Gaudi Afternoon

by Barbara Wilson

  “Except April.”

  “I don’t think April is going to be in the picture much anymore,” I said. “If that makes you feel better. She’s going back to America tonight by herself.”

  “That’s good,” Delilah said, and for the first time she looked happy. “So it will just be me and Ben and Frankie?”

  “Yes, if they can work something out.”

  “I hope so,” Delilah said, and began to crawl out of her shell. She stopped and looked at me. “You know the real reason that April didn’t like me?”

  “Well…”

  “’Cause I figured out she was a boy.”

  “What!” both Ana and I said.

  Delilah nodded sagely. “She was. Just like Frankie. A boy that turned into a girl.”

  “That’s impossible, Delilah, you’re confused. I mean, it’s understandable that you would be confused, the way you’ve grown up. But I can assure you that April is not and never was a boy.”

  “Was too.” Delilah made as if to curl back up in the shell.

  “Okay, if you say so.” Jeez, this kid needed counseling. And fast.

  Delilah reluctantly climbed out.

  “You ready to go back to Ben and Frankie?”

  “Yeah. I guess.” She turned to Ana. “Will you come with us?”

  Ana was touched. You could tell she was having a struggle not to kidnap Delilah forever.

  “I’ll take you on the moto,” she said.

  “What about me?”

  “It’s just two blocks, Cassandra.”

  So I followed them on foot. Soon, soon, soon this would be all be over and I’d be on my way to London and then Bucharest. Tomorrow perhaps, after one last passionate night with Carmen. Anymore and she’d be demanding that I move here. She was already demanding that I let my hair grow again.

  The white waves of La Pedrera gushed around the corner and I saw Hamilton coming towards me from the Provença door.

  “I met Ana and Delilah at the elevator,” he said. “I’m so glad she’s safe. It was a stupid thing for me to do, to take her from Frankie’s hotel. It just made things more complicated.”

  There was no need to respond to that. I gestured to one of the white mosaic benches that seemed to emerge whole from the sidewalk of the Passeig de Gràcia. We sat.

  “Hamilton,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me that April was your stepsister?”

  He started. “You’ve seen April?”

  “At the Parc Güell. She told me the whole story of your childhood. She’s on her way back to San Francisco tonight. She said she realized it would never work with Ben.”

  He was silent for an instant. “She told you the whole story?”

  “Well, I think so. About her parents and your mother and the drinking and everything.”

  “Not the whole story then.”

  “What’s the mystery here? Lots of people come from broken homes, lots of people come out, what’s the big deal?”

  Hamilton stared across the street at the rippling bulk of La Pedrera.

  “April wasn’t my stepsister.”

  “Oh god. Don’t tell me she made that all up.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What then?”

  “She was my stepbrother.”

  “Stepbrother as in boy-brother?”

  “Albert.”

  I leaped up and then sat back down again. “So Delilah was right.”

  Hamilton just nodded.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” I swore. “Does Ben know? No, of course Ben doesn’t have a clue. Frankie must not either. Je-sus Christ.”

  “I’m not sure, but my guess is that when April got involved with Ben she didn’t know about Frankie. Ben wasn’t so eager for anyone to find out that she’d been married to a male-female transsexual. April may have thought that Delilah had a father she visited every weekend. But at some point she realized that Ben had huge problems with Frankie’s transsexuality. Would April tell her if she thought that? Would you?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted.

  “And the longer their relationship went on the more impossible it probably felt to discuss it. And then there was Delilah. Maybe Delilah said something to her. Maybe that’s why she didn’t like Delilah. I’m almost certain that’s why she left San Francisco for Barcelona.”

  The hot spring afternoon was turning now to evening as Hamilton and I sat on the white bench looking at La Pedrera. A tinge of pink and peach from the sunset colored its porous surface, and it pulsed with undulant vitality, an expanding space rather than a static geometric configuration. It was wonderful—even so, if I’d only seen the outside I wouldn’t have known that the real beauty of the building lay in the finely finished interior details, in its swirls of plaster and curves of dark woods, in the shapes of its rooms and the coils of its stairways.

