Fic: The Catalan Opening, Part I (Fútbol, gen/various)
Title: The Catalan Opening, Part I
Fandom: Fútbol
Pairing: Puyol-centric gen with a large side of slash, featuring (in this part): Piqué, Valdés, Villa, Silva, Xavi, the Alcântara brothers, and a few others.
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~4700 so far
Summary: AU cop dramedy. Police Chief Carles Puyol hunts for a killer and, in the process of doing so, saves his own life. A very loose interpretation of the "Piqué cheers Puyi up" prompt on the football kink meme.
Disclaimer: Lies!
It was about six or seven months after Carles's first heart-attack -- long enough that they'd stopped walking on eggshells around him, short enough that he still got reproachful looks from the mossos when he tried to order pizza. A tipoff had come from one of Villa's guys at Immigration Control that the Alcântara brothers had been stopped at the border with a carload of coke, and there was no way Carles wasn't dragging his wheezing, depressive, overweight self down to fucking La Jonquera in the middle of the night to make sure that the locals didn't fuck anything up.
Villa insisted on driving. He insisted on seat-belts, and on amber lights, and on being a total and complete pain in the arse, as if the fact of having twice impregnated his wife qualified him to be Carles's mother.
"Wind up the window, I don't want the exhaust from that truck coming in."
"Or you could just overtake it," Carles pointed out. "Fucking hell, are we actually doing the speed limit?"
Villa ignored him.
"Seriously, Villa," chimed in a muffled voice from the back. "Or Xavi'll get there before we do. You don't want to keep him waiting."
The words were coming from around waist-level, and Carles twisted his stiff neck around to see what Victor was up to. His second-in-command was sprawled out comfortably on his back on the roomy seats with one arm draped over his eyes, the worn black leather of his jacket squeaking loudly on the beige upholstery when he shifted.
Beige, Carles thought disgustedly. He remembered when Villa wore belts with brass studs in them, and leopard print. Then he made a mental note to commandeer the back seat on the drive home.
Fuck they were getting old.
All except Xavi, the bastard. He'd got on the road maybe half an hour after they had, was probably chain-smoking and reading and navigating with one elbow on the steering wheel-- but yeah, Carles thought he'd still probably get there ahead of them. Rumour had it that he slept six hours a week and drank the blood of his little assistant to keep young. Carles didn't quite disbelieve it. Twelve years on the force had given him a healthy suspicion of lawyers, even if they worked for his city.
"Better late," Villa retorted prissily, "than never, if you ask me. Could everyone please just fucking relax, Silva's got them locked up nice and tight and they're not going anywhere else tonight."
"Neither are we," Victor muttered, at the same time as Carles said, “Famous last words.” Villa just rolled his eyes, and then slowed down with deliberate, vindictive caution to let a herd of lethargic sheep cross the road in front of them. Carles watched wearily as their shapely little rumps waddled by, and tried not to think of either his mother's buttered lamb cassoulet or everything that could possibly go wrong with three sleep-deprived cops, six kilos of cocaine, and two cold-blooded killers in a dinky little border town on the arse-end of France.
One and a half agonising hours later they pulled up at the two-storey brick shack that passed for the Els Límits police station. Xavi was sitting impatiently on the waiting room bench, in probably the same hat and trench he'd been wearing since the 1950s. His assistant -- "You see? He looks old beyond his years," Victor whispered -- was hunkered down next to him in a wrinkled square-shouldered grey jacket, and pecking away at an incongruously stylish laptop. A third man, shorter and slighter than the two lawyers, also jumped up to greet them, his floppy hair and knitted green vest nicely rounding off the odd trio of badly-dressed civil servants.
"Hello," he said politely, in accented Castillan. "How was your drive?"
"Heyyy, man, Silva," Villa said, reaching out happily and grabbing the tiny Canarian by the cheek. "How's everything rolling?"
"About time," Xavi said to Carles, doing that thing with his lips that conveyed a minor but distinct level of annoyance. He glanced down at his watch. "Time is money, you know."
Carles agreed. Not literally, of course -- the city couldn't afford to give him overtime -- but he certainly didn't have any to spare for all this fuzzy lovemaking. "You in charge here?" he said pointedly to the small man, who nodded and extricated himself from Villa's tender embraces.
"I'm second captain," Silva told him with a modest little smile. "Señor Mancini is captain, but he's gone home for the night. His wife made stew."
Carles resisted the urge to pull on his hair. "All right then," he said tersely. "Let's get started. They're upstairs? Please tell me you've locked them up in different cells."
"Of course, Captain," Silva said, unclipping the keys from his belt-loop and gesturing for the Barcelona men to precede him up the stairs. "Standard procedure, cells number one, two, and three."
"Three?" came four sharp voices in unison.
Silva took a step back. "Um, yeah. Did I not tell you?"
"No, you didn't," Villa frowned. "Who's the third?"
"Oh, just some... guy," Silva made a vague flutter with one hand, "not in the database. Said he was just a hitchhiker, but I thought it'd be better to keep him around till you came. Just to make sure. He was a little bit drunk, I think."
They all exchanged glances, and then Villa and Victor and Xavi and Xavi's assistant stampeded towards the holding cells, leaving Carles to inch his way up the stairs at a pace which would not unduly strain his ancient and malfunctioning heart. Silva hovered deferentially behind him, which would have been irritating but for the fact that Carles knew he was still holding the keys.
