Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Read Free Book Online Page A

Dutch airline distributed them in the remaining seats. A leathery old woman sat next to Carvalho. She was wearing a typical flowery hat and looked neat and well turned out. She was in talkative mood, and Carvalho soon found himself immersed in an absurd discussion about why the salinity of the Mediterranean wasdropping alarmingly year after year. When the stewardesses started bustling up and down the cabin, he realised they must be in the last stages of the journey. He stood up and headed for the lavatory. He checked his papers. He had his Spanish private detective permit and the out-of-date ID the San Francisco police had given him eight years earlier. He made sure his Star revolver was fitting snugly in his shoulder holster. He took two switchblades out of his jacket pocket. One belonged to the pimp he had beaten up in Charo’s apartment. He threw it into the lavatory bowl. The other was his, a magnificent Mexican blade he had carried with him ever since his adventures in Baja California.
    He pulled up his trouser leg and slipped the knife into a sheath hidden in his shoe lining. Then he returned to his seat. The old French lady had dozed off. Carvalho took advantage of this verbal truce to consider what had brought him on this journey. He could not get out of his mind the image of the faceless corpse of the man who was ‘bold and blond as beer’. Sometimes he found himself filling the blank with other people’s faces: Jean-Pierre Aumont in
Scheherazade
, or Tab Hunter. Or a blond Yves Montand with less clown-like features. All of a sudden, the words of the song Bromuro had mentioned came back to him, although they were still rather jumbled:
    He arrived on a boat
    With a foreign name
    I met him in port at nightfall
    His sad voice was filled
    With a song that was yearning for rest
.
    That was it, more or less. He remembered how the song began:
    Bold and blond as beer was he
    A heart tattooed on his chest
    The song was sung by a woman who had fallen in love with this handsome foreigner. With this handsome sailor who had spent one night, just one night, with her. Did that woman exist in the case of the tattooed man? He certainly had enough mystery about him for a woman to be caught like a bird in the branches of a tree.
    Men of mystery tend to attract women, Carvalho told himself, almost out loud. Could the woman be Frenchy? It was significant that the man went with the same prostitute several times. Carvalho was sure that somewhere there was a woman, the singer of the song, who could tell him all or nearly all the secrets of the man who was ‘bold and blond as beer’. The motto on the tattoo was surprising as well. One thing was a veteran of the Spanish Legion, full of scorn and literature, setting off between the wars on another adventure with his gun and some verses by Apollinaire. That would never happen nowadays, thought Carvalho, now that people have discovered they can only do what’s possible. Nobody invents their life as though it were a novel.
    That’s why I search from port to port
    ask all the sailors for anything new
    alive or dead, to him I’ll always be true
    The stewardess tapped Carvalho on the shoulder and brought him out of his daydream. She pointed to his seat belt. Her smiling, healthy face with a touch of rouge framed by auburn, almost red hair gave her a look hardly ever seen in Spain. Carvalho watched as she continued on her rounds, telling passengers about their belts, asking them tostop smoking or to raise their seat-backs. She was superb. Carvalho began to feel the kind of erotic urge foreigners feel when they identify a new city with new women. Every journey should lead to a surprising woman, a grand finale, the best terminus. Why not the stewardess? Carvalho tried to catch her eye, but she was surveying the passengers with a neutral, professional glance, and skipped over Carvalho like an object she had already checked and stored away.
    Carvalho forgot about his erotic impulse and instead