The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  This last querulous remark was directed at Carvalho.

  ‘You should worry about the Watchdog of the West on your own doorstep—Willy Brandt.’

  ‘You Spaniards have nothing to say on the subject of our Willy. Spaniards have nothing to say about anything. After all, putting up with Franco for thirty years. . . !’

  ‘It was you Germans that landed him on us. You helped him win the war.’

  Carvalho was annoyed with himself. He hated scenes. The natural masochistic inclinations of men and strong nations made it inevitable that the German would back down, and that Jauma, drunk and lascivious, would go onto the offensive, shouting:

  ‘Tonight well sleep with five hundred women all at once! And Rhomberg will do the business. Have you seen the size of his organ?’

  ‘An experience I can live without. . .’

  ‘I saw it once, on a beach in Mykonos. The Super Paradise beach, it was. We were spending the Easter holiday there with our families. Where Rhomberg walks, the grass will never grow again.’

  Rhomberg laughed and blushed.

  ‘It’ll be at the firm’s expense. We’ll go, and look out five hundred chicks. Four hundred and ninety for Rhomberg, five for you, Carvalho, and five for me. Best to find chicks with no front teeth, because they do a better blow job. And if they do have their front teeth, we’ll hire a dentist to pull them out in a civilized manner.’

  Rhomberg was seriously annoyed to find that he had left his Havanas behind at the hotel. Carvalho and Jauma concurred in observing that American cigars were unsmokable, but luckily the restaurant’s range of tobacco extended to a trio of Jamaican Macanudos. This prompted Carvalho to a brief sermon on the quality of their tobacco.

  ‘They’re perfectly made, but the flavour’s not a patch on a Havana.’

  ‘If you ask me, standards have fallen in Cuba. The best Cuban cigars these days are the ones that Davidoffs sell under their own label, but the traditional brands have gone way downhill. The quality of the tobacco’s still incomparable, though. The feel and weight of this Macanudo is excellent, but what about the flavour, Carvalho. There’s no flavour, no flavour!’

  They moved on to post-prandial drinks. Rhomberg plumped for a black label whiskey, while Carvalho ordered a marc from Burgundy, and Jauma one from the Champagne region. Then they settled in for the night. In the years to come, Carvalho’s main memory was of opening his eyes several hours later to find himself in a cushion-filled room where Jauma was engaged in heavy petting with three naked black women and Rhomberg was lying asleep next to a white girl who was busy trimming her nails, with her legs crossed and her breasts almost resting on her knees. Carvalho had a woman under him. She was gazing at the ceiling and humming a slow fox trot.

  Concha Hijar de Jauma had breasts that looked sad and were probably veined. The former could be deduced from the way that she compensated by wearing an excessively pointed bra. The latter he concluded from the transparency of her skin, which revealed the blood flowing in her forehead, her arms and her hands. The sight of the widow’s veins, together with the dark rings round her eyes, miraculously drawn by nature in the space of a couple of weeks, combined to produce a general effect of mourning. She had been educated in English schools and in Spanish barracks, under the paternal eye and tactical prudence of a Spanish general who did little as a military man, and even less as a member of the boards of countless companies. The girl’s upbringing had been wealthy and authoritarian. She then went to university, in Barcelona, to study medicine (Doctor Puigvert had removed a gall-stone for her father), and two weeks later discovered sex, thanks to a young student by the name of Antonio Jauma, and politics, thanks to his friend Marcos Nuñez. In fact neither Jauma with his sex nor Nuñez with his politics effected any fundamental alteration in the young lady, who only compromised herself in the most formal of senses with either one of them.

  ‘She’s absolutely and radically a virgin.’

  Marcos Nuñez had just concluded his assessment when the drawing-room door opened wide to reveal señora Jauma. Carvalho savoured the woman’s presence and imagined how many men must have fallen for her. While her husband was alive it must have been stimulating, fascinating, to invade this atmosphere of religiosity where every pleasure came tinged with a soupçon of sinfulness.

