The Angst-Ridden Executive

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘It’s a present for someone. I wonder, could you ring me at the Argemi estate in Palausator, because I don’t have the address that I want it sent to. . .’

  ‘I know the people. Señor Argemi’s house is full of furniture that has been bought at our shop.’

  ‘Call me at around one. Maybe a bit before. Ask for me—Pepe Carvalho. Then I’ll be able to give you the exact address.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  In a fish shop recommended by the man at La Marqueta he ordered a fair-sized rascasse, a kilo of small squid, and a further kilo of rock fish for making soup. He asked could they please keep them in the fridge for him, and be sure to phone him at Argemi’s half an hour before they closed for lunch, to remind him to call by and pick them up.

  ‘I’ve got so much on my mind that I’m quite capable of driving back to Barcelona and forgetting all about them.’

  ‘No problem, sir.’

  Like Hansel and Gretel, he was dropping bits of bread en route to the ogre’s castle, to mark his way. He returned to his car and set off for Palausator, calling in at Peratallada on the way, to ask a few questions about the Argemi estate. He made a point of telling various people his name, and made inquiries as to Argemi’s personal standing in the area and the physical layout of the estate. He was told that he could get there directly from the road that ran through the rice fields around Pals, or he could go the roundabout route via Sant Julia de Boada. Carvalho checked out both routes. He climbed to the top floor of an abandoned rectory in order to get an overall impression of the estate. The grounds were overlooked by a large, solid country house set on a gently sloping green ridge. A trail bike was being put through its paces on the path leading to Argemi’s private forest. There was a bustle of people in the vicinity of the house, and the smoke rising from an outdoor barbecue indicated that an al fresco lunch was being prepared. Carvalho decided that the time had come.

  A groundsman came out to meet him at the iron gate. He was old and Andalusian. He made inquiries via a phone concealed in one of the square stone columns that supported the iron gate. The gate opened to reveal an enormous lawn stretching away to the house. A deluxe lawn which had grown, in the space of a few years, as much as a normal lawn would grow in thirty. As if his entrance had been a signal, a thousand small jets of water started up and wove a cool, sparkling web in a fine spray across the lawn. The installation covered more than half a hectare of lawn in a display of hydraulics that bordered on the aesthetic. An expensively dressed servant was taking two Afghan hounds for a walk, and they were busily engaged in barking at the detective’s wretched little car. The path left the lawn behind and continued over a gravel esplanade that was dotted with magnolias, acacias, and laurel bushes. The walls of the house were covered with wisteria, alternating with bougainvillea and Virginia creeper. This vegetal mass was scrupulously respectful of the windows of the house, which were conspicuously Gothic, evidently stolen by antique dealers from old churches in the Pyrenees thathadbeen abandoned to the mercies of bats and antique dealers. A roofless Gothic cloister surrounded a forged iron outdoor grill set on large chunks of masonry. The spit-roast on its own engaged the efforts of two women and a man who were preparing the charcoal for a barbecue that was evidently expected to be perfect and well attended. Beneath an arch of recently-hewn stone stood Argemi, waiting to greet him, in a short silk dressing gown and with a big Havana between his fingers. He had placed himself in the centre of the doorway in such a manner that the keystone with the date of the building on it acted as a frame for his neatly-trimmed grey hair.

  ‘Carvalho—you don’t know how much pleasure this gives me.’

  ‘Hi, dad!’

  The shout came from an Amazonian female motorcyclist on a trail bike as she roared past the front door of the house. Carvalho just had time to register a slender blonde body encased in leather and a toothpaste smile.

  ‘That’s my daughter. We call her Solitud at home, in honour of the great novelist Victor Catala.’

  ‘She’s some girl! Is she for real?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t have a PR company create her? I remember an advert that was very popular when I met Jauma in San Francisco. A blonde girl, looking unmistakably American, smiles out from a street hoarding and announces to the world at large: “Everybody needs milk”.’

  Argemi laughed as he inclined his short, well-fed body to usher Carvalho in. The entrance hall was about half a kilometre square, and provided a showcase of some of Europe’s best antique shops. From there they went into an open-plan living room, passing beneath a pair of Catalonian vaulted arches, which also looked like the result of a competition to find the biggest and the best preserved. There were three seating areas, marked off by oriental carpets. One for watching television, another for reading, and a third for conversation, which was where Argemi took Carvalho, and where they sank into carnivorous sofas that seemed to swallow them up with the smooth, sucking motion of shifting sands.

  ‘A prince among houses, Carvalho! If this house could only speak. It used to belong to the richest landowners in this part of the world. They went bankrupt during the first Carlist war, and the eldest son took off for Cuba. He made his fortune there, and returned home. He decided to buy back the house, and set about making it habitable again. The family went bust again, though, after the Civil War. At that point the house was bought by my father-in-law, and he started the work which has led to this being the jewel that it is. What you see here is ten years of work and the entire imaginative effort of my life devoted to creating a house that would reflect my cultural tastes and my taste for good living. I’ll show you my wine cellar later. And the indoor swimming pool. And the little mini-golf course I have in the west wing. As you see, I have a splendid oak forest, which I have stocked with my favourite animals, deer and squirrels. Do you know what excites me most about forests? The mushrooms that pop up at the end of August. Here they call them flotes de suro. I don’t know their name in Castilian. Perhaps they don’t even have one. Castilians don’t go in for mushrooms much. . . In fact they’re useless with them. By the way, can I count on you for lunch?’

