Do Not Disturb (4 page)

The next time Jose raised his fist to his wife, Lucas didn’t just hit him. He beat him into bloody unconsciousness on the kitchen floor. Turning to his mother, flushed with triumph, he was horrified to find himself being screamed at.

“Lucas!” she yelled, tearing her hair, while his younger brothers looked on in awe. “What have you done? You could have killed him!”

“And why shouldn’t I kill him, Mama?” Lucas looked baffled. “After the way he treats you. The way he treats all of us.”

“He feeds us, Lucas,” said Ines, shaking her head. “He clothes us. He puts a roof over our heads.”

“Barely,” spat Lucas, pulling at the peeling paper on the wall in disgust.

“Who’s going to take care of us if your father can’t work?”

“He’s not my father,” said Lucas indignantly. He couldn’t believe that they were having this conversation. Didn’t his mother want to escape? Didn’t she want to be free of him? “And I can take care of us, Mama. I’ll get work in town, in the hotels. I won’t even drink away three-quarters of my wages. How’s that?”

“You don’t understand!” said Ines. Wetting a tea towel, she sank down to her knees and began mopping away the worst of the blood from Jose’s face. “You’re still a child. You don’t understand anything.”

She was right about that. He didn’t understand.

Within twenty minutes, he’d thrown his few paltry possessions into a bag and was on the point of storming out. Jose remained motionless on the floor, although occasional soft moans indicated he was still alive—sad fact though that was.

“Mama,” said Lucas, hesitating at the last moment. “Please. Come with me. Bring the boys. What do you have to stay for, for Christ’s sake?”

He felt betrayed, bewildered, hurt beyond belief by her behavior. But he still loved her, and his brothers. If there was any chance at all to rescue them…

“
Querido
,” she whispered. There were tears in her eyes. “I can’t.” It was the last time Lucas was to see her for four years.

The first twelve months were the worst. Lucas was used to poverty, but he wasn’t used to having to sleep on the beach or in
shop doorways. His first few jobs were all in the kitchens of cheap tourist cafés. The pay was third world, but the food was free, and a couple of the places even let him sleep on the floor behind the counter during the winter months.

The problem was that Lucas could never hold down a job for more than a few weeks. As soon as anyone crossed him—a temperamental cook, a demanding boss, or a dissatisfied customer—he flew completely off the handle, settling disputes the only way he knew how: with his fists. Having worked so hard for it, it came as a shock to him to discover that his physical strength did not automatically translate to power and control. That sometimes it could lead him into situations beyond his control—situations that harmed him.

At sixteen, waking up cold and aching from yet another long night on the beach surrounded by junkies and hobos, he decided that his days of drifting were over. He needed a steady job, one that provided meals and accommodation as well as a wage. By the end of that week he’d found one.

The kindest thing you could say about the Britannia Hotel in San Antonio was that it was a shit hole. Managed by a fat, ignorant sadist named Miguel Munoz, the place smelled constantly of disinfectant—it was that or vomit—and operated against a constant background white noise of electronic slot machines, arguing couples, and screaming children.

Lucas worked in the laundry room, which in some ways was a blessing, as it kept him away from the obnoxious British and American guests, whom he soon came to loathe with a passion. But the work was tough and often revolting, with sheets regularly covered in vomit or worse. It made Lucas seethe that these rich foreigners—rich by his standards, anyway—flocked to his beautiful island in droves, but when they got here, all they wanted to do was drink themselves into oblivion.

None of them made even the most cursory attempt to speak Spanish. They couldn’t even be bothered to sample the cuisine,
eschewing the delicious local tapas and fresh traditional dishes in favor of spaghetti Bolognese or the ubiquitous “chicken ’n’ chips.”

But his time at the Britannia wasn’t wasted. The hotel, like the rest of the dives in San Antonio, opened his eyes to a world of possibilities. If a fat slob like Miguel was making money hand over fist offering a service as atrocious as this—and he was, as he liked to remind his impoverished staff constantly—how much more money must there be in a decent, professionally run hotel?

Lucas had no intention of spending the rest of his life removing used condoms from other people’s filthy bedding. He was going to get out of Ibiza. And he was going to get rich in the hotel business.

The first thing he needed, he rapidly realized, was an education. School had never felt like much of a priority during his hand-to-mouth childhood, and the gaps in his basic learning were huge as a result. Undaunted, he enrolled himself in night school, and though he was often so tired after a day’s work that he fell asleep in class, he nevertheless managed to complete his high school diploma within a year.

“I don’t know what you’re so happy about,” Miguel had taunted him the day he heard his results. “What do you expect to do with that? Run Goldman Sachs?”

But for once, Lucas didn’t rise to the insult. Instead he quietly continued with his studies, focusing on the subjects that he knew would provide a passport to the better life he craved. To his own amazement and delight, he turned out to have a marked aptitude for languages. He’d already picked up a lot of English by osmosis from the tourists at the Britannia, and he rapidly added German, French, and Italian to his repertoire. Not since he first started weight training as a kid had he experienced such a sense of achievement in such a short space of time. Slowly, like an early spring flower struggling up through the frost toward the sunlight, his confidence began to grow.

