A Shortcut to Paradise (12 page)

 

 

Nothing was going right for Amàlia Vidal and she was livid. Her Colombian maid had rung early in the day to say she was ill and wouldn't be coming in. “The lazy bitch!” Amalia had thought when she'd hung up. She and her husband had guests that night and the flat looked like a pigsty, or so she felt. They'd celebrated St John's Eve the night before with friends, and dirty plates, glasses and empty bottles were piled up in the kitchen. In a filthy temper, cursing her maid, Amàlia tried to fit everything into the dishwasher and, wearing pink plastic gloves that were too big for her, she hurriedly cleaned the disaster area, wondering how she would cope. Her husband had gone to play tennis with one of his clients, and Amàlia was alone with the catastrophe. Moreover, she was suffering from a slight hangover and in no mood to start cooking. The final straw was when she looked in the mirror and saw that the wart that had appeared on her nose a few months ago was growing.

While cleaning the stove, she decided not to renew the girl's contract. She'd be the third maid in the house in two years, but Amàlia was very demanding and
difficult to get on with. Andalusian girls were preferable, she thought, remembering her parents' maid. She'd come into their service at the age of sixteen and, as Mr Right never came her way, she went on living with them and still got their lunch ready now in her eighties. Nevertheless, it was absurd to have to pay a local girl four or five times what you had to pay a foreigner. On Monday, she decided, she'd speak to the agency again and they'd hear her complaints on Tibidabo.

Amàlia and her husband led an intense social life, particularly since their children married and they had finally managed to get them out of the house. She taught history at the university and wrote literary critical articles from time to time for the press. Her forte was women and the discriminations they suffered, and that explained why she was part of a committee set up by the Generalitat to evaluate the sexist nature of advertisements, and of a commission that kept itself busy ridding the language of oppressive, chauvinistic words. Amàlia was a militant feminist, admired by women and hated by men in equal parts. Her husband was the director of a powerful cosmetics company and he was proud to have a wife who published books and was invited on to TV chat shows. As he'd been seeing a retired model for years, Amàlia Vidal's husband had succeeded in striking a balance in terms of attitude and testosterone that made him the ideal lover and the perfect husband. His life was as calm as a millpond and the envy of his friends, even though they couldn't imagine what it was like to be married to a stalwart of new-wave feminism in the academy and civil life.

She would definitely not cook. She still had to clean the dining room and tidy the lounge, and her head was splitting. To avoid soiling the kitchen, she and her husband would grab a sandwich for lunch and she'd order take-away hot food for ten. As she was working on securing a professorial chair, and it was no easy move, she couldn't allow herself the luxury of cancelling dinner with her closest colleagues in the department. She knew the fact she'd been at the Ritz the night Marina Dolç was murdered had made her popularity rocket: everybody wanted to know who, how and why. Personally she'd never liked Marina Dolç, but, since she was a woman who'd triumphed in a male-dominated world, Amàlia had been forced to grit her teeth and pander to her. Now she could milk her death for what it was worth, if she played her cards right. For the moment, she'd been invited to participate in a debate on literature and discrimination – the subject of her thesis – on a peak-viewing-time programme, and a foundation had commissioned her to write a report on the chauvinism latent in the novels of Amadeu Cabestany, the man presumed to be the murderer. Yes, Marina might still prove useful, she thought, as she searched the city guide for a catering company she could order supper from. And best of all, now she'd passed on to a better life, Amàlia didn't have to put up with her in person.

12

Sebastià Rovira had a vice, a habit or a virtue, depending on how you looked at it: he liked to go whoring. It wasn't that he didn't love his wife, whom he'd been married to for the past twenty-three years, or didn't desire her, quite the contrary, but his weekly visit to a brothel was a ritual he'd practised from his nineteenth birthday and he couldn't survive without it. He had been a taxi driver from the age of twenty-six and was now fifty-one and the father of three daughters who lived at home and dreamed of becoming models. His only other vices were black tobacco, a coffee and cognac to put fire in his belly after lunch and the weekly work out at a knocking shop. Otherwise, Sebastià was a hard-working man, a good father and a loving, considerate husband. When he was driving in the morning he listened to the Cope, the Pope's station, and in the afternoon Ràdio Taxi, but he was polite and tried to avoid talking politics with his customers.

