Panteco had to admit he had been hoping for a catch bigger than a cigarette smuggler whose propellers had fouled on a bin-liner. He had been hoping to train his searchlights on a row of orange blob buoys. If he found a blob buoy he was likely to find a palangre line and the chances were it wouldn’t be weighed with grouper fish but another catch which El Callado’s men pulled aboard with grappling hooks.

Because a good palangre fisherman didn’t use blob buoys. He didn’t want people to know where he fished.

Emilio had been a good palangre fisherman, thought Panteco, jabbing his nib at the desk.

And what would happen to Mohamed, grinning on the bench? Panteco could ask him anything and go on asking from arsehole to kingdom come without hearing one truthful reply. He was right to grin like that. Panteco knew what would happen. After two weeks in Las Rosales, Mohamed would have acquired fifty thousand pesos to pay for his confession. In two weeks’ time a man would knock on the prison gates and admit that Mohamed’s boat and the twelve crates, half of them soaked, were his.

Panteco leaned forward. “Mohamed?” he said.

“Monsieur?”

“Suppose they’re not your cigarettes,” he said reasonably.

Abdul Hadi grinned. “No, monsieur.”

“Suppose we forget about this morning.”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“Suppose I need something to help me forget.”

“Monsieur?”

“What I want to know, Mohamed, is this. Who is El Callado?”

The Mohamed said nothing, but sat there grinning.

The sight was too much for something in Panteco. He dashed forward and ploughed a fist into his clear, smooth face.

6

Inside the Café Ulises, Mohamed had decided. He was determined to win a biro in Abyla Television’s “Whose Eyes?” competition. He entered the kitchen and scrutinised the temporary cook with a look of such intensity she hurled a bread roll at his head.

The kitchen could be glimpsed through two diamond-shaped panels in the swing doors at the rear which, each time they swung open, revealed a number of notes pinned to the inside. The sopa del dia; those dishes not available on the menu; the telephone number in Caracas where Periclito Amaral, the café’s owner, might be contacted during the next three weeks.

Back, forth, back, forth, back, forth swung the doors until, just when they had closed together with a little shudder, Mohamed burst out of the kitchen and walked balletically across the floor to where Ghanem the Mute sat vacant-faced under the television set.

Mohamed served Ghanem his usual plate of calamares. He was in the process of twisting a large pepper grinder, as taught by Periclito, when he yielded to temptation and looked up. Instantly he became lost in admiration for each of the thousand and one faces he saw everywhere reflected on the walls and on the pillars. They were the faces of an Arab in his mid-twenties, with short frizzy hair and an apologetic moustache like a circumflex.

In Periclito’s mirrors not only did people see themselves repeated at curious angles and larger than life, but everyone saw everyone else. They saw the banker, Dionisio Porcil, playing dominoes with the chairman of the telephone exchange. They saw Ghanem the Mute watching The Strong Tend to Leave. They saw Captain Panteco arriving for a late dinner with the librarian. And if instead of sitting, they stood as Mohamed stood, and leaned against the central pillar, itself a four-sided mirror, beneath the celebrated features of Lieutenant Zamora, they could see the bar against the wall, the guitar on which Gallo, the bell boy, was quietly playing to himself, three chords at a time; and the semi-curtained stage on which a moment before Rosita had completed her first fado.