The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (6 page)

She needed to know how many nights Atticus would be staying in Kent, what day he would arrive, if he would be bringing guests this time, if he was still vegetarian, if he had changed cologne or still liked the one he had used all his life, and, above all, the exact time and date of his departure, because she planned on giving Atticus's room to Holden's parents-in-law, who were going to spend New Year's Eve with the Craftsmans that year.

Moira always wrote everything down in her enormous black planner, from the cards they received to the presents they sent to the amount of beef they should order from the butcher's in Sevenoaks.

The uncertainty was killing her.

•  •  •

Marlow took a cup of hot Horlicks on a silver tray up to Moira, who was in bed. The maid always prepared it before she went to bed herself, and she tended to dissolve half of one of her own tranquilizers in the drink because she figured that Mrs. Craftsman was partly responsible for her symptoms. That night, Marlow, unaware of any such scheme, added another two tablets of diazepam with the good intention of making it easier for Moira to take the bad news he was about to give her.

The dose proved excessive, of course.

“Moira, dear,” Marlow began softly while he stroked her back. “I'm afraid I have to tell you something about Atticus.”

“Atticus?” she mumbled.

“How to tell you this, my love . . . Don't be frightened, try to see the bright side of it. For a few days now, well, we haven't known where he is.” There, he had said it.

Moira made no comment. She remained lying on her side with her face pressed against the pillow.

“He's probably somewhere without any cell phone reception, you know how Spain's a mountainous country, with a lot of sea around it, and because he's an adventurous type he's probably decided to take a holiday. I can just imagine him, dear, on board a fishing boat, or on a snowy mountaintop, or perhaps on one of those islands that the Spanish still own off the coast of Africa.”

“Africa?”

“Yes, sort of near Mauritania.”

Silence.

“But he'll be back soon. He would never miss Christmas at home. He's a good boy, our Atticus. And just in case,” he added very quickly, “I've informed the police. They're busy looking for him, Moira, and they assure me we'll have news soon.”

More silence.

“For the moment, we know he isn't in hospital, which is reassuring. He hasn't been in an accident, thank God. There haven't been any accusations either, so he hasn't got into any trouble. He's simply disappeared. Without a trace. Just like that time, do you remember, when he was twenty and went off on that gap year. We didn't hear from him for months. We didn't worry then and we aren't going to worry now, Moira, because there will be a reasonable explanation for all this. I, for one, am not in the least bit alarmed. He's a grown man, he can make his own decisions, he doesn't need to ask our permission. If he wants to climb aboard a tuna-fishing ship, that's his choice. If he wants to become a hermit and live off insects, then so be it. It's his life.”

Moira started snoring. The overdose had done its work. In all probability, thought Marlow, she wouldn't remember anything the next day. Shame, because it had been an excellent speech for a man of so few words.

Calmer and fully convinced by the strength of his own argument that there was no cause for alarm, he got into bed as well, pulled the tartan blanket up to his chin, and fell fast asleep.

CHAPTER 9

C
ontrary to Berta's initial fears, Soleá and Asunción actually got along well. When she saw them for the first time, next to each other—one young and wild, the other mature and serene—she had pictured an impossible tandem bicycle with broken brakes and flat tires. “Staff Writer” was written on both of their contracts after “Job Title,” but each one had her particular way of understanding the role. While Soleá spent all day out wandering the streets in search of stories to tell, Asunción enjoyed working in the office and the careful task of calmly writing reviews, features, and profiles.

From the very first day, they had divided the work according to their interests: Soleá went to the opening nights, presentations, and festivals; she elbowed her way into interviews, her photos came out blurry, and her articles were lighthearted. Asunción read, took notes, compared, wove strands together. Between them, in the end, they always managed to season their articles to perfection.

They met with Berta once a week to organize the contents of the next issue. Each one presented her list of suggestions and Berta analyzed them with the neutrality of King Solomon. She was always astounded by what her two writers came up with.

“Do you really want to write about the African tribal music festival, Soleá?”

“It's free, Berta, half of Spain will be there.”

“In the Monegros Desert?” Berta blinked, coughed, and nearly always gave in.

“And you, Asunción, want to write an article about the aesthetic perversions of Surrealism?”

“There were heaps of them.”

“That I don't doubt.”

Then they shared the work by sections: film for you, books for you, museums for you, events for you, music for you, art for you, and so on. The order of ingredients in the cocktail varied each week so that everything got covered.

