Lost Luggage (46 page)

More clues, more clues. On our previous visit to Carrer Nàpols, we'd left an envelope with our photos in it on the dining-room table. We'd taken them the summer that we'd met up in London.
There were photos of London Fields, the house where Chris and Sarah lived in Martello Street (which our father visited several times), of us four toasting each other with pints in the pub. We'd made some extra copies and planned to send them to Carolina and Petroli as a thank-you for helping us. From the dust marks on the table and the position of one of the chairs, we deduced that our father had sat down to look at them. We checked to see if any were missing and, although we weren't sure, we suspected he'd taken one featuring the four of us. Or was that wishful thinking?

Over dinner that evening we pooled our ideas. Okay, we weren't certain that the intruder had been Gabriel, but it seemed the most logical explanation and it helped us to believe he was alive. We had no choice but to cling to our theory. In that case, he knew that we four brothers had met up and were looking for him. He knew that we were crazy enough to get together every so often in Barcelona. That we'd turned the mezzanine apartment in Carrer Nàpols into the headquarters of the unlikely Christophers Club. We considered all the facts and told ourselves we were on the right track and yet, since this was about our father, we also knew it would be a good idea to nip any optimism in the bud. He was the one who'd started it all by leaving a list of our names on the bedside table, right? It looked like a calculated decision aimed at making sure everything would proceed step by step. That's why it would be naive of us to expect that he was going to pop up all of a sudden, just like that. Right from the start we'd understood that our father hadn't disappeared overnight—Abracadabra!—but had crumbled apart, little by little. So, maybe the reverse was happening now, and, instead of suddenly turning up, he was sending us signs, enticing us with clues to keep looking for him.

Mixed up with all the tension of the day, the exhaustion—and a few bottles of wine—these conclusions had us all waxing lyrical. We wondered what would happen to the Christophers when we found our father. Would our lives change? Would we go on seeing each other? It might be better to let the whole thing go and just celebrate our friendship. To hell with Dad. Christof, the most melodramatic (and drunkest), gabbled on about how we had to have a
brothers' pact but didn't specify what that meant. Chris retired to a solitary corner as if he could conjure up through silence some idea of the future. Cristòfol wondered what was more important, the quest itself or success, the end or the means, and Christophe wound him up by expounding on theories of risk and consequence.

Feeling the need to banish gloomy portents, someone had the good sense to propose a toast to our mothers.

That night the four of us went to sleep well and truly addled, Cristòfol at his place and the visiting Christophers at the hotel where we always stayed. The next day, Saturday, we overplayed our hangovers—come on, admit it—and pretended to forget our fit of psychodrama. The new developments were pushing us to act. At breakfast time, Christophe came down from his room with a surprise that, what with all the chatter the day before, he'd forgotten to show us. It wasn't as spectacular an offering as Christof's wreckage of the Pegaso, but it immediately became very important. A friend of his from the University of Paris, in the Department of Computer Applications in Physics, had been working on a project to create highly accurate computer-enhanced portraits. Their precision was so impressive that the French secret services bought the program. Christophe had given his friend a photo of our father, the most recent one we had, from 1975, and the computer came up with a sketch of how he might look today. The friend had handed him a sealed envelope on which he'd ironically written “Top Secret,” but Christophe preferred not to look at it until we were all together. It was quite a surprise. We decided to open it with due solemnity, after breakfast, and in the meantime we nursed our headaches with strong coffee and puerile conversation.

“Will we recognize him, do you think? I've imagined him so often . . .”

“The facial structure doesn't change much, my IT friend tells me.”

“Yes, but don't forget he turned sixty in 2001 . . .”

“So, now he'd be about to retire. That's if he ever went back to work.”

“What if he's got white hair?”

“What if he's got fatter?”

“Or thinner . . . Maybe he doesn't eat much.”

“You're so annoying! The computer can't know all that. It just does a sketch of the face. The program starts out from the logical evolution of the three most prominent features. Nose, ears, mouth . . .”

