The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Did Jauma ever tell you that over the past three or four years millions and millions of pesetas have disappeared from Petnay’s accounts in Spain? Did you know that this year the figure ran to two hundred million?’

  ‘This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’m surprised that Petnay weren’t aware of it.’

  ‘They most certainly were. Jauma informed them, year after year, and this year in particular.’

  ‘Ridiculous! How could a company like Petnay permit a situation like that to continue?’

  ‘That’s precisely what I want to know.’

  ‘Sit here and wait, please.’

  A light that seemed to offend the eyes, or warn them of fearful things to come. Office furniture that encompassed three distinct epochs: from neo-classical polished wood, to metallic furniture that made hollow noises, and all this framed in that curious style that attempts to make all offices look like the offices of Hollywood films of the 1940s. Typewriters on metal trolleys. And, above all, people. People passing through and people sitting there with an uneasy feeling that perhaps it’s going to be for ever.

  The police themselves give the impression of being in historical accord with the furniture. There are some on the verge of retirement, with the faded, opaque luminosity of years and years of service, with little moustaches which they learned to trim during the War and which they still tend carefully, grey hair by grey hair—a strange but cultivated insect with rectangular wings pinned to a leathery upper lip. Then there are the forty-year-olds, athletes to a man, and all with pot bellies and an ideological formation dating from the Franco era, the only one they have known. They all have to hold second jobs in order to make ends meet, and they’re fed up and angry at the way they have to spend the hours of their working lives among a defeated and ill-fated humanity. Finally, the young ones, really young, long-haired and looking like young bank clerks, with a certain metallic naturalness, and with provincial university law degrees, but who failed to disguise sufficiently their opposition to Inspector So-and-So. Or exFalangist youth who have converted into a profession the mystical notion that life should be an act of service. There are also the ones who have learned everything from North American TV films, following the style of the FBI agents like the kids of Hamelin followed their wise piper. The gestures of office workers, a mechanical aggressivity that is part of their stock-in-trade, and an ability to pass from a blow to the forgetting of that blow in an instant, in the confidence that the person on whom it landed has no choice but to play along. Young car thieves, pickpockets, shoplifters, prostitutes, gays with plucked eyebrows and false eyelashes, quarrelling neighbours with tears in their eyes and the marks of blows on their faces, an old man who has stabbed his luscious niece, and a hunter who shot his wife without waiting for the hunting season to begin. The lucky ones make a statement and leave, but there are some who remain at the end of the corridor, and through a chink in some door that has not been closed in time, you hear their screams and protests, the threats made in a room without windows and with no light other than what hangs over the loser like a noose. When they return from the end of the corridor—maybe bruised and maybe not—with their hands handcuffed and looking contrite, they look like they’re returning from an enforced first communion. Carvalho watched them as they reached the last opaque glass door, which was as far as he could see. But he knew what came after. A sudden end to the labyrinth of offices, and the start of the cement. Stairs that plunge down to a damp, cold hell which is accessed by a barred door which then leads to a corridor with cells on either side, and the toilet-cum-shower at the end, where the shit makes it impossible to take a shower and the smell of the disinfectant never succeeds in overcoming the smell of the most wretched, desperate piss in all the world. ‘Door!’ they shout from above, and from below a uniformed guard moves calmly and deliberately to open the door to receive the prisoner and the accompanying instructions. Put him in solitary. The prisoner will regain his identity in the cell and will discover how far he has been defeated, with the clear awareness that in this game it was impossible to win anyway. Even if you’re only in for a few hours, it strips you of something that nobody will ever be able to give you back. You’re left with the dizziness of the leap that you have to make between the reality of what you think you are and the reality of what the police want you to be.