Berta was the one who gave the green light to what they wrote and controlled the budgets, organized their trips, hired photographers, and always managed to find four or five advertisers who would cover most of the costs of each issue. Normally these were film companies, cell phone networks, discount warehouses, restaurants, and hotels. It was company policy that
Librarte
couldn't accept advertising campaigns from publishing houses other than Craftsman & Co., and this seriously limited Berta's possibilities for finding clients.

María took care of the administration of the small business with the same attention to detail that she applied to her accounts at home. “It's easy,” she would say. “All you have to do is get the balances to tally.” She collected the receipts that Berta signed in countless files and folders. She kept every ticket, every receipt, and every note in shoe boxes, which she covered with crepe paper and cellophane. A different color every year. She also bought train or bus tickets for the writers (
Librarte
's finances had never, to that
day, been buoyant enough to allow a plane journey), printer ink, toner cartridges, and items of stationery.

She was astonishingly thrifty in the office, as she was at home: They recycled the paper, they got the last drop of ink out of each pen, they turned the lights off as soon as the sun came out, they shut the computers down every night, they didn't switch the heating on until well into November, and they never turned the air-conditioning on, because María claimed that on top of being expensive, it was unhealthy and unnecessary. This was most probably because she had grown up in a village near Toledo and experienced such heat as a child that she had become immune to the ravages of the thermometer.

Therein lay the root of most arguments in the office, because although María was happy with a fan and cold water to combat the heat, Asunción suffocated with hot flashes and sweated buckets.

Berta had to mediate: She gave María the month and a half of annual leave that she begged for on account of the school holidays and, in return, allowed Asunción to turn on the air-conditioning for the last half of July and all of August, and learned to disguise the resulting spikes that showed up on the electricity bill.

As for Gaby, she alone constituted
Librarte
's technical team. No computer program could refuse to do what she wanted. She was capable of finding the documents that mysteriously disappeared from Soleá's desktop and resuscitating Berta's Mac when she burst in panicking about what she called “the sudden death of that piece of junk.”

She imported and exported photos and archives, was a whiz with Photoshop, used InDesign, Quark, and Adobe as if they were physical tools, knew how to turn proofs into PDFs, and
could get into the others' laptops from the comfort of her own home.

She had studied graphic design in Paris when that sounded like outer space to people on the Iberian Peninsula, and she had found the love of her life in the boy who sat next to her in class, an Argentinean whom everyone addressed using his surname, Livingstone, because they had forgotten his first name.

Franklin Livingstone had grown up in Santa Fe, in the province of Córdoba, on a farm with green, fertile land, lulled to sleep by gaucho songs, eating steak and drinking bitter maté. Hence his unpolished character, his leathery skin, and his rough hands. His mother, who hailed from a well-off Buenos Aires family, had imagined a glorious future for him: on the thirtieth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, a successful businessman, prestigious lawyer, famous architect, or ruthless banker. But none of these dreams of hers had come true. At college in Boston, more bored than he had ever imagined possible, he discovered that his cowboy's hands were made to caress more interesting things than the current accounts of his future clients. Women and paintbrushes, in that order, began to take up most of his time.

To his mother's horror, he left business school and enrolled in art school. When he finished, he got a grant to travel to Paris, the city of light and art, and became one of the pioneers of digital design, which his mother naturally thought was a load of mumbo jumbo.

There he met Gaby, bright as a button, full of hopes and dreams, with everything ahead of her. He started to work the old magic on her, like they used to do in Córdoba back in his grandparents' day, with presents and sweet nothings.

He painted a portrait of her in oils in which he emphasized her lynx's
eyes staring out from the other side of the canvas. What greater proof of love was there than those months of work, holding in his mind's eye the image of the color of her skin, the softness of her curls, the curve of her chest? She was always catching him looking at her from his desk, sometimes using a pencil to measure the distance between her eyes, or the length of her neck.

When the portrait was finished, he invited her to see the hovel where he lived, a student room in a building in the fifteenth arrondissement. It was there that their love story began, with an artist's attentiveness. Or rather, two artists: he the brush, she the paint.

Sometimes Livingstone would come to the office midmorning. He would bring the girls cakes, flowers, ice cream, or
alfajores
. He would say to Gaby, “See you at home, princess,” and it still made her legs tremble.

They had been married for more than five years. They wanted to have children. It wasn't happening.

“Right when you least expect it, Gaby, you'll see,” Berta consoled her.

But every month, Gaby emerged from the office bathroom with a sour look on her face.

“You'll see,” Berta would assure her once more, “right when you least expect it.”

CHAPTER 10