“Sorry,” Silva apologised into Carles's elbow. “I meant to tell Villa on the phone earlier, but he got all excited and it must've slipped my mind.”
“It's fine,” Carles said, conquering step number nine and letting out a huff of breath that he hoped would pass for a long-suffering sigh. “Just tell me what you know about him now.”
This, as it turned out, was not very much. The man had had no passport on him, nor a driving licence or even a credit card. He'd claimed to be a Mr Gerard Stevens, late of Manchester in England, but no matches had come up in the system. Mancini hadn't been able to get anything coherent out of him, either, but Silva could tell Carles that he was “over two metres tall” and sounded “more or less definitely” Catalan, despite the English name. “He swore at me in English, though,” he added admiringly.
Carles would have commented, but they'd finally gained the top of the stairs, and the sight of his colleagues gathered rather soberly on the landing brought him back to the main matter at hand, and consigned all thought of the mysterious Gerard Stevens to the messy filing cabinet at the back of his brain. He caught Xavi's eye, and the other man nodded. Carles returned it grimly.
“Thiago first,” he said.
Silva signalled to the two watch officers, and they headed down the corridor to the cells. A third man in uniform directed Carles's team to the interrogation rooms, and they watched through the two-way mirror as a dark-complexioned young man in ripped jeans and a hoodie was escorted in. He slouched back in his chair and propped his hands on the table edge like the cuffs on his wrists didn't faze him, and then stared straight ahead, without even a glance at the mirror.
“Hm,” said Xavi under his breath. “I thought he'd be...”
“Taller?” Carles smirked.
“Older.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Carles shook his head. “They get younger every year. This one's a bit of a prodigy, though. Not even twenty-one, but all the intel says he's pretty much running the whole Mazinho operation these days.”
“Hm,” said Xavi again. He shrugged off his coat and tossed it to his assistant, who was sitting (and typing) in the corner chair. “So why was he caught doing the donkey work, then?”
“That's the question, isn't it?” Carles said. “That's why I wanted you here - in case this is all some kind of set-up. Head of a drug ring with his brother suspected of homicide, and they just pull into customs and hand themselves over on a silver platter? Sounds a bit too convenient for my liking. Valdés,” he turned to the detective.
“Sir?” Victor said. He had his game face on.
“Find out what they're playing at. If it's just drugs, if it's part of some new op we haven't heard about, or if it's anything at all to do with Van Persie. If we're going to get anything out of them it's got to be now, before that shyster of theirs shuts us down.”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Oh, and Villa?”
“Sir?”
Carles tossed him a stick of gum. “Do your thing.”
Villa and Victor - Valdés when he was working - had been partners for just half a year. To the surprise of no one even remotely familiar with the fine traditions of police psychology, the two of them worked well as a unit, although it was usually less a matter of Good Cop/Bad Cop than of Bad Cop/Really Bad Cop. Victor was frightening enough on his own. He looked more like a gangster than most of the suspects they brought in: bald, biker jacket, crazy black eyes, and Carles knew for a fact that he'd acquired most of his tattoos after he had joined the force, in intentionally visible places and specifically for the added intimidation factor. Villa, on the other hand, was small, neat, and meticulous, like the more vicious sort of government accountant. But he had a way of annoying information out of people that almost qualified as a superpower. He would wander around the interrogation room looking half-interested, examining his soul patch in the mirror and making needling little remarks at the suspects from time to time, harmless as a gadfly until eventually they cracked and spilled their guts all over the floor just to make him go away.
Thiago Alcântara didn't look up when the pair of them entered the room. He gave Victor a bored, dismissive glance when the older man took the seat across from him and flipped open the case file. Villa - perched on the far corner of the table with his back to the proceedings - he completely ignored.
“Six kilos of the powdered stuff in the glove compartment,“ Victor said without preamble.
Villa let out an impressed little whistle. “Six!” he said apostrophically.
Victor ignored him too. “Must've been a big compartment,” he said. “You've got an Audi A7, it says here. Nice big car.” (“Very nice,” Villa agreed in an undertone.) “Must've cost you a bundle. But you've got money to burn, eh? That amount of pure talco, it's gotta be worth, what, maybe five hundred, five hundred fifty thousand on the streets? Expensive way of getting our attention. Especially since you didn't seem to appreciate it so much when you had it before.”
Thiago didn't bite. But Victor continued, leaning confidentially forward so that he was all but looming into the boy's field of vision. “So what is it that you want from us this time, Thiago? You get out of your depth with your buddies on the street? Or was it your suppliers - someone starting to look a little too closely at those nice fat profit margins of yours? Was that the plan - pretend to cosy up to the cops for a bit and then threaten to turn them in?”
Still no dice.
“Either that, or -- ah! You heard about the new heightened search protocols tried to pull a double bluff. (“Ooh, a double bluff.”) “Stash it somewhere so obvious that they'd never think to look there?” Victor shook his head. “That's never a good idea, man; you can't be too subtle with the border police.”
“No, you can't,” said Villa on cue, and with formidable redundancy. But the kid was stonewalling like a champ, so Victor ramped it up a notch. He stood, raising himself to his full height, and then leaned down low over the table and caught the boy's eye, his voice going smooth and dangerously quiet.