“Ah, I get it: It'll be like a prison mugshot.”

“All computer-enhanced portraits look like prison mugshots.”

Since the conversation was going nowhere, Christophe asked for silence. Then he opened the envelope, and the portrait was revealed.

The impression it made on us was enormous. It was him and it wasn't him. We looked at that face, with so little that was personal about it, and were fascinated to recognize Gabriel in it, although his proximity was unsettling. But it was him, yes. He would certainly look like that. Together with aging his features, the computer had cleverly given him a gentle stare—the elusive warmth the four of us had known when we were little. He gazed at us out of the sheet of paper, as if trying to convey how bad he felt about the situation.

We made photocopies of the portrait. We went back to the mezzanine apartment—where everything was as we'd left it the day before—got out a map and divided up the neighborhood. The grid layout of the Eixample zone made the task easier. Our idea was to go into shops and bars and ask people if they recognized this man. It was quite likely that they'd seen Gabriel, that he'd been walking these streets in the last few days, and any information they could give us, however tenuous, would be a great help. We separated at the street door, agreeing to meet up in the same place in two hours' time.

“Let's synchronize our watches,” Cristòfol said. We were acting like kids pretending to be detectives, so excited by the game that our hearts were thumping.

Most of the people we spoke to looked at the portrait and said they'd never seen him. We asked them to try to remember, to imagine him: a tall, thin man of some sixty years, retiring by nature, a good man. Perhaps he used to come to the shop a while ago, or
maybe they'd seen him recently. Some gave it a bit more thought, as if they were doing us a favor, and then said no. When they realized we were foreigners—except for Cristòfol—a few people started asking questions. Is he a terrorist? Did someone kill him? Has he disappeared? Are you from Interpol?

Not everything turned out to be so predictable, however. Chris spoke with the man from a kiosk in Passeig de Pujades, near Carrer Nàpols, and he recognized our father as an old client. He bought a newspaper every Saturday and Sunday. Only the newspaper? No, there was a time when he was buying a BBC English course in installments (Chris smiled), but he'd tired of it after some months. When had he stopped going there? A year ago, the kiosk man guessed, maybe more. He offered to stick the portrait up in his kiosk so people could see it, but we preferred to keep it private.

Cristòfol stumbled upon the most promising clue—or, let's just say, another piece of the mystery—in a greasy dive in Carrer Sardenya. Even the name was prescient: Bar Carambola, the “stroke of luck” bar. When he went in, a minute or two before midday, they'd just opened and there were no drinkers. In the depths of the bar, two little girls were sitting in front of a television set watching cartoons. A bartender was restocking the fridges. The owner was leaning on the bar flicking through a sports paper. His eyes were puffy and ringed with dark circles. Cristòfol showed him the portrait of Gabriel. The man made a strange sound like a snorting horse—
bruuf-f-f-f
—and looked even more loutish, at which point the toothpick fell from his mouth to the floor.

“He used to come here on Friday nights,” he said. “He met up with a group to play cards. They'd be at it for hours. They used to begin with low stakes, but the betting always heated up after a while.”

The oafish bar owner remembered Gabriel. He remembered him because he had a very peculiar way of playing, holding his head high and always looking dour. He'd gone up in smoke all of a sudden.

“If he's still alive, he'll certainly have problems. That's why you're looking for him, isn't it? I knew he'd end up badly. The way
he concentrated so hard on a game of cards . . . Either he ended up in the clink, or someone rearranged his face.” He went quiet as if he had nothing else to say but then added meditatively, “The fact is he knew how to win, the fucker.”

Making it clear that he didn't want to talk, the bar owner inserted another toothpick and went on turning the pages of the sports paper. Cristòfol asked for a coffee, out of courtesy. The bartender, badly shaven and about thirty years old, served him with a wink. When he raised his cup, Cristòfol found a folded paper napkin underneath. He picked it up and glanced over at the bartender. The bartender pretended to look away but nodded his head. The owner was still absorbed in the sports news. Cristòfol cupped the note in the palm of his hand and read it. There was a nine-figure number and the words “Phone me tonight.” Then he paid for his coffee and left without saying good-bye.

