The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) Read Free Page A

could give him one till the morning shift had started. So they’d chatted, and Cámara had read articles in the sports pages building up to the weekend’s matches, until he had fallen into uncomfortable, shallow sleep on the black, sweaty chair. Both he and Hilario were woken at dawn by the first morning rounds.
    ‘Idiots. Leave me alone.’
    Hilario had waved his hand – his right hand, the one that was supposed to be paralysed. Not very high, and it had quickly flopped back on to the bed. Was he regaining some movement there?
    Cámara had managed to get some coffee from the canteen on the ground floor, and then a sandwich and a flavourless chocolate doughnut from a vending machine near the lifts, but by the afternoon he was ready to head over to the flat, have a shower and lie down for an hour or two while Pilar relieved him.
    But Pilar wanted to talk; she was nervous about sitting here on her own with Hilario. Life at the flat was different – there she had things to do, and a certain power. Here in the hospital she was jumpy, anxiously looking for little tasks to perform. And in this state she talked at him, as though nailing him to the chair, ignoring Hilario. Not waiting for her to pause, Cámara got up and walked out the door. A few minutes later, with the card-key from reception in its allocated slot, the television was on and Pilar was absorbed in a Venezuelan soap opera.
    ‘Yes, you go. We’ll be fine.’
    Hilario had fallen asleep again.
    ‘I’ll be back in a few hours.’
    ‘Don’t you worry. Take your time. There’s some meat stew in the fridge, left over from Tuesday. Should still be all right.’
    It was getting dark by the time he stepped outside. The first street lamps were flickering and cars were driving with their sidelights on.
    He breathed in deeply and leaned against a railing for a second, wondering to himself about suddenly being back here, in Albacete. What would happen to Hilario? He’d been livelier the night before. Today he’d barely spoken, acting out far better the role of ill old person than was expected of him. There would be time for rebuilding connections in his brain later. If he made it.
    He pulled himself away from the railings and started to walk. He needed to stretch his legs, get some air back inside him after hours on the train and then in the hospital. Albacete was a small city, and the flat was no more than a fifteen-minute walk from where he was, but he decided to strike out into the streets in another direction first. Exercise, not more sitting and lying down, would set him up better for another night on duty.
    It was gone seven and the shops were busy with last-minute buyers before eight-o’clock closing time. Cars were left double-parked with flashing emergency lights on as people dashed in and out of grocers’, stationers’ and the shops run by Chinese immigrants selling cheap plastic household goods. He was always surprised that there could be so much bustle in this small urban space. Just a few streets away, where the suburbs ended, the flat, featureless light brown fields of the Albacete basin – La Mancha – stretched for long distances. The city felt like an oasis in the desert, or an island many, many miles from any other civilised land mass, and yet you were almost unaware of this as the cars and the people created a bubble of noise and energy. As if to protect themselves, he thought. To protect themselves from remembering that they were afloat, lost, and alone.
    It could almost have been a place worth visiting. There were a few interesting little corners, and a large, attractive public garden, known simply by locals as
El Parque
, although it did have some official, more long-winded title. Yet in reality there was nothing to recommend the city – no riverbanks, no museums of note, no great public buildings. If anyone did associate it with anything, it was with knives: Albacete was, for reasons that no one could explain convincingly, a centre of knife