“I suggest you come here and we’ll both go to the meditation centre and demand an immediate refund.”
“Do you think anybody will be there this morning? After all that shit yesterday, I expect it will be shut and the mossos will be busy looking for clues and all that jazz.”
“I expect someone will be there. Bernat, the Bach flower remedies guy, was one of Horaci’s partners, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. And his wife Sònia was the other partner, so it seems. Alícia told me that on Friday when we were having dinner. Who’d have thought it?… She didn’t look like a murderer.” I felt a shiver go down my spine when I remembered that she’d sat next to me.
“We’ll press them and demand they refund our cash,” Borja responded, ignoring my comment. “Can you be quick?”
I sighed. I knew I didn’t have any choice.
“I’ll get dressed and I’ll be with you in half an hour.”
I didn’t expect we’d find anyone at the centre, and was even less optimistic about Horaci’s partners handing back the four thousand euros we’d given them so blithely and that had probably disappeared from the centre’s safe. Nevertheless, as Borja had sounded so touchy on the phone, I thought there was no point arguing and that it would be more sensible to go to his place and make him see the light there. As it was Montse’s turn to take Arnau to school this week, I was still in my pyjamas. I showered and dressed as quickly as I could. Before leaving, I told Joana something urgent had cropped up and that I would go to the supermarket in the afternoon. As Borja’s tone of voice had been worrying, I grabbed a taxi to save time.
Borja opened the door all ready to leave. He didn’t even ask me inside. He looked in a bad state and I told him so.
“I said I didn’t get any sleep last night,” he growled.
“Hey, bro, just as well it wasn’t your money. You look terrible…”
“Come on, let’s be off.”
As we went down in the lift, I got the impression my brother was feeling too rough to drive and I suggested we took a taxi. However, he argued we would certainly need the car to ferry back and forth. If nobody was at the centre, he said, we’d try to get the addresses of Bernat or the widow, and, as a last resort, pay him and her a visit at their homes. I’d never seen Borja so beside himself, and concluded he urgently needed the money back. Perhaps Merche had given him an ultimatum, which wasn’t like her, or he had a creditor who’d lost his patience.
“You sure everything is all right?” I insisted.
“Quite sure,” he rasped. But his “sure” implied quite the opposite.
Borja had parked the Smart by the entrance to the Catalan Trains station in Putxet that is five minutes’ spirited walk from his flat. We started down Balmes and, while waiting for the green light to cross the road by Castanyer, we were accosted by three men in tracksuits who towered a good metre above us. The sky was cloudy but all three wore shades.
“Come with nosotros, por favor,” said one of them, while the other two surrounded us and pinioned our arms.
“What are you after?” Borja asked, trying to disentangle himself.
“Come.”
One of the men spoke to his colleague in a language I didn’t understand that sounded like Russian or another Eastern European language.
“He tambien come,” he shouted, referring to me, as his colleague pushed me in the direction of a black Transit van parked in front of Borja’s block.
“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelped, trying to resist. “Hel—!” but a hand was stuffed into my mouth before I could finish the word I was trying to shout.
It all happened in a flash. In a matter of seconds, Borja and I were tumbled in a heap inside the Transit. Resistance or escape was impossible, because our pathetic limbs, the product of sedentary existences, were no match for biceps flexed by weights and circuit training. Once inside the Transit, one of the men put a cloth to my nose, dripping with a substance I guessed was chloroform; I tried to fight and kick, but it was no use. Before hitting the floor unconscious, I saw Borja also struggle to stop them from anaesthetizing him.
When I woke up, my head ached and I was sitting in a chair with my hands, but not my feet, tied behind me. I didn’t know how long I’d been like that, but, wherever we were, it was almost pitch dark. I gradually recalled the men with shades, the black Transit van and the cloth soaked in chloroform. When my eyes got used to the shadowy light, I saw we were in a very big room decorated like a Chinese restaurant.
“What’s happened? Where are we?” I heard Borja ask sleepily. I then realized that we were back to back, I was facing a small barred window, and he faced a wall.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
“No, but I’ve got one hell of a headache.”
