A Shortcut to Paradise (2 page)

Consequently, over three long months of plaster casts, depression and painkillers, the bills had simply piled up in a drawer in the Fabià household. His wife's income was barely enough to put food on the table, pay for the older kid's nursery and buy nappies. The eight hundred and fifty euros net Carmen earned as a secretary in a legal practice that was reputed to be mafia-run (three hundred of which were paid in black money) didn't stretch any further.

Fortunately, family and friends had scrambled seven grand together, which was a real miracle because they were all stony-broke. They had their own problems when it came to paying their mortgages or rent for their matchboxes, or had lousy retirement pensions, or were out of work, or earned a ridiculous pittance for work they did in the vain hope of getting a steady job in the future. Nonetheless, friends and relatives, generously and in goodwill, had dug deep in their pockets and got together more than a million of the old pesetas. Ernest and his wife were still two grand short, to be sure, but he told himself that morning that finding two was a sight
easier than finding nine. He wasn't going to allow them to steal a flat valued at more than three hundred and fifty-five grand on the open market. Right then, two fucking thousand euros marked the difference between a future worth living or destitution for Ernest and his family.

It was while he was rereading that threatening Final Notice for the nth time and imagining them all piling into the small flat his parents rented in Hospitalet that he reached a decision. He'd spent that week on bended knees before his bank manager and had rung all the financial institutions that advertised in the daily papers or on television, trying to get another loan, a puny loan of two grand you had to pay back fourfold in reasonably easy monthly instalments. To no avail. Ernest discovered the banks gave out money to pay for little luxuries, but not to clear debts. Banks didn't turn on the tap when you really needed it, when it was an emergency, or was, as Ernest kept telling everyone, the fault of that bastard, who'd been blind drunk, he was sure. It could be months, even years, before they received any insurance money, and to get that they'd certainly need to hire lawyers and pay out a pile of dough.

He knew what he was planning was pure madness and that he'd better not let on to anyone. Nonetheless, he was a man at the end of his tether and that threatening Final Notice didn't leave him any choice. He must act, and quickly. So rather than ducking out, drinking himself silly, mixing a cocktail of sleeping pills or walking out on a sinking ship, Ernest decided to put himself into the shoes of the heroes of the novels he translated and, for the first time in his life, he took the bull by the horns.

2

It was the third week into June and the heat was beginning to tell. Although it cooled off in the evening after the sun had set, everyone was expecting another long, oppressively hot summer. Their sea-side city was sentenced to endure muggy haze and urban sloth, and the lack of rain, championed only by the tourists lording it over the city centre in their bermudas, simply made things worse. It hadn't rained since April, and the lengthy drought meant everyone was beginning to feel rather frenzied. The weather prophets forecast ecological disasters to suit all tastes, but holidays were the main topic of conversation, particularly at work, where the air-conditioning was switched on and colds and allergies abounded. As on any Friday, the streets were a morass of cars, noise and fumes.

Ernest was determined to put his plan into action, before cold common sense could douse his enthusiasm, so he left home at ten thirty. He walked his aching bones to a toy shop he remembered seeing when driving by in his car. It wasn't a local corner-shop but a large store where he certainly wouldn't be the only customer. The shop assistants working there no doubt did so on a daily or weekly basis, employed by a firm that specialized in
temporary contracts, and Ernest thought that was just what he needed given the circumstances. He walked in nervously and tried to find the boys' toy section. Although they had two sons, it was his wife who always bought their toys from an emporium run by a cheerful, enigmatic Chinese family. Consequently, Ernest had very little experience of toy shops and it took him a while to realize that the section he was looking for didn't exist. The shop had heeded the advice of educationalists and no longer discriminated along gender lines, as one of the assistants explained rather curtly, so pistols and machine guns were jumbled up with dolls and toy kitchens, Action Men were cheek by jowl with Barbies and racing cars, and footballs and Barça strips with cookers and hairdressing and make-up packs. Being a timid soul, Ernest realized that this unexpected cohabitation made life harder for him. While he searched the chaotic shelves in a state of shock, the long-lost residues from the Marxist politics still slumbering in a corner of his brain forced him to wonder if that post-feminist façade wasn't simply an excuse to justify a lack of staff and the consequent confusion, and, in addition, whether it wasn't behind the sudden interest girls now showed for uniforms and the colour khaki and the way boys had converted to the lucrative creed of metrosexuality.

