– Wake up, Piano Tuner.
He recognizes the voice. But it lacks its usual tone and depth.
– That’s it, Piano Tuner.
Emanuel Palabras.
Outside his own space, in completely unaccustomed, unsuitable surroundings. Erhard isn’t embarrassed, more like disappointed, that Papa Palabras would enter a dump like this. He’s brought one of his young Maasai girls along, not the extraterrestrial but another younger, more emaciated version – the kind that Palabras favours. Standing behind her, near the door, is Charles, the brawn with his leg in a cast and propped up by crutches. An accident while painting, Palabras has explained, even though Charles doesn’t look like the painter type.
Erhard glances towards the pantry, but the door is almost completely closed, and none of the guests seem to find the room interesting. He pulls the blanket over his cock, visible through the slit. A reddish-grey bird. Emanuel sees it and evidently thinks it’s hysterical, but he says nothing.
– How about that? Erhard says. – Señor Palabras out exploring the real Fuerte. Welcome to the dregs.
– You’re no more the dregs than I am, Emanuel says, searching for a place to sit. – You’re a busker among the kings. You lack for nothing, you could live in a proper home if you wished, but you choose this… this hideaway.
– Get to the point, Palabras. Why are you here?
– I’m a man consumed by grief. My daughter-in-law is dead, and my son will soon be too.
– Has something happened?
Emanuel waves his hand. – A matter of time. Meanwhile, there’s no one to care for me. I need people whom I can trust. And now two of them are gone. You’re all I have left, Piano Tuner.
Characteristically melodramatic, but Erhard has the sense something’s coming.
– What about Charles and the girl?
– I need you, Piano Tuner. For Raúl’s sake. Emanuel sits opposite the sofa. On the coffee table. – I need a man in my business. Now that Raúl’s gone, there’s no one to steer the ship. No eyes to navigate.
Erhard doesn’t understand what Palabras is driving at. – What do you mean?
– You know the profession inside and out. You even have a nose for business, I’m aware. Rumour has it you’re the best taxi driver on the island.
That rumour had escaped Erhard’s attention. – Do you mean Taxinaria?
– You won’t need to drive any more. All you’ll have to do is tell me what’s happening on the ground. Maybe keep people in line.
– So Raúl wasn’t just on the board of directors? You own Taxinaria?
Emanuel Palabras glowers at him as if he’s an idiot. – What else but his father’s money qualifies my dumb boy to join the board of directors? But now I’m looking for a man who knows the business, someone who can think for himself.
Charles is now right beside the pantry, leaning against a section of bare wall. Erhard doesn’t like him standing there, but doesn’t know how to get him to move elsewhere.
– I can’t work for Taxinaria, Erhard says. – That would be disloyal.
– Rubbish. No more communist camaraderie chatter. Of course you can. We are the future, you should join us.
– I can’t just take over Raúl’s job like that. It’s undignified. What would you need me for over there? I’m an old man, closer to retirement than a promotion. Why should I work for you?
– To help me. That’s what I’m telling you. You and I, we understand each other, and I’ll pay you handsomely. There, that’s the short answer.
Erhard doesn’t take the bait. – You can’t just buy people, he says, staring directly at Palabras.
– I’m not buying anyone, I’m rewarding those who see opportunity. C’mon, Piano Tuner. Are you planning to spend the rest of your days here? Here?
He repeats the word ‘here’ to underscore just how absurd the thought is.
The idea of ending his days here doesn’t frighten Erhard. Probably because he’s accepted it. But when Palabras puts it that way, it doesn’t sound attractive. – I’ll manage, he says.
Palabras goes on without listening. – You can even move into his flat until it’s sold. Get away from this place for a few months.
Erhard rises to his feet and gets dressed, his back to his guests. He pulls on his jeans and no underwear, which he can’t find now and doesn’t care to search for.
Emanuel Palabras starts from the beginning. – I hear you’re looking for a new diesel generator.
Erhard stands stock-still. Sees the MitchFever photographs stuck to the fridge. – Yes, he says and nonchalantly flips the photographs over. – Who told you that?
– Small villages talk, as they say.
– Do you own the electronics shop?
Palabras owns so many things, one can never be certain.
– No. Thank god. Too trifling for me. But one hears things. They also said you were looking for a girl down near Morro Jable.
Erhard’s a little alarmed that people have been talking about him. He’s usually too uninteresting for that kind of thing. Why now?
– Isn’t that right, Piano Tuner? Is she some whore you just had to have?
Palabras’s typical reasoning. – No, she was a sensible young woman, who… Just as he’s about to say, Who takes good photographs, something causes him to change his story. – Owed me some money for a taxi ride. I got my money, and that’s that.
Palabras scrutinizes him. Then he nods. – You’re not just some old dog, you’re also a stingy old dog. He laughs. – Just don’t run around wasting your time, and keep everyone happy. Drive your taxi, tune my piano, take care of yourself.
It sounds like a threat of some kind, though Erhard can’t say why.
– What is that beeping noise? Charles suddenly says, nudging the pantry door open with his crutch. He stares into the darkness at the shelves of coffee and tinned soup. The cords with the IV and the catheter are concealed behind the shelves and run above the door, invisible unless one enters the room and closes the door. Since there’s no light in the pantry, Charles won’t do that. – It’s coming from in here, he adds.
Erhard knows what it is. It’s the sound the respirator makes when she hyperventilates. It could mean that she just peed. But he can’t go out there now.
– It’s just a temperature gauge signalling that it’s too warm in there. It’s better if we close the door.
Just before Charles steps into the pantry, Erhard manages to shut the door. He tries to make it seem natural by continuing on to the refrigerator and taking a quick, desultory peek inside. It has been days since he last went shopping. He hasn’t had any desire to spend money on food. He sees January’s envelope on top of the fridge and pushes it further in, so that it doesn’t stick out so much.
– Thanks for the offer, Palabras, he says, trying to redirect conversation. – But Raúl’s not dead. He might return tomorrow from his little drinking binge in Dubai. So I don’t want his job or his flat. But I will take care of his girlfriend, he thinks. Then he continues: – I’m not going to stop driving a taxi just because you’ve had some great idea. You’re not going to tell me what I will and will not do. – And anyway, I don’t know what I would do at Taxinaria if I’m not driving a taxi.
A moment passes, then Emanuel Palabras begins to laugh. – Fine. If you think my impossible son will return. One can always hope, and may the gods have mercy on him, but until then, his business, which is my business, needs to be kept afloat. It’s not a company run by robots, a factory that just spits out product. It’s people-based, you understand; it requires one’s presence.
Emanuel follows Erhard around the house and then outside, while Erhard brushes his teeth and finds a t-shirt and feeds the goats. For a moment, the two men stand side by side watching the grey goats leap around the rocks. Charles has followed the two men out, and now he laughs at Laurel, the one with only a single horn. The Maasai girl brushes her hand through the pelt of the smaller of the two goats, Hardy, who usually isn’t very cuddly when he eats.
Emanuel explains how important it is to land the right person in Raúl’s position. – I was the one who gave him the company when he turned twenty-four. Back then it was a simple business without any competition. That was precisely thirteen years and four months ago. He needed to have something to do. But he’s never really been interested in it. He came to the office mostly when it rained.
– I’ll consider it, Erhard says, without meaning it, when they’re once again seated at the little kitchen table with a cup of instant coffee each.
– Raúl probably told you about his work? Palabras asks.
– We didn’t talk about it, but I’m sure he had his reasons for that.
– Wasn’t he the one who got you your job way back when?
– In a way.
Raúl had found a poster somewhere in the city: Good Drivers Wanted. When they went downtown one evening, he’d pulled the poster from his pocket and tossed it at Erhard. That was at the beginning of their friendship, before Beatriz entered the picture, and they would get pissed together. Erhard had applied for the job, and was hired immediately. This was in 1998, and they needed full-time drivers. Erhard drove for a man called Roberto. A few years later Roberto joined up with three other cabbies and formed TaxiVentura. Erhard continued to drive for Roberto until Roberto’s death a few years ago. After that he kept driving for TaxiVentura.
Emanuel Palabras discusses Taxinaria’s finances, which worsened after TaxiVentura signed a contract with the airport three years earlier. But Erhard’s not listening. He knows all about the conflict because of the many arguments the drivers had down in the queue, but he doesn’t want to hear any more about it. – You haven’t made it easy for us, Palabras concludes, as if it is Erhard’s singlehanded efforts that have saved TaxiVentura. – But now it’s time for you to join the good guys.
– I’ll think about it, Erhard says, wondering how he might say no.
– Think good and hard, Papa Palabras says.
His three visitors ride off in Emanuel’s boxy white 1972 Mercedes 60, the girl driving. She can barely see over the steering wheel.
He hurries to the pantry to check on Beatriz and the equipment. The drainage bag, which is small and difficult to remove from the container, is filled with urine, even though he’d emptied it the night before. Maybe the glucose has begun to take effect. He rolls her onto her side and fills the generator with diesel.
Afterward he turns on Radio Mucha and studies January’s photos, jotting questions on the back of the envelope. In one column he writes questions that he can answer himself; in the other he writes questions only the police can answer. He tries to shift questions from one column to the other. His hand trembles, and his penmanship is uneven.
How high was the water at Cotillo Beach at night during the period between Wednesday, 4 January and Saturday, 7 January? When the car had stood on the beach for at least one day?
Who saw the car arrive? In parentheses: No one. He recalls Bernal telling him that. No one saw the car arrive.
Was there an onshore wind?
Who sails along the coast, and how close do they sail? Could they have seen something?
How do new vehicles arrive on the island?
Why Danish newspapers?
He has the feeling that the newspapers are a dead end, not worth wasting his time on. The newspapers were what the boy happened to be wrapped in, that’s all. Nothing more. Who reads Danish newspapers here anyway? Many of the tourists – including the Danes – arrive on the island with English newspapers tucked beneath their arms or, at most, Jyllands-Posten or Politiken. There was a time when Danish newspapers were delivered to some of the hotels, but no longer; people use computers to read their news now. At the end of the nineties he subscribed to BT. It was sent to him once a week, arriving seven days late, stiff and crumpled from the night dew and the harsh morning sun. He subscribed to follow the football scores. That was back when you could still be a B1903 fan. He read every article and imagined the matches while pretending to hear Svend Gehr’s voice, even though he probably never announced those kinds of matches or was on TV any more. He still remembered the players: John Beck Steensen, Martin Løvbjerg, Kim, ‘Gold Paw’ Petersen. But when they merged all the Copenhagen clubs into one super club, all the magic disappeared. He maintained his subscription for another six months, then cancelled it, and never held another Danish newspaper in his hand until he went to the police station with Bernal and rummaged in the box with the newspaper fragments.
As a subscriber, he’d had his name and address stamped on the back of the newspaper. Even though his house number wasn’t included, it always reached him. He underlines the question about the newspaper and writes: Where did it come from?
To answer that question, he needs to get hold of the newspaper fragments. It’s illegal, but wouldn’t necessarily be all that difficult. He knows where the box is.
His shirt with TaxiVentura’s logo on the breast pocket is still in a laundry sack at the bottom of a wardrobe. He smoothes it a little and pulls it over his head without buttoning it. It smells strange, worn, although he hasn’t put it on for seven or eight years, since that time Barouki wanted to make everyone look more professional and take up the fight with Taxinaria in earnest. He gets a cardboard box and packs it with tins and other items to give it weight. Then he closes the box, wraps it in heavy-duty tape, and writes the address on a yellow Post-it note. He then scribbles a second note with the address of the local police in Morro Jable. He shoves the second note in his pocket along with the role of tape.
He takes the back roads down to Puerto. No one follows him. No Mercedes, no Palabras and company. Still, he makes a wide pass around the Palace and waits to turn into the car park until he’s the only car on the roundabout. He parks just around the corner from the entrance.
The atmosphere is that of coffee klatsch for the island’s grumpy residents. In the reception area, there’s a woman with a small dog, a married couple and their son, two women who appear to be together, and a man with a large suitcase. The floor is littered with papers and forms that blow off one of the shelves every time the door opens; in the centre of the room is a large, dry potted plant. Erhard walks over to the metal detector, hands his box to the guard, and points at the logo on his shirt. The guard glances at the address and lays the box on the other side of the detector. Erhard passes through the detector, picks up his box, and heads down the corridor as if he’s done this many times. The guard doesn’t even watch him go. An older man in overalls who’s drinking water from a tap in the hallway gives him a disinterested glance.
He passes the open office space where all the officers sit. But no one’s there at the moment. The room is empty. Perhaps they’re in a meeting, or they’ve gone down to the harbour, a three-minute walk from here, where Antonio the deaf man serves the best Spanish omelettes one can find for breakfast.
Erhard continues to the storage room, where Bernal brought him last time. It’s dark in there, and he snaps on a large wall switch. The fluorescent tubes click and hum. He starts at the big shelf where he saw the cardboard box; he’d expected to find it where he had seen it before, but it’s not there. There are other boxes, small bags filled with clothes, stacks of paper wrapped in elastic bands. The shelf is four metres high and five or six metres wide. He walks around it and finds three other shelves. They are organized following some method that’s incomprehensible to Erhard, probably by case number, but all Erhard is looking for is the box. He could use more light or a torch; he has to poke his head across every shelf. He inspects shelf number two and is halfway through number three when he hears voices and footfalls out in the office. Then laughter as if from a funny film or a strip show. The policemen have returned to their desks.
Through the shelves he can see people walking around in the hallway. The man in overalls is washing the floors in front of the storage room door, so there’s no one out there at the moment besides him.
Erhard picks up his pace, his eyes darting faster over the shelves. He pauses only when he sees square shapes: cases, cardboard boxes. The police seem to use a standard box, with the docket for the case number on one side. Although those boxes are smaller than the one he’s looking for, each time he sees one at a distance he thinks he’s found the right one. He turns around and begins investigating shelf number four when he finds the one he’s searching for on the lowest shelf. Written across it is the word Archivados. It looks like an ordinary box packed with porcelain, but he recognizes it instantly.
He sits down and pulls out the box to analyse its contents. But it’s impossible to see anything in such bad light. He’d like to carry it to the table near the door, but he hears some men talking either at the door or in the storage room near the first shelf. If they spot him they’ll wonder what he’s doing. There’s no lid on the box, and no flaps that he can fold out. He grabs some paper from one of the other shelves and wraps it around the box. From his pocket he withdraws the yellow note with the address of Morro Jable’s small police headquarters and affixes it. The paper doesn’t stick, but it doesn’t matter. He just needs to get out of here, fast.
