Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing (10 page)

“What do you mean?” asked Montse, sipping her cava.

“Homeopaths believe that the more often you dissolve an active principle in water and shake it, the more powerful the resulting medicine is. However, the fact is that when you dissolve a substance in water several times, let alone the exaggerated number of times they do it in homeopathic preparations, the substance that is theoretically supposed to cure you has in fact disappeared.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“We know that any substance has a finite number of molecules. It's known as Avogadro's law,” I replied, sipping more of the cava that always lubricated our late-night debates.

“Sounds familiar.”

“Consequently, if you dissolve a substance a lot, the moment comes when it ceases to exist as a substance. It's simply not there any more.”

“So how do the homeopathic people justify themselves?”

“Now, we come to the best bit of all. They believe that water has a memory that preserves the properties of the substances that are dissolved in it.”

“And is that possible?”

“Scientific experiments carried out in laboratory conditions say it isn't. The theory that water has powers of memory is bullshit.”

“It's incredible.”

“It's the same with Bach flower remedies,” I continued. “No rational criteria exist to prove the effectiveness of preparations based on steeping wild flowers from a region in Wales in watered-down brandy.”

“So what is it all about then? A money-making exercise?”

“I don't know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I imagine a little bit of everything. People who believe in the stuff in good faith, like Lola, and people who earn thousands from it.”

“You know what?” asked Montse, refilling her glass with a smile that suggested we'd not just be going to bed simply to sleep that night, “I think we'd better drink the cava before its molecules dissolve and no longer have any impact on us.”

Montse was right: we got up with a headache. After I'd taken Arnau to school, I came home, took an ibuprofen and stretched out in bed again. When I woke up, it was almost midday, and even though the headache had gone, I still felt groggy. In a spirit of dutiful resignation, I showered, then packed pyjamas and underwear in a bag and went out. Borja had insisted on inviting me to lunch to compensate for all the times he invited himself to our place, and I didn't want to ring him and make an excuse. We had to be at Dr Bou's centre by five, and the plan was to have lunch, grab our bags and head there.

“There's a restaurant near here with an excellent set lunch,” he said, hardly hiding the fact that he was euphoric. “We can leave our bags in the flat and collect them afterwards.”

“So Merche handed over the four thousand euros, no questions asked?”

“Well, I'd hardly say she didn't ask any questions… But this time I did promise to return them.”

I left my bag at Borja's and we went off. As soon as we stepped out, we saw it was drizzling, but, as the restaurant was only a couple of streets down from where my brother lives, we didn't bother to go back to the flat for our umbrellas. We hadn't gone twenty metres when a complete
stranger wearing huge sunglasses stood in front of us and blocked our path.

“You
are
Mr Masdéu, aren't you?” she whispered, addressing my brother.

“That depends,” replied Borja, smiling sweetly.

“Carry on walking. We don't have a lot of time,” said the stranger, looking all around and breaking into a brisk walk next to Borja. “They might be trailing me.”

“I'm sorry, but you are?…”

“What business of yours is that? You have something that doesn't belong to you,” she continued.

She was thin, average height, with dark hair that was cut pageboy style. She was dressed so as not to draw attention to herself, but even so couldn't hide the fact she was svelte and shapely. The small area of her face her rain-splashed glasses allowed a glimpse of was youthful and soft-skinned, and her small nose and highly sensual lips gave me a hard-on. I didn't register this at a first glance, but I am almost definite she was wearing a wig.

“Yes, I think I know what you are referring to,” Borja snapped, winking. “But must we really keep walking?”

“I told you they are probably following me. It's dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Borja stopped dead in his tracks. “Hey, nobody ever said anything about—”

“I've come to give you this.” She took a mobile phone from her pocket and gave it to Borja. “And to say that someone will be contacting you. Be prepared…”

“Be prepared? But you just listen, I—”

“I must be off. Don't try to pull a fast one, or you will regret it.”

And she left us gawping into space, rushed across the street, and left in her wake a trail of scent and mystery until she vanished from sight.

“Dangerous! She said it was dangerous,” I yelped, forgetting I was screaming at Borja in the middle of the street. “And who the hell is she?”

“I don't know. My contact for the business over that statue, I expect. But I don't understand why she gave me this mobile, if they already have my number,” my brother mumbled, not bothering to hide that he, too, was bemused.

“And that damned stone statuette is in my home!” I growled.

“I'm sorry, bro. I didn't think that… But don't you worry. They don't know you've got it. They can't possibly know.”

“And who are
they
? If you don't mind!”

“I don't have a clue. The antique dealer in Amsterdam said it would all be very straightforward: a person would contact me via my mobile and give me a time to hand over the statue. There must have been a change of plan.”

“Well, you'd better phone him and find out what the hell is going on!”

“It doesn't work like that. He contacts me. I don't have a way of ringing him.”

“You've got to find another hiding place, Pep. I don't want that statue in my house.”

“Quite right,” he replied. “I'll drop by your place on Sunday night when we leave the meditation centre and take it with me.”

“And where will you hide it?”

“In my flat, I suppose. At least, until I can think of somewhere better…”

“Do you know what? I have just lost the little appetite I had.”

“Me too.”

Even so, we had lunch in the restaurant. Borja gradually recovered his sangfroid and by the time the second course had arrived he had convinced me it was all a wheeze to
frighten him and prepare the ground to pay him less money than he'd agreed with the antiquarian. While we were drinking our coffees, he took the mobile out and put it on the table.

“It's not what you'd call the latest model, is it?” he remarked with a smile. In fact, I hadn't seen a model like that in a long, long time.

“So what are we going to do?”

“Nothing much. Wait for them to call,” Borja replied, shrugging his shoulders.