After poking around and leisurely inspecting the broad range of toy pistols the market offered, Ernest selected a black and not very big item, which he thought could be mistaken for the real McCoy if he was fortunate enough not to bump into an expert. He paid in cash and had the forethought to ask them to wrap it up as a present, in case someone found it odd for a respectable-looking paterfamilias to be buying a pistol in a toy shop. A tense Ernest decided to catch a bus home straight away, with his innocent parcel tucked under one arm and evil machinations stirring in his mind.

He knew nobody would be in during the day. He wasn't expecting visitors and didn't intend to pick the phone up. His wife Carmen was out at work. There weren't good connections to her lawyers' practice, so she always got a bite to eat in one of the bars in the area. Oriol was at the nursery, where they gave him lunch and an afternoon snack, and Jordi would be at school until six. Back at their flat, Ernest locked the door and went into the dining room. He put the parcel on the table, carefully unwrapped it and put the box and the wrapping paper in a rubbish bag. He hid the toy pistol in a pocket in his jacket, which he hung up among the other jackets in their bedroom wardrobe. Then he went out, in his shirtsleeves, dropped the rubbish bag in the bin and hurried home. But then he stopped at the kiosk. He'd kicked the habit eighteen months ago, though he'd been having second thoughts for the past few days. The moment he'd purchased the pistol, he'd decided the seriousness of the situation fully justified a relapse. That first cigarette after such a lengthy abstinence made him feel slightly queasy, but it tasted wonderful.

He had to wait until the evening to implement his plan. He had twelve long hours ahead and felt uneasy. He switched on the television in search of distraction, but it didn't help. Nor could he get any shut-eye or concentrate on the novel he'd just begun. By midday he'd made himself a sandwich, more to while the time away than because he was really hungry, and ate while glancing at the newspaper. At half-past four, feeling rather sorry for himself, he went out again, this time to collect the boys from school.

It was a quarter to nine when his wife arrived home, weary and distraught. The Metro was down yet again due to construction work for the high-speed train. The boys were asleep and she didn't dare go in and give them a kiss in case they woke up, even though it was Saturday tomorrow and they didn't have to wake up early. Carmen wasn't hungry and her back was hurting. She felt guilty, particularly because of Oriol, who was still only small and missed her. Rather than playing with her son, as her mother had with her when she was young, Carmen was forced to spend eight hours a day trapped in a windowless office for a derisory wage, doing a job that brought her nil professional satisfaction or social life. But they needed her income, and that was why they'd parked Oriol at a nursery at the age of three and why she and Ernest could only devote what remained of the weekends to their sons once they'd done the shopping and cleaned the house while their kids gawped at those cartoon series they'd sworn they'd never let them watch. While Carmen thought about all that and wept her heart out in the shower, Ernest cooked an omelette and set the table.

He put on a cheerful front during supper and told her he'd arranged to have a drink with an old friend she didn't know. He'd bumped into him quite by chance in the street when he went to buy the paper, and they'd agreed to meet up that night. He sensed that his friend had money, so he was intending to see if he could extract a little cash from him that would ensure their life didn't go to the dogs.

“I haven't seen him for a hell of a long time,” said Ernest apologetically. “What's more, he's divorced and childless, so it will probably spin out and I'll get back late…” he added, expecting his wife to react.

Carmen was usually quick to complain when he spent an evening out with his translator friends lamenting the sorry state of the profession, but she didn't moan and even told him not to worry. She simply asked him to wake her up when he came back and tell her how it had gone. She too was very worried by the disastrous state of their finances. Carmen realized their economic situation was bad, even though her man had generously spared her explanations of just how bad.

At around eleven, when Carmen was in bed, Ernest left home wearing old jeans, a white shirt and the brown jacket where he'd hidden the toy pistol. His cheap brand of sunglasses and beige cloth cap were also in one pocket. He stopped the first taxi that passed by the corner near their house, heart racing but mind made up, as there was everything to play for, and once inside he stammered: “To Up & Down, please.”

