The problem was I had believed it before, and I still did then; and suppose he had embellished it a little, with the undercover stuff and his lies about Caballero being involved with Energi, and about the breakin. I convinced myself that he’d done it to keep the Mayfields’ involvement secret and maybe also in the hope that I’d hang in there and help him, after Loman and Venable, his badly chosen security team, had turned on him.
What I did know for certain was what had happened to us after we were reunited in Sevilla, and what had happened ultimately to him and Auntie Ade.
So why had Ludo filmed my house? Since I had come to believe the rest of her tale I decided to accept her explanation, that Frank was thinking of hiding in St Martí. I wished I could ask him, but still I concluded loyally that he had indeed concocted a brilliant scheme to help his best pal out of a jam, and it had gone fatally wrong on him.
For the next couple of days, I focused on Tom alone. I took him to a cricket Test match at Lords . . . he knows all the players, and loved it; I slept through much of it . . . and for a cruise on the Thames . . . he’s been nagging me ever since to buy a boat . . . before we headed back to Spain, back to our usual, humdrum, sun-splashed existence, filling in time before we were due to leave for California.
For his age, Tom’s a great reader. In no time, he’d devoured all six books I’d brought him from Dad’s. For my age, I’m not. I found the first of mine to be a struggle, which eventually I gave up and turned to the second, plucked in a hurry, and completely at random, from the shelf. It was called Reverse Circle, by a guy named Michael Jacks. I sat down to read it one night, on the front terrace, when Tom had gone to bed.
I had reached page thirty when I began to feel a tingle. By page one hundred I was aware that I was sitting stiff and upright in my chair, reading as fast as I could, and that I couldn’t stop. It was almost three in the morning when I put the book down. The square below was deserted, the mosquito population was well fed, my eyes were standing out like organ stops, and I was wide awake.
With certain subtle differences, I had just read the story of the Hotel Casino d’Amuseo scam, page by page. Ex-con comes up with a brilliant wheeze, recruits team in Italy, finds some Mafia interests to come up with front-end money, and the fund-raising gets under way. Then it all goes pear shaped, the Mafia figure out what’s happening, ex-con’s wife is kidnapped, and he’s chased halfway across Europe before . . .
And that’s why I found myself staring, gasping, and finally laughing, alone in the middle of the night. In the end, with the aid of a gullible accomplice, the ex-con and his wife get clean away.
By next morning, it didn’t seem so funny. I sat outside Mesón del Conde with Tom, watching an American coffee with a little milk get cold before me, happy for my son to devour my croissant as well as his own, my brows knitted as I racked my brains thinking how I could prove what I suspected or, better, rid myself of my worst fears. And then I remembered. I replayed a scene in my mind, dialogue between me and . . .
I looked at my mobile. The signal was just strong enough for me to make a call. This time it didn’t take me as long to get through to Intendant Gomez, and to make an appointment to see him in his office in an hour.
I took Tom with me. He would have stayed on the beach, but I wouldn’t allow that. Normally I’d use the slower road to Girona, but that day I headed for the autopista, bombing down it and paying the toll at exit seven. Gomez was ready for me when I arrived. I asked Tom to stay in the waiting room, found him a magazine, and headed for the intendant’s office.
‘Do you have the ashes?’ I asked him.
‘Of course. Do you want to take them away?’
‘I want to see them.’
He looked puzzled, but he agreed. He led me along to a store room, issued an order to a clerk, then led me on into a second room, windowless, with a table set under a strip light. I waited, until the orderly entered with something a little bigger than a hat-box. ‘This is all of them,’ he told Gomez, shooting me a strange glance.
The intendant was equally puzzled when I took the lid off, peered inside at the greyish contents and started to sift through them with my bare hands, feeling for anything other than ash and bone chips. I worked away for ten minutes and more, until I was sure I had gone through everything, every last scrap of cremated tissue.
‘Is this everything?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he assured me. ‘I supervised the recovery myself, I made sure there wasn’t a single piece left there. Why? Are you going to tell me what you’re looking for?’ He was staring at my arms; they were grey to the elbow.
I swallowed, hard. ‘Mr Gomez, my aunt had silicon breast implants. They would have survived the fire, altered perhaps, but they would have survived in some form. Also her front teeth were capped, steel-bonded porcelain on gold posts. Was there any melted gold?’
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Can I see everything else that was taken from the site?’
‘Sure.’ He left, returning ten minutes later with another, smaller, box. I tipped its contents on to the table and peered at them. I saw the remnants of my taser gun, two scraps that might once have been mobiles, and three shrunken relics that looked as if they had once been credit cards. They were fused to a metal clip that I recognised as having come from Frank’s Gucci billfold. I checked them carefully, looking for a fourth, but there was no sign of it. Either it had been destroyed completely . . . or it had never been in the fire.
I was about to call a halt to my search, when my hand bumped against the melted taser. I turned it over and saw something small, sticking in it rather than to it. I hadn’t been aware that I’d been looking for it, but as soon as I saw it I knew that I had. I pulled it out and held it up.
