Gaudi Afternoon (15 page)

“Cassandra,” wailed a familiar contralto voice. “They've stolen my child.”

T
HE HOTEL WHERE FRANKIE HAD
been holed up was in the Barri Xines, not far from the Palau Güell, the town house that Gaudí had built for his favorite patron at a time when the area had been up and coming instead of down and out. Squashed between seedy buildings with store fronts displaying objects both useful and risqué, the palace retained its mystery. Gaudí's architectural marvel opened up inside with rooms that made you feel as if you were in a huge medieval castle. High ceilings fretted with painted wood, long halls that fooled the eye with their grand perspectives, lovely arched windows that gave, most surprisingly, onto dreary streets and tenements instead of wooded estates or fog-shrouded lakes.

I remembered a story Ana had told me once in her detached, slightly ironic way: One day she'd gone to a reception in the Palau Güell. The reception had been to honor some well-known architect, and they had all been standing around with drinks in their hands chatting in the formal and restrained way of such receptions when someone had happened to notice that across the street was a brightly lit room in which you could see a band of pickpockets spreading watches, gold chains, rings and wallets out on the lumpy bed. Slowly the architects had drifted over to the window until the whole group was there, silently and with great fascination watching the thieves sort through their spoils.

Frankie's hotel, the no-star Hotel Palacio, wasn't the worst I'd ever been in—that honor went to a dive in Calcutta and the less said about that the better—but it probably wasn't where Ben would have liked to imagine Delilah staying. A dirty wooden staircase led up to a small lobby on the second floor, where a pair of pinched sisters glared at me before pointing the way down the dimly lit hall to Frankie's room.

Frankie was waiting for me, dressed in tights and a sporty royal blue sweater but still somehow managing to suggest a Tennessee Williams heroine in an advanced state of dishabille. She was chain-smoking and her nails were broken and bitten. She began to cry when she saw me.

“You're the only one who can help me,” she sobbed, throwing herself on the sagging bed over which hung a portrait of the Virgin in blue.

“Before we get into the matter of helping we need to sort a few things out, Frankie.”

“I'm innocent,” she said. “Put it down to a mother's love. I was desperate at having Delilah taken away from me, taken just like that, without a word of explanation or farewell. I thought, well if they want to behave like that, so can I. I didn't kidnap her violently, I simply stole in to see her, lifted her gently in my arms and walked off with her.”

“Without anyone's assistance.”

“Cassandra, would Ben or April help me? After they'd slipped away to Barcelona like thieves?”

“What about Hamilton?”

“Hamilton would have no reason to help me.”

I was puzzled. Surely if any of the three had facilitated the kidnap, now would be the time to betray them. Could it be someone else here in Barcelona? Someone I didn't know? It might have been lack of sleep, but I was starting to get a headache.

“Let's start at the beginning,” I said. “You got into La Pedrera sometime when April was there alone, before I came over. You had scoped the place out earlier, and assuming you didn't have an accomplice who let you in, you bribed the
portero
to make you a key to their apartment. You went in, but before you could get Delilah, Hamilton and then Ben came home and you panicked. You rushed up to the roof where Ben cornered you, then came back downstairs and managed to grab Delilah and take her out to the street and find a taxi. All without help. You came to this hotel where you thought no one would find you, which is in a terrible neighborhood in case you hadn't noticed… so then what happened?”

“That's what I've been trying to tell you for the past fifteen minutes, Cassandra. You've been wasting valuable time with your accusations.”

“I've just been trying to establish a chain of events,” I said. “I have no reason in the world to help you, especially not after you've lied to me the way you have.” I made as if to leave.

“Don't go,” Frankie wailed and grabbed my arm. “I know I've lied to you. But I had no choice. You'd never have believed the truth.”

“That's true,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I wouldn't have, and maybe I still don't. Whatever the truth is.”

“The important thing is that Delilah is missing. She's been missing for two hours already.”

