Barcelona 03 - The Sound of One Hand Killing (28 page)

Borja went over to the novelist, pecked her twice on the cheeks and did the introductions. Joana, Montse and Lola also kissed her and said they'd been so much looking forward to meeting her.

“He's the guy who's always on TV!” said Borja smiling, nodding towards that ghastly fellow who kept endlessly signing copies and letting his fans snap him on their mobiles. “People like to have books by the famous, but they don't read them.”

“Oh, don't suffer on my behalf,” said Teresa Solana, returning Borja's smile. “Sant Jordi is the day of the book, not the day of literature. No need to wear sackcloth and ashes!”

“But aren't you annoyed when the people who are not real writers get all the attention?” I asked. “It's encroaching on your professional territory.”

“It's inevitable,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Luckily this isn't a profession where you need a membership card – or at least not yet. It has its drawbacks, but lots of advantages as well.”

“Yes, but people are made to think the real writers are those that sell the most.”

“No way! People aren't that stupid!” she replied.

Teresa Solana seemed resigned to sitting there doing nothing and being observed as if she was an animal in the zoo. Very occasionally someone approached her with a copy of a novel of hers and asked for a signature. Once again, I observed that there were no half measures on the day of Sant Jordi: writers behind the stalls either signed a pile of books or signed next to none.

Montse and Lola felt sorry for her and both bought a book. Montse's was called
A Not So Perfect Crime
and Lola chose
A Shortcut to Paradise
, in the hope that the title was a good omen. Lola asked her to dedicate the book to Borja and then gave it to him.

“I can't wait to hear how it all went,” said Teresa Solana, referring to the assignment she'd given us. “I hope you've got some interesting anecdotes I can use in my novel…”

“Oh, lots! I think you'll have no reason to complain,” said Borja, smiling. “Why don't you drop by the office on Wednesday and we will give you a full report. I am sure you won't be disappointed.”

“When the book comes out, I'll send you a couple of copies. I've already got my title:
The Sound of One Hand Killing
. And thanks again for your help. I don't know what I'd have done to finish it on time without your help!”

Just then, some women friends came over to say hello to the novelist and we took our leave. We walked down in the direction of La Rambla, prepared to continue our pilgrimage as far as the statue of Christopher Columbus. However, when we saw crowds surpassing our worst expectations, we decided to turn tail and head straight to the Set Portes for our paella.

“This afternoon we'll go and see Pilar Rahola, and I'll ask her to sign her last book for me,” said Joana, as we strolled down Via Laietana. And then she added: “Now
she
is what I call a famous writer!”

I winced at her awe before the raucous star of Catalan chat shows.

EPILOGUE

When the thunderclap resounded, Lord Winston Ashtray, weighing in at over two hundred and forty pounds, was comfortably seated by the side of the splendid fireplace that heated the library in his mansion on the Lifestyle Ends estate, in the county of Oxfordshire. Lord Ashtray was smoking one of his cigars and reading the memoirs of the first Lord Ashtray, who made his fortune in India and suffered the Sepoy Mutiny in his own flesh, in the shape of the loss of a limb, before returning to England and receiving from the hands of Queen Victoria the title that allowed his descendants to warm a seat in the House of Lords for the next one hundred and fifty years. A large slice of the wealth of Lord Ashtray's extensive family originated from that stout, moustachioed forebear, whose portrait dominated the library, and the fifth lord considered it his duty not to depart this world before he had finished the seven volumes of memoirs the first Lord Ashtray had bequeathed to posterity in general and his heirs in particular. Sadly, the first Lord Ashtray wasn't as deft with the pen as he was with the sabre or his investments, and his great-great-grandson had sat in the same wing armchair every afternoon for almost five decades and still hadn't reached the end of volume one.

Three months ago the present Lord Ashtray had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday. He was no spring chicken
any more. If he didn't get a move on, he pondered, the Grim Reaper would take him before he'd had time to finish the diaries. As the fifth lord, in his idiosyncratic way, was a God-fearing man, he was afraid that if he met his Maker before he got to the end, his lack of respect for the man responsible for his good fortune would sentence him to spend eternity meandering around Lifestyle Ends like a soul in limbo with the literary ghost of his one-armed great-great-grandfather as his sole companion. This thought pinned him to that armchair in the library every afternoon in the vain hope that, with each new paragraph, the stale prose of the first Lord Ashtray might come to life.