He hurries past two men now seated at the table, and out into the corridor before they can say anything. He doesn’t look up, but heads straight towards the exit. The entire office is now a bustle of activity, and people rush past him. There’s even a voice that sounds like Bernal in the back of the room. A group of five people on their way through the metal detectors. He hopes to exit while the guard is occupied and doesn’t notice. The coast is clear on his right.
– Señor Jørgensen?
Hassib, the police officer he met in Raúl’s flat, is standing in the doorway of a small, well-lit room with great big copy machines. – Hello again, Erhard says, not slowing.
– What are you doing here? Hassib calls after him.
– I’m delivering a package on behalf of your colleagues, Erhard says, passing through the metal detector without glancing back. Just as he’s about to shove the door open with his shoulder, he feels a hand holding him back.
– Who sends packages by taxi?
Hassib has set down his coffee and is looking at the box in Erhard’s hands.
– How should I know? I’m just doing what I’m told. Erhard nods at the yellow note. – Morro Jable headquarters, he reads.
– Jable? Hassib studies the note closely. – What’s the rush?
– You can drive it out there if you want to, Erhard says, holding out the box. – I don’t need the forty-five euros.
The young Arab’s eyes are bleary, with dark bags beneath them. He glares at the box as if he’s considering something. Then he shakes his head and retreats a step. – I’m not done with you, he says. Then he turns and leaves.
Erhard pushes the door open and hustles to his car.
At home he empties the box on the table. Because of the draught that always breezes through the house, the newspaper fragments flutter like ashes in a bonfire. The smell of urine is nearly gone, but not quite. He sorts the fragments, tossing those with clear images or text back into the box. Then he arranges the rest in orderly rows, studying them one by one.
He uses a magnifying glass. He’s thorough, lifting each little fragment and examining both sides before returning the fragment to the box. Once he’s checked the first rows, he arranges new rows. He’s never considered how much empty space there is in a newspaper. After he’s gone through half, he counts all the blank fragments. Seventy-seven white or newspaper-coloured. Fifty-one black or grey. Thirty red. Five green. Four blue. Two purple.
Then he takes a lunch break. Sits on the stool eating a heel of stale bread.
He hasn’t deliberated on Papa Palabras’s offer yet. Which is to say: He hasn’t made a decision yet. On the one hand, the offer is interesting; on the other, it’s inappropriate and completely wrongheaded. Palabras knows Erhard has zero experience running such an operation. He knows that Erhard would have difficulty – if he doesn’t find it impossible – being the boss of people who’ve been his competitors these past few years. With a couple of them, he wouldn’t mind demonstrating that he can do better without them – Pauli Barouki for one – and he’s already begun to consider the improvements he might implement. One could do a lot for the drivers: improve the situation at dispatch and with the taximeters, get better coffee in the break-room. But it’s too early to think about these things.
Right now he’s mainly curious as to why Palabras is so eager to bring Erhard aboard. There’s no simple answer. The charitable answer is that he wants to maintain control of the business, and now that Raúl is gone, Erhard is the closest thing to a right-hand man who knows something about operating a taxi company. The practical answer is that Palabras wishes to delay any decision regarding Raúl’s business until it’s clear just what happened to him. The cynical answer is that Emanuel Palabras wishes to assert his influence on his son’s company, even in a future where someone like Marcelis Asasuna probably will aim to increase his role in the company. In reality, Erhard really wishes to say no thanks and continue his life as usual. There’s something about the offer that seems strange, even if he can’t precisely say what.
He finds scribbled on one of the fragments, in faint ink, rick 2310. He examines the fragment carefully under the magnifying glass. Someone traced it repeatedly, so that it pierced the paper.
He sets the fragment aside and inspects a new row, not looking at the contents of the newspaper, only the forms, colours, structures. He knows exactly what he’s searching for; he’s seen it a number of times without thinking about it. If the newspaper was sent to the island from Denmark, then someone in Denmark would’ve stamped the recipient’s name. A name and an address in grey, blocky type. It may have worn off some, or it may be illegible, but nevertheless it would’ve been added after the newspaper had been printed, all the way up at the top of the front page so the mailman would have been able to read the address even when carrying the newspaper in a stack of letters. Finally after almost three hours, and after laying down a forth row of newspaper fragments, he finds it. Part of it, at least. The address is incomplete, consisting only of a name, road, and house number. The name of the city is missing.
Café Rústica, c/o Søren Hollisen, 49 Calle Centauro.
It doesn’t ring any bells. In thirteen years as a taxi driver he has never heard of Calle Centauro. Or a cafe by that name. He goes out to his car and calls dispatch. Two minutes later he gets a response. There’s no Calle Centauro. Not here on the island, the girl adds.
Maybe Politiken wrote the wrong address. If only he could find the name of the city. He continues to rummage through the pile of fragments. Evening falls, then night. He takes a short break and checks on Beatriz, making sure her IV is stable and giving her the right dosage. Her body is absorbing sustenance. Though his hands are cold, he feels her body, warm and pulsating.
He makes it all the way through the pile of fragments, but doesn’t find a city name. He considers starting over again from the beginning. But something tells him that the fragment he’s looking for isn’t there. He has been thorough. A thousand fragments might be missing. If he gathered every single one of them, laying each one together like puzzle pieces, then maybe he would see the holes here and there and know that the fragment with the city name is one of the missing pieces. But he can’t do it any more. He’ll have to find Calle Centauro another way.
On Tuesday morning he doesn’t drive to Alapaqa but to Tuineje. To Mónica’s. He has never visited her without Aaz. It’s a big step. He parks at the side of the road to gather his courage, but instead grabs his notebook and dashes over the road to the payphone.
– This is Erhard Jørgensen. May I swing by?
– It’s only eight o’clock. Quarter after eight, Mónica says.
– It’s important.
– Does it have anything to do with Aaz?
She sounds afraid.
It hadn’t occurred to him that she would think of Aaz. – Not at all, everything’s OK. It’s about the computer, like last time.
She’s relieved. – Can’t it wait?
– I’m parked down the road. I’m calling from a payphone.
Pause. It annoys Erhard a little how long it takes her to respond.
– Give me ten minutes to eat my breakfast.
He waits in the car, then walks to her house fifteen minutes later. Before he reaches the door, she opens it and leaves it ajar, so he can enter. She has apparently cleaned up. Papers are neatly stacked, and a dishrag dangles from a little cord above the sink. She’s wearing a red dress with small, glistening sequins. It looks like something one wears to tango. Erhard doesn’t tango.
– You’re a cab driver. Don’t you know every address on the island? she asks when he explains what he’s looking for. The computer is on, and she sits at her desk. – Didn’t you say something about learning how to use a computer?
– Someday, maybe, Erhard says, though he can’t picture ever doing so.
– What was the place called again?
He spells the cafe’s name as well as the name of the street.
– It’s on the east coast, Mónica says, zooming out. – Oops. I forgot to write Fuerteventura. Just as she’s about to tap the keys, she zooms out again. – Wait, it’s on Tenerife. Does that sound right?
– Is there a cafe nearby?
– Let’s see. She points at an aerial photograph, taken right above the little waterfront city. Some text is written across the map, and Erhard spots the name of the street. – Café Rústica. Was that it?
– It’s on Tenerife?
– Yes, in Santa Maria del Mar, just south of Santa Cruz.
– And there’s no Calle Centauro here on this island?
– No, not as far as I can tell. She stands up. – Would you like a cup of coffee since you’re already here?
– Can we find one more thing first?
She returns to her seat.
He shows her the fragment with the pen’s scratch-marks: rick 2310. – Maybe they’re digits from a telephone number?
He gives up trying to follow what she’s doing on the computer. Instead he watches her fingers deftly manoeuvre across the keyboard. She obviously plays the piano.
There’s no one called Rick with those digits in his telephone number. Not on Gran Canaria either. No one’s called Rick, for that matter. But plenty of Ricardos, Richards, Rickos, Rickys, and Rickis, of course. There’s no connection. She also searches for the name Søren Hollisen and finds a Søren Holdesen Jensen, an engineer from Farum, Denmark – but no Hollisen anywhere close to the Canary Islands. She tells Erhard that you can’t always count on the Internet to find answers. Not everything is online. If a person doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found on the Internet, either.
Then she prepares coffee.
Erhard studies the map again. Sees the cafe’s name in small white letters across the aerial photograph. For some reason it seems right.
It must be the place, even if there’s one ‘a’ too many or too few in the name. Mónica cleans up the kitchen and he tells her loudly about the newspaper fragments, and how he’d put them together to locate the address. He wishes he could tell her what it means. About the boy in the box. But he can’t do that. Not yet. He drinks his coffee. It’s strong and bitter. As he watches her wipe coffee grounds from the kitchen counter, he notices her nice round ass behind all the sequins.
He heads home to fill the generator, then drives to the garage to hoover the car and wash the doors and panels. Normally he cleans his car every other week, but it needs a scrubbing: all the black surfaces on the seats and the steering column are grey with dust. The auto workshop has a special brush that blasts water through the seat cushions and sucks it out again, removing grime and stains. He also gives the boot a thorough scouring. You never know who might look in there.
After his conversation with Emanuel Palabras, he’s curious to see things with fresh eyes. He’ll stop by the office, maybe run into Pauli Barouki and tell him that he bloody well better take care of those damn forms. And the carwash in front of the office which Erhard never uses because it’s always too crowded. White foam runs into the drain, which is plugged with disintegrating cardboard.
But now he can take his ideas to Taxinaria and push some of them through. From colleagues who’ve changed sides, he knows that they have the same problems. He could be the man of the day, the man of the month, with all of his ideas. Raúl, that asshole, used to just laugh at Erhard’s angry outbursts. Who knows whether he implemented any of his ideas at Taxinaria. According to rumours he’d heard, they’d purchased more sponges for their wash centre and a new smart-board for the duty roster. The only thing Erhard has ever managed to get Barouki to agree to was a bookshelf for a lending library. Erhard had installed the shelf himself and donated the first books. Of course, Erhard was the only one who ever used the shelf. In the end, Erhard removed his books and took them back home.
When he’s done cleaning his car, he parks on the other side of the fence and enters the gate. He waves a quick hello to Gustavo, the brand-new driver, as well as Sebastiano, who works for Taxinaria.
Maybe Erhard was right all along that Pauli Barouki didn’t like him. Perhaps because Pauli knew that he was friends with the Palabrases. It seemed as though he treated Erhard differently than the others. Like that time with the lockers. Each driver was given a little locker to store his coats, a change of clothes, or personal property. At one point they were reassigned lockers to accommodate the new drivers. Erhard’s was moved into the corner, squeezed up against the electrical box. Which meant his locker wasn’t even half the size of the others. Earlier, that locker had been given only to substitutes and part-time drivers. Erhard complained, but Barouki simply retorted that, unfortunately, there was nothing he could do for him, and that Erhard shouldn’t expect special treatment just because he had friends in high places. At the time, he’d thought Barouki meant his reputation in the company, where Erhard served as a kind of confessor for several of the most frustrated drivers. But maybe he’d meant something else entirely.
Erhard walks through the workshop, down the corridor, and up the stairs. On this floor are three small rooms clustered around a small terrace, where the sun blazes down on a cactus surrounded by rocks. He heads directly into the office. Pauli Barouki is washing his face in the sink he had installed. He’s lanky and grey-skinned.
– Hermit, he says, without glancing up.
– I just want you to know that I never realized until now that Emanuel Palabras owns Taxinaria.
Barouki laughs. This surprises Erhard. – Well, well.
– Is that why you gave me that tiny locker? I asked you to reconsider. It wasn’t fair.
Barouki’s smile vanishes. – Save your idealism. You got that locker because you got the bookshelf. It’s that embarrassingly simple. You can’t get everything you wish for.
– You still don’t get the idea behind that shelf.
– Seems no one does. Barouki washes his faces again, then removes a towel from a small basket underneath the sink. He sits down and pats his face dry, his hands, his arms. – I haven’t treated you differently because you’re friends with Raúl or old man Palabras. I am many things, but I’m not unfair.
– Then why don’t we have the new whiteboard for duty rosters? We’ve discussed it for years.
– Will you pay for it? No. If everyone chips in ten euros, we can talk about it. Or forego your salary for two weeks and we can buy one.
– Maybe I should move on. Maybe Taxinaria’s not as stingy with its money. In the thirteen years that I’ve worked here, this company hasn’t spent so much as a hundred euros on its employees. We painted the break-room ourselves, and the chairs are Gonzo’s, for Christ’s sake.
– You got the lockers when you asked for them.
– That was more than ten years ago.
– C’mon. I wasn’t even here ten years ago. I’ve helped change a lot of things in my time. I helped you get that new dispatch console. You know that.
– That was years ago, and anyway it was just an investment in your equipment. Besides, the drivers weren’t exactly clamouring for that new console.
– Look around you, Hermit, you’re not in wonderful Danimarca any more. Every one of us, this entire country, is deep in debt. Mainlanders don’t come here if they owe the banks money. The entire island lacks tourists and we don’t have the funds to pamper drivers, even if we wished to.
– Enough with all that financial-crisis rubbish. You could have done something long ago. You seem to be doing all right lounging around on your manicured lawn up on the hill.
– Careful what you say, Hermit. You’re no majorero. Don’t you forget that.
– I’m just telling you to do something. If you don’t care to listen to me, then listen to Anphil. He’s a majorero, and he lives and breathes for this place. And what have you done for him? Nothing. I’ve gotten a job offer from Taxinaria, and I’m going to accept it.
Barouki is washing himself again, his back to Erhard. – We do all we can, Hermit. Don’t overplay your hand. I’ve been hearing that young Palabras is now counting pennies on the bottom of the ocean. Those aren’t the kind of people you want to fool around with any more than you need. He turns to Erhard now. – Did you forget how we help you each month with your little money-transfer to your ex-wife? It’s actually quite difficult to transfer money. Our accountant tells me all the time how much of a mess it is, but we do it anyway. Why? Because I promised to help you. It’s called loyalty.
– You think I can’t get others to help with that?
Erhard glances down at the empty table. There’s not a single paper, newspaper, computer, or telephone. It appears as though the table has just been moved into the room He spins on his heels and leaves before Barouki says anything more. Everything happened so fast, but maybe it’s for the best.