  ‘All depends on what we’re eating.’

  ‘Barbecued meat. All local meat. Everyone knows about Gerona veal, but I can assure you that the best thing about Gerona is its lamb, its butifarras, its fresh dripping, and the rabbits which I raise on the same food that they’d eat in the wild.’

  ‘I see that you enjoy eating all kinds of animals, señor Argemi. Calves, rabbits, pigs, lambs, Germans, and even your own best friends.’

  ‘I gather you’re wanting to get down to business. Your bruises must still be hurting. Believe me, I was very worried that my men might have overdone it. However, I must say, your face looks very presentable.’

  The expensive-looking servant came in with a message for Carvalho.

  ‘There’s a señor Savalls on the phone for you, from La Bisbal.’

  Argemi obligingly excused him, and Carvalho took the phone, spoke to the man from La Marqueta, and remarked pointedly what time it was, whose house he was at, and that he would be there to pick up the bottles by four that afternoon.

  ‘Your business with the bottles seems rather urgent. . .’

  Argemi’s comment was accompanied by a slight puckering of the brow and the beginnings of a broad smile on his muscular face.

  ‘So, let’s not beat about the bush. Yesterday was just a warning. You’ve overstepped the mark. I realize that your threat to Concha was some sort of bravado, but I decided that the time had come for action.’

  ‘When I made that threat I still hadn’t made up my mind between you and Fontanillas.’

  ‘Carvalho, the very idea of Fontanillas is absurd. It does your professionalism no credit at all, I’m afraid. Fontanillas is a politician, of no great aspirations and no great qualities, but who is likely to end up in t
he government some day. You should have known at once that it was me. When you leave this house, you may find you don’t have long left on this earth.’

  The servant reappeared with the phone.

  ‘A call for you, from Terra i Foe, from La Bisbal again.’

  Carvalho repeated almost exactly the formula of the previous call. Argemi had allowed himself to be swallowed further into the sofa. His eyes were twinkling.

  ‘That’s a rather expensive life insurance you’ve taken out, there.’

  ‘You’ve not seen the half of it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m enjoying it. Anyway, to continue. As you know, officially speaking the loose ends have all been tied up. Jauma was murdered. Rhomberg was going through a personal crisis and disappeared. The authorities think that you’re just a troublemaker trying to stir things up. So there’s nothing for you to do, now. I suspect that you’re not a moralist—in fact I know you’re not. So I’m going to give you exactly what you’re looking for: the satisfaction of knowing that you were on the right track, and also a few details that you don’t yet know. For a start, I didn’t actually kill Jauma with these hairy hands which the good Lord gave me. To be honest. I couldn’t have done it. I was terribly fond of him, and in fact I still am. For instance, I’m seriously worried for his family’s future, so I’ve just found a buyer for his yacht. It’s not easy to sell a yacht these days, particularly when everyone’s expecting tax reforms that are going to hit luxury items in particular. Incidentally, my own view is that this is only fair. The keystone of any radical democratic reform has to be progressive taxation. As I was saying, I didn’t kill Jauma personally, but I did give the orders for him to be killed. Jauma was an excellent manager, but he lacked a proper global overview of Petnay’s role in the world. I, on the other hand, was Petnay’s political confidant, and a number of decisions passed through my hands. There’s a good cover for all this, since my company has production links with Petnay. My real functions, though, were rather more complex. For example, Petnay is very worried about Spain’s political future. Not simply because the company itself could lose out, but also for what a chaotic political situation in Spain could mean in the context of politics and economics at the international level. Reasonably enough, Petnay has been trying to influence the political situation in Spain, and will play a part in any solution that is progressive, yet doesn’t fundamentally change things. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, however. Petnay considers that a powerful democratic Right is needed in Spain, to prevent a revolutionary free-for-all. For that to happen, there needs to be a permanent threat of destabilization. I’m sure you take my meaning. Petnay is banking on a democratic solution, but at the same time they are financing far-Right violence so as to generate fear, which in turn will guarantee order. Let’s be frank, Carvalho. Franco taught us a very basic lesson. Under a strong hand, a country produces. Democracy cannot permit the use of a strong hand, but in order to succeed it needs terrorism in the background, a dirty war, which drives people into the arms of stabilizing forces that appear to have clean hands. Petnay started off, rather tentatively at first, directing funds to this end. When Franco died the caution vanished, and that was when Jauma and his picturesque accountant discovered that two hundred million pesetas had disappeared somewhere along the line. Petnay’s explanations only made Jauma even more suspicious. He carried on investigating, and discovered that my company had been the channel by which Petnay had funneled the money to its unknown destination. He approached me. At first he came right out and accused me of embezzlement, on the assumption that I had been in cahoots with some senior Petnay executive to defraud the company. I decided to give him the whole story. But then something happened which I hadn’t anticipated. Jauma began to feel the call of his political past. It got particularly bad after the right-wing violence at the start of this year—labour movement people being killed, kids shot in the street, and so on. Jauma was going off the rails, and I could see it. In the end he rang me and gave me an ultimatum. I was to make a public statement about Petnay’s financial arrangements. I warned him that it would all end in tears. He, personally, would be socially and financially ruined, and there would be a political scandal which would do nobody any good. After all, it suits the centre parties to have a bit of right-wing violence about, because it makes them look like the lesser of two evils. The same goes for broad sections of the Left. The ultra-Right provides the Left with a useful alibi: they can’t afford to overturn the centre parties, because the fascist savages would step in and occupy the resulting political vacuum. And of course all this is great for the ultra-Right, because they get the chance to crack a few heads and kill someone every once in a while, and this keeps the Left right back at square one and does any reformist government a tremendous favour.

