A Shortcut to Paradise (7 page)

“Quite,” I commented sarcastically.

“It was no joke.”

“I know,” I said even more sarcastically.

“In the end,” Borja went on, ignoring my grin, “I tried to excuse myself and scarper, but when I was in the lobby and about to exit, the place was suddenly awash with cops. I got cold feet and decided to hide in one of the rooms where we'd been wined and dined. That wasn't a good idea, because the police chose that exact place to use as a kind of operations centre, and it was soon packed with
mossos
.”

“My God, what a mess!…” The mere idea cracked me up.

“I didn't know what to do, but I'd already found a hiding place when I saw them come marching in…” he sighed. “I'd slipped under one of the tables there, not suspecting I'd be there until eight on Saturday morning. Luckily the tablecloths reached almost to the floor, which was spotlessly clean…” he added, attempting to smile.

“Pep, don't try to soft-soap me. I've told you more than once that this Borja saga would land you in it one of these days,” I rasped in his direction, upset rather than angry.

My brother's problem is that his name isn't Borja Masdéu Canals Sáez de Astorga, as he introduces himself and as it says on the elegant visiting cards he cheerfully hands out in Barcelona to his rich acquaintances, but Pep, or rather, Josep Martínez Estivill. It's not true either that he was born in Santander, as he often likes to claim grandiosely; in fact, he came into this world in the district of Gràcia, as I did; we are twins for a good reason. Obviously, nobody is aware of that little nugget, that we're twins as well as partners, absolutely nobody, not even my wife. By one of those strange quirks of nature, Borja and I don't look at all alike and that helps our subterfuge. Indeed, he's rather handsome, after our mother, and I turned out on the plain side.

“So how did you manage to leave without the police catching you?” I asked, intrigued. “Or did they?”

“No way! What with the racket made by guests coming down for breakfast, the waiters, journalists and police coming in and out, I was able to beat a discreet retreat!”

And he added, shrugging his shoulders, “What did you expect me to do? To risk the police revealing that I'm not Borja Masdéu in front of Mariona and all those people? If they found out I'm a common or garden Martínez, our business would be done for, Eduard. What would we do then?” he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows and snarling.

I swallowed. It's not that Trau Consultants – that is our company name – is the most prosperous business on the planet, but we can't complain. Being the trusted butler to the rich brings in more than you'd think. In my case, if we were forced to shut up shop for some reason I'd be hard put to find another line of work, and as for Borja… True, he has no family responsibilities, and between Merche, his rich girlfriend, Lola and that friend of his in the Barceloneta (who I'm positive deals in stolen goods), he'd no doubt get by. As for me, who's going to employ a forty-five-year-old ex-bank employee with no special talents? And in the improbable likelihood that I ever did find a job, how would we manage to survive at home on the minimum wage that is surely all I could aspire to with things as they are at the moment? Not that I've ever regretted the decision to leave my old position, but, unlike Borja, I find it difficult to keep cool and collected in moments of crisis.

“And what about this novel?” I asked, weighing it in my hand. “What are you intending to do with it? You haven't got sucked into the business of the murder of Marina Dolç…”

“Well, on that front… As I'd stood Mariona up in the middle of all that hassle, and as Mariona is a lady one cannot stand up… I naturally phoned her the following morning to apologize.”

“How thoughtful.”

“I logically needed a good excuse. So I told her…” – he paused, I expect in order to give me time to prepare psychologically for what I was about to hear – “that I had disappeared because the police had asked me to lend them a hand in the investigation. Unofficially, of course. As Mariona thinks you and I are proper detectives…”

I was speechless. While I was taking all this in, I was trying to imagine what the connection could be between the story my brother had spun Mariona in order to save face and the fact I was now holding the novel of a prize-winning, if murdered, author.

“In fact,” he added rather nervously, seeing that I wasn't reacting at all, “as I was hiding so long, amid so many
mossos
, I found out lots. Time of death, murder weapon, suspects, eyewitness statements… I doubt there is anyone better informed.”