When he heard the thunderclap, Lord Ashtray sighed, looked out of the window and tried to concentrate on his reading, between yawns. How could it be, he wondered, that his forebear who had lived in the glorious era of Queen Victoria, at the height of the British Empire, on which the sun had never set, never had anything interesting to relate? Why the devil should he be interested in the dresses Lady Stouter wore at the official receptions held by the Resident in Delhi or the opinions of Count Dumbderly on the hazards of playing cricket during the monsoon season? Why should he have to dwell on Lady Reeker's bunions or Lord Pile's problems with the spicy local cuisine, problems that derived from his rash abuse of the same because he enjoyed it the hotter the better? Lord Ashtray glanced at the time on the grandfather clock that was buried under two centuries of accumulated dust, stared at the empty glass of cognac next to the Venetian-glass ashtray that contained the ash from his cigar and sighed yet again.

Just like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, the fifth Lord Ashtray had inherited
the first lord's fondness for banquets, a propensity to develop gout, and the habit of ignoring his doctor's advice. So much so that when his faithful butler, George, entered the library, Lord Ashtray had just poured himself a second cognac that was so generous poor George had to strive to stop raising an eyebrow in an imperceptible sign of disapproval. Even though it was almost the merry month of May, the English countryside was still cold, and Lord Ashtray, like almost all of his forebears, preferred to have recourse to cognac for a little heat rather than to those simply dreadful jerseys that winter after winter his wife knitted him from the wool of the sheep that grazed in his meadows.

“Milord, your secretary has arrived. He's just parking the car,” his butler announced, rescuing him from his flow of thoughts.

“Thank you, George. Tell him to report here immediately.”

Lord Ashtray put the book down on the small table, sipped his cognac and smiled. The big moment had come at last. Thirty-five years after his father had lost it in a poker game, the Baghdad Lioness would be back with the family. The fourth Lord Ashtray, now deceased, had always cursed and sworn he'd lost the Lioness because Lord Marlowe had cheated, whereas Lord Marlowe, for his part, had been telling anyone who wanted to listen for the past thirty years that the night when Lord Ashtray lost the Lioness he was so drunk he'd have bet anything in order to carry on gambling. In fact, the fourth Lord Ashtray had gone so far as to stake his wife, but as Lady Ashtray's beauty was wholly internal and not even the gamekeeper wanted a piece, Lord Marlowe had refused to accept her and had challenged Lord Ashtray by saying he hadn't the spunk to bet the Baghdad Lioness. Lord Ashtray wasn't short of spunk after the pints he'd sunk; what he didn't have, however, was an ounce of nous.

The lioness with the rippling muscles was a unique item, and when the first Lord Ashtray had purchased it from a tinker for a few shillings it was already missing its hind legs. When he returned to England, the small statue had continued to gather dust in the attics of Lifestyle Ends for years, relegated to the bottom of the trunk where the first Lord Ashtray kept his military kit and souvenirs from his time in Iraq. The first Lord Ashtray only discovered the real value of the sculpture many years later, when a young archaeologist from the British Museum was naive enough to tell him it was unique rather than offer to buy it from him for the few pounds he would readily have accepted. The archaeologist's
naïveté
and the first Lord Ashtray's greed prevented the British Museum from exhibiting that wonder in its display cases, and from that day onwards the statue became part of the collection of oriental junk – as the first Lady Ashtray called it – initiated by the first lord and continued by his descendants.

Mr Charles Slothman, Lord Ashtray's secretary, knocked timidly on the door and walked into the library. He had only been in his service for eight months, after the sudden death of his predecessor in circumstances that, given his age and fondness for a little S&M, weren't as strange as some tried to make out. Charles was still scared of putting a foot wrong.

