Tattoo Read Free Page B

the mixture started to thicken, he poured it over some potatoes. Then in a pot he placed first the prawns, then the monkfish and finally the hake. The fish took on colour and added their juices to the mixture. Then Carvalho poured in a cup of the strong fish broth. Ten minutes later, the
caldeirada
was done.
    Carvalho laid the table in front of the fire and ate straight from the pot. The chilled Fefiñanes, though, had to be drunk from a tall, elegant wineglass. Each wine had to have its own special glass. Carvalho did not usually follow style diktats, but this was one he strictly adhered to.
    After his meal he drank a cup of the weak American coffee he had learned to prepare in San Francisco, and lit up a Montecristo No. 1. He sprawled across two sofas so that he could get completely horizontal, and lay with cigar in one hand and coffee in the other, gazing dreamily at the flames wavering as they disappeared up into the sooty heights of the chimney. He was imagining the body of a young, blond man, ‘bold and blond as beer’, according to the song. A man capable of having that motto tattooed on his back:
Born to raise hell in hell
. Among the stories about tattoos he could recall, one stood out: the poor crook who had put
Death to all cops
on his chest. He had paid dearly for this open declaration of principles, spending almost thirty years in jail alternately for petty crimes and for being a vagrant. Looking at El Madriles’ tattoo had become a favourite pastime in all the police stations of Spain.
    ‘Come on, Madriles, let’s have a look at it.’
    ‘I swear it was nothing more than a mistake, Inspector, sir. I was drunk when it occurred to me. The maestro who tattooed me warned me at the time: Madriles, it’ll only bring you trouble.’
    ‘So another spot of bother won’t matter much. Go on, Madriles, take your shirt off.’
    The tattooist. Somebody must have given the young man ‘as bold and blond as beer’ that tattoo. There weren’t many experts left, but was this a professional tattoo, or one out of a Parisian drugstore, the sort young girls went in for when they wanted to leave a mark on their flesh and in their minds. This one must have been done by a professional. If not, the same water that had given the fishes the time they needed to gorge themselves on the dead man’s face would have washed away the motto by now, and the body would have emerged from the sea not only stripped bare by death, but rendered completely anonymous – unless his fingerprints were in police records somewhere. His ID card, thought Carvalho. Of course they would be in the police records. He pondered on a possible link between the dead man and his client. There must be some connection between them. Carvalho tried to brush aside this hypothesis. He knew from experience that the worst thing to do in any investigation was to start from a hypothesis. That can only restrict the approach to the truth, and sometimes even distort it.
    By the time he had finished his first litre of coffee for the night, the fire was crackling loudly and had turned the entire room into the backdrop for its wild but fettered dancing. Carvalho was hot; he stripped to his underpants. This lasted only a moment, just long enough for him to identify his own white body with that of the corpse: he shuddered, and rushed to get the protection of a second skin, his pyjama jacket.

 
    H e woke when he was tired of sleeping. Through the shutters of the half-open window he could hear the birds chattering among themselves about how bright and hot the day was. He looked out of the window and saw that everything was where it ought to be: the sky was up, the earth down. The electric heater and the Italian coffee-making machine helped him recover a sense of self. The shower and the coffee he drank forced him to recognise the here and now, and the idea that he had work to do that would help him get through another day: not that he had any better notion of what to do with