The Angst-Ridden Executive (19 page)

The receptionist arrived in person, bringing champagne and a glass. He wasn’t amused when they asked for a second glass, but his irritation seemed to pass when Jauma handed him a five-dollar tip.

‘And what about my girl? Why so long?’

‘At this time of night you’ll only get a black girl or a chicano, and most of them live forty miles away, down by Watts, on the other side of town.’

Jauma looked at his crutch and commented:

‘A lot of things can pass through a man’s soul in the course of two hours.’

The police were hot on his heels. Gausachs wanted to see him. Fontanillas had rung: ‘Must speak to you, urgently.’ And Concha Hijar too: ‘If necessary I can call at your office.’ Gausachs received him in his office, seated in an executive chair made of high-quality tooled leather, and flanked by three men who were obviously foreigners and who observed Carvalho as they tried to figure out what made him tick.

‘You’ve stirred up a fine mess, here.’

Despite the raised voice and the tone of reproach, Carvalho noted that the more or less polite approach made a pleasant change.

‘If you hadn’t started poking your nose in where it didn’t belong, Dieter Rhomberg would still be alive today.’

‘It wasn’t me who tipped his car into the river and “disappeared” him.’

‘Nobody tipped that car into the river. It must have crashed, and the body’s bound to turn up one day. Anyway, the only reason why Dieter was on the move was because you were stirring everything up with this ridiculous investigation.’

Gausachs turned to the three men and said, in English:

‘Do any of you want to say anything?’

The one with the commanding features who looked like he might have turned down the post as vicar of Wakefield turned to Carvalho and said, in an impeccable, slightly lilting English:

‘I know that you understand English. My company is very concerned about this business, and wants it cleared up as soon as possible. You know how these things are if there’s a scandal in the milkman’s house, sooner or later the whole street knows, and then the whole neighbourhood, and the milkman loses his customers. If there’s a scandal in a company like Petnay, the whole world knows about it. At this point nobody wants to continue with this ludicrous investigation, particularly not now that it’s indirectly claimed another innocent life. We realize that you have economic and professional interests at stake here, and we are prepared to compensate you for the loss of the case. How would two thousand pounds sterling sound—what’s that in pesetas?’

Gausachs calculated the rate of exchange, and then said in a generous tone:

‘Upwards of three hundred thousand pesetas. A very fair offer, señor Carvalho.’

‘Supposing I asked for ten thousand pounds? What would you say?’

‘Probably nothing, but we would think the worst,’ the ‘vicar’ replied, sarcastically.

‘Would you pay, though?’

‘It would be dishonest on your part to ask.’

‘Petnay has nothing to say on the subject of honesty.’

The vicar blinked and looked to see what his colleagues were thinking. The two Englishmen shrugged their shoulders. Gausachs asked them:

‘Leave me alone with señor Carvalho.’

Three pairs of shiny shoes disappeared. Gausachs offered Carvalho a malt whiskey.

‘You could probably get more money than they offered, but not as much as you seem to think. Do I make myself clear? Given that we want to get the business settled, and given that you need to make as much as you can out of it, we could settle on four thousand pounds—sorry, I mean six hundred thousand pesetas. But don’t push your luck, Carvalho. Petnay is an understanding firm, but it is also powerful. What’s more, at this moment the Spanish police are very angry with you.’

‘How come Dieter Rhomberg disappeared so abruptly from Petnay’s payroll? Why did he sound like he was on the run? Why was he traveling under an assumed name, and not in his own car but in a hired car? Why did that car show up in a river that had almost no water in it? Why did he take that weird detour off the motorway? How come, if he was “drowned”, no body has been discovered? Why are you all so keen to let everyone think it was an accident? Why are you prepared to give me six hundred thousand pesetas to get off the case? I think that just about sums things up.’

