The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (11 page)

T
he taxi pulled up in the middle of Calle Mayor, bringing the traffic to a standstill. It deposited Atticus with the same lack of haste as an old lady crossing the street—and with utter indifference to other drivers' insults and honking horns.

As the crow flies, the building that housed the
Librarte
office wasn't too far from his hotel; it should have taken about fifteen minutes to get there. However, as soon as Atticus entered the narrow streets full of old-fashioned shops—with their awnings, wooden signs, and tired appearance—and saw the barbers' shops, secondhand bookshops, and the bars from whose ceilings pigs' trotters were hung up to dry like laundry, he felt as if he had fallen down a black hole and gone back fifty years.

He breathed in a heady combination of morning smells: fried food, cigarette smoke, ripe fruit, and the exhaust fumes of buses. He rather liked the mixture of Spanish aromas. Strange. He was hungry.

He rang the bell. The spy hole went from opaque to glassy. The door opened.

On the other side of the door was a middle-aged, plump,
smiling woman who hugged him as if he were a prodigal son returned to the fold.

“Come in, Mr. Craftsman, make yourself at home,” she said genially. “I'm Berta Quiñones. The girls and I have been waiting for you. Have you had breakfast?”

“I haven't, as it happens,” replied Atticus, somewhat surprised by such a reception.

“Fantastic!” shouted a second older lady, who was fatter than the first and even more cheery. “So you won't say no to a good cup of hot chocolate with
churros
and
ensaimadas
, am I right?”

Her name was Asunción. She told him that the buns were delicious, made with plenty of butter and filled with angel's hair jam. She showed him how to eat the
churros
properly, by rolling them in sugar and then dunking them in the hot chocolate several times before eating them.

“Go on, try it.”

The other three women were significantly younger. They surrounded him and observed him attentively while, still holding his briefcase, he ate the gloriously tasty, crispy
churro.

The prettiest of them, a tanned beauty with blue eyes, came slightly closer than propriety allowed. “You've got chocolate around your mouth,
Míster Crasman
,” she told him.

And she held out a white handkerchief that she removed from her own pocket.

On top of the photocopier, which was covered with a crocheted cloth, sat the rest of their breakfast. As well as the
ensaimadas
and
churros
, there were saint's bones, marzipan rolls, almond pastries, and aniseed doughnuts.

Atticus let the five women spoil him.

“If you're too hot, I can put the air-conditioning on,” said María.

After half an hour, he was so full he felt like the Big Bad Wolf with rocks in his belly, and everything Berta was saying was making his head spin. She had already brought him up to speed with the office and everyone who worked there.

“She's got three gorgeous children, she's single, she's fat because of her menopause not because she's ill, and I live near here with my cat. This one paints better than Picasso, that one writes better than the angels themselves. María is like a little ant: always saving, saving, saving. Gaby is cheerful as a lark, and Soleá . . . is the apple of my eye. An amazing girl, Mr. Craftsman, clever as a hare, sharp as a fox, the life and soul of this magazine.”

Berta seemed like a mother to all of them and the office felt like a family home.

“Do you smoke, Mr. Craftsman? It's illegal, you know, to smoke in the workplace, but given that you're the boss, I should think we can make an exception.”

“You can call me Atticus.” The Englishman had no option but to concede in the face of such a show of affection. “If it did please you, my ladies,” he added, because Atticus had a purely academic knowledge of Spanish. He tended to use expressions he had learned from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books like
La vida es sueño
,
Lazarillo de Tormes
, and
Don Quixote de la Mancha
, which were set texts at Oxford University.

They had prepared Berta's office as carefully as his Aunt Mildred, if she were still alive, would have prepared the guest bedroom of her house in Portsmouth. And like her, they had hung new net curtains in the window, placed a glass of ice-cold water in front of him, left a silver frame empty on his desk (“for you to put your favorite photo in”), and arranged a vase of wild lilacs.

Atticus thanked them wholeheartedly for their kind gestures.
Then, excusing himself with a charming smile, he shut himself in his new office, put his feet up on the desk, and fell fast asleep.

•  •  •

An hour later, on the other side of the door, the girls were unable to bear the worry of waiting any longer, so they turned off their computer screens and started talking in whispers.

“What do you think he's doing in there? I haven't heard a peep for ages.”

“He must be studying the case.”

“Don't you think it's weird that he hasn't asked us for documents, account books, or anything?”

“I reckon he'll call us in one by one in a bit.”

María was the most pessimistic of the five of them. She had made up her mind that nothing could be done, that no strategy would work. The man had come to fire them, and that was what he would do. Their fate was sealed.

Soleá, on the other hand, had complete faith in her plan. She was just as nervous as María, but her impatience had less to do with the probable outcome of their situation and more to do with her excitement at going into battle with the Englishman.

“I'm going in,” she said when it was twelve thirty. “I can't stand it a moment longer. All this waiting is killing me.”

“Go for it, Soleá, go get him!” said Gaby, egging her on.

Berta got up and walked over to Soleá. She grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “We're counting on you. On you, Soleá, no one else. It's up to you to sweet-talk him.”

