Tattoo (9 page)

But in the case of the young man bold and blond as beer there were some notable and pleasant differences. The most obvious was the hundred thousand pesetas Señor Ramón had paid him. Then there was that motto on the tattoo, the defiant cry of a Renaissance prince in the body of a migrant worker who had become first a pimp and then a faceless merman, an amphibious creature without features or identifying marks.

Staring at her glass of liquor on the weary bar, the woman of the song continued her stubborn search for a man who had arrived on a ship with a foreign name, and had a heart tattooed on his chest. Carvalho was sure there was a woman like that in this case. Somewhere, though he still had no idea where, imprinted on a woman’s skin were the most revealing traces of the drowned man with no face.

N
ight was falling in Amsterdam. Carvalho cursed the fact that he had lost a day’s sightseeing in the city. He ate more slices of black bread with raw herring and onion. A mug of cold beer would help the digestion. He had the bright idea of asking some young girls how to get to Rokin Street. It was relatively close by, near the station and his hotel on the other side of Dam Square. Carvalho decided to walk, although the tram that went to the museum quarter would have taken him right there. Rokin Street was beyond the Damark and Dam Square, and in fact came out very close to Rembrandt Square. In Dam Square there seemed to be some kind of shouting match between a group of hippies and a few angelic-faced youngsters wearing yellow plastic waistcoats who were extolling family virtues. The hippies, like a tribe of Comanches fighting a losing battle against the palefaces, were clustered on the steps of Dam Square while the angelic host proclaimed the glories of patriarchy or matriarchy.

Carvalho reached number sixteen Rokin Street and went straight in. A flight of wooden stairs led up to a neon sign declaring:
Patrice Hotel
. A cleaner who had been almost invisible in the semi-darkness opened the door for him. He sat in the hall awaiting developments. The pieces of furniture looked typically Dutch, with that doll’s-house style the good burghers of the city traditionally opted for. A woman who must have been Patrice herself came out, proffering a body
that had the thickness of age but was given a lift by skilful corsetry. Her face had likewise been artfully restored to a semblance of beauty. Carvalho told her he had come from Spain and was looking for a relative of his. The family was worried because they hadn’t heard of him in almost two years. Julio Chesma. The last news they had was that he had been staying in this boarding house.

‘Here? I couldn’t say. Wait a moment.’

She stumbled over her English. She left, then returned with a tall, well-built Dutchman who looked as much like the inspector who had questioned Carvalho in his hotel as only a tall, well-built Dutchman could.

‘Mr Singel does not speak English, but he has a good memory,’ Patrice explained as she told the man what Carvalho wanted. The Dutchman examined Carvalho with an affectionate disingenuousness. Not for nothing do Dutch children believe that Santa Claus comes from Spain. He replied in Dutch to Patrice.

‘You see, my husband has a better memory than me. It’s true, your relative was here. But he left two years ago and we don’t know what became of him after that. He was an excellent person. Very neat and tidy. Yes, very neat and tidy.’

Carvalho could get nothing more out of the pair. Julio Chesma had been a good tenant. They knew nothing about his line of work, but he did seem to have lots of free time. Of course he never received any visits from women. They had no idea who his friends were, men or women. It was the husband who supplied this information: Patrice merely translated it into English.

Carvalho expressed his satisfaction that they had such a high opinion of his relative.

‘I suppose I shall have to go to the police. Perhaps they know something.’

The Dutchman almost answered him directly, but quickly checked himself and went on staring at Carvalho with his wide-eyed, childish Santa Claus look. His wife went through the motions of translating for him, and soon came back with his reply.

‘Yes, perhaps the police would know something. They have a very good information network and they keep a close eye on foreigners.’

Carvalho said goodbye to them. He walked back down to the street, then stopped outside a wine merchant’s a few doors farther down. Looking round, he could see there was a bookshop across the street from the Patrice Hotel from where he could watch all the comings and goings in the hotel. He went inside, keeping one eye on a pile of books about 1920s design and the other on the door of the Patrice. He was taking a chance waiting for something to happen, because everything might be as normal as it had seemed, or perhaps the Singel family liked their sleep and would not leave the hotel until the next morning. Twenty minutes later and he had gone through just about everything ever written on design between the two world wars. He did not want to move to another row because from there he would not be able to see the hotel entrance. After half an hour Singel appeared and aimed his identikit appearance towards Dam Square. Carvalho followed him. Singel was strolling along without a care in the world. In Dam Square he waited for a tram – long enough for Carvalho to hail a cab and ask the driver to wait a few moments. The driver was as hysterical as all cab drivers in Amsterdam are. He complained about having to wait and having to follow a tram. Carvalho gave him a ten-florin note and his resistance weakened. He got out of the car and busied himself under the bonnet just in case anyone objected to him being double parked. Singel’s tram arrived and the taxi set off in pursuit.

