Authors: Leif Davidsen
I was thirsty, sweaty and hungry. There had been a time when I would have looked down my nose at happy families on the beach. At dad, mum and the kids, as they sat there all sunburnt, together and self-sufficient. There had been a time when I would have been a little bit envious, even though I would never have admitted it to anyone, or to myself. But now I felt fine about families with their joys and sorrows. I had a family myself. I had been known for saying, and considering it the only right way to go about things, that wolves live and hunt best when alone. That there’s a difference between being lonely and being alone, and that I was alone and not lonely. But now I loved my life with my family and realised that I had been both alone and lonely before. Being indispensable – that others were dependent on me and that my actions would have an effect on those dearest to me – gave me great satisfaction. My family: just being able to say that made me happy now, as did the fact that the money I earned wasn’t for me alone, but also contributed to the welfare and happiness of others.
I parked the jeep in a side street near my hotel. Before picking up my key, I stood at the bar and drank a large glass of freshly pressed orange juice and ate a tortilla with small pieces of potato and onion, which was light and delicate. The bar was next to the hotel. Like so many Spanish bars it was rather noisy, with a television blaring in
one corner, litter and cigarette-ends on the floor, laminated tables, the smell of oil and garlic; and an agreeable chinking and hissing and clatter of cups, glasses and the espresso machine creating an animated wall-to-wall muzak. The walls were adorned with a couple of aged travel posters showing the Costa Brava’s rugged coast and various Barcelona football teams from past years. A young Michael Laudrup was smiling confidently in several of them, from the days when he led the team to one championship after the other. Most of the customers were locals having lunch. I smoked a cigarette and drank a double espresso as the edge wore off my adrenalin and I settled down. I talked football with the bartender. He had read about Barcelona’s collapse in his midday paper. The club wasn’t top of the division any more, but third. In Catalonia that counts as a collapse. Barcelona has to win the championship, otherwise the team’s a disaster. I’m a Real Madrid man myself, but we talked amicably as I tried to unwind. After a hit I always felt like I had done two hours with the Japanese in the karate institute on Calle Echégaray. I was refreshed, elated and exhausted all at once. So much planning, so much preparation, so many logistical considerations, and then the difference between success and failure was just a few hundredths of a second anyway. There could be a fault with the film or camera. A microscopic grain of sand in the shutter might have ruined the frames. For once my hands had shaken. The light calculation wasn’t right. The victim was blurred and unrecognisable. Umpteen things could have gone wrong.
I showered and packed before ringing Madrid. The exposed films were in the locked camera case, my clothes in a handy bag that could be taken on a plane as cabin luggage. I travel light and get the hotel to do my washing en route or buy a new t-shirt.
Oscar usually turned up at his office around 4 p.m., whereas lots of offices in Madrid didn’t open again until 5 p.m. That was changing. Their rhythm was becoming more and more European, but getting
hold of people during the conventional siesta time was still difficult, especially in any kind of public administration office. The siesta hours were for business lunches, family, or for conducting affairs in secluded hotel rooms or in the small apartments of mistresses. I had the phone number of Oscar’s current mistress, but just for emergencies. You could generally only reach Oscar at home with his wife on Sundays; that was how he and Gloria had arranged their lives. Gloria was a big woman and still very attractive, but she could no longer hide the fact that we were approaching 50. That didn’t seem to bother her, and when she wasn’t taking care of her flourishing legal practice, she saw to it that younger lovers confirmed her desirability. Spaniards are a pragmatic people when it comes to affairs of the heart and neither Oscar nor Gloria would dream of getting divorced. Not because they were Catholics, the law gave them the choice. But they were well matched and their private life and joint business transactions were so intertwined that the only people who would profit from a divorce would be the army of lawyers employed to unravel their assets.