All the enamel had gone, but the metal had survived the blaze in more or less its original form. I looked at it under the light. It was still recognisable, as a lapel pin in the shape of a maple leaf.
‘Do we have a problem?’ Intendant Gomez murmured.
‘I rather think we do. These ashes, they’re not my cousin and my aunt. They’re the guys who kidnapped them. Somehow Frank got the better of them, killed them, then did this to them, very efficiently, in the hope, well founded as it turned out, that we’d assume this was him and Adrienne. I don’t know how he managed it, but that little sod’s got away with everything.’
‘Everything? What do you mean?’
‘I mean he’s stolen seventy-seven million euros.’
The policeman sucked his teeth. ‘Maybe not everything,’ he exclaimed, ‘but damned close.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ he conceded. ‘But it could be better put. It could be, what are we going to do? Two deaths have been registered, by you. I have been chasing two murderers and now I find that they are dead, but so, officially, is the man who killed them. As for the money, was that stolen in Spain?’
‘No.’
‘Then I have no jurisdiction. That’s not my business.’ He looked at me. ‘I believe that in English you have a saying, something about covering your backside. Is that correct?’
‘It’s slightly less polite than that, but you’ve caught the meaning.’
‘Then that’s what I’m going to do, by doing nothing at all. I suggest, respectfully, that you do the same. You can take those ashes away, if you want. Otherwise I’m going to take them to a hill that I pass on my way home and release them.’
I thought about the old Dylan song, ‘Blowing In The Wind’. At that moment I couldn’t come up with a better solution. I walked out and left him to it.
Forty-four
It nagged at me, though. The more I thought about it, the whole damn business nagged at me. Frank had conned everybody, from the word go. Justin, his best friend, had told him about his wife’s problem. He had recalled that non-selling novel that his mother’s client had written and that undoubtedly he had read, and he had stolen the plot, lock, stock and smoking barre
l.
He had conned Justin, Ludmila, Caballero, Hermann Gresch, every-damn-body. Who had fed Gresch his dope in number forty-seven? Frank, of course, and I was willing to bet that the final delivery had been spiked. Where had he found him? I took a guess, one that wouldn’t be hard to verify, with Justin’s help: in prison, and if so, sure as hell, he’d had a drug problem there too. The guy had been a tool, no more.
But weren’t we all? I thought back to the time I had spent with him. Most of all, he’d conned me: I’d been cast in the role of the gullible accomplice.
From the moment we’d hooked up in Sevilla, I’d been the softest touch of them all, falling for all the bluff and double-bluff. My fake abduction, set up on Frank’s orders by the desperate Ludmila, the rescue, painful for her, the frantic flight across Spain, had all been fake, and its ultimate purpose had been . . . to make me an unassailable witness to Frank’s death and, in the process, his ticket to a life of luxury. Yes, Ludo had been stupid, but what did that make me?
Yet, I realised, at the time it had all been real, so real that for much of my time as a ‘fugitive’ I’d been genuinely, authentically scared. My cousin had to be some sort of a dark genius, the king of the fraudsters.
Worst of all, the cunning, needle-dick swine had even conned me into screwing him on board that damn sleeper train, with that scared, trembling act of his. I was sure that if I checked back, I’d find out that ours hadn’t been the last compartment available, as he’d claimed. Then there had been the next night, in the pool . . . only . . . No, I had to admit that maybe that was my idea as much as his, maybe even more.
And then there was Auntie Ade. He had conned her, too, into coming after him. Yes, of course he had. Except why, exactly, had he asked Ludmila to video my house? He’d had no intention of hiding out with me; clearly that was crap. So why had he done it? There could only have been one reason for that. He wanted to show Willie Venable the lie of the land when it came time for him to snatch Adrienne. But how had he known that she’d ever be there?
Because they both bloody well knew, that’s why. My outrageous old aunt had been in on it from the start. Those ashes had shown she was no more dead than he was; she and Frank had run off with the loot together!
As I pieced it all together I looked across at my son; he was digging a hole in the sand a few feet away from where I lay on the beach. ‘Tom,’ I asked him, ‘remember when you came back to the house and found that Aunt Adrienne had gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you take Charlie for a walk along the beach that morning? You know that dogs aren’t allowed there at this time of year.’
‘She told me to,’ he replied. ‘I told her that I wasn’t supposed to, but she made me. She said I’d get no breakfast if I didn’t.’
The old bitch! She’d bullied him out of the house so that she could pull her disappearing act with Venable, Frank’s hired gun. Except . . .
Another huge ‘but’ exploded before my eyes. ‘But why would Frank hire real hit-men if all they were doing was role-playing?’ I asked, in a whisper. ‘And if they were pros, how did he ever get the drop on them and kill them?’ But, then, we’d all been Frank’s tools, hadn’t we?
That’s when it stopped being even slightly funny and got scary again.
