The Angst-Ridden Executive (20 page)

‘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.

‘Not bad.’

‘You have such a way with words.’

In order to have reached the river at that point, Dieter would have had to leave the motorway at Junction 6, taking the A-road towards Barcelona, and then decided to drive round a maze of cart tracks. Or, even more bizarre, he would have had to come off at Junction 5 and double back towards Gerona. The idea that he’d been looking for a place to eat didn’t hold water, since he’d already eaten at the Jacques Borel restaurant at Exit 7, in the company of a second person.

‘Did they leave together?’

‘That I can’t say. I’ll tell you the same as what I told the police. First this German was sitting there. I remembered him because I remember thinking that the Germans had started coming early this year. Then this other man came over and seemed to be asking if he could join him. He was thin, dark-haired, and a bit on the short side. . .’

‘Were the other tables all taken?’

‘A bunch of tourist coaches had turned up from somewhere, and the place was fairly full, but it wasn’t packed. Incidentally, the other gentleman paid the bill.’

‘Did the German try to pay?’

‘I wasn’t looking, so I can’t say. The short gentleman came over very determinedly, asked me for the bill, paid it, and went back to the table. When I looked round again they’d gone.’

‘So they didn’t arrive together?’

‘No. Definitely not. But as to whether they left together, I really can’t say, because as you can see, from where I sit you can’t see the car park. All you see is the first car parked next to the door.’

‘What did the police have to say about the German’s eating partner?’

‘They asked a lot of questions about him. He was one of those short, thin types, and he had a lot of facial hair. He was clean-shaven, but you could see that he was the hairy sort, and he had sort of a big face, if you know what I mean. He wasn’t from Catalonia. He spoke Castilian. Very dry very Castilian, you might say.’

‘Did he leave a good tip?’

‘Not exactly. Fifty pesetas.’

‘Was he a regular customer, maybe? Did you recognize him from before?’

‘No. And I’m an old hand here. There’s a big turnover of waiters in this place, but I’ve been here for three seasons now.’

Carvalho decided to drive the route that Dieter must have taken to get to the river. The very idea that he’d have made such a detour was patently ridiculous and would only have made sense if he’d been a nineteenth-century violinist with a passion for listening to murmuring streams and poplars with their flashing white leaves rustling in a gentle breeze. What’s more, there was nowhere near enough water to drown a giant of a man like Rhomberg. On the other hand, if you accepted the idea that he’d faked an accident so as to disappear from history, the river Ter was only a few miles further on—a far more substantial river—not to mention all the rivers that he’d have had to cross as he sped across Europe from Bonn to the Tordera. Carvalho struggled down the riverside, along paths that were no more than muddy tracks and occasionally turned into little streams where the recent rains had washed down. He came to the point where the German’s car must have dived off. You could still see the track marks of the crane that had lifted it out, and the broken vegetation that marked where the car had gone down. Carvalho returned to the main road and made for Vich, traveling along the northern slope of the Montseny range. He was an urban creature by nature, and all this gave him an inexplicably pleasant sense of nostalgia and euphoria—the clarity of the air at this altitude; the luxuriousness of the woods which were becoming daily more lush ever since the decline in use of wood charcoal and the subsequent eradication of the small brushwood-collecting industry; the constant presence of the three peaks of Montseny, which changed in form and volume as your viewpoint shifted; and the green of a countryside that was well watered by small rushing rivers that hurtled towards fusion with larger rivers. He had never lived in the country, and in general his links with nature extended little further than his garden in Vallvidrera and the occasional contemplation of Valles from the windows of his apartment. This, on the other hand, was serious countryside, with farmhouses, woods, farmland and here and there small islands of summer residents observing the principle that mountain air is healthier than the seaside. Some had built themselves Swiss-style chalets, with almost vertical slate roofs designed to cope with a snow which was never much more than an optical illusion in that part of the world, and which generally ended up as a dirty layer of frozen slush on the ground. The Ibiza style was also in evidence, as was the style which provides a showcase of all the building materials known to man, from brick to slate, and taking in wood and artificial stone en route. The petty bourgeoisie has bad taste the world over, but the twentieth century has the honor of having conceived a specimen of bourgeoisie that is more than usually cretinous, with a level of earnings enabling them to live in splendid isolation, but with a cultural formation that extends no further than mass consumerism. Still dizzy from the curving mountain roads, he finally reached the plain of Vich, with its landscape dotted with little hillocks of grey volcanic earth. He drove into the town, where the big old houses provided an austere central nucleus surrounded by modern housing consisting for the most part of small brick-built town houses, or two-storey apartments whose scale was constrained by tight budgetary considerations. He parked the car in the main square and went in search of small shops from whose ceilings hung salami sausages, dry, smoked sausages and cured pork fillets that looked as if they were made of china. He stocked up with two huge salamis, five smoked sausages and a gammon ham, and refrained from buying butifarras in order to observe the ritual of buying them in La Garriga. He bought a box of Vich sponge cake for Charo, and the third passer-by he asked was able to inform him where to find La Chunga, the dive that belonged to the mother-in-law of Jauma’s alleged murderer.