  “You know what Gaudí wrote about La Pedrera?” Hamilton said. “I’ve always liked this. He said ‘… the corners will disappear and the material will abundantly manifest itself in its astral rotundities; the sun will penetrate on all four sides and it will be the image of paradise… and my palace will be more luminous than light!’”

  “That man was ahead of his time,” I said. “Far far ahead… shall we go in?”

  “No point saying anything about April to Ben now, is there?” Hamilton asked.

  I shook my head, and then, companionably, we sighed and got up.

  Frankie and Ben were sitting on the sofa with Delilah between them like a little prisoner of war. Ana was in tears, trying to explain her rationale for the kidnapping. Her usually competent English had deteriorated.

  “I want. I only want make your girl happy. She so unhappy.”

  “Cassandra!” Frankie said as Hamilton and I entered. “This is the final straw.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Frankie,” I said cheerfully. “You got her back, didn’t you? You got what you came for, didn’t you?”

  “But I’ve been employing you, Cassandra.”

  “Not recently.”

  “That’s just like you, Frankie,” Ben said. “You lie all the time.”

  “Oh you think you’ve been Miss Honest, Bernadette. You think you’ve been behaving with great honorability.”

  “Stop it!” shouted Delilah, jumping up from the sofa and running over to Ana. “I hate you both! I hate you talking like that! I’m sick of it!”

  Ben and Frankie stared at her.

  “But Delilah,” said Ben after a moment, in a tone of adult reasonableness. “It’s only that we love you.”

  “You should love each other!” the little girl screamed. “That would be better!”

  Ben’s face fell. “But we do love each other, honey.”

  Frankie sighed. “We do, Delilah. We just have a funny way of showing it.”

  She took Ben’s hand. “Ben and I go back a long ways, Delilah. A lot of things have happened since we met, including you, a lot of changes. Some changes aren’t easy to accept.”

  Delilah clung obstinately to Ana.

  “We don’t want you to be unhappy,” Ben said, tears in her eyes.

  “We want to be good parents to you,” Frankie said.

  Ana bent down and whispered something to Delilah, and slowly a smile appeared on the little girl’s face.

  “Okay,” she announced. “But I want to go back home. And I want both of you to be nice to each other. Please.”

  Hamilton was coming undone beside me and suddenly left the room.

  Frankie nodded. Ben nodded.

  “Do you promise?” Delilah asked.

  “Well, I’ve really been needing to get back to the gym,” said Ben. “I’m completely out of shape.”

  “I promise,” said Frankie, nudging her.

  “I promise,” said Ben.

  Later I asked Ana what she’d whispered to Delilah.

  “I told her I would give her one of my new houses to take with her. So she would always have a home.”

  19

  I WAS BACK AT THE li
ttle square outside the church of Santa María del Pi, where Frankie and I had met that morning only a little more than a week ago. It was now the morning after Delilah had been found for good, and I was about to meet Ana and Carmen for a farewell coffee before my plane left for London.

  I’d been doing some translation, because in spite of myself I’d gotten interested in the story of María and Cristobel and had made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t skip to the end of the book to find out what happened. In my notebook, safely inside my leather briefcase beside me, I had almost fifty new pages translated, only twenty-five more to go. I would finish them in London, prepare a second draft and be well on my way to Bucharest by the beginning of June.

  At long last the mystery of Raoul’s black bag was solved! It contained nothing more, nothing less than….

  “Excuse me, is anyone sitting here?” a heavy German-accented English interrupted me. Its owner pointed to the table next to me, on the chair of which I’d settled my briefcase.

  “Yes, all the tables immediately around me are occupied or will be shortly,” I said in Spanish.

  He sat down anyway, a young man with dark glasses and a ponytail.

  “I’m here for a conference,” he informed me.

  “That’s nice,” I said, and returned to my pages.

