“She’s got three gorgeous children, she’s single, she’s fat because of her menopause not because she’s ill, and I live near here with my cat. This one paints better than Picasso, that one writes better than the angels themselves. María is like a little ant: always saving, saving, saving. Gaby is cheerful as a lark, and Soleá . . . is the apple of my eye. An amazing girl, Mr. Craftsman, clever as a hare, sharp as a fox, the life and soul of this magazine.”
Berta seemed like a mother to all of them and the office felt like a family home.
“Do you smoke, Mr. Craftsman? It’s illegal, you know, to smoke in the workplace, but given that you’re the boss, I should think we can make an exception.”
“You can call me Atticus.” The Englishman had no option but to concede in the face of such a show of affection. “If it did please you, my ladies,” he added, because Atticus had a purely academic knowledge of Spanish. He tended to use expressions he had learned from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books like La vida es sueño, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Don Quixote de la Mancha, which were set texts at Oxford University.
They had prepared Berta’s office as carefully as his Aunt Mildred, if she were still alive, would have prepared the guest bedroom of her house in Portsmouth. And like her, they had hung new net curtains in the window, placed a glass of ice-cold water in front of him, left a silver frame empty on his desk (“for you to put your favorite photo in”), and arranged a vase of wild lilacs.
Atticus thanked them wholeheartedly for their kind gestures. Then, excusing himself with a charming smile, he shut himself in his new office, put his feet up on the desk, and fell fast asleep.
• • •
An hour later, on the other side of the door, the girls were unable to bear the worry of waiting any longer, so they turned off their computer screens and started talking in whispers.
“What do you think he’s doing in there? I haven’t heard a peep for ages.”
“He must be studying the case.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that he hasn’t asked us for documents, account books, or anything?”
“I reckon he’ll call us in one by one in a bit.”
María was the most pessimistic of the five of them. She had made up her mind that nothing could be done, that no strategy would work. The man had come to fire them, and that was what he would do. Their fate was sealed.
Soleá, on the other hand, had complete faith in her plan. She was just as nervous as María, but her impatience had less to do with the probable outcome of their situation and more to do with her excitement at going into battle with the Englishman.
“I’m going in,” she said when it was twelve thirty. “I can’t stand it a moment longer. All this waiting is killing me.”
“Go for it, Soleá, go get him!” said Gaby, egging her on.
Berta got up and walked over to Soleá. She grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “We’re counting on you. On you, Soleá, no one else. It’s up to you to sweet-talk him.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to let you down,” she replied solemnly. “Anyway, he’s not bad looking,” she admitted.
“He’s hot,” said Asunción.
“He’s scorching,” added María.
“Go get him!” said Gaby again.
Then Soleá knocked on the door. Twice.
They heard furniture scraping inside Berta’s office. The silver frame slammed onto the desk. Atticus Craftsman cleared his throat.
“Come in,” he said.
And Soleá disappeared into the darkened room without looking back. Into the lair of that blond, handsome, green-eyed wolf.
CHAPTER 18
Never, for as long as he lived and even if the continents cast off from their moorings and formed a new Pangaea, would Atticus Craftsman forget Soleá Abad Heredia’s entrance into his new office on Madrid’s Calle Mayor.
That woman cut through his body and soul like a knife.
If he hadn’t been so polite and British, he would have allowed himself to completely lose his cool instead of falteringly trying to conserve it, stumbling against furniture, knocking over the glass of water, stuttering, and limping. Howling with wolfish desire.
She was a witch, there was no doubt about that. In fact, they all were. Five witches in a coven, preparing concoctions and love potions in their copper cauldrons. How else to explain why he, a man of the world, educated at Oxford and with a mother as devoid of emotion as he was, felt such an animal reaction to a beauty like Soleá?
The girl had eyes like a cat’s, as blue as the sea, as round as the full moon. And she waved her hands in circles, her fingers opening and closing like fans in front of the innocent victim of her enchantment.