  ‘Well . . . Carvalho! We meet again. . . I’

  Somebody gave him a slap on the back that felt almost friendly. Raising his eyes he saw the face of a Spanish police inspector who could have come out of a foreign film that Spanish National Radio would have described as anti-Spanish for the simple fact that it was anti-Franco. Then the second-rate Hollywood actor left him. Several minutes passed, and Carvalho sensed that he was in for a long wait, a black sheet of a night without sleep, which he would have to spend either pacing up and down the painfully short corridor or sitting on an uncomfortable chair with hard edges. They left him in the company of the man who had shot his own family. A mediocre Sunday-driver sort of a man, who stared at his handcuffed wrists and sobbed incessantly, as if his nostrils were being tom apart by the crying.

  ‘Remei, poor Remei!’

  ‘Poor Remei, eh? You should have thought of that before you shot her.’

  ‘Remei, poor Remei,’ the hunter wailed, ignoring the admonitions of a passing police officer. The hunter raised reddened eyes and looked at Carvalho:

  ‘Twenty-five years, and never a bit of trouble. I’ve never been here, even to get a passport. Why would I want a passport—I’ve got a nice little villa, and we go there every Sunday.’

  ‘Did you kill her?’

  He bowed his head and said he hadn’t, and sobbed sobs that were trying to drag tears up from unknown depths.

  ‘And the kid. I shot my daughter too.’

  By now his crying seemed more substantial, or at least it had increased in fluency and mucosity. He poked around looking for a non-existent handkerchief. Carvalho handed him a sheet of white paper that was lying on one of the tables.

  ‘They’re going to do for you.’

  ‘Here, use this.’

  The handcuffed man contrived to blow his nose.

  ‘Poor thing! She was complaining. I wanted to build a barbecue in the garden, a silly thing, so’s we could have meat grilled on proper charcoal, because we’ve got butane gas indoors, and meat grilled over gas just doesn’t taste right. I bought some of those heat-resisting bricks. . . what do they call them. . . ?’

  ‘Refractory.’

  ‘That’s it, refractory. And I ordered a good solid iron grid from the ironmonger’s, big enough to grill meat for a regiment, because sometimes there are twenty or twenty-five of us, what with the girl’s fiancé, and my brother and his kids. Anyway, I wanted it to do paellas too. I don’t know how people manage to cook these days.

  ‘People forget that every once in a while you might need to make a paella. And what are you going to cook it on? Remei always used to say: “When you have to do a paella for more than six people, this cooker’s not big enough. A paella needs to be kept moving, otherwise the rice cooks unevenly.” “OK,” I said, ‘I’ll build a barbecue outside.” I started cementing the bricks in, and she starts fussing: “No, I don’t want it there, because all the smoke will go into the house, and then it’s me who has to clean up afterwards.” And so on, blah-blah-blah, and so there I was, with the cement already mixed, and half the wall already built. I gave the bricks a kick, and she started saying I was crazy. “You’re mad. Mad. Just like your mother!” And out it all came. First she had a go at my mother. Then my father. And then the girl joined in. And then, I don’t know, I just wanted them to stop, I wanted an end to the boom-boom-boom going on in my head. I turned on them, and they ran over to the garden gate, and carried on—blah, blah, blah. And I swear, sir, I swear, as I sit here now, I have no idea how I ended up coming out of the house with the rifle. I just wanted them to stop. And Remei
was shouting at me from the gate, “Look at the bastard—now he’s got his gun.” And I fired. And fired again. And they tried to run away, and I didn’t want them to, so I fired again, and again, and they both fell. Oh, mother of God!’

  ‘Jose Carvalho Larios?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Follow me.’

  Eleven o’clock at night. A three-hour wait.

  ‘Has he just killed his wife and daughter?’

  ‘No—wounded them.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘The daughter, yes. The wife only slightly, but she’s in a state of shock. Come on in.’

  The inspector who had slapped him on the back was now sitting at the end of the room.

  ‘We can get this over with very quickly if you co-operate. I want a complete statement regarding your relations with Rhomberg, and the reasons why he was traveling to Spain under an assumed name, or at least as much as you know.’

