“You are Mr Masdéu, aren’t you?” she whispered, addressing my brother.
“That depends,” replied Borja, smiling sweetly.
“Carry on walking. We don’t have a lot of time,” said the stranger, looking all around and breaking into a brisk walk next to Borja. “They might be trailing me.”
“I’m sorry, but you are?…”
“What business of yours is that? You have something that doesn’t belong to you,” she continued.
She was thin, average height, with dark hair that was cut pageboy style. She was dressed so as not to draw attention to herself, but even so couldn’t hide the fact she was svelte and shapely. The small area of her face her rain-splashed glasses allowed a glimpse of was youthful and soft-skinned, and her small nose and highly sensual lips gave me a hard-on. I didn’t register this at a first glance, but I am almost definite she was wearing a wig.
“Yes, I think I know what you are referring to,” Borja snapped, winking. “But must we really keep walking?”
“I told you they are probably following me. It’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Borja stopped dead in his tracks. “Hey, nobody ever said anything about—”
“I’ve come to give you this.” She took a mobile phone from her pocket and gave it to Borja. “And to say that someone will be contacting you. Be prepared…”
“Be prepared? But you just listen, I—”
“I must be off. Don’t try to pull a fast one, or you will regret it.”
And she left us gawping into space, rushed across the street, and left in her wake a trail of scent and mystery until she vanished from sight.
“Dangerous! She said it was dangerous,” I yelped, forgetting I was screaming at Borja in the middle of the street. “And who the hell is she?”
“I don’t know. My contact for the business over that statue, I expect. But I don’t understand why she gave me this mobile, if they already have my number,” my brother mumbled, not bothering to hide that he, too, was bemused.
“And that damned stone statuette is in my home!” I growled.
“I’m sorry, bro. I didn’t think that… But don’t you worry. They don’t know you’ve got it. They can’t possibly know.”
“And who are they? If you don’t mind!”
“I don’t have a clue. The antique dealer in Amsterdam said it would all be very straightforward: a person would contact me via my mobile and give me a time to hand over the statue. There must have been a change of plan.”
“Well, you’d better phone him and find out what the hell is going on!”
“It doesn’t work like that. He contacts me. I don’t have a way of ringing him.”
“You’ve got to find another hiding place, Pep. I don’t want that statue in my house.”
“Quite right,” he replied. “I’ll drop by your place on Sunday night when we leave the meditation centre and take it with me.”
“And where will you hide it?”
“In my flat, I suppose. At least, until I can think of somewhere better…”
“Do you know what? I have just lost the little appetite I had.”
“Me too.”
Even so, we had lunch in the restaurant. Borja gradually recovered his sangfroid and by the time the second course had arrived he had convinced me it was all a wheeze to frighten him and prepare the ground to pay him less money than he’d agreed with the antiquarian. While we were drinking our coffees, he took the mobile out and put it on the table.
“It’s not what you’d call the latest model, is it?” he remarked with a smile. In fact, I hadn’t seen a model like that in a long, long time.
“So what are we going to do?”
“Nothing much. Wait for them to call,” Borja replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“But mobiles are banned from the meditation centre,” I retorted. “I left mine at home…”
“You’re a real baby! I don’t expect you can smoke either, but I don’t intend going three days without a smoke.”
“And what if they catch you?”
“Eduard, we’re big boys now. This chakra and cosmic-harmony business is baloney to soak the rich, can’t you see that? And what’s more, we’re going of our free will and paying a fortune for the ride. I intend on smoking the odd cigarette. Whatever they may say,” he added, shrugging his shoulders yet again.
“Know what? I’ll be back in a second,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’m off to buy a packet of cigarettes.”
PART II
Alícia Cendra had long since given up trying to pick up boyfriends in bars. That was the past. Now she was about to hit fifty, the only men who approached with a saucy glint in their eyes when they spotted her sitting with only a glass for company were solitary seventy-year-olds with the stink of alcohol on their breath and a box of Viagra in their pocket. She no longer interested men, or at least the ones she fancied, so no need to lose any sleep over it. As the women’s magazines that she read at work or the hairdresser’s explained, she had simply become invisible. The hint of cellulite her clothes revealed and the incipient crow’s feet no cream could erase disabled her from competing against the skinny, soft-fleshed bodies of the young girls who marked out the night-time territory to the lilt of the latest hit song. No, picking men up in bars was no longer an option for her. She had gradually been forced to resign herself to that sad fact.
Winning the love of a man was a slow, painstaking task in this new pre-menopausal stage in her life. A long-term project that required time, patience and hours in the beauty parlour and, above all, planning. Alícia Cendra had assumed by now that going out at night in the hope of coming across a second Prince Charming – her first had been the husband who’d abandoned her for one of those silly young things – meant coming home drunk and depressed, and, worst of all, alone. Consequently, on the rare occasions when she did go to a bar for a drink, she did so without high hopes, only to sip one of her favourite cocktails, and, jostled by a noisy crowd, she would fantasize secretly about the man who had recently become the great love of her life, Dr Horaci Bou.