Her hair was black, pitch-black. And it came down to her waist, with a wave at some indefinable point between her neck and her middle. She smelled of orange blossom, and she moved with the grace of a fine thread in the breeze.
Soleá didn’t let him get a word in. She planted both hands on the desk and, leaning forward, showed Atticus the curve of her round, firm breasts.
“You just stay there, Míster Crasman, and listen to this story I’m going to tell you. It’s a family secret. Something that absolutely no one knows, but I swear it could change everything.”
And so Soleá began telling him about a dream she’d had.
“I wanted to write a novel based on this story . . .”
She told him that once, when she was a child, she had been shut in the attic as punishment for doing something naughty. There, she had started pulling away the moth-eaten sheets and brushing the dust off old furniture from her grandparents’ house.
“I found a wooden chest and broke the lock to open it. Inside there was a military uniform, with a beret and everything, an old pistol, some ruined boots. It had belonged to my grandfather, my mother’s father, who died in the civil war. At the bottom, tied with a red ribbon, I found a pile of papers: letters, documents, and poems. Mostly poems, Míster Crasman.”
“Was your grandfather a poet?”
“No,” replied Soleá, shaking her head. “That’s the thing. My grandfather was a cattle trader, nothing to do with poetry. But,” she went on, “according to what my Granny Remedios says, out in the fields they often used to meet a skinny lad with a big round head who spent his days sitting on a rock and writing. They would share food and talk with him. The lad was called Federico and he was born in Fuente Vaqueros, that’s what he told my grandfather.”
At this point, Soleá paused for dramatic emphasis.
“Are you telling me that your grandmother has unpublished García Lorca poems in her attic?”
“That’s what I’d write my novel about,” said Soleá. “I remember reading one of the poems when I was a girl, and the refrain stuck with me: ‘Luna de cascabelillos, luna gitana, bata de cola.’ ”
“Very García Lorca,” the Englishman admitted.
“The tricky thing would be convincing my grandmother to let us see them. When she found out I’d broken the lock on the chest, she went crazy. It was fifteen years ago, but my ears still hurt from how hard she pulled them that day,” she recalled. “She hid the chest somewhere else. I never knew where. And I haven’t seen it again since.”
“But . . .” Atticus lifted his hands to his blond mop of curls. “By Jove, your grandmother could be rich!”
“She doesn’t care about that,” Soleá pointed out, hammering her blue eyes into the center of his heart. “She’d rather die poor than live with the shame.”
“What shame?”
“What other shame could there be, Míster Crasman?” Soleá lowered her voice as if about to reveal a terrible secret. “García Lorca was gay.”
After such a revelation, Atticus Craftsman was left in no doubt that people from the south of Spain were so nuts they were off the map. If the poems Soleá was talking about really did exist, he was looking at a literary find of incredible proportions. He wouldn’t say anything to h
is father for the moment, because if the great Marlow Craftsman found out that there was even a remote possibility of getting his hands on some unpublished García Lorca poems, he might well show up in Spain with his team of lawyers, advisers, and shareholders, and turn Atticus’s life upside down. What’s more, it was highly likely that this story would turn out to be a farce, and that the pastoral scene with the goats and the poet were inventions and the papers were utter bull.
Soleá had suddenly fallen silent. She was looking at him with her bewitching eyes, waiting for him to make the next move. She looked like a Gypsy who tells people’s fortunes and scatters rosemary in exchange for a few coins . . . You’ll marry a rich man, you’ll be cured of all your ills, you’ll have an infinitely long life, as long as the lines on your palm.
Atticus understood that he had no choice but to investigate that story, however unbelievable it might seem. First, because he couldn’t spend the rest of his days thinking that once, in his youth, back at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an extraordinary woman had offered him fame and glory on a plate and he had turned her down because he didn’t believe her. Second, because Soleá’s spell had worked its way into all the veins and arteries of his British anatomy and had sown them with wildflowers. Beautiful flowers, but poisonous, like wild poppies. It was better to get to the bottom of the truth, or the lie, than to have to look into the mirror as an old man and see a face filled with regret.
