From Barcelona, with Love (4 page)

“Little bastard,” Mac said mildly. “Attacking the hero of the hour.”

“Oh, just pour me some more champagne, will you,” Sunny said, “and tell me what you think of our Paloma.”

He got fresh chilled flutes from the refrigerator, filled them, and handed her one. “A toast to Paloma,” he said, “who, I suspect, is in some kind of trouble.”

“What? A little girl like that? In trouble?” Then Sunny remembered the look in Paloma's wide chestnut eyes. She recalled uneasily how some girls had looked like that, when she was at school. It was the look of an outsider, of someone who wasn't quite in touch with her life … a loner.

Mac said, “You realize she's Bibi Fortunata's daughter.”

Sunny gaped at him, the glass halfway to her mouth. “No!” she said. Then she remembered Paloma's red hair, her freckles, her long delicate body. “
Oh my God,
of course she is,” she said. “The long-lost Bibi.”

“Who simply disappeared,” Mac said. “Gone forever, I guess. Though how she could leave her child behind I don't know.”

“I do,” Sunny said. “Bibi was in such a mess, condemned as a killer by the media and the public, even though she never had a trial. How could she bring up a child? How could she be a normal mom, picking her up at school, going to all the school activities? Who would want to know Bibi's little girl? It's tragic, but I believe Bibi did the right thing.”

Mac went and sat next to her on the garden swing with the striped awning he'd inherited when he bought the house, all those years ago. Arm around her, swinging gently back and forth, he looked out at the darkening band where the ocean met the night sky, and said, “I got the feeling she wanted to talk to me.”

“So what are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “Nothing I can do. If Bibi wants to hide from the world and her family, that's up to her.”

“Maybe you're wrong and Paloma was just starstruck,” Sunny said, because after all Mac was by way of being a “star.”

Still, Mac wondered what was up.

“I wonder why she lives—basically—in Barcelona?” he said, looking thoughtful.

 

Part Two

 

Chapter 4

Barcelona

There's a tall stone house,
tucked away from all the traffic and the noise, the cafés and the crowds at the end of an alley in the historic area of Barcelona known as Las Ramblas, a kaleidoscope of narrow streets crammed with shops and churches, bars and clubs and small hotels.

The house has a high shabby wall and a pair of iron gates, painted blue. An old man holds guard over these gates, sitting day by day in his small stone guardhouse, a bright blue beret over his white hair. The beret matches his eyes, blue and still young, though the rest of him is falling apart. A dog sits beside him. A sleek little black-and-white dog, a would-be Jack Russell but with Spanish ancestors.

The old man speaks only Catalan, the language of Catalonia, which is where Barcelona is located, and if you attempt to talk to him through the gates wanting to know if this is a museum and can you see round, you will be given a growl by the dog and a glare from the old man and told the Catalan equivalent of fuck off.

The now neglected courtyard once bloomed with carefully tended garden flowers, as well as heavy-scented jasmine and bougainvillea and hibiscus, because Barcelona is on the Mediterranean and enjoys that special climate, hot in summer but never too cold in winter, to need more than an overcoat when the north wind whips in. Now the garden is overgrown and wild.

Today is different though. The old man is on the alert, his eyes watchful. For today the gates of the Ravel family townhouse are to be opened again. The Matriarch is expected. The last time those gates were opened were for her husband's funeral, ten years ago.

The Ravel name has been known for more than two centuries for the fine sherries they produce in the fertile, chalky land of the Jerez region, but are also known now for the vineyards and bodega in Penedès, south of Barcelona, where the Marqués de Ravel red wine is made, a wine that is rapidly climbing its way to become one of the most popular Spain produces; less weighty than a Shiraz, less tannic than a Chianti, softer than a Californian Cabernet. Its popularity also lies in its price point: not too high, not too low.

The pricing was the decision taken by Doña Lorenza de Ravel, the widow and grand Matriarch of the Ravel family. What the Marquesa de Ravel says goes—and her family, with their inheritance in mind, does her bidding uncomplainingly. Or at least they do not complain in front of her. Not too loudly anyhow. Only one of her four stepchildren has ever disobeyed and that was Bibi and she was a rebel right from the day she was born, and, possibly, too, until the day she died.