On the way out he says hello to Anphil, who’s lying underneath Ponduel’s Lexus. Ponduel’s sitting out front with one of Taxinaria’s drivers, who has stopped in for coffee. The difference between the two companies is negligible, yet they behave like two rival football clubs.
Ponduel’s normally not very chatty, but when Erhard asks him how he’s doing, he complains about the auto workshop. He doesn’t think the Greek – that’s what he calls Anphil – should be the sole mechanic responsible for thirty drivers while freelancing for Taxinaria at the same time he does rush jobs on Marcelis’s wife’s Mazda. Erhard listens for a moment, but knows that Ponduel can keep on like this for a long time. So he heads back to his cab, accompanied by the driver from Taxinaria. He’s in his mid thirties, or maybe he’s forty, with coarse skin. The son of a driver who was killed in a horrible accident the year before during the Maria Festival.
Erhard taps his arm before the Taxinaria driver climbs into his car.
– How do you like it over there? Working there.
The man gives Erhard a friendly look. He’s of the new generation which doesn’t want to get mixed up in all the competition, gossip, and idiocy of years past.
– Just like here, I’d imagine.
– Have you ever met Raúl Palabras?
– I’ve only seen him twice.
– Hmm. Did you know that Emanuel Palabras owns Taxinaria?
– Quién sabe. Marcelis is the one who calls all the shots.
– What’s he like? Is he as strict as they say?
The man smiles. – More or less. He yelled at me once. You don’t want to experience that twice.
– What happened?
– I complained about some moving boxes that have been in the break-room since last summer. Only five people can sit in that itty-bitty space. The secretary was thrown out of her boyfriend’s house or something, and she hasn’t found a place to live. So she sleeps on the sofa at the temp’s place, Loulou’s, and she keeps the rest of her things in eleven boxes stacked against the walls.
Erhard laughs. – Why hasn’t Marcelis asked her to remove them?
– You know. She’s a secretary. He makes a suggestive gesture.
– Isn’t Marcelis married?
The man stares at Erhard as if he’s stupid. – Between you and me, I’m saving up to start my own company. After three more years of driving I can go independent. I’m not going to sit in some taxi for the rest of my life like my father.
– Good for you, Erhard says. Though, in truth, he doesn’t believe there’s room enough for three taxi companies on the island. It’s hard enough with two. – Good chatting with you. Maybe I’ll see you around.
Erhard drives down Calle Nuestra Señora del Carmen and parks at the back of the queue to get a few customers, when dispatch rings and tells him that he’s got a phone call. He walks into Café Bolaño and waits by the telephone. Maybe it’s Barouki. He picks it up on the first ring. He hears the line click over.
– We don’t want you here, Hermit.
– Who is this?
– Marcelis Osasuna, motherfucker. Marcelis practically screams into the receiver. Erhard has only met the man a few times, but everyone knows him. And he’s known for his use of English obscenities.
– What makes you think I want to work for you?
– Why do you think, Extranjero? Palabras might own me, but he doesn’t decide everything.
Sebastiano must’ve told him. – All I did was ask the boy what it was like to work at your place.
– What fucking boy?
– Forget it. But I haven’t given Emanuel Palabras my answer yet.
– Rumour has it you’re lashing the whip over at Ventura. Don’t come over here and whip me. I’ll give it right back to you.
– Does Palabras know you’re calling me?
Silence. – Of course not. And if you tell him you’re finished.
– So many threats, Erhard says, even though he didn’t mean to say it out loud.
– I can keep ’em coming. I’ve fought tooth and nail for this company. You’re on your way into the lion’s den, Extranjero.
Erhard hears Marcelis ruffle through some papers.
– You might be tight with the Palabrases, but you’re not coming over here and taking over.
– Who says I want to?
– What do you want then?
– I want to consider it for a few days, and then I’ll let Emanuel Palabras know.
– You think very carefully, Hermit.
Marcelis hangs up.
For a moment Erhard stands with the black plastic receiver in his hand, then he finally hangs it up, staring at the wall. One of the posters taped next to the payphone is an ad for one of the many private boats that sail to Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria – even a little ferry that sails to Hierro of all godforsaken places. He studies the photograph of the captain, or anyway someone wearing a captain’s hat, who’s toasting with some passengers in the ship’s bar. Erhard makes a decision. During the next few hours he won’t think about his future, as a driver or anything else. He will go to Morro Jable and sail to Santa Cruz. Then he remembers Beatriz and the bloody generator. There’s only one person who can take care of her while he’s gone.
He retrieves his notebook from the car. He inserts a quarter in the telephone and punches the doctor’s number.
The trip makes him restless.
There’s something strange about leaving the island, the sandy ground under his feet. Apart from short forays to the pile of rocks that is Isla de Lobos with Raúl and Beatriz once in 2008, this is only the third time he has left Fuerteventura. He’s been to Lanzarote twice, once to pick up his Mercedes. That was in 1999.
He sits on the sundeck under the blinding sun for a long time. Ten hours with nothing to do. Afraid to fall asleep, he doesn’t drink any alcohol. He makes a game of shaking small peanuts from a sticky bag and tossing them into his mouth.
The captain isn’t nearly as friendly as he looks in the photograph. He’s grumpy and incoherent. Chain-smokes at the railing and stares down in the water as if he wishes to throw himself into the ship’s wake. Erhard converses with him several times, but is interrupted when tourists want to snap photographs with him. The captain salutes and poses for these photos; he has nothing to do with the ship’s navigation, of course, but is a kind of steward whose job is to radiate a captain’s authority – though he doesn’t quite succeed. It is the kind of thing that always amused Raúl. Big shots in decline. Beaten down. Raúl loved getting politicians, policemen and civil servants pissed, then humiliating them with idiotic tomfoolery, watching them blush when a female bartender offered them tequila in a glass squeezed between her breasts. He loved to steal their hats and pick at their ties like a coquettish stripper, stick bills down their snug-fitting trousers, or send them double vodkas with umbrellas. One time he grabbed a man by his collar simply because he’d dressed his son in a sailor suit. Just because of that.
How could Raúl have turned his fist against Beatriz? It’s logical enough to believe that’s what happened, and yet he can’t believe it. He doesn’t want to believe his friend is capable. He doesn’t want to believe he could misjudge someone’s character. What is he to make of the words Beatriz had somehow said? Help me. Let me go.
It frustrates him that his thoughts about Raúl are mixed. Not pure, not simply loving or angry. Maybe what he feels is what a father feels for his prodigal son: reproachful, damned, grief-filled. He enters the little bar on the sundeck where the captain stood in the photograph on the poster. Buys the last bag of peanuts. Afternoon arrives, then evening; sea birds – some long black creatures with square beaks – squawk in the wind that whistles above the boat. The ship approaches land.
He stands at the stern.
Tenerife across the water.
Many years have passed since the last time he was here. When he arrived on the islands and was searching for a place to stay, he’d spent some days at a cheap hotel near a beach. As the boat skips on the waves towards the white harbour, he sees the island with new eyes. The island appears taller and redder than Fuerteventura, and it’s impressive. Far more attractive than the island he’s chosen to live on. He thinks of his mother, who always loved Copenhagen whenever they drove around Tivoli Amusement Park, but feared and hated the city if one of her children were out of her sight for just two minutes, or when they waited at the Central Station for Erhard’s father to arrive on a train, and a homeless man would ask Erhard’s brother Thorkild if he had a light. Living your life in a state between destructive hatred and deep-seated love is exhausting.
He gazes across the water at the island. Every time the boat sinks into the valley of a wave, the island appears larger and more solid.
Calle Centauro is a sad-looking place. A beige road in a business district. But the cafe is white and large, actually more of a discotheque than a cafe. There’s a massive room, constructed around a small atrium with palm trees that jut through a hole in the roof. Erhard sits at a table underneath one of the palms and scans the handwritten menu. Not something he sees very often. Even the dinkiest and shabbiest wine and cocktail bars in Corralejo have lively menus with flamingos and headlines in alternating font colours. This menu is grey and brown, scrawled in cursive with fat circles above the ‘i’s.
The owner must be a woman. There are flowers in small vases, something he can’t recall seeing anywhere in Fuerteventura. Everything is nice and clean and newly painted; all the waitresses seem busy and happy. One of them, a heavy-set girl wearing a tight white peasant blouse, reaches up to light a candle in a candlestick set in an old-fashioned wagon wheel. Then she approaches Erhard. She’s almost too nice, asking him whether he’s on holiday. He nods and she stands ready with her little notepad.
She tells him about nearby sites that he should visit, though not on Saturdays, because there are too many people on Saturdays, and not after nightfall, because the Tunisians are there, and not around noon when the sun is strongest. He asks whether she’s from California, and she is. She laughs, tells him she’s impressed, then asks him where he’s from. He tells her. She says that several of the girls are from Fuerteventura, too, then goes on to say that she lives just above the restaurant, in a flat where the girls can stay if they have just moved here, as long as they work off the rent. She’d like to be a manager some day, she says, if she can learn how. He orders a Mai Tai. He can see the girl’s cleavage over the rim of his menu. Before she walks off, he asks if she knows Søren Hollisen. She hesitates. She has heard the name, she thinks, but she doesn’t know him. Then she heads back behind the bar, where she talks to another waitress, a fierce-looking girl with her combed-back hair in a ponytail. As if Erhard’s some rich grandfather who might dole out some pocket money, the California girl eyes Erhard while she speaks. The ponytail girl drinks from a bottle, unimpressed.
He counts his money and finds he has just enough for a couple of drinks and a meal, but not to spend the night. He’ll have to sleep on the beach, which he’s done before. It’s easy enough if he’s pissed. Maybe it’ll be the last time he’ll ever need to.
The notion that his luck is about to change doesn’t stick; it slips through his fingers like sand. He doesn’t dare believe it. For nearly twenty years, misfortune has followed him; he has made poor decisions and lived the wrong kind of life and met the wrong people at the wrong times. Usually he feels, and even says, that his timing has been ten years off. First ten years too early. Married while still a teenager – that says it all. While the last twenty years have been ten years too late. Too late to do anything about his music, to meet a nice woman, to lean back and enjoy life as one does at his age in Denmark and as so many of his Danish contemporaries here on holiday do. And suddenly, emerging out of his wretchedness, in the middle of all that’s going on with Raúl and Beatriz and the dead boy, he sees an opportunity that he needs to grasp. No matter how difficult or foolish it might turn out to be. The opportunity to become something else, to be someone. Maybe he’ll be able to purchase one of the houses above the city. With a garden. He can sit reading in an air-conditioned office or take a walk down to the workshop to speak with Anphil, or he can host meetings and offer his guests a dram of whisky.
He hasn’t told Emanuel Palabras anything about this.
In the morning, before he left his house, he called Palabras and mentioned the episode with Barouki, and Marcelis’s phone call. He didn’t repeat everything that Marcelis had said, but he did say that Marcelis seemed unhappy with Erhard’s potential role.
All bark and no bite, Emanuel had said. Raúl had his share of confrontations with Marcelis too. Welcome to the company, he added.
The last thing he said: Say yes and I’ll give you a salary worthy of a director. Which sounded good at that point, but Erhard considers his title now. What did Raúl actually do for the company? If Erhard assumes Raúl’s job, does that also mean that Erhard should keep a low profile and stay out of daily operations? He wants to make a difference; if he can’t, he can always quit. Nobody owns him.
But he’s tempted by thoughts of skipping his generator idea and getting Beatriz to a private hospital in Puerto, maybe inviting Aaz and his mother to his place for coffee.
Ponytail girl is the one who brings his Mai Tai, setting it on a saucer. He pays sixteen euros and lays four in her hand. It’s a decent tip, and yet she stares at the coins with no change of expression. He asks her if she knows Søren. Her gaze is sharp. Maybe she’s mostly into girls, he thinks. She glares at him as if she thinks men are pretty much a waste of time.
– What do you want to know?
– Søren Hollisen, do you know him? Perhaps he’s a customer?
– I know who he is. Everyone here knows.
– How do you know him?
– I don’t know him. It’s impossible to know him.
– But you’ve met him.
– Met, she says, making air quotes with her fingers.
– Are you from this island?
– Fuerteventura.
– Oh, Erhard says. But he isn’t interested in small talk with this girl. – Does anyone here know him better than you?
– Ellen.
– Who is Ellen?
– The owner, a Brit. She’s out in the back. But she’s leaving soon.
Erhard thanks her, then sips his Mai Tai. It’s too sweet. Too much syrup, not enough lime. But it’s got plenty of rich, dark rum. He eats the embellishment, a pineapple and orange. While he chews the pineapple, a woman in a light-blue shirt and black trouser-suit sits down at his table. She looks like a man, but one with long hair gathered up in a bun and a mouth so tight and narrow that it resembles a line drawn with a Sharpie.
– Friend or foe? she asks with a distinct Irish accent.
Erhard says nothing, just looks at her.
– You’re looking for Søren Hollyson. She pronounces it Soren – Are you a friend or foe?
– Neither.
– What has he done this time?
– As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything.
– Why are you looking for him then? I’m guessing it’s not because you’re attracted to him?
There’s something sly about the way she questions him. It feels like more of an interrogation than when Hassib asked him questions.
– Maybe I’ll tell him myself.
– Go ahead, but you’ll have to travel to Dakar. Has it got anything to do with money?
– Maybe, Erhard says, to confuse her a bit.
– He has nothing to do with this place any more. We’ve done everything we can to get back on our feet again after the mess he left behind. We don’t want to get mixed up in anything.
– Easy now, easy, Miss…
– Blythe-Patrick. Ellen.
– OK, Ellen. I don’t know Søren at all.
– Are you with the Danish police?
– No. I’m from Denmark, it’s true, but I haven’t been back in many years. I live in Fuerteventura.
– Well, I haven’t seen him in months, perhaps a year. But I’ve heard he’s in Dakar.
– I may not even need to talk to him. Maybe you can help me?
She straightens in the chair and glances around the cafe, as if she’s nervous someone will hear them. But there’s no one around. On a sofa in the back of the room sits a couple, so clearly pissed that they’re practically asleep. – I don’t want to get mixed up in Søren’s shit.
– I’m not mixing you up in anything, Erhard says. He draws the small baggie from his pocket with the slip of paper inside. – Do you recall if the cafe ever had a subscription to a Danish newspaper? Sometime last year?
