“I mean, you don’t hate dogs or are allergic to them?”
“Not at all,” she said. “I think they’re sweet. Though I don’t like big dogs. They scare me. You might think of adopting one,” she said. “There are loads of abandoned dogs in need of someone like you.”
“Thing is, when you adopt, you never really know what you’re getting.”
I could sense this last comment of mine did not sit well with her. The car was already approaching the Parque del Oeste. I saw the Temple of Debod all lit up.
“We never got back to talking about the case,” she said.
“Perhaps we will, soon.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
I walked her to the entrance of her mother’s building, kissed her, and said goodnight.
– 18 –
I didn’t read any more of the trial that night. I exchanged some text messages with Carmen, maintaining a line somewhere between flirtation and constraint. I was generally pleased with how things had gone, but frustrated. I’d wanted to find out more about the fellow who showed up at Casa Dani. Who was he really? How and when did they meet? What did this “about something else entirely” mean? The side of me commensurate with my age and experience told me to let it go, for it was none of my business, and she seemed relieved and grateful to me for not pressing harder. But a needy insecure side of me wanted to ask her about it.
I tried to put it out of my mind by phoning the concierge’s desk to see if they could find me a breeder or a good quality pet store in the area that might have a King Charles spaniel puppy available. Twenty minutes later, close to 3 a.m., there was a discreet knock on my door followed by an envelope being slipped underneath it. On thick Ritz stationery, written with a fountain pen, was a list of breeders and stores with their respective phone numbers and websites. I felt ashamed for putting them through such trouble at such an hour. It seemed at once like the sort of service the Ritz might get off on providing, and a spoiled American’s request. It was then that I remembered Carmen’s suggestion I try to adopt a dog and how she had reacted to my lack of enthusiasm. So I googled pet adoption services in Madrid and in the surrounding area. I decided to go for ones outside the city, thinking they might have healthier options. I found one I liked the looks and sound of in a region called La Vera, about two hours west of Madrid.
I phoned the pet adoption place and left a message. Tired of being driven around, I had the hotel rent me a car the next morning, and after sending Carmen a bon voyage message I found my way onto the A5 highway out of Madrid heading toward Extremadura. Around the time her plane took off, I had stopped for a coffee at a roadside café near a village called Santa Olalla.
It was dark inside, and I stood at the bar like a Spaniard. A TV was on, but nobody was watching. A selection of CDs with racy covers was on display just to my left. I enjoyed the noise of milk being steamed and the thudding sound the barman made knocking used coffee grounds into a wooden drawer under the espresso machine. I saw no women about, just local men who seemed comfortably unemployed.
The woman I’d met in Paris and followed to Madrid was jetting north by northwest somewhere above me that very moment, in an Iberia Airbus on its way toward Santiago de Compostela, from where it would veer west and initiate a transatlantic crossing. Seven hours later she’d see the coast of Newfoundland and then our mutually shared Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
I was glad to be out of the city. That part of Spain was beautiful at that time of the year. All the plains were green and blowing. Poppies sprouted everywhere, drawing the eye to deep red stains in the tall grasses of undulating fields. The Gredos mountain range rose in the distance. The air was clean, the light bright and fresh, the temperature mild, the coffee with hot milk served in a Pyrex glass with half a sugar cube delicious. Back in the car that smelled new, I felt autonomous and optimistic. It was pleasurable finding my way to the adoption fellow’s village.
When I got there and drove through it there was little to recommend it apart from the gorgeous surrounding scenery. The man’s “chalet” was just outside the village, a one-story brick structure that looked unfinished. I knocked on the door and a great barking surged from within, basso, alto, and soprano. Jose Antonio was tall and portly and very charming. He was an elementary school teacher who ran this service pro bono in his spare time. Many of the dogs ran around us as he told me how some of them had come to be there. The house smelled of animals and damp and was starkly appointed with haphazard furniture. He lived for the dogs.