‘In a few hours from now this will be the official version and therefore the correct one. Rhomberg was going through an acute personal and professional crisis. In fact he had still not recovered from the death of his wife. Not only did he leave Petnay, but he underwent a personality change and decided to set off on a voyage of self-discovery. You turned up on the scene, mixing Rhomberg up with the Jauma case, without any proof that the two were connected. Rhomberg decided to come to Barcelona to settle the business for once and all, so as to do what he considered his duty by his good friend Antonio Jauma. As he’s driving down, for reasons that we don’t yet know, his car crashes into the river and he disappears. Maybe he’ll turn up again in a few months’ time, or even years, alive and well, having used this fake death as his way of getting away from everything as only a presumed corpse can. I think this also just about sums up the situation, and I think this explanation is far more likely to be accepted than yours. At the level of public opinion, it’s more than adequate, particularly if people aren’t inclined to see ghosts where there are none.’

‘And what about Jauma’s widow? And Rhomberg’s family?’

‘They accept Petnay’s version, which is the only possible version. Tomorrow morning I shall be waiting for you, here, at ten. I want a signed statement from you, recognizing that the Jauma case and the Rhomberg case are both now closed, and accepting the official version. I shall hand over, with this very hand, over this very table, a cheque for six hundred thousand pesetas.’

‘Did you know that Jauma had discovered an “oversight” of two hundred million pesetas in last year’s accounts?’

‘That’s ridiculous! Where did you get that from—from one of Jauma’s do-it-yourself accountants?’

‘Petnay was informed about this missing money, so how come you weren’t told? Why don’t you ask the vicar of Wakefield?’

‘What vicar are you referring to?’

‘The slimy one out there who was trying to bribe me. Ask him, and tomorrow morning, here, at ten, have the reply ready for me. “In that very hand.’”

Gausachs was plainly put out. Carvalho turned on his heel, walked off, and left Gausachs, muttering as he went:

‘Petnay version, indeed!’

And he burst out laughing. The laughter came back to him several times as he proceeded on foot to the office of the lawyer Fontanillas. ‘Damn you—you’re getting me mixed up in a hell of a mess.’

‘Don’t get all worked up, señor notary.’

‘What do you mean—I’m not a notary.’

‘You look like a very notorious notary to me, and it doesn’t suit you when you get angry. Calm down, friend. Take it easy!’

He sat down, without first asking if he could, and placed his hands on his knees. Fontanillas had pressed the button on his intercom, as if to send a message, and took a moment or two recovering from his surprise at Carvalho’s abrasive manner.

‘Go ahead—say it. I’ve done nothing but stir up trouble. But everything’s sorted out now, and my services are no longer required.’

‘We’ll pay what we owe you.’

‘And more besides. . .’

‘If that’s the problem, and more besides.’

‘Why?’

‘Because people need to be left to live their lives in peace, and ever since you started rooting around in the Jauma case, there’s been no peace for anyone. Poor Concha, for a start. Then there’s the wretched business about Rhomberg, which was indirectly caused by you, with these investigations of yours.’

‘And what about you? Do you want a quiet life again, too? Were you the one—the prestigious lawyer and future leader of the Centre Right, from what I read in the papers—who put pressure on the Civil Governor to find Jauma’s killer come what may?’

‘I have friends among the powers-that-be, and I did what I could to move things along. I saw it as doing a favour to Concha, so as to put her mind at rest. I know her, and I know that she won’t rest until everything makes sense. Anyway, Carvalho, everything now fits. The police now have a statement that says that, unfortunately for Concha, Antonio died without his Y-fronts on. And Rhomberg has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it.’

‘Did Jauma ever tell you that over the past three or four years millions and millions of pesetas have disappeared from Petnay’s accounts in Spain? Did you know that this year the figure ran to two hundred million?’

‘This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’m surprised that Petnay weren’t aware of it.’

‘They most certainly were. Jauma informed them, year after year, and this year in particular.’

‘Ridiculous! How could a company like Petnay permit a situation like that to continue?’

‘That’s precisely what I want to know.’

‘Sit here and wait, please.’

A light that seemed to offend the eyes, or warn them of fearful things to come. Office furniture that encompassed three distinct epochs: from neo-classical polished wood, to metallic furniture that made hollow noises, and all this framed in that curious style that attempts to make all offices look like the offices of Hollywood films of the 1940s. Typewriters on metal trolleys. And, above all, people. People passing through and people sitting there with an uneasy feeling that perhaps it’s going to be for ever.