  ‘They told me you were here half an hour ago. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. My head must have been somewhere else.’

  What she seemed to be seeking was not so much respect for her widowed state as respect for her right to lose her head. When Carvalho introduced himself, she looked him over, and was able to tell at a glance whether he was the sort of man who wiped his lips with a serviette prior to raising a wine-glass to his lips, and also whether the detective viewed her as a widow with time on her hands. The discovery that Carvalho most assuredly would wipe his lips, and also that he was eyeing her with contempt but nonetheless voraciously, disconcerted the widow. She felt the need to take refuge in a more conventional role, so she introduced a moistness into her eyes, a tiredness into her hands as she pressed them together, and a note of anxiety into a soprano voice that betrayed a lack of sleep.

  ‘Are you up to date with the facts?’

  ‘He is. He knows everything that we know.’

  ‘You will help us, won’t you? Antonio deserves it. He was so loyal to his friends—even more than to his family or to myself.’

  ‘He wasn’t actually my friend. I think I ought to make that clear. I met him over a couple of days several years ago, and he certainly struck me as a remarkable man, but I wouldn’t say he was a friend of mine.’

  ‘You will help us, though?’

  ‘If you’re approaching me in my professional capacity, yes, I will.’

  ‘I have money, and I want to get to the bottom of this. It’s unbearable that everyone seems to be accepting the official version, and that everybody’s trying to hush it all up.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Everyone from the Petnay management to my father. My father has been moving heaven and earth to keep everything low-key. Petnay don’t want to find themselves involved in some sordid scandal, so they prefer to offer me money to keep quiet. I can’t agree to that. I’m doing it for my husband—for his memory, and for the memory that his children will inherit.’

  According to Nuñez’s explanation during the drive down from Vallvidrera, Concha Hijar had been a political militant during her student days in the school of medicine. But at forty years of age she was speaking as her mother would have spoken at forty years of age, and as she would also expect her own daughter to speak at the age of forty.

  ‘I want you to spare no expense.’

  ‘Have no worries on that score. My rate is two thousand pesetas a day, payable within sixty days. In cases where the insurance companies are disputing claims, I generally take a percentage of what my client will receive. However, as far as I can gather from what you’ve told me, we have no problems with Petnay or with the insurance.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In this case, in addition to the daily rate, I would expect a bonus of one hundred thousand pesetas if I solve the case within sixty days.’

  ‘When can you start?’

  ‘Here and now. With you. Tell me honestly—was your husband involved in a romantic liaison that might have made him a target for revenge?’

  ‘People don’t believe this, but we women are always the last to know. Antonio was very much a ladies’ man. They tell me he used to devour them with his eyes. But when it came to the real thing—absolutely nothing. He spent himself in words. People saw him as a womanizer because he was always talking about women, and with women, in a particular sort of way—”I want you. . .”, “Don’t play hard to get. . .”, “Go to the dentist and get him to take your front teeth out. . .” etc, etc. I’m sure you know the sort. He was so predictable. He never talked of anything else. But words are one t
hing, action another.’

  ‘When you said that you didn’t believe the business about the women’s perfume, what did the police have to say?’

  ‘I’d rather not go into that. It wasn’t exactly nice.’

  ‘Please. I need to know.’

  ‘It was disgusting: “People like your husband, if you don’t mind my saying so, get up to all kinds of kinky things. Some of them like to be beaten. . . some like, well . . . to be urinated on. So why shouldn’t your husband like sousing himself in toilet water?’”

  ‘According to the forensic examination, had he had sex that night?’

  ‘There were signs of ejaculation, but they can’t say whether this was due to sexual excitation or whether he’d actually had intercourse. The fact that he was not wearing underpants is more of a mystery.’

  ‘And the knickers?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘How were they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. They just told me that they were women’s knickers, that’s all.’

  ‘I need to know more about them.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. You want the brand name?’

  ‘No. I particularly need to know whether they’d been worn or not—in other words, when he put them, or when they were put, in his pocket had they just been used? Or had they been washed? Or were they new and not yet worn?’

