Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  Cristòfol stumbled upon the most promising clue—or, let’s just say, another piece of the mystery—in a greasy dive in Carrer Sardenya. Even the name was prescient: Bar Carambola, the “stroke of luck” bar. When he went in, a minute or two before midday, they’d just opened and there were no drinkers. In the depths of the bar, two little girls were sitting in front of a television set watching cartoons. A bartender was restocking the fridges. The owner was leaning on the bar flicking through a sports paper. His eyes were puffy and ringed with dark circles. Cristòfol showed him the portrait of Gabriel. The man made a strange sound like a snorting horse—bruuf-f-f-f—and looked even more loutish, at which point the toothpick fell from his mouth to the floor.

  “He used to come here on Friday nights,” he said. “He met up with a group to play cards. They’d be at it for hours. They used to begin with low stakes, but the betting always heated up after a while.”

  The oafish bar owner remembered Gabriel. He remembered him because he had a very peculiar way of playing, holding his head high and always looking dour. He’d gone up in smoke all of a sudden.

  “If he’s still alive, he’ll certainly have problems. That’s why you’re looking for him, isn’t it? I knew he’d end up badly. The way he concentrated so hard on a game of cards . . . Either he ended up in the clink, or someone rearranged his face.” He went quiet as if he had nothing else to say but then added meditatively, “The fact is he knew how to win, the fucker.”

  Making it clear that he didn’t want to talk, the bar owner inserted another toothpick and went on turning the pages of the sports paper. Cristòfol asked for a coffee, out of courtesy. The bartender, badly shaven and about thirty years old, served him with a wink. When he raised his cup, Cristòfol found a folded paper napkin underneath. He picked it up and glanced over at the bartender. The bartender pretended to look away but nodded his head. The owner was still absorbed in the sports news. Cristòfol cupped the note in the palm of his hand and read it. There was a nine-figure number and the words “Phone me tonight.” Then he paid for his coffee and left without saying good-bye.

  Back in the mezzanine again after we’d met up at the agreed time, Cristòfol was jittery, and the bit of paper was burning a hole in his pocket. We shared the results of our inquiries and, once again, confirmed what we already knew: Our father had the ability to lose himself in a crowd, to pass unnoticed. And the place where he really excelled at anonymity was in the house where he lived. We spent the afternoon consulting the other residents in the building, and the results were shockingly meager. In three of the nine other apartments they wouldn’t even open the door to us. Three other neighbors denied knowing him or even having seen him on the stairs (since he lived on the mezzanine, Gabriel wouldn’t have used the elevator). Two chatty old ladies who lived in next-door apartments on the first floor opened their doors together, like a pair of coconspirators. They studied the portrait and assured us that this man was the “ghost” who’d hidden himself away in the mezzanine apartment some time ago. This creature, they informed us, had died about a year ago. They themselves had called the police to report a terrible smell coming from the apartment. Behind the whole thing, they said, was some murky story, some high-level affair of state, because the government pretended that nothing had happened.

  “He must have been a Russian spy. Or American. A leftover from Franco’s times.”

  “Or an extraterrestrial. They kidnapped him without making a sound so they could analyze him.”

  “Sometimes we heard him speaking foreign languages.”

  “He was communicating with his superiors. Somebody doesn’t want that to be known, but that’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “We’re not giving up on this and we’re still in a state of high alert. We’ve been hearing voices from the mezzanine again, for some months now.”

  “It’s always at weekends. Something’s going on there.”

  We said they weren’t mistaken and asked for their help. We didn’t want to disappoint them. If they heard any noise in the apartment during the week, or more conversations, they should inform us. They were so thrilled we feared they might have a seizure.

  The woman in the mezzanine apartment on the other side of the wall separating it from our father’s was an Italian called Giuditta—which we knew from her mailbox—and she was the most interesting resident in the building. The first time Cristòfol went to the apartment in Carrer Nàpols, she heard him arrive, came out, and called to him from the landing. They chatted for a bit. She knew about Gabriel’s disappearance and was very sorry about it. The police had questioned her a couple of times before registering him as missing, but unfortunately she didn’t know anything. Gabriel had never been given to chatting with neighbors, had he? Then she offered to collect any mail that might arrive.