The police themselves give the impression of being in historical accord with the furniture. There are some on the verge of retirement, with the faded, opaque luminosity of years and years of service, with little moustaches which they learned to trim during the War and which they still tend carefully, grey hair by grey hair—a strange but cultivated insect with rectangular wings pinned to a leathery upper lip. Then there are the forty-year-olds, athletes to a man, and all with pot bellies and an ideological formation dating from the Franco era, the only one they have known. They all have to hold second jobs in order to make ends meet, and they’re fed up and angry at the way they have to spend the hours of their working lives among a defeated and ill-fated humanity. Finally, the young ones, really young, long-haired and looking like young bank clerks, with a certain metallic naturalness, and with provincial university law degrees, but who failed to disguise sufficiently their opposition to Inspector So-and-So. Or exFalangist youth who have converted into a profession the mystical notion that life should be an act of service. There are also the ones who have learned everything from North American TV films, following the style of the FBI agents like the kids of Hamelin followed their wise piper. The gestures of office workers, a mechanical aggressivity that is part of their stock-in-trade, and an ability to pass from a blow to the forgetting of that blow in an instant, in the confidence that the person on whom it landed has no choice but to play along. Young car thieves, pickpockets, shoplifters, prostitutes, gays with plucked eyebrows and false eyelashes, quarrelling neighbours with tears in their eyes and the marks of blows on their faces, an old man who has stabbed his luscious niece, and a hunter who shot his wife without waiting for the hunting season to begin. The lucky ones make a statement and leave, but there are some who remain at the end of the corridor, and through a chink in some door that has not been closed in time, you hear their screams and protests, the threats made in a room without windows and with no light other than what hangs over the loser like a noose. When they return from the end of the corridor—maybe bruised and maybe not—with their hands handcuffed and looking contrite, they look like they’re returning from an enforced first communion. Carvalho watched them as they reached the last opaque glass door, which was as far as he could see. But he knew what came after. A sudden end to the labyrinth of offices, and the start of the cement. Stairs that plunge down to a damp, cold hell which is accessed by a barred door which then leads to a corridor with cells on either side, and the toilet-cum-shower at the end, where the shit makes it impossible to take a shower and the smell of the disinfectant never succeeds in overcoming the smell of the most wretched, desperate piss in all the world. ‘Door!’ they shout from above, and from below a uniformed guard moves calmly and deliberately to open the door to receive the prisoner and the accompanying instructions. Put him in solitary. The prisoner will regain his identity in the cell and will discover how far he has been defeated, with the clear awareness that in this game it was impossible to win anyway. Even if you’re only in for a few hours, it strips you of something that nobody will ever be able to give you back. You’re left with the dizziness of the leap that you have to make between the reality of what you think you are and the reality of what the police want you to be.

‘Well . . . Carvalho! We meet again. . . I’

Somebody gave him a slap on the back that felt almost friendly. Raising his eyes he saw the face of a Spanish police inspector who could have come out of a foreign film that Spanish National Radio would have described as anti-Spanish for the simple fact that it was anti-Franco. Then the second-rate Hollywood actor left him. Several minutes passed, and Carvalho sensed that he was in for a long wait, a black sheet of a night without sleep, which he would have to spend either pacing up and down the painfully short corridor or sitting on an uncomfortable chair with hard edges. They left him in the company of the man who had shot his own family. A mediocre Sunday-driver sort of a man, who stared at his handcuffed wrists and sobbed incessantly, as if his nostrils were being tom apart by the crying.

‘Remei, poor Remei!’

‘Poor Remei, eh? You should have thought of that before you shot her.’

‘Remei, poor Remei,’ the hunter wailed, ignoring the admonitions of a passing police officer. The hunter raised reddened eyes and looked at Carvalho:

‘Twenty-five years, and never a bit of trouble. I’ve never been here, even to get a passport. Why would I want a passport—I’ve got a nice little villa, and we go there every Sunday.’

