The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘That’s enough! I’m having my milk in a bowl, and that’s an end of it.”

  Every now and then you have to make a stand, because if you don’t people take advantage of you. I know it’s a bit of an obsession, but everyone’s got so many manias that one more won’t do any harm. His bowl of milk was a means of re-establishing a link with his childhood, and the distant faces that were almost beyond recall. His aunt: ‘Juan, you’ll be late for school.’ His grandfather: ‘Juan, will you stop playing about?’ The weak light of the first light bulbs in Valles—fifteen .and twenty watts apiece—which were carefully switched off as soon as the first daylight appeared, in the daily battle between the electric current and the country folk who were scared to waste the stuff. Nowadays people don’t care. They leave their lights on, ten at a time, and damn the expense. They don’t worry any more. Instead he takes it out on her because she gives him stick for wanting to drink his milk out of a bowl. His grandma used to tell them to lock the larder properly, because the radio announcers would come out at night and eat everything in sight. He began to laugh, and laughed till the tears ran. The red light was still showing through the fog, and he roused himself sufficiently to notice that he had a hard-on. He felt his cock with a degree of pride, and noticed a tickling sensation. He needed a piss. There was no sign of the train yet, and beyond the roadside verge he saw that the fog and the undergrowth were thick enough to conceal a man’s slow, steady piss from the gaze of the cars, motorbikes, bicycles and lorries that were waiting for the train to pass. The knowledge that it was cold outside, and the possibility of the train arriving at any moment, led him to one last test. He made as if to piss, and then tried holding back, to stop the hidden flow. He only just managed it, and some drops of urine emerged like beads of golden water onto the Y-front of his underpants.

  He had no choice. He got out of the car, hunched his shoulders as if shoring up his body against the weight of the cold, and crossed the verge with what he imagined was a spring in his step. He plunged into the undergrowth, looking back as he went, to check whether the people waiting on the road could still see him. The hidden stream was demanding to be liberated; it seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in the domination it was able to exert over a man who was both its master and its slave. ‘There you go, there you go,’ the man murmured to himself. He spotted the substantial bulk of a lime tree, and reached to unzip his fly. His hand went into his fly as if trying to get hold of a soft, live creature that was hard to get hold of. He fumbled for the slit in his underpants and grasped the warm, fleshy substance of his penis. Once again he looked to the front and behind him, then to right and left, as he extracted his appendage and dangled it with two fingers of his right hand while the other fingers made a kind of roof, or rather a canopy, for the almost religious devotion with which he pissed. As he relieved the weight on his bladder, he felt a sense of euphoria, and no longer cared whether people could see him or not. He was trying to trace a pattern with his piss on the bark of the tree, but his eye was suddenly caught by something odd on the ground—something that seemed to have been buried there, and which was slowly being uncovered by the jet of piss. Like an electric probe, the urine slowly washed the shape clean, and before the staring eyes of Juan de can Gubern there finally appeared the shape of a hand. His eyes rested on the hand momentarily, as if trying to make sense of it, and then passed to the muddied sleeve of a jacket, which seemed to contain a man’s arm, and then to the entire jacket, and then to the man himself, face downwards, and half hidden by earth, hoarfrost, and weeds. Juan Gubern’s member turned limp as the cold got to it, and then swiftly retracted. He thought: ‘I should shout,’ but he didn’t, because he suddenly heard the sound of the train approaching and remembered that he had left his car blocking the road. He hurriedly retraced his steps, struggling to return his penis to its rightful place as he went.

  ‘I was just on my way to the office. Was your business really so urgent that you had to come up to Vallvidrera?

  As he asked the question, Carvalho pointedly did not invite his visitor to sit down. The detective was irritated by the feeling of having been caught unawares in his lair, and his eyes traveled across the various signs of disorder in his household: the unwashed plates on the dinner table; the record on the turntable and its sleeve lying on the floor; the overflowing ashtray next to the sofa; and the open book on the floor, covered in ash. He first resolved the problem of the book, by shutting it and tossing it onto a shelf on the other side of the room. He kicked the ashtray under the sofa while at the same time piling up plates and glasses, and taking them to the kitchen. When he returned he found that his visitor had retrieved the book from the shelf and was flicking through it, blowing out the ash from between its pages.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a book.’

