A Necessary Action Read Online Free PDF Page A

the steps. All the time, Willi Mohr had sat at his easel and worked on a painting of a house and some cacti. Santiago had said good-day and good-bye and possibly a few words, but Willi Mohr had just nodded twice. Hehad let the money lie there for two days, and then he had picked it up and paid his bill at the tienda.

5
    Forty minutes after he had left the guard-post, Willi Mohr was standing in front of the house in Barrio Son Jofre. When he opened the door, the cat came up to him and brushed against his legs, and the bitch rushed out on to the floor. She whined and cringed and wagged her tail. She must have been very hungry and thirsty, just as he was.
    The house in Barrio Son Jofre was built on two floors and had three rooms, apart from the kitchen. From the large room on the ground floor a stone staircase led up to the first floor. Of the two rooms above, the larger was well kept but the smaller was more or less uninhabitable. The floor was broken and part of it had fallen through into the kitchen. In the whole house there were only two pieces of furniture, a large brown wooden bedstead upstairs and a rattan chair with a woven cane seat downstairs. There was a mattress downstairs too, and a blanket, and about twenty paintings. Most of them lay on the floor, but some were fastened to the walls with drawing-pins. Beside the chair stood a metal paraffin lamp, and on a piece of sacking in one corner lay some clothes and other personal possessions. The downstairs floor was carefully swept, but upstairs, where no one had been for a long time, there was a thick layer of greyish stone-dust over everything.
    Willi Mohr poured out some water into an earthenware bowl for the bitch and put some dry pieces of bread into it. Then he thrust his hand in amongst the pups and took out his pistol and the notebook. The weapon felt heavy and damp and he weighed it in his hand as he went into the room. He stood still in the middle of the floor and said to himself: ‘What the hell
did
he want anyhow?’
    And after a pause: ‘He’ll fetch me down there again and before that I must kill the other one too.’
    He leafed through the notebook. The first page was dated thethirtieth of July the year before, the day after Hugo had gone. He had written several pages on the first days and then the notes grew briefer and briefer, and after the fourth of September they ceased altogether. On the following pages he had jotted down figures and small sketches and then there was another note. The handwriting was firm and quite legible.
    16th December, 8 a.m. Yesterday I waited all the afternoon and evening in the puerto but they did not come back. It was past two in the morning when I got home.
    After this date there were a lot more notes and now the notebook was almost full.
    Willi Mohr bit his lower lip and slowly shook his head.
    Then he put the things back in their usual place under the mattress, took off his clothes and lay down on his back, naked, his hands clasped behind his head.
    He thought: Tomorrow I’ll kill the pups. I’ll pick out the one with the best markings and keep it. The others I’ll kill.
    Just before he fell asleep he thought about the truck and the day the Scandinavians were drinking at Jacinto’s bar. Fourteen months had gone by since then.

Part Two

1
    The truck was a re-built 1931 model Fiat-camioneta. It had no fenders and no hood and the driver’s cabin and back had been stripped and replaced with two wooden seats rather like park benches. All these alterations had been made purposefully, to make the vehicle lighter and more useful as transport for people on bad roads.
    The vehicle had a history, as it had come to Spain during the Civil War with General Bergonzoli’s first blackshirt division and had fallen into the hands of the worker’s militia after the battle at Brihuega in March, 1937. But no one knew anything about that now, so the camioneta was not considered of any historical value.
    Dan Pedersen had taken it over