When we were done on the beach, and Tom was in the shower washing off the sand before we went to Can Roura for dinner, I booted up my computer and went on line. Just for fun, I Googled up the names ‘Sebastian Loman’ and ‘Willie Venable’. I got no hits for hit-men, but I did come up with a fistful for Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the great twentieth-century American playwrights. Take Willy Loman, from Death of a Salesman, and Sebastian Venable, from Suddenly Last Summer, switch forenames and voilà.
The two ‘killers’ were fictional characters. Which meant?
I entered both plays in the search bar, added Spain, and in an instant I found myself looking at something called the Toronto Theatre Arts Group. The previous winter it had undertaken a tour of expat communities across Iberia, bringing the joys of Miller and Hemingway to retired coppers and retired villains along the Algarve and the Costa del Sol, with a one week stop-over in . . . Sevilla.
I was hot on the trail. It took me only a few more seconds to find the group’s website. Its menu was extensive and included a section labelled ‘Performers’. I clicked on it, and a dozen faces popped up, with a short biography below each one.
The guys I was looking for were there. ‘Sebastian Loman’ was, in reality, Jerry Martis, from Uxbridge, Ontario. ‘Willie Venable’ was Jeff Paton, from Rochester, New York. Poor bastards.
They were actors, hired to play unorthodox roles for big bucks, I guessed. And Frank had written the script. He had shown them to Caballero and Ludmila, by having them ‘bodyguard’ her in Sevilla. He had sent them to intercept me in the tapas bar, to drop me their names, and feed me the clue that had taken us to Masia Josanto where, of course, they had been careful to make themselves known in advance. He had told Jerry to be in the Mezquita for me to spot. He had planned Jeff’s ‘abduction’ of his mother, with the aid of the video footage that the simpleton Ludmila had shot for him, and, no doubt, he had set up his own ‘kidnapping’, being careful to leave me his rucksack, with the mobile, so that it would be me who unravelled Adrienne’s video clue. Finally, he had put the trap for me in place, the one that had fooled me completely, so terrifying had it been.
Those two guys had earned their money. They hadn’t deserved the pay-off they’d been given. I knew what had happened. Just as ‘Lidia’ and Caballero had believed in Sevilla that their gun had been loaded with blanks, so had Jerry and Jeff, until they had handed it back to Frank and found out the terminal truth.
So that was it, the whole story. My cousin wasn’t just a con-man. He’d done what he had to in bringing down the curtain on a superb performance. He’d become a killer too. And my aunt had been a part of it . . . unless, of course, her little bastard had buried her somewhere else. I wouldn’t put that past him. I wouldn’t put anything past him now.
Forty-five
I had two more calls to make, before I finally put the affair to bed.
En route to Los Angeles, Tom and I stopped over in Toronto, where I hired a car and drove for an hour and a half to the home of Mrs Lina Martis, of Uxbridge, Ontario. She was in her early fifties and she was worried to distraction about what had happened to her son, Jerry. She hadn’t heard from him in months, not since he had told her that he and his boyfriend, Jeff, had been hired for this weird project by an English guy. He hadn’t given her any detail, but said that there was a quarter of a million Canadian in it for each of them.
I didn’t give her my real name. I called myself Lidia Bromberg. I did give her a distorted, but still recognisable lapel pin, and suggested that she contact Intendant Gomez of the Mossos d’Esquadra, to report her son missing, and that she also should let the Canadian Embassy know what she had done. I left the poor woman in a state of shock.
My second call was on the way home. We stopped off in London, and there, in Mark Kravitz’s flat, I had another meeting with the rodent-like Moira from MI5. Mark had arranged it, at my request. This time the woman was polite, cautious, and curious.
I told her my story in every detail, save two. I invented names for Justin and Ludmila Mayfield. (Yes, an investigation might trip over Ludo, but very quickly it would look the other way, given who her husband was.)
I gave her my copy of Reverse Circle, by Michael Jacks, and advised her to read it. I told her how much Frank, and probably his mother, had got away with, in terms of cash and murder. I said that, although I had no proof, I believed that my cousin might now be using the name Jason Lee. Finally, I asked her what her service, if it was really interested in major crime, proposed to do about it.
‘We’ll look out for them,’ she replied.
As far as I know, they’re looking still.
Me? I’m watching the sun rise out of the sea, from my bedroom t
errace. One day my Tom will deign to join me, but not yet, not yet. He’s his own man.
Author’s Note
There is no house in St Martí d’Empúries that corresponds to the one where Primavera and Tom claim to live.
Shirley Gash’s home is fictitious also, as is Mark Kravitz’s flat, Emil Caballero’s White House, and the Mayfields’ upwardly mobile terrace.
There is no such book as Reverse Circle and no such author as Michael Jacks, although my buddy Michael Jecks, the UK’s foremost author of medieval murder mysteries, gets pretty damn close.
The rest of the businesses, scenery and locations described here are all real, if ‘tweaked’ on occasion.
Welcome to the laid-back world of St Martí d’Empúries, where the sun never sets unless it feels like it.
Visca Catalunya.
QJ
Inhuman Remains Page 26