“When did you notice she was gone?”

“This morning. You know in these types of places they don't have a bathroom in the room but down the hall. About seven this morning Delilah got up and told me she was going to the bathroom. I was half asleep and hardly heard her and must have dropped off again. When I woke up it was eight-thirty and she wasn't in her bed. I thought she might have gotten lost in the hotel or be downstairs in the lobby, so I went rushing around trying to find her. She wasn't anywhere. That's when I called you.”

I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty. “Do you think she could have gone out in the street?” If she had there was no telling what could have happened to her.

But Frankie refused to believe that, perhaps because it was too horrible a thought, the idea of Delilah being picked up by thieves who might either try to ransom her or sell her. “I'm sure it was Ben,” she said.

“But Ben had no idea where you'd taken Delilah,” I said. “She thought you'd gone off to the airport and back to San Francisco. We spent half the night there and at the train station.”

“If only I had gone back to San Francisco,” Frankie groaned.

“So how could Ben have known you were still here in Barcelona?”

“I told her.”

“You told her!”

“Of course,” Frankie said. “I'm not like her and April. I wouldn't want them to worry.”

“Well, if you told them then why are you surprised they found you? Or came and got Delilah?”

“Because I didn't tell them where I was. There are hundreds of hotels in Barcelona. How could they have known it was this one?”

A good question. If I hadn't been able to find Frankie in the best hotels, how could Ben and April, who spoke little Spanish, have found Frankie in one of the worst hotels?

“I didn't even call them,” said Frankie. “I sent a message with a taxi driver to their apartment. All it said was ‘Delilah is safe with me. I will be contacting you soon to work out new custody arrangements.'”

I didn't know what to think. I preferred to think that April and Ben had somehow gotten the hotel's name from the taxi driver rather than that Delilah had been nabbed off the street by professional childnappers, but it was still all very confusing. If April and Ben knew where Delilah was why hadn't they contacted me? I'd searched out Hamilton last night, but he hadn't said a word. Perhaps they hadn't told him?

“Frankie,” I said. “If you think Ben and April have Delilah and you know where they're staying, why don't you just go there and talk about it with them? What do you need me for?”

Frankie's thin lips quivered. “I need you to go with me.”

“But why?”

“Because. Because I'm afraid of them.” And Frankie burst into tears again.

This was not the way I had envisioned my stay in Barcelona, speeding around in taxis with bereft mothers. Before I'd always taken this city at a leisurely pace: long mornings reading newspapers and books in cafés, which drifted into serious lunches with Ana and other friends; afternoons spent napping and strolling along the streets, stopping in bookstores and again in cafés; resplendent evenings full of food and music and talk.

Now I had the feeling that even Gaudí's architecture, which had always been a lovely backdrop for my wanderings, was never going to be the same for me.

We screeched up in front of the door to La Pedrera and went inside and up the elevator. Frankie was clutching my arm and smoking non-stop. My headache wasn't getting any better.

We knocked and April came to the door. She looked from me to Frankie with wide-open dark eyes. I couldn't read their expression. “Ben,” she called, a little unsteadily. “Ben, they've brought Delilah back.”

Then she noticed that Delilah wasn't with us, but not in time to warn Ben, who came rushing out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around her midriff. What's she got that I haven't, I thought. Except fifteen years or so and a tattoo of a dancing woman on her back shoulder.

“Where is she, where's Delilah?”

“I thought you had her,” shrieked Frankie.

“Oh my god,” said April. And fainted.

Neither Ben nor Frankie seemed to notice April's unconscious state, so it was left to me to bring her around with water from a vase of flowers, while Ben and Frankie screamed at each other. Or perhaps it was the screaming that brought her around.

“What have you done with Delilah?”

“Why are you pretending you don't have her?” Frankie grabbed Ben's arm and Ben's towel slipped off, revealing rock-hard thighs and an abdomen like a knotted slab of maple.

