A Not So Perfect Crime

by Teresa Solana

  “Let’s go for a beer and I’ll tell all,” he bounced back at me.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’ll ring Montse and tell her I won’t be home for lunch today. I’ll think of some excuse and you and I can go and lunch elsewhere. You’ve got some explaining to do, Pep! ...”

  “Borja,” he corrected me. “Remember I’m Borja now.”

  I took him to the Set Portes, a well-known restaurant not far from the bank. As it was Friday, I had a free afternoon, although Raquel kept texting me to say we should meet. I decided to take a risk and, before I had time to regret my decision, I switched off my mobile. I didn’t want any lover inopportunely souring our meal.

  The restaurant was packed with tourists and what looked like businessmen agreeing devious deals between courses, but we were lucky and got a table. It was next to a family of riotous Russians who ate and drank like Cossacks, and we agreed to emulate them. I ordered paella – one of the chef’s specials – and a bottle of Rioja. After all that time, our fraternal reunion merited a celebration.

  However, rather than letting him speak, I rushed into telling him about my affair with Raquel and the crisis in my marriage. I told him how I hated my work and the decision the new bosses were forcing me to take. We didn’t notice we dispatched the bottle of Rioja and a plate of olives before engaging with the paella. Two more bottles soon hit the dust.

  I don’t think I could have come at a better time,” he smiled very confidently. “You seem to have got yourself into a right state.”

  “I don’t know what to do ...”

  “Eduard, God doesn’t play dice ...”

  It was the first time I’d heard him pronounce the phrase that I’d end up hearing time and again. On that occasion, however, after all the wine I’d sunk, I almost asked him if the guy up there didn’t play dice then what the hell was he doing the day our parents were killed in an accident. But I shut up and let him speak. It was his turn.

  “So how are you?” I asked, switching tack. “What happened to you over all those years? Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?”

  Borja proceeded to tell me very little, indeed nothing in particular, about his life. He’d travelled, tried his hand at various trades and seen enough of the world to learn that the good guys always end up losing. His silences led me to deduce his love life hadn’t been days of wine and roses.

  “I’d rather not discuss that,” he said looking down. “Better we talk about the future. About our future.”

  He explained his idea – the company where we now work – and suggested I should give up my job and enter into partnership with him. He’d been a rolling stone for too long and wanted to settle down, or so he said.

  “I have a couple of matters to settle and can’t carry them forward by myself,” he said confidentially. “I need you, Eduard. And anyway, it’s not as if your finances are booming.”

  “No, you’re right,” I had to agree. “We’re still paying the mortgage off, and although Montse works and is a civil servant, we only just keep our heads above water. And the twins are a bottomless pit. You must meet them, Pep.” I still hadn’t got used to calling him Borja. “After all, they are your nieces!”

  “All in due course. If everything turns out as it should, you’ll pay off your mortgage before long and be able to take that trip round the world you wanted to do when we were kids.” He paused. “You haven’t done that yet, have you?”

  No, I hadn’t. When I succeeded in escaping from the hell that was life with my uncle and aunt at the age of twentythree and set up on my own, I enrolled on a university course. I couldn’t give up the bank job that fell into my lap at the age of nineteen thanks to mysterious strings pulled by uncle, yet at the same time I still dreamed of becoming a writer. Borja had been much more adventurous than me, had gone abroad and fled the miserable vision of the world with which our relatives soured our adolescence, and I was alone. Too alone to embark on an adventure I’d always dreamed I would share with my brother. I’ll never cease to wonder how different our lives might have been if our parents hadn’t crashed on the Garraf corniche when Borja and I were thirteen.

  In any case I never managed to write a single novel or finish my degree course, and Don Quixote was partly to blame. To my great misfortune, I can’t stand that book. In those heroic days when we students went on wildcat strikes and smoked joints in the Arts Faculty quad, I was a proud, naïve idealist, and that got me into the odd spot of bother. Including never taking my degree.