  ‘And how am I supposed to find that out?’

  ‘Via his lawyer. Or your father. Or our friend here.’

  Marcos Nuñez seemed to have lost interest in the business, and was sniffing around the books on the shelves. A dining-room-cum-living-room which would have held twenty rock and rollers and their partners with ease. A series of original paintings by artists who hadn’t yet made it—Artigau, Llimos, Jove, Viladecans, and one who was on the point of making it—an eight-hundred-thousand peseta Guinovart. Classical style for the seating and avant garde for the light fittings. A small stuffed crocodile and op art mobiles, and not a speck of dust in sight. From the living room you could hear the sound of a servant assiduously polishing the oak parquet. The widow Jauma was trying to imagine a pair of women’s knickers that were not her own. Carvalho was trying to imagine them placed on the more precise geography of some woman’s body.

  Charo opened her eyes, the only part of her that was covered.

  ‘This is no time to be sleeping.’

  In a reflex action, the girl pulled the sheet over her head, but Carvalho had already flung the curtains wide open, and the room was flooded with April light.

  ‘Pig! That’s hurting my eyes!’

  Charo leapt out of bed. She rushed to the bathroom, but not before giving Carvalho a punch in the stomach.

  ‘I can’t wait till you’ve finished in there.’

  ‘I’ll be out in a second.’

  ‘I know you better than that. . . I’m leaving a photo of a man on your dressing table. I want you to try and remember if he was ever a client of yours. Maybe you could ask around among your fellow workers. Only people you know, though.’

  ‘What do you take me for, Pepito, darling?’

  Carvalho leaned over to the talking door, gave it a playful tap, and replied:

  ‘An expensive call-girl.’

  ‘Thank you, Pepito. You’re so charming.’

  ‘If you find out anything, I’ll be in my office till one, and then I’ll take a stroll round the billiard halls. I’ll be lunching at the Amaya.’

  He had no desire to hang about for a question and answer session with Charo. He left her flat intent on enjoying the morning’s sunshine and getting to the Ramblas as soon as possible. He let the road carry him down to the harbour, where the April morning light was beginning to get a grip on the city. If he stood still, the heat of the sun made him feel as if he was slowly cooking inside his winter jacket and he needed to cool off. Having drawn new energy from the heat and light, he walked back up the Ramblas. With a burst of energy he went up the wooden steps two at a time. The house that had once been a brothel run by a Madam Petula was now divided into a maze of offices belonging to a variety of small enterprises: wholesalers of eau de cologne, solicitors catering for small-time crooks, a commercial agent, a journalist bent on plumbing the depths of the Barrio Chino with a view to writing an urban realist novel, an ageing lady chiropodist, a dressmaker, a hairdresser’s with faithful clients who had been going there since the 1929 Exposition, and a few flats occupied by pelota players from the Colon club and girls from the Barcelona by Night troupe. Carvalho’s premises consisted of a small apartment measuring about thirty-five square yards. The office proper was painted green, and had a selection of nineteen-forties office furniture. There was also a tiny kitchen, with a fridge and a small toilet. The major domo of this establishment was an ex-convict byname of Biscuter, who had once shared a prison cell with Carvalho. The detective had never known his real name. Over the years he had occasionally told himself to ask, but the name ‘Biscuter’ seemed to serve well enough. Biscuter had had an unhealthy fascination with cars—other people’s cars. Between the ages of fifteen and thirty he had spent most of his time in prison. He was very short, with the head of a forceps-baby, and was bald in a comical sort of way, with a thick blond growth protruding from above his ears. He had red cheeks and a mealy complexion, thick pendulous pink lips, and cod’s eyes. He was proud of his fitness and the way his life was constantly being put to the test in Carvalho’s service. They had met in the street a few blocks from the Modelo prison. He’d asked Carvalho for twenty-five pesetas.

  ‘It’s for the bus, chief. I’ve lost my travel card.’

  ‘You’re going to get pulled in by the police if they find you hanging around here, Biscuter. Don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Good God—it’s the student!’

