The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘If you give me the knickers you’re wearing, señorita, I’ll give you a new pair:

  When all was said and done, there was no reason why the theory propounded by Golden Hammer shouldn’t be right. Four thugs have a girl on the streets. Jauma turns up. They realize that he’s loaded, so they decide to blackmail him. Jauma won’t play ball, so they kill him. But why the knickers? There could only be two reasons for that particular detail. Either it’s a ritual part of things when pimps kill people, or it’s because someone knew Jauma well enough to know that people wouldn’t be surprised to find him with a pair of women’s knickers. Golden Hammer had said that the former was not a possibility, so that left the latter. It was a bit implausible, though, to set him up with a pair of knickers that were completely new. And why was everyone in such a hurry to accept this as the truth?

  ‘There’s someone to see you, boss.’

  Carvalho was plucked out of his reverie by the realization that they were not alone. In the middle of his office stood two long-haired types flashing police badges at him.

  ‘Jose Carvalho?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve been sent to ask you a few questions about the murder of Antonio Jauma.’

  Biscuter went to fetch another chair from the bathroom. Cold, blue Formica and metal. Carvalho unobtrusively moved the lever which enabled him to raise the height of his own chair a few inches above those of his interlocutors.

  ‘Are you a private detective?’

  Carvalho handed over his license, but they ignored it.

  ‘In Spain private detectives aren’t supposed to stick their noses into other people’s business, particularly when the police are involved.’

  ‘As far as I knew, the Jauma case was closed.’

  ‘So why are you re-opening it?’

  ‘I’ve been asked by the widow.’

  ‘Our boss has told us to give you a bit of advice, strictly between these four walls. If you find out anything, he expects you to tell us first. Be very careful with anything you find out before we do. A private detective’s license lasts as long as we decide. . .’

  ‘I’m not expecting an Oscar. Or a Nobel Prize either. All I expect is that my client pays me, and obviously as soon as I know anything I’ll tell my client first. Then it’s up to her what she decides to do with the information.’

  Biscuter’s eyes switched to and fro between his boss and the two detectives as if he was watching a game of tennis.

  ‘Watch who you stir up and who you ruffle. They get angry with us, and then we have to cool them out. The boss says you’ve been seeing too many Bond movies.’

  ‘Actually, I fancied myself more as Gregory Peck.’

  ‘We’re not joking, pal. . . ,

  The voice sounded irritated. There was a moment’s silence,

  ‘We’ve tried to keep this pleasant, but don’t think we don’t know who we’re dealing with. You’ve got a very interesting past, and when the chief read your dossier he was kicking himself that you were ever given an investigator’s license in the first place.’

  ‘I knew the nephew of a nephew of the man who was prime minister at the time.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘When the glorious General Franco was still alive.’

  That cuts no ice these days.’

  The evening paper gave the news that a car with foreign license plates had been found in the river Tordera. The river had been unusually swollen because of the recent rains, and evidently the current had carried the car a few yards downstream. There was no sign of the car’s driver. All that was known was that it was an Avis car, and that it had been hired in Bonn by a Peter Herzen. The strange thing was that there was no sign of luggage in the car either, and it was suggested that, since he was traveling alone, he had kept his traveling bag on the back seat of the car, and that the water had swept it away.

  As night settled on the Ramblas, Carvalho began to register the symptoms that marked the onset of the daily confrontation. The riot squad had begun moving into position, according to the prescribed rituals of the ongoing state of siege. Apolitical counter-cultural youth and young counter-cultural politicos maintained their customary distance from each other. At any moment a gang of ultra right-wing provocateurs might appear, and you would see the militants of this and that party disperse and head for their now legalized party offices, since they didn’t want to find themselves removed from their recently acquired pedestal of legality and historical respectability by getting involved in street brawls. Between the hours of eight and ten the prostitutes, the pimps, the gays, and crooks great and small would disappear off the streets so as not to find themselves caught up in a political battle that was not of their making. Carvalho watched from his window as the tension mounted up the Ramblas, while Biscuter stood at his side complaining of the dangers the city was facing.

  ‘And this is quiet compared with some places, boss. Imagine what things must be like in Bilbao. Or San Sebastian. Or Madrid. The ETA and GRAPO kidnapping people all over the place. The right-wing firing at demonstrators. And the shoot-out at the lawyers’ office. That way they’re hoping to destabilicize the situation.’

  ‘Destabilize, Biscuter.’

  ‘What does “destabilize” mean, boss?’

  ‘Creating a scenario in which the authorities lose control of the situation, and the political system is incapable of guaranteeing order.’

  ‘And who benefits from this?’

  ‘Invariably those in power. It gives them an alibi for doing what the hell they want.’

  ‘It’s not right, boss! They should hang the lot of them! You know what I say—flogging, that’s what they need! That’s what I’d do with them. What a bloody mess!’