“Borja, I still don't see what all that has to do with this novel,” I said, waiting for him to give me a good reason why I should be holding that stack of paper.

“It's quite simple. Through Mariona's mediation, Clàudia Agulló, who is Amadeu Cabestany's agent, as well as Mariona's, we've been contracted to prove her protégé is innocent. He's in the clink at the moment.”

“It's as clear as mud…”

As I'd still not read the newspapers, I hadn't the slightest idea who Amadeu Cabestany was or what Mariona Castany's literary agent's role was in all that mess. Nor could I see what the hell we were doing getting involved in what seemed to be a literary spat with a writer's corpse thrown in for good measure.

“Eduard, writers have literary agents” – Borja seemed unenthused about stating the obvious – “and Clàudia Agulló is the agent for the writer who was runner-up for the prize, this Amadeu Cabestany. According to Clàudia (who is really good-looking, by the way) he is one of these brilliant, misunderstood writers, who has surrendered himself to literature body and soul… All the same, the police believe he did in the Dolç woman out of resentment. And also because he'd had one too many. What's more, they were staying in adjacent rooms. What's more, Amadeu went up to his room a few minutes before she followed suit.”

“That could be pure coincidence…”

“A bunch of eyewitnesses, including yours truly, saw the sour-grapes look on his face when the winner's name was announced. Not to mention the little speech he then delivered!… He was scathing about Marina, and, while he was at it, about the members of the jury. They're not so pretty, and he shat on them.”

“People say these things when they're in a temper,” I reasoned.

“True, but some guests heard him tell Dolç she'd live to regret the prize, and that can be read as quite a threat, in the light of what then happened.”

“Yes, that
is
more damning,” I allowed.

“In short, the police arrested him on the spot, after concluding that everything pointed to him as the main murder suspect.”

“Yes, it certainly looks that way. And if he threatened her…”

“Yes, but Clàudia is convinced he is innocent. Obviously if Cabestany could back up his alibi, we'd be out of a job.” The prospect seemed to dampen his spirits slightly. “He says he left the hotel five minutes after leaving the bar. He also says he took a taxi and went to the Up & Down club, and was held up at gunpoint when he left. The porter at the Ritz doesn't remember seeing him leave, but at that time of night lots of people were going in and out… For the moment none of the taxi drivers have been tracked down, and no eyewitnesses have appeared from the disco. And no news of the mugger either, who took all his cash but nothing else. Not his ID, credit cards or watch. And, according to Cabestany, he even gave him money for a taxi.”

“That all sounds pretty implausible. Perhaps he is really guilty and made up the whole story. You did say he is a writer, didn't you? He can't be short of imagination…” I suggested.

“In any case, I have an envelope containing six thousand euros to encourage us to prove he is innocent. Courtesy of his agent.” He took the envelope from his pocket and showed it to me. “What do you reckon?”

I let him see I was thinking hard, for appearance's sake. It was true that the case of the Barça player with the unfaithful wife had turned out to be more profitable than we'd expected, but in any case once solved it only sorted out our lives for a month and a half at most. Given the present state of our finances, with the prospect of a summer in Barcelona dying from the heat and Arnau and the twins on our backs day in day out, I thought that six thousand euros were six thousand good reasons to take the case on. There are five mouths to feed at home, and although the Alternative Centre for Holistic Well-being that Montse has set up in Gràcia works quite well, that cash cow's yield falls short.

“Very well, back to the grindstone!” I exclaimed, all resigned, as I lit up another cigarette. “But is this Cabestany really that good? I've never heard of him…”

“I don't know, my boy, I hadn't either. But I think Agulló is smitten and as she's a friend of Mariona and not short of the readies either…”

“Perhaps it was robbery,” I suggested. “Have the police discounted that?”

“Yes, nothing was taken from the room. Jewels or money. Besides, there's the small matter of her skull being smashed open by the prize she'd just been given, a Subirachs statuette. And the murderer did a good job: her whole brain was in pieces. According to the police, it seemed…”

“That's enough!…” I cut him dead before the coffee and biscuits in my stomach decided to repeat on me. “You've still not told me what the hell this manuscript has to do with all this.”

