The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘The boy’s too attached to me,’ he said, more or less out loud.

  He had once read of a writer who had fled the Soviet Union. Before leaving, he had made a point of mistreating his son during their last year together so that the boy would remember him with loathing and not with longing. He had done more or less the same himself. He had cut the boy out of his life as if he was an encumbrance, but the boy had repaid him with idolatry. He kept his father’s letters and photos as if they were holy relics. He asked his aunt to alter his father’s jackets, so that he could wear them. He’d fallen under the same spell of love as Gertrude had.

  ‘I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.’

  Later on, when he was somewhere safe, he would get someone to call the boy. But maybe it would be too late, and he’d find that his son didn’t want to know him.

  ‘You’re going too fast.’

  This came from behind him. It took a moment for the exact tone of the words to sink in. Then he connected with them, got annoyed, and turned round. The man had sat up, and Dieter caught a glimpse of the muzzle of a gun which was held just out of his reach.

  ‘Take it easy, Fritz. Slow down and pull into the next lay by. You’ll see a big blue P. That means “parking”. No tricks, mind you, because I might just take your ear off. Just park up, nice and easy.’

  ‘What do you want? I’ve hardly any money on me. I travel with travelers cheques and credit cards.’

  ‘We’ll see. You just park, and then we can have a little chat.’

  Dieter clung to the hope that there might be other people parked in the layby to help him. He saw the blue P sign coming up, and he slowed down. He was heartened to see another car parked there.

  ‘Stop right here.’

  He braked abruptly, sending up a little cloud of dust. The man kept his distance, and kept the gun pointed at his head.

  ‘You can see for yourself. I’ll give you my wallet. You can look in my luggage.’

  ‘Give me the card I gave you. Throw it over.’

  There was a sign of movement from the other car. A man got out and came over towards them. The short man stayed just as he was. The other man was thickset and solidly built, and when he reached their car he leaned down to look in.

  ‘Is that him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Are you Dieter Rhomberg?’

  ‘Are you the police?’

  The man behind him shouted—‘You—turn round!’ Dieter turned to look, and as he turned he saw the flash of something in the man’s hand as a razor slit his throat like a knife going through butter.

  Carvalho was jerked to full wakefulness by the surprise of seeing Bromide outside of his usual habitat of the Monforte and its neighbouring bars. There he was, standing at the front door of his house in Vallvidrera, kitted out with a tie, a three-piece suit, and extra-shiny shoes. He was accompanied by an athletic-looking youth with the figure of a Florentine statue.

  ‘Can we come in, Pepiño?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Bromide—you look like you’re dressed for a first communion!’

  ‘The occasion demands it. This is a friend of mine, to do with what you were asking me about yesterday. What’s more, the weather’s nice, so I thought to myself, a nice day in the country, go and pay Pepiño a visit.’

  The athletic youth had the air of a professional paranoiac, because as he came into the house he first peered into every corner and then stepped back to the door to check the garden. Then he followed Carvalho and Bromide. But he wouldn’t sit in an armchair; instead he leaned up against a chair and studied Carvalho, as if trying to get the measure of him.

  ‘This friend of mine knows everything there is to know about arguments and problems between pimps, their women, troublesome customers, and so on. Anything you want to know, just ask.’

  ‘Why—does he run a pimp’s agency?’

  ‘No. He’s a pimp too. Better sort of class, though. He’s a stunt man in the movies. One of those who go round crashing cars and throwing themselves down stairs. He’s an athlete. Show my friend your biceps.’

  The young man fended off the temptation with a sweep of his hand, but couldn’t avoid a smile.

  ‘Sure—I know—you didn’t come here to do circuit training! I presume Bromide has told you about the man they found murdered at Vich, and the women’s knickers, and so on. What do you know about all this?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Do you think the killing had sexual motives?’

  ‘We never kill a client. If one of them goes too far with the girls and starts getting disgusting, we might give him a bit of a fright. If he hits a girl, for instance, or something like that. OK, there are always fights between rival pimps—like when somebody’s screwing somebody else’s girl—but killing a client would be like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.’

  ‘What about the knickers in his pocket?’

  ‘There’s something odd about them.’

  ‘Do you say that because it’s your personal impression, or because you’ve got proof?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, did you say what you said because that’s your opinion, or have you been making inquiries among your colleagues?’

  ‘I asked. From what they told me, nobody knows anything.’

  ‘What about outside Barcelona?’

  ‘Nothing happens outside Barcelona. A bit of small-time sleaze in some of the industrial towns, but there’s nothing going on there that we don’t find out about, sooner or later.’

  ‘He’s amazing, Carvalho. He knows everything there is to know. They call him the “Golden Hammer”, because he’s got a cock that strikes like a hammer and shines like gold.’

  Once again Bromide’s friend shrugged off the compliments, but couldn’t contain a self-satisfied smile.

  ‘Some people might think that I spend my time just screwing and pimping. I’ve got a trade now though, so I’ve started running down the business with the girls, and nowadays I only do a bit here and there.’