The woman glances down at the paper and grins. – Yes. I do. I do, because no one ever read it. Politiken, it was. She butchers the pronunciation as pollyticken. – It just sat there. Turned out that we never got Danish visitors. And the Norwegians and Swedes apparently don’t give a toss about Danish newspapers.
– When did you subscribe?
– I don’t know. A year ago? One day it just stopped coming. Søren started the subscription, but no one knew how to cancel it, so we just chucked all the newspapers into the rubbish bin.
– Have any of your colleagues suddenly vanished in the last three months?
– Vanished, no. But a few have them have gone home. To England, Spain, Holland, or wherever it is they’re from.
– Do you know any young girls who’ve gotten pregnant and had an abortion?
– You Danes aren’t afraid of stepping on people’s toes, are you? She laughs. – But I like that, as long as you don’t scare my girls.
– I’m trying to help someone I know find his girlfriend. She was last seen here with this newspaper.
She leans across the table and lowers her voice. – If you’re looking for girls in the 18- to 30-year-old range who forget to insist on condoms, then you’ve come to the right place. There are all sorts of girls like that here, in every stage of pregnancy, even the skinny ones that you don’t notice are pregnant until they retch on the floor of the bar. Islanders may be Catholics, but their daughters aren’t exactly nuns. The clinic down in Santa Cruz makes a pretty penny. This is a party island. The men don’t care, and the girls are too stupid. It’s as simple as that. Is she Danish?
Erhard had always imagined the mother was Danish, because the child had been swaddled inside a Danish newspaper, but now he’s not sure. He recalls the images he’s seen of the boy. – Possibly. She’s light-skinned.
– A friend’s girlfriend, you say? You don’t know much, do you?
– Did someone take the newspapers home? Maybe a Danish girl, a customer here?
– Well, on any given day except Sundays, more than 1,500 people party here until the sun rises. Could one of them have taken the newspaper home? It’s hard to say. I know that we mostly just threw them out. We got tired of them.
– So when did you stop receiving the newspapers?
– In October. Maybe November.
– What did you do with them? Where did you throw them out?
The woman scrutinizes Erhard as if he doesn’t understand something. – In the rubbish bin, of course.
– May I see?
– Sure, just walk around the building. Have fun.
Erhard looks at her as he gets to his feet. – There’s too much syrup in your Mai Tai. Don’t put so much in or use more fresh lime.
He doesn’t care to rummage through the rubbish bins. It was just something he came up with to irritate her. Why would he? What would he search for? What good would it do him to see where they threw a bunch of newspapers months ago? So he walks up and down the street and finally into a bar that’s broadcasting horse races on its many televisions.
At around eleven o’clock he eats a ham sandwich and drinks the cheapest beer on the menu. He doesn’t speak to anyone. He practises being the director: crossing his legs and looking dignified, smiling a little, and waving at the waiter – a small man with a waist apron underneath a pair of man-boobs. Erhard orders another beer. A woman sits at the bar, and he dreams of impressing her in conversation. He knows his newfound confidence is only because he’s on Tenerife. At home he wouldn’t puff himself up like this. At home he would’ve already gone home. The woman, who’s at least twenty years younger, is seated with her back to him, but he can see her spine through her thin yellow dress. She doesn’t even glance in his direction, but seems mostly interested in writing something on her mobile phone.
After he’s eaten, he goes down the hill to find the beach and a place to sleep. He’s tired, wiped out. He brought an extra beer from the bar. Café Rústica, just as the woman had said it would be, is packed. People are hanging from the windows and sitting on the patio as the music thumps and vibrates. The nightlife vibe is different here than on Fuerteventura. There’s a different kind of abandon, as if young people here are wealthier and more willing – which is probably true. He walks slowly past the cafe and pauses on the path leading around the building. He can see and smell the rubbish bins, which by the light of the streetlamps resemble parked tanks. A couple is making out intensely around the corner. Erhard coughs loudly so that they know he’s there, then saunters past them and down the alley. On his right is the cafe, a high wall lacking windows. Around thirty metres ahead, a yellow square forms an open door from the kitchen to the alley. On his left, a tall fence encloses what appears to be a container terminal. Erhard spots movement, and a posse of soft, mewling cats scuttle between his legs. In the darkness they’re all blue. The stench is powerful. Not from the cats, but the overflowing rubbish bin. Cinched rubbish bags are poking up from underneath the lid. He starts towards the open door, through which he hears rap music. A young man, a Moroccan dishwasher wearing yellow rubber gloves, strolls outside smoking a cigarette. The light from the doorway illuminates the fence and a row of wicker baskets, bottles, cardboard, and rotten fruit that smells sweet and hot. Erhard stands quietly until the dishwasher discovers him and nods. A young man like that doesn’t dare speak. Besides, it’s not illegal for Erhard to be here.
– Newspapers? Erhard asks, nodding at the rubbish bin. The man, who doesn’t seem to understand him, just nods again. – Are there newspapers here?
Erhard points at the bin.
– No, you put newspapers over there. They have to go in the container for recycling.
Erhard returns to the tall black container that he’d passed earlier. He peers inside it. It’s nearly filled with Spanish and English newspapers. He pulls out a few. They are from yesterday, Tuesday, Sunday.
– What do you need them for? the dishwasher asks. If you need them for sleeping, then you can borrow a blanket from me. It’s going to be cold tonight.
Just as Erhard’s about to respond, he sees a broad hole in the fence next to the newspaper container.
– What’s in there? Only containers?
The dishwasher has lit another cigarette and now sits on a folding chair beside the door.
– Storage, freight, import/export, furniture, antiquities. Anything that fits inside a container. They get angry when people go through there, but they won’t put up a new fence.
– Why would anyone go that way? Is it a shortcut?
– People host huge parties in the waterfront houses sometimes, and it only takes five minutes to get down there if you go that way. Otherwise you have to walk around, and that takes maybe fifteen.
– Do you have a torch? Erhard asks. But he doesn’t wait for a response before stepping through the hole in the fence.
He gets all the way through the container terminal without noticing anything particularly interesting. Partly because the area is dark, lit up only by some old streetlamps with tyres around their foundations, and partly because there’s nothing particularly remarkable. The dishwasher was right. Many of the containers are sealed with heavy-duty padlocks. There’s all sorts of stuff in the open containers. Boxes and bubble-wrapped items, or things packaged in glass cases or foam. Some containers hold steel and old bicycles. Down near the driveway, one hundred metres before the guardhouse and the barrier that blocks entry to the terminal, stand several refrigerator containers, a couple of RVs and small trucks, and what appears to be construction materials for a house. He passes the guard, who’s watching a Sylvester Stallone film, and continues to the beach. There he sits next to a bonfire with a sand sculptor and his dog.
The two men share the beer Erhard has brought, and they give the dog a slurp from a metal tray. The heat, the bonfire light, and the sound of the sculptor’s voice tires him out. The man talks about Lanzarote in the 1980s, when Moroccan fishermen filled their boats with people and knowingly crashed their cutters against the coast so they would have to be saved and brought to land. Erhard thinks he’s met this man before and wonders if he’s that well-known businessman who was convicted of fraud. Then he falls asleep. He wakes briefly when the sculptor lays some old towels, coats, and blankets over him, but otherwise sleeps. The sun rises. The sculptor must have packed his things and headed to the beach with his dog early; Erhard sees their footprints in the sand when he wakes around eight o’clock. He sits for a long time staring at the water.
He’s back on Fuerteventura after lunchtime. He finds his car parked alone in the small car park next to the harbour. A seagull’s on the roof. He shoos it off and drives northward, wondering how he’ll avoid screwing everything up. It’s up to him now; he can’t resort to his old methods of problem-solving.
He arrives fifteen or twenty minutes late, and he spots Aaz standing at the door of Santa Marisa’s, along with Liana, one of the nuns. He steers the car up alongside them and Aaz climbs in. The nun lowers her head to the window and taps on the glass with her thin finger.
– It’s very upsetting to him. You need to be punctual. He doesn’t like to wait.
– I’d arranged with Mónica that I would pick him up at 3.15 today.
– It’s bad enough that you changed the appointment. He knows how to tell time, you know.
– I know that, sister.
Each time Erhard talks with the nuns, they say something that makes him feel like an idiot.
– But the worst of it is that you’re fifteen minutes late. It’s 3.30.
– I’m sorry. He hates these kinds of petty arguments. He hadn’t planned to be late, after all. It just happened.
– I’ll let his mother know you’re running late. She’s probably worried.
– Thanks, Erhard says. He prefers that Mónica not be told.
They leave Corralejo and head through Las Dunas. Erhard sprays washer fluid on the windscreen. Aaz likes that, laughing as if everything were normal. He holds absolutely no grudges and it’s liberating to be around him.
– I’ve been over the water. To Tenerife.
Oh, what were you doing there?
– Trying to find the mother, you know, of that little boy.
You learn anything?
– I don’t know. Maybe.
What does it look like over there? Is there sand and rocks like here?
– There are green palms, just like they have at Santa Marisa. Cliffs rise from the water. And the wealthiest residents build their houses along those cliffs. There was a beach with white reclining chairs, where men rake the sand in the evening, and a small bay where I sat with an old friend and watched the sea turn black, and we talked about you.
Aaz glances at Erhard. The boy understands everything.
– Some day you can go with me on the boat and cross the water to the big island. When Liana isn’t so angry any more. Maybe your mother will want to come along.
Erhard wishes to tell him about Emanuel’s job offer. About the better days ahead. But he’s suddenly afraid it’ll only confuse Aaz and make him nervous if he says too much about such changes. He needs to consider what he says before he speaks.
When they drive through Antigua, they laugh at a man chasing a hat caught in the wind.
He’d like to let Aaz walk in by himself, but Mónica is standing outside, waiting. Erhard gets out of the car with Aaz and nods apologetically at Mónica, trying to absorb the worst. Aaz brushes past Mónica and into the house.
– Did Liana call?
– What happened?
– I was just delayed.
– I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself tangled up in, but I hope it doesn’t mean that Aaz can no longer count on you.
– I’m not tangled up in anything.
– It’s OK if you call me and ask me to change the time like you did yesterday, but don’t start forgetting your commitments and arriving late and…
– I’m not tangled up in anything.
– You show up here early in the morning, then suddenly you’re going on a trip. Something is going on.
– It won’t affect Aaz in any way.
– You won’t be late again?
– I promise.
His promises are piling up, he thinks.
– Did it have something to do with that address I found for you?
– Yes.
– Is it something illegal?
Erhard laughs.
She repeats her question.
– No. It’s… it’s… something good. I’m looking for someone.
– The girl in the photograph?
– No. She just helped me with something, he says. It would be foolish to involve Mónica in this, he thinks. But in reality he’s afraid to tell her what he’s up to in case he doesn’t find the mother. – I’m just looking for an old friend who’s gone missing.
– Hmm, she says, dubious. – Who?
– Raúl Palabras, he says, because he can’t think of anyone else.
– Is he your friend?
– Yes.
She stares at him at length, and he suddenly feels old. As if she’s judging him for the first time, really seeing him and his wrinkled face. – It doesn’t matter what you do and who your friends are. As long as you don’t let my son down. As long as you don’t do it again. Tears well in her eyes.
He wants to lay his hand on her shoulder. But she’s already on her way back into her house.
– I was going to invite you to an early dinner, she says, but I guess that doesn’t matter any more. Just be here at eight o’clock.
It’s the first time she’s ever given him an order like that.
He doesn’t even care to defend himself. There’s no way he can eat dinner with them. The doctor was at his house the night before and then again this morning, but it’s time Erhard went home and filled the generator with diesel. He slumps back to his car.
He hasn’t argued with a woman in seventeen years. Not since Annette. In a way, it’s familiar and exhilarating, but still trite and annoying. Like playing Ludo with different rules. There are no established truths and nothing to refer to, only a feeling that everything they’d discussed had nothing at all to do with what their conversation was actually about. He wants to drive off and never return.
Or he wants to do precisely what he’d promised her. What he’d promised Aaz.
A bloody maelstrom of emotions and thoughts swirls in his head.
As he’s filling the generator with diesel, he hears the telephone ring inside the house. A rare event. Since he hasn’t even filled half the tank, he ignores the call.
After he goes inside, empties the drainage bag, and affixes a new one, the telephone rings again. He can’t just drop the bag he’s holding. He studies Beatriz, and can’t shake the feeling that he’s let her down. Several days have passed since he last stood at her bedside and spoke to her. He doesn’t know what to say, so he just stands there growing tired as the machine regulates her shallow breaths.
The phone rings a third time. He glowers at the green plastic device and lifts it reluctantly.
– Where have you been? Emanuel Palabras blurts out.
– South.
– I’ve talked to Marcelis.
– Did you fire him?
– Easy, my friend. I’m just telling you what I’ve done. Now that the air has been cleared, we can put the shop in order.
– I haven’t accepted your offer yet.
– But you will.
This irritates Erhard. He has a strange feeling this is how things will play out: Papa Palabras will dictate how they do their work. But he won’t let his irritation control him.
– Yes, he says.
– Good, my friend. Good.
Erhard wants to know more about the business and its finances. Wants to look through the company’s books. Palabras doesn’t understand why – it’s not something Raúl ever cared about – and he thinks it’s a waste of Erhard’s time. Raúl has been gone for more than ten days, and before that he was derelict in his duties, so Erhard needs to get down to business.
– What do you expect me to do?
– Keep an eye on the lazy drivers, sign some good contracts. You’ll have to figure it out.
– I have some experience with accounts, from the old days.
Silence.
– You never cease to amaze me, Piano Tuner.
– I’ll need a thorough review of the finances if I’m going to work with Marcelis.
– Surely the man can set aside a few hours to take you through it? During a nice lunch, Emanuel adds, then shifts topics. – I want you to move into Raúl’s flat. I’ll pay the rent. You can live there until we sell the place in a few months, when the market’s better. By then you’ll have saved up some money and can buy your own. They say the housing market will improve this year.
Erhard doesn’t know what to think. – What about Raúl? What if he returns?
– Don’t say his name again.
– He’s your son, Palabras.
– He’s dead.
– Nobody knows that for sure. The police say he left the island, but you know him. He might be in Dakar, or Madrid for that matter. It’s only been, what, eleven days? He’s been gone for a month before.
– He’s dead. The flat needs to be cleared, and all his shit hauled away.