“From what I heard when I was under that table at the Ritz, the members of the jury told the police Marina Dolç was murdered in exactly the same way as the protagonist of her novel and in the same circumstances. In other words, the first thing we should do is read it carefully, don't you think?”

“Fat chance of finding anything. I mean, that was probably only a coincidence.”

“Eduard, you know what I think on that front,” he retaliated solemnly. “That God doesn't play dice.”

8

We decided (or, more precisely, Borja decided) that I would devote a couple of days to reading
A Shortcut to Paradise
while he was busy negotiating something or other in the upper reaches of the city, which I think was related to a golf tournament in which Merche was competing. The novel was a five-hundred-page door-stopper I suggested we split between us. My idea didn't prosper.

“You were the one who studied Spanish literature,” he countered.

“Yes, but I didn't finish my degree and that was years ago!”

“You might even enjoy it.”

We now had real work, and rather than cleaning the office, I headed home, the manuscript under my arm, resigned to spending a good few hours of my life reading that unpublished novel. I usually like to read for a time in the evening, before going to sleep, and, unlike my brother, I don't only read thrillers. A novel normally lasts me at least a month – two if there are more than three hundred pages or if there are European Champions League matches – but now Borja wanted me to rattle through the novel and take notes into the bargain. According to the jury's unanimous verdict,
A Shortcut to Paradise
had deserved to win a prize that probably didn't have the prestige others enjoyed, but was certainly well-funded, and, as prize-winning novels automatically became best-sellers, I imagined it would at least be entertaining. I knew Montse liked Marina Dolç's novels and I thought I'd seen the odd one at home, although I must confess I'd never read any. My current bedside reading was a very entertaining book set in the Congo, which unfortunately would now have to wait.

Theoretically, Marina Dolç's latest novel might hold the key to finding out whoever had put its author out of circulation, though I thought it was extremely unlikely. Nonetheless my brother was right: a detective must be methodical and the novel might give us a lead. So I went home, knowing I'd have peace and quiet until six, when the kids got home from school. Montse was busy with her therapies at the Alternative Centre, and I knew she wouldn't be back for lunch. As the anti-smoking session is on Monday and there are always lots of relapses at the weekend, Montse spends the day bolstering her clients and battling with her own withdrawal symptoms. So I had a bite to eat while I leafed through the crime pages in the newspaper to put myself into the right frame of mind, and then picked up that pile of paper, ready to begin. I was curious but also felt somewhat respectful. It was the first time I'd read an original manuscript that very few people had previously read.

I'm no literary critic or expert, so I can't say whether
A Shortcut to Paradise
is or isn't a good novel. But the fact was that if Borja and I hadn't agreed to take on this case, I'd have put it back on the shelf at page thirty
and gone for a stroll. It got off to a good start with a murder on page three and looked promising, but as my children would say, the rest was rubbish, a real brainclogging hotchpotch of loves, betrayals and disillusion, to my mind without rhyme or reason. Perhaps it might be a very good novel, I can't deny that, but it was neverending . Whenever I took another sip of coffee to help digest what I was reading, I'd remember Voltaire and his daily intake of twenty-eight cups, in order to calm my spirits, and, as far as I know, he never had a heart attack. When I did finally reach the end, my whole body was shaking and I had a stinking headache.

“You read it?” my brother asked impatiently over the phone on Tuesday evening.

“Not yet.”

“You finished it?” he rasped on Wednesday.

“No, I haven't. It's rubbish!”

“Hurry up then.”

It took me three days to swallow it all, though I think it remained undigested. It was Thursday by now, and as Borja had to take Lola out that night, we agreed to have a drink at Harry's. When I arrived, he was already there and on the phone, to Lola, I supposed. They seemed to be arguing. I acted as if I was oblivious and took out the notebook where I'd jotted down my reflections as I sped through the book. Borja ended the call straight away and asked me to start off. He appeared to be genuinely intrigued.