  This time, when we Christophers knocked at the door, she opened it just a crack so we could see her only as far as the chain allowed. Cristòfol thought she was more aloof than on the first occasion. We said we needed to talk to her. Had she heard any noises recently? We suspected that her neighbor . . . She asked us to wait a moment and closed the door again. She took two or three minutes (running around the house, tidying up, turning off a radio, banging a door) and then opened up again, and this time was slightly more communicative. She’d changed into a dress and put on a bit of makeup, but neither the rouge on her cheeks nor a touch of lipstick concealed the fact that she was rattled. She seemed uncomfortable.

  Somewhat stiffly, she invited us into her living room. She didn’t offer us anything to drink, probably because she wanted us out of there quickly. The living room was a colorful, baroque version of our father’s. The floral curtains and sofas gave it a slightly shabby British touch, like the Fawlty Towers dining room. Her wall-to-wall carpet was in different shades of brown that would have been perfect in a bingo hall. The walls were completely covered with two shelves of books (most with brightly colored spines), paintings of different landscapes, and photographs. Since we were obviously gawking at everything, she told us that she liked reading two very different sorts of books, romantic novels and atlases. Christophe pointed at a black-and-white photo on the wall. A spotlight was shining on a girl hanging upside down from a trapeze, and you could make out some of the structural elements of a circus tent in the background. The girl’s feet were hooked over the trapeze bar and she made it look easy. Her life depended on the tension of those two feet, yet her face transmitted angelic calm.

  “Excuse me, is that you?”

  “Yes, that photo . . .” She sighed. “I wasn’t even sixteen. Imagine. I look at it sometimes and don’t believe it’s me.”

  Senyora Giuditta was over fifty. She still had the svelte, tucked-in figure of a trapeze artiste but her face had the markedly ambiguous expression, halfway between forced happiness and real fatigue, of someone who’s had to pile on makeup every day of her life, of a woman who’s grown old in the circus. Without waiting for us to ask for further details, she was quick to tell us she’d grown up in a circus family—the Cherubini Brothers, as advertized on a framed poster—and had been singled out for the trapeze from an early age. After retiring, she’d stayed on with the circus, working with her family until one day about ten years ago, when they were doing a season in Barcelona, she’d got fed up with her nomadic existence and put an end to it. Shortly afterward, a school employed her as a gym teacher, and she was still working there.

  Tension crept into her voice when we told her that we’d come to see her because someone had been in the apartment the previous day and everything seemed to suggest that the intruder was Gabriel Delacruz himself. He’d taken some things with him. Had she heard anything? The other neighbors . . . She seemed to be listening to us out of courtesy, or because she’d suppressed any desire to talk. Her answers were now short and tetchy. We shouldn’t trust the other neighbors, she said. The two old ladies on the second floor had pinecones for brains. Senyora Giuditta spoke Catalan shot through with
Italianisms, which elevated her words into something almost lyrical. Cristòfol translated them into our own idiolect. She hadn’t spent much time at home recently. No, she hadn’t heard anything the day before. In fact, she’d only seen Gabriel on very few occasions. If they met on the stairs or taking rubbish down in the evening, they had very brief conversations. They talked about the weather, criticized the other neighbors or recommended the odd television program. Sometimes, if she was away, he took delivery of the occasional packet from her book club. We showed her the portrait, and she confirmed that the drawing was quite a good likeness of Gabriel. From what she remembered. Now it must be, let’s see . . . more than a year since she’d seen him. No, she had no clue as to where he might have gone.

  “I can’t tell you anything more, really I can’t.” She stood up to indicate that our time was up. Yet you would have said she enjoyed talking about Gabriel. When we stood up too, she couldn’t resist asking us a favor.

  “Could the four of you sit down together on the sofa? Just for a moment, that’s all.”

  It was a reasonably long comfortable sofa but still quite a squeeze with all of us sitting there. We waited for Giuditta to say something. It was clear that she wanted to look at the four of us all lined up like the Dalton Gang.