“I'll be honest with you, Thiago - it's not looking good. You think you'll get off with a few years in Modelo, and who knows? Maybe you will. But the funny thing about drug charges is, they can really go either way. And then there's that murder case from all those months back. You remember Mr Van Persie, don't you? Because his dad sure remembers you. So maybe the judge gets persuaded to put you away for a little longer, and then that won't be good at all, will it? Especially for a kid like your brother. Nice and young, big smile, pretty eyes - bet they don't see a lot of that sort in those maximum security places. And nine years is quite a long time. (“A long time,” said Villa gravely.)
“Now, you want to tell us what's going on, you want to cooperate - fine. We'll see what we can do for you. If not...” Victor took a step back and gave him a small smile, cracking his knuckles in a time-honoured, ominous fashion, “...we can wait till you do. We've come all the way here just for you, after all. We've got all night.”
“All night,” Villa echoed, like a very bad pop song.
Finally, a result: Thiago pursed his lips. Carles, in the viewing hall, was uncannily reminded of Xavi. He glanced sideways at the prosecutor, who raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
Back in the room, Villa had also seen the opening, and was upping the ante. He pulled out the stick of HappyDent and unwrapped it, making sure to crinkle the foil as loudly as possible. Then he carefully examined both sides of it before slotting it precisely into his mouth. The next few seconds were spent applying his jaw furiously to the rectangle of gum as if the task required all of his powers of concentration. Then, once it had moistened and softened and resolved itself into a pleasantly pliable consistency, Villa wriggled around to get comfortable on the edge of the table, and settled in to wait.
The noisy, repetitive smack of tongue on teeth on latex resounded wetly through the otherwise silent room. Somehow it managed to seem just half a beat too slow, like the ticking of a languishing clock; and its inexorable, squelching rhythm conveyed in no uncertain terms that Villa could, and would, sit here and do this all night. Victor, by now well accustomed to this part of the production, was obligingly quiet, flipping blandly back and forth between the pages of the case file and ignoring the kid as profoundly as the kid was ignoring him.
Their suspect was steely, but he was still young, and it was almost inevitable that his impatience and inexperience would get the better of him in the end. Barely eight and a half minutes into the chewing gum treatment, Thiago Alcântara cracked.
“Will you cut that out!” he snapped, slamming his cuffed fists down on the table with a clang.
Villa merely turned his head, shot a mildly affronted look at the prisoner, and resumed his metronomic ruminations. Victor sat and let several more seconds smack by, the better to allow the bewildered Thiago to consider his position. Then at last, the latter said sullenly into the silence:
“We didn't do anything, I fucking swear it. Someone else must've planted it. We were on holiday. Don't believe me if you like, but we're not that stupid.”
Victor made a non-committal noise. “Who planted it, then?”
“How should I know,” Thiago made a face.
“Convenient, that,” Victor remarked. “Seems like there's a lot about your own business that you don't know. Someone plants a packet in your car, it's not you; someone shoots a guy in your own backyard, it's not you. But if not you, then who?”
“You're the fucking cops, why don't you find out?” Thiago spat, lunging forward. “Can't you do anything right?”
Victor tilted his head. “Where have we gone wrong?” he asked mildly.
The whole room went still, and for a moment it seemed like Thiago would say something. But then he pursed his lips again, and slumped back into the chair.
“We want our lawyer,” he said flatly, and that was that.
“Hm,” Xavi said when it was over. “You think he was telling the truth?”
“Of course not,” Carles scowled. “Damned kid knows what he's doing.” And then, “Damn,” again, pounding a hard fist into the thankfully sturdy wall. “Ow, fuck fuck fuck,” Carles shook out his wrist. “I never learn. I could've sworn we had him there, though, at the end.”
“Well,” Xavi said philosophically. “There's always the younger one.”
Rafael Alcântara was broader than his brother in face and frame, but there was something blunt and almost cheerful about his features that made him seem like the softer target. Victor had him cowed and blubbering within minutes; no gum had been necessary.
Unfortunately, the blubbering yielded nothing of use, except the details of an unlikely Parisian holiday, and many repeated vehement protests that Rafael had no idea how the coke had come to be there, and still had no idea about “Robin”. Which was of course suspicious considering that he'd initially claimed not to know the dead man at all, but that in itself was nothing new. Carles had had plenty of suspicions since day one. What he did not have, was proof.
Hungry and weary - it was going on three in the morning - he headed out onto the landing to see if he could sneak in a cup of coffee while Xavi and the rest finished the paperwork.
“You guys did good,” he told the two detectives as he left.
Victor shrugged. “No worse than the last time.”
“It couldn't have gone better,” Carles reassured him.
“Well, it could have,” Villa said wryly. “They could've confessed.”
“It was always going to be a long shot. And we'll dig around some more in the morning, follow up with the credit trail in France,” Carles promised. “For now let's just mop up here and head home for the night. I'm taking the back seat,” he added.
“Fair enough.”
Silva found Carles just as Carles found the coffee, but that was all right - he didn't know about the heart attack, or at least didn't know Carles well enough to nag.
“Did you want Gerard Stevens?” the Canarian asked him.
“Who?” Carles paused in mid-sip, and then kicked himself mentally. “Oh, him. Yeah. Of course. Tell Valdés to--” Then he reconsidered. Victor had looked exhausted, and Villa had looked bitchy beyond all belief - the two of them had never taken failure well, and he didn't think he could handle it if the sulking actually worsened on the drive back. Besides, if they were doing another interrogation, he'd probably end up having to take over the paperwork.
“Actually,” he told Silva, mustering a polite smile, “I'll do this one myself. You can have monitoring duty, if you don't mind.”
