A Necessary Action by Per Wahlöö Read Free Book Online Page A

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    ‘I’ve got some money,’ he said.
    ‘Good,’ said Siglinde, ‘then we can live off you until things straighten out.’
    They dropped Santiago off at the nets, halfway round the bay.
    ‘We’ll move tonight, when it’s a bit cooler,’ said Dan Pedersen. ‘Will you come with the fish-van?’
    ‘Of course,’ said Santiago Alemany, raising his hand in farewell.
    When the truck had driven away, he sat down on the ground, threaded the net over his big toe and went on where he had left off.
    He said nothing to those sitting nearest him and neither did anyone say anything to him.

5
    It was three in the afternoon when a civil guard by the name of Pablo Canaves knocked Ramon Alemany unconscious with his carbine in Jacinto’s bar.
    Ramon Alemany came round fifteen minutes later. He laughed and talked but walked very unsteadily, and he seemed almost incapable of recognizing people round him. His brother helped him home and put him to bed. Then he washed the blood from his injuries and bathed the bump on the back of his head with cold water. By then Ramon had already fallen asleep.
    He slept heavily for four hours. When his father came and woke him up, Ramon Alemany got up with a headache. He alsofound it difficult to see, and over and over again had to shake his head to get the lines to meet and fall into the usual everyday pattern. It hurt very much when he shook his head. He tried eating a piece of bread dipped in olive oil, but at once felt very sick and vomited.
    Immediately afterwards he carried two containers of paraffin down to the fishing-boat. They were full and together weighed more than a hundred-and-sixty pounds. He did not once put them down on the way, and when he climbed over the railing, red and black spots danced before his eyes. He could see only very indistinctly and spoke slurringly and disconnectedly. His father thought he had been drinking and hit him several times across the back of his neck with a piece of rope, but not especially hard.
    At the same time, Pablo Canaves had gone off duty. He was married, lived in the puerto and was sitting at home in his bare kitchen in his stockinged feet, his uniform jacket unbuttoned. He talked to his wife as he ate a plateful of boiled rice and two salted sardines.
    ‘I knocked a man unconscious today,’ he said.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Ramon Alemany.’
    ‘Oh—him!’

6
    The town was quite small and yet was the largest and the most important in the district. It lay high up and was wholly surrounded by mountains, except in the east, where a narrow crooked valley opened out to the sea. The mountains were quite steep but very eroded, and the yellow-grey stony slopes were thinly covered with pines and low, thorny bushes. To the east, towards the sea, there were terraced fields of olive and almond trees and there was quite a number of farms there too, most of them derelict and abandoned. From the town ran two roads, one down to the puerto, the other southwards, parallel with the coast and in the direction of the provincial capital seventy kilometresaway. The main road was asphalted and climbed in long bends up towards a pass in the mountain range. For ten years, work had been in progress to continue it northwards to open up negotiable communications with several isolated villages. But the work was carried out in such difficult circumstances that it was making no noticeable progress.
    It was not necessary for anyone travelling directly from the provincial capital to the puerto to take the road round through the town in the mountains, for there was also a through road which ran into the main road twelve kilometres south of the town. This road was old and very bad, but it saved time and had a view over the sea. A lot of people made use of it. Three thousand people lived in the town up in the mountains, of which about five hundred were fully employable men. Most were peasants or farmworkers, but as the land could not support them, many worked on road construction