  “You’re Gabriel’s four sons, aren’t you?” she finally said but didn’t wait for us to confirm it. “You’re very alike. When you started coming here at weekends, that’s what I guessed. One day Gabriel opened up more than usual and told me he had four sons. From four different women. In four different countries. He said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. I didn’t believe him, of course. At the time, I thought he had a very strange way of combating his loneliness, with his dry sense of humor. ‘He’s laughing at himself so as not to despair,’ I decided.”

  After thanking her, we said good-bye and went downstairs. Back on the street, we each drew our own conclusions.

  “I’d say she couldn’t stand our father,” Christophe began.

  “Well, I think she was secretly in love with him, and he didn’t want to know about it,” Christof said.

  “Maybe . . . but did you notice one thing?” Cristòfol asked. “She said that she and Dad talked about TV programs . . . but Dad hasn’t got a television set.”

  “I don’t know what to say, really,” Christopher mused. “But I don’t trust her. While we were piled up there on the sofa, my fingers began twitching and started feeling around. It’s one of my tics. You know how the nether regions of sofas, those yucky spaces between cushions and grooves, are always a treasure trove of surprises. My fingers found this.”

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket and flashed a crumpled-looking poker card. It was the joker. Careful examination of the card revealed that somebody had drawn a little spot on the front of it, a mark.

  After our unhelpful conversation with Giuditta, we went for a walk around the neighborhood and then for a beer. Taking a roundabout route we approached the Carambola. It was open and noisy inside, but we gave it a miss because we didn’t want to put the bartender in a tight spot, if he was still working at that hour. We had our beer in another bar and argued for a while about the definition of “night,” the time we were supposed to phone him. At nine on the dot, as the result of our democratic vote, Cristòfol got out his mobile phone to call the number that was going to bring us a little closer to our father.

  “I want you to get one thing clear from the start: This conversation never happened. Remember that please,” implored a boyish voice, which immediately conjured up the bartender’s scared face. “Now listen. The owner of the bar is a shithead called Feijoo, with a double o. This morning he clammed up like the bastard he is. He used to play too, in those poker games, and he still plays every Friday. They pull down the metal blind and lock themselves in there till daylight. You saw how sleepy he was, didn’t you? I think it’s against the law to play for money like that, but a retired cop from the Guardia Civil comes along too. He’s called Miguélez. Remember that name. Feijoo makes me stay on Fridays to serve them drinks, clean up, and keep an eye on the entrance. Remember I haven’t said a word, eh?” he repeated. He spoke slowly, anxiously, as if what he was saying had been bottled up for a long time. He didn’t allow any time for a response. “That man in your drawing, Delacruz, they called him, always cleaned them out. One way or another and without any fuss, every Friday he turned up he went away with a lot of money. They all lost to him, some more and some less, but they were really pissed off. No one remembered who brought him along in the first place or whose friend he was. He drove them crazy because he wasn’t a show-off and he didn’t drink or carry on like they do when they win a good hand. They tried to distract him by winding him up with their insults but it didn’t work. This Delacruz only drank cognac. He wet his lips and that’s all, always after putting down a card. A glass lasted him a couple of hours. Once Feijoo made me serve him some cheap cognac. It was off and would have made any barracks drunkard throw up, but Delacruz didn’t complain. He asked for a bathroom break and the others said he could go. They were laughing their heads off, but the guy came back after five minutes, a new man. Then he bled them dry once again. You’re still listening, aren’t you?” He paused.

