I stood with my back to the window in Mireia’s living room. After several weeks on the beach, she was like a hyperreal version of herself, her eyes greener than I remembered, her hair streaked with blond. She had never looked more beautiful. That only served to strengthen my resolve, and I decided to tell her I was leaving Barcelona. She wasn’t happy for me. On the contrary. She seemed bewildered, almost outraged, as if I was trying to damage her.
“This is all so sudden,” she kept saying.
I had been living hand to mouth for years, I told her, making a few thousand here, a few thousand there. I had been longing for my life to change, but I had done nothing to bring that change about. I didn’t say that I had been waiting for her. I didn’t say that I had finally realized that she didn’t want a relationship with me, and never would, and that all I could expect from her was frustration and disappointment.
She sank down on to her sofa. “God, my head is spinning.”
I experienced a burst of malicious satisfaction, and Jeanne, the narrator of Giving, came to mind. Vic had been wrong to think the story wasn’t realistic.
“By the way,” I said, turning to the window, “I did what you asked. I told Vic to leave you alone.”
As I stared at the huge bricked-over area, which was deserted that evening, I thought I felt Mireia stiffen behind me.
“My neighbor,” I said, “remember?”
I gave her an abbreviated version of what had happened on the terrace at El Xalet. He had walked out, I told her, and I hadn’t seen him since.
“You know, in the end,” I said, “I don’t think it was as big a deal as you were making out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe he just fancied you. Maybe that whole business with the movie was him trying to impress you.”
Even as I spoke, I felt this objective tone was a departure for me, a by-product or indication of the new freedom I’d attained, and Mireia noticed.
“You almost sound as if you’re on his side,” she said.
I glanced at her over my shoulder. “I did what you asked. I can’t do any more than that.”
“No, of course not.” She looked down at her hands.
I was about to say something more conciliatory, but she spoke first.
“I slept with him.”
“What?”
“I slept with him. Your neighbor.” She paused. “It only happened once.”
I stared at the bricked-over area. The whole world tilted, and I felt sick. When I spoke, I felt my voice coming from somewhere else. Somewhere outside me.
“But you said you were frightened of him. You said—”
“That was after.” She sighed. “The drink I had with those people in his room was after.”
“So why did he need the photos? He’d already seen you.”
“I don’t know. To show the others?”
I turned and looked at her again. There was defiance on her face, but there was also shame.
“I’m sorry, Jordi,” she said. “I should have told you.”
I picked up my jacket and started for the door.
“Don’t go. Please.”
I didn’t have anything to do that evening, but I had to get away from her. I needed time to think. Or not think. But she had followed me across the room.
She placed a hand on my arm, her face close to mine. “Don’t hold it against me.”
“I’ve been an idiot.”
“You’ve always been such a good friend to me—”
“Friend.” The word caught in my throat.
I left her apartment, not bothering to close the door.
Out on the street, the traffic was too loud, and the sky, though cloudy, was too bright. I stood on the pavement, with people pushing past me. I had the brief but vivid sensation that I had just been released from an institution where I’d been held for years, and was overwhelmed by the nonchalant speed and thrust of the world in which I found myself, a world that was now completely unfamiliar to me.
* * *
—
BEFORE I FLEW TO LONDON, I met Mireia in a café in Barceloneta. She had been for an interview at the W, a new five-star hotel that had been built on the waterfront. She told me it had gone well, though she wasn’t sure she would get the job. My eyes moved beyond her. The hotel stood out against the blue sky like a sail made of mirror glass.
She reached into her bag and took out a bunch of keys. “I found these the other day, in Sant Andreu.”
I picked up the keys and studied them. The key ring they were attached to was a square of silver metal with a suspension bridge etched into it. Underneath, in black, was the name of an English city: BRISTOL.
“I don’t think it means anything,” Mireia said, “do you?”
“No.” I pushed the keys back across the table.
Later, she asked when I was leaving.
“Friday,” I said.
“So soon?” She reached behind her head and lifted her hair away from her neck, then let it drop, tumbling, against her back. Didn’t she realize that she could make my heart ache with the simplest of gestures? “Can I visit you?”