Erhard can’t tell whether Palabras knows for certain Raúl is dead or has simply made a decision. – Can’t you just pack it all up and store it?
– Why are you defending him?
Erhard stares into the darkness of the pantry. – How did he die?
– He took his own life after bringing shame to his father.
That doesn’t sound like Raúl, Erhard thinks. He wouldn’t kill himself or regret doing anything against his father. – How do you know?
– Why do you keep digging around in something that doesn’t involve you, Piano Tuner? I’m telling you, I don’t want to hear anything more about him.
– I can’t move into his flat with all of his things, it’s too strange. What about all his papers and cookbooks? And his collection of eighties records and photos and wine?
– I don’t want to hear anything more about him. Drink the bloody wine and throw the rest out. Get someone to take the shit away. Do whatever you wish. Move in if you want. If you prefer your majorero cave out in Majanicho, fine. As long as you’re presentable and punctual at work. And don’t be stingy when you go out to eat with clients.
– I’ll think about it, Erhard says. He already has the key to the flat. But he doesn’t tell Palabras. He doesn’t say that he’ll happily trade the cave for the flat. Moving into the flat would make everything easier. Beatriz could return to her own things, and get a nice bed, and he wouldn’t have to run around keeping an eye on the generator. If Raúl doesn’t return any time soon, or if he really is dead, it doesn’t make Erhard a bad person if he lives a good life for a few months. Just until Beatriz is doing better, and he has the money to buy something else. Something worthy of a director.
– Seize your opportunity, Piano Tuner. I’ll arrange a meeting with Marcelis. If you have any problems with him, call me.
Palabras hangs up.
Erhard pours himself a glass of wine, then goes out and pulls some trousers, underwear, and towels from the washing machine. They’ve been sitting in the machine for too long, and now they smell. He hangs the clothes on one of the lines. Laurel’s munching on a piece of fabric that appears to have come from one of Erhard’s shirts. This happens every now and then. The clothes blow off the line, vanish, and the zipper or buttons turn up in the goats’ shit. He fills a cup with feed and scatters the pellets on the ground; the goat shuffles away from the clothesline and over to his food. Erhard hopes it’ll attract Hardy, who might be close by, perhaps resting behind a large rock, but he doesn’t see a trace of him.
He thinks about Bill Haji and the wild dogs.
Could the wild dogs be getting more desperate for something to eat? Could they capture and devour a goat? Maybe if it was injured or stuck between two rocks. He glances at the ground where someone has dug into the hard soil – one of the goats? Everything happens for a reason. There’s a story behind everything. Just as the car on the beach and the cardboard box and the newspapers have a story, a series of actions, regardless of how incomprehensible they might seem.
A mother abandons her child only if there’s a reason, an underlying pressure. She’s not evil or selfish. Maybe because she’s a good person, so realistic about herself and her situation that she wants to spare the child from the pain of growing up. It’s a crime, yes, but one committed out of love, out of an altruistic consideration for the child’s welfare. The most probable reason the boy was left in the box is that his mother drowned herself after having parked the car down on the beach. Perhaps she was at Rústica, grabbed some random newspaper, and stuffed it into her purse. He’s not sure how the newspaper is connected, but he’s sure there is a connection.
He drives for a few hours, then picks up Aaz at precisely eight o’clock. Mónica says nothing. She seems to study Erhard’s face slyly, so he won’t look her into her eyes.
– She thinks I’m an idiot, doesn’t she?
You were late, that’s all.
– She doesn’t think I’m an awful person?
She’s too proper to tell anyone that.
– That’s the problem. She’s too proper. Does she have any faults or irritating habits you can’t see?
She likes wet kisses.
– That’s what mothers do when they kiss their kids.
She’s not a good cook. She burns the sancochado and the fish tastes awful.
Erhard laughs. – I can’t even make sancochado. I’ve never tried.
I haven’t either.
– What else? What does she like to do?
She likes to take care of her weird plants. Succulents, oleanders, birds of paradise. She talks to them and waters them with a little green canister that looks like an oil tin. She can revive a dead plant. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A dry stem became a large red flower. It’s like in the nuns’ Bible. She can wake the dead with her fingers.
– She’s a special lady, no doubt. And so is Sister Liana. Look, she’s waiting for us.
Sister Liana says nothing, but shoos Aaz through the gate like a stray goat.
He packs his best clothes. He counts his underwear and scoops up the white ones without holes, then packs his CDs and six books he hasn’t read. It takes some time to choose among them. He packs everything into a single cardboard box along with the cigar box of photos. He empties the fridge. Standing in the doorway staring up the hill, he toasts Laurel and listens to the wind and the roof, which continues to bang.
Finally he fills the boot with the IV, the catheter, and the respirator, then hurries to carry Beatriz to the car. He lays her across the backseat, underneath a blanket. He shuts off the electricity and unplugs the generator in the shed. It grows dark and quiet. Almost as if the house, originally a shepherd’s dwelling, wasn’t here. The cattle rancher lived on the other side of the mountain with his family, and he let his cattle roam freely. But the goats always came over to this side of the mountain, the less windy side, and so the cattle rancher built this house for his son who took care of the goats. When cattle prices fell at the beginning of the eighties, and the huge farm was sold at auction to a real-estate company, the new owners decided to rent out the shepherd’s house for a price that attracted the worst kinds of people. The goats came with the place, but the new renters were unable to care for them. Erhard knows nothing about tending goats, but he likes these two creatures, and he feels the need to take care of them even though he’s moving downtown.
He scatters a few handfuls of feed around the house so they won’t have to search too hard. He calls out for them a few times, but that has never worked.
He settles Beatriz in her own bed and he sleeps under a blanket on the sofa. He sleeps the sleep of the guilty, waking with a bad conscience – as if he’s forgotten something important. He peers around in the brown darkness of the flat and wonders about the sounds emerging from the building: lift, water spigot, voices.
While the sun is on its way up, he drinks the last of the instant coffee. It’s an expensive brand, Zebrezá, which makes the coffee completely brown and foamy. It’s clear they’ve hired someone to clean the flat, but still he runs a cloth across shelves, tables, and doors. He empties drawers and washes them, sorts everything, then puts it all back. He washes blankets and Raúl’s bed linen. When it comes to cleaning, he’s self-taught and feels unstructured and ineffective. Since he’s lived on the island, he’s never had others clean for him or watched others tidy up. He throws out everything in the cupboards. Afterward, he fills the cupboards again with items he buys at HiperDino.
He eats lunch with Beatriz. Her face is no longer thrilling or meaningful, now seemingly just sculptural elements on a light-brown background. So delicately fastened that they might rustle apart at any time. Cautiously he removes the respirator’s mouthpiece, then pours a little water on his index finger and runs it gently across her lips. He doesn’t hear the words every time, but he has heard them a few times when he’s sitting quietly beside her. When he gets used to the wheezes emerging from the respirator and adopts the same rhythm as her. He needs them, the words. To hear them again. To know what he’s doing and why. To understand himself and feel less alone. He traces his fingers across her lips, follows each little curve, balancing on the cusp of the mouth’s darkness. The index finger which at the slightest mistake slips into the crevice, the woman’s most fascinating orifice. The only place where the contents conquer the form. Annette had an average mouth, he discovered after many years of not knowing why she always seemed so ordinary. She was a nice-looking woman in many ways. She had long, straight hair, which had gradually turned silver. Many of his friends envied him for her breasts, which appeared larger than they really were. But her lips, her mouth: over the years he took them personally. It was his job to make her smile. Yet for each day that he failed, he knew it would only grow harder and harder. Not until he left her did he begin to blame her mother, her family, her social standing. There was so much scepticism and frustration in the family that the four sisters – Annette was the youngest – seldom smiled. As if there were no muscles in their faces.
But Beatriz had had the most incredible smile. She was one of those kinds of women who’d achieved everything with her smile. The little girl who gets to sit in front on the scooter, the big girl who gets her first job, the grown woman who decides which man she will drive crazy.
Help me. Let me go. The words are so faint that it makes no sense to call them words, just tiny signals in the noise of the respirator. He calls for her, he whispers to her, he feels the heat from her ears. What should I do, Beatriz? What do you want? Her body seems to respond. Her chest rises, a force having taken hold of her, and her face begins to quiver. Then the catheter makes a noise and a greenish liquid oozes into the drainage bag. All at once he is struck by her state of immense vulnerability, and he affixes the respirator’s mouthpiece in place and carefully rolls her onto her other side. She speaks, but he’s the only one who hears, and he’s the only one who can help her now. Normally he wouldn’t want this kind of responsibility or this kind of role, but no one else can do it. There’s no one to complain, no one to reproach him. Only himself. Only his own insistent voice.
He returns to his cleaning with a kind of angry energy. He finds Radio Mucha on Raúl’s nice stereo and hoovers the flat to the sound of loud music. When he reaches the entrance way, he sees a letter leaning against a vase on the chest of drawers. Someone was in the flat. It’s from Emanuel Palabras.
Marcelis’s office, Monday, 1 p.m.
It occurs to him how powerful Emanuel Palabras actually is. He actually managed to make Marcelis schedule a meeting with him. Erhard feels a tickling sensation of delight that’s succeeded by reluctance to spend time with Marcelis, being forced to ask him questions and to learn from him. Marcelis won’t be open and communicative; he’ll brush Erhard off. He’ll presume that Erhard doesn’t understand business economics or leadership or anything but driving a taxi. Marcelis has never been a chauffeur, and he’s probably never even driven a cab. He got things under control at Servicio Canarias, a messenger service known for its expensive prices and unreliable messengers, but Erhard doesn’t know what Marcelis did there, or what he got under control.
Standing in the entrance way, it also occurs to him that many others might have keys to the flat. He needs to think more aggressively, be more distrustful, and expect the worst if he wishes to maintain control. He empties the drawers and lays all the keys from a little box on top of the commode, then adds the keys to Raúl’s car and flat. All in all, there are two keys to the flat, three unknown keys, and the car keys. After trying both keys in the door, he goes to the study and scavenges the shelf, looking for a thin blue and white telephone book. He riffles through to L, and selects the only locksmith in the city. A man called Saragó. He punches the number and schedules him for Friday at 8 a.m.
He studies Raúl’s car keys. In some way, it seems more transgressive to take over his car than his flat. The car was one of Raúl’s favourite things. He loved its buttons and its white leather interior and its hum when he drove on FV-1. Taking over the car means pushing Raúl definitively out of the way. But at the same time, Erhard knows why he finds it so difficult. Growing up in his family, he was told that one must earn the good things in life; but in reality, no one ever deserved anything good. It was well known that happiness wasn’t capricious; it was ridiculous. Though his father had toiled and toiled without asking for handouts or assistance, he ended his days filled with spite, and dementia, mean without knowing why, determinedly and repeatedly insisting that he never had anything handed to him. But what’s wrong with having something handed to you, really? What’s wrong with gathering up the crumbs that life throws at you? Why not take hold of the good things in life like some kind of drunken busker, regardless of whether one really earned them or not? Now it’s Erhard’s turn to enjoy the spoils of life, even if he hasn’t earned them.
In the afternoon he drives to dispatch. He’s never been good at endings, the gentle transitions or gradual shifts. He’s not crazy about change, but if it has to be, then it has to be. No reason to camouflage an ugly conclusion. No reason for friendly gestures and kind words. A goodbye is a goodbye.
But that doesn’t make it any easier. Or painless. Leaving Annette and the girls was dreadful. But it was a simple, sharp break – very clear. He didn’t beat around the bush with prevarications, excuses, and nightly calls. He didn’t ask for understanding or forgiveness. One day he followed Mette to school and stood on the stairwell watching her walk down the corridor, the next day he was gone. So even though he’s been part of this company for many years, it ends here, now, today. There is paperwork and stuff to do with the Merc which he leases from TaxiVentura, but he doesn’t wish to explain himself or give a speech while raising a dram. Already when he parks in front of the workshop, people are giving him funny looks. They know, he presumes, though he doesn’t care. He hoovers the car, pounds the floor mats against the grate, washes and dries the panels, washes the headlights and windows, polishes the wheel rims. He empties the glove box and tosses everything in the rubbish bin, and removes the little necklace that dangles from the rearview mirror. He leaves the keys on the table with Anphil, then goes inside. The company’s only female driver, Felia, a no-nonsense woman, is standing at her locker organizing her receipts when he enters. He heads to the corner and begins stuffing the few things he owns into a plastic bag. As soon as he has gathered his things, he leaves.
Dispatch is located on the outskirts of Corralejo, and on the way back he follows a long, gloomy road. When he reaches the end of it, he bumps across a ditch and wends through an overgrown construction site. Cats sit on top of rusty barrels.
He’s travelled this road many times, thousands, but he’s never really noticed the containers. But now he does. Just like on Tenerife, they’re behind a crumpled chain-link fence in an area with greyish-brown asphalt and weeds that poke up through tyres and cracks. He slips through a gap in the fence and drives among the closest containers.
Someone transports the giant containers here. No one sees them do it, apparently; they’re just there, sealed up in once place and opened in another. At night they sail into port stacked on rusty blue supertankers. In the morning they’re lifted onto lorries that haul them onto land and deposit them here on these asphalt fields. The contents are emptied, distributed. The invisible consumer-machine, well-oiled and smooth and insentient. Erhard now recalls what he saw on Tenerife: A container with an old VW. He only saw part of it; in the available light, he could just make out the characteristic headlights. Where do the cars come from? And how are they transported? Erhard doesn’t know. He’s never considered where the island’s cars actually come from. Barcelona? He runs his hand along the rough sides of a container and gazes into the darkness inside. It’s darker than dark. It could easily hold a car.
There’s something about that car. It’s reasonable to assume that someone drove it from Puerto, then abandoned it on the beach. The distance from Puerto to Cotillo is around thirty miles, if one drives over Corralejo. It ought to be in Lisbon. The plates were missing.
Facts:
An unknown mother.
A dead boy.
Newspaper fragments from Tenerife.
A stolen vehicle from Amsterdam?
The beach in Cotillo. At low tide.
The most likely scenario is that the mother went with her son from Tenerife to Fuerteventura, maybe in a fishing boat or a private boat or one of the big yachts. Something happens, the boy dies, and the mother wraps him in newspaper from a cafe she’s visited. In Puerto she gets her hands on a stolen car, removes the licence plates, and tries to drive into the water with her already dead child. But the car gets stuck in the sand, and the mother walks out in the sea and drowns herself, leaving the boy’s body in the box on the backseat.
