The second Mrs Appleton was one big disappointment. And not simply because her lack of brainpower had destroyed his ambition to retire from his career in the most important embassy on the planet, but also because the antidepressants and tranquillizers she’d started taking in order to survive the boredom of diplomatic life had transformed the revitalized fireworks of their sex life into a low-budget backstreet fling. Aware that that jamboree, like his career, was in implacable decline, he started to weigh up the idea of divorcing the second Mrs Appleton and trying to get back together with his ex.
However, Mr Appleton soon discovered that disentangling himself from the second Mrs Appleton was going to be far from easy. His present consort wasn’t as docile as his first had been, and, when he insinuated that perhaps the moment had come to end a relationship that was foundering rather than developing, the second Mrs Appleton reacted by rejecting the option of divorce and threatening to mount a scandal of epic proportions with a kiss-and-tell interview in the Sun if he sent a lawyer her way.
That was the day Mr Appleton sidelined the divorce option and seriously began to contemplate the possibility of becoming a widower.
With the meticulous attention to detail that had been a feature of his life, Mr Appleton began to assess the various alternatives on offer if he were to rid himself of the second Mrs Appleton via the convenient method of dispatching her to the other side. He felt that suicide was the least risky option, and, making the most of a note in his possession that could be read as a goodbye message, he wasted no time in activating the plan that had occurred to him.
In no uncertain terms, Mr Appleton had forbidden the second Mrs Appleton from sending photos or messages by phone (he was afraid she’d hit the wrong button and send her documents to the wrong person’s inbox), and as a result she had become accustomed to leaving him short notes on the pillow or bedside table when she felt a need to apologize after she’d embarrassed him. Mr Appleton quickly read these notes and threw them in the wastepaper bin (her spelling mistakes really grated on him), but, luckily, he had kept one she had written to him in Washington immediately after the reception where she had ruined his career. The handwritten note said “I’m so sorry, love” and was signed off with her first name. The only drawback was that, below her signature, the second Mrs Appleton had drawn an erect penis and two hairy testicles, which she had enhanced with a sensual kiss from her red lips. It didn’t look like your average suicide note, but as everyone in Barcelona was becoming familiar with the second Mrs Appleton’s wayward character and aversion to formalities, Mr Appleton thought it would pass muster and decided to go for it.
Mr Appleton chose a Saturday early in September when their maid was on holiday to terminate his wife’s life. It was the day he had offered to accompany a member of the English Parliament to see a performance of The Twilight of the Gods at the Liceu opera house. The second Mrs Appleton hated opera, and, knowing his wife’s tastes, Mr Appleton assumed she would refuse to swallow four and a half hours of Wagner just for the sake of appearances.
“Don’t you worry, it’s only a Labour MP. No need for you to suffer,” Mr Appleton told her, laughing it off.
The performance began at seven. At about four, when the second Mrs Appleton was curled up on the sofa zapping through the channels, Mr Appleton took a bottle of cava from the fridge, opened it and slipped in a handful of tranquillizers he had previously rendered into powder with the help of a spoon. Then he walked into their dining room and, like a real gentleman, offered his wife a glass of cava knowing she wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of a drop of bubbly. Moved by his gesture, the second Mrs Appleton thanked him for thinking of her and went on to knock back the whole bottle.
She immediately fell asleep. Mr Appleton helped her to their bedroom on the second floor of their house, but rather than leaving her on top of the bed, he dragged her into the en suite bathroom, stripped her and lifted her into the bath. While the bath was filling up with hot water, Mr Appleton fetched a knife from the kitchen, returned to the bathroom and slit her wrists.
When the second Mrs Appleton was knocking on the gates of St Peter, Mr Appleton grabbed the bottle of cava, the glass and the note he was intending to use as a suicide missive, and took the lot into the bathroom. He slowly removed his fingerprints from places where they shouldn’t be, checked that everything was in order and finally changed his clothes, combed his hair, sprayed scent over himself and went to the garage to get his car.