I smiled. “That’s what my mother said.”
“London…” She gave me a reproachful look. “You’ll probably go and marry one of those English girls.”
“Probably,” I said lightly. “But I’ll always love you.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, as I stood in my apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes, I remembered something Vic had said. Small, but perfectly formed. Even at the time, the comment had sounded suggestive. Knowing what I now knew, I found it sickening. I hadn’t seen him since that night, not even from a distance. I had stopped going to the café on Plaça Kennedy, and when I left my building I always took the stairs, since I didn’t want to risk running into him in the lift. If my doorbell rang unexpectedly, I pretended to be out. But as my departure date approached I began to think it would be cowardly to leave without saying goodbye. I felt the need to clear the air.
At seven o’clock on Wednesday evening, I left my apartment and stepped into the waiting lift. As usual, the cramped space smelled of other people’s sweat. I thought I could also smell Vic’s cologne, as if he’d been standing where I was standing only moments earlier. My stomach knotted, but I forced myself to press the button that said SOBREATICO.
The lift jolted to a halt on the ninth floor, and when I stepped out onto the narrow landing I noticed that the door to Vic’s apartment was ajar. I moved closer, the silence broken only by the chatter of a helicopter overhead.
I pushed on the door. The gap widened.
“Vic?”
His hallway seemed emptier than I remembered, though the chest of drawers was still there.
“Vic? It’s Jordi.”
My voice sounded strangled, weak. I cleared my throat.
Then I heard footsteps approaching from the living room, and a young blond woman appeared. She had a phone in one hand and a glossy folder in the other.
“Senyor Carbonell?”
“No,” I said.
“But you’ve come to see the apartment?”
I shook my head. “Actually, I was looking for Vic Drago.”
“Ah yes,” she said. “The previous tenant.”
“Has he moved out?”
The woman held my gaze. “So far as we can tell, he left about a week ago.”
“And his wife?”
“His wife too.”
I looked beyond the woman and saw that the living room had been cleared of all its furniture, though there were still some plants on the terrace.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
The woman indicated the chest of drawers. “He seems to have left this behind, but we rent the apartment unfurnished. I don’t supp
ose you want it?”
“No!”
I had answered so abruptly and with such vehemence that I startled her, and she seemed suspicious suddenly, as if I might be implicated in Vic’s disappearance, or at least more involved than I was letting on.
“No,” I said again, more gently. “Thank you. But I’m about to move myself—to London.”
The woman’s eyes returned to the chest of drawers. “It’s unusual, don’t you think?”
“That he left it behind, you mean?”
“Well, yes. But also it’s not like any chest of drawers I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s made out of birch wood.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “From Siberia.”
She gave me an uncertain look, as if she thought I might be pulling her leg.
“That’s what Vic Drago told me, anyway,” I went on. “He told me a lot of things, and they weren’t all true.”
In that moment the lift jolted in its shaft and began to grind its way down through the building.
“That’s probably your client.” I stepped out onto the landing, then I turned back. “You don’t happen to know where Senyor Drago went, do you?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” she said. “You’re not the only person looking for him.”
“I see. Well, sorry I can’t help.”
“Good luck with your move.”
“Thank you.”
Rather than wait for the lift, I set off down the stairs. When my head was almost on a level with the floor, I glanced back towards Vic’s apartment. Through the half-open door I saw the estate agent approach the chest of drawers, then bend from the waist and run a hand down one of its sturdy legs.
* * *
—
IT SEEMED OBVIOUS that Vic Drago would crop up again at some point in my life, and I felt that my move to London, his hometown, only increased the chances of that happening, but the months went by and he failed to appear. Sometimes I thought I caught a glimpse of him—on a tube platform, in the lobby of a cinema—and I would rush over. Vic? But it was always a stranger. It turned out that there were a lot of men who looked like him. Not just in London. Everywhere. Sometimes he would stroll square-shouldered through my dreams, dressed in one of his loud jackets and smelling like a casino, his presence freighted with a significance I could never quite determine. Every once in a while, I would Google him—vic drago storage, vic drago barcelona, vic drago embezzlement, vic drago pornography, and even vic drago interpol—but none of the results I pulled up bore any resemblance to the man I’d known. Perhaps Mireia had been right after all, and Vic was a pseudonym. Like Brett.
