Little Indiscretions
Page 24
But she was here now, young Chloe, little Clo-Clo, the same age as Eddie when he died, ready and willing to do all those things he would have done if he’d had time. She hadn’t planned what had happened the previous night at the Lilies, nor did she have any grudge against the chef, with his pointy mustache and his little notebook full of the scandals and secrets he’d been privy to, or so he said: a treasure chest, in other words, of real-life stories, cruel and perfect, better by far than anything a writer could invent.
“Okay, I’m opening the door, you old fool, it’s okay,” she had said. But when she finally opened the door to help Nestor, there he was on the floor holding that little book, as if he were offering it to her, while her brother looked on. All Chloe could think about was helping Eddie fulfill his dream. That’s why she snatched the book from the cook’s outstretched hand: that’s where they were, all those stories of love and crime that Eddie would have loved to write.
The opportunity had presented itself; exploiting it was easy. Easy to find a justification for what she had just done, to shut the door again, pretend not to hear, dream of Eddie, wait for the cold to silence the cook’s cries forever, and then go up to her room as if nothing had happened . . . it had all been very easy. And now she realized that she, the little sister, had succeeded where her brother had failed, because now she would be able to fulfill the destiny that death had snatched away from him. “Those who die young always find a way to come back to this world and finish off their destiny.” That’s what Miss Liau Chi had said to her, and she believed it. Wasn’t she holding the proof in her hands: the very thing he had gone looking for the day he died?
Little Indiscretions, that was the title Nestor had given to the collection of anecdotes he was writing. It was bound to be full of really juicy gossip, terrible, shameful secrets: exactly what she needed to live out Eddie’s crazy idea of writing books about other people’s lives.
So, the previous night, without checking the contents of the notebook, Chloe had gone off to sleep peacefully, pretending that nothing had happened. And she believed it—she had fooled herself. It’s the best way to fool others, after all.
SITTING IN FRONT of the window now, Chloe Trias remembered all this as well as something far worse, which had happened just a few minutes earlier, when she opened up her treasure chest and discovered what the chef had really written in his moleskin notebook. What the fuck?!
She couldn’t believe her bad luck. She read the sentences over and over, stunned: “The secret of a chocolate mousse . . . the trick for making a perfect île flottante . . .” Jesus fucking Christ! “The scandalous flavor of a mango sorbet . . .”
She looked out of the window. The funeral procession was approaching the garden gate now. The bright sunshine seemed to be mocking her as she tried to spot Nestor’s body. She wanted to shout something obscene at that lying, cheating cook. She even opened the window. But then she stopped. There’s no point abusing the dead, so she went back to leafing through the notebook, as if she were hoping a magic spell might grant her the power to find something she hadn’t noticed before. But all she could see were Nestor’s culinary indiscretions, written down in that neat, rounded hand of his, stubbornly occupying the pages. A pointless murder, another broken dream.
KAREL WOULD BE coming to get her soon. It was nearly time to leave the Lilies. She would have to pick up her clothes and stuff them into her backpack. Another chapter of her life would come to an end and she would be alone again. As usual, she thought. And yet, as she was about to stand up, something outside caught her eye and made her stop. She sat there watching a ray of sunlight shining on Nestor Chaffino’s body bag, the same ray the other characters in this story had seen from their respective windows. The way the plastic of the bag reflected the sunlight reminded her of all those mirrors and their sparkling reflections, and suddenly she was laughing again, as happy as she had been staring at the closed door of the Westinghouse, as if her brother’s dark gaze had returned to her eyes. Life had not been kind to her, true: stealing what she loved, deceiving her and laying traps. And it was true that luck had just played the cruelest trick of all: substituting recipes for the stories she was going to use to live out a dream. And yet despite all this, she smiled as she said good-bye to Nestor’s body bag, because she had just realized that there might still be a way of beating destiny. She had a story that no one could ever take away. The story of a little or perhaps a not so little indiscretion: her own story, what had happened to her at the Lilies. And realizing what she had, like a boy with a head full of dreams who has just completed the first twenty-one years of a long, ambitious life, Chloe began to tear out all the pages on which Nestor had written. Nestor’s culinary secrets were scattered in a flurry of paper—after-dinner petits fours, ginger truffles, ice creams and sorbets—until only blank pages were left and the title page, which read:
LITTLE INDISCRETIONS
Once she had removed all traces of cookery, underneath the title inscribed in Nestor Chaffino’s tiny, round hand, Chloe noted down the first lines of a story. She would work out how it ended later on. This is how it began:
His mustache was stiffer than ever, so stiff a fly could have stepped out to the end, like a prisoner walking the plank on a pirate ship.
