A Shortcut to Paradise (3 page)

3

As she went up in the lift to her bedroom at the Ritz, Marina Dolç looked into the mirror and sighed. She was ageing. She was surely the