It was hot and muggy outside. As Mr Appleton drove out of his garage, he didn’t notice the two men following close behind in a grey Ford Focus that had been parked outside his house for a couple of days. He had agreed to meet the Labour MP at 6.30 in the foyer of the Liceu and didn’t want to arrive late, but the glass of cava (from a different bottle) that he had been obliged to drink in order not to arouse suspicion was making him feel queasy and headachy. As the opera they were about to see was on the long side, he decided to stop at a pharmacy to buy anti-acid tablets and painkillers. He found one open on the Carrer Escoles Pies, double-parked his car and went inside.
The only people in the shop were an adolescent girl rummaging on a shelf and the chemist. Mr Appleton strode towards the counter, not noticing the two men come in who had followed him from his house and into the pharmacy. The second he heard male voices speaking threateningly in a language that sounded like Chinese and saw the expression of panic on the shop assistant’s face, he swivelled around and found himself facing two Oriental-looking men and one pistol aimed at himself.
Two shots rang out.
Mr Appleton fell to the floor, mortally wounded. And while his life ebbed away, he remembered the fragment of a conversation he had overheard in the course of one of those acts of protocol he’d had to attend, and how the now deceased second Mrs Appleton’s ears had pricked up when a jaded inspector of the mossos d’esquadra had mentioned the new fashion for contracting Chinese hitmen through the pages of The Times.
Paradise Gained
Sergi couldn’t think how to tell his girlfriend he wasn’t going to be able to go on holiday. It was no use saying he was broke – Marisol knew he worked for his uncle and that he paid him a decent wage – or that work was preventing him from taking a fortnight off to get a tan on a beach with a backdrop that was rather more picturesque than the three cement chimneys of the old Sant Adrià de Besòs power station. Even Senyor Benito, Sergi’s uncle, had shut up shop and taken his wife to his village to get away from the muggy heatwave. And Marisol, who’d been waiting for weeks to show off the silvery bikini she’d bought in the sales, began to lose patience.
“I don’t get it, Sergi. There are some really great bargains on offer! And it’s stifling in Barcelona …”
Marisol lived in Gràcia in a flat-share with various friends from the faculty, psychology students like herself, and Sergi in Sant Adrià. They’d been going out for a couple of years, and were now at a stage in their relationship when they were starting to make plans to live together the moment Marisol finished her Masters in Clinical Psychology and got a job. Sergi was a musician – he played the sax – but, as he couldn’t live by music alone, he was forced to work for his uncle while he tried to build up a reputation by performing in bars and festivals with the jazz quartet he had set up with friends.
What Marisol didn’t know (Sergi hadn’t told her) was that her boyfriend was the favourite nephew of Senyor Benito, one of the old gangsters from the neighbourhood of La Mina. Experience had taught Sergi that going on about the criminal nature of the family business usually provoked a hostile reaction, and that’s why he’d told Marisol what he told everyone who wasn’t part of that delinquent scenario of intrigue on seedy side streets, in warehouses on the city’s outskirts or down-at-heel bars: he’d say his uncle had a transport company that did house removals and haulage, and that he worked occasionally for him as a driver.
The circumstances that were stopping Sergi from going on holiday went back to a casual conversation Se
nyor Benito had had with the lawyer who looked after his clan’s legal disputes. Sergi’s uncle had complained that a disadvantage of his business was the extraordinary amount of cash it generated that he couldn’t put in the bank, that he was forced to lodge bundles of notes in different hiding places, which was always stressful, because Sant Adrià was now full of gangs that did their own thing and didn’t kowtow to him. His lawyer, who thanks to the fees he earned from the frequent visits Senyor Benito’s employees made to Can Brians prison lived better than the Corleones’ consigliere, told him that the best way to avoid such headaches would be to open an account in a tax-free paradise, which was what most of his customers had done.
“You don’t even have to take a plane, because it’s all done anonymously by computer. In fact, if you’re interested, my brother-in-law would do it for a commission,” his lawyer said.