  His visitor smiled a smile of enigmatic complicity. Forty years old, Carvalho thought to himself, but looks younger. Wearing a sweater, with the tabs of his shirt collar sticking out like little wings. ‘Judging by the way he moves, he must be hooked on James Dean,’ the detective decided, as he watched his visitor put his hands into his pockets, raise his shoulders and smile boyishly as he scanned the room with eyes that were shrewd and calculating.

  ‘There are worse things in life than books, señor Carvalho. Nice place you’ve got here. Does it cost much to rent?’

  ‘I think I bought it.’

  ‘You think. . .?’

  Carvalho went over to the big glass door, and as he looked out to check that the Valles countryside was still where it had been the night before, he noticed a car parked at the bottom of the garden stairs, and a man, waiting there, leaning against the bodywork.

  ‘Have you come with a chauffeur?’

  ‘I don’t even have a car, let alone a chauffeur. What I have in this world amounts to more or less nothing. A sweater or two. A girlfriend every now and then. One or two friends. And some languages. German, for example.’

  ‘What do you take me for—an employment agency?’

  ‘No. I’ve come to see you about a mutual friend—Antonio Jauma.’

  ‘He may be a friend of yours, but he’s certainly no friend of mine. I’ve never heard of Antonio Jauma, although I did know a Jauma once—a fellow student of mine. . . ended up as a teacher; a tall, skinny type, a Christian socialist. . . quite unforgettable. He wasn’t an Antonio, though.’

  ‘Antonio Jauma wasn’t tall. He wasn’t a teacher, either. He was a top executive in an international company. He wasn’t a Christian, and if he was progressive it was in a human rather than a political sense. It appears that Jauma had a high opinion of you. I’ll remind you when and where you met: in the United States, on a flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco.’

  ‘The executive!’

  The amused expression that appeared on Carvalho’s face prompted no particular reaction from his visitor. His repeated glances in the direction of an empty chair forced Carvalho to offer him a seat, and, once seated, the visitor slowly and deliberately lit a cigarette, took a deep breath, in order to get his narrative started, and gave Carvalho a detailed resume of his encounter with Jauma miles above the Mojave Desert. Carvalho began to wonder whether he was in the presence of some kind of oral novelist, a habitual monologist with a taste for performing to gatherings of Trappists, a cultured leftist fallen on hard times, and he sensed that the story was probably going to end with a coup de theatre, a carefully weighted punchline which would tie up the threads and give meaning to the whole.

  ‘So anyway. . .’

  A thick exhalation of smoke emerged from the visitor’s mouth and hung in the air like a grey sheet.

  ‘ . . . Antonio Jauma has been murdered.’ He had still not said his all, because his eyes had turned from mischievous to serious, and were searching for something—a suitable prop to enable him to complete his peroration.

  ‘Or at any rate he’s dead.’

  ‘I have to admit that
I’d be more interested if he’s been murdered. The fact of his being dead is just a consequence. How did he die? When? Where?’

  ‘Shot through the heart from behind. A perfect shot. Then they dumped his body in a wood near Vich. According to forensic it hadn’t been there long-probably since about one in the morning.’

  ‘What are the police saying?’

  ‘That it was some pimp getting his own back. As you may know, Jauma was a bit of a womanizer, in the oldest and least pleasant sense of the term. As far as the police are concerned, it’s an open and shut case. While he was out on the town, either someone tried blackmailing him and he resisted, or he fell foul of one of the hard men. The body smelt of women’s perfume—of toilet water, in fact. . . a personal hygiene fragrance, if you know what I mean. Eau lustrale pour l’hygiene intime. What’s more, it was dressed normally, but with one exception. No underpants. Instead they found a pair of women’s knickers in his trouser pocket.’ ‘

  ‘All of which suggests a night on the tiles. Seems clear enough.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Neither does his widow.’

