by Mark Pryor
“I didn’t think anything,” Hugo lied, with his most disarming smile. “That’s why I asked.”
“Most people assume wrongly.” She switched her gaze to Garcia. “If our ages were switched, no one would ask if he was my father.”
“I agree, there is a double standard,” Hugo said. “May I ask, how long have you been married?”
“Eighteen years. We met in Paris and got married a week later. No one thought it would last, of course, but here we are. I suppose there are a few cracks that we paper over, but that’s true of most marriages. Do you know of any perfect ones, Señor Marston?”
An image of Ellie flashed into Hugo’s mind. He didn’t know if their marriage was perfect, he thought maybe it was, but then again, maybe it simply hadn’t had time to develop cracks. Hugo’s second marriage had been far from perfect. “No, I can’t say that I do.”
“As long as marriage is limited to human beings, no such thing will exist,” she said. “Ah, but you’re not here to ask me about that, are you?”
“No, not really,” Hugo said. “Is your husband here?”
“No. Leonardo travels a lot and when he’s not traveling, he works a lot at his office. I suspect he has a mistress, too, but I am not sure about that.” She smiled. “He would be the rare specimen not to, wouldn’t you think?”
“Well, I’ve never had one,” Hugo said with a smile, trying to lighten the mood. “Perhaps things are different in America.”
“You came all the way here from America, on a case?”
“No, I live in Paris.”
“How very nice. Why do you need to speak to my husband?”
Hugo glanced at Garcia, not sure how much he wanted to give away. This was, after all, his investigation. She picked up on the look and cocked her head at the chief inspector.
“Really just for background information. Did you know Rubén Castañeda?”
“Did I know him?”
“Yes,” Garcia said. “You didn’t . . . your husband didn’t tell you? I’m afraid he’d dead.”
“Oh, no, how awful. And no, he didn’t tell me.” She slumped in her seat, her mouth tight. “But I did know him, of course, he works . . . worked with Leonardo. I met him a few times, that’s all. He seemed like a nice young man, very handsome and charming. Please, how did he die?”
“I’m afraid he was murdered,” Garcia said.
Figueroa sat up straight and opened her mouth, but for a moment no words came out. When she spoke, it was in a whisper. “What happened?”
Garcia’s tone was soft. “It’s probably better if we keep the details under wraps for now, if you don’t mind.”
“No, of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . I just . . .”
“It’s natural to ask,” Garcia said. “Please, no need to apologize.”
Hugo watched her closely as she fought to control her emotions. He couldn’t tell, though, whether the battle was being fought because she was an upper-class Spaniard who wasn’t supposed to show distress or because she was trying to hide something. Like how well she knew Castañeda.
“Is my husband . . . do you think he knows something about this?”
“It’s just routine,” Garcia assured her. “We have to talk to everyone who knew him or worked with him. We had a chance to meet with everyone at his business yesterday, but we also like to talk to people a second time, in case there’s anything new they remember.”
Well played, thought Hugo.
“Yes, of course,” Figueroa said. “I’m afraid I don’t know when he’ll be back. Sometimes he calls and sometimes not, we give each other a lot of freedom.” She sighed and looked down. “He takes advantage of that more than I do, but then he is younger. And a man.”
Hugo and Garcia exchanged glances, not knowing how to respond to that. Figueroa seemed to sense their discomfort and smiled. “I’m sorry, that sounded self-indulgent. As I said before, our marriage is unconventional. I won’t tolerate my husband paying for his extracurricular habits, but otherwise, as long as he’s discreet, I am quite forgiving. Like I said, as long as he doesn’t pay for it.” She shuddered, the idea of that clearly repugnant.
“That’s really none of our business,” Garcia said, “I hope you don’t feel we were intruding.”
“You weren’t,” she said, “but I was explaining. And when I speak to him, I will tell him you were here.”
She rose to her feet, signaling an end to the conversation. Hugo and Garcia stood, too, and followed her out to the elevator. She smiled, but said nothing, as she closed the large doors. In the elevator, Garcia said, “There’s a café next door. Are you hungry?”
“Now that you mention it,” Hugo said, “I am. Good idea.”
The lunch crowd had thinned, and they managed to find a table by the window, away from nearby ears. A waiter in jeans and a black waistcoat took their order, both men opting for the seafood paella.
“I’m thinking we need to expand our search,” Garcia said when the waiter had left. “Can your friend Tom help? He has connections, right?”
“He would have suggested it if there was more he could do. I’ll talk to him, but he’s pretty proactive when it comes to catching bad guys.”
“Where is he now?” Garcia asked.
“I’m not sure. Being proactive, I hope.”
“Interesting man, he is.”
Hugo smiled. “What do you mean by ‘interesting’?”
“I think what I don’t quite understand is why he’s your friend. I don’t mean to insult you, or him, but you seem like an odd pair.”
“Yes,” Hugo agreed. “I suppose we do. We were roommates at Quantico, during our FBI training. Fate put us together and never got around to separating us.”
“No, you two are friends. He just seems a little . . . wild for you, for your personality.”
“He is, on the surface.”
“But you look beyond the surface.”