“What was your grandfather’s name?”
“Antonio Heredia.”
“And you say he was a cattle dealer . . .”
“Exactly.”
“And he was homosexual?”
Oh, how Atticus regretted having pronounced that word without first considering the consequences or understanding that such a statement was a serious affront to someone who grew up believing that “gay” was the worst insult possible. Atticus, who was perfectly accepting of everyone whatever their sexual orientation, watched Soleá’s transformation in shock: Her body grew rigid, her fists clenched, her eyes closed to a squint, her voice became hoarse, she turned the air blue.
“I shit on all your ancestors!” she shouted. “Every last one of them! For fuck’s sake! That’s it, fucking Englishman, I’ve had enough of your fucking magazine and your stupid English face! No one disrespects Soleá Abad Heredia’s grandfather, you better believe that!”
Furious, she thumped the table and shot curses from her cat’s eyes.
Berta, who was of course listening through the door, appeared on the scene all of a sudden, alarmed by the shouting.
“What have you done to Soleá?” she accused Craftsman, who had gone into a state of shock.
The three other women followed their boss into Atticus’s office. There really wasn’t enough space for six deranged adults in the room, all gesticulating and screaming as if they had lost their minds.
In the midst of the chaos, Atticus heard some worrying accusations: harassment, sexual abuse . . . This was getting out of hand.
“He insulted my grandfather!” Soleá was finally able to make herself heard over the voices of her colleagues. “God rest his soul!” she added.
The crime couldn’t have seemed so serious to the others, as they gradually calmed down and lowered their voices.
“Shit, Soleá, way to scare us,” said María, embarrassed. “We thought Mr. Craftsman was trying to rape you.”
Atticus felt his legs shaking. He slumped into the office chair.
“All of you, please get out,” he finally managed to say. “Except you, Berta. I want you to stay. We need to talk.”
• • •
The conversation that followed was a tense one. Berta listened to Atticus’s monologue, unable to interrupt, while he gradually regained his composure. He started by explaining the motivation for his visit to Librarte, which, as she had surely gleaned from her conversations with Mr. Bestman, was for no other reason than to close the magazine, although he was determined to study the problem in depth in the hope of finding some solution that would suit everyone involved. In the event of the magazine being deemed definitively unviable, which was the most likely outcome, the publishing house was willing to generously negotiate their severance packages.
However, due to unexpected circumstances, Atticus said, he needed to go on a short research trip to the south of Spain. There, he would spend a few days resolving certain issues that he said were none of her concern—don’t take it the wrong way, Ms. Quiñones—so the fate of Librarte wouldn’t be decided until his return. During his trip he planned to write a report on the reasons behind the magazine’s failure. He therefore required, and please take note, account books, expense receipts, figures for revenue and overhead lists of advertisers, the price of paper converted to pounds sterling, the results of the general media study, et cetera, et cetera.
“Ah, yes, one other thing,” added the young man. “If I’m going to spend awhile in Spain, I would prefer to rent a small studio flat near the office. I don’t like hotel life. It’s very impersonal. I hope you’ll be able to find something appropriate.”
“Of course,” replied Berta maternally. “I know a little flat on Calle del Alamillo, next door to my place. We can stop by there later if you like, and I’ll show it to you. It’s sweet.” At that moment the office door opened slightly, and Atticus saw the outline of Soleá’s body appear, with her narrow waist, her small bust, and her black hair.
“I’d like to apologize, Míster Crasman,” she said in a whisper. “I lost my head because my family is sacred to me. I don’t know if you understand, but it won’t happen again. I swear I won’t raise my voice at you again.”
Guessing at that moment that the lie he was about to tell would stay with him for the rest of his life, Atticus Craftsman was able to articulate the purest of truths:
“It was my fault, Soleá. It’s because I’m English.”