And languages were not his only talent. At school he’d been so withdrawn and moody he’d barely noticed the lingering looks he got from girls in his class. But by seventeen he was well aware of the effect he had on the opposite sex, and the power it gave him.

Lucas’s attitude toward women was complicated. Having grown up watching his mother suffer, he felt protective toward most of the girls he slept with. His natural instinct was to like them. But his mother’s example had taught him other things too: namely that women were weak and not necessarily deserving of respect. These two conflicting beliefs, combined with his naturally awesome libido, made Lucas that rarest and yet, to many women, most desirable of males: a benevolent chauvinist pig, the sexual equivalent of a benign dictator.

Older women in particular found his combination of Latin good looks and macho sexual dynamism irresistible. Lucas made them feel beautiful, because that was truly how he saw them. But he refused to be controlled or tied down in any way.

Getting one of his wealthy, older lovers to fund his education was never something he consciously planned. And yet, when it happened, he felt quite happy to accept it as no more than his due.

As the months and years passed at the Britannia, his fantasy of one day owning his own hotel became more detailed and fully formed. His hotel would be the polar opposite of the Britannia: simple lines, an aura not just of luxury but of peace. In his mind he’d planned everything, right down to the linens and the table settings. It even had a name.

Luxe.

Not “The Luxe” or “Hotel Luxe.” Just the one word: four letters to symbolize Lucas’s vision. His little piece of heaven on earth.

He was describing the place to Carla Leon one Sunday afternoon five summers ago, after making love. The latest in his seemingly never-ending stream of Mrs. Robinsons, Lucas liked
Mrs. Leon because she was adventurous and funny, and because she seemed to know so much about the educated, wider world that he yearned to be a part of. “It sounds incredible, my darling,” she murmured, lying back against the mossy ground of the secluded woodland where he’d taken her. “But you mustn’t underestimate what you’re going to need to make it happen.”

“You’re talking about money?” said Lucas, sitting up and gazing moodily ahead of him. Why did everything always come down to that in the end?

“Not just money,” said Carla. “The hotel trade is highly competitive. You need an education.”

“I’m getting one,” said Lucas proudly. “I’ve told you that.”

Sitting up herself, gloriously naked, Carla leaned forward and began to stroke his bare back. Sometimes his strength frightened her. His muscles were so taut and bulging they looked like they might be about to erupt through his skin.

“It won’t be enough,” she said gently. “You need relevant qualifications. An MBA. The place you should really aim for is in Switzerland. The Ecole Hôtelière in Lausanne. EHL. That’s where all the top hoteliers train. Have you heard of it?”

“Of course,” said Lucas, who hadn’t but was too arrogant to admit it.

By the end of the week, he knew all there was to know about the school—courses, entry requirements, fees, foreign student visas. Carla was right. Lausanne was exactly where he needed to be. But getting there was going to be a daunting task.

The night she left with her husband for Madrid, Carla made Lucas a promise: “This time next year, if you’ve succeeded in passing all the international exams you need for entry, I’ll fund your application.”

He neither thanked her nor questioned her. He simply trusted in her word and set about studying like he never had before, slaving over his books and sleeping with a copy of the EHL prospectus under his pillow, like a holy text. When at last he earned his qualifications, with a month to spare before his year was up, he called her.

They hadn’t spoken since she’d left the previous summer. But Carla didn’t sound remotely surprised to hear from him.

“Send me the application form, Lucas darling,” she told him. “All you have to do is sign it. I’ll take care of the rest.”

And so she had.

Lucas adored Lausanne. His courses were hard work, but nothing compared to the hell of the Britannia, and his ambition and drive carried him through the four years like adrenaline spurring on a marathon runner.

Most of his classmates were from wealthy or, middle-class families, but to his surprise, Lucas found it easy to fit in. Social life at the EHL revolved around frat-house parties and weekend ski trips, both of which he took in his stride. And of course, it didn’t hurt that he was far and away the best-looking guy on campus.

“Are you sure you haven’t skied before?” Daniel, a buddy from his macroeconomics class, quizzed him suspiciously on their first trip to the mountains. “You sure don’t look like a beginner to me.”

They were in Murren, a tiny, car-free hamlet burrowed into a mountainside in the Jungfrau valley. Home of the famous Downhill Club in the 1920s, it remained popular with British skiers looking for natural Alpine beauty, but without the ritz and pretension of the big resorts like St. Moritz or Courchevel, and was also favored by the local Swiss. Lucas, who didn’t know such
storybook Hansel and Gretel villages still existed, was utterly charmed.

“What can I say?” He grinned. Having just completed a tricky black-diamond run, he was feeling more than a little pleased with himself. “I guess I’m a natural.”