Silva didn't. In fact he looked pleased and excited, but maybe he always looked that way. Carles was a little nervous himself. He had no right to be - on the force his whole life, he was long past the point where he could (and did, Agnès used to say) question suspects in his sleep. But he hadn't done an interrogation personally since his health had got him pity-promoted into an executive job. Was it possible he'd lost his touch?
The new prisoner didn't look like much, though - big, yes; tough-looking, no. He wore a rumpled D&G t-shirt and floral bermudas, and he was bleary-eyed and clumsy from lack of sleep. That makes two of us, then, Carles thought. He decided to break protocol and give the poor guy a cup of coffee - they wouldn't get anything out of this if the suspect couldn't keep his eyes open.
His kindness paid off, and the alleged Mr Stevens perked up considerably after a few minutes. He gave Carles an appraising once-over, and then nodded to himself like he was pleased about something.
“So, Mr Stevens,” Carles began curtly. He was a little irritated at being sized up so obviously (so he had put on some weight - didn't mean he couldn't still kick the guy's arse).
“Call me Gerard,” the man offered cheekily in English. “How do you do?”
“God help me,” Carles thought. Aloud, he said, stone-faced: “No, no, it's 3am, we're not doing this.”
“Fine,” the prisoner capitulated with a grin. “Only did it to piss off that other guy, anyway. You know - Italian, late forties, condescending?”
“You mean Captain Mancini. Yes,” Carles didn't smile, but it was a close thing. “So: obstruction of justice, not to mention the potential drug charges. We could make this unpleasant for you, so how about you cooperate? Let's start with your real name.”
“Er,” the guy raised his right hand, like a schoolboy. “About the drugs--”
“Your real name.”
“Geez, all right, fine,” the guy said, holding his hands up pacifyingly. “It's Gerard Piqué i Bernabéu.”
“Any relation to Amador Bernabéu?” Carles asked, on the off chance.
“Yeah. My grandfather,” Piqué admitted. Then he winced. “Please don't tell him about any of this!”
“We'll see,” Carles said coolly. “How did you end up trafficking coke?”
“I didn't!” Piqué protested, and launched into a long and involved explanation that began with a big fight with his father a year and a half ago and ended with being pick-pocketed at a rest-stop just outside Lyon.
“So I'm standing by the roadside, right, and I realise my wallet's gone. My tickets are gone, and my phone's disappeared, and my passport is missing, and all these middle-aged French people and their kids are staring at me like I'm the criminal instead of the victim.
“And I'm thinking, oh no, what am I going to do, when all of a sudden this sweet-ass ride pulls up into the parking lot. Big black Audi sportback, five doors, chrome rims, the works - and what do you know, it's got Spanish licence plates! And two guys come out of it and they're speaking Catalan, so I think, wow, this must be a godsend, and I ask for a ride to the border. They seemed nice! And they never said anything about drugs. I didn't know they were trafficking, I swear!”
“They didn't seem nervous, when you got to the checkpoint?”
“No!” Piqué said. “They seemed normal! I mean the younger one was a little moody, but he'd just been through a bad breakup, so that's only to be expected.”
“A breakup?” Carles prompted with a frown. It didn't seem likely that drug dealers would have very much time to date. But the case had gone cold; any new detail could be vital.
“Yeah,” Piqué nodded. “They didn't talk much when I was there in the car with them, but the very first thing I heard Thiago saying was, 'It's not worth throwing your life away over this,' and, 'You deserve better'. Thiago's the thinner one, in the black hoodie. I don't know what the other one's called.”
Carles paused for a moment to make sense of this. It sounded slightly absurd. In the end he gave up. “Very well,” he said meaninglessly. “By the way, I don't suppose you saw anyone sneaking up to the car at any point during the trip. You know, to plant something? It's unlikely, of course, but they're claiming they've been framed.”
“Hmmmmm,” Piqué scrunched up his forehead. Carles held his breath. “You know, now that you mention it... I did see a guy when we stopped in Perpignan. I was stretching my legs, and they were still in the bathroom - I don't know. I didn't see him do anything. But there was definitely a guy.”
“Definitely a guy”? Carles tried not to groan. So much for a breakthrough. “Could you describe him?” he asked anyway.
“Er, dark hair, normal looking, probably Spanish?” Piqué shrugged. “He didn't look very French. Around my height.”
“Would you recognise him if you saw him again?”
“Probably,” Piqué hedged. “I don't know.”
“But you didn't see him do anything.”
“Not really. He was just walking around the car a bit.”
“So he could've just been looking at it.”
“Right.”
“Right. Great. Fantastic. Well, you're free to go,” Carles told him resignedly, pressing a knuckle into his aching right temple. Bloody migraines again. “Detective Silva will process you out. But don't leave the country for the next month or so - we may need to question you again.”
“Oh. Great. Well, all right, then,” Piqué said. He looked lost for a second, but then he leapt up and bounded towards the exit.
Carles collapsed into the chair he'd vacated. Stale cases, idiot witnesses, farcical coincidences - had police work always been this aggravating? Maybe the younger generation was getting stupider and more annoying. Or maybe he was getting too old for the chase. Before he could work himself into a proper good sulk, though, he was interrupted by a knock on the door. Carles lifted his head wearily, and glared up through his hair at the intruder. It was Gerard Piqué again, wearing a traveller's hat and a large, winning smile.
“Hey, you're headed to Barcelona, aren't you?” he said brightly. “Any chance you could give me a lift?”