They were both my friends and my business partners and we had known each other for more than 20 years. We had met during the chaotic, expectant years following Franco’s death. Back then Oscar was a six-foot German journalist who wrote for a number of left-wing papers, and Gloria was a beautiful law student who carried her membership card of the outlawed Communist party as if it was one of the Tsar’s missing crown jewels. We had a brief, intense affair, but everyone seemed to sleep with everyone in the days when we said “comrades” without blushing, and the affair ended quickly and without acrimony. Oscar and Gloria were another matter. They fell madly in love and had stayed together against the odds; not that fidelity had played a major role in recent years. We had been young, poor and revolutionary together, and we had become rich together. They were my second family. They had never had children. Gloria
had once had an abortion in England, back when it was forbidden in Spain, and after that she had regarded her illicit supply of the Pill as a revolutionary sword to be brandished in front of the Pope and all the other old, dyed-in-the-wool, reactionary, ludicrous men who tried to control her life. By the time she began to want children, it was too late. The clock had apparently struck. She couldn’t get pregnant, but if it was a big disappointment she hid it well. Oscar was pretty indifferent – if Gloria wanted a child, he was happy to be a father. She couldn’t, and without missing a beat they returned to life as normal, and after a couple of years stopped talking about it.
I thought about them as I packed my sweat-soaked jeans and t-shirt into the holdall and put on a clean shirt and a pair of light-coloured trousers. I drank a couple of cold colas from the minibar. Lately, I had begun thinking quite a bit about my childhood and youth. I was too happy and contented with my life to be experiencing a mid-life crisis, but maybe life ensures that you’re more inclined to look back when you accept that your youth is definitively over, that life has passed its peak, that there are some things you can’t do any more, even though you’d like to. Perhaps remembering the past makes it easier to cope with the years ahead, as you gradually slip into old age and hopefully an easy death.
I rang Oscar’s direct number and he answered straight away. Oscar didn’t speak Spanish when we first met, so we had used English from the beginning. Even though he now spoke fluent Spanish, we still used English when it was just the two of us. That’s what came most naturally.
“Well, old boy,” said Oscar in his husky, deep voice. “Fire away.”
“It’s in the bag,” I said.
“And?”
“Almost a Jacqueline,” I said. “So put the wheels in motion.”
“You’re a clever, cynical boy.”
“It’s a Minister, on the right.”
“Just as well or you’d have trouble with Amelia,” he said, and I could hear the amusement in his voice. He liked Amelia, but had never quite got over the fact that I was now married and was faithful to my wife, had become bourgeois in my old age, and listened to her and respected her opinions. But luckily all four of us got on well.
“I’ll bring in the material tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll make sure there’s a technician waiting.”
“I’ll do them myself,” I said.
“What about a lawyer?”
“They’re taken on a public beach.”
Oscar and I seldom said things straight out over the phone. Spain has an extensive and powerful security apparatus and there isn’t always complete respect for the laws on protection from wire-tapping. Spain is a European country with terrorism, and blood and violence have a way of getting the better of constitutional rights.
“How public?” he said.
“Totally public. It’s not private property. Anyone with a boat can use it.”
“I’ll put the wheels in motion. When are you coming home?”
“I’ll change cars and drive to Barcelona now and get the first flight.”
“OK, signing off, old boy,” he said with the kind of satisfaction in his voice that these days was nearly only ever induced by the thought of making money.
“Give my best to Gloria,” I said.
“Will do, old boy.”
I checked out and walked over to the jeep with my holdall in one hand and the camera bag containing the negatives, which would fill Oscar’s and my bank account with many, many thousands of dollars over my shoulder.
A black Mercedes was parked at an angle in front of the jeep. Two men were leaning against the car, their arms crossed. One of them
wouldn’t be much trouble. He was short and podgy, with a broad, heavy face below a bald pate. He didn’t look very fit. He looked exactly like what he undoubtedly was: an expensive spin-doctor employed to pull unfortunate chestnuts out of the fire for his lord and master. The other one was 30-odd, with beefy arms bulging under his jacket and a cocky little smile below his black sunglasses, but he didn’t have the air of a bruiser. He looked like a body-builder, not a fighter. It was a case of pumped-up muscles, not the sinewy toughness that you got from the gym I used. They were both in suits, despite the heat. Well-cut tropical wear, and they didn’t seem to be sweating. The shepherd had talked. The shepherd could read and write, at least the numbers and letters on a licence plate belonging to Avis.
“
Oyes, hijo de puta
,” the heavy said. He straightened himself up, letting his hands hang down beside his body. He seemed relaxed, but I could read the signs.