  “I don’t know what Montse will make of all this,” I reflected aloud while I polished off the crema catalana I’d ordered for my dessert.

  “So you ended up marrying your psychoanalyst! That’s really funny!”

  “No, I didn’t, Montse isn’t a psychoanalyst. She’s a psychologist.” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but you did get involved with her,” he smiled mischievously.

  In fact, it was down to Don Quixote and my trauma that I met Montse. She had just finished her psychology degree and was the friend of a friend’s girlfriend. After she’d worked out my problem she insisted on helping, and, although she failed in that, I did end up marrying her.

  True, I have a trauma in relation to Don Quixote. I only have to hear the title mentioned to go all jittery. I can’t help it, but I have a terrible complex about it, a sort of phobia, I’ve always thought it’s because it is a novel everyone praises to the skies. Politicians, whatever their stripe, quote from memory some of its wittiest lines and praise its author, and suffer no outrages of fortune when it comes to spending our taxes on all manner of commemorations and homages, which, knowing the likes of them, just have to be extremely dubious. For my part, I’m convinced most of our parliamentarians have never bothered even to leaf through the book, although, to be honest, I should confess I’ve never been able to get past the first forty pages, and it’s not for want of trying.

  To be frank, not to have read Don Quixote is not such a serious problem, unless you happen to be a student in a Department of Spanish Literature. Naturally I’d have behaved much more intelligently if I’d imitated most of my companions and pretended I’d read it. It would have been sufficient to repeat pompously and authoritatively a handful of ill-digested critics. Rather than this, let’s be quite clear, I behaved remarkably stupidly.

  I had only a year to go and couldn’t think of any better topic for my final dissertation than a study that would show how almost nobody in this country (in this city, really) had read from beginning to end the sacred text of Spanish letters. I wasted my time getting 500 questionnaires distributed – yes, five hundred – in and outside the faculty, a sample that included every social class, from patrician Pedralbes to proletarian Santa Coloma de Gramenet. Of the 500 surveyed, eighteen were emphatic they’d read it from cover to cover and had really enjoyed the experience (needless to say, not a single one belonged to the faculty or had passed through its halls). The remaining 482 confessed they hadn’t even tried to read Don Quixote or hadn’t got beyond the first fifty pages. Always for the same reason: as a novel it was too long and too full of words they didn’t understand, not to mention the miles of footnotes that some demented sadist had decided to concoct with the clear aim of demoralising the long-suffering readers. These 482 en masse answered “no” to section “D” of the survey which asked if they would be prepared to confess to their sin in public.

  Predictably, I felt relieved after seeing those results and a little less lonely. It turned out I wasn’t the only person in the world who’d not read that masterpiece of world literature! Unfortunately, the staff in the department didn’t rate my original contribution to the study of Golden Age literature and muttered that rather than wasting my time so dreadfully I should have immersed myself in the tome and forgotten all that nonsense. They swore they’d never give me a degree, whether in that faculty or any other, and also declared if you attempt to go all quixotic and make this survey public (verbatim) someone will ensure you get a facelift (also verbatim).
As I wasn’t at all sure what going all quixotic entailed, I decided to drop it and deliver myself unto Montse.

  “My only condition is that you don’t tell your wife I’m your brother,” Borja pressed me while we were still in the restaurant. “If she knew, she’d put her foot in it sooner or later. Eduard, this business will only prosper if we can persuade our clients I am Borja and belong to their social circle. Believe me, it’s the only way they’ll confide in us. Just think of it as your second chance in life.”

  “I don’t intend to change my name,” I objected.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he hurriedly explained. “You can go on being Eduard Martínez and who you are now. Well, no need to go around proclaiming you’re leftwing and all that ... I expect you’re still waving the red flag, aren’t you?”

  “And what about you?” I asked, although by this stage I could imagine his reply.

  “Bah, I don’t believe in politics any more!” he said, making a gesture that suggested he’d given all that up: “You know, if you have to make a choice, I prefer the good life.”