Part II >
Fandom: Fútbol
Pairing: Puyol-centric gen with a large side of slash, featuring (in this part): Piqué, Valdés, Villa, Silva, Xavi, the Alcântara brothers, and a few others.
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~4700 so far
Summary: AU cop dramedy. Police Chief Carles Puyol hunts for a killer and, in the process of doing so, saves his own life. A very loose interpretation of the "Piqué cheers Puyi up" prompt on the football kink meme.
Disclaimer: Lies!
It was about six or seven months after Carles's first heart-attack -- long enough that they'd stopped walking on eggshells around him, short enough that he still got reproachful looks from the mossos when he tried to order pizza. A tipoff had come from one of Villa's guys at Immigration Control that the Alcântara brothers had been stopped at the border with a carload of coke, and there was no way Carles wasn't dragging his wheezing, depressive, overweight self down to fucking La Jonquera in the middle of the night to make sure that the locals didn't fuck anything up.
Villa insisted on driving. He insisted on seat-belts, and on amber lights, and on being a total and complete pain in the arse, as if the fact of having twice impregnated his wife qualified him to be Carles's mother.
"Wind up the window, I don't want the exhaust from that truck coming in."
"Or you could just overtake it," Carles pointed out. "Fucking hell, are we actually doing the speed limit?"
Villa ignored him.
"Seriously, Villa," chimed in a muffled voice from the back. "Or Xavi'll get there before we do. You don't want to keep him waiting."
The words were coming from around waist-level, and Carles twisted his stiff neck around to see what Victor was up to. His second-in-command was sprawled out comfortably on his back on the roomy seats with one arm draped over his eyes, the worn black leather of his jacket squeaking loudly on the beige upholstery when he shifted.
Beige, Carles thought disgustedly. He remembered when Villa wore belts with brass studs in them, and leopard print. Then he made a mental note to commandeer the back seat on the drive home.
Fuck they were getting old.
All except Xavi, the bastard. He'd got on the road maybe half an hour after they had, was probably chain-smoking and reading and navigating with one elbow on the steering wheel-- but yeah, Carles thought he'd still probably get there ahead of them. Rumour had it that he slept six hours a week and drank the blood of his little assistant to keep young. Carles didn't quite disbelieve it. Twelve years on the force had given him a healthy suspicion of lawyers, even if they worked for his city.
"Better late," Villa retorted prissily, "than never, if you ask me. Could everyone please just fucking relax, Silva's got them locked up nice and tight and they're not going anywhere else tonight."
"Neither are we," Victor muttered, at the same time as Carles said, “Famous last words.” Villa just rolled his eyes, and then slowed down with deliberate, vindictive caution to let a herd of lethargic sheep cross the road in front of them. Carles watched wearily as their shapely little rumps waddled by, and tried not to think of either his mother's buttered lamb cassoulet or everything that could possibly go wrong with three sleep-deprived cops, six kilos of cocaine, and two cold-blooded killers in a dinky little border town on the arse-end of France.
One and a half agonising hours later they pulled up at the two-storey brick shack that passed for the Els Límits police station. Xavi was sitting impatiently on the waiting room bench, in probably the same hat and trench he'd been wearing since the 1950s. His assistant -- "You see? He looks old beyond his years," Victor whispered -- was hunkered down next to him in a wrinkled square-shouldered grey jacket, and pecking away at an incongruously stylish laptop. A third man, shorter and slighter than the two lawyers, also jumped up to greet them, his floppy hair and knitted green vest nicely rounding off the odd trio of badly-dressed civil servants.
"Hello," he said politely, in accented Castillan. "How was your drive?"
"Heyyy, man, Silva," Villa said, reaching out happily and grabbing the tiny Canarian by the cheek. "How's everything rolling?"
"About time," Xavi said to Carles, doing that thing with his lips that conveyed a minor but distinct level of annoyance. He glanced down at his watch. "Time is money, you know."
Carles agreed. Not literally, of course -- the city couldn't afford to give him overtime -- but he certainly didn't have any to spare for all this fuzzy lovemaking. "You in charge here?" he said pointedly to the small man, who nodded and extricated himself from Villa's tender embraces.
"I'm second captain," Silva told him with a modest little smile. "Señor Mancini is captain, but he's gone home for the night. His wife made stew."
Carles resisted the urge to pull on his hair. "All right then," he said tersely. "Let's get started. They're upstairs? Please tell me you've locked them up in different cells."
"Of course, Captain," Silva said, unclipping the keys from his belt-loop and gesturing for the Barcelona men to precede him up the stairs. "Standard procedure, cells number one, two, and three."
"Three?" came four sharp voices in unison.
Silva took a step back. "Um, yeah. Did I not tell you?"
"No, you didn't," Villa frowned. "Who's the third?"
"Oh, just some... guy," Silva made a vague flutter with one hand, "not in the database. Said he was just a hitchhiker, but I thought it'd be better to keep him around till you came. Just to make sure. He was a little bit drunk, I think."
They all exchanged glances, and then Villa and Victor and Xavi and Xavi's assistant stampeded towards the holding cells, leaving Carles to inch his way up the stairs at a pace which would not unduly strain his ancient and malfunctioning heart. Silva hovered deferentially behind him, which would have been irritating but for the fact that Carles knew he was still holding the keys.
“Sorry,” Silva apologised into Carles's elbow. “I meant to tell Villa on the phone earlier, but he got all excited and it must've slipped my mind.”