“If it’s so easy, why don’t you do it and pocket the commission?” retorted Senyor Benito, who never trusted lawyers when it came to money, least of all his own.
“You know, it’s easy enough, but you need to be up to speed with the internet and know how to navigate the dark web.”
“The what?”
“The dark web, the part of the internet that’s home to hackers.”
“Oh …”
That day, at the entrance to the courthouse, Senyor Benito told his lawyer he’d think about it, simply to put him off. He thought the idea was interesting, but, as he was suspicious by nature and didn’t want to depend on third parties who might take advantage of his ignorance to bamboozle him, he decided to bypass his lawyer and suggest to his sparkiest nephew that he ought to study computers with the aim of opening an offshore account for him.
Sergi was twenty-four and reputed to be smart. His father, one of Senyor Benito’s brothers, had died at the end of the nineties during one of those gang wars that contribute to the improvement of the species via the natural selection of weapons chosen to liquidate all rivals. From a young age, Sergi had needed to be a live wire when it came to earning his keep, and Senyor Benito soon saw that the future of his youngest nephew didn’t reside in his (non-existent) biceps or in his (scant) skills when it came to intimidating bad payers, driving second-hand Transit vans at top speed or using a knife without getting hurt, but in his ability to use his brain when it came to making decisions.
“So, Uncle, why exactly do you want me to study computers?” asked Sergi the day the patriarch suggested he should go back to reading books.
Senyor Benito prided himself on being a wily old bird, and preferred not to tell his nephew what he had in mind.
“Oh, you know, these computers are beyond me. But I can’t rely on Paco and Manel, as you well know. They may be my sons, but they don’t have your brains.”
“And in the meantime, what am I going to live on? Because if I’m going to be studying, I won’t be able to make any more deliveries …” Sergi replied, fishing.
“Don’t you worry, I’ll still pay you a monthly wage. You just make sure you get top marks, right?”
Sergi, unlike his relatives, didn’t have criminality in his blood and hated chasing around with his crazy cousins; he thought he’d won the lottery, and rushed to tell Marisol the good news. As the world of education was a remote, unknown galaxy for Senyor Benito, Sergi opted for a nine-month computer course in a backstreet academy in Badalona.
But Sergi soon discovered that he was even less interested in computers than in being a gangster, and stopped going to his classes. He was bored, and as he knew it was easy to hoodwink his uncle, who could barely switch on a computer, he decided to forget the academy and invest his monthly income in a giant TV, loudspeakers and a brand-new sax.
They were the happiest times of his life. Sergi pretended to go to his classes, and when his uncle asked him if he was learning a lot, he assured him that starting to study computers was the best decision he’d ever taken. In fact, he wasn’t lying. Sergi was delighted with the new lifestyle that put money in his pocket without having to join in with his cousins’ thuggish behaviour and gave him all the time in the world to play his sax and enjoy sex with Marisol.
Nine months later, Sergi showed his uncle a (fake) diploma that credited him with top marks in the exam. Pleased with the good return on his investment, Senyor Benito congratulated him profusely and then asked him to show what he had learned at the academy by opening him an account in a tax-free paradise.
“My lawyer says it’s very easy, that you only need the internet and to know how to work a computer,” he added, seeing the sceptical expression on his nephew’s face.
“You know, Uncle, it’s not so easy as that …”
“Come off it. They must have taught you this kind of thing on your course, right?”
“Well, not exactly …”
Sergi tried to explain to his uncle that tax evasion via a computer and internet connection was more complicated than he thought. It was one thing to be able to use Excel or Word, reboot your computer when it jammed or to use an anti-virus program and eliminate cookies and unnecessary files, but it was something else to open an offshore account in what his uncle called a tax-free paradise from your dining room, as if tax havens were like shopping at online Ikea.
Senyor Benito hadn’t a clue what Sergi was talking about, and lost his temper.