  He pointed to his flight bag, which he had set on the chair on top of my briefcase. EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION.

  Obviously he expected me to gasp, “Gosh, you must be a famous organ transplantor!” or “What is the European Society for Organ Transplantation? It sounds fascinating.”

  Well, sod him. Even if I were interested, I had work to do.

  “I’ve seen you before,” he announced, in another bid for conversation.

  “I think that’s very unlikely,” I said haughtily. “I’ve just emerged from a remote location in northern Borneo where I was immersed in native culture for about twenty years. You’re practically the first white man I’ve seen. I can’t say your lot improved much while I was away, either.”

  “No, I am sure of it,” he announced. “I have followed you twice. The first time I was quite lost. I had been looking at the cathedral but then I became disoriented. I wandered the streets. Then I saw you. I called after you to ask you directions but you started running. I realized you were afraid, so I ran after you to tell you I would not harm you. But you did not stop. Then, a few days later I saw you again late at night. Again, you did not stop.”

  “I had an urgent appointment. Besides, how did you know it was me?”

  “Your jacket!” he said. “What a coincidence we meet now. My name is Wolfgang Schlagwurst. Herr Doktor Schlagwurst.”

  “Nice to meet you, Wolfgang. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a deadline to meet.”

  I turned my head away and tried to concentrate:

  According to Cristobel the black bag, the ever-present mystery of her marriage, the curse of her wandering life on the river with Raoul, the mysterious piece of luggage that Raoul guarded with his life and that she believed if only she could open it would be her key to freedom and a new life, contained nothing more and nothing less than….

  “Cassandra, stop working!” Carmen bounced petulantly into a seat across from me. She withered Herr Doktor Schlagwurst’s interest with a snap of her manicured fingers, which incidentally brought the waiter.

  She ordered a café solo and took my hand in hers. “I’m very very angry with you, querida. You come to Barcelona by surprise and you leave by surprise.”

  I squeezed her fingers and said, “That’s what life in the translation business is all about, Carmen. Speed, violence, sex, mystery. Translators come and they go, you can’t count on them. You should never count on a translator. Or an organ transplantor for that matter.”

  “Cassandra, don’t joke. You’ve broken my heart.”

  “It’s better to leave when we’re feeling good about each other,” I said. “Besides, I’ll be back.”

  “You said that last time.”

  “Well, I came back, didn’t I?”

  “But when?”

  To my relief I saw Ana approaching across the square. Hamilton was with her. Why had she brought him?

  “Ach, you have more company,” said Herr Doktor Schlagwurst. “Then I will be going. So nice to have met you, Fraülein. And I apologize for having scared you.”

  I gave him a sudden smile. “In Northern Borneo,” I said in Spanish, “somebody like you would be a nice snack.”

  He bowed politely and removed himself and his bag.

  Ana and Hamilton sat down.

  “I’m so sorry you’re going, Cassandra,” said Ana. “I feel as if I’ve hardly seen you.”

  If I allowed myself to really feel partings and farewells, I’d never have seen the countries and known the people I have. I closed my heart’s door gently on sentiment and laughed, “You’ll see me again. Probably when you least expect it.”

  “So is everything solved among your friends?” asked Carmen.

  “Yes. Frankie and Ben worked out a new custody arrangement and have agreed to go into counseling. They’re leaving tomorrow for home. And April left last night on a flight to London and then San Francisco.” I didn’t mention that I had gone to the airport to say good-bye to her. I wanted her to know that I wished her well, and that I thought Reflexology was probably the greatest new substitute for substance abuse ever invented.

  “Delilah wrote me a note,” Ana said, and pulled it out. “I think she dictated it to Frankie.”

  Dear Ana,

  I think you are nice, you build neat houses, the one with the different parts is the best. Thank you for giving it to me, I know I will sleep really good every night. Thank you and good-bye, Delilah

  Ana smiled at Hamilton and to my surprise took his hand.