  ‘He started at fairs, doing handstands on bar stools, on the edge of a coin, that sort of thing. Shame he wouldn’t show you his muscles. And he used to have all the girls chasing him. So in the end he decided to have a slice of the action himself. How many girls are you running nowadays, Hammer?’

  ‘Six or seven. You don’t want to overdo it, because you find that you can’t keep up with them, and there’s a lot of competition about. Also, these days women aren’t as easy to handle as they were in your day, Bromide. In those days, give them a wallop and they’d be good as gold. These days, you have to work on their psychology. With one of them you have to be nice to her kid. Another might need bringing into line. Another might have a mother in a wheelchair, and you have to find her a masseuse. And another might be epileptic. The girls don’t tend to get knocked about so much these days, but sometimes people try worse things. You have to guarantee them a full-time protection service.’

  ‘You’ll end up running a union, Hammer.’

  Carvalho could stomach just about anything, but he drew the line at pimps. For him they were like dog-ticks—loathsome little insects grown fat from feeding on someone else’s blood. The athlete had the face of an evil-looking lamb, and the innocence of a micro electronic computer.

  ‘Let’s get back to the corpse. Why are the police claiming that it was a sex revenge killing?’

  ‘I’m sure they’ve got their reasons. It doesn’t add up, though.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if it makes sense or not. One day they’ll take one of you in and wring a confession out of him.’

  ‘You’d have to be very stupid to own up to something like that. And anyway, people don’t just own up of their own accord. When they pick up a pickpocket, they stick him with every unsolved case
in the book. But they know very well that pimps don’t kill clients. They might give a customer a fright, or a good kick in the crutch, or blackmail him, but even this happens only rarely, because you get a lot more out of happy customers than you do out of blackmail. What does happen, though, is that sometimes you get a young pimp who’s too clever for his own good, and wants to make a fast buck. He has to be brought into line, and we take care of that.’

  ‘What about the knickers, then?’

  ‘All for show. Believe me.’

  ‘You mean it’s not your style?’

  ‘I can only think of one case. A dirty old shitter. The sort who likes to shit on girls, or gets them to shit on him. If it’s OK by the girl, he can shit away to his heart’s content. But if she doesn’t want to, he’s got no right to force her. Anyway, we had a shitter on our hands. We warned him. He tried it a second time, with another girl. And another. One day we took his underpants, filled them with shit, and sent them to his home address, with a card that said: “A Souvenir from Lulu”. And he never came back.’

  ‘How about it. Pepe, don’t we get a drink?’

  ‘What do you fancy, Bromide?’

  ‘One of those wines you’re always drinking.’

  ‘What about yourself?’

  ‘I don’t drink, thanks. If I start in the morning, I’d be at it all day, and I have to work at night. I’ll have a glass of mineral water. Non-fizzy. Or a pear juice, please.’

  Carvalho brought up from his cellar a 1969 Cote du Rhone, and Bromide watched him preparing to open it, with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in expectation as if he was about to embark on some fantastic adventure.

  ‘Are you opening that bottle just for me, Pepiño?! What is it, French?’

  In the morning light the wine looked a little sleepy, like the face of a girlfriend who’s still half asleep and still smells of bed. The Valles light gave an edge to the wine’s warm red colour, and Bromide’s dirty white tongue slurped the wine down.

  ‘This is a hell of a wine, Pepiño. And how am I ever going to be able to drink another wine after this? They’ll all taste like tap water!’

  ‘Think of this as your first communion, Bromide.’

  ‘Can I drink all of it?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘You don’t owe me anything any more, Pepiño. What you’ve done for me here is better than all the tea in China. When I was in the Blue Division, one time they gave us a whole case of white Rhine wine. Very good it was. But we were just kids, and we didn’t appreciate it. Some of them said that it wasn’t a patch on Valdepenas. The ignorance of youth! They gave it to us at Christmas, just before they sent us off to the Russian front. Then they wanted us to put on a guard of honour so that General Munoz Grandes could review us. Well, I’m telling you, the soberest one among us was leaning like the Tower of Pisa! Anyway, Munoz Grandes passed in front of us, stiff as a rod, and he didn’t like what he saw. Some creep shouted “Arriba Espana”, to sober us up and get us to stand straight, but instead we just fell about in heaps, pissing ourselves laughing—I mean really pissing ourselves! Because our bellies were hot and our peckers were cold! And that’s a wicked combination, Pepiño, wicked . . .’

  A strikingly modernist flight of steps led up to two large carved wooden doors with gilded fittings. In the reception area a porter was sitting reading Luiz Cernuda’s Reality and Desire. Carvalho, being a man who was suspicious of life’s surprises, found himself momentarily in a state of suspended animation as he read and re-read the title of the book. Thereupon the porter raised an ironic smile over the book in his hands, and murmured:

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Pedro Parra, please.’