When she left the cinema that night, she decided to go to the Dry Martini for a drink before going to bed. She felt like a margarita. Nobody was expecting her home, apart from her cat, and, even though she’d have to be up early in the morning to go to work, it wasn’t that late. Now spring was in the air and longer days were here, she found home oppressive. She had few women friends, and those she did still have had husbands and better things to do on a Thursday night than go out with a divorcee who lived absorbed in a very different mental world. Alícia’s friends felt envy rather than pity. They imagined her childless and without commitments, happily enjoying a life that was beyond their reach as married women.
Reality was somewhat different. True enough she entered and departed relationships without having to explain herself to anybody, but at the end of the day she couldn’t get used to living by herself. The silence that dominated her flat, a silence too eloquent to be broken by the sound of television or radio, overwhelmed her and translated into attacks of anguish Alícia fought off by frequent visits to her refrigerator and bouts of cleaning that wiped her out. But she could hardly tell her girlfriends that, because she felt that if she confessed she couldn’t stand so much freedom they’d think she wasn’t a modern woman and would phone her even less.
Dr Bou had been a stroke of luck, and for some time he’d been the focus of her nocturnal fantasies and kept her brain busy with romantic dreams during the day. Dr Bou, the man known to her and the rest of his patients simply as Horaci, was her therapist, the man dedicated to healing her body and soul in this new and crucial stage of her life. She had met him through Abril, a work colleague on a six-month temporary contract, who was always buttering her up in the hope it would be made permanent, because Alícia was administrative head of the department where they worked. Abril was hooked on alternative therapies and always singing the praises of the centre for meditation that Dr Bou ran
in Sarrià and all things you could learn there. One afternoon, they both went there after finishing at the office. It was a turning point in Alícia’s life.
Dr Bou inspected her chakras and solemnly stated, with the hint of a smile on his lips, that her second chakra, Svadhisthana, wasn’t working harmoniously, and her seventh, the Sahasrara, was totally gummed up. As she hadn’t a clue what chakras were, the doctor embarked on a long explanation of how these were the body’s centres of energy, according to Vedic philosophy, and how, consequently, people’s physical and mental well-being depended on them working properly. Yoga and meditation, Oriental disciplines that went back thousands of years, would help her re-establish the proper functioning of her chakras, or so he said. What’s more, if she applied the principles of feng shui to the arrangement of her furniture at home, principles Abril had mentioned to her more than once, she’d corral positive energies and block out negative ones. They held short beginners’ courses in the centre and the results were spectacular, the doctor assured her, dazzling her with his dentist’s smile.
Alícia left the centre in a spin. Apart from being charming, Horaci was sensitive and handsome. Beneath long eyelashes, his dark myopic eyes radiated magnetic power saturated with a mystical allure she found hypnotic and difficult to shake off. She immediately felt drawn to him and without a second thought signed up to the Zen Moments meditation centre and became a devoted pupil of Dr Horaci Bou.
Horaci was personally responsible for the meditation classes, and Alícia was quick to turn him into the second love of her life. An impossible love, like all great loves, because the doctor was married and, as he confessed to her one day, he remained faithful to his wife. As she was so in love with him, Alícia was always at a loss to know what to say, and, whenever she opened her mouth, she realized what a fool she must seem. Nevertheless, one day when she’d stocked up on red wine at the supermarket and on incense and candles at the ethnic products shop, she found the strength to invite him to her flat with a view to seduction. However, her plan was thwarted.
Dr Bou turned down her invitation in a highly intelligent manner. He apologized, saying that his marriage was going through a rocky patch and he wasn’t sure he could survive the test of spending an evening alone with such an attractive, sensitive woman as her without falling in love. In truth, he sweetly snubbed Alícia with his flattery, but from that day on, as his words had half-opened the door of hope, she kept fantasizing about a mortal illness or timely accident that would remove his wife from the scene and turn her dream of becoming the second Mrs Bou into a reality.
She had taken the first sip of her margarita when she saw him sitting at a table at the back of the bar. He wasn’t alone and she wasn’t his wife, whom Alícia knew. Even so, it wasn’t difficult to see that the emotional intimacy between this woman and Bou had been spawned in bed: his hand on her thigh, his passionate looks, the words he whispered in her ear. Alícia gulped down her margarita and asked the waiter for another, feeling her voice shake and her cheeks redden.
Horaci had deceived her. He hadn’t rejected her because he wanted to remain faithful to his wife, as he’d said, but because he already had his bit on the side. The rumours that were rife in the centre were true. And this other woman, the object of his attentions, was no youngster with a lithe, supple body, but a woman her age, and nothing out of the ordinary. That made her even more furious. What did that bitch have that she didn’t? More class? More cash, perhaps? She knocked back her margarita, asked for the bill and walked out of the bar with a broken heart, blurry eyes and a snotty nose.
Once in the taxi she started to wrestle with an idea. By the time she opened the door to her flat, she had reached a decision. That was it. The time had come to give up, to accept she’d never find a man with whom it was worth the turmoil of falling in love, that she would never be happy again. The most she could hope for at her age was to grow old eating ice cream and drinking vodka in front of the TV, like the woman in that film. Faced by such an unappetizing future, she might as well end it. It was time to bring the curtain down.