  ‘Now, I didn’t offer my services in all this without a lot of reservations and soul-searching. In the end, I think that what I have done has been justifiable even from a progressive point of view. Jauma refused to understand, though. I had discussions with Petnay, and we concluded that there was no choice but to kill him. Then you came along and started sticking your nose in—or rather, you, and Concha with her idiotic puritanism, and Nuñez and his having nothing better to do with his time. It was all the fault of you three that I had to kill Rhomberg, and it cost me a lot of money, let me tell you. You can’t imagine what it costs these days to hire a killer who’s willing to go through a trial, plus three or four years in prison, and everything that it entails. It costs a fortune. In comparison, Alemany’s archives worked out cheap. And, as it turns out, Carvalho, getting rid of you is going to cost me even less. Almost nothing, in fact.’

  This time it was the fish shop ringing. Carvalho was becoming uncomfortably aware that Argemi had good reason to laugh.

  ‘What other guarantees did you set up?’

  ‘What I want from you is a complete explanation of what has happened, to be deposited with a mutually trustworthy person.’

  ‘Very literary. I’d almost be tickled to oblige. Anyway, as I was saying, getting shot of you isn’t going to cost me a lot. The price of a good lunch, in fact—to which it gives me great pleasure to invite you. I also wanted to invite you to share a really special moment with me.’

  He rang a small gold bell to summon his servant.

  ‘I bought this in Vienna. It’s the bell that the emperor Franz Josef used to use when he fancied sex with Sissi. Ding-ding, and she’d come running like a little dog. Ah, Miguel—would you please bring us the bottle I told you about.’

  ‘And what about Rhomberg? How did he die?’

  ‘There’s no point you talking in front of the servants. I pay them so well that they’d kill for me if I told them to. Anyway—Rhomberg. . . The main thing is that he’s dead. There’s no point in your trying to find the body. We learned from the Jauma case, and decided to cover our tracks. I don’t know the details of how he died, but I gather that the people who do this sort of thing can be pretty ruthless. I don’t know the men involved personally. I rely on middlemen. Raspall, for instance. He was the one who bought Paco’s mother-in-law’s bar to set up a discotheque, and he was also the one who bought Alemany’s papers, with a view to presenting them to the Institute of Business Management library—purged, needless to say, of anything that might incriminate me, but in such a way that the figures still add up.’

  The servant carried the silver tray at a perfect right angle as if it were an extension of his arm. On the tray were a dust-covered wine bottle and two slender cut-glass wine glasses.

  ‘Look at that. It’s a ’66 Nuits Saint Georges. Exactly a year ago I brought ten crates back from France, and the producer there told me that I had to lay it down for at least a year before I touched it. And now you and I are about to have a well-deserved first tasting.’

  The servant opened the bottle. Argemi immediately took the cork, closed his eyes, and savoured the bouquet. Then he tossed it over, and Carvalho caught
it.

  ‘Smell that—this is a superb wine.’

  Carvalho smelt it, and immediately regretted having entered into the game.

  ‘Well, say something! It’s excellent, isn’t it!’

  The wine occupied the transparent belly of the glasses, and as it lay there it took on a redness that was the most basic red in all the world. The servant handed one glass to Argemi and another to Carvalho. He nodded deferentially and withdrew to where he had come from.

  ‘Drink, Carvalho. It’s a wonderful wine.’

  They looked at each other across the room. The only one smiling was Argemi, but his smile suddenly evaporated as Carvalho slowly emptied the contents of his wineglass onto the carpet. The detective got up, making no attempt to conceal the pain in his muscles. He turned his back on Argemi, went towards the door, and continued walking as Argemi commented in a calm voice:

  ‘Jauma didn’t deserve the sacrifice you’ve just made for him. Nineteen sixty-six was a great year for Bourgogne wines.’

  Carvalho went down to his car. He waited for the motorbike to pass one more time, to get another view of the strong, young body that needed milk like the whole world needs milk. He started the car, drove past the iron gate, which was solicitously opened for him by the groundsman, and made his way mechanically down the driveway that connected with the main road. The entire geography of his brain was taken up with the phrase ‘the angst of the senior executive’, and minutes later he found himself heading for home, humming those six little words to the backing of a tune which he had never heard before, and which would never be heard again.