  I decided not keep prodding, afraid he’d come out with some really outrageous comment. On the other hand, the decision I faced was too important to take on the spur of the moment, particularly after we’d landed ourselves with a skinful of three bottles of Rioja and a couple of glasses of cognac. I asked him for time to think the offer over.

  “Goes without saying! Take as long as you like. But remember what mother used to say: ‘If you want to catch fish ...’”

  “‘... you’ve got to get your arse wet.’ Yes, I remember. Course I do!”

  Thoughts of our mother made us sad, and we fell silent for a while. I could see Borja’s eyes glinting and I was about to burst into tears. Then I remembered I’d not taken any flowers to the cemetery for at least two years.

  Borja insisted on paying, then suggested we went for a stroll to clear our heads. We zigzagged up the Ramblas and when we reached the plaça de Catalunya, he pushed me into a taxi. He said he wanted to show me something.

  He took me to the office on Muntaner, where Borja had yet to install the fake doors. For a time he even fooled me into thinking a secretary existed who was eternally absent. He adopted a professional tone I didn’t recognize and explained he was dealing with a case related to valuable jewels from a legacy that had disappeared. He had to scrutinize every move made by the relative who had allegedly put his hand in the jewel box, in case he showed them in public or tried to sell them on the sly. The person compromised by the affair, a public figure, preferred not to tell the police or contract a professional detective agency. He wanted the matter resolved with the utmost discretion.

  I sat on Borja’s suggestion for a week. As things were in such a bad stew at home with Montse, and I couldn’t sort out the situation with Raquel, I thought I’d hit rock bottom and things couldn’t possibly get worse. “From lost to the river”, I told myself in good old Spanglish as a preamble to one of my few courageous acts ever. I agreed to accept the redundancy package and my brother’s offer: the time had come to escape from a life that had ground to a halt. We invested the money in Montse’s business and the situation began to pick up. At the age of forty-two, thanks to my kid brother, I could make a new start with my wife, and despite all the upsets and difficulties we faced at times, I’ve never regretted my decision.

  As for Raquel, Borja guaranteed he’d get her off my back. I don’t know how he managed it, but the fact is that, overnight, my lover stopped besieging me and disappeared mysteriously from my life. Apparently, she and Borja had a conversation, but I haven’t the slightest idea what my brother said to her. I only know that the day I bumped into her in one of the city’s big department stores she looked daggers at me and screamed I shouldn’t go near her.

  “Don’t even look at me!” she cried, grimacing in disgust.

  I took her at her word, fled the scene and ran to tell Borja what had happened.

  “Do what she says,” was all he said, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  As I know my brother and I have always been on the cowardly side, I decided to let things be and not probe further.

  5

  “You want candles on your cake?” I asked timidly while I was still putting my coat on.

  “Of course!” Montse seemed shocked I should ask. “I want forty. Not one less!”

  It was almost nine o’clock and Montse had to hurry so as not to be late. Thanks to the advance we’d extracted from the MP, she was in a good mood and didn’t protest at all when I told her I couldn’t take Arnau to school. I’d agreed to meet Borja to plan our approach to our new case, after I’d put the money in our bank account and bought her birthday present. My brother and I might be able to buy the cake and cava after we’d spoken to Mariona Castany. I was relying on him to bring the Smart.

  I don’t drive. I expect it’s part of the fall out from the accident that killed our parents. Although I did try to get my driving licence for a time, I suffer panic attacks whenever I sit behind a steering wheel, even when the engine isn’t switched on. Luckily Montse is an excellent driver, but I can’t expect her to spend the day chauffeuring me around. Whether I like it or not, I have to see to myself and use public transport, which is very ecological but not what you’d call practical.

  Borja doesn’t own a car, though he usually drives Merche’s two-tone Smart. I imagine it seems rather absurd for two men like us, in our particular line of business, to move around Barcelona in a tiny red and white car that catches the eye and is really quite girly, but we don’t have any choice. Merche also owns a silver Audi that’s really stylish but she rarely lets Borja drive it.