“So what the fuck have you been doing all this time?! Do you mean I’ve been wasting my money?”
“No, Uncle, of course you haven’t.”
Sergi was terrified. Senyor Benito didn’t realize the short course had cost him the equivalent of three years’ fees in the Faculty of Medicine, and if he ever found out that Sergi had pocketed the monthly instalments but hardly gone to any classes, he’d be so annoyed he’d give him a facelift and break every bone in his body. Sergi kept inventing excuses, but when it looked like the old patriarch would rush off to the academy with his shotgun and scare the life out of the director because his nephew was so clueless, he said he’d look into it and see what he could do.
*
A couple of days later, Sergi went to see his uncle, equipped with the MacBook he’d persuaded him to buy for him while he was (theoretically) attending his computer course.
“Where do you want me to open the account, Uncle?” he enquired as he switched his computer on. “Switzerland? Or the Cayman Islands?”
“Panama,” the old patriarch decreed. “I’ve heard that’s where the most important people keep their cash. Do you know what rate of interest you get in Panama?”
“These tax havens,” improvised Sergi as he keyed something into a document he’d previously prepared at home with a template and photos he’d found on Google, “don’t pay interest. They just keep your money. You don’t pay any taxes, obviously, and that’s the joy of it. In fact, it’s as if you were keeping your money in a mattress, but with someone keeping an eye on it 24/7.”
“Oh!”
Sergi printed out the document and gave it to his uncle. You could see a bank logo next to the heading, “El Panameño”, consisting of the silhouette of a pink flamingo. Underneath was what looked like an account number, and other figures that really meant nothing at all. Sergi hadn’t put himself out looking for a name and a logo. Looking online, he had discovered there was a small island by the name of Flamenco, and the name had immediately made him think of The Flamingo, the most famous of the casinos set up by the Mafia in Las Vegas. He just couldn’t resist having fun using the bird as the logo of a bank that didn’t even exist.
“When can I start putting money into the account?” asked Senyor Benito, his eyes flashing impatiently.
“Tomorrow. First, I’ve got to organize an appointment with a bank middleman, who’ll make sure the money reaches the branch.”
The old patriarch looked happy enough. “Let me know when you’ve got the meeting, and I’ll come and pick you up in the Mercedes.”
The following morning Senyor Benito stuffed seven hundred thousand euros in wads of used notes into a
backpack and drove Sergi to a bar on Barcelona’s Carrer Muntaner. Senyor Benito rarely ventured into the city, and he knew that his appearance – his gypsy sideburns, imperial T-shirt, braces, straw boater and the oxygen bottle he was forced to cart around because of his emphysema – might catch certain people’s eyes in some parts of the capital. His nephew asked him to stay inside his car, shotgun at the ready in case there was a problem. Sergi had donned his Sunday best in order not to look out of place among all the executives in suits and ties, and walked into the bar, emerging a few minutes later without the backpack. He handed his uncle a sheet of paper in the form of a bank statement which recorded a deposit of €685,000, all certified with a signature and stamp.
“The missing €15,000 is down to the bank and middleman’s commissions,” Sergi told his uncle, watching for his reaction out of the corner of his eye.
“I expected there’d be a cost,” nodded Senyor Benito. “But, you know, I thought it’d be a lot more.”
Sergi cursed silently (he’d not been sure what to pocket in terms of fees) and asked his uncle to get going. He had to go back to the bar and tie up a few loose ends with the middleman, he told him, as regards future transactions, and then he wanted to go to Decathlon and buy Marisol a present. Pleased with a receipt which registered that he now belonged to the millionaires’ club with accounts in a tax haven, he blessed his bright idea of paying for his nephew to go on that computer course and told his driver (one of his brothers-in-law) to head off back to La Mina. Sergi, who’d told the bartender he’d gone out for a smoke, went back in, finished his beer and retrieved the backpack with the money. Then he caught a bus to Plaça de Catalunya and a train to Sant Adrià.
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories Page 9