They did not go far. The tram came out into Leidsplein. Singel got off and headed for a crowded pub next to a seafood restaurant, something unusual in a country where the gastronomic choice in fish is usually limited to rollmops or the smoked herrings that are to be found in stalls in every Dutch city and town. Looking in through the pub window, Carvalho could see Singel sit at a table where the sole occupant was a girl dressed like a hippy. Singel spoke urgently to the droopy girl, who had hair like a dyed-blonde Angela Davis, eyes that looked as though they had been made up with lumps of clay, and a body that was enveloped by a sheepskin that had probably been slaughtered and turned into clothing while she was already wearing it.

Their conversation did not last long. The girl got up and Singel followed her. From the doorway of a nearby cinema where they were showing
Fritz the Cat
, Carvalho saw Singel start to walk back the way he had come. The sheepskin with the girl inside crossed Leidsplein heading for Weteringschans. Carvalho knew all that Singel had to offer, but the girl opened up new possibilities, so Carvalho decided to follow her. Close to Leidsplein there was a small, lively district, like a smaller version of the red light area, full of restaurants, a few nightclubs and sex shops. The girl carried on through it and then turned right at a corner. In front of them appeared a strange church with a façade painted in psychedelic colours. The Paradise Club: a former church donated by the city council to the young people of Amsterdam. It had become a vast emporium that offered musical and artistic pop, a café selling hash cakes, a magazine and film library, and a shopping centre for the somewhat limited consumer capacities of the hippy world.

To get in Carvalho had to become a member. Two florins, plus entrance fee. This was a formality he had previously
encountered only in live-sex clubs. All the different chapels of the church were crowded with the denizens of Hippyland, who spilled out on to the double staircase rising left and right to the meeting rooms on the first floor. The girl slipped in through the centre doors leading to the apse, where a rock group was playing, while behind them a screen showed shapes and colours intended to supplement their psychedelic chords. The apse itself contained an audience seated in sober rows, but in the side naves the floor was littered with a confused jumble of humanity which only occasionally responded to the music. The smell of marijhuana filled the air. Carvalho could feel dozens of pairs of eyes on him. In his mid-season suit he looked like a neo-capitalist from Mars, and his hair ended neatly at his shirt collar. He was like a tourist lost in the Marrakesh souk. The girl was striding up to the front of the aisle, forcing her way through the crowd almost like a swimmer. She started to talk to a group of sad-looking youngsters. Carvalho leaned against a pillar to look less conspicuous, but kept one eye on the girl while with the other he casually surveyed the high altar. The group had been replaced by clowns who made no one laugh. Somebody passed him a joint. He took a liturgical drag on it, then passed it on to his nearest neighbour. Through the smoke he saw the girl standing up, followed by two young men. One of them was wearing a sheepskin that must be the twin brother of the girl’s; the other looked like a Wild West prospector without a gold or silver mine to lay claim to in many weeks. Buffalo Bill and the two sheep sauntered back towards the main door. Just as they were about to step outside they whispered something among themselves and, with what for them was an extraordinary display of speed and agility, flattened themselves against the walls. A police patrol car had pulled up outside the Paradise, and the cops were busy hunting down suspects on the pavement.

Carvalho had almost nothing to be afraid of. He walked outside, and from the top of the staircase watched the cops doing their job. They had already arrested two Malayans, and one of them was chasing a black man up towards Leidsplein. So Aryans were off the menu, and although Carvalho was a dark-haired Celt he would probably not arouse the cops’ hunting instinct unless he was very unlucky. The cop had been unable to catch up with the black man, and came panting back. They put the two Malayans into the patrol car and sped off along Sarphatastraat. The flock of sheep and their shepherd Buffalo Bill came to life again. They went past Carvalho and disappeared into the shadows to the left of the Paradise Club. Carvalho guessed they were heading for one of the cars parked there, so there was nothing for it but to repeat the ‘follow that car’ scenario. Luckily, the trio was drifting along on the wings of Nirvana, which gave him time to find a taxi and sit waiting in it for them, his wallet lighter by another ten florins.