That matches the police’s investigation. Erhard’s latest discovery of the newspaper on Tenerife, and the fact that the car had stood in high water – as it shows in the girl’s photographs from the beach that day – also supports that explanation. And yet, as he stares at a cat running through the container terminal and into a dry bush, he’s convinced it’s something else. Something else entirely.
He studies the container door, the locking mechanism. It locks in place by jamming an arm-length rod downward: this drives a bar in the lower and upper halves of the door into a hole in the hull of the container. Erhard tries the lock a few times. It seems solid and simple. He knows this kind of mechanism from his work; they have an old trailer that locks the same way. With that one the rod goes the other way; it has to be jammed upward instead, which means that the door sometimes opens by itself if one hasn’t shoved the rod all the way up and fastened it with a bar or padlock. But here, gravity ensures that the rod doesn’t loosen. He moves on to another open container, then a third. None have the exact same locking mechanism.
Erhard doesn’t quite know what it means. He continues between the containers and then onto an expansive zone with construction equipment, stacks of plywood. It’s almost five o’clock. He has nothing to do before he meets with Marcelis in three days. For the first time in fifteen years he’s free of dispatch. Downtown, with nothing in his pockets, other than Emanuel Palabras’s promises.
The islands’ tomatoes look like clenched fists. The skins are like apple peel, the juice like egg-white. He picks one at a time. In the bottom left corner of the box he finds three good ones, and one that may be a little too ripe, but smells strange, salty. Three will do. Then he fishes a square chunk of African goat cheese out of a bucket filled with vinegar. He pays with tips from the previous day, from what might have been his final taxi ride – not a memorable event. A solicitor of some kind. Erhard had been more concerned that he picked up Aaz on time.
Just then he sees Cormac. Since it’s siesta, he’s sitting on the stairwell smoking and gazing curiously at Erhard, who is approaching with his purchases.
– On the way up? Cormac asks.
– In a bit. Just need to get my shopping done.
– On the way up the food chain, I mean.
Cormac grins so that it’s impossible not to see where he’s missing teeth in the back of his mouth.
– An old dog can enjoy his last days, Erhard says, exaggerating on purpose.
– The good drivers say you’ve earned it.
– Do they? Erhard’s more surprised than he sounds. – And what do the mean ones say?
Cormac looks at him as he sucks his slender cigarette. The smoke rises as if from his hair. – Ponduel, that devilish bastard, says you’ve brown-nosed your way to the job.
In other words kissed a wealthy man’s ass, Erhard thinks.
– That’s because he doesn’t know what a bad kisser I am.
Cormac laughs. – Others say you’re sniffing around doing police work. But one hears a lot of things in an electronics shop.
– Who says that?
Erhard wants to keep his surprise hidden, but he’s not completely successful.
– My dear wife heard it from one of the girls down at the harbour. That you’re looking for a dead boy’s mother.
Erhard laughs tensely and turns away for the first time. He doesn’t know how to deal with a telltale. Should he deny the story, knowing full well that it might make Cormac even more curious? Or should he play along and confirm the rumour? There’s only one answer: to not care, to laugh it off. But before he says anything, Cormac changes the subject.
– Did you ever get in touch with the hairdresser’s daughter? The computer expert?
– It wasn’t important.
– You were looking for a photograph?
– I found another way.
– Oh well, Cormac says, seemingly satisfied.
Erhard has an idea. – Do you know anything about my new colleague, Marcelis Osasuna?
Cormac begins to roll another cigarette. – The union-buster? he says without looking up. – If you’re not friends with him, I’d tread carefully.
– I don’t know anything about that.
– Remember the Servicio Canarias strike?
Erhard shakes his head.
– The lorry drivers struck a deal after refusing to work for eleven days, because they wanted a fired colleague rehired. Your man Osasuna stopped the negotiations without getting the guy his job back.
– So he wasn’t the director?
– Maybe he was the assistant director or something fine like that? And there was that issue with the rubbish dump.
Erhard remembers that one. Some locals had opposed Taxinaria’s plans to use the construction site west of dispatch for reserve car parts and tyres. A woman who lived behind the area had, for many years, tried to gain permission to use the area to build a playground for the neighbourhood children and to have all the construction materials removed in order to create a garden. But the county continued to delay the decision, and then all of a sudden her application was rejected. – What did he have to do with that?
– The parrots all said that it was Señor Osasuna who’d caused the county to support business interests, if you know what I mean.
The rumours on the island were tiresome, but sometimes there was truth to them. He might as well play along. – Did the parrots say anything about Osasuna’s wife?
– Probably a little.
It’s clear that Cormac hadn’t heard this one before.
Erhard tosses out a handful of titbits. – Something about the wife not liking Fuerteventura so they only see each other on the weekends? And he has a close relationship to his secretary, who has moved into the office?
– Something like that.
– He’s only human, Erhard says.
– Aren’t we all?
Erhard picks up his bags. – Have to get home now. Buenas.
– Buenas.
He cuts the tomatoes and cheese into small slices, then eats at Beatriz’s bedside. On Saturday morning, the locksmith arrives and curses and groans for two hours, but finally manages to exchange the lock for a powerful three-point lock and gives Erhard three keys that cannot be duplicated. Erhard affixes one of the keys to his keychain and hides another in a glass of sardines in the fridge. The third key he tapes underneath the hall stairwell. In case the doctor or someone needs to come check on Beatriz.
He opens a bottle of champagne and blasts the cork over the balcony. He passes the entire weekend shifting from the telly to the terrace to Beatriz’s bedside. He remains in a state of constant buzz, barefooted. He shaves his face in the bathroom with its many lamps. Saturday, he spends a lot of time finding a football channel on the large flat-screen. There’s a receiver under the telly which needs to be set at 23. As soon as he does so, the sports channel appears. He leaves the television on and listens to the commentators argue as he prepares food and organizes Raúl’s CD collection. He doesn’t throw anything out, but stacks what he doesn’t like and shoves it all into a little cabinet under the stereo. During siesta, he sleeps for half an hour beside Beatriz, and Saturday night he also crawls in under the blankets next to her, falling asleep to the plopping sound of the catheter.
The doctor stops by on Sunday. He examines Beatriz, then says he doesn’t believe Erhard knows how to take care of her. He stands on the balcony polishing his sunglasses, speaking in a subdued voice. She’s not properly washed and now has bedsores on her left side. Get someone to help you at the very least, the doctor suggests, but Erhard refuses. He doesn’t want anyone else involved. His brief meeting with Cormac reminded him how quickly stories circulate. He’s certain the doctor will keep his mouth shut, but only because he’s in a moral bind and doesn’t care to admit it to anyone.
The doctor strongly recommends that she be transferred to the hospital. It is unlikely that she’ll awaken. She appears to have had a severe swelling of the brain, which has decreased some, but not completely. He doesn’t use the words brain-dead, but Erhard can tell that’s what he means. She might be suffering silently, Michel says. But Erhard thinks he’s just being a coward.
– I take full responsibility for her, Erhard says. – She’s not going anywhere. She has to stay here. If she’s brain-dead, then she’s brain-dead. A hospital can’t change that. If she’s suffering, I’ll give her some painkillers. You can get them for me. If she ever wakes up, if she ever emerges from this state, she’ll do so here.
The doctor seems to accept Erhard’s position. He would like to continue to check in on her, but he doesn’t want to guarantee anything. Erhard shows him where he hid the key underneath the stairwell. Afterward they drink beer in front of the telly, watching golf being played at some lush course in Spain. The doctor likes golf.
He stands quietly at the door for a moment. Even though it leads into the reception area, he sees Marcelis’s name on the door. Just as he’s about to grab the knob, the door swings open.
– It’s Jørgensen, Ana says loudly, stepping aside to allow Erhard to enter. – Ana Lorenzo, administrative assistant. She offers her hand, which is cold as ice. Behind her, the entire office is a mess.
– You’re too fucking early, Marcelis shouts from his desk. Erhard reminds himself to act like Marcelis’s equal. Don’t blink, don’t flee, don’t get tongue-tied.
– I’m right on time, Erhard says. He wants to ask what has happened, but doesn’t want to seem too curious. He fears the two of them have just had a good shag on the secretary’s desk, scattering papers and folders onto the floor. But he can tell by the open filing cabinet and the way Marcelis is running around his office lifting stacks of paper that something else is going on.
– What did the accountant say?
– I didn’t call him. But he couldn’t have been the one here on Friday, Ana says.
– Go call the bloody accountant. Maybe he stopped in.
Ana’s just about to say something, but gives up and instead dials the number. Erhard sidles past her and into Marcelis’s office. He’s busy emptying the archives while cursing out the janitors, the accountants, Ana, and anyone who moves things out of place.
– Are you ready? Erhard says, pressing forward purposefully.
– Fuck no, I’m not ready. Someone removed all my account files, all the shit I was supposed to show you.
– You want to meet another day?
– Just wait until we’ve heard from the accountant. It was probably him. Ana?
Ana enters. – Alquizola hasn’t been here since September.
– What about the janitors? Marcelis asks. – They’re always moving my shit around so that I can’t find anything.
– We’ve cut the janitorial service on the weekends. They’re only here on Thursday and Monday afternoons.
Silence.
– What about your stupid moving boxes? When are you planning on moving all your shit? They’ve been here for, what, five months now? The files are probably in one of them.
Ana hurries out of the office. Marcelis sinks into a chair. Erhard doesn’t know what to do. – I’m sure they’ll turn up, he says.
– Welcome, Marcelis says mirthlessly. – Good way to begin.
– There are copies, right? Don’t you always make copies?
– Yes, but they’re also fucking gone. There are two files. The original papers and the copies. I don’t understand it.
– I thought people put those kinds of things on computers nowadays.
– That’s what I fucking thought too, but that fuckface José Alquizola, our accountant, doesn’t use computers. He does everything by hand. I hope he drops dead.
Ana stands in the doorway. Erhard hopes she’ll announce that she’s found the files. – I’ve searched all of my boxes and they’re not in there.
– I know, my dear. That was just something I said.
Marcelis removes some papers from a chair so Erhard can sit down.
– I’ll stand.
– Are you planning to stand in your new office, too? I’m getting it ready for you next door.
Raúl’s office. It could only be his. Erhard has that strange feeling one gets when something completely wrong is about to happen. As if his entire body is shielding itself from becoming the kind of boss that he’s made fun of for decades.
– Office? he says.
– Now that you’ve got his car, you damn well can’t impersonate a director in the break-room. You need an office. Or would you like to sit in here with me? Marcelis closes his door. – As long as you don’t get any funny ideas about having additional privileges any time soon, if you know what I mean?
– I don’t know what you mean.
Marcelis points to reception. – It’s not exactly a secret, I’m aware. Even my wife probably knows. So don’t even think about using it against me.
Erhard had considered doing something along those lines, but then decided not to pursue it.
– Palabras said you don’t know anything about running a business.
– I’m just a taxi driver, Erhard says, though he actually understands a great deal more than he lets on. He wants to hear Marcelis’s explanations, to know whether or not he’s being honest about the most important aspects of the business and its finances. – I’d like you to explain everything.
Marcelis stares at Erhard sceptically. – It’s not rocket science, it’s not even very interesting. But OK. If we’re going to do it today, then we won’t be able to use the budget and actual figures. I’ll just explain how we manage our accounts when the drivers bring us their books and that kind of Business for Dummies bullshit.
Marcelis raises the lid of a flat cabinet, revealing a whiteboard. He draws a house and some arrows with money, then adds some boxes and arrows back and forth as he explains how it all works. Ana enters with espressos and some pastries filled with red jelly. Erhard learns that the rumour is true: some drivers get a cut of sixty percent, while others only make forty percent. At TaxiVentura Erhard had himself earned seventy percent for the past six years. He could have earned more if he’d negotiated better. But Erhard found Barouki difficult to talk to, and he wasn’t comfortable negotiating and didn’t want to ask for anything. Now he sits there watching Marcelis explain Taxinaria’s finances, and how it influences liquidity, how the late delivery of drivers’ books requires financing at the start of each month, and how they’ve tried to sell their garage and maybe rent TaxiVentura’s. And it occurs to Erhard then that he’ll never drive a taxi again. This is where he will sit from now on. In a chair. Alongside Marcelis and others like him. Participating in meetings. Talking. Making decisions. Even though he hopes Raúl will somehow return one day, sunburnt and gaunt after months bingeing on drugs, he feels the thrilling winds of real change. It makes him dizzy. He wants to hold on to something. He asks for something to drink.
– We don’t drink until after five o’clock, Marcelis says, without glancing at Erhard. As if he’d been waiting to say just that.
This is his first longish drive in the silver-grey Mercedes. He would exchange this vehicle with his old car anytime, but the ride is phenomenal. The car glides so quietly through Las Dunas that he can practically hear the kitesurfers.
He orders a black coffee at Miza’s place, then sits at the table flipping one of the business cards Marcelis had printed for him in his hand – apparently to amuse himself. A temporary one, Marcelis said. You’ll get proper ones on proper paper, of course. The temporary business cards were printed on thin paper with Taxinaria’s blue and gold logo in the corner and his own name and title, Chief Operating Officer, in cursive underneath. He shows it to Miza, who congratulates him and lays homemade almond cookies on his saucer. Erhard doesn’t quite know what the title means.
He’s surprised at how easygoing Marcelis was. Maybe Marcelis thinks they’re on the same team now. Erhard recalls that time Lars Bo Römer jumped from B1909 to Aarhus GF and was booed every time he played in Copenhagen. Can a person change his affiliation just like that? During Marcelis’s review, Erhard felt like an infiltrator behind enemy lines – whose assignment was to flush out Marcelis. He listened carefully for holes, vagueness, hesitation, evasiveness, and any attempt to turn Erhard’s lack of experience into a reason for simplistic explanations. But Marcelis had been, despite the confusion surrounding the missing files, surprisingly thorough, even though he obviously couldn’t dive deeply into every detail in a single afternoon. Afterward they’d gone into Erhard’s new office, which Marcelis had had fitted out with some furniture and wall paintings.
– I had the aquarium removed, Marcelis said. – That was Raúl’s. And the bar in the corner. He was a little too fond of whisky, if you ask me. Is that your kind of thing, too? Are you also into the finer things?