“Don't worry, I'm not going to let you down,” she replied solemnly. “Anyway, he's not bad looking,” she admitted.

“He's hot,” said Asunción.

“He's scorching,” added María.

“Go get him!” said Gaby again.

Then Soleá knocked on the door. Twice.

They heard furniture scraping inside Berta's office. The silver frame slammed onto the desk. Atticus Craftsman cleared his throat.

“Come in,” he said.

And Soleá disappeared into the darkened room without looking back. Into the lair of that blond, handsome, green-eyed wolf.

CHAPTER 18

N
ever, for as long as he lived and even if the continents cast off from their moorings and formed a new Pangaea, would Atticus Craftsman forget Soleá Abad Heredia's entrance into his new office on Madrid's Calle Mayor.

That woman cut through his body and soul like a knife.

If he hadn't been so polite and British, he would have allowed himself to completely lose his cool instead of falteringly trying to conserve it, stumbling against furniture, knocking over the glass of water, stuttering, and limping. Howling with wolfish desire.

She was a witch, there was no doubt about that. In fact, they all were. Five witches in a coven, preparing concoctions and love potions in their copper cauldrons. How else to explain why he, a man of the world, educated at Oxford and with a mother as devoid of emotion as he was, felt such an animal reaction to a beauty like Soleá?

The girl had eyes like a cat's, as blue as the sea, as round as the full moon. And she waved her hands in circles, her fingers opening and closing like fans in front of the innocent victim of her enchantment.

Her hair was black, pitch-black. And it came down to her
waist, with a wave at some indefinable point between her neck and her middle. She smelled of orange blossom, and she moved with the grace of a fine thread in the breeze.

Soleá didn't let him get a word in. She planted both hands on the desk and, leaning forward, showed Atticus the curve of her round, firm breasts.

“You just stay there,
Míster Crasman
, and listen to this story I'm going to tell you. It's a family secret. Something that absolutely no one knows, but I swear it could change everything.”

And so Soleá began telling him about a dream she'd had.

“I wanted to write a novel based on this story . . .”

She told him that once, when she was a child, she had been shut in the attic as punishment for doing something naughty. There, she had started pulling away the moth-eaten sheets and brushing the dust off old furniture from her grandparents' house.

“I found a wooden chest and broke the lock to open it. Inside there was a military uniform, with a beret and everything, an old pistol, some ruined boots. It had belonged to my grandfather, my mother's father, who died in the civil war. At the bottom, tied with a red ribbon, I found a pile of papers: letters, documents, and poems. Mostly poems,
Míster Crasman.
”

“Was your grandfather a poet?”

“No,” replied Soleá, shaking her head. “That's the thing. My grandfather was a cattle trader, nothing to do with poetry. But,” she went on, “according to what my Granny Remedios says, out in the fields they often used to meet a skinny lad with a big round head who spent his days sitting on a rock and writing. They would share food and talk with him. The lad was called Federico and he was born in Fuente Vaqueros, that's what he told my grandfather.”

At this point, Soleá paused for dramatic emphasis.

“Are you telling me that your grandmother has unpublished García Lorca poems in her attic?”

“That's what I'd write my novel about,” said Soleá. “I remember reading one of the poems when I was a girl, and the refrain stuck with me: ‘
Luna de cascabelillos, luna gitana, bata de cola.
' ”

“Very García Lorca,” the Englishman admitted.

“The tricky thing would be convincing my grandmother to let us see them. When she found out I'd broken the lock on the chest, she went crazy. It was fifteen years ago, but my ears still hurt from how hard she pulled them that day,” she recalled. “She hid the chest somewhere else. I never knew where. And I haven't seen it again since.”

“But . . .” Atticus lifted his hands to his blond mop of curls. “By Jove, your grandmother could be rich!”

“She doesn't care about that,” Soleá pointed out, hammering her blue eyes into the center of his heart. “She'd rather die poor than live with the shame.”

“What shame?”

“What other shame could there be,
Míster Crasman
?” Soleá lowered her voice as if about to reveal a terrible secret. “García Lorca was gay.”

After such a revelation, Atticus Craftsman was left in no doubt that people from the south of Spain were so nuts they were off the map. If the poems Soleá was talking about really did exist, he was looking at a literary find of incredible proportions. He wouldn't say anything to his father for the moment, because if the great Marlow Craftsman found out that there was even a remote possibility of getting his hands on some unpublished García Lorca poems, he might well show up in Spain with his
team of lawyers, advisers, and shareholders, and turn Atticus's life upside down. What's more, it was highly likely that this story would turn out to be a farce, and that the pastoral scene with the goats and the poet were inventions and the papers were utter bull.

Soleá had suddenly fallen silent. She was looking at him with her bewitching eyes, waiting for him to make the next move. She looked like a Gypsy who tells people's fortunes and scatters rosemary in exchange for a few coins . . . You'll marry a rich man, you'll be cured of all your ills, you'll have an infinitely long life, as long as the lines on your palm.