  Carvalho began back at square one, in the United States. The officer was peering over the top of his glasses at a bundle of documents which presumably had to do with Carvalho.

  ‘Don’t you know that it’s against the law for a Spanish subject to enroll in organizations like the CIA without authorization?’

  ‘I started off giving Spanish lessons, not realizing that it was the CIA. Then I found it amusing, so I carried on. When I left, I clarified my position with two ministries Foreign Affairs, and the Home Office.’

  He continued his account up to his latest phone conversation with Rhomberg’s brother-in-law and showed them the telegram that had arrived from Bonn, signed ‘Dieter’.

  ‘You’re going to find yourself in big trouble if you carry on with this case. The Jauma case is now closed. The murderer has been arrested. We have his confession. A young man from Vich. Jauma arrived at a roadside bar run by the boy’s mother-in-law and started flirting with the lad’s wife. We happen to know that the girl’s the village prostitute, and that the husband lives on her earnings. Anyway, Jauma made a pass at the girl, and she complained to the husband. There was a fight, and you can imagine the rest for yourself. As for Rhomberg, either he has faked his own disappearance or he’s at the bottom of a river somewhere.’

  ‘You couldn’t drown a cat in that river!’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. There’s been a lot of rain this year, and the water level was up. Anyway, my job is just to warn you. The case is now settled. You’ll now make a statement as regards Rhomberg. I’ll read it back to you, and if you agree it’s a fair representation of what you said, then you can go. I repeat, I’m not speaking for myself; I’m passing on orders from above.’

  He pointed upwards at the ceiling, and the eyes of those present followed his finger. A young policeman was at the typewriter, typing with two fingers, evidently a prisoner of a set of expositional formulae that were insufficient to translate what Carvalho was trying to say. He tore up sheet after sheet in order to start over again, and the frustration only increased his nervousness and aggressiveness. In the end Carvalho had to dictate his statement himself, complete with punctuation, and an hour later, with the witching hour past, the policeman embarked on a meticulous reading of the document, which was followed as attentively by the typewriting constable as it was by Carvalho himself.

  ‘Fine. You can go now. But remember what I told you.’

  ‘Is Jauma’s killer in the building, here?’

  ‘They’ve just finished questioning him.’

  ‘Have they taken him down to the cells?’

  ‘Not yet, no. He’s got a visitor. His mother-in-law.’

  ‘Could I see him?’

  ‘You can see him, but not talk to him.’

  In one of the offices the tearful hunter was talking with a middle-aged woman. He introduced her as his sister. A fifty-year-old woman who was still fresh and good-looking, with twenty excess kilos very well distributed about her person. In another corner, a smiling and disdainful Paco the Hustler was talking with his mother-in-law. A faded denim outfit and long, curly hair. The features of a hardened Wide-boy. He saw Carvalho looking at him and stared him out defiantly. Cool, confident, and sure of himself.

  ‘Why do they call him “The Hustler”?’

  ‘He says that’s been his nickname since he was a kid. He used to steal chickens in the village in Andalusia where he comes from. Then his folks came to live in Catalonia. He had a bit of a record as a small-time hustler, but then he married the daughter of a woman who ran a bar, and seemed to settle down. At least, he gave up thieving, although the guardia civil reported that he’d put his wife on the game.’

  ‘A village pimp, eh?’

  ‘There’s a lot of it about.’

  Carvalho bade the young police officer goodnight, and passed under the eye of the vigilant guard at the front door, to reach the fresh, black air of the street outside. He had a hunger and a thirst as if he hadn’t eaten for days and he felt like he hadn’t shaved for a week. And all this for four hours’ detention. He went to get his car from where he’d left it parked next to his office in the Ramblas, and fifty metres into his freedom he heard the sound of voices. Someone was running up behind him. It was Biscuter and Charo. They fell on him hysterically.