“Come over here, Slothman. Don't stand there like an Aunt Sally!” roared Lord Ashtray from his armchair. “You've got the package, I trust?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Slothman, coming over and placing a poorly gift-wrapped package next to the ashtray and balloon of brandy.

“No mishaps?”

“None whatsoever, sir. All concluded most satisfactorily.”

“Thank you, Slothman. Go and ask them to make you a cup of tea in the kitchen. Oh, and do tell George I don't want anyone bothering me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lord Ashtray's private secretary silently left the library, his cheeks flushing a deep red. Fancy sending him off to the kitchen like the errand boy! He was a man with two degrees, a doctorate and a master's from Cambridge! And all because his brilliant future had been suddenly curtailed by a clutch of unfortunate incidents sparked by his students at Eton, who'd continuously teased him with their adolescent bodies and bulging Calvin Klein crotches. His devastating dismissal had forced him to enter the service of an ignorant, despotic millionaire who took advantage of that shameful stain on his CV to treat him like soiled linen, but one day his luck would change. The downcast Mr Slothman sloped off to the kitchen, swearing that one day he would wreak revenge on Lord Ashtray for the humiliations he had inflicted on him from his lofty position as a fat, self-satisfied aristocrat.

In the meantime, Lord Ashtray had picked up the package and started to unwrap it. As he trusted no one (especially after he'd discovered his own sister had walked through the countryside emulating Lady Godiva in protest against fox-hunting), Lord Ashtray had personally organized the theft. The fifth Lord Ashtray considered the recovery of the Baghdad Lioness a matter of honour, and, as Lord Marlowe wasn't prepared to relinquish it, not even for a sum that had been calculated it would fetch at a Sotheby's auction, Lord Ashtray had decided to take action and hire an experienced gang of crooks to steal the statue. That gambit had cost him the earth, but money was no problem for the lord. Unlike other tawdry, blue-blooded aristocrats with empty coffers who'd been forced to marry
off their daughters to foreign magnates or open their mansions to the public in exchange for paltry tax relief, Lord Ashtray was proud that he didn't have to sell off his title or change his Lifestyle Ends estate into a Victorian theme park for Japanese and superannuated tourists. As long as he lived, foreigners or middle-class snobs wouldn't be poking their noses into his house and photographing it with their digital cameras. And if Lord Ashtray had one thing, apart from two useless sons and the gout that also gave him pain day in, day out, it was money. And if one had money, they had taught him at the select boarding school where he had studied, there was nothing in this world one could not do.

Twenty years ago Lord Marlowe, who was now in his nineties, had moved to Provence in search of bluer skies, less primitive cooking and, above all, proximity to the casino in Monte Carlo. Lord Marlowe had left his wife in England and brought with him his butler, his collection of pornographic magazines and his antiques. The Baghdad Lioness was, needless to say, the apple of his eye, not for its monetary or archaeological value, which he didn't care a fig about, but for what it symbolized: his victory over his eternal rival.

As neighbours, the respective families of Lord Ashtray and Lord Marlowe had been enemies for more than a century, despite the fact that at this point in history neither of the two lineages could recall what had sparked the original quarrel. The house Lord Marlowe owned near Arles was a fortress, but the eight million euros Lord Ashtray had offered a band of crooks to get him the Lioness meant the brains of that gang of thieves had worked overtime until they'd thought of a way to steal the statue without killing anyone, let alone Lord
Marlowe, a requisite Lord Ashtray had laid down as non-negotiable, because he wanted to see the foolish look on his old neighbour's face when he realized his sculpture had been stolen. In the event, Lord Marlowe's ancient butler, James, took two days to realize that the Lioness had fled its case, since he always refused to have an operation on his cataracts and was as blind as a bat. By the time the police came to the Marlowe estate, the statue was already out of the country.

The plan was perfect and its execution superb. The mercenaries stole the statue and gave it to the man who spoke French, though one thief thought he might be Spanish. The man, who'd been recommended to Lord Ashtray by a Dutch antiquarian fond of high jinks, transported it to Barcelona in an Audi driven by a woman. In Barcelona the man was to hold on to the antique until things calmed down and Lord Ashtray's secretary contacted him.