“So have I. That must be chloroform they gave us.”
“Yeah, but where are we?”
I was slightly more awake by now and surveyed the room again. A closer look revealed that the objects were nothing like the tacky items you find in the Chinese restaurants Montse and I sometimes visited. These seemed the genuine article. The beams in the ceiling were polychrome wood, and two square columns painted red flanked a wooden door that was closed. There was a sign written in gold Chinese characters above the door and, by the window, at ground level, were a bed, a trunk that looked antique and two chairs leaning against the wall that also had an antique flavour. The only light in the room came through the small barred window opposite me.
“What can you see?” I asked Borja in a hushed voice.
“Nothing at all. It’s very dark in here. Wait,” he said a few seconds later. “There’s something that looks like an old suit of armour. But it’s not like our medieval armour. The helmet is different… There’s a bow and quiver with arrows next to it!” he whispered.
“How extraordinary. It’s as if we were inside a Chinese house,” I muttered.
“Look at the lanterns in the ceiling,” said Borja. I looked up. “You’re right. They do seem Chinese. What about you? Can you see anything else?”
“A small window,” I answered, stretching my neck as much as I could to see outside. However much Borja turned his head, he couldn’t see the window.
“And?”
“I don’t know. It looks as if we’re in the countryside.”
“In the countryside?”
“I can see the sky. And mountains. And a very long stone wall… Hey!” I paused to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me and then stretched my neck further. “Hell, I don’t believe it!”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t believe it! It can’t be true!” I muttered as I felt my heart racing.
“Eduard, say something, for Christ’s sake!” Though Borja was making every effort to twist his neck, he could only see the window out of the corner of his eye.
“You won’t believe this, but I can see the Great Wall of China,” I whispered. “Pep, I reckon we’re in China!”
“China?”
“Shush! Don’t shout!”
“China? Are you sure?” repeated Borja incredulously.
“Lower your voice. Yes, I swear what I can see through the window is the Great Wall, and we’re in this room with all this oriental furniture… Welcome to China, Pep. To China!”
“Damn me…”
My head went into a spin and I took some deep breaths. China. That meant Borja and I were thousands of fucking miles away from home. How long had we been asleep? Ten hours? Twenty? And why had they bothered to transport us so far?”
“Eduard, I meant to tell you something,” Borja said all of a sudden.
“Go on, fire away.”
“On Sunday evening, when I got back to the flat, I found it had been turned upside down. I suppose someone was looking for the statue.”
“Bloody hell…”
“That’s why I needed the cash. I wanted to go to a hotel until this was all cleared up.�
��
“You should have told me. Look at the mess we’re in now!”
“I’m sorry, bro. I swear I had no idea things would turn out like this. I’m sorry I got you involved.”
We said no more. I was angry and Borja was shamefaced. Our breathing was the only sound. I tried to wriggle free, but hurt my wrists.
“How do you know they weren’t ordinary burglars?” I asked after a while, trying to sound hopeful. “You know, with the crisis, burglars are back big time…”
“They didn’t steal anything, my plasma TV, Rolex, crocodile-skin briefcase… I checked them out. They just made one hell of a mess.”
“So it probably wasn’t the burglars who raided our office either,” I said, thinking aloud. “It was people after the statue.”
“I’d come to the same conclusion. Though I don’t understand why they have brought us to China if it’s the sculpture they’re after,” argued Borja.
I was as confused as he was and as at a loss for words.
“Perhaps it’s an extremely valuable Chinese antique,” I suggested a few seconds later. “Perhaps it’s a deity of theirs and you’ve committed sacrilege…”
“Sure, but the guys who stuffed us into that Transit weren’t Chinese!” Borja responded. “They seemed more like Russians. Besides, I don’t think the statue was Chinese. Oriental at a pinch, but not Chinese.”
“Oh, so now you’re a specialist in antique art, are you!” I grunted. “I seem to remember you failed every single exam in art history at school. And if I hadn’t let you copy me in the final exam…”
“So what? You copied your maths answers from me…” he countered as we both tried to free our hands.
