Nogueira was seated next to the picture window sipping coffee. A madeleine sat next to his cup. An empty plate gleaming with grease showed he’d had breakfast as suggested. Manuel declined the offer of food and gulped down a cup of coffee. They got up, and he grinned when he saw Nogueira scoop up the untouched pastry the innkeeper had served with his coffee. He looked skyward and took his time, letting the lieutenant have his inevitable cigarette. He admired the calm, gentle rhythm of the persistent rain the Galicians call the orballo and remembered the starry sky of the previous evening that had seemed to promise no precipitation today.
“Let’s take my car,” Nogueira said.
Manuel gave the lieutenant a sidelong glance much like Café’s usual expression. He remembered vowing not to go with Nogueira again unless he had an avenue of escape. But his car wasn’t at the inn. After the two bottles of wine he and Lucas had shared the previous evening, Daniel had driven them back with the promise a couple of his employees would get their cars back to them.
“And what about Café?”
“I put down a blanket,” the officer said without looking at him, clearly aware of Manuel’s surprise.
Manuel helped the dog settle in his place, got into the car, and said nothing until they were well out on the main road. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going this early in the morning? I thought the roadhouses were closed at this hour.”
Nogueira gave him a baleful glance, and for a moment Manuel thought the man was thinking about making him get out of the car and walk back in the rain. But Nogueira’s reply was entirely calm. “We’re going to call on Antonio Vidal, aka ‘To?ino.’ The hustler who álvaro telephoned.”
Manuel pushed himself up in his seat and started to say something, but the policeman forestalled him. “I called a contact at headquarters this morning to make sure of the address. He told me a family member reported To?ino missing a few days ago. We’re going to check it out.”
Manuel mulled that over in silence, vexed at being pushed step by step through this investigation of álvaro’s movements. An inner voice admonished him not to go there, to avoid this because any discovery would be hurtful. He turned a deaf ear. He pretended he didn’t care and glanced at the lieutenant. Nogueira turned off the main road and seemed lost in his own thoughts. Manuel saw his pushback had had positive effects: the blanket so the dog could accompany them in his car, the way Nogueira had stifled his protestations when obliged to wait. Given the policeman’s general attitude, those might be interpreted as apologies or at least the equivalent of a truce. If Nogueira could control himself, then Manuel was determined to do the same.
The Os Marti?os neighborhood spread across a hillside where the paved road quickly ran out and became a track of poured concrete for a mile or so. The rough surface made the car jolt and vibrate. Then the track became a dirt road from which gravel driveways led to single-story houses. Some of the inhabitants had done their best to dignify their dwellings with geraniums in plastic pots and pathways of loose tile leading up to their doors. Tiles had sunk unevenly into the muddy ground. Most of the houses had that disorderly, unplanned appearance he’d begun to suspect was typical of Galicia. It was worse here than elsewhere. Unfinished construction and piles of building materials by the gates gave the structures an air of dour pretension made that much worse by the rain that rendered the drenched houses as perfect depictions of misery.
“Galician feísmo,” Nogueira commented.
“What?” replied Manuel, jolted out of his reverie.
“Feísmo. The aesthetic of the ugly, they call it. This fucking tradition we have of leaving everything half-finished. Comes from the custom of parceling bits of land out to all the offspring so they can build their own houses. They throw up some walls and a roof and eventually get the place habitable; they marry, and they keep adding to it bit by bit. No plans and usually without permits or qualified labor. Construction is ruled by the necessities of the moment, not by any notion of harmony or beauty. That’s the aesthetic of the ugly. Feísmo.”
Manuel looked out at brick walls with rough smears of mortar along the joints, windows mounted in the facades, many still chocked in place. Abandoned heaps of cement, sand, or rubble stood by the entrances of many of the houses.
“But, feísmo?”
“You can’t tell me it’s not ugly as a pig’s butt.”
“Okay,” Manuel said. “That kind of construction suggests a weak economy. Maybe.”
“Weak, my ass!” Nogueira exclaimed. “Drive through here any day, and you’ll find cars costing fifty thousand euros parked in front of these houses. It has nothing to do with a poor economy. It’s a culture of ‘What the hell, that’s good enough’ and ‘That’ll do.’ A lot of the time it’s the next generation that winds up finishing the house.”
Nogueira checked the address in his little leather-bound notebook and stopped before a small cinder-block house on a square lot. A television antenna jutted up from the roof like a flagpole planted on a mausoleum. A white balustrade separated the entrance to the house from the door of a garage that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. The area around the house was laid with a scattering of tiles that extended perhaps six feet into the yard. Concrete-block planters on either side of the door held spindly trees. A wide dark oil stain discolored the tiles. The place looked deserted, but they saw the face of an old woman watching them from the window of the house next door. She made no effort to hide her curiosity.
“Let me do the talking,” Nogueira warned him before they got out. “You say nothing, and they’ll assume we’re on official business. We won’t do anything to make them think otherwise. And leave the dog in the car.” He checked the floor behind them. “He’d make them suspicious.”
Café gave him one of those glowering sideways looks.
They hurried across the yard in the rain. Nogueira ignored the doorbell and instead hammered on the painted wooden door. The quick series of demanding knocks brought back to Manuel the memory of the knocking on his own door that had started everything.
A woman of about seventy opened the door. She wore a wool housecoat and an apron. Her eyes were cloudy with cataracts. The right one looked as red and rheumy as that of some great fish.
“Good morning!” Nogueira greeted her in the official voice he’d used during all his years as a policeman. She muttered something in reply but he kept talking. “Did you report Antonio Vidal as missing?”
The woman raised both hands to her mouth as if trying to stifle her question. “Did something happen? Did you find my To?ino?”
“No, se?ora, not yet. May we come in?”
Her reaction showed she assumed they were from the police. She opened the door wide and stepped aside. “Please do.”
The house had a single main room. The woman had furnished it as a dining room too elaborate for such a place. It was dominated by a large oval dining table with eight chairs. A polished dark sideboard held a full set of fine porcelain dishes that had probably never been used, a vase with artificial roses, and a small wooden shrine with the figure of a saint. It was one of those passed from one family to another; according to the local tradition, parishioners take turns hosting and venerating such displays in their homes. A small oil lamp flickered before the shrine. A row of medicines stood at one end of the sideboard.
She pulled a pair of chairs out from the table. “Please have a seat.”
Nogueira remained standing. Manuel stepped away to examine the lamp set on a block of cork and a bowl where the fragment of a playing card was floating on a layer of golden oil over clouded water.