  Cristòfol just managed to say, “Yes, yes, I am,” and the bartender spewed out another torrent of words as if they were burning on his tongue. “I haven’t said a thing, okay? Then one of the regular players started telling Feijoo that this Delacruz was cheating for sure, and they had to catch him at it. Feijoo spent the whole week after that going on and on about it. ‘This Friday’s not going to go by without us catching him red-handed.’ He was like a cracked record. Friday came along, and the other four players turned up in the bar ten minutes early. They brought new cards and marked every joker with a felt-tipped pen, a tiny black spot between the eyebrows, like the third eye of those Hindu gods. Every time you got a joker in your hand you had to look at it carefully. If you got one without the dot, that meant he was using some trick to switch cards. That’s what they suspected. While they were getting ready for the game, Miguélez pulled out a pistol—he put it in his coat pocket. I remember him saying, ‘It’s not loaded but, if necessary, we can give him a nice little fright.’ ” Cristòfol tried to interrupt but, once again, the bartender wouldn’t have it. Seeing that this was going to go on for a while, he clamped the phone to his other ear and signaled to us other Christophers to be patient. “Anyway, I don’t know whether Delacruz was cheating or not, and I don’t care. I liked him because he was taking money off those jerks. That night, I left them drinking around the table, ready for the game, and went outside. I pretended to be sweeping up around the entrance. Ten minutes later I saw Delacruz coming along Carrer Almogàvars. When he was near the door I muttered that he should take care. He stopped, looked at me in surprise: Why and what was the danger, he asked. ‘The boss and his pals have got their knickers in a twist today,’ I said. ‘They put their heads together and they’re out to get you.’ He thanked me. ‘The cop’s even got a pistol, but don’t worry, it’s not loaded,’ I added at the last minute. He strolled into the bar like he didn’t have a care in the world. So sure of himself. After a while, when I went back inside, they’d started playing. Delacruz sat with his back to the bar as usual, and I couldn’t see his face, but his presence always inspired respect. So concentrated and still, you would have sworn he had a blindfold over his eyes and was facing a firing squad. I put his glass of cognac on the table, but he didn’t look at me. I watched the game for a while, coming and going with rum and coke for the rest of them. They were playing in silence, concentrating hard, jumpy as hell and smoking like chimneys. They were all on the lookout. With each game the notes were piling up more and more in the center of the table. It was about an hour before they chilled out and started laughing. They were all winning except for Delacruz, and he was losing and losing, hand over fist. Everything I’m telling you is true, right? I’m not bullshitting. By about two in the m
orning, they’d cleaned him out. We’re talking big money because the starting stake was always very high, about seventy or eighty thousand pesetas. He told them he was pulling out. They’d bled him dry. But Feijoo said no way. They’d all had bad nights and they’d all hung in till the bitter end. Now it was his turn. For me, looking on, it was clear that Delacruz was losing on purpose, but those jerks didn’t get it. They were blinded by the winnings they were going to be sharing out. Delacruz said that wasn’t in the rules of the game. Everyone knows that when you lose everything you can call it a day. To their amazement, he gulped down his cognac, got up, and started to put his coat on. When he turned around to leave, Miguélez yelled, ‘You’re not going anywhere till I say so! Sit down again, you son of a bitch,’ and pointed the pistol at him. Delacruz turned around and saw the gun. He raised his hands as if this was a holdup and his gesture made the situation even hairier. One of the players called for calm. ‘Get back to the table,’ Feijoo ordered. ‘I’ll write you an IOU so you can keep playing, but you’ll be paying me interest, and you’d better swear in your mother’s name that you’ll repay me tomorrow morning, right down to the last peseta . . .’ ‘You mean so he can keep losing,’ Miguélez interrupted, and they all laughed.

  “I was watching Delacruz, full of admiration for him because he had the situation under control. He knew it would turn out like that, just as he’d planned. He sat down again, signed the note, and took Feijoo’s cash. Then he went on till daybreak, losing everything like some kind of bonehead, and the game came to an end. The next day . . . no, the same day, I mean Saturday, Delacruz didn’t show up. Of course he didn’t. No way. Feijoo was foaming at the mouth and, as the hours went by, he was more and more aware that he’d cocked up. More than the money he’d lost, what really pissed him off was that he’d been taken for a ride. He kept taking the note out of his pocket, looking at the scribble that passed for a signature, and asking aloud who this Delacruz was. Where he lived. What he did. Being met by silence got him even more worked up. That night, at closing time, Miguélez the cop appeared. He dropped in to make a big deal of himself, bragging that he’d spent his winnings on taking his wife out to lunch by the sea in Barceloneta and a classy whore after that. When he saw Feijoo in such a foul mood he said he’d sort it out and not to worry. On Monday morning, no problems, he’d drop into the cop shop and get Delacruz’s address.