‘Did you kill her?’

He bowed his head and said he hadn’t, and sobbed sobs that were trying to drag tears up from unknown depths.

‘And the kid. I shot my daughter too.’

By now his crying seemed more substantial, or at least it had increased in fluency and mucosity. He poked around looking for a non-existent handkerchief. Carvalho handed him a sheet of white paper that was lying on one of the tables.

‘They’re going to do for you.’

‘Here, use this.’

The handcuffed man contrived to blow his nose.

‘Poor thing! She was complaining. I wanted to build a barbecue in the garden, a silly thing, so’s we could have meat grilled on proper charcoal, because we’ve got butane gas indoors, and meat grilled over gas just doesn’t taste right. I bought some of those heat-resisting bricks. . . what do they call them. . . ?’

‘Refractory.’

‘That’s it, refractory. And I ordered a good solid iron grid from the ironmonger’s, big enough to grill meat for a regiment, because sometimes there are twenty or twenty-five of us, what with the girl’s fiancé, and my brother and his kids. Anyway, I wanted it to do paellas too. I don’t know how people manage to cook these days.

‘People forget that every once in a while you might need to make a paella. And what are you going to cook it on? Remei always used to say: “When you have to do a paella for more than six people, this cooker’s not big enough. A paella needs to be kept moving, otherwise the rice cooks unevenly.” “OK,” I said, ‘I’ll build a barbecue outside.” I started cementing the bricks in, and she starts fussing: “No, I don’t want it there, because all the smoke will go into the house, and then it’s me who has to clean up afterwards.” And so on, blah-blah-blah, and so there I was, with the cement already mixed, and half the wall already built. I gave the bricks a kick, and she started saying I was crazy. “You’re mad. Mad. Just like your mother!” And out it all came. First she had a go at my mother. Then my father. And then the girl joined in. And then, I don’t know, I just wanted them to stop, I wanted an end to the boom-boom-boom going on in my head. I turned on them, and they ran over to the garden gate, and carried on—blah, blah, blah. And I swear, sir, I swear, as I sit here now, I have no idea how I ended up coming out of the house with the rifle. I just wanted them to stop. And Remei was shouting at me from the gate, “Look at the bastard—now he’s got his gun.” And I fired. And fired again. And they tried to run away, and I didn’t want them to, so I fired again, and again, and they both fell. Oh, mother of God!’

‘Jose Carvalho Larios?’

‘Yes.’

‘Follow me.’

Eleven o’clock at night. A three-hour wait.

‘Has he just killed his wife and daughter?’

‘No—wounded them.’

‘Seriously?’

‘The daughter, yes. The wife only slightly, but she’s in a state of shock. Come on in.’

The inspector who had slapped him on the back was now sitting at the end of the room.

‘We can get this over with very quickly if you co-operate. I want a complete statement regarding your relations with Rhomberg, and the reasons why he was traveling to Spain under an assumed name, or at least as much as you know.’

Carvalho began back at square one, in the United States. The officer was peering over the top of his glasses at a bundle of documents which presumably had to do with Carvalho.

‘Don’t you know that it’s against the law for a Spanish subject to enroll in organizations like the CIA without authorization?’

‘I started off giving Spanish lessons, not realizing that it was the CIA. Then I found it amusing, so I carried on. When I left, I clarified my position with two ministries Foreign Affairs, and the Home Office.’

He continued his account up to his latest phone conversation with Rhomberg’s brother-in-law and showed them the telegram that had arrived from Bonn, signed ‘Dieter’.

‘You’re going to find yourself in big trouble if you carry on with this case. The Jauma case is now closed. The murderer has been arrested. We have his confession. A young man from Vich. Jauma arrived at a roadside bar run by the boy’s mother-in-law and started flirting with the lad’s wife. We happen to know that the girl’s the village prostitute, and that the husband lives on her earnings. Anyway, Jauma made a pass at the girl, and she complained to the husband. There was a fight, and you can imagine the rest for yourself. As for Rhomberg, either he has faked his own disappearance or he’s at the bottom of a river somewhere.’

‘You couldn’t drown a cat in that river!’