  ‘That’s to be expected. She wouldn’t be the first widow to refuse to believe that her husband led a double life.’

  ‘In Concha’s case you could be right. She’s a proper lady, from Valladolid, and she’s never taken Antonio’s sexual inclinations very seriously. However, I too don’t believe that things are as simple as they seem.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, we’ve all seen enough detective films to know that criminals lay false trails to conceal the motives of their crimes. . . Now, what’s the classic false trail scenario?’

  ‘Pouring a bottle of whiskey or brandy down the dead man’s throat so that it looks as if he was drunk.’

  ‘Exactly, señor Carvalho. And, if you ask me, something similar happened in Jauma’s case.’

  ‘Why? Did he smell of drink?’

  ‘No. He smelt of women’s cologne. As I say, intimate cologne. As if he’d been soused in a barrel of the stuff. You take my meaning?’

  ‘Did you tell this to the police?’

  ‘I prefer not to have dealings with the police. I spent many years in exile in the Eastern Bloc, and my legal status in Spain is not what you’d call clear. I persuaded Concha to tell the police, though, and to get a lawyer on the case. Neither the police nor the lawyer have shown the slightest interest. So she decided to look into things herself. At that point I remembered that Jauma had mentioned your name a few times—specifically with a view to bringing you in to investigate possible instances of industrial espionage. Jauma was a very important figure. Petnay is a vast multinational, and he was their number one executive in southern Europe. They also used to send him on inspection tours of Latin America.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why such an important person should remember someone like me—a pretty crazy chance meeting over Death Valley, followed by dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. And then a trip up country. And what I find even stranger is the fact that you’ve been able to find me, and that you know that I’m a private detective. When Jauma met me, I was still living in the States.’

  ‘Jauma made it very easy for us. We found your phone number in his desk diary, together with three possible addresses, and instructions for one of his secretaries to get in touch with you as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Three addresses?’

  ‘This one, the address of your office on the Ramblas, and the address of your girlfriend, Rosario Garcia Lopez, aka Charo.’

  ‘Why did he want to see me?’

  ‘That’s another mystery. I suspect that it was probably something to do with his company.’

  ‘Was he the jealous sort? Maybe he thought his wife was having an affair?’

  ‘Concha?’

  For the first time the middle-aged youth in the sweater showed signs of surprise.

  There had been a third party at the San Francisco dinner, one Rhomberg—Petnay’s general overseer in the US. Carvalho took the Power Street cable-car to Fisherman’s Wharf, and arrived sufficiently early to be able to spend some time exploring pavements that were peopled with underground newsvendors, folk singers and long-haired practitioners of a variety of cheap and pointless crafts: manufacturers of sunflower seed necklaces, brass jewelry makers, Xerox poets, and spaced-out painters who ventured beyond the Golden Gate as if by an act of voluntary self-immolation. Carvalho resisted the temptation to try a portion of crayfish from a street stall. He could feel the tension in his stomach mounting at the prospect of serious eating. There were all kinds of stalls offering the passer-by a variety of ready-packed seafoods, either as consolation for the fact of not being able to afford to eat in the plush restaurants that stood nearby, or by way of an incitement to move on to greater things. Carvalho didn’t have time to decide. Out of a taxi stepped Jauma, in the company of a man who was clearly a German. His feet had barely touched the ground when he frightened the life out of the aforementioned hippies with a loud display of histrionics and a cry of:

  ‘Carvalho—For lobsters, and for the Love of God!’

  The German was also introduced with a characteristic Jauma flourish:

  ‘Dieter Rhomberg. Petnay’s number three man in the sectors that I’m involved with. In other words, a man who’s more powerful than Franco. Tonight’s meal is on him.’

  ‘It is?’

  The German appeared more surprised than annoyed.