“It's fine,” Carles said, conquering step number nine and letting out a huff of breath that he hoped would pass for a long-suffering sigh. “Just tell me what you know about him now.”
This, as it turned out, was not very much. The man had had no passport on him, nor a driving licence or even a credit card. He'd claimed to be a Mr Gerard Stevens, late of Manchester in England, but no matches had come up in the system. Mancini hadn't been able to get anything coherent out of him, either, but Silva could tell Carles that he was “over two metres tall” and sounded “more or less definitely” Catalan, despite the English name. “He swore at me in English, though,” he added admiringly.
Carles would have commented, but they'd finally gained the top of the stairs, and the sight of his colleagues gathered rather soberly on the landing brought him back to the main matter at hand, and consigned all thought of the mysterious Gerard Stevens to the messy filing cabinet at the back of his brain. He caught Xavi's eye, and the other man nodded. Carles returned it grimly.
“Thiago first,” he said.
Silva signalled to the two watch officers, and they headed down the corridor to the cells. A third man in uniform directed Carles's team to the interrogation rooms, and they watched through the two-way mirror as a dark-complexioned young man in ripped jeans and a hoodie was escorted in. He slouched back in his chair and propped his hands on the table edge like the cuffs on his wrists didn't faze him, and then stared straight ahead, without even a glance at the mirror.
“Hm,” said Xavi under his breath. “I thought he'd be...”
“Taller?” Carles smirked.
“Older.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Carles shook his head. “They get younger every year. This one's a bit of a prodigy, though. Not even twenty-one, but all the intel says he's pretty much running the whole Mazinho operation these days.”
“Hm,” said Xavi again. He shrugged off his coat and tossed it to his assistant, who was sitting (and typing) in the corner chair. “So why was he caught doing the donkey work, then?”
“That's the question, isn't it?” Carles said. “That's why I wanted you here - in case this is all some kind of set-up. Head of a drug ring with his brother suspected of homicide, and they just pull into customs and hand themselves over on a silver platter? Sounds a bit too convenient for my liking. Valdés,” he turned to the detective.
“Sir?” Victor said. He had his game face on.
“Find out what they're playing at. If it's just drugs, if it's part of some new op we haven't heard about, or if it's anything at all to do with Van Persie. If we're going to get anything out of them it's got to be now, before that shyster of theirs shuts us down.”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Oh, and Villa?”
“Sir?”
Carles tossed him a stick of gum. “Do your thing.”
Villa and Victor - Valdés when he was working - had been partners for just half a year. To the surprise of no one even remotely familiar with the fine traditions of police psychology, the two of them worked well as a unit, although it was usually less a matter of Good Cop/Bad Cop than of Bad Cop/Really Bad Cop. Victor was frightening enough on his own. He looked more like a gangster than most of the suspects they brought in: bald, biker jacket, crazy black eyes, and Carles knew for a fact that he'd acquired most of his tattoos after he had joined the force, in intentionally visible places and specifically for the added intimidation factor. Villa, on the other hand, was small, neat, and meticulous, like the more vicious sort of government accountant. But he had a way of annoying information out of people that almost qualified as a superpower. He would wander around the interrogation room looking half-interested, examining his soul patch in the mirror and making needling little remarks at the suspects from time to time, harmless as a gadfly until eventually they cracked and spilled their guts all over the floor just to make him go away.
Thiago Alcântara didn't look up when the pair of them entered the room. He gave Victor a bored, dismissive glance when the older man took the seat across from him and flipped open the case file. Villa - perched on the far corner of the table with his back to the proceedings - he completely ignored.
“Six kilos of the powdered stuff in the glove compartment,“ Victor said without preamble.
Villa let out an impressed little whistle. “Six!” he said apostrophically.
Victor ignored him too. “Must've been a big compartment,” he said. “You've got an Audi A7, it says here. Nice big car.” (“Very nice,” Villa agreed in an undertone.) “Must've cost you a bundle. But you've got money to burn, eh? That amount of pure talco, it's gotta be worth, what, maybe five hundred, five hundred fifty thousand on the streets? Expensive way of getting our attention. Especially since you didn't seem to appreciate it so much when you had it before.”
Thiago didn't bite. But Victor continued, leaning confidentially forward so that he was all but looming into the boy's field of vision. “So what is it that you want from us this time, Thiago? You get out of your depth with your buddies on the street? Or was it your suppliers - someone starting to look a little too closely at those nice fat profit margins of yours? Was that the plan - pretend to cosy up to the cops for a bit and then threaten to turn them in?”
Still no dice.
“Either that, or -- ah! You heard about the new heightened search protocols tried to pull a double bluff. (“Ooh, a double bluff.”) “Stash it somewhere so obvious that they'd never think to look there?” Victor shook his head. “That's never a good idea, man; you can't be too subtle with the border police.”
“No, you can't,” said Villa on cue, and with formidable redundancy. But the kid was stonewalling like a champ, so Victor ramped it up a notch. He stood, raising himself to his full height, and then leaned down low over the table and caught the boy's eye, his voice going smooth and dangerously quiet.
“I'll be honest with you, Thiago - it's not looking good. You think you'll get off with a few years in Modelo, and who knows? Maybe you will. But the funny thing about drug charges is, they can really go either way. And then there's that murder case from all those months back. You remember Mr Van Persie, don't you? Because his dad sure remembers you. So maybe the judge gets persuaded to put you away for a little longer, and then that won't be good at all, will it? Especially for a kid like your brother. Nice and young, big smile, pretty eyes - bet they don't see a lot of that sort in those maximum security places. And nine years is quite a long time. (“A long time,” said Villa gravely.)