  The valve on the pressure cooker had stopped hissing. Biscuter’s execrations reached Carvalho at about the same time as the first shouts from the Ramblas. Within seconds the street outside became a nocturnal corral packed with stampeding humans. The riot squad swept down the street like so many lead soldiers, with their truncheons raised. All of a sudden, as if moved by a collective clockwork, they all paused, and the fleeing demonstrators slowly regrouped, their numbers reduced, but still sufficiently numerous for someone to start shouting, ‘Amnesty—free the prisoners!’ and for the crowd to advance defiantly towards the police again. Another charge. A Molotov cocktail exploded among the front ranks of the police, and the logical structure of their charge suddenly disintegrated. The controlled anger of the riot squad was now replaced by a destructive fury.

  As the police passed by, innocent bystanders were felled by truncheons, and the riot cops with their tear gas and rubber bullets fired after the fleeing demonstrators. The noise of a gunshot set Carvalho’s nerves on edge as he watched from the window. The police stopped and turned round to look down alleys and up at people’s windows. One of them fired a rubber bullet at the front of a building, and people closed their shutters and balcony doors as if in expectation of a sudden downpour. Carvalho left his shutters slightly ajar, and witnessed a stylized charge and fragmented movements as the forces of order passed in front ofthe restricted viewpoint ofthe crack in his shutters.

  Biscuter called from the kitchen:

  ‘It’s ready, chief. I’ve made the sauce.’

  As the smell of the cooking made him turn his head, peace had already returned to the Ramblas. The police had resumed their previous cautious vigilance, and in the riot buses the cops had raised the plastic visors of their helmets and were relaxing.

  ‘Are they properly cleaned?’

  ‘There were a few hairs, but I cleaned them off. They’re really tender.’

  A whole culture of Catalonian cooking has been constructed on the basis of an onion and garlic base with spices, and Biscuter had learned it studiously. The little fellow ate without taking his eyes off Carvalho, in the hopes that he might let fall some word of apprec
iation.

  ‘Delicious, eh, chief?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Correct—is that the best you can say, boss?! Jesus—I’d have to do your budgie’s balls in bechamel before you’d say “Very good, Biscuter! Bloody brilliant. Biscuter!’”

  Minutes later Carvalho was drinking a coffee with brandy in the Cafe de l’Opera, surrounded by remnants of the demonstration and the first specimens of Ramblas nightlife. Carvalho instinctively picked out the plainclothes policemen. As between plainclothes police and those who have a policeman in their heads, who was not a policeman here?! Two gays were caressing each other beneath a modernist-style mirror which reflected the tender napes of their necks. Seventeen young girls dressed as dope-smokers and runaways had just arrived from home and were ordering Evian water from the waiter. The two hundred and thirty clients of the Cafe de l’Opera sat on their cinemascope island and provided a spectacle for the shy passers-by outside, out sightseeing or looking for whores. The waiters carved a passage through the customers like black and white snakes, and their evidently magnetic hands contrived to hold aloft brass trays that in the olden days had been corroded by spilt absinthes during nights of passion involving gentlemen and their mistresses in moiré.

  ‘The drinks are on the house,’ shouted a doubled-up hunchback trying to clear a way for himself. His clothes smelt of hashish and his armpits of sweat. Voices that smelt of tobacco and of sandwiches swallowed down like a fuel to sustain the body on its long voyage from nothingness to death, passing via total apathy. On the shoulders of a big boned man, a two-year-old child is leaning over a gin and tonic and accepts a strawberry lollipop handed to him by a waiter with rosy cheeks. In a corner a pre-tubercular youth sits alone, listening to his own guitar solo, and his dirty locks of hair spill over the guitar strings. At the door two riot cops suddenly appear. They stand there, with the visors of their helmets down and their malicious smiles flattened by the transparent plastic. They show no indication of either coming or going. They just look, and probably enjoy listening to the silence they have caused, which is broken by the occasional cough or the clink of glasses being replaced on marble bar-tables. The kid starts to cry. The riot cops leave.

  ‘Have you never been to our premises before?’ ‘Haven’t you taken a stroll around our private woods?’ ‘Would you like to take a look around so as to familiarize yourself with the mansion?’

  Carvalho wasn’t sure whether Gausachs had actually said any of these things, or whether his tone had simply suggested them. Tall and sturdy, with a bell-shaped chest, blond hair and looking like a young patrician of the textile industry with some English engineer or his daughter among his antecedents, Gausachs was a picture of refinement, with a Greek profile somewhat bloated by excesses of food and drink. He had the gestures of a master of ceremonies, a way of looking at you with half-closed eyes, a restrained smile, and just one arm moving gently in order to indicate agreement, remembrance, forgetting, direction to, etc. He spoke a formal Spanish which deliberately avoided the drawling vowels of Catalan, a falsely pure language chosen so as to keep in with the people who mattered in Madrid. He also had the linguistic jargon of the typical young executive: ‘It goes without saying. . .’; ‘On the basis of. . .’; ‘At the level of. . .’; ‘Consider it done. . .’

  ‘I’ll be delighted to show you round, but you’ll have to forgive us if the place is in a bit of a mess. We’ve got the builders in. Everyone to their own taste—I’ve decided to redesign the style of the place a bit. Especially the reception area. Poor Jauma was a creature of instinct, in this as in all things, and he gave no importance to scene-setting. Even this improvised office that you now see would have been inconceivable in his day.’