I followed him into a small room in the back of the house where there was a round table and some simple chairs and on the floor a large, round plastic tub with some ruined cushions in it and three dogs younger than the ones that had greeted me. I saw the one I wanted immediately. It was black with a white chest and white front paws. It was the smallest of the three, but it looked at me intensely as the other two continued to fall over themselves while trying to rip apart a small cardboard box. Jose Antonio made us tea and told me about the little fellow. It was what he termed a typical story, a puppy that had been given to a child for Christmas only to be abandoned six months later, on the side of a highway, when it was time to go to their summer home or condo, by which point the novelty had worn off. I found it hard to believe, but he assured me it happened all the time. He had named the little dog Lobezno, which meant “little wolf.” He thought it might be either a purebred or mix of a Tibetan terrier with something else. He assured me it had been checked out and given its requisite shots and dewormed and that the little guy would not grow to be much larger than thirty pounds. We did paperwork, I gave him a donation, and then he put the dog in a carrying case.
I drove to Jarandilla de la Vera to get some pet supplies and had a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and a Diet Coke for lunch at another bar. In no hurry to return to Madrid, I drove to the parador in the town of Oropesa where, according to a website, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner once stayed, in a special room called the Cardinal’s Suite. I booked it en route. Oropesa was not an attractive town either, but the parador, some sort of castle from long ago, was beautifully refurbished and had a swimming pool hidden by tall hedges draped in honeysuckle. No pets were allowed, but I snuck my new companion in and gave the head maid a bit of cash to look the other way for a night.
The suite had a large bathroom and two sitting rooms and then a narrow hall that led into an elaborate, turret-shaped boudoir dominated by a vast, canopied bed with a painted headboard. I’d nabbed a bunch of newspapers from a table near the reception desk that I spread out on the floor for the puppy to play on. He was reluctant to come out of the carrying case when I set it down and opened it, but eventually he did, and we had our first serious chat. I told him who I was and what was in store for him and he listened with what I can only describe as nobility.
In the late afternoon I went down to the pool and being the only one there went for a quick swim in my boxer shorts. Back up in the room I played with the puppy, took a nap, woke up and thought about Carmen.
That she might already be crossing the Charles River into Cambridge was difficult to believe. Though I’d flown across the Atlantic countless times, it never did anything to dilute my sense of wonder. I sent her a photo of the puppy, underlining the fact that I had adopted it, and asked her to think of a name for him. I saw he’d done some of his business on the newspaper and I cleaned it up. He’d found one of my socks and was playing with it, rolling around like a kitten, making little growling noises. I ordered some dinner from room service.
In the suite that night I did all I could to not tell Carmen how much I wished that she were there with me. What I did tell her was that I’d all but made up my mind to return to New England sooner than later. As I prepared to go to sleep, I encouraged the puppy to get up on the bed with me. It was high and he was little still. But he didn’t want to be picked up. It seemed I was dealing with the fallout of some past trauma. In the end I stripped the bed and arranged the sheets and the coverlet an
d the pillows on the hard floor and we fell asleep together like that.
I woke at dawn. The puppy was asleep at my feet. Two of the five windows arranged in a semicircle had their curtains drawn open, revealing an ochre-toned cathedral nearby bathed in soft pink light. There was a large nest in the bell tower with a stork sitting in it, preening itself. Swallows swooped and darted about the roofs and the whitewashed walls of houses closer by. I opened one of the windows so as to be able to listen to them and got back under the covers on the floor. The puppy woke up, looked at me, and went back to sleep. It was too early to order breakfast, and I was feeling lazy but too awake to close my eyes again.