“But mobiles are banned from the meditation centre,” I retorted. “I left mine at home…”

“You're a real baby! I don't expect you can smoke either, but I don't intend going three days without a smoke.”

“And what if they catch you?”

“Eduard, we're big boys now. This chakra and cosmic-harmony business is baloney to soak the rich, can't you see that? And what's more, we're going of our free will and paying a fortune for the ride. I intend on smoking the odd cigarette. Whatever they may say,” he added, shrugging his shoulders yet again.

“Know what? I'll be back in a second,” I said, getting up from the table. “I'm off to buy a packet of cigarettes.”

PART II

Alícia Cendra had long since given up trying to pick up boyfriends in bars. That was the past. Now she was about to hit fifty, the only men who approached with a saucy glint in their eyes when they spotted her sitting with only a glass for company were solitary seventy-year-olds with the stink of alcohol on their breath and a box of Viagra in their pocket. She no longer interested men, or at least the ones she fancied, so no need to lose any sleep over it. As the women's magazines that she read at work or the hairdresser's explained, she had simply become invisible. The hint of cellulite her clothes revealed and the incipient crow's feet no cream could erase disabled her from competing against the skinny, soft-fleshed bodies of the young girls who marked out the night-time territory to the lilt of the latest hit song. No, picking men up in bars was no longer an option for her. She had gradually been forced to resign herself to that sad fact.

Winning the love of a man was a slow, painstaking task in this new pre-menopausal stage in her life. A long-term project that required time, patience and hours in the beauty parlour and, above all, planning. Alícia Cendra had assumed by now that going out at night in the hope of coming across a second Prince Charming – her first had been the husband who'd abandoned her for one of
those silly young things – meant coming home drunk and depressed, and, worst of all, alone. Consequently, on the rare occasions when she did go to a bar for a drink, she did so without high hopes, only to sip one of her favourite cocktails, and, jostled by a noisy crowd, she would fantasize secretly about the man who had recently become the great love of her life, Dr Horaci Bou.

When she left the cinema that night, she decided to go to the Dry Martini for a drink before going to bed. She felt like a margarita. Nobody was expecting her home, apart from her cat, and, even though she'd have to be up early in the morning to go to work, it wasn't that late. Now spring was in the air and longer days were here, she found home oppressive. She had few women friends, and those she did still have had husbands and better things to do on a Thursday night than go out with a divorcee who lived absorbed in a very different mental world. Alícia's friends felt envy rather than pity. They imagined her childless and without commitments, happily enjoying a life that was beyond their reach as married women.

Reality was somewhat different. True enough she entered and departed relationships without having to explain herself to anybody, but at the end of the day she couldn't get used to living by herself. The silence that dominated her flat, a silence too eloquent to be broken by the sound of television or radio, overwhelmed her and translated into attacks of anguish Alícia fought off by frequent visits to her refrigerator and bouts of cleaning that wiped her out. But she could hardly tell her girlfriends that, because she felt that if she confessed she couldn't stand so much freedom they'd think she wasn't a modern woman and would phone her even less.

Dr Bou had been a stroke of luck, and for some time he'd been the focus of her nocturnal fantasies and kept her
brain busy with romantic dreams during the day. Dr Bou, the man known to her and the rest of his patients simply as Horaci, was her therapist, the man dedicated to healing her body and soul in this new and crucial stage of her life. She had met him through Abril, a work colleague on a six-month temporary contract, who was always buttering her up in the hope it would be made permanent, because Alícia was administrative head of the department where they worked. Abril was hooked on alternative therapies and always singing the praises of the centre for meditation that Dr Bou ran in Sarrià and all things you could learn there. One afternoon, they both went there after finishing at the office. It was a turning point in Alícia's life.

Dr Bou inspected her chakras and solemnly stated, with the hint of a smile on his lips, that her second chakra, Svadhisthana, wasn't working harmoniously, and her seventh, the Sahasrara, was totally gummed up. As she hadn't a clue what chakras were, the doctor embarked on a long explanation of how these were the body's centres of energy, according to Vedic philosophy, and how, consequently, people's physical and mental well-being depended on them working properly. Yoga and meditation, Oriental disciplines that went back thousands of years, would help her re-establish the proper functioning of her chakras, or so he said. What's more, if she applied the principles of feng shui to the arrangement of her furniture at home, principles Abril had mentioned to her more than once, she'd corral positive energies and block out negative ones. They held short beginners' courses in the centre and the results were spectacular, the doctor assured her, dazzling her with his dentist's smile.

Alícia left the centre in a spin. Apart from being charming, Horaci was sensitive and handsome. Beneath long eyelashes, his dark myopic eyes radiated magnetic power saturated
with a mystical allure she found hypnotic and difficult to shake off. She immediately felt drawn to him and without a second thought signed up to the Zen Moments meditation centre and became a devoted pupil of Dr Horaci Bou.

Horaci was personally responsible for the meditation classes, and Alícia was quick to turn him into the second love of her life. An impossible love, like all great loves, because the doctor was married and, as he confessed to her one day, he remained faithful to his wife. As she was so in love with him, Alícia was always at a loss to know what to say, and, whenever she opened her mouth, she realized what a fool she must seem. Nevertheless, one day when she'd stocked up on red wine at the supermarket and on incense and candles at the ethnic products shop, she found the strength to invite him to her flat with a view to seduction. However, her plan was thwarted.

Dr Bou turned down her invitation in a highly intelligent manner. He apologized, saying that his marriage was going through a rocky patch and he wasn't sure he could survive the test of spending an evening alone with such an attractive, sensitive woman as her without falling in love. In truth, he sweetly snubbed Alícia with his flattery, but from that day on, as his words had half-opened the door of hope, she kept fantasizing about a mortal illness or timely accident that would remove his wife from the scene and turn her dream of becoming the second Mrs Bou into a reality.