  That was what the prisoners used to call Carvalho when he was inside. He invited Biscuter for a meal, and they reminisced about the meals they had managed to concoct in Lerida prison, with a stove made out of a big tomato tin and a small red-pepper tin equipped with a wick and fuelled by methylated spirits.

  ‘You even managed to make a crab bouillabaisse, chief.’

  From the end of Carvalho’s sentence to the present day, Biscuter had been in and out of prison many times. He’d been cured of his passion for stealing cars, but his record stuck with him. He would occasionally fall foul of a police round-up, and, being unemployed, would find himself charged under the Vagrant Persons Act.

  ‘If only I could find a job. . .’

  ‘How would you fancy working for me? You’d be in charge of a small office. You’ll make me a coffee or a potato tortilla every now and then, but apart from that your time’s your own.’

  ‘I also know how to make bechamel, boss.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll even risk eating it. You can sleep in the office. You’ll get board and lodging, and I’ll give you a couple of thousand pesetas a month for your expenses.’

  ‘And a letter of employment, so’s they don’t keep picking me up?’

  ‘And a letter of employment!’

  From that day to this Biscuter had not left the little Ramblas world that Carvalho inhabited. Occasionally he came in useful for detective work, looking as he did like a down-and-out.

  ‘I’ll keep your coffee hot, boss. Brrrm, brrrm!’

  Biscuter had the curious habit of accompanying his activities with the noise of a 750cc motorbike. His speciality had been stealing big cars and reselling them in Andorra, but the only thing that Biscuter now retained of his former glories was the language. When he was happy, his lips made a sound like a car exhaust at full throttle, and when he wanted to indicate that all was not well, the ‘brrrm brrrm’ turned into a disconsolate ‘pifff. . . pifff. . . pifff’.

  ‘Give me three quarters of a cup, and then take a look to see if Bromide’s about.’

  ‘Straight away, bos
s! Brrrm, brrrm!’

  Biscuter knew just how hot to make the coffee to suit Carvalho’s delicate palate. His boss didn’t like it over-hot. Carvalho drank the coffee slowly as he tried to get San Francisco on the phone. It appeared that Dieter Rhomberg was out of town, but he had an appointment for a business dinner at the Fairmont that night. The picture of the revolving restaurant on the top floor of the Fairmont, with its Scandinavian buffet and its waitresses who dressed like a cross between valkyries and the girl-next-door in a rather dated musical, unfolded before him. He saw himself going up in the external lift, which looked out over the city, and which slowly unfolded its mysteries—a city seated on pine clad hills, a city whose downward slopes rushed headlong into the bay below.

  ‘Rhomberg is a lovely man, as long as you don’t get put off by his intellectual manner.’ So had said the ‘lady from Valladolid’. ‘He was very fond of Antonio. He’ll be able to help you.’

  ‘Bromide’s gone to the doctor’s, boss. He left a note saying he won’t be back before one.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s gone for a urine analysis.’

  ‘He must be trying to find out about the bromides that he claims the government’s putting in everything we eat and drink so as to keep us all off sex.’

  ‘He could have a point there, boss. I haven’t had a decent hard-on for months.’

  Carvalho picked up the phone again:

  ‘Is that the Urquijo Bank? Can I have the research department. . . ? Colonel Parra, please. . . Sorry, I mean Pedro Parra. . .’

  At university Pedro Parra had been known as ‘Colonel’ Parra. He’d been obsessed with the idea of setting up an anti-fascist resistance movement in the mountains, and he used to go training every Sunday, in the hills. He never missed a chance to do a round of press-ups to show off his physique. He would arrange secret assignations in the mountains near the city, always at places which were a sweat to get to, with half your breath spent cursing him and the other half spent trying to get your breath back. There was not much of that Parra left now. These days he worked as an economic researcher for the Urquijo Bank, and the only hint of the call of the mountains was the triangle of suntan—the mark of the inveterate skier which his unbuttoned shirt revealed.