Once, on my way to a wedding in Buckinghamshire, I drove along a section of the North Circular, making for the M1. On a whim, I left the main road at Staples Corner and found myself in an industrial estate, exactly the kind of place where I’d imagined Vic’s warehouses would be. I could picture him on those characterless streets, stepping out of his black Lexus, his gold chain bracelet glinting on his wrist. You’ve got to show up now and then. Keep the bastards on their toes. I spent the next twenty minutes driving round the area. There were plenty of warehouses—some even offered storage—but I didn’t see the name VIC DRAGO anywhere. Of course he might have sold up by now. He might be running a different business entirely. It was all too long ago, too far away.
Someone did appear, though—in the end…
I was walking east along Piccadilly on a sunlit afternoon in late March when a man in a long dark coat emerged from a doorway. The wavy black hair, streaked with gray. Something intense about the gaze. I knew I had seen him before, but it took me a few moments to recall his name, and he was almost past me by the time I spoke.
“Daniel Federmann?”
He stopped in midstride.
“I thought it was you,” I said. “Amazing.”
His head turned, and his eyes moved across my face, impassive. “Do we know each other?”
“I came to your workshop once, in Barcelona.”
He said he had no recollection of me. “I’m sorry,” he added. “That sounds rude.”
I laughed. “It’s all right. I mean, think of all the people who must have walked into your shop.”
He looked down at the pavement.
“It was several years ago,” I went on, “but I’ve never forgotten the quality of your work—the craftsmanship…”
“Thank you,” he said.
Unwilling to let him go as yet, I searched for a question. What was he doing in London? Visiting museums, he told me. I asked which ones. He mentioned Sir John Soane’s and Leighton House. He’d been indulging his interest in furniture, he said. He smiled ruefully, as if he had admitted to an embarrassing pastime or condition.
“Did you ever see Vic Drago again?”
Just then, I thought I saw two expressions on Federmann’s face, one inquiring, or even wary, the second arriving a fraction of a second later, and sliding over it, concealing it, and I was left looking at a man who appeared to be calmly dredging his memory for a name.
“Vic Drago,” I said. “He bought a chest of drawers from you.”
If I had caught Federmann off guard, there was no sign of it now. He was watching me carefully, as if I was telling him something he didn’t know.
“It was made of birch wood, from Siberia.” I had the feeling I was talking in code, but I kept going. “The wood was cut by the light of a full moon. That’s what gave it its special pliancy. Its pale color.”
Federmann’s smile had returned. “I used to say a lot of things to make a sale.”
“It wasn’t true?”
“No.”
“But you remember the piece?”
He nodded.
“And Drago?” I said. “You remember him too?”
“I think I know who you mean. Was he a friend of yours?”
“He was my neighbor.”
Federmann glanced across the road at Fortnum & Mason’s, with its eau-de-nil window frames and its oversize clock. “He killed himself, didn’t he? Or was it an accident?”
Though we were standing in spring sunlight, a chill shook me. “Is he dead?”
“I believe so.” Federmann paused. “I’m not sure of the facts,” he said. “I read about it, I think—in a newspaper.”
“Do you remember how he died?”
“I’m afraid not.” Federmann pulled his coat around himself, as if he also suddenly felt cold. “Sorry, but I really should be going.”
“Daniel,” I said. “That’s an angel’s name, isn’t it.”
He looked at me, and there was nothing on his face, nothing except a faint glimmer of amusement. Then we shook hands and parted.
When I had walked a few paces, I stopped and glanced over my shoulder, and I was surprised to see that Federmann had done the same. Our eyes met across a distance, as they had once before, in his workshop at the foot of Montjuïc. At that moment, I had the sense that I had been looking in the wrong place, that it wasn’t Vic Drago I should have been thinking about but Federmann, it was Federmann I should have been thinking about all along, but he had already turned away, and I had no choice but to turn away myself, and we moved off in opposite directions, along paths that would never cross again.
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