We heard voices approaching and shut up immediately. The door opened and three men walked in. I recognized two of them from the trio who’d shoved us into the Transit; I’d never seen the third man, who looked like he was the boss. Although they hid behind shades, they didn’t bother to switch any lights on.
“OK, you fuckeeng bastard! Your time is up! Give me the fuckeeng memory steek or your brother is dead!” shouted one of the men, squaring up to Borja and slapping him in the face twice to encourage him to answer.
“What the hell is he on about?” Borja asked me in a hushed tone.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand him either!”
The man was speaking English, but he had a strange accent that betrayed the fact English wasn’t his mother tongue.
“I won’t ask you again!” the guy said, punching Borja. “The memory steek! Now!”
“No English!” screeched Borja. “No English!”
“No English?” The three men burst out laughing. “Come on, man, don’t try fooling me!”
“No English!” repeated Borja. “Français. Est-ce que vous parlez français?”
“I told you ages ago we should learn English!” I whispered. “Nowadays, you can’t get anywhere without English.”
I heard him swear in his mother tongue.
“Cosa querer you tienes,” said the man who’d addressed us in jumbled Spanish in the street before kidnapping us. “You buscar and traer. Or bang, bang, him muerto!” He aimed a finger at my head as if he was about to shoot me.
“I don’t know what you’re on about!” hissed Borja.
“I reckon he was saying you should go and get the statue and bring it here, or they’ll do me in,” I muttered.
He clouted Borja, again.
“OK, OK!” shrieked a whimpering Borja. “Me traer cosa! No hurt mi amigo. Not him culpa.”
The guy who seemed to be the boss of that gang of mafiosi, curiously the smallest of the three, signalled to the younger one, who nodded. He went over to Borja and cut the string tying his hands with a knife that was no Boy Scout affair.
“Ir! Now!” shouted the man who spoke Spanish, giving Borja a push.
I could see his drawn face and bleeding nose. Borja clutched at the door frame and asked in a pleading voice, “Hey, Eduard, if we’re in China, how will I go home and come back here?”
“Ir!” repeated the man.
I had never seen Borja look so scared. For my part, I was terrified and could only think of Montse, Arnau and the girls.
“Pep, do whatever you have to, but bring that statue back here. Montse, my children…” I implored, a knot in my throat.
“I’ll be back, Eduard. I swear I will…” he said, as they dragged him out of the room. “Don’t worry. I won’t let them…”
His voice faded into the distance and the man who’d cut him free came over and gagged me, I imagine, in order to ensure I couldn’t shout for help. The fact was I was so shit-scared that if I had tried to scream right then, my voice would have failed me. Before he shut the door and left me by myself in that peculiar room, the man laughed and said something I didn’t understand. My whole body was shaking. I made one last effort, pulled myself up slightly and looked through the window, where the impressive stone mass of the Great Wall reminded me that I was in China. And at that point I fainted.
15
When I came round, my first thought was that it had all been a nightmare and I still hadn’t woken up. However, that fantasy only lasted a few seconds, because the stabbing pain I felt in my arms and wrists, and the panic attack that overwhelmed me the moment I realized my mouth had been gagged, brought it all back to me: I had been taken prisoner by total strangers and, even worse, they spoke languages I didn’t understand, so I couldn’t communicate with them. The scared look on Borja’s face gradually came back to me, as did the punches, his bloody nose and the way he’d been dragged out of the room by men who’d forced him to go back to Barcelona to get that damned statue. I also recalled we were a long way from home, in China, a country where I wouldn’t be missed if I disappeared, because, apart from Borja and our kidnappers, nobody knew I was there.
I could still see the Great Wall through the window and the tears clouding my vision, and it was a chilling reminder that nobody would come to my rescue in such a far-flung spot. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my whole life, and I felt completely numb. I was incapable of thought: all I wanted was to return home and for none of this ever to have happened. Why the hell couldn’t my brother be a normal person with a normal job, as they said in that beer advert? Why did he have to be a Walter Mitty and get involved in these kinds of mess, rather than being happy to contemplate the lives of the wealthy in glossy magazines and on the TV, like the rest of us mortals?