Erhard shook his head and peered out the window at the courtyard below, where two drivers stood talking. Two new faces among the many Erhard had yet to meet. Behind the courtyard he could see the red mountaintop rising into the sky. Yet another cloudless day.
– What will I actually be doing here? Erhard asked.
Marcelis looked at Erhard and began to laugh. – Good question, he said, picking up the business cards that lay on the table, handing them to Erhard, and explaining that he could start passing them out left and right. – Figure out what you can, and do as much of it as possible. But maybe you can begin by figuring out what we do with the cars. We’ve just scrapped a cab, and we need to buy a few new ones. We’ve got an agreement in place with an importer, but I don’t know if it’s the best deal for us. You know what’s required, so maybe it’s a good assignment for you. I’ll send you some emails detailing our current agreement.
He’d pointed at a large, square computer monitor that covered most of the desk. It wasn’t the right time to ask, How do I read emails? Afterward, Erhard guardedly asked Ana what he should do, and she printed out some papers for him: summaries of car prices and payment conditions. On the top sheet was the name of a car importer.
He walks down to the water. There’s no beach at Alapaqa. Only a series of feeble piers running from the breakwater to the fishermen’s two- or three-man cutters and racks of nets. The fish are hanging out to dry, and some dogs bark at a big seagull perched on a drying board.
An importer of cars. He thinks about the car on the beach in Cotillo. Last seen in Amsterdam. Could one register a stolen vehicle here on the islands? Or was that why it didn’t have licence plates?
The police certainly knew all the importers, and had sent them inquiries. No doubt there was a vehicle identification number. He imagines containers like the two he’d investigated. A young man breaks in, steals a car, and pays the guard to look the other way. It seems improbable that the theft wouldn’t be discovered, or that the car wouldn’t be missed, but not impossible. There’s a saying on the islands: Paperwork makes busy men tired. There’s something to that. No one on the Canary Islands likes to file reports, registrations, or contracts. A car might vanish in a stack of paperwork. A lot happens on the islands, including strange, inexplicable things.
He returns to the now slightly dusty Mercedes parked in the little car park behind Miza’s cafe. There are two things he’d like to do. One is to find the car from the beach. Right now it’s in police custody in a lot near the Palace. The other is to stop by Casa Negra, the only restaurant on the island that serves African food. As he drives down the narrow road leading through Alapaqa to the high street, he thinks about Casa Negra’s extra spicy fish dish with rice. The restaurant is in a shitty location right near the airport’s runway, so the table shakes and all the diners sit frozen in place every time a plane comes in for a landing. He’d prefer doing the latter before the former, because he’s starving, but decides to head towards the Palace to get that over with.
He drives past the gate that leads up to the Palace’s entrance and car park, then all the way round the building. The driveway ends in a stony field. He turns the car round and returns the way he came, this time going south around the Palace. He spots a bunch of parking spaces and abandoned cars, but all the driveways lead to similar businesses, like Retail Invest, Joint Markets, Northeast Invest. There are foreign names and rental companies occupying grey buildings behind grey fences dividing the grey landscape. Then he sees a warehouse at the end of a short road, a hangarlike facility behind a tall fence; the police’s shield hangs on a wide gate. Erhard swings the car round, parks, and walks up to the fence. To the left of the gate, on the other side of the fence, is an empty folding chair. A CCTV camera is mounted there on one of the poles above the chair. He stares into its black lens and sees the lot’s reflection. A moment later, an unseen door opens in the warehouse and a policewoman approaches him.
– What is your business here? she says from a distance.
– I’m looking for a car, a Volkswagen.
– What is your business? This is police property.
– I’m looking for a car that’s gone missing.
– I’ll have to ask you to direct your inquiry to the police station. She points in the direction of the Palace. – Remember to ask for an inspection form called RO-19.
Judging by her expression, she has uttered that sentence many times. She has an irregular face, tilting slightly to the left, as if she has had tooth pain or migraines for a very long time. There’s also something forced about the way she lets her hair fall over her eyes. Maybe she’s trying to cover up some ugly brown welts or something. She’s the service-oriented type, who has probably fed a bunch of rug-rats since she was seventeen and still irons her three ex-husbands’ shirts.
– Maybe you can help me, Erhard says, stepping right up to the fence. – My company is looking for a car that was never registered, but just disappeared. It would mean a lot to me.
– She studies his business card, which he holds up to the fence.
– Unfortunately you’ll need an RO-19.
He takes a chance. – I know it’s in there. I would just like to see it, that’s all. A blue Volkswagen Passat.
– I would like to help you, but I can’t.
– Give me two minutes, that’s all I’m asking.
– I’m afraid I can’t help you, she says a little hesitantly.
She would’ve already gone back inside if she was going to stand her ground. But he needs to use soft arguments. – Señorita… Vasquez. He sees the name written on her badge. – A little boy was found dead in the backseat of this car. I’m trying to locate his mother, and I need to see the car.
The woman now removes her sunglasses and rubs her eyes, scrutinizing Erhard. He must look like an innocent old man, because she quickly puts the glasses back on and whispers, –I’ll check the computer to see if we have a Passat.
To let him in, she’ll have to press a large button located on an electrical box a few metres from the fence. She eyes Erhard.
– Why is a taxi company searching for her? Isn’t that a police matter?
Erhard doesn’t have a good response. – Unfortunately, Señorita, your colleagues are too busy with other cases. Only a few of us worry about dead kids.
It’s not an answer to her question, and it’s risky. If she doesn’t have children of her own, she’ll sniff out his manipulation. But if she has children, then she’ll push the button.
She loses her focus for a moment. – What happened to the boy?
– The Cotillo case?
– Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of that.
He tries to nudge her. – Can you believe she abandoned him in a cardboard box?
She regards Erhard at length. Then she pushes the button. – You have to promise you won’t touch the vehicle. It’s the only thing I request.
– I just need to see it. I’ll stand a few metres away and just look.
– Everything in here is evidence.
The gate begins to creak open.
– Here, take my card. And you have me on film, of course. Erhard points at the camera. – I won’t touch anything, and I’m not trying to destroy a case.
– I’ll give you three minutes, Señor. I’ll go with you.
As soon as he’s inside, she presses the button again, and the gate closes.
The facility is dark. A few faint lamps light up as Erhard and the woman walk among the rows of cars, motorcycles, boxes of junk, and strange objects wrapped in plastic. Everything divided into numbered units. Only one out of every eight units or so houses a car. Or the remains of a car. He sees flattened vehicles, charred delivery vans, a roofless bus.
They walk in silence. The place reminds him of a mortuary. A war mortuary with dead soldiers. Every item has a story. A fate. A police report. They pass a huge cage, its door swung open, the kind that can hold a tiger or a bear. A motorcycle sidecar without a motorcycle. A chest freezer. He wants to ask the woman where all the things come from. What are their stories? But he knows she won’t answer. And he’d rather save his questions for later. They pass a row of cars, some dark blue and one a Volkswagen. Erhard just shakes his head, it’s not the right one. He needs to stroll around without the tall woman nipping at his heels. He pauses before a row of peculiar items, twisted and unrecognizable in the darkness. The woman’s torch sweeps swiftly over them: an exercise bike, a fountain, a bar stool. It’s almost funny. A kind of grotesque children’s game, in which one must remember everything one has seen. But his smile quickly fades. In reality, it’s all just row after row of worthless stuff that, at the end of the month, will be hauled to the dump north of the city.
– You’ve got many fine things here. Are you responsible for all of it?
She seems uncertain whether or not he’s being ironic. – You could say that. Me and Levi, our carrier, and a few night watchmen.
Erhard tries to think of something with which to praise her without sounding phony. People like her love that kind of thing. – Most people would probably turn on more lights, he says, but you manage with just your torch. You must have guts, Señorita Vasquez. You’re a rare breed.
That last part was a bit over the top and didn’t sound like a compliment, but the guard didn’t seem to notice.
– I’m just doing my job, she says, flashing her torch on another car, a Seat.
Erhard shakes his head, and they continue down through the centre of the hall.
– Well, thank you for your help anyway.
– It’s nothing. When was it confiscated?
The girl’s photograph from Cotillo Beach was taken on 6 January.
– About a month ago, he says. It’s hard to believe.
– Then we should’ve gone…
Before she completes her sentence, he sees the car and stops. Dark-blue, but black in the darkness. A 2011 model.
– May I borrow that? he says, meaning the torch.
She shines the light on him. – But don’t touch it. She hands him the torch as if it were an axe.
Erhard approaches the car. He runs the torch over the body, bottom up, searching for sand marks along its sides, and peers through the windows into the backseat as if the box with the boy was still inside. Then he walks around the car and squats next to the bumper. The guard stands beneath the lamps and is just about to say something, but Erhard makes sure to keep his distance. He studies the bumper. He keeps the torch light trained on it, scanning from left to right, and before long begins to see movement in the lacquered, shiny surface. He lets his eyes roam back the other way now, slower this time. He’s certain he’ll find a mark, a dent. When the guard steps back a couple paces, Erhard quickly slides his fingers across the rear of the car. Smooth as only a factory-new car can be. A fact that surprises him. He stands and walks around the car.
– Two minutes, Señor.
– OK.
Erhard squats next to the front bumper. It’s just as shiny and smooth as the rear bumper. He focuses on the minutest details, but the guard – now standing a couple of yards behind him – puts him on edge, and his eyes dart this way and that, unable to locate what he’s looking for. Inch by inch he inspects the bumper’s natural curves, created by some computer somewhere in Volkswagen’s design department. Perfectly executed and perfectly painted. He sees nothing out of the ordinary.
– Time’s up, Señor. I’m sorry, but…
Erhard gets to his feet, and the guard begins to guide him back towards the door. Swiftly he spins and runs the pads of his fingers across the bumper. The guard turns and yells at him, but he’s half-concealed in darkness and can now feel, in the very centre of the bumper, a level bump, a directional shift that didn’t come from the factory. It’s a 20-centimetre-wide area, which can only have been made by something large and heavy. That’s why he didn’t see it before; it was too big for him to see it. He’d been searching for something minute, but he was looking at the wrong scale. Erhard turns towards the woman and raises his hands.
– I’m sorry. I just had to feel it.
She has brought her telephone nearly to her ear, as if she’s called someone, but she hasn’t said a word. She looks at the telephone, then presses a button and clips the phone back on her belt. – I told you not to touch anything. You better come with me.
She’s not simply irritated, but also hurt, as if he’s disappointed her personally. She nudges him towards the door. Behind them, the lights snap off.
– I’m sorry, he says over his shoulder.
– I don’t think you are.
– You won’t get in trouble. No one knows I’m even here.
– Yes, I will.
– I just needed to see the car. For the boy’s sake.
– Stop nattering about that boy. That’s just a story you invented to trick me. They’ve reached the door, and now head outside. The light is strong, but the air is sweet. – I need to ask you to leave, Señor, she says, as if he’s not already on his way, and she buzzes him out the gate. Erhard wants to thank her one last time, but before he can say anything, she’s turned her back on him and retreated inside the hangar.
He returns to his car and drives to Casa Negra. He orders the spicy codfish and a tall glass of beer, even though he’s told himself that he’s not allowed to drink any more today. While he waits, he jots down every possible scenario on a napkin: The car was stolen in Amsterdam and later from a container terminal. The car was stolen in Amsterdam and sold to the mother or father here on the island. The car was… He can’t bring himself to write this one down. The car was stolen in Amsterdam, fell out of a container on the open sea, and somehow washed ashore here on Fuerteventura.
Already in the lift he hears something. Music and choppy voices all the way up through the shaft. When he passes the fourth floor, he thinks it must be Raúl. So he’s returned home after all. So he’s just been on one of his drinking binges with his friends, stuffing drugs into every orifice, under the radar, outside of Daddy’s reach and far away from everyone who loves him, so that no one could try to bring him back. So he’s returned to a life in almost total overhaul. So he’s home again. He’s found Beatriz, and he’ll ask Erhard who was cremated and poured into an urn in Alto Blanco. The game is over. In the best-case scenario it’s back to Majanicho for him.
Then he remembers the new set of keys. The noise must be coming not from his flat, but the corridor. The doors of the lift open. There are twenty or twenty-five people standing in the hallway. It’s the classic crowd one finds in any bar, just dressed in finer clothes, ties, and gold necklaces instead of ragged tattoos on their ankles. He searches for Raúl’s eyes, bloodshot after weeks of drinking and random sex. He searches for his friend’s face. But as he scans the crowd, it occurs to him that his friend isn’t among them. He will never be here. They are hired men and women, no one you know or like. They are little more than sandwich boards, rented to fill space. A pair of Maasai girls stand together against the wall, waiting as if for a big blowout sale. None among the crows seems to know who Erhard is, or even care to find out. He cuts through the throng and towards the door, next to which, preoccupied with a Maasai girl – the nearly coal-coloured doll – stands Emanuel Palabras.
– Piano Tuner, he says loudly, hurrying to pour a glass of champagne that he hands to Erhard.
– What are we celebrating?
– Your first day of work.
– I would hardly call it a day’s work.
– Get used to it. You’re the director now. You’ve no need to tally up your hours any longer.
– So you thought you’d bring over some whores and homeless people in suits.
– Speak nicely about my ladies of the night. They hear you. Besides, it’s hardly your flat, but mine. Even if you’ve changed the lock.
– I thought you said the flat gave you the creeps.
– If I tell you to party with the best girls and boys on the island that money can buy, then that’s what you should do.
There’s something in the tone that sickens Erhard. It makes him feel bought and paid for. The man he’s visited and helped for many years, and whom he almost viewed as a friend, is in reality a calculating businessman. But he cannot muster the strength to tackle it now.
– If we’re going to party like this, we’ll do it on the rooftop terrace, not in the flat. I don’t want to see a single one of your little friends down here, or you, Señor Palabras, unless it’s to go home or to use the loo. Agreed?
– You’ve accustomed yourself to this fine station rather quickly, Palabras says. – But we’ll be good, of course, won’t we ladies and gentlemen?
Everyone nods their assent.
Erhard keys open the door and steps inside the flat, snapping on the light. He stands blocking the hallway to the bedroom and watches the group march into the living room, then out on the balcony, and finally up onto the rooftop terrace led by Palabras and the hobbling Charles. One of the girls kicks off her high heels, and one of the men opens another bottle of champagne.