  The porter used a bone paper-knife to mark his place, and shut the book as if it were the most precious thing in the world. He led Carvalho to a small waiting room and the detective barely had time to decide between Cambio 16 and Triunfo as his reading matter before Pedro Parra appeared in the doorway, looking every inch a real colonel, with the air of someone about to give a crucial order. Despite the chilly spring weather, or possibly thanks to a deluxe central heating system, the economist-colonel was in his shirtsleeves. He stood there, began to laugh, and slapped Carvalho on the back as if he were a lumpy mattress. The intervening years had done nothing to lessen his likeness to Rosanno Brazzi. He was greying elegantly, had the complexion of a mountain climber and skier, and beneath his shirt you could see the results of his daily work-out, one-two, one-two, in-out, in-out, in front of an open window every morning, summer or winter, rain or shine.

  ‘All that’s missing is the uniform.’

  ‘A general’s uniform. If twenty-odd years ago you used to call me “colonel”, then I must surely be a general by now. It might even still happen. There’ll be a guerrilla war soon, and that’s a good time to go up in the world.’

  ‘A guerrilla war? Your only chance of going up in the world would be if you went and climbed the front of the Senate House!’

  ‘Still the same old knife-in-the-ribs Carvalho. But what have you been doing with yourself all this time? The last I heard was that when you came out of prison you went off traveling. They told me you were a private detective. Bogart-style, like in the films.’

  ‘Nothing so glamorous. Runaway adolescents. Jealous husbands wanting their wives trailed.’

  ‘Sounds a pretty reactionary job to me.’

  ‘No more reactionary than gathering economic statistics for the financial oligarchy.’

  ‘No need to get personal! Don’t forget I’m gathering statistics for you too. Here, I’ve prepared you a rundown on Petnay’s activities in Spain and its immediate ramifications. For example, part of their Latin American activities is controlled from Spain. Another part is controlled from San Francisco, and now they’re setting up a third head office, in Chile, in Santiago. As regards their key personnel, I would make a distinction between the managers and the politicians. Sometimes the two coincide, but not always. Unlike other companies, Petnay almost never conducts its negotiations via state apparatuses through diplomacy, for example. They have their own network, and only turn to the State Department in the last resort.’

  ‘Who’s in charge of things in Spain now?’

  ‘Antonio Jauma. He represents management’s public face. But somewhere close to him there must be the politico—the one who goes to talk to ministers, pulls strings and so on.’

  ‘Well, just for a start, Antonio Jauma has been murdered, so someone else must be running the show now.’

  ‘Our records aren’t entirely up to date.’

  ‘Carry on, then. Who’s the politico?’

  ‘Nobody knows. Or at least very few people know.’

  ‘Who’s going to be taking over from Jauma?’

  ‘How long ago did he die?’

  ‘A month and a half. No—a bit more. . .’

  ‘It’s probably a temporary stand-in. Companies like Petnay don’t make this kind of decision overnight. I’ll go and phone someone to find out.’

  ‘Hang on. The porter in reception. . . Do you only hire porters with degrees in literature? He was reading Reality and Desire.’

  ‘What’s that? You know I’m just a humble economist.’

  ‘The collected poems of Cernuda.’

  ‘Oh, right. He’s a poet. A porter poet. He’s had a few books published, in fact.’

  While he waited for Parra to return, Carvalho found himself thinking of other poets with unusual jobs. Emilio Prados, in exile, working as a playground supervisor for children in a secondary school in Mexico. Or the poet who ended up teaching infants in a school in Tijuana. Carvalho had met him in a bar at the border, as he was drinking tequila solos, with salt, interspersed with a sip of water and bicarbonate.

  ‘I’m not coming back,’ he had said, ‘until Franco’s dead. It’s a question of dignity. Maybe I am nothing he
re—but at least I have my pride. You’ll find me in a few pre-War anthologies. The name’s Justo Elorza—have you ever heard of me? No? I’ve only just had the chance to start being published again. I went from the Argeles to Bordeaux. Then I got on a boat, to Mexico. I ended up in Tijuana. A temporary teaching job in a school. Temporary! Thirty years, my friend, thirty years! Every time I heard a rumour that Franco was ill, or that he was about to be toppled. I gave up shaving. I packed my bags, and I stopped changing the sheets, so that I had even more reason to leave. Several months ago I just gave up. I’ve got twenty books of unpublished poems. I went to Mexico to talk with the Era publishing house. Renau, the mural painter, is a good friend of mine. He’s in East Germany now. Anyway, the woman at Era is the sister of Renau’s brother-in-law. They’ve suggested I do an anthology. Imagine it—an anthology of poems that have never been published!’

  A growth of white stubble round his chin, the looks of the poet Machado but with a stomach peppered with ulcers, one lens of his glasses more or less covered with sticking plaster so as to concentrate his vision in his one good eye, a stained shirt that had once been white but was now yellow , a rim of dirt round a frayed collar and the pervasive smell of old man’s sweat, a pervasive smell of an animal which is soon to die.

  ‘There’s a standing committee of three or four Petnay inspectors who will advise the company on Jauma’s successor. They’ll stay here for another couple of weeks, and then they’ll leave Martin Gausachs in charge. He was Jauma’s second in command.’

  ‘Do you know the man?’

  ‘A meteoric career. He was four years behind me at university, studying law. Won all sorts of prizes as a student. Then he went to MIT and returned as a professor of business administration. A true technocrat.’