“That’s the best way to find a friend,” Hugo said. “How boring to spend your time with someone just like you, why not just be alone?”
“Good answer.”
“It’s more than that, though. He’s a genuinely good person. Troubled, as you can probably tell. But a lot of his problems stem from his work, stuff he’s done on behalf of his country. And don’t underestimate his intelligence, Bartoli, he’s a very smart man. The bumbling drunkard act is,” Hugo stopped himself and couldn’t help smiling. “Well, only half of it is an act. And the other half he’s working on.”
“He drinks too much?”
“Most of us do, Tom’s just an expert. But like I said, he’s getting things under control.”
“With a little help from his friend.”
“He needs the occasional reminder, yes.”
The waiter returned with their food, steam rising from the little clay pots in which the rice and seafood was served. Garcia pulled out his phone and laid it on the table. He stared down at the screen as he picked up a fork and poked at his food. Steam puffed from the little holes he made in the rice as he prodded it. “Those punctuation marks then ‘huevos y bacon’ and ‘unhygienic,’” he read.
“Any new ideas?” Hugo asked. He balanced a mussel and some rice on his own fork and blew gently on it.
“Well, we did some training recently, all about social media and the Internet. I’m no expert, but at first I thought it was one of those Twitter things, like you can use punctuation to mark key words or topics.”
“Not a Twitter user, sorry.”
“It’s just something people can click on to see more posts on that subject.” Garcia paused and stared down at his meal. “Wait, I got that wrong. For that you use the other symbol.” He took out his phone and showed it to Hugo.
“The pound sign, or hash?”
“Sí, except this is asterisks, sorry. It’s not that after all.”
Hugo’s head snapped up. “Wait, did you say . . . can I look at that message again?”
“Sure, help yourself.”
Hugo picked up the phone and reread the text. He forgot about the sum of the message, opaque as it was, and instead looked at each word and character as if it had its own, stand-alone meaning. The close focus paid off, and like a kaleidoscope coming up with a beautiful picture, Hugo saw the meaning behind the text.
“It’s her. It’s Amy,” he said. He sank back in his chair and stared at Garcia’s blank face.
“How do you know?”
“But I’m an idiot, I should have seen it before.” He thumped the table in frustration, the elation fading as he realized they’d wasted precious time. “Dammit, I really should have seen it before.”
“Seen what?” Garcia said, impatient.
“The asterisks. You were absolutely right, they should have been pound signs, but they weren’t.” Hugo shook his head. “She’s a genius, that girl. An absolute genius. She knew her dad would worry and that she’d missed her meeting with me. She knew I’d come looking for her.”
“Hugo,” Garcia growled, “if you don’t tell me what you’re talking about . . .”
“You asked me about her, remember? How I knew her, what she was like. I told you that I used to read to her, that she loved mystery stories and picture books like Tintin?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“What did I tell you was her absolute favorite?”
“You said . . .” Garcia frowned as he thought. “You said Asterix the Gaul. Aha! Asterix and asterisk!”
“Right, and the last word is a character in the series, Unhygienix, the fishmonger. The phone would have changed it automatically to unhygienic. She knew I’d either be here looking for her myself, or eventually have access to this message. Clever, clever girl.”
“Most definitely. What about the eggs and bacon thing? That sounds English or American.”
“Yeah, it does.” Hugo thought for a moment. “She and I were supposed to meet at a café in Paris. That’s where I saw the man who turned out to be Castañeda. Anyway, it’s an American café, serves American-style breakfasts.”
“Like eggs and bacon.”
“It makes sense but . . .”
“But what? It fits.”
“Not completely. Look, there’s two ways to read a message. You can look at the overall communication and get meaning that way. Or, in this case, you can look at the specific words that are used and decipher the meaning that way.”
“So?”
“Even when you look at individual words,” Hugo said, “there’s still an overall continuity, a theme to the way the message is being expressed.”
“I don’t understand, I’m sorry.”
“I mean that if the first and last parts are from the Asterix series, the middle part will be, too.” Hugo snapped his fingers. “All the other references were characters, so maybe this one was, too.”
“Eggs and bacon?”
“Sure, she knew the books inside and out. Way better than I did.”
“Then we need to look at the books.”
Hugo smiled. “I thought you’d just had Internet training. Can you run a search on your phone?”
“Ah, of course. What exactly should we say?”
“Type ‘eggs and bacon’ as one word, no spaces. Then ‘asterix,’ a space, and ‘character.’”
“OK, done. Let’s see.” Garcia squinted at his phone. “Not seeing . . . ah, bueno, here it is.”
“Which book?” Hugo felt his heart hammering in his chest.
Garcia was smiling. “The character’s actual name was Huevos Y Bacon. The book is Asterix in Spain, which means she’s here, she’s still in Spain.”
Hugo let out a genuine sigh of relief. “Thank heavens for that.”
“Is there something else in the message?” Garcia asked.
“I don’t know, not that I can see. Why do you ask?”
“Well, there’s something I don’t really understand,” Garcia said. “Why didn’t she just say that it was her? And tell us where she is?”