‘Don’t you believe it. There’s been a lot of rain this year, and the water level was up. Anyway, my job is just to warn you. The case is now settled. You’ll now make a statement as regards Rhomberg. I’ll read it back to you, and if you agree it’s a fair representation of what you said, then you can go. I repeat, I’m not speaking for myself; I’m passing on orders from above.’

He pointed upwards at the ceiling, and the eyes of those present followed his finger. A young policeman was at the typewriter, typing with two fingers, evidently a prisoner of a set of expositional formulae that were insufficient to translate what Carvalho was trying to say. He tore up sheet after sheet in order to start over again, and the frustration only increased his nervousness and aggressiveness. In the end Carvalho had to dictate his statement himself, complete with punctuation, and an hour later, with the witching hour past, the policeman embarked on a meticulous reading of the document, which was followed as attentively by the typewriting constable as it was by Carvalho himself.

‘Fine. You can go now. But remember what I told you.’

‘Is Jauma’s killer in the building, here?’

‘They’ve just finished questioning him.’

‘Have they taken him down to the cells?’

‘Not yet, no. He’s got a visitor. His mother-in-law.’

‘Could I see him?’

‘You can see him, but not talk to him.’

In one of the offices the tearful hunter was talking with a middle-aged woman. He introduced her as his sister. A fifty-year-old woman who was still fresh and good-looking, with twenty excess kilos very well distributed about her person. In another corner, a smiling and disdainful Paco the Hustler was talking with his mother-in-law. A faded denim outfit and long, curly hair. The features of a hardened Wide-boy. He saw Carvalho looking at him and stared him out defiantly. Cool, confident, and sure of himself.

‘Why do they call him “The Hustler”?’

‘He says that’s been his nickname since he was a kid. He used to steal chickens in the village in Andalusia where he comes from. Then his folks came to live in Catalonia. He had a bit of a record as a small-time hustler, but then he married the daughter of a woman who ran a bar, and seemed to settle down. At least, he gave up thieving, although the guardia civil reported that he’d put his wife on the game.’

‘A village pimp, eh?’

‘There’s a lot of it about.’

Carvalho bade the young police officer goodnight, and passed under the eye of the vigilant guard at the front door, to reach the fresh, black air of the street outside. He had a hunger and a thirst as if he hadn’t eaten for days and he felt like he hadn’t shaved for a week. And all this for four hours’ detention. He went to get his car from where he’d left it parked next to his office in the Ramblas, and fifty metres into his freedom he heard the sound of voices. Someone was running up behind him. It was Biscuter and Charo. They fell on him hysterically.

‘Was it all right, chief? Did they treat you OK?’

‘Oh Pepe, poor Pepe, my Pepe . . .’

Charo’s mouth kissed the entire geography of his face in minute detail.

‘Don’t go mad—I was only in there for four hours!’

‘In that place you always know when you go in, but you never know when you’re coming out again.’

‘Biscuter’s right. He rang me, and I’ve been out worrying about you all night.’

‘What about your clients, Charo?’

‘To hell with my clients!’

‘I’ve got a meal ready for you, chief. It’ll make your mouth water.’

Propelled by Charo and Biscuter, Pepe reached his office in a good frame of mind, even though the day’s events had left him with many unanswered question. Supper was a squid casserole with potatoes and peas, washed down with a bottle of Montecillo. Charo ate the squid, but without the sauce. She drank the wine too, despite Carvalho’s observations about the irrationality of her diet. Biscuter and Carvalho smoked two cigars. Montecristo Specials.

‘The widow’s been ringing. Every half-hour. I’ve lost count. . .’

‘Whose widow? Franco’s?’

‘No, boss, Jauma’s. She said it’s urgent she sees you today.’

‘It can wait till tomorrow.’

‘Nuñez phoned too. He was pretty insistent. He said he’ll be waiting for you at
El Sot
if you get out of prison before three o‘clock.’

‘I haven’t been in prison. Biscuter.’

‘I say it’s the same thing. I’ve never yet set foot in a police station without ending up with at least six months inside.’