It could not have been a less familiar place. A parador in the middle of nowhere at the edge of a town I knew nothing about, in a country where I hardly spoke the language. And yet I felt content and at ease. The anonymity and the isolation were a relief. The surroundings were unexpected and appealing. I wondered if Sinatra and Ava Gardner had really been there in that room back in the day, drinking and screwing and brushing their teeth together, the skinny tenor from Jersey and the gorgeous North Carolinian hick, the two of them feeling even more alienated than I did. I remembered that my father met Sinatra a few times, at Jilly’s in New York, and that he had spent a boozy weekend with him in Palm Beach with JFK before the latter’s inauguration.
Just as I was about to get up, I received an email.
Shaun,
I thought about our conversation at Horcher’s last night. BTW, I really am happy you went ahead and adopted your little dog who looks adorable.
I forgot to mention that my father was a painter. His mother was Italian, a teacher of mathematics, his father a textile manufacturer from St. Petersburg, Russia, who fled to Milan where he met his bride shortly before the Bolshevik revolution. Mother met my father in Rome where he was working as an apprentice for a classic portraitist. She was on a university trip. They fell in love. He left Italy because of her and came to live in Spain. Once there his mostly figurative work changed. He fell under the influence of a school of new Spanish painters, like Saura and Guerrero and Zóbel. You may not be familiar with them or this period. He got caught up in their world and often got into trouble with the Franco authorities. Though he wrote to me faithfully after the divorce, I never responded, first out of anger, then out of embarrassment. Driving down the Amalfi coast one night he and his second wife and their two children had a horrific accident. He was the sole survivor. Shortly before I married Matthew, when I was in Italy for a scientific congress, I went to see him. He was in terrible shape. He hugged me and would not let me go until we both collapsed in an ocean of tears and regret. I stayed with him for as long as I could. We wrote to each other often after that and discovered numerous similarities.
Then, in the midst of my awful marriage, I received word of his sudden death. When I left Boston on this latest trip, before I went to Spain, before I went to Paris and met you, I flew first to Milan and visited his grave where he is buried next to his parents. When Consuelo mentioned you to me, I think it was the fact that you are an art historian that most caught my attention. Anyway, I too have lived with sorrow and guilt. I don’t know why it is so difficult for me to talk about this, but it is. I wanted you to know.
Xx Carmen
I read it a few times as the light increased and the swallows continued their aerobatics outside. It made sense. Her hair and eyes and cheekbones were sculpted from Russian genes, her coloring and spirit were Italian and Iberian. People’s lives. The illusion with which we begin a romance, and then all the different ways it can go wrong afterward. I pictured the accident along the Amalfi coast, shuddered, and ordered breakfast. I read some more of the transcript. I was almost finished with it.
– 19 –
Eugene J. MacBride: “Captain Morrison told me to say that I picked up the child and was fooling with her and let her fall accidentally and got scared away and all such a lot of stuff he was telling me. And how soon I could get out of it by telling this— how I couldn’t get into any trouble—that they had to get somebody for it. He told me that he had to get somebody for it.
“I must have been in that room at the precinct house five or six times, in and out with different men, trying to get me to say that I had done this thing, them telling me it would be the best thing for me to do what Captain Morrison told me, that I would get out of this thing in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I was getting pushed around from one to the other all night long.
“About three in the morning I was put in a cell. I stayed until about two o’clock the following afternoon. About every fifteen minutes someone would come in and wake me. I got sick of it. They kept on with it until around eight in the morning, not allowing me to lay down. I would like to know if I could get washed. Couldn’t get no wash. Then I asked for a drink of water and some breakfast. I didn’t get nothing until there was a couple of them coming in, running in and out three or four times, pounding me with a small stick that looked like one of them little billy clubs they carry. They didn’t pound me with them, they just jammed them at me that way. I got it a couple of times here (indicating right breast). They didn’t hit me in the face.
“Finally, they had me so I was crying. I didn’t know what to do myself—came in there telling me ‘You have to tell this.’ I didn’t want to tell it. I had no reason to tell it. I am not guilty of anything. It didn’t make any difference. ‘If you tell this thing you are not going to be held for it—maybe a couple of days and then you will get out of this thing,’ they said, ‘it is just that we want to get something to get this thing squashed. We ain’t had no sleep either, we ain’t had no more to eat than you did.’ Have I got to suffer I says for somebody else who has committed this crime, for to let you people sleep? It didn’t make no difference to them.