  Walls paneled in beech wood, a Res Mobel table, an office refrigerator, a three-piece Oxford suite in real leather so delicate that it looked almost like human skin, an Indian rug, a Sunyer acquired at a recent auction (a present, Gausachs added) and a cocktail bar in which malt whiskey had the pride of place, next to a solid silver ice bucket.

  ‘Then I’ll show you where Jauma used to work. It looks like a warehouse office in some suburban department store. He was a man of brilliant intuitions, but he was a bit old-fashioned in his ways, even though you could say that he was still very much on the ball. When it came to running a company, he was a force to be reckoned with, but at the level of image, of packaging, he was fifty years behind the times.’

  ‘So have you now been put in complete charge of the company?’

  ‘I’m being advised by a committee sent from our head office in London, but they’ll be leaving soon.’

  ‘According to people who have studied Petnay—and as you know there’s a lot of them about, especially since the coup in Chile—people who reach high management positions in the company—yourself, for example—always have beside them a political appointee. Something analogous to the function of a political commissar in the people’s armies.’

  Miraculously Gausachs managed to laugh just with his lower lip, a technical feat that Carvalho found astounding.

  ‘I do not know whether multinational corporations will go down in the history of world economics, señor Carvalho, but it appears that they already have a special place in the history of literature—in the fairy story section. Absurd, completely absurd. I won’t deny that there are areas of management that touch on politics and—more than politics—on the business of law-making. Decisions in these areas are taken at high political levels—but I am the one who makes them—me, Martin Gausachs Domenech—just as señor Jauma did in his day.’

  ‘Nothing escapes the eye of a regional general manager?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing: Each of us has three-monthly bilateral meetings with our senior management, and every six months there’s a general conference. Periodically regional inspectors pass through, or general inspectors, and there’s a kind of central administrative committee which functions as the main accounting brain.’

  ‘Isn’t Dieter Rhomberg the inspector for this region?’

  ‘Indeed he is. But he’s just resigned.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I heard yesterday. I had a telex from head office which said that, as of two months ago, Rhomberg is no longer our regional manager. He has resigned.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit strange that it’s taken them two months to get round to announcing it?’

  ‘Since Jauma’s death things have got a bit out of synch, and a few things have tended to get overlooked, because this is a big period of re-organization and it’ll be going on for a while yet. Even if big firms like this are like giant machines, the human element still counts for something. Particularly so in Jauma’s case. He was very much his own man, in the sense that he kept a lot of things in his head and few in his diary. There are dozens of corners that we still haven’t had time to explore. He relied on his fantastic memory, and that’s something that can’t be handed on. The man didn’t believe in division of labour. Just imagine—this company has an amazing management team, absolutely brilliant, and a computer centre to rival the Pentagon, but Jauma felt duty-bound to take the accounts for his sector and get them checked over by some mysterious accountant friend of his.’

  Again the smooth, flat laugh emerged via Gausachs’s bottom lip,

  ‘Was he suspicious of something or someone?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. It was just the way he was. Must have come from his background—rural, provincial, rather. He was a bit provincial in some things.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘He was a very capable man, in a professional sense, although I myself would have done a lot of things differently.’

  ‘You’ll get your chance, now.’

  ‘It’s made a few difficulties for me. Jauma’s job involves a lot of travel. I’m having to give up my assistant lectureship at the university, and right at this moment I’m wrestling with a bit of a problem, Shoul
d I stand as an MP in the next elections? A group of my friends is pushing me into it, Catalonia needs businessmen to represent it in the upper echelons of government:

  ‘And the upper echelons of government need Catalonia to be represented by businessmen.’

  ‘That’s certainly true. But I’m not sure whether I’d be capable of alternating responsibilities between business and politics, I think I’m going to have to choose.’

  ‘Which will you choose?’

  ‘At this moment in time, as things stand, at ten in the morning, on the basis of all the available data, and strictly between ourselves, I choose Petnay. There will always be other elections, and anyway I find this job fascinating.’

  ‘What does Petnay produce in Spain?’

  ‘In the sense of manufacture, it makes mainly cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, feedstuffs, packaged food, and so on. But it also runs finishing lines for a lot of other products, and it’s no secret that Petnay has a qualitatively determining stake in a lot of other Spanish companies.’

  ‘Qualitatively determining?’

  ‘That’s a term I coined for my classes on foreign investment. A lot of the time it’s not necessary for a big multinational to control a full fifty-one per cent of the shares of a given company. All it needs is to own a holding large enough to guarantee internal stability in the company concerned and its creditworthiness in relation to the banks. You follow?’

  There was almost nothing left of the tousle-haired, slightly cross-eyed, but sympathetic-looking lad. He had enough hair not to appear bald, but not enough to be able to go around uncombed. The thick bifocal lenses that he wore seemed to have corrected his squint by submerging his eyes in a sea of milky distance. Wrinkles and ruts on his cheeks served as drains for the trickle of sweat that sprang from the roots of his hair, as the lawyer Fontanillas struggled to follow the trainer’s movements.