Today, the grand townhouse has been cleaned, dusted, aired. Doña Lorenza has summoned a family meeting. She intends to sort out the past. Finally.

The white-haired old man pushes back the iron gates, removes his beret, bows his head respectfully as the black BMW X5 swings into the short driveway and parks in a sputter of gravel. The driver's door opens and a pair of long legs emerges, feet encased in red python four-inch-heeled Jimmy Choo heels, followed by their owner. Very tall, curvy, rampaging black hair, fuchsia lipstick on her wide mouth, black eyes that take in everything in one wide comprehensive glance. No silver-haired grande dame this. Forty-one-year-old Lorenza de Ravel, the Matriarch, is
hot.

Lorenza was the third wife of Juan Pedro de Ravel. She'd married him eighteen years ago when she was only twenty-three and Juan Pedro was sixty-five. Widowed for ten years, she is the main inheritor of his fortune and his lands, his vineyards, his bodega, and his famous sherry business. The Ravel name is known worldwide, but it was Lorenza who turned some of those inherited vineyards into wine-producing, Lorenza who oversees the business; she who made the decision to go for the popular market instead of taking on the small and very competitive upper-crust wineries; she who decided the quality and the price point that have made it a success.

Lorenza slams the car door shut and stands for a moment, taking in the old house where she had come as a young bride, far from blushing and virginal but with a handsome silver-haired husband who adored her and was rich enough to satisfy all her whims. She is beautiful now, but then she had been truly lovely, a softer, rounder, thrillingly sexy young woman who enjoyed nothing more than making love to her husband, or him making love to her, or them making love. Whichever way they did it she loved it. Right up until the day he died, not in her bed, thank God, though he was—also thank God—in her arms, and she had been able to say goodbye to him.

He had died, right here, in this house, on a sunny autumn evening with the long library windows still open to catch the breeze and Magre, who was Juan Pedro's beloved old black cat, curled on his knee. The cat was named Magre—“skinny”—as a joke because you never saw a cat as fat as this one. Juan Pedro had said he felt a chill and pulled a sweater over his shoulders. Sitting in her big yellow wing chair opposite, Lorenza had glanced up from the glass of wine—the new vintage they were tasting—and, surprised, thought her husband suddenly looked his age.

Juan Pedro smiled at her. He lifted the cat and put it tenderly onto the sofa next to him. “Come here, my
guapa
Lorenzita,” he said, holding out his hand to her. She liked it when he called her
guapa,
“pretty one”; it made her feel like a teenager. She went and took his hand and he pulled her onto his knee. She put her arms around him, leaning back a little, smiling into his eyes.
“Guapa,”
he whispered again, and then he exhaled deeply and all the life went from his brown eyes, leaving them pale as beach pebbles.

Lorenza did not scream, nor did she call for help. She knew it was too late. Instead she held him close to her warm body, loving him for loving her and hating him for leaving her.

Everyone thought Lorenza Machado had married Juan Pedro de Ravel for his money and his prestigious name. The truth was Lorenza had married him because she had fallen madly in love. He was only the second man she had loved in her entire life.

Holding him, she'd wept silent tears until Magre's piteous yowl brought her back to her senses. The cat's steady golden gaze held hers. Juan Pedro's cat knew what had happened. Cats always understood those things. It was as though Magre was saying “We loved him together, now I am yours.” And because of that Lorenza removed her arms from around her husband's neck, she pressed his eyelids over his blank eyes and kissed his mouth. Then she picked up Magre, who must have weighed all of seventeen pounds, and went to fetch help.

She left the de Ravel house in Las Ramblas the day of Juan Pedro's funeral, vowing never to return. How could she? Without him? It was their place and now it was ended.

Of course the entire family had shown up for the funeral, not one of whom believed Lorenza had married Juan Pedro for anything other than his money. “Well, now she's got it,” they muttered to one another in the crypt of the great temple of Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's architectural gift to the city of Barcelona and still unfinished all these years after Gaudí's accidental death in 1926. Genius did not stop you from getting run over by a tram, even if you were one of the great architects of the world, as well as one of the poorest. And one whom Juan Pedro de Ravel had revered, which was why his funeral service was held there.