There isn't a taxi driver in the whole of Barcelona who doesn't know where Up & Down is, particularly if they're on the night shift. North of the Diagonal, the disco had known better times, before other night spots, strategically placed in the Port Olímpic, usurped the top places in the glamour listings. Long gone were the days when it was
de rigueur
to wear a tie and sport shoes were banned; nevertheless, a selection process still existed that went from dress code to the size of one's wallet. Like most fashionable discos, Up & Down favoured an easygoing style that encompassed rough-cut designer jeans and top brands of sweatshirts, and the casual uniform of Conservative Party youth, sleek hair and boat shoes included. The eagle-eyed doormen would have been loath to allow someone as drab as Ernest to pass through the gates to that temple to bourgeois
recreation, but he wasn't in fact intending to go in. He was going to stay outside and hover like a vulture waiting for an easy prey. Although he'd never crossed that threshold, it was common knowledge that Up & Down was one of the favourite haunts for the wealthy of Barcelona.

Ernest had finally decided on an easy enough solution to get hold of the two grand they desperately needed: he would steal it at pistol-point. Once he'd come to this decision, his ethical beliefs and strict scale of values forced him to limit his possible field to the rich. He didn't want to risk holding up someone as povertystricken as himself, although that wouldn't have been difficult. So after he'd chewed over his plan of action, he'd worked out that his best option was to travel to where the well-off lived and partied. On a Friday night, in a plush disco like that, he'd find the filthy rich thick on the ground. He was quite right. What's more, the place had the added bonus of being surrounded by badly lit boulevards with few passers-by.

The moral dilemma of the theft didn't bother him in the slightest at that point in time. It was one thing to steal in order to avoid work, he thought, and quite another to enter St Dismas's fraternity of thieves as a last resort. He wasn't out to steal to put food on their table, but worse still, to continue having a dining room to put a table where he could put their Spanish omelettes. Of course, he was a total novice and anguished about picking the right victim, and about ending up in the police station and becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.

When he reached the disco at around half-past eleven, Ernest realized it had only just opened its doors and that the restaurant next door was full of people dining out. The façade was a hundred per cent glass, as required by the canons of the ersatz modernity Barcelona now aped, which meant too many witnesses and casual onlookers. Three extremely young men, all in black, with small gadgets attached to their ears, were inspecting the people entering Up & Down, and allowing them in or turning them away. Ernest became rather anxious and kept his distance, trying to keep outside their line of vision. He was planning to accost someone who staggered out drunk and then lead him to a cash point, so he was probably in for a wait. It might be hours before he found the right victim for his toy pistol, so he decided to take it easy and go for a drink in an Irish pub on the other side of the road.

The pub was packed and filled with a smoky haze. The lights were dimmed and a Premier League match was being shown on the screen which some foreigners were enthusiastically watching. Fortunately, his presence went totally unnoticed. Ernest sat at the bar, pretended to watch the football and ordered a beer. He went to the lavatory a couple of times to pee, more a question of nerves than an ailing prostate, and at one thirty exited the pub, thinking he'd snoop discreetly around the disco. He made good use of the darkness and the darkorange low-consumption streetlights installed courtesy of the mayor, as he lurked in the shadows trying not to attract attention while he made sure the place wasn't bristling with bodyguards or bouncers.

That beer and the couple of whiskies he'd downed while killing time had been a good idea, like the supply of nicotine in his pocket. It was just what he needed to bring on the Dutch courage required by that turning
point in his life. He noted how every muscle in his neck was taut and how his heart had begun to race and thud. If he'd been a hunter, he'd have recognized that silent injection of adrenaline coursing through his veins, but as he wasn't, he had a panic attack, thinking it might be a heart attack in the making. He had to calm down, so he took several long, deep breaths as he'd been instructed in the hospital. That night Ernest Fabià, translator of English literature and specialist in the mating rituals of the Tupi-Guarani Indians, was about to become a thief. What he couldn't imagine, however, was that he was also about to become the alibi for a man who'd be accused of murder the morning after.