The side street was deserted. The hum of the traffic starting up again drifted from the main street and I could hear the metallic sound of shop shutters being rolled up.
“Son of a bitch yourself,” I said.
He took a step forward so that he was obstructing my access to the jeep.
“You’re blocking my way,” I said.
“Hand it over!” was all he said in reply and pointed at the camera bag.
“It’s private property,” I said.
“The films aren’t. You’ll get the cameras back, don’t worry. Hand it over!”
I put the holdall down on the road. I could feel myself sweating, and my heart was racing. The noise from the main street grew imperceptibly fainter, as if it was filtered, while my concentration focused on the man in front of me. He wasn’t quite as composed as he appeared. There was
a frailty in his eyes and beads of perspiration on his upper lip. I shoved the camera bag round to my back and waited, hoping that someone might show up in the side street so he wouldn’t be able to get violent, but he took a step forwards and made the mistake of sticking out his hand as if he was going to rip the bag from my shoulder. I grabbed hold of his hand, took a short step backwards, so I made use of his own momentum, found his little finger and twisted it while I wrenched his arm round and upwards. He gave a startled gasp, but the sound got caught in his throat as I jammed my knee into his testicles while still pulling his shoulder until I heard the joint crack. He crumpled in front of me with a hollow groan, numbed by shock and pain.
I picked up my holdall. The short, fat driver stepped away from the Mercedes and raised his hands in a warding-off gesture. It had all happened so quickly that I doubt he had registered what had taken place. His partner was on his knees, retching with pain. His finger would swell up and his crotch would ache for several days.
“No,” was all the short fatty said as he stepped pointedly aside. I walked passed him, threw my bags into the jeep and drove off. My hands were trembling from delayed shock and the back of my shirt was soaked through. A family of holidaymakers with a couple of young children had come round the corner and stood gaping at me. The father put his arms protectively around the two youngsters. The woman had her hands over her face. It wouldn’t make for a pleasant holiday, but that couldn’t be helped.
I drove slowly and carefully down to the Avis office. It wasn’t only the heat that was making my vision swim a little. I took three or four deep breaths to get my breathing under control.
At Avis I exchanged the jeep for a hard-topped, fast Audi, and it wasn’t until I turned off onto the motorway and sped up that I calmed down, but I kept looking in the mirror to see if a Mercedes or a patrol car was pursuing me. I didn’t feel completely safe until I was on the
plane to Madrid. I put a Grateful Dead CD in my Discman and leaned back in my seat. The plane was half empty. I saw the Mediterranean disappear as we swung slowly round and headed inland across the vast, barren Spanish interior and the familiar, vicious craving for a drink overwhelmed me.
I thought about Amelia and Maria Luisa and asked the stewardess for a cola, as the plane carried me home to Madrid.
Luckily there was no reception awaiting me at Barajas Airport which was its usual busy self. I had no trouble getting a taxi into the city, enveloped in the blue-violet cloak of approaching night and the smog which, thanks to the heatwave of recent days, had settled over this large heap of stones on the Castilian tableland. Madrid had been my home on and off for nearly a quarter of a century and, since my wedding eight years ago, I had no intention of ever leaving it again. I was no longer a nomad, but a resident. I had always seen myself as an eternal wanderer, living wherever I hung my hat, but now I was like a farmer bound to my patch of soil. I had settled down and was so content with my life that now and then I feared retribution. Not in the form of violence or disaster – I couldn’t really imagine that – but maybe the itchy restlessness would return with its old force and drag me away from that one spot in the world where I felt secure and happy.
A radio sports channel blared away as we drove into the centre, through the dense, honking, aggressive evening traffic. The taxi driver seemed to feel the same as I did – he couldn’t be bothered to talk. He was a gaunt, lean Moroccan who most likely had neither a work nor a residence permit, but had crossed the narrow Strait of Gibraltar to seek his fortune in the rich and yet so crisis-ridden European Union.
Madrid’s suburbs are among the ugliest in the world, Soviet in their monstrosity. They fan out in ranks from the centre, huge and dark, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that they surround a vibrant city centre that I was always glad to come home to.