A Necessary Action (19 page)

Witness could not give exact time of accident as neither he nor his brother had a watch, but he estimates it as between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

This testimony is confirmed in all essentials by fisherman Ramon Alemany Ventosa, who was at the time constantly in the company of the witness and similarly witnessed the accident.

17th December 1954            

Puesto de Policia no. 413 

Zona Oriental S.F.P.D.

(Signature)              

‘Not a word of truth in it,’ said Willi Mohr slowly to himself.

He did not feel especially surprised or angry, but more as if he had been faced with an already known fact. Possibly he was
surprised that the story had been so clumsily put together and was so obviously untrue.

He raised his head quickly and looked at the men at the other table and he caught Ramon Alemany’s gaze for perhaps a tenth of a second before it turned away. It was wild and frightened and then the moment passed and Ramon was again staring at his cards. Although he was leaning forward, and despite the bad light, Willi Mohr could see the thin white scar from the scratch down his cheek.

Santiago nudged his brother jokingly and said something. Then he put his cards together and laid them down. Both the other players began to argue loudly and aggressively, but Santiago flung a few small coins down on to the table and got up. He and Ramon walked towards the exit and just as they passed the table by the door, he looked straight into Willi’s eyes, coldly and calmly.

Willi Mohr stayed there three or four minutes more and drank his cold coffee. Then he rose and began to go the round. He found them in a seedy little bar at the end of the quay, a place where there were very rarely any visitors. It was run by an old man who watered the wine and sold it cheaply to strange fishermen.

Santiago and Ramon were standing by the dirty little bar counter, drinking red wine. They were talking quietly to each other, but fell silent when Willi Mohr came into the room.

They daren’t even rely on the fact that I can’t understand what they’re saying, he thought.

He nodded and went to stand beside them. Santiago called for another glass and Willi Mohr let the old man bring it and put it down, but he did not touch it. After a minute or so, Santiago said something to him, and he shrugged his shoulders to show that he had not understood. Ramon stared stubbornly down into his glass. Suddenly he emptied it in one draught, turned towards the door and walked out. Santiago stayed for a while, then he too left, without saying anything more and without looking at the man at his side.

Willi Mohr took his glass and went and stood in the doorway to watch the Alemany brothers, who had joined each other again some way up the quay. He knew that he had driven them indoors and that he need not follow them any longer.

They would probably go home now.

‘We’re getting into a routine with this now,’ he said to the dog.

Willi Mohr stayed in the puerto the whole afternoon, but Ramon and Santiago did not show themselves again that day.

He read through the report again, and was again struck by the fact that it was so obviously false and easy to refute.

It surprised and confused him, and he felt disappointed and exhausted, as if he had used all his strength to burst open a door.

To go from bar to bar looking for the Alemany brothers had been an uncomplicated, almost mechanical occupation, and now he missed it. At the same time, it irritated him that he could not say definitely why he had done it.

He had a feeling that many small thoughts were slowly being drawn together into something liberatingly simple, but he doubted whether it would ever find the strength to burst free from his mind. Presumably it would stay there behind the wall and wither away. Perhaps it would drive him mad.

He drove home at about ten o’clock. The camioneta engine was running badly and he decided to begin overhauling it the next day, while he still had enough money for spare parts.

When Willi Mohr went into the house in Barrio Son Jofre, the silence and loneliness fell round him. It was then that the thought occurred to him that he was the only person who could refute Santiago Alemany’s story. If there had not been a translation of the report, he would never have been able to read it and it must seem quite plausible to anyone else.

No one had reckoned with him. Neither with his memory nor his almost abnormal memory for detail, details which to a great extent he was the only one to know about.

Willi Mohr stood in the darkness, talking to himself. He asked: ‘How did it happen? What did they do? And why?’

He held his breath for ten seconds, as if awaiting a reply, but nothing happened.

He undressed and crept down between the damp sheets. His head thumped and it was a long time before he fell asleep.

He jerked awake and sat up, violently, as if a cry or a shout had torn apart the silence and was ringing round the room.

It was all quite clear.

The Alemany brothers had killed Siglinde and Dan.

Naturally he knew why they had done it. Who would know better than he?

Now they were frightened and their fear was not without cause.

He would force them to confess, no matter how or when.

Then he would kill them.

Everything was quite simple.

Never before had he thought such clear and simple thoughts.

Willi Mohr lay down on the mattress. He felt completely calm and fell asleep almost at once, as if he had just been freed from some great uncertainty or recovered from a long illness.

It was in the middle of the night and the room was quite dark.

Willi Mohr underwent the change very quickly, but there was no one who knew him well enough to notice it. He was seen daily in the puerto, where he sat in bars or wandered about in the alleyways, a thin, lonely foreigner, who never did anything which aroused attention.

He did not seek the company of the Alemany brothers and was never together with either of them, but he was very often to be found somewhere in the vicinity of them. When they visited one of the bars, he was usually sitting in the same place, and seldom left before them. If they went to another place, it would not be long before he appeared there too. He was never seen drinking spirits, but he could sit for hours over a cup of coffee or a mineral water. Sometimes he appeared to be studying his surroundings, but he mostly stared straight ahead, his blue eyes quite expressionless.

He had a black and white mongrel with him and drove an old re-built Fiat truck, which he used to park on the quay where everyone could see it. In the shops where he bought things, it was noticed that he was learning more and more of the language.

At the beginning of April, he left the country as a temporary member of the crew of a private yacht. Barely two months later, at the end of May, he came back and again took up residence in the house in Barrio Son Jofre.

After that he never again visited the puerto.