‘It’s shut down, though. You know what happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘When the two women were left on their own, they decided to shut up shop.’

‘Are they living in Vich?’

‘No, they’ve got a flat over the bar. Who are you after, the mother or the daughter?’

‘Which would you recommend?’

‘The mother, without a doubt. She’s divine. Got such an arse on her. . . save you the price of a mattress!’

He recalled a half memory of the woman who had been talking with Paco the Hustler. He went on to fill in the outline with imagined fleshy pleasures as his eyes scanned the horizon in search of the roadside bar. In front of a furniture showroom, at the end of a long stretch of road, just at the point where the ridge of tarmac begins to turn off towards Tona, La Chunga finally appeared. A flat, whitewashed, tile-roofed building. An illuminated Tio Pepe billboard, plastic multi-coloured Coca Cola and Pepsi signs, and a curtain of plastic strips hung over a door that was very definitely shut. There were signs of life coming from the back, though, and from the one-room flat over the bar. As he came round the front of the building he saw a pick-up truck with its doors open, loading goods and chattels from a side-door of the bar. A man was doing the loading, and Paco the Hustler’s mother-in-law was telling him to be careful as she passed out the boxes. The woman had twenty-five years in each of her well-rounded breasts and fifty combined in an arse that was a sight to see. As her eyes turned to meet those of the stranger, the faded beauty in her generous features still possessed a come-hither quality that was concentrated in her impertinent lips.

‘The bar’s shut.’

‘It’s not a drink I’m wanting. I want to talk with you and your daughter.’

‘If you’re a journalist, you can go right back where you came from. I’ve had enough. Go away and leave us alone!’

‘That’s right,’ said the man. ‘Go away and leave us alone.’

He jumped down from the truck and stood between Carvalho and the woman, legs apart and menacing. Carvalho waved his ID card under their noses, and when the man read the word ‘detective’ he relaxed.

‘He’s the police.’

On the balcony of the flat appeared a girl who was fifty per cent the image of the woman below.

‘More police?’

The girl was crying more than shouting. Carvalho nodded his head in an attempt at an authoritative gesture, and walked towards the house without turning to see if they were following.

‘How much longer are we going to have to put-up with this?’

The woman gave Carvalho a threatening look.

‘It’s all been signed and sealed. In God’s name, why do you have to keep bothering us?’

The man gave her a look that told her not to say too much, and at that point the girl arrived from upstairs, with her teenage streetwalker’s breasts showing under a thin woolen jumper.

‘Is he your husband?’

‘No. My brother. I’m a widow. And if they think that just because I’m a widow they can intimidate me, they’re very much mistaken. Take it from me. I’m no push-over, and everything I’ve got in this life I’ve earned with my own two hands.’

‘The gentleman, Antonio Jauma. . .’

‘Gentleman, you call him! Are you referring to the one who was killed? Because he was no gentleman. At least, not what I mean by a “gentleman. . .”’

‘Did you know the man?’

‘No. What I know is what the kids told me.’

‘What kids?’

The girl, here, and Paco, her husband.’

‘So you never actually saw Antonio Jauma?’

‘No. On the night he turned up I’d gone upstairs to watch TV. My favourite comedy was on..

‘According to the police, Jauma went to a bedroom with your daughter, and a short while later the girl came out again, half naked and screaming for her husband.’

‘So they say.’

‘Is it true?’

The girl lowered her eyes.

‘Don’t you say a word, you! She’s still a minor. She’s only eighteen.’

‘So who’s going to answer my question?’

‘Me, if I feel like it.’

Carvalho went up to the woman and reached out and tweaked her nose.

‘Turn down the volume, lady, it’s giving me a pain in the head. Now, you’re going to answer. Fast, and politely, because if you don’t, you’re going to get a kicking right where it hurts.’

The anger on her lips and in her eyes expressed itself only in a quiet sob and a couple of impotent tears.

‘Is that a proper way to talk to a woman?’

‘I talk to you the same way you talk to me. Like a truck driver. So get on with it. Enough pissing about. You—why did you run out screaming?’

‘Because he was wanting to do filthy things with me.’

‘What kind of filthy things?’

‘All sorts. He wanted to beat me. He wanted to see me piss. I called my husband. I managed to push him out of the room, and that was the last I saw of him. Then I heard a shot. Paco came back, very nervous, and said that the man had pulled out a gun.’

‘So where did he find a gun? From his navel? I thought he had no clothes on when you pushed him out of the room.’

‘He was dressed.’ The mother spoke up.

‘That’s right, he was dressed,’ the daughter confirmed, staring at the ground.

‘What happened then?’

‘I don’t know. Paco did it all. He drove off with his pick-up, and came back three hours later.’

‘I heard the truck driving off, and I thought. “Where’s that waster going at this time of night?” Because Paco is a waster. He’s done whatever he’s done, but I don’t blame him, though, because bastards like your “gentleman” don’t deserve to live. If a man likes women, that’s fair enough. But he should be straight about it. I can’t stand perverts.’