“I told them that if they would give me something to eat, I would tell them what Morrison told me. They brought me something to eat. It was while the door was open as they brought me something to eat that one of them had what looked like the butt of a gun and he held it to my head and says, ‘Do you see that? Now look, don’t forget what you said. Here is your meal.’
“The story I confessed to was not the truth. I did not at any time kill Ingrid Anderson. I did not take her up in my arms and while playing with her drop her down on the tiling of the vestibule of 1077 Ogden Avenue, or any other place. I did not see Ingrid Anderson on June 6, 1916, or on that day give her or any other child a penny. I don’t know whether Captain Morrison ever saw me before Saturday night at the station house. He might have seen me before. I don’t know. I never seen him. I have been a gardener. I have also been a foreman, taking charge of men. Also doing odd jobs around the neighborhood, doing anything outside of mechanical work. I started to earn my living when I was fifteen years of age.
“Captain Morrison is smarter than me and so I said what he told me to. I did not tell anyone that I had been forced into this statement because I was afraid. I have never had any trouble with Captain Morrison. I suppose the reason why he should want to send me to the electric chair on false evidence is to save himself. If they didn’t get somebody for this thing, why, they would lose their sleep. That is all they were thinking about that Saturday night when they had me there. Nobody, at no point, ever said anything about the child being raped.
“I was living with the family of Conlans at 1077 Ogden Avenue. I did not have a separate room of my own there. I slept with Mr. Conlan himself. My brother-in-law. The Conlans occupy five rooms. They have three children. All the rooms are taken up by the family. I am not in the habit of playing with any girls or little boys. I associate with people of my own kind, my own age.”
– 20 –
I closed the file and checked my email and found another from Carmen, who was clearly having trouble sleeping. She suggested I call the puppy Corru, after a small seaside town in Galicia named Corrubedo where there was a vast beach she loved. I thanked her for the story about her father and said I would love to se
e some of his paintings someday and that, yes, I would christen the puppy with the name she suggested and strive to roll those two r’s together, but only on the condition she show me the town and beach at her earliest convenience. I found it on a map and was intrigued. I took a long shower and then took Corru out for his first walk.
I tried to make some sense of what I’d been reading. Were the coroner, the assistant DA, and all of the policemen lying for Captain Morrison, or was MacBride the liar, saying whatever he could to avoid being strapped into the electric chair? MacBride seemed too much of a simpleton to me, incapable of such guile and subterfuge. More than that, he did not come off as a rapist or a cold-blooded child killer, not that I had known any. And the timeline didn’t hold up. Why wasn’t that obvious? With so many people seeing him in so many places that day, afternoon, and evening, when would he really have had the time and opportunity to rape and strangle the girl in the basement and then return to the wall in such a calm manner? My gut told me that Captain Morrison—who I pictured as a kind of Hugh “Blazes” Boylan from Joyce’s Ulysses—was the villain, and that he and his cops were thick as thieves, determined not to lose their case and look foolish. But of course I wasn’t certain. I began to wonder why I cared so much.
Back in the room I phoned my travel agent in New York and, using little Corru as my excuse, had her book me a private plane back to Paris. Then I double-checked to see that his papers and health certificate were in order, packed, and put the little guy back in the carrying case. I paid for the room and drove directly to the Madrid airport. We landed at Orly around 6 p.m. and Thierry took me to the apartment. I fried myself an egg for dinner, ate it with toast and marmalade, opened a cold Sancerre blanc, fed Corru crackers and little bits of ham and cheese, and then went back yet again to try to get to the end of the transcript. On behalf of “the People,” police witnesses were called to knock down MacBride’s testimony.
April in Paris Page 8