Back in the mezzanine again after we'd met up at the agreed time, Cristòfol was jittery, and the bit of paper was burning a hole in his pocket. We shared the results of our inquiries and, once again, confirmed what we already knew: Our father had the ability to lose himself in a crowd, to pass unnoticed. And the place where he really excelled at anonymity was in the house where he lived. We spent the afternoon consulting the other residents in the building, and the results were shockingly meager. In three of the nine other apartments they wouldn't even open the door to us. Three other neighbors denied knowing him or even having seen him on the stairs (since he lived on the mezzanine, Gabriel wouldn't have used the elevator). Two chatty old ladies who lived in next-door apartments on the first floor opened their doors together, like a pair of coconspirators. They studied the portrait and assured us that this man was the “ghost” who'd hidden himself away in the mezzanine apartment some time ago. This creature, they informed us, had died about a year ago. They themselves had called the police to report a terrible smell coming from the apartment. Behind the whole thing, they said, was some murky story, some high-level affair of state, because the government pretended that nothing had happened.

“He must have been a Russian spy. Or American. A leftover from Franco's times.”

“Or an extraterrestrial. They kidnapped him without making a sound so they could analyze him.”

“Sometimes we heard him speaking foreign languages.”

“He was communicating with his superiors. Somebody doesn't want that to be known, but that's the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“We're not giving up on this and we're still in a state of high alert. We've been hearing voices from the mezzanine again, for some months now.”

“It's always at weekends. Something's going on there.”

We said they weren't mistaken and asked for their help. We didn't want to disappoint them. If they heard any noise in the apartment during the week, or more conversations, they should inform us. They were so thrilled we feared they might have a seizure.

The woman in the mezzanine apartment on the other side of the wall separating it from our father's was an Italian called Giuditta—which we knew from her mailbox—and she was the most interesting resident in the building. The first time Cristòfol went to the apartment in Carrer Nàpols, she heard him arrive, came out, and called to him from the landing. They chatted for a bit. She knew about Gabriel's disappearance and was very sorry about it. The police had questioned her a couple of times before registering him as missing, but unfortunately she didn't know anything. Gabriel had never been given to chatting with neighbors, had he? Then she offered to collect any mail that might arrive.

This time, when we Christophers knocked at the door, she opened it just a crack so we could see her only as far as the chain allowed. Cristòfol thought she was more aloof than on the first occasion. We said we needed to talk to her. Had she heard any noises recently? We suspected that her neighbor . . . She asked us to wait a moment and closed the door again. She took two or three minutes (running around the house, tidying up, turning off a radio, banging a door) and then opened up again, and this time was slightly more communicative. She'd changed into a dress and
put on a bit of makeup, but neither the rouge on her cheeks nor a touch of lipstick concealed the fact that she was rattled. She seemed uncomfortable.

Somewhat stiffly, she invited us into her living room. She didn't offer us anything to drink, probably because she wanted us out of there quickly. The living room was a colorful, baroque version of our father's. The floral curtains and sofas gave it a slightly shabby British touch, like the Fawlty Towers dining room. Her wall-to-wall carpet was in different shades of brown that would have been perfect in a bingo hall. The walls were completely covered with two shelves of books (most with brightly colored spines), paintings of different landscapes, and photographs. Since we were obviously gawking at everything, she told us that she liked reading two very different sorts of books, romantic novels and atlases. Christophe pointed at a black-and-white photo on the wall. A spotlight was shining on a girl hanging upside down from a trapeze, and you could make out some of the structural elements of a circus tent in the background. The girl's feet were hooked over the trapeze bar and she made it look easy. Her life depended on the tension of those two feet, yet her face transmitted angelic calm.