“She might if I’d phoned.” Hugo leaned forward as he explained. “I can’t be sure, but she wasn’t just into fictional mysteries, she was fascinated by true crime, which meant she’d grill me for details of cases when I saw her. One that I remember talking about was the kidnap of a twelve-year-old girl. This girl was a twin, and after she’d been kidnapped, she sent her twin a message, a letter, and told her to come get her, but come alone without telling a soul. A mall is where she was supposed to go. Anyway, the twin didn’t tell the police or parents, just like her sister had said. She showed up at the mall, right time right place. And she disappeared, too.”
“Kidnapped?”
“Right. The note hadn’t come from the sister, but the kidnapper.”
“It was a trap.”
“The code was Amy’s way of telling me what she needed to tell me, and letting me know it was really her.”
“Why do you think she didn’t call? Maybe her kidnapper is within earshot?”
“Yes. And I bet whoever it is doesn’t even know she has that phone. I have to think, too, if she’s not saying where she is or who has her, it’s because she doesn’t know.”
“We should try calling it, talking to her.”
“No. It could put her in danger, if it rings or buzzes. She’ll call if she can, and in the meantime there’s no need to risk her safety again. The good news is that if we can ping it, either we’ll find her or she’ll be close by.”
Garcia looked at his phone. “No word on that yet. What can we do while we wait?”
“We need to talk to those Estruch people.” Hugo checked his watch. “But before that, let’s head to the market and catch up with Claudia and Tom. We can get those keys and find out what Rubén Castañeda was hiding from the world.”
They paid their bill and headed out into the street. They started walking in silence, but after a minute Garcia turned to Hugo and asked: “By the way, what happened to those girls, the twins who were kidnapped?”
“We found the second one. Got a fingerprint off the letter he’d sent, which took us straight to him.”
“And the first girl? Her twin?”
“She was dead by the time her sister read that letter.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They stopped at a small grocery store to buy water, and Hugo stood aside to let a young woman exit the shop. She had long, dark hair and was pale but pretty. She carried her groceries on her back in a worn, army-green backpack and, as she stepped out onto the narrow sidewalk, she reached up and plucked a half-smoked cigarette from behind a drainpipe, taking an immediate puff to bring it back to life. She shot Hugo a smile as she swung her leg over her bicycle and peddled away down the street.
As they walked toward the market, Hugo turned to Bartoli Garcia and asked, “What did you make of Barsetti’s wife?”
“Like you, I was a little surprised when she opened the door. But, like she said, a young woman marrying an older man wouldn’t raise the same eyebrows.”
“Very true. This seemed a little different, though, like she’d come to the conclusion he’d married her for her money a little late.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just think that when a rich man marries a beautiful girl twenty years younger than him, he’s not surprised that she’s attracted to his bank account as much as his personality. Rosario Figueroa, on the other hand, seems a little bitter about the whole thing.”
“If he’s sleeping with other women, the bitterness is justified.”
“Let me ask you, how is infidelity seen over here? I know in France that it’s not exactly the norm but it happens, and it isn’t seen the same way it is in America. Instant recriminations and divorce.”
“I think it is the same here as in most of Europe. Neither spouse goes into a marriage expecting their partner to have sex elsewhere, but on the other hand the reality is that you can love someone and have sex with someone else. Your Disney view of marriage is not reality, and in Europe we prefer to live in the real world, not a
pretend fairy tale.”
“So why take the vows and promise fidelity?”
“We promise things all the time we cannot possibly control. Have you ever told a woman you’d love her forever and then you didn’t?”
Again, Ellie flashed through Hugo’s mind, the one woman he had expected to love forever, a woman taken away from him before he’d had a chance to test his promise. “Actually, no.”
Garcia laughed. “You Americans. If that’s true, it’s because you haven’t told enough women you love them.” He put a hand on Hugo’s shoulder. “You should do it more, they like it.”
“What if they hold me to it?”
“Then I suggest you don’t say it to any American girls.”
It was Hugo’s turn to laugh. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, explain Rosario Figueroa’s attitude. According to you, she should be a little more realistic about what her husband might get up to. And yet, as I’ve said, she seems bitter.”
“There are few rules in love or marriage, Hugo, especially once you get it up and running. But I can tell you there are a couple of things that will upset an otherwise open-minded partner. First, if you sleep with the wrong person.”
“Meaning?”
“Your friend’s wife, your ex-wife, or perhaps a colleague or superior at work.”
“Makes sense. And it sounds like he’d be in trouble if he slept with a prostitute.”
“Yes,” agreed Garcia. “Although that felt different. Like, if he did that, it’d be the end.”
“I got that sense, too. I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind it, why the difference.”
“Me neither, but every couple lives within the boundaries of its own peculiarities. Other people’s oddities don’t have to make sense to us, we just have to recognize them, I suppose.” Garcia stroked his mustache in thought. “Anyway, the other faux pas I was going to mention is being indiscreet. Having a lover should never be an inconvenience or embarrassment to your spouse. You don’t take her to the restaurants you frequent with your wife, and you don’t parade your mistress in the street where friends and family can observe.”
“You should write a book on this,” Hugo said.