all because I won’t go and shriek at John for my money. But I just can’t do that sort of thing.’
Adamson looked even more sullenly annoyed.
She linked her arm with Meegan’s. ‘Hurry up, love. If I don’t pour something wet and cold down my throat in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to curl up and die. I read that one can die from dehydration.’
‘You’ve a bit of leeway.’
She pressed her body against his. ‘Now then, no nasty remarks about my size. I want you to know I weighed myself in the chemist’s and their scales are dead accurate and stripped I’ve lost a whole kilo in the past fortnight. It’s because I never have a last drink now: only the one before the last.’
‘You stripped in the chemist’s?’
‘For God’s sake, give your imagination a rest, you dirty old man. D’you think I’m going to show my treasures to that lecherous man behind the counter?’
Two-Faced Death (An Inspector Alvarez Mystery Book 1) Page 4