“Now, you want to tell us what's going on, you want to cooperate - fine. We'll see what we can do for you. If not...” Victor took a step back and gave him a small smile, cracking his knuckles in a time-honoured, ominous fashion, “...we can wait till you do. We've come all the way here just for you, after all. We've got all night.”
“All night,” Villa echoed, like a very bad pop song.
Finally, a result: Thiago pursed his lips. Carles, in the viewing hall, was uncannily reminded of Xavi. He glanced sideways at the prosecutor, who raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
Back in the room, Villa had also seen the opening, and was upping the ante. He pulled out the stick of HappyDent and unwrapped it, making sure to crinkle the foil as loudly as possible. Then he carefully examined both sides of it before slotting it precisely into his mouth. The next few seconds were spent applying his jaw furiously to the rectangle of gum as if the task required all of his powers of concentration. Then, once it had moistened and softened and resolved itself into a pleasantly pliable consistency, Villa wriggled around to get comfortable on the edge of the table, and settled in to wait.
The noisy, repetitive smack of tongue on teeth on latex resounded wetly through the otherwise silent room. Somehow it managed to seem just half a beat too slow, like the ticking of a languishing clock; and its inexorable, squelching rhythm conveyed in no uncertain terms that Villa could, and would, sit here and do this all night. Victor, by now well accustomed to this part of the production, was obligingly quiet, flipping blandly back and forth between the pages of the case file and ignoring the kid as profoundly as the kid was ignoring him.
Their suspect was steely, but he was still young, and it was almost inevitable that his impatience and inexperience would get the better of him in the end. Barely eight and a half minutes into the chewing gum treatment, Thiago Alcântara cracked.
“Will you cut that out!” he snapped, slamming his cuffed fists down on the table with a clang.
Villa merely turned his head, shot a mildly affronted look at the prisoner, and resumed his metronomic ruminations. Victor sat and let several more seconds smack by, the better to allow the bewildered Thiago to consider his position. Then at last, the latter said sullenly into the silence:
“We didn't do anything, I fucking swear it. Someone else must've planted it. We were on holiday. Don't believe me if you like, but we're not that stupid.”
Victor made a non-committal noise. “Who planted it, then?”
“How should I know,” Thiago made a face.
“Convenient, that,” Victor remarked. “Seems like there's a lot about your own business that you don't know. Someone plants a packet in your car, it's not you; someone shoots a guy in your own backyard, it's not you. But if not you, then who?”
“You're the fucking cops, why don't you find out?” Thiago spat, lunging forward. “Can't you do anything right?”
Victor tilted his head. “Where have we gone wrong?” he asked mildly.
The whole room went still, and for a moment it seemed like Thiago would say something. But then he pursed his lips again, and slumped back into the chair.
“We want our lawyer,” he said flatly, and that was that.
“Hm,” Xavi said when it was over. “You think he was telling the truth?”
“Of course not,” Carles scowled. “Damned kid knows what he's doing.” And then, “Damn,” again, pounding a hard fist into the thankfully sturdy wall. “Ow, fuck fuck fuck,” Carles shook out his wrist. “I never learn. I could've sworn we had him there, though, at the end.”
“Well,” Xavi said philosophically. “There's always the younger one.”
Rafael Alcântara was broader than his brother in face and frame, but there was something blunt and almost cheerful about his features that made him seem like the softer target. Victor had him cowed and blubbering within minutes; no gum had been necessary.
Unfortunately, the blubbering yielded nothing of use, except the details of an unlikely Parisian holiday, and many repeated vehement protests that Rafael had no idea how the coke had come to be there, and still had no idea about “Robin”. Which was of course suspicious considering that he'd initially claimed not to know the dead man at all, but that in itself was nothing new. Carles had had plenty of suspicions since day one. What he did not have, was proof.
Hungry and weary - it was going on three in the morning - he headed out onto the landing to see if he could sneak in a cup of coffee while Xavi and the rest finished the paperwork.
“You guys did good,” he told the two detectives as he left.
Victor shrugged. “No worse than the last time.”
“It couldn't have gone better,” Carles reassured him.
“Well, it could have,” Villa said wryly. “They could've confessed.”
“It was always going to be a long shot. And we'll dig around some more in the morning, follow up with the credit trail in France,” Carles promised. “For now let's just mop up here and head home for the night. I'm taking the back seat,” he added.
“Fair enough.”
Silva found Carles just as Carles found the coffee, but that was all right - he didn't know about the heart attack, or at least didn't know Carles well enough to nag.
“Did you want Gerard Stevens?” the Canarian asked him.
“Who?” Carles paused in mid-sip, and then kicked himself mentally. “Oh, him. Yeah. Of course. Tell Valdés to--” Then he reconsidered. Victor had looked exhausted, and Villa had looked bitchy beyond all belief - the two of them had never taken failure well, and he didn't think he could handle it if the sulking actually worsened on the drive back. Besides, if they were doing another interrogation, he'd probably end up having to take over the paperwork.
“Actually,” he told Silva, mustering a polite smile, “I'll do this one myself. You can have monitoring duty, if you don't mind.”