I found it hard to breathe with that gag over my mouth, and my heart was racing. I realized that putting the blame on Borja wasn’t going to help me out of that situation and that I should calm down. I tried to slow my rhythm of breathing for a few minutes by taking deep breaths in and out of my nose; almost imperceptibly, my heart started to beat at a more reasonable rate and I gradually calmed down. My situation was too serious to risk a fatal heart attack.
I took one last deep breath and glanced around me. I concluded I hadn’t been unconscious for very long after they’d taken Borja off: the light coming through the window, an afternoon light that was gently, monotonously turning into dusk, hadn’t really changed. Although I was sitting down, the stance I had been forced to adopt was excruciating, because my arms were tied behind me to the back of the chair and the rough string knotted around my wrists cut into my skin; I could move my feet, which weren’t tied at all, but had pins and needles in my hands and that indicated they were about to lose all feeling because of the lack of any blood flow. What’s more I was very thirsty, and I suddenly realized I’d not eaten or drunk anything for hours. Not that I was hungry… After the long journey I’d been forced to make, my brain had ignored my stomach and concentrated on keeping me alive. Nonetheless, it was so hot in that room that I now felt alarmed when I realized that, if my kidnappers didn’t soon give me water, I would start to dehydrate and hallucinate. I tried to shout to attract their attention, but saw straight away it was very unlikely that my gagged cries would penetrate the stone walls i
mprisoning me. I listened hard: I could hear nothing on the other side.
In my situation, all I could do was think. At best, I worked out it must take ten to twelve hours to fly from Barcelona to China, and that meant Borja would require more than a day for the round trip, assuming he was travelling by private jet and didn’t have refuelling stops or air-company timetables to worry about. That was a massive number of hours to be stuck in a chair, and the prospect of waiting all that time before Borja appeared with the statue and those men set me free numbed my brain once again. I had no other options. To cap it all, the guys who’d kidnapped us didn’t look like the kind who had scruples. How could we be sure that once they’d got their clutches on the statue, they wouldn’t shoot us in the head and bury our bodies in no-man’s-land?
At the same time, I couldn’t work out why the hell they’d taken us to China if the statue they wanted was hidden in Borja’s flat? It was obvious they were keeping me prisoner as a kind of guarantee that my brother wouldn’t simply make his escape, but I couldn’t for the life of me see the sense in forcing us to make such a long journey that, in Borja’s case, had to be endured three times. Perhaps they thought the statue wasn’t in Barcelona and that he’d hidden it in that corner of the planet, but that didn’t make any sense either, because, as I well knew, my brother had never set foot in China. It was true he had worked on a merchant-navy vessel at some stage in the twenty years he worked abroad and had thus seen the world, but that was years ago, when Borja was still called Pep and didn’t have the contacts he now had. No, it was complete madness. There had to be a simple explanation.
Sitting opposite the motionless landscape framed by that window, I gradually began to lose all notion of time. I suddenly realized I didn’t know what time or day it was, and the monotonous light coming through the window was no clue at all. Perhaps sunset took longer in China than in Barcelona, and afternoons were longer, I pondered, or perhaps only a few minutes had passed since I’d come round from my fainting fit, a few minutes I felt had been never-ending. From childhood, I’d always thought that time passed very slowly in China, a name that still evoked for me the era of the mandarins and great emperors, and that had all belonged to the two thousand years of their feudal period. I am sure my perceptions were shaped by the cliché-ridden films made in the West that I had watched from childhood, but nevertheless the word “China” immediately brought to mind images of ferocious warriors on horseback, women with bandaged feet wearing exquisite silk kimonos, and Fu Manchu. I had to make an effort to remind myself that contemporary China, where we were now, had gone through a first revolution that ended the imperial era, and that the country was presently going through a second revolution, a slow, inexorable transition to rampant capitalism. On the other hand, China still had the death penalty. What if those men handed us over to the Chinese authorities once they’d got their statue back, and they decided to sentence us to death for trafficking a statue that was part of their national heritage?
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