He checks on Beatriz and locks the bedroom door before taking a glass of champagne and heading up to the terrace. One of the perfumed girls tries to sit on his lap and wrap an arm around him, but he pushes her gently away. Palabras talks about celebrating his victories and grieving his losses. It’s the lot of the mediocre man to let his days merge into one grey lump, he says. One should drink champagne any chance one gets. It’s the only civilized thing to do, Palabras roars across the terrace.
They rearrange the furniture and empty the bar. Erhard already feels as though these are his things, and it irritates him how they’re making themselves at home. They even brought a small transistor radio, and they are playing a little too much electronica, a little too much canned music.
– You owe me a key, Emanuel Palabras says behind two girls. He sounds almost like Raúl when he’s drunk.
Erhard grins. He doesn’t know what to say.
– It’s my property, Piano Tuner.
– Then move into the flat below me.
– I’d hoped you’d be inclined to be a little friendlier.
– I’m inclined to have a little peace and quiet. Thanks for the party, but I prefer my home being mine, not a nightclub.
– So you won’t give me a key? Charles, say something to him.
But Charles does nothing. One of the girls is sitting on his lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy, drinking red wine.
– It’s my flat.
– But I need to know that this is my home. I don’t like you coming and going. It’s not about you, it’s about… Hmm, what is it about? It’s about feeling secure, safe, somewhere.
Palabras continues: – I can request the locksmith make an extra key. He does what I tell him.
– I wish there were others besides me to keep you in check.
Emmanuel Palabras throws his hands up as if it’s all poppycock. Erhard wonders if he’ll ever feel at home in this flat, or whether it’ll always be in a kind of no-man’s land. Maybe a home is defined as a place where one can be alone, by oneself, in the singular. And the elder Palabras feels that he can come and go whenever it pleases him. He raises his glass to Palabras and chugs the expensive – no doubt several hundred euros – champagne in one gulp, which he knows irritates Palabras. The night is full of shooting stars, or at least he read that it would be in the newspaper. He hasn’t seen any himself, but maybe that’s because his eyes are mostly closed.
By two in the morning, Palabras resembles one of his wooden masks. His face appears softened from exhaustion. It occurs to Erhard that he himself must look just as tired. The Maasai girls have shuffled over to the bar and are drinking champagne, talking softly, incomprehensibly, in their own language, while the young men sit on the balcony stairs smoking. Charles helps Palabras out of his chair and brushes crisps from his jacket. Erhard almost feels tenderness for him. Charles thanks Erhard, then commands the Maasai girls and the men to clean up and carry the glasses down to the kitchen. As they leave, Palabras just raises his arm in farewell before he follows the others.
It’s as if they were never even there. It wouldn’t surprise him if he went down to the kitchen and found everything in its right place. But the atmosphere has shifted. It’s a Monday night, and all is quiet. Not good in Corralejo. It’s the sound of unemployment. Of a dearth of tourists. He gets to his feet to trundle off to bed. There’s a large wet stain on his trousers. Right on his crotch. As if someone poured a drink on him.
The next day he decides to go to work. On the street, he pauses at Silón’s shop to admire a black briefcase. It’s one of those with a simple code-lock mechanism, which opens with a click. He lays his book, pillbox, and a long baguette into the case and snaps it shut. Silón asks for thirty euros, but Erhard gets it for twelve. Leaving his things inside the case, he walks to the Mercedes. He beeps the car open, climbs in, and drops the briefcase on the passenger seat. If Annette could see him now. She wouldn’t believe it. She would think he was heading to a costume party. She would think he was someone else.
Taxinaria’s offices are modern and colourful and resemble those built in the new part of Puerto. He has to punch in a code to enter, but luckily one of the girls from the service – which is what they call their dispatch – is on her way into the office at the same time. He walks down a long corridor next to a travelator, past a few quiet offices and the break-room, which is dark. He tries to buy a cup of coffee from the vending machine in the hall, but can’t get it to work. He pulls a bottled water from the refrigerator and sits down to read the previous day’s newspaper, which lies on his desk.
Shortly after eight o’clock, someone begins to putter in reception. He stares through the slit in the door, watching Ana organize her things on the table and touch the soil on the plant in the windowsill. A somewhat sad-looking girl – probably Lene’s age, mid thirties – dressed in oversized trainers. Erhard doesn’t like to see women in trainers, and he can’t imagine Lene wearing them. Last time he saw her, she was wearing huge winter boots from Bilka, the Danish big-box chain where Annette bought most of the things for the children. She is a girl who’s used to being abandoned, used to cleaning up after others, used to people around her exploding, breaking down, talking to her meanly, talking badly about her, groping her – without ever complaining. She’s a girl who can survive anything, but will never be happy. He hopes he’s wrong.
– Buenas, he says softly.
– Buenas, she says, her back to him as if she already knew he was there.
– Do you know anything about cars?
She turns to face him. – Should I?
She thinks it’s a trick question.
– I don’t know anything about them, he says. – I just drive them.
She smiles apprehensively. – I don’t know much, either.
– The papers you printed for me yesterday. Marcelis says I should evaluate some cars for us to purchase. But I’d like to see some old contracts and do a comparison.
– They’re on the drive. On the computer, she adds when he stares at her dumbly. – Would you like me to print them out for you?
– That would be very helpful.
In that moment he sees all the years of irritation and frustration, not pronounced in her eyes but more in a wrinkle forming between them, a wrinkle that has registered all the inept, idiotic, incompetent, and irresponsible men who have made her life miserable. Then the wrinkle smoothes out, and she bends over her desk and looks at her computer. – I’ll bring it in, she says. Her helpfulness is practised, and apparently not just reserved for the boss she’s shagging.
While he waits, he pulls his book from his briefcase. It’s one of the books he brought with him when he moved into the new flat. He chose it because the cover showed an image of a black telephone on a wooden floor. The story’s about a female otologist who is recruited to join a team of experts who are tasked with capturing an international terrorist. The culprit, described as a computer genius, has made a machine that rings up people and kills them with an ultrasonic sound. Ultratone. Hence the title. Erhard knows the plot only because he’s read the back of the book. He’s still reading the first chapter, where we meet the doctor at a conference as she’s reviving an old fling with an investment expert from New York City. He reads a passage several times. In it the doctor waits, hot and horny, at her lover’s hotel room, until she calls the front-desk clerk and discovers that he has checked out. He’s gone. It’s a ridiculous novel. Erhard knows that. But he thinks about the doctor, the emptiness she feels in a strange place, and it almost makes him weep.
He manages to sit up in his chair just before Ana enters with the papers and walks him through them, pointing with a pen that’s wet with spit because she’d had it in her mouth. Cute. After she has left, he studies the papers disinterestedly. He has nothing to add. It occurs to him that the Volkswagen Passat is a more popular vehicle than he’d previously thought. Through the years, Taxinaria has owned more than fifteen Passats, which had their heyday shortly after 2000.
He walks with Ana to the lunch room. Though everyone apparently eats in the same room, the drivers have their own area behind a row of potted plants, while the others – management, Ana, the sales staff, and the telephone girls – sit closest to the kitchen. At TaxiVentura he’d often heard the drivers go on about the girls and the bosses who were too hoity-toity to sit with the likes of them, but now it occurs to Erhard that it might create problems bringing the two together in an ostensibly equal space, since there is a deep cleft between those who labour in an office for thirty-five hours a week and those who drive a taxi seventy hours a week. With an inverse salary distribution.
He eats pan-seared potatoes and lamb skewers. One of the advantages of working here is that he doesn’t need to bring his own lunch. Meals are prepared in the restaurant, Muñoz, next door and carried over on large trays. It’s nothing special, but it’s much better than what he could ever make. He doesn’t talk to anyone. Ana’s absorbed in conversation with some of the women whose names and voices he’d heard on those occasions when, out of curiosity, he’d switched over to Taxinaria’s frequency. They’re discussing the drivers who suddenly turn up in the office bearing flowers or chocolate and making wild gestures, because they’ve sat far too long in their taxis listening to the bickering and the commentary, and they’ve fallen in love with the soft voices on the radio.
So did Erhard once. It was many years ago. Michela was her name. The way she talked, every driver thought she was speaking directly to him. For weeks he considered how to go about it, how he would approach her. The problem was, there were few valid reasons for a driver to enter the office. In the end he decided he would wait for her to get off work, then drive her home. That was convenient and offered the least amount of risk. But the day before he was to carry out his plan, he’d learned that all the other drivers – even Luís – had the same thought in mind. Suddenly the idea seemed silly and uninspired, and he felt a kind of disgust at his own desperation. Since then, he’s seen the pattern emerge time and again. The drivers are bored, lonely souls, and the girls have refined their voices for years, developing a poisonous instrument as compensation for the immoderate bodies they conceal behind garish dresses. At Taxinaria too, the two girls with the most passionate voices are decidedly plump, while the other three – including the Tunisian, Alissa – have coarse, horse-like features that make them appear big-boned. They talk over one another about their husbands and boyfriends, their dogs, and a new film that was screened on the wall of a house down near the harbour. Ana listens and laughs guardedly as if she’s never heard of anything like it.
He heads back to the office. He has no interest in reading the novel about the telephone terrorist. He picks up the car paperwork again. It’s a print-out from a dealer’s website. At the bottom of the last page he sees a name and telephone number. He lifts the telephone and dials the number. If he’s lucky, he can reach him before siesta.
– Autovenga, good afternoon.
– Hello. I’m calling from Taxinaria. My name is Erhard Jørgensen. May I speak to Gilberto Peyón?
– Speaking. New or used?
– Hardly ever used.
– I’m not sure I follow.
Erhard can tell that Gilberto needs to warm up a little before he begins asking him for favours. – The best you have, he says. – I’m the new director here and I’m looking to purchase a few new cars.
Erhard hopes the office door is closed.
– Where did you say you were calling from?
The line crackles.
Erhard starts from the beginning, and this time the man is livelier.
– It would be a pleasure to supply you again. I don’t mean to offend, but I thought our partnership was over?
– Why? Erhard asks.
– Palabras said he could get others to supply him with cheaper vehicles.
– Emanuel?
– Raúl. But I’ve heard that he’s dead.
– Don’t believe everything you hear.
The car dealer laughs. Confused. – That’s true.
– I’m looking for the best of the best, Erhard says. He guesses that the dealer is the ambitious type: the eager salesman who in four years hopes to run his own dealership.
– Let’s cut a deal.
– But first, Erhard says. The line clicks as if the salesman received a shock through the phone. – I need some information about a particular vehicle. A vehicle that was ordered… for a colleague.
– With us?
– I don’t think so. But I wondered if you might look it up somewhere and see what has been ordered? My old colleague was the one who ordered it. He was a bit sloppy. I hope you’re not as sloppy.
– No, we’re not.
– Good. It’s a blue Volkswagen Passat from 2010, 2011, or 2012.
– From Spain?
– Maybe, but via Amsterdam.
– When was it ordered?
– I don’t know.
– Under what name?
– I don’t know.
The line goes quiet. – A Passat, you say?
– Yes.
– One moment.
A long silence.
– Hello. There have been no Passat orders to the island since the end of 2010. No Volkswagens at all, in fact.
– How many other companies import Volkswagens to the island?
– There’s Bruno Tullo out near Vallebrón, but I don’t think he sells any more. In fact, I think he’s dead.
– OK. Then let me ask you: How might a Passat stolen in Amsterdam, without plates and with thirty miles on the odometer, now be parked in Cotillo?
– I don’t know. That kind of thing… we don’t do that kind of thing.
– No, I hope not. But how would one do that?
– There have been cases of stolen vehicles here on the island, but they are rare. They’re hard to hide. Everything needs to go through Puerto. Through Ruiz.
– Ruiz?
– The customs officer here in Puerto. Trust me, he doesn’t let any cars slip past him. Ruiz has earned his fair share on each and every car that drives on the island.
– So, theoretically, one could convince Ruiz to allow a car onto the island, even if it’s stolen?
– Theoretically, yes. But not if you knew Ruiz. He may be an idiot, but if I may say so, he’s a stickler for Spanish law. If he found out there was a car on the island without his approval, he would find the person who brought it here and force him to pay the duty. He’s not someone you try to cheat.
– How do I find him?
– He’s at the harbour. At Customs.
Erhard jots this down. – Listen, if you do me a favour and get in touch with Ruiz and ask him if knows anything about a dark-blue Passat that was brought to the island in the last three months, then I’d be more than happy to strike a deal with you. Two cars on the expensive side.
The salesmen sounds more upbeat, but also uneasy. – I’m happy to hear that, Señor Jørgensen. But Ruiz is not so easy to get in touch with. He doesn’t like taking phone calls.
– Then stop by his office. The harbour can’t be more than a few miles from where you work.
When the conversation is over, Erhard is dripping with sweat. Every muscle in his body quivers tensely, ready to snap. He slumps over his desk. All he wants now is for Ana to fetch him a glass of water.
He spends the afternoon on a walk. On the street he bumps into a few of the drivers having a cigarette, and one who’s filling in a crossword puzzle on his telephone. He talks to them briefly. Mostly he listens, twice adding that he hopes his many years behind the wheel can help make life better for the drivers and also for Taxinaria. They seem to like the idea, but aren’t as excited as he’d hoped. We’ll see, the man who was doing the crossword puzzle says, before heading back to his car.
Time passes incredibly slowly.
It’s not even siesta yet, and he feels more tired than he’s ever been following a fourteen-hour shift. Maybe his body can’t tolerate office work. Maybe it can’t tolerate the absence of a cold beer or a warm whisky. He ends up sprawled across the broad windowsill with a cup of coffee, reading the terrorist novel. The otologist is off to meet England’s prime minister in a secret bunker on the Isle of Man. Before dinner, she changes into a fancy gown and spends more than one page describing her appearance in the mirror. The gown highlighted my thighs and all those years I spent on the Stepmaster in the living room. My breasts were as inviting as any woman’s could be after giving birth to two children and without plastic surgery – with only a little padding in the beige-coloured top from Victoria’s Secret. The book was written for another time, another gender, another universe, and Erhard feels like a visitor, a slimy little Peeping Tom. Just as he’s about to throw the book away, Ana knocks on the door with a message from Gilberto.
– He asked me to tell you that Ruiz doesn’t know the vehicle in question. She gives him a quizzical look.
– Thank you, Ana, Erhard says, then has to come up with an excuse. – It’s something to do with the new cars. He helped me find the right one.
She nods and closes the door on her way out.
He throws the book in the rubbish bin. The image of the otologist in her bra is hard to let go of.