“April, April dear,” I was murmuring. “Wake up April, are you all right? Do you want me to rub your feet?”

“You stole her right from under my very eyes and you think I have her?”

“You're the one who has her. You took her this morning when the poor little thing had to go to the bathroom.”

“What are you talking about? I had no idea where you were. How could I have taken her?”

“I sent you a message. That's how you found me. Don't pretend you didn't get it.”

April groaned and her eyelashes fluttered. I had to fight down a terrible desire to kiss her. April, I wanted to say, what are we doing with these two crazy people? Let's just you and me go away together, I know we're meant for each other. Her black eyes opened and she stared at me. According to the film script she should have murmured, “Darling, I knew it was you all the time.” But instead she croaked, “Where am I?”

“You've always been like this,” Ben shouted. “One lie after another, one excuse after another. I could give a damn if you'd had surgery to become an elephant, if only you'd be honest for once.”

“You don't know a thing about honesty. Or human kindness. If you'd been honest or kind you never would have left San Francisco without telling me. Do you think it's been easy finding you? I had to give up my job, everything to follow you.”

I assisted April to an upright position, but she seemed not to want to take part in the debate.

Frankie continued, “The only reason I took Delilah in the first place was to get you to agree to new custody arrangements.”

“Kidnapping is no way to get me to agree to anything.”

“Well, we're even now. I don't have Delilah and neither do you,” Frankie said smugly. But then reality hit her. “Then she really has been kidnapped by white slave traders.”

The two of them burst into shocked tears and then resumed accusing each other.

April said, “I think I need some fresh air.”

I walked April as gently as an invalid through the tiny Pasage de la Concepción that led from Gràcia to the Rambla de Catalunya, and seated her at an outdoor café sheltered from the sun. On either side of us traffic flashed by; it wasn't the quietest place for a conversation, but in Barcelona there aren't many quiet places. I often sat at this café, for it was just across from Ana's apartment building.

“Poor April,” I said several times, encouragingly, but she only nodded her frizzy black hair. She looked a little older this morning, wearing a gold caftan that could have been a bathrobe, her darkly-haired legs shoved into Birkenstocks. I still adored her though.

I ordered tea and
ensaimadas
, the Catalan version of sweet turnovers.

“I feel so guilty,” she said finally, in a low monotone. “Women are supposed to love kids, women are supposed to want kids, women are supposed to be crazy about babies and children. Well, I don't love kids, I mean, as a rule, as a
species.
And I can't stand how
central
children can be to someone's life, how parents can
fight
the way they do over a child.”

“One thing I'll say for big Catholic families is that no one gets any special attention. The fighting was all between us when I was growing up.” I paused. “Are you saying you don't like Delilah?”

“I
wanted
to like Delilah….”

“But right from the beginning she was a bone of contention.”

April shook her head. “I didn't even know that Ben had a daughter at first. I probably wouldn't have gotten involved with her if I'd known. But does she look like a mother?”

I had to shake my head. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door to Ana's apartment building open and a large, brightly painted papier-mâché arm protrude. Today Ana was taking her maternal construction to the home of the prospective mother.

“Of course she doesn't,” said April, chewing on her sticky pastry. “She looks like a bodybuilder, she looks like a bulldyke, she looks like…”

“A boy.”

“How was I supposed to know she had a daughter? She never mentioned her. It was all ‘Oh, April you're the only one for me. April I'll love you till I die.' It was flowers and cards and phone calls until I gave in.”

“And then you found out about Delilah. And Frankie.”

“She wasn't only a mother, but a mother in a custody dispute. Not only a custody dispute, but a dispute about gender. About who was a real woman, who had the right to be the mother.”

Ana, with her long braid tucked up under a workmanlike beret, was loading arms and legs into the back seat of the car she'd borrowed. She couldn't quite get the thighs to fit and had opened one of the back windows. The pair of red and yellow legs protruded wildly and disjointedly.