  My brother’s girlfriend is one of these tax lawyers who earns an annual salary that shouldn’t be allowed and always wears a fortune in clothes and jewels alone. Not to mention her hair-dos and various beauty treatments, what with antiwrinkle and cellulite treatments and work-outs in the gym ... Merche is four years older than us, and despite her efforts she looks her age. From what Borja has told me, I reckon she spends what I earn in a month on skincare.

  It’s not that she’s a particularly beautiful woman; you could say she’s a self-made woman by dint of her credit card. A reshaped nose (and from what I can make out, tits and bum as well), a permanent tan, immaculately peroxide blonde hair, dresses from Chanel at the very least ... Merche’s hair always looks as if she’s just left the salon, too stiff for my liking, and I’ve never seen her not made up. She usually trails a strong scent of perfume in her wake, no doubt a very expensive brand that makes me feel queasy. Everything about her is excessive, like the mink she flaunts to work even when it’s not cold. She’s always in a hurry and the smile permanently set on her face is more of a grimace. However, her eyes seem sad and I’ve never seen her laugh spontaneously.

  “I can’t think why you don’t make an honest woman of her,” I once told Borja. “She appears to be in love with you.”

  “Because she’d find out I’m Pep, not Borja. Besides, she’s already married. We’re fine as we are.”

  “You know, if she really loves you, she’ll understand why you use a pseudonym ...” I went on in good faith. “It must be really hard for you!”

  I don’t know if I’m a romantic or just get into a state over complicated love affairs. It doesn’t mean I don’t like looking at girls, particularly in the fateful summer months when I can imagine things that even make me blush. But I’ve been living with Montse so long I don’t how I’d survive without her.

  “I can’t see what your problem is, I mean with leading a more normal life,” I sometimes blurt out.

  “Forget it”, he invariably retorts.

  There was a queue at the bank that cold December morning and I reached the office half an hour late. Borja was in excellent form.

  “I phoned Mariona and we’ll drop by her house for a drink at one,” he announced. “Let’s see if we can find out what the latest gossip is on the high-falutin’ Mrs Font!”

&n
bsp; “We’ll have to tread carefully, because if Mariona suspects we ...”

  “You leave it to me,” he grunted. “And not a word about Pau Ferrer! Mariona is very clever. If it all turns out to be a misunderstanding ...”

  “This case is giving me bad vibes. The painting’s got a strange feel to it, you know? Sinister even.”

  “Bah, that’s normal in modern art! ... The gloomier, uglier and nastier it is, the more it fetches,” he pronounced like an expert. “Hey, time for a coffee, it’s bloody freezing!”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea if they came to sort out the heating,” I suggested. “One of these days a client will get frost-bite.”

  “You know that’s not on.”

  No, it wasn’t on, down to some issue over the rent for the flat. I preferred not to ask.

  “By the way, before I forget”, I said changing the subject. “The shoes Lídia Font’s wearing in the painting are red. A very bright red.”

  “I’m glad you told me. Did you notice anything else?”

  “Well, her lips are red as well. Like the ruby in the necklace. But you know rubies are red.”

  Borja is colour-blind. Really colour-blind. It’s not that he gets red and green mixed up, which is what people think is the case with people who suffer from this complaint, but he sees them as the same colour. Our mother discovered this when we were seven, and ever since my brother’s had a complex about it. Perhaps because of the jokes he had to put up with at school, or may be it upsets him to think he sees the world differently to most of humanity. Personally I think he’s being silly, but Borja doesn’t want anyone to know he’s colour-blind, as if it were a defect or slur that, if it were public knowledge, would destroy the sophisticated socialite image he’s created for himself. As he’s so preoccupied with his appearance, he has banned both colours from his wardrobe so he doesn’t mix them up when he gets dressed, or so he says. The only exception I’m aware of is a crimson tie Merche gave him as a present and which he hardly ever wears.