Willi Mohr was tired after the police interrogation and slept nearly all day. He woke at about eight in the evening feeling hungry, and as soon as he had washed and dressed, he went up into the town to eat. The eating-place he usually frequented was small and seedy, in a narrow side-street off the Avenue, up by the church. It was run by a couple of old maids and was mostly frequented by junior non-commissioned officers feeling the need for a change from army fare. The food was uninviting but cheap. Only two courses were served, either a kind of soup with green leaves floating in it, or black pudding with rice. The soup was thin and not very nourishing but the rice oozed with mutton-fat and refined olive-oil, so anyone eating both courses did not need to leave the table hungry. For three months, June, July and August, Willi Mohr had gone there every evening, but then his money had come to an end and he had been forced to live on bread and salted sardines bought on credit at the tienda. This did not matter all that much, as he was more or less indifferent to what he ate, but he was not domestic and did not like messing about with food.

Although he had paid his bill at the tienda, he still had some money left from Santiago Alemany’s visit four days before, so he ate both courses. There were no other customers in the dirty little café and both the old women served him at table; he had not been there for a long time and their attentions were both ridiculous and moving.

Willi Mohr took his time. He wiped the grease and oil carefully off the plate with small pieces of bread and picked his teeth thoroughly and lengthily before getting up to say goodnight. The old women had already been paid and had withdrawn into a
corner where they were sitting like black shadows, silently waiting.

As soon as he had stepped out into the street, they locked the door behind him.

It was already eleven o’clock. Willi Mohr went to the square and drank coffee outside the Central, sitting there until everyone else had gone and the proprietor had begun to yawn. Then he went home to bed.

This was more or less his daily routine. True, now and again he painted for a while on the picture of the house and cactuses, but he doubted it would ever be more complete than it already was and he had no desire to begin another one.

For four months he had done virtually nothing whatsoever.

He was waiting.

Before he had been waiting for Santiago Alemany to come to the house in Barrio Son Jofre.

Now Santiago had been there and Willi Mohr was still waiting.

For the visit to be repeated.

Today, thought Willi Mohr, I must do it.

He closed the notebook and put it in his back pocket and went out into the kitchen.

He thrust his hand under the stone bench and one by one lifted out the puppies, carried them into the room and put them down on the floor in the patch of sun by the stairs. Then he sat on the bottom stair and looked at them. There were three in all. At first there had been four, but one had died almost at once and the bitch had pushed it out on to the kitchen floor. Now she had come in with him and was standing on one side wagging her tail. She trusted him and had manifested this trust by licking his hand every time he had thrust it in under the bench to take one of her puppies.

The cat was sitting a little farther up the stairs watching the scene with astonishment and disapproval.

The puppies whined and crawled slowly away in different directions. They were already old enough to begin showing some individual personality; their eyes were open and one of them whined more often and on quite a different note from the others. Two of them were black and white, the third brown and white.

The brown one would probably be an ugly dog. It was dirty brown on one side and white on the other, and in the white patches were a number of scattered small liver-brown spots.

One of the black and white ones looked very odd. It had a circular spot round its right eye, black legs and white feet. That was the one which was always whining. The other had a black head and back and was undoubtedly the least unfortunate in its markings.

It had taken Willi Mohr no more than thirty seconds to decide which of the puppies had the best markings, but nevertheless he still sat watching them.

He was no longer sure whether he accepted that markings were the best way of judging them.

After a while he got up, went out into the kitchen and fetched a basket. Then he sat down again and looked at the pups as they strayed uncertainly round in the patch of sunlight.

He lifted up the brown one and held it in his hand before putting it into the basket. It felt warm and small and softly alive.

The bitch sat there, quite unmoved.

After pondering for a few more minutes, he lifted up both the other puppies and sat there with one in each hand. Finally he put the black one into the basket and put the other one down by his feet. It immediately fell over and yelped shrilly as it scrabbled round the floor. It was the one with the spot over one eye.

Willi Mohr watched the chosen puppy, but now and again looked down into the basket, where the other two had crept close to one another and fallen asleep.

Suddenly he made an exchange. He put the pup with the spot round its eye into the basket and took out the brown one instead. It woke at once and began to crawl round, whining.

The bitch came up and licked it.

‘No, this simply can’t go on,’ he mumbled.

He changed the dog again and put the brown one in the basket and the one with the spot round its eye on the floor, but this
manoeuvre confused him even more. He scratched his head and put the third pup into the basket too. The bitch wagged her tail and stared at him with her stupid brown eyes.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

He pulled the basket towards him and placed it between his legs, closed his eyes and thrust his hand into the basket, taking one pup out at random. It was the brown one.

He went out into the kitchen and put it under the stone bench. The bitch came with him and busily scratched away round it.

Before he left the kitchen, he sought out the few bits of rope he usually used for tying up brushwood, then placed them on top of the puppies, swung the basket over his shoulder and went out.

Behind the house was a rubbish heap and a few low, dusty cactus bushes and a little farther on was a stone wall which bordered a terraced field containing ten or so withered almond trees. One the other side of the field rose the mountain, steep and stony, thinly overgrown with spindly pines.

Willi Mohr walked across the terraced field, crunching old almond cases and dry lumps of yellow clay under his feet. Then he began to climb upwards through the stones. Now and again he heard the puppies whining in the basket.

He had to go quite far up the mountain to find any pieces of wood worth tying up and taking home, and the higher he went the more open grew his view over the countryside. When he turned round he could see the town lying below him, flat and dismal and yellowish-grey in the dip between the mountains, and also the road down to the sea, a winding white strip between the ridges, the glittering water far away and even the houses in the puerto, where he had not been for so long.