Southern Seas by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

Author:Manuel Vazquez Montalban [Montalbán, Manuel Vázquez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-118-8
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2012-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

The back room of a pharmacy for giants: fifty-litre flagons made for who knows what unmentionable potions; flasks; test tubes; glass containers packed in straw and woodshavings; bare wooden shelves stained by damp and darkness; carpets; sawdust on the floor; jumpy cats; bare light bulbs; an ageing white-moustached athlete juggling with cardboard boxes; a sad-eyed alsatian sniffing at each newcomer; at the end of a corridor, amid obsolete and abandoned giant-sized glass goods, a stern man using a calculator; beside him, a boy checking emery-polished syringes; Alfredo Kraus singing The Pearl Fishers through a loudspeaker perched in one corner of the ceiling. Above their heads, the sound of high-heeled shoes clicking across the mezzanine floorboards.

The man with the calculator said: ‘Can I help you?’ He didn’t even turn his head until Carvalho held the photograph of Stuart Pedrell before his nervous eyes and twitching nostrils. He concluded his calculation, gave the boy a couple of orders about what needed to be done before closing time, and walked across the shop floor, his arms and high-set shoulders moving as if they were separate from the rest of his body. As he led the way up the wooden stairs to the mezzanine floor, Carvalho noticed a little office in which a girl was typing a letter and a short-sighted, heavily built woman with sad, narrowed eyes had stopped work to make a telephone call.

‘Auntie,’ she was saying in Catalan, ‘Mother asked me if you’ll be coming up to Garriga this Sunday.’ She stopped at the sight of Carvalho and then continued in a lower voice. The boss sent the girl to do something, and sat down on an office table that was jammed up against metal filing cabinets. Next to the wastepaper basket a cat was eating a piece of liver. A spaniel looked at the newcomer with all the imperturbability of a Buster Keaton. A younger spaniel, the image of Lauren Bacall, imprudently sniffed him and tried to take a lump out of his ankle before the boss’s shout drove her under a table. In a cage, two demented canaries were dancing the dance of servitude. The boss flicked a switch, and Alfredo Kraus faded away. They sat in the half-silence of a warehouse submerged between one of the hundred and seventy-two apartment tower blocks of San Magín.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘What would you make of a man who knows Placido Domingo’s recordings by heart and gives a perfect description of the final scene of Strauss’s Salome, as interpreted by Caballé? I’m very keen on opera, and I rarely get the pleasure of meeting a real connoisseur. He was one.’

‘Did you only talk about opera?’

‘Opera and business. But in fact we didn’t see much of each other. I manage the warehouse from downstairs, and my wife runs the office up here …’

‘… Míriam’s fiancé will be there too. Look, Inès. Haven’t you had a letter from uncle in Argentina …?’

‘Where did he live?’

‘Very near here, but I don’t know exactly where. Why? Has something happened to him?’

‘He’s a relation of mine, and he’s gone missing.

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