Tattoo (A Pepe Carvalho Mystery) by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

Author:Manuel Vazquez Montalban [Montalban, Manuel Vazquez]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781612192093
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

She said her name was Salomons. The widow of Cees Salomons, she explained. They took the lift down to the ground. While the attendant was busy with his levers, she whispered in Carvalho’s ear:

‘Is it true Julio is dead?’

‘So it seems.’

‘That’s dreadful.’

She seemed genuinely upset. She strode out of the lift in front of Pepe and led him towards a Volvo parked at the foot of the tower. On their way to one of the least new districts of Rotterdam neither of them said a word. She came to a halt in a tree-lined street. At the far end a canal was visible. She opened the front door to an apartment block, then they went across an internal garden where a few girls in bikinis, bearded young men and straw-blond kids playing with a rubber ball were all out enjoying the sun. The widow Salomons opened her apartment door, and Carvalho found he was directly in a light kitchen-cum-dining-room. A staircase led directly off it up to another floor. She gestured for him to take a seat on one of the stools that went with a high white lacquer table. She sat opposite him. In the centre of the table between them sat a wicker fruit bowl full of glistening Mediterranean fruit. The widow Salomons seemed to be lost in thought: she sat staring at a stainless-steel kettle on the unlit stove.

‘It’s dreadful.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Yes, I knew him well.’

She raised her head to the ceiling. Tears were welling up in her eyes. As she stretched, he could see she had a thick but beautiful white throat.

‘Very well.’

The tears poured down. Carvalho started to play with a grapefruit that seemed to have been polished with a cloth. The oranges and lemons were just as shiny. The widow raised her head again, and Carvalho sank his visual fangs into her beautiful white throat. He had the fleeting impression that she must have taken a course run by the Actors’ Studio in Rotterdam. She wept like Warren Beatty in Splendour in the Grass. It was all so staged that to Carvalho her grief seemed to be delicately poised between the theatrical and the cinematographic. It takes all sorts, he said to himself, and began to peel an orange. The widow Salomons got up to fetch him a plate to put the peel on. Carvalho remembered an old joke he had heard from a professor of French literature, Juan Petit: ‘Imagine that one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s angst-ridden characters is in mid-crisis when he hears his doorbell ring. He goes and answers: it’s the man from the electricity company. If he has enough money to pay, he’s fine. He can go back to his metaphysical angst. But if he can’t, his metaphysical angst goes out the window and an everyday angst takes its place.’ Professor Petit had been as lucid as he was scary, sitting there clutching the vaporiser he used all the time to control his asthma attacks.

‘I’m sorry. I’m making a fool of myself.

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