Silva didn't. In fact he looked pleased and excited, but maybe he always looked that way. Carles was a little nervous himself. He had no right to be - on the force his whole life, he was long past the point where he could (and did, Agnès used to say) question suspects in his sleep. But he hadn't done an interrogation personally since his health had got him pity-promoted into an executive job. Was it possible he'd lost his touch?
The new prisoner didn't look like much, though - big, yes; tough-looking, no. He wore a rumpled D&G t-shirt and floral bermudas, and he was bleary-eyed and clumsy from lack of sleep. That makes two of us, then, Carles thought. He decided to break protocol and give the poor guy a cup of coffee - they wouldn't get anything out of this if the suspect couldn't keep his eyes open.
His kindness paid off, and the alleged Mr Stevens perked up considerably after a few minutes. He gave Carles an appraising once-over, and then nodded to himself like he was pleased about something.
“So, Mr Stevens,” Carles began curtly. He was a little irritated at being sized up so obviously (so he had put on some weight - didn't mean he couldn't still kick the guy's arse).
“Call me Gerard,” the man offered cheekily in English. “How do you do?”
“God help me,” Carles thought. Aloud, he said, stone-faced: “No, no, it's 3am, we're not doing this.”
“Fine,” the prisoner capitulated with a grin. “Only did it to piss off that other guy, anyway. You know - Italian, late forties, condescending?”
“You mean Captain Mancini. Yes,” Carles didn't smile, but it was a close thing. “So: obstruction of justice, not to mention the potential drug charges. We could make this unpleasant for you, so how about you cooperate? Let's start with your real name.”
“Er,” the guy raised his right hand, like a schoolboy. “About the drugs--”
“Your real name.”
“Geez, all right, fine,” the guy said, holding his hands up pacifyingly. “It's Gerard Piqué i Bernabéu.”
“Any relation to Amador Bernabéu?” Carles asked, on the off chance.
“Yeah. My grandfather,” Piqué admitted. Then he winced. “Please don't tell him about any of this!”
“We'll see,” Carles said coolly. “How did you end up trafficking coke?”
“I didn't!” Piqué protested, and launched into a long and involved explanation that began with a big fight with his father a year and a half ago and ended with being pick-pocketed at a rest-stop just outside Lyon.
“So I'm standing by the roadside, right, and I realise my wallet's gone. My tickets are gone, and my phone's disappeared, and my passport is missing, and all these middle-aged French people and their kids are staring at me like I'm the criminal instead of the victim.
“And I'm thinking, oh no, what am I going to do, when all of a sudden this sweet-ass ride pulls up into the parking lot. Big black Audi sportback, five doors, chrome rims, the works - and what do you know, it's got Spanish licence plates! And two guys come out of it and they're speaking Catalan, so I think, wow, this must be a godsend, and I ask for a ride to the border. They seemed nice! And they never said anything about drugs. I didn't know they were trafficking, I swear!”
“They didn't seem nervous, when you got to the checkpoint?”
“No!” Piqué said. “They seemed normal! I mean the younger one was a little moody, but he'd just been through a bad breakup, so that's only to be expected.”
“A breakup?” Carles prompted with a frown. It didn't seem likely that drug dealers would have very much time to date. But the case had gone cold; any new detail could be vital.
“Yeah,” Piqué nodded. “They didn't talk much when I was there in the car with them, but the very first thing I heard Thiago saying was, 'It's not worth throwing your life away over this,' and, 'You deserve better'. Thiago's the thinner one, in the black hoodie. I don't know what the other one's called.”
Carles paused for a moment to make sense of this. It sounded slightly absurd. In the end he gave up. “Very well,” he said meaninglessly. “By the way, I don't suppose you saw anyone sneaking up to the car at any point during the trip. You know, to plant something? It's unlikely, of course, but they're claiming they've been framed.”
“Hmmmmm,” Piqué scrunched up his forehead. Carles held his breath. “You know, now that you mention it... I did see a guy when we stopped in Perpignan. I was stretching my legs, and they were still in the bathroom - I don't know. I didn't see him do anything. But there was definitely a guy.”
“Definitely a guy”? Carles tried not to groan. So much for a breakthrough. “Could you describe him?” he asked anyway.
“Er, dark hair, normal looking, probably Spanish?” Piqué shrugged. “He didn't look very French. Around my height.”
“Would you recognise him if you saw him again?”
“Probably,” Piqué hedged. “I don't know.”
“But you didn't see him do anything.”
“Not really. He was just walking around the car a bit.”
“So he could've just been looking at it.”
“Right.”
“Right. Great. Fantastic. Well, you're free to go,” Carles told him resignedly, pressing a knuckle into his aching right temple. Bloody migraines again. “Detective Silva will process you out. But don't leave the country for the next month or so - we may need to question you again.”
“Oh. Great. Well, all right, then,” Piqué said. He looked lost for a second, but then he leapt up and bounded towards the exit.
Carles collapsed into the chair he'd vacated. Stale cases, idiot witnesses, farcical coincidences - had police work always been this aggravating? Maybe the younger generation was getting stupider and more annoying. Or maybe he was getting too old for the chase. Before he could work himself into a proper good sulk, though, he was interrupted by a knock on the door. Carles lifted his head wearily, and glared up through his hair at the intruder. It was Gerard Piqué again, wearing a traveller's hat and a large, winning smile.
“Hey, you're headed to Barcelona, aren't you?” he said brightly. “Any chance you could give me a lift?”
Part II >