Read Online On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes - Free Book Online Page A

money there: women, jewels, good food. Bali belongs to Indonesia—celebrities go there to get married. Beautiful girls carrying trays of fruit and flowers on their heads (and if you don’t like small, dark girls, there’s a whole collection of big, buxom Australians vacationing there), beaches lined with coconut palms, good discotheques. But that’s too handy for the creditor’s hitmen, those Bulgarians who are such experts in tracking people down and in the ancient art of inflicting pain.”
    “They’re not usually Bulgarians, they’re Moldavians,” Justino states, with his encyclopedic knowledge of dark subjects. “People say the Moldavians are worse, even more ruthless.”
    For a second, I wonder if I, too, in order to recover what I’m owed, should get in touch with that band of pursuers. But I immediately think, no, it’s too late, the horse has well and truly bolted. Sometimes I forget and continue to think as if I have years ahead of me, not just hours. While he talks, Justino skillfully cuts the cards, shuffles them like a magician or like the cardsharp he is, although at this hour of the evening, he behaves more like a modest pensioner, as most of us do, as Francisco does, and as I have also started to do: pure theater. The money which, to frighten his rivals, he places on the table in the clandestine card games he plays at night—when he takes off his mask and shows his teeth—had its origins in Switzerland and Germany in the 1960s (those German marks and Swiss francs begat pesetas that then begat euros, three monetary generations). Thanks to contacts he had with who knows what mafias, he earned his money by charging commissions on the work contracts and permits he acquired for men from the area seeking employment abroad. He took men from the villages to work as sanitation workers, waiters, bricklayers, or laborers, and he alone knows all the shady dealings involved. He’d housed the men in large, freezing-cold huts, where they would have died of hypothermia if they hadn’t paid separately for coal, or oil for the heater, and then, on top of what they’d shelled out for the journey and the work permit, he had deducted some twenty or thirty percent from their wages in payment for continued protection and accommodation. What puzzles me is that the survivors of those expeditions still speak to him, even buy him a drink and think he did well by them. Forty years later, they still say: the guy’s so smart, a genius really. I mean we’re talking about Germany and Switzerland here—they’re so finicky about who they let in. But he could smuggle you across three frontiers under a blanket, feeding you sips of brandy to keep you warm during the time you spent in the trunk of a car or sharing a refrigerated trunk with a cargo of Galician fish; and when you got there, everything was already sorted and the next day you were working. The victims speak of him with almost religious awe, and you might think that they still haven’t realized that they were slaves in the hands of a trafficker of human flesh. However, when the same grateful guy has had a few drinks things change radically. Then the whole story changes, and at that point, you do get a glimpse of the cannibal, of our very own Hannibal Lecter. The predator. In Olba, he has continued to do more or less the same thing, just variants of slave-trading: taking vanloads of workmen to jobs he finds for them in exchange for keeping twenty or twenty-five percent of what they earn. That’s just an example. He’s a protean being who has a finger in every pie: agriculture, construction, import-export, banking. And he dabbles in all the professions too: teams of orange-pickers, groups of bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, whole brigades of drivers. Not to mention the white-collar sector: customs men and port agents, superintendents, lawyers, notaries, town councilors, mayors. He makes them all employees in his service company, which, of course, has no legal