CHAPTER 19
The result of the phone conversation between Inspector Manchego and Lucas the locksmith was a flawless plan for a forced entry, technically illegal, that would be of significant mutual benefit. The policeman promised to pay €250 to the locksmith, who in turn promised to break and enter without arousing suspicion, to keep quiet, and to duly carry on daily life without fear of future police investigations. They set a date for a couple of days later. Manchego handed over the money, and they sealed the deal with a firm handshake.
The night in question turned out to be damp and unpleasant, as befits late November. They met at the stroke of midnight, and it was unbearably cold. The inspector admitted to himself that perhaps it would have been better to meet at eight in the evening, as the locksmith had suggested, when it would have been just as dark, but when you’re going to commit a crime, he thought, you should meet at midnight: the peak time for criminal activity.
The plan was simple. He would meet Lucas near the doorway, greet him with a quick nod so as not to arouse suspicion, and keep watch in the street while his accomplice professionally and stealthily opened the door to number 5. Then he would wait on the corner until Lucas gave him a call on his cell phone. This would be the signal that he was inside the flat, the coast was clear, and Manchego could go in without fear of being seen.
Lucas arrived right on time. He had a relatively suspicious toolbox under one arm and was looking particularly criminal. His face was covered with a scarf, and he was wearing a woolen hat, leather gloves, and clothes that would have been perfect for a villain in any detective film.
Manchego thought it was a fitting getup for a break-in, although he would have preferred a little more discretion, perhaps less sturdy boots or the odd item of clothing that wasn’t camouflage print—Lucas resembled a cross between a biker and a poacher—but all in all, his accomplice didn’t look too bad.
He greeted him, as planned, with a subtle tilt of the head.
Lucas walked straight past Manchego as if he hadn’t seen him. He went up to the flat, took out a homemade lockpick, thumped the door, and th
en kicked his way in, making a hellish noise.
Lights came on in some of the windows. A very elderly neighbor called out in a shaky voice, “Who’s there?” and then threatened to call the police.
More blinds opened and a few faces peered out.
Inspector Manchego began to panic. This wasn’t what they had planned. His break-in needed to be silent, prudent, innocuous—a quick in-and-out with no witnesses. Discretion was of the utmost importance; that’s how he had explained it to the locksmith. What a bloody incompetent idiot, what a lousy shit of a thief.
“But you’re a policeman,” the so-called Lucas had replied. “If anyone hears us, all you have to do is show them your badge and say you happened to be passing by.”
“Yeah, okay,” Manchego had accepted, “but it’s better not to have to step in, if you know what I mean, unless strictly necessary.”
The old woman was now shouting, “Police! Police!” Her shrill voice echoed off the walls in the narrow street.
All of a sudden, his cell phone rang. That lout of a locksmith was calling, as planned. Just like he should have done if it had all gone smoothly, without anyone noticing.
“Christ on a bike!” shouted Manchego, answering on the third ring. “You burst in like a herd of elephants, wake the whole street up, and now you call—but don’t hang up, you idiot.”
“We have to switch to plan B, Manchego. There are neighbors out on the stairs,” the locksmith replied, sounding unbelievably calm. Lucas had nerves of steel.
Inspector Manchego took out his badge and standard-issue gun and pushed open the door to number 5, Calle del Alamillo.
“Police!” he shouted.
The stairwell was narrow, the hallway dark. Several heads, all belonging to rather elderly people, were poking out over the wooden banister. Someone flicked the switch and a dim bulb lit up on the landing.
All of a sudden, Lucas’s unmistakable form appeared, jogging downstairs with the toolbox under one arm and a couple of books under the other. As he passed Manchego, he gave him a firm shove with his right arm, the one holding the books. The inspector stumbled. He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should point the gun at his partner in crime to make the scene more convincing or let him escape with only a verbal threat.
The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman Page 7