Sebastià usually dropped by a club of a Friday after dinner. There were three or four where they'd known him for years and he alternated them as he did the girls. He didn't feel guilty about being unfaithful to his wife and tried not to bed the same girl twice in a row to avoid experiencing remorse. He took precautions so as not to catch an infection, treated well the women, who depended on the oldest trade in the world, and never created problems. He told his wife that the Friday nightshift was lucrative and that had been true for the last few months. In the past he had simply parked his car near one of the clip joints where he relieved his excess testosterone on a weekly basis and pretended the money came from what he put aside during the week, but ever since his brother-in-law had got out of prison they'd done a deal: Jacinto drove his brother-in-law's taxi on the Friday nightshift and, before going home, returned the taxi to him and they shared the takings.

Jacinto was out of work. He'd spent a couple of years incarcerated in the Model accused of robbery with grievous bodily harm and three years more at Can Brians on a drugs rap. In fact, he was a smalltime pusher who got badly duped, and, as far as the theft went, was unlucky that his victim decided to give chase and smashed his face in when he ran into one of those iron posts the council erects on pavements to stop illegal parking. Jacinto was no angel, but he wasn't violent either. Indeed, he was reputed to be considerate towards women and loyal to his friends. Nevertheless, his record meant no one wanted to risk taking him on, so he did little jobs for taxi drivers, like taking their cars to be washed or repaired and driving his brother-in-law's taxi when the latter went whoring.

On Friday morning, while he was eating breakfast in the O Pulpo Gallego bar and waiting for one of the taxi drivers who were around to give him an errand to run, Jacinto glanced at one of the free newspapers distributed in the city. He was really interested in the
sports pages, but when he took the daily from the pile on the bar, the photograph on the front page caught his eye. The face of that terrified man immediately rang a bell and Jacinto's heart started to thud.

Jacinto had two assets: he didn't need to look at the clock to know the exact time within two or three minutes and he had a photographic memory. No doubt, if he'd been born into a different family, someone would have noticed his powers of recall and turned him into a valuable academic asset, but the only university in his neighbourhood was on the Carrer Entença. As soon as he saw the photo, Jacinto felt on edge because he recognized the guy at once: it was the man he'd taken to the Up & Down club the previous week when he was driving Sebastià's taxi, and the same man who, in an amazing coincidence, hailed him a couple of hours later on the Diagonal and asked to be dropped off at the Ritz.

Jacinto had realized it was the same customer, but as he was driving Sebastià's taxi illegally and tried to pass unnoticed by his customers, he said nothing. He also remembered how, when they were approaching the Ritz, he had been slightly alarmed to see half a dozen police cars and an ambulance parked in front of the entrance, and how, as a precautionary measure, he'd decided to drop his customer two hundred metres further on and make himself scarce as fast as traffic regulations allowed. Jacinto didn't possess a driving licence, only a shoddy fake based on his brother-in-law's, and if they caught him, the judge would more than likely put him inside for another stretch. After doing five years, he wasn't too sure he could stand it or that his family would continue to support him.

Although he didn't usually drink in the morning, he ordered a cognac and started to read the news story. That fellow, apparently a writer by the name of Amadeu, was being held in custody, accused of murdering a famous woman writer. The police were looking for an eyewitness to confirm his alibi, but didn't seem very hopeful. Jacinto looked at the photo again and swallowed. He knew from experience that customers rarely looked their taxi drivers in the face, but he couldn't be absolutely sure. Besides, this guy, who looked freaked out, must be having a really bad time in the Model, a place he knew only too well. He understood the responsibility that had now fallen on his shoulders and felt weighed down. Without more ado, he decided to order another cognac and ring his brother-in-law.

“Sebas, I must see you. It's important. Where are you?”