  ‘We should celebrate the fact that your people have won the elections. Rhomberg might look like one hell of an executive, but in fact he’s a socialist. Left-wing, too. Supports the Young Socialist wing of the SPD.’

  ‘I can’t imagine that your friend’s particularly interested. . .’ the German exclaimed, in a tone that was half civility and half irritation.

  ‘Our friend’s in the CIA . . .’

  Carvalho’s stomach gave a heave. He realized that Jauma was saying it for a joke, but he had still said it.

  ‘ . . . Sure, the CIA. What other explanation can there be for a Galician who spends his time traveling between San Francisco and Vegas?’

  ‘Maybe he’s a croupier?’

  ‘Sure. A CIA croupier.’

  ‘Why does he have to be CIA?’

  ‘Because in Spain the CIA only recruits Galicians. I read it in Readers’ Digest.’

  Jauma laughed at his own joke, and ushered them towards the restaurant. ‘For the love of God . . . ! For Lobsters. . . ! For Justice and for the Fatherland!’

  Half an hour later there was still no sign of oyster soup and the lobster Thermidor that Jauma had recommended, or rather chosen on their behalf. During that time they drank two bottles of chilled Riesling, while Jauma and Rhomberg immersed themselves in an extremely technical discussion of the problems of the North American market and the necessity of adapting the packaging of some of their products to suit the taste of shop-windows in San Francisco.

  ‘I still reserve judgment until I’ve had a look round the Hollywood stores. In a couple of streets at the bottom of Beverly Hills you have the biggest concentration of luxury goods shops anywhere in the world. Even bigger than Paris or New York.’

  ‘What does Petnay make?’

  ‘Perfumes, alcoholic spirits and pharmaceutical products.’

  The German seemed inclined to stop there. Jauma, however, continued the list.

  ‘Fighter planes, bombers, high-tech communications systems, all highly “sophisticated”, as they say. . . as well as newspapers, magazines, dailies, politicians, and revolutionaries. . . Petnay makes them all. Even the lobster that we are about to eat, if it’s a frozen one, was very probably packed by Petnay. They own one of the biggest fishing fleets in the world, with operations in Japan, Greenland, Senegal, Morocco and the United States. In this restaurant there’s not a thing that couldn’t have been made by Petnay—from t
he fake French Californian wines down to Herr Rhomberg and myself.’

  In Jauma’s opinion, the oyster soup was out of a packet. Carvalho corrected him: ‘Tinned.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as oyster soup out of a packet.

  Carvalho and Jauma stuck to the rules and refrained from drinking wine with the soup. Rhomberg made up for them by polishing off a bottle all by himself—one glass of chilled white wine for each spoonful of soup. Jauma justified his choice of lobster Thermidor on the grounds that this particular recipe best concealed the insipid taste of American lobsters.

  ‘Big, but tasteless. You, Carvalho, will be my guest at my estate in Port de la Selva on the Costa Brava. We’ll go to the fish market at Llansa. They sell terrific lobsters there—live, red ones, not very large, but properly fished—not farmed. Angry lobsters. To be cut up very carefully. Do you know why, Carvalho?’

  ‘So that they don’t lose their waters, in other words their blood. That’s what gives them their flavour. You also have to pull their stomach out in one piece. It comes away very easily if you pull on the intestine that comes out under the central fin of the lobster’s tail.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  The German’s face had been turned bright red by the effects of the wine. He laughed.

  ‘It was only women and good food that saved us all from going mad under Franco.’

  Jauma shouted this out loud, to the general consternation of the surrounding tables. He repeated the statement in English, directing it at a crowded table consisting of four married couples, all white, with all the men dressed in green Prince of Wales check suits and the women dressed like Piper Laurie in a Hollywood comedy of manners.

  By now Rhomberg was sufficiently drunk not to feel embarrassed. He—gave three cheers for socialism and drank to the forthcoming downfall of Franco.

  ‘I can’t believe that you Spaniards have put up with him for as long as you have.’