The ornate spires, the curlicues, the colorful mosaics, the sheer fantasy of the immense temple were in such contrast to the quiet, reserved husband Lorenza knew, she wondered why he'd stipulated that his funeral service should be held there. One of the reasons had to be because it was big enough to hold everyone and had a joyous feel to it, even if it was in the crypt and you were tripping over ongoing works and bags of cement. So many people had packed in, friends, relatives, business acquaintances, wine dealers, children, grandchildren, ex-mistresses (none since his marriage to Lorenza but they still cared because he had always taken care of them), workers from the estates and the vineyards. They came from around the world to say goodbye to him.

Lorenza had already said her private goodbye to her husband. She retreated to the oldest of the Marqués de Ravel vineyards in Penedès, southwest of Barcelona, and the ancient house that had begun as a small whitewashed stucco building, thick-walled, Spanish style, against the winter winds and with small windows that kept out the cold, but also kept out the summer's heat. When it was first built it was not a comfortable place, but the original had been added on to, growing over the years in a Dutch Colonial style that would have been more at home in South Africa's vineyards than in Spain.

The white house was beautiful, special, with its blue gables and dormers and the long row of tall windows on the ground floor that let in all the light and sunshine. The view was lovely even in winter, when the vines curved in spiky leafless rows up the hills and over and down, into infinity it seemed. Then came the spring, and leaves of such a tender green it touched the heart because it meant life was coming back to the Ravel land. Of course with summer the place became alive with itinerant workers, and come the late September–early October harvest, depending on the weather and the exact ripeness of the grapes, white for the grassy-scented Sauvignon Blanc, and Tempranillos and Cabernets, there seemed to be more people at the vineyard than in Las Ramblas.

The stone-faced bodega would smell of crushed grapes and also of the food set up outside on planked wooden tables, good hearty food for the workers, with wine to drink after a long day's picking, and maybe a de Ravel sherry or two afterward to wash down the good bread, baked that morning by Lorenza's own cook who had been with the family longer than Lorenza herself.

Until Juan Pedro died, Lorenza had never lived at the bodega, only visited. Now it was her home, her domaine, her life. It was also the symbol of her success.

Lorenza had become a force to be reckoned with and that was why, today, after reading the shocking letter from the American lawyer over and over again, she had called a family meeting. It had finally become necessary to sort out the past and secure the de Ravel future.

 

Chapter 5

Lorenza's housekeeper's name
was Buena. In fact, her real name was Maria Carmen but her response to any question or comment was always
buena
—“good”—and so she had become known by that. Buena had been sent on to Barcelona a week earlier to open up the house. She'd called in plumbers and electricians to make sure everything worked, and had employed a team of cleaners and window-washers and repairmen, because after all, nothing had been touched in ten years. The “wake” Lorenza had held after her husband's funeral, for family and the closest friends, had left her big
salón
in an after-the-party mess, which Buena had cleaned up then, but now she saw to it that everything was put back clean and tidy. Only the master bedroom and the small library that opened onto the courtyard garden, the room where Juan Pedro died, though they had been cleaned too, were exactly as he had left them. On Lorenza's orders, nothing had been moved.

The front door was a single slab of solid chestnut, twelve feet tall, carved from a tree on the Ravel estate, felled in a freak hurricane a century ago. The door knocker was solid brass in the shape of the Hand of Fatima. The fingers were worn smooth with use and had once again been polished to a dull gleam.

Buena heard the car and ran to open the door, flinging it back so hard the knocker rat-tatted against the groove it had made in the wood. She pushed back the gray hair that somehow always straggled out of its bun, skewering it with a long hairgrip, adjusted the horn-rimmed glasses that always slid down her long nose, straightened the blue cotton housedress, worried that it pulled over her plump hips, and beaming with pleasure called out, “
Bienvenido, Señora.
Welcome home.”