  “We have something to announce,” she said. “Hamilton and I have been discussing having a child. He wants a family too.”

  Hamilton blushed. “It’s a little unconventional, but I think it may work.”

  After all we’d been through it was astounding that anyone could use the word unconventional.

  “Congratulations,” I toasted them with orange juice. “Just remember: get everything in writing.”

  Ana laughed. “Oh, that reminds me. Here’s something that will amuse you, Cassandra. After your adventures with pickpockets this trip.” She took out a newspaper clipping from her pocket. It was from La Vanguardia.

  A ring of thieves has come up with a new way to make off with the purses and bags of Barcelona’s unwary citizens and tourists. Using flight bags from a conference that was held a week ago in Barcelona at Montjuic, one or two skilled German thieves have taken upwards of fifty items. Yes, there really was a conference of the European Society for Organ Transplantation, but if you see these words imprinted on a flight bag anywhere near you—watch out!

  Carmen said, “Cassandra, where’s your briefcase?”

  I looked at the seat next to me.

  Cristobel and her long-lost daughter María had vanished.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries

  Chapter One

  I WAS ON my way to China, by way of Vienna and Budapest, when I first met Gladys Bentwhistle, her granddaughter Bree, and most of the Snapp family. Not everyone knows this, but an open-ended roundtrip ticket from Hungary to China on the Trans-Mongolian Express is one of the least expensive ways to visit Beijing. The only drawback is that you must first go to Budapest and reserve your ticket via Moscow, and then apply for the Chinese, Mongolian and Russian visas at their embassies—all this before suffering nine days of bumping across steppe, taiga and desert. Still, it’s cheap if you have the time, and this trip I had particular reasons for not minding a possible stay of several weeks in Budapest. My old friend Jacqueline Opal, whom I had seen in London only two or three months before, had dropped me a postcard at my Hampstead mailing address, a postcard of the Danube which announced, in breathless capitals,
that she was now co-owner of a secretarial agency in Budapest. This was so manifestly unlike Jack, a high-spirited Australian drifter who had held nothing more taxing than a series of temp jobs in London, and those only in order to finance a series of low-budget, maximum-risk world adventures, that I felt I had to see what she was up to.

  It was an April evening, darkly green and rainy. I’d arrived in Vienna from London, via jet-foil and a high-speed train that had propelled me through dozens of European cities so quickly that I’d hardly had time to read the station signs, much less distinguish enduring national characteristics, and had gotten off for a few hours to stretch and catch up with myself.

  It had never been sunny during any of my brief visits to Vienna; I’d never seen its icing sparkle, had never gotten the least hint of its waltzing and prancing, its operettas and operatics. Grandeur was there, you couldn’t really avoid it, in the enormous Habsburg palaces and Imperial museums and theaters all around the Ringstrasse, but it always seemed magnificence of a particularly pointless kind. Vienna had once been the capital of an empire of fifty million, a large family estate (some said a prison) composed of a dozen nationalities, all struggling to assert their historical identities. After defeat in the First World War the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, and Vienna was left, with all its pomp, head of nothing more than a rather small country called Austria.

  But my Vienna wasn’t the Imperial city of the Habsburgs, nor was it fin de siècle, decadent and glittery. Much of what I liked about the city came from the uncertain but lively period sometime after the First World War, after the elegance had begun to thin, but before the political chaos of the thirties. My Vienna was intellectual, melancholy and neurotic, well-suited to damp days, to walking through small squares with trees coming into leaf, which is what I did that particular afternoon, after I had made one important stop.

  In every city I find an anchor. Sometimes it’s a café, sometimes a street, sometimes a painting in a museum. It’s what I claim as mine, what I visit when I pass through, what makes me feel at home. In Amsterdam it’s a pub on the corner of two canals, where the sun strikes a worn walnut tabletop in an elegiac way on late afternoons in autumn. In Mexico City it’s Frida Kahlo’s blue house. In Bangkok it’s the Chao Phraya River with its network of brackish canals and spicy floating markets.