She went to the chemist’s and bought the pills, then opened a bottle of vintage Rioja and put an opera on her CD player at home. She didn’t really like the opera but she felt La bohème was a more appropriate soundtrack to suicide than Julio Iglesias, her favourite crooner. She sat on her sofa, took her shoes off and started stuffing pills, washing them down with Rioja. There were almost two hundred, in small bottles, and it took her some time to empty them. Luckily, they were small and easy to swallow.
At around two a.m., after seeing off the Rioja and starting on a Penedés, expecting death through overdosing on homeopathic pills at any moment, she got terrible stomach ache. She felt the need to vomit and shit all at the same time, but, as she was drunk and her head was in a spin, she didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. Prostrate on the floor in the hallway in her flat, she realized the light had gone out on the theatrical scene she had been imagining. The forensic investigator would find a pathetic, drunken fifty-year-old swimming in her own sick and shit in the hallway at home, and that would be the only thing that everyone, Horaci included, would mention at her funeral.
Feeling miserably sick, she managed to reach the phone and ring a girlfriend for help. Half an hour later, an ambulance was rushing her to the emergency ward at the Sant Pau hospital, its siren wailing away. The results of the tests they did showed that the vomit and diarrhoea were caused by alcohol and the huge bag of sweets she’d crunched at the cinema. The two hundred homeopathic pills had made no impact whatsoever. The doctor who saw her didn’t take her attempted suicide at all seriously.
“By the way,” she told her as she signed her discharge form, “I’ll give you a prescription for an ointment to cure mange. You should use it over the course of three days.”
“Mange?” exclaimed Alícia, totally at a loss. “What are you talking about? Those blotches are brought on by a psychosomatic illness!” And as she ran her eyes over the red patches on her arms and legs, she added, “Don’t you see? It’s nerves.”
“No way!” retorted her doctor, shaking her head. “It’s mange. We’ve had a few outbreaks recently. But no need to worry: use this ointment and give your sheets a good wash. It’ll all be gone in three days.”
Alícia had been suffering from blotchy skin and itches all over her body for over seven months. Horaci had examined them and assured her that they were stress-related, and would disappear as soon as balance was restored to her chakras. That was when he had prescribed those homeopathic pills – six a day – that she’d used in her attempted suicide. The doctor couldn’t have been so far out in his diagnosis.
“Hey, I can’t possibly have mange,” she insisted, choked and deeply embarrassed. “Do you think I’m some dirty slut living like a down-and-out? You could damned well eat your dinner off the floor in my flat!”
“That’s neither here nor there,” replied the doctor as she signed the prescription. “You could have caught it anywhere you’ve been in contact with someone who’s got it. Do you go to a gym?”
No, Alícia did not go to a gym, but all of a sudden she remembered the grey fitted carpet where they did their yoga exercises and the itching Pietat, a fellow pupil at the centre, was always complaining about. Horaci had also told her it was stress and prescribed the same pills, though they didn’t seem to make any impact on her either.
She thanked the doctor and got up from the bunk. What if that young doctor was right and the problem that had been torturing her for months could be solved in three days by applying an ointment? And what if that whole chakra scene was simply stuff and nonsense? Her head still in a spin, she took off the hospital gown, put on the dirty clothes she had been wearing on admission and left her little cubicle in a state of shock. As she walked through the emergency ward, her brain kept buzzing. How could she have been so gullible? Why hadn’t she listened to what everyone had told her and gone to see the dermatologist in the local medical centre?
&
nbsp; She left the hospital half sleepwalking on the arm of her friend. What with the hangover and the diazepam she’d been given to fight off her next attack of anguish, the world had become a very confused place. However, inside her head, a word started to ring as forcefully as those absurd mantras she had to learn at the meditation centre. Her friend tried to calm her, but she didn’t feel like chatting and, in the end, they walked to her place in complete silence. Once in her flat, she showered and let her friend prepare a cup of camomile tea and put her to bed.
“I feel much better. But I’m tired and need some sleep,” she told her. “You go, and don’t worry about me.”
The fact is Alícia simply wanted to be alone. She had a lot to think about and a new reason for living: she wanted to make Horaci pay for the ridiculous farce she’d been part of during all those months. What was it people said? That vengeance was a dish best served cold? Hot or cold, Dr Bou would regret all his lies and hypocritical smiles, his sugary pills and gross incompetence. If it was the last thing she did, she would find a way to wreak her revenge on that man who’d made a real fool of her by taking advantage of her ignorance and trust.
So what if she was then reincarnated as a beetle.
10
After lunch we went back to Borja’s flat to pick up our bags and go to Zen Moments. When we walked into the meditation centre we found four people in the queue at reception. In front of us were a pair in their late twenties, who seemed to be friends because they were so deep in conversation, a very courteous, silver-haired, well-preserved gentleman who immediately caught Borja’s eye, and a woman around the fifty mark carrying a bag that looked on the big side if it only contained the pyjamas and two changes of underwear we’d been instructed to bring. In the meantime, people kept entering and leaving the building; some who walked past had just had a shower and their hair was still damp.
Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing Page 8