“Taking customers to Plaça Adrià. I'll be with you in five minutes.”

“When you're done, switch the ‘vacant' sign off and come to Cisco's bar. This is an emergency,” he said gloomily.

“Yes, sir. I'll be with you in twenty minutes.”

Sebastià was slightly uneasy. What had his brother-in-law done now? He hoped the emergency didn't mean he needed cash, or that he'd got into a tangle and expected him to come to the rescue. If it weren't for his sister and their two children… Basically, thought Sebastià, his brother-in-law wasn't a bad character, but he
was
good at landing himself in trouble. And, as everyone agreed, he was unlucky.

It took less than fifteen minutes to get to Cisco's bar. While Sebastià gulped down a beer and waited for
his pork-and-pepper roll, Jacinto told him what was stressing him out, whispering so the other customers, mostly taxi drivers, in the bar couldn't hear. Sebastià listened carefully and felt relieved.

“The guy couldn't have killed her,” Jacinto explained nervously. “I picked him up on the Gran Via and later on the Diagonal. The second time he was really in a bad way and he told me he'd been mugged. He was also slightly drunk.”

“That's OK then. Someone else will remember him and tell the police,” responded Sebastià, rather disconcerted.

“I thought I should…” Jacinto hesitated.

“That you should go to the police and tell them you were driving my taxi that night? Forget it. You'll do no such thing. If they find out you sometimes drive my taxi on the side… I'd lose my licence and you'd go straight back in the clink.” And he added, “Cinto, you can't do that to us, either to me or to your wife. Do you really want to go back to the Model?”

“Of course I don't. I just wanted to know what you thought…”

“Keep quiet” was the message. Jacinto decided he'd change Cisco's bar for Antonio's for a few days, where they only had
Sport
and
The Sporting World
. As his brother-in-law had advised, he should forget that business and avoid the daily papers for a while. He had enough worries, apart from a criminal record, and the last thing he needed was an encounter with a shirty magistrate. So a rich woman writer had been murdered in a luxury hotel? Well, that didn't affect him or his struggle to keep afloat. His brother-in-law was right: sooner or later they'd find someone else to confirm the fellow's alibi and he'd be let out of the slammer. There must be a bunch of eyewitnesses. No need to worry.

But Jacinto suspected it wouldn't be so easy for him to forget the fear-filled eyes he'd seen in the newspaper that he now knew belonged to a man called Amadeu Cabestany. In the evening when he and Sebastià met up again at the family's St John's Eve party, they looked askance at each other but didn't mention the issue again. There was nothing more to say. However, that year Jacinto let off fewer crackers than usual, drank more cava than he could handle and was less interested in the generous bosoms being displayed by his sistersin-law. The next morning, after getting up with a slight hangover and washing his face with cold water, he looked in the mirror and acknowledged that that man's features were as sharply defined as ever in his head, as if someone had super-glued them to each and every one of his neurones.

13

The first St John's Eve that Amadeu Cabestany spent in prison hardly warranted a firework display. He'd been shut up in the Model for six days, in a cell in the fifth gallery, and he was frightened to death. They'd accused him of a murder he hadn't committed and, for the first time in his life, this great fan of Kafka found himself in a Kafkaesque situation and wasn't at all amused. Amadeu had devoted many, many pages of his novels to cheerful themes like death, solitude and sorrow, and courageously explored in his labyrinthine prose the anguished tragedy of the human condition. Nevertheless, he now knew that nothing he'd written remotely resembled the nausea he'd been feeling from Sunday morning as a result of his imprisonment. In the Model, no less, a place that no longer harboured Republicans and Romantic anti-Franco fighters, but thieves, junkies and renowned killers belonging to merciless mafias. For the moment, none of Amadeu's sombre reflections made captivity more tolerable or helped him confront that nightmare with a brave heart, quite the contrary. Lucid appreciation of the world as a perverse place dominated by evil – and, in the specific case of the Model, thought Amadeu, by delinquents who probably hid a sharp knife under their blankets – prevented him from grasping at any fragile straws of hope.