They were driving a 2CV painted in bright colours and plastered with pacifist stickers. The car went down Vijzalstraat towards Dam Square. Then it went up Damark until it turned sharp right into the maze of narrow streets leading to the red light district. They parked perpendicular to a canal, and Carvalho paid off his taxi. He stood waiting until they moved off on foot, into the heart of the red light area. Nearly all the windows on the main street were lit up, and women sat posing for clients in front of attractive-looking beds. Only the bright red and purple lights gave an exotic touch to their quiet, almost wifely wait. Peeping Toms and ordinary passers-by peered at them briefly and looked away, because it was plain that the women did not like being stared at as though they were monkeys in a zoo. Some of them were standing in the doorways, showing off their
peroxide hair, their high boots and miniskirts, their bored, scornful expressions.

The three youngsters went into a takeaway pizzeria. Carvalho leaned on the counter and ordered a steak tartare sandwich and a beer. The shepherd and his sheep grazed on pre-cooked pizza. Buffalo Bill glanced at a pocket watch he had taken from what looked like a Wells, Fargo saddlebag. The watch must have told them there was no hurry, because they also leaned on the bar in their usual dreamy way and began to talk among themselves as if they had the whole night before them. Carvalho asked for a sandwich with various levels of cold meat, lettuce and boiled egg. He had another beer and struck up a conversation with the waitress. She was not much to look at but was all there, with mounds of auburn hair that looked as solid as her thighs above a pair of uncomfortable-looking boots. When he discovered she spoke only Dutch or English, Carvalho pretended to be a visiting Frenchman. No, it wasn’t a very busy night. At weekends the area filled up, but mostly with tourists. Either foreigners or Dutch people from the interior who were venturing into the hell that was Amsterdam. As she said it, she added a touch of irony to the word ‘hell’. Carvalho asked her the obvious question: whether she got off work late, and whether she had anything to do afterwards.

‘I’ve got lots to do.’

‘Bad or good?’

‘That depends,’ she said, laughing.

Carvalho could get nothing more out of her. She had a lot to do, which was good or bad depending on how you looked at it. It was obviously a defence mechanism that the waitress employed at least twenty times a night, so Carvalho decided on something more neutral and ordered another mug of beer. The three youngsters were still taking their time.
Now they were drinking cups of coffee as if it were water, although the coffee in the pizzeria was as strong as espresso. Then Buffalo Bill consulted his watch again and they moved off. Carvalho let them leave. He glanced at the young girl under the pizzeria lights and saw she was neither ugly nor beautiful, but quite the opposite. By which he meant that she had acquired that neutral look with which liberated women defend themselves from becoming looked on as objects. They had certainly succeeded in their aim of not looking erotic any more, but Carvalho prophesied that they would soon create a fresh convention among their male partners and in the near future women objects would become anti-women objects or women anti-objects.

Carvalho paid a fond farewell to the waitress’s thighs with the look of a thief in a butcher’s shop. The three others were strolling towards the central canal in the heart of the red light district. A circle of onlookers had gathered round a Salvation Army band singing its hymns of praise or dire warning on the very threshold of the hell that was Amsterdam. The prostitutes watched the Salvation Army’s virtuous display from their shop windows. The uniformed musicians had been joined by some local housewives, who were protesting meekly in this way about something that had given their neighbourhood its character ever since the days of Adam and Eve, when it first grew up alongside the port of Amsterdam and the Central Station, which brought in their endless quota of people with hungry loins. Curious onlookers and the still hungry contemplated this piece of musical theatre with the condescending air of a football crowd being entertained by a Samoan wedding dance performed by a group of sensitive teenagers just finishing high school. The trees, the lights reflected on the water of the canal, the serene architecture of the surrounding houses,
the polite reserve of the watching prostitutes, and the silent passers-by all contrived to make the red light district the opposite of sordid. In this context, the Salvation Army’s thunderous hymns sounded like pasa dobles at an end-of-year student party.