She stopped to take a breath and think about what to say in the next sentence of Little Indiscretions, a novel by Eddie Trias.
And as she continued her draft:
Except that flies can’t survive in a cool room at twenty below zero, and neither could the owner of the blond, frozen mustache: Nestor Chaffino, chef and pastry cook, renowned for his masterful way with a chocolate fondant.
Chloe discovered that with a real death and a couple of basic ideas, it’s not so hard to spin a story of passion, secrets, and malice, because lies can be perfectly convincing if they contain an element of truth.
So where do I go from here? she wondered, before writing:
And that’s how he was found hours later: eyes wide open in astonishment, but with a certain dignity still in his bearing. True, his fingernails were scratching at the door, but there was a dishcloth tucked into the string of his apron as usual, though looking smart is hardly a major preoccupation when the door of a 1980s-model Westinghouse cool room, two meters by one and a half, has just shut automatically behind you with a click.
BUT AS SHE drafted the first paragraphs of Little Indiscretions, unbeknownst to Chloe, on the doormat of the Lilies a cockroach was wiggling its antennae.
PHOTO: © JORDI SOCIAS
CARMEN POSADAS is the daughter of a Uruguayan diplomat and has lived in many capital cities, including Moscow, Buenos Aires, and London. She is a prizewinning children’s author and co-writer for film and television. Little Indiscretions was first published as Pequeñas Infamias; it won the coveted Planeta Prize in 1998 and has since gone on to sell more than half a million copies worldwide. She is the author of The Last Resort, also published by Random House, and her books have been translated into fifteen languages. Carmen Posadas lives in Madrid.
PRAISE FOR Little Indiscretions
“[Posadas provides] a sprinkling of endearingly kooky characters. . . . [Little Indiscretions] is all so . . . charming that it makes you think about psychopathic killers with renewed affection.”
—Time Out New York
“A perfectly plotted novel to gladden the hearts of all amateur detectives . . . [Carmen Posadas] is a joyous writer.”
—Le Monde (France)
“The joy in reading Little Indiscretions becomes how Posadas weaves each character’s story, each with its single thread that threatens to unravel his or her life.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“Little Indiscretions gives us a close-up view of a glittering Madrid high society that is rotten to the core.”
—La Vanguardia (Spain)
“The action proceeds with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy to a denouement both hilarious and horrifying.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Posadas invents clever devices for delivering each suspect. . . . There’s murder in the air.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Sassy. Sexy. Superb. Culinary mystery lovers will devour Little Indiscretions and pound the table for more!”
—CAROLYN HART
“Excellent . . . This is murder spiced with humor, stirred with a light touch, and served with a deft translation.”
—Library Journal
“Carmen Posadas’s Little Indiscretions is quirky and delicious.”
—JILL CHURCHILL
“This elegant mystery . . . has as many secrets as one of the murder victim’s chocolate fondants. . . . Serpentine sentences . . . and furtive desires wrestle with verbal flourishes as light as a random caress. Utterly European in its aristocratic air, and great fun to read.”
—Booklist
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
English translation copyright © 2003 by Christopher Andrews
All rights reserved
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2003.
This work was originally published in Spanish as Pequeñas Infamias by Editorial Planeta SA, Barcelona, Spain, in 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Carmen Posadas
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaton Data
Posadas, Carmen.
[Pequeñas infamias. English]
Little indiscretions / Carmen Posadas.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PQ8520.26.O72P4813 2003
863'.64—dc21 2003043105
Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-464-7
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