  ‘Was it all right, chief? Did they treat you OK?’

  ‘Oh Pepe, poor Pepe, my Pepe . . .’

  Charo’s mouth kissed the entire geography of his face in minute detail.

  ‘Don’t go mad—I was only in there for four hours!’

  ‘In that place you always know when you go in, but you never know when you’re coming out again.’

  ‘Biscuter’s right. He rang me, and I’ve been out worrying about you all night.’

  ‘What about your clients, Charo?’

  ‘To hell with my clients!’

  ‘I’ve got a meal ready for you, chief. It’ll make your mouth water.’

  Propelled by Charo and Biscuter, Pepe reached his office in a good frame of mind, even though the day’s events had left him with many unanswered question. Supper was a squid casserole with potatoes and peas, washed down with a bottle of Montecillo. Charo ate the squid, but without the sauce. She drank the wine too, despite Carvalho’s observations about the irrationality of her diet. Biscuter and Carvalho smoked two cigars. Montecristo Specials.

  ‘The widow’s been ringing. Every half-hour. I’ve lost count. . .’

  ‘Whose widow? Franco’s?’

  ‘No, boss, Jauma’s. She said it’s urgent she sees you today.’

  ‘It can wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘Nuñez phoned too. He was pretty insistent. He said he’ll be waiting for you at El Sot if you get out of prison before three o‘clock.’

  ‘I haven’t been in prison. Biscuter.’

  ‘I say it’s the same thing. I’ve never yet set foot in a police station without ending up with at least six months inside.’

  ‘I’m going for a talk with Nuñez, and then I’m off home. I’m missing my creature comforts.’

  ‘I won’t leave you tonight, Pepiño. I’m coming up with you.’

  ‘Do what you like.’

  She kissed his shoulder under his shirt and hugged him round the waist as they went down the stairs. He drove up right outside El Sot, and told Charo to wait in the car. Nuñez rushed across to meet him, and they went to find themselves a quiet comer to talk. Carvalho told him the latest, namely that somebody had provided the police with a suitable murderer for Jauma, and that it looked as if Dieter Rhomberg’s body had disappeared for ever.

  ‘The widow’s the key to it all. If she pulls out I have no authority to carry on.’

  ‘I’ll try to put pressure on her.’

  ‘Just a few days. A week, I need just one week. At least so as to know if I’m on the wrong track.’

  He saw a girl standing among a group of people. It was the same girl who
had been with the young man of the hitchhiking ghost.

  ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend. That was just a friend of mine. He’s not here.’

  ‘What a shame—it would have been a golden opportunity, except that I’m busy tonight.’

  ‘The year still has another two hundred nights in it.’

  ‘How about we eat out tomorrow?’

  ‘Hey—you’re quick! I don’t know. . . I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘Ring me.’

  As Carvalho was about to leave, the girl gave him a big smile. Nuñez was clucking around like a solicitous host.

  ‘Pretend you don’t know what’s going on. Don’t phone Concha. I’ll ring her myself and tell her that you’re out of town pursuing your investigations.’

  ‘That will be true enough, as it happens.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’m taking a trip. I want to see a river, and a reactionary town.’

  ‘Vich?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Charo devoted herself to a detailed foreplay that lasted the entire drive back. Having arrived home, Carvalho made his way, naked, down the darkened hallway of his apartment, and his cock was warmly welcomed, first by her lips and then by her tongue, as it pressed hard against her teeth and her mouth opened to make way for it. Charo proceeded backwards on all fours, sufficiently slowly so as not to interrupt her oral caress of his cock, and when they reached the sofa she gently made him sit down, maintaining the contact all the while. Then she swiftly exchanged the warm damp protection of her mouth for that of her sex, which opened its tender slit to him. As Carvalho came, his attention was divided between her thighs and a buzz of thoughts that was refusing to take solid shape.

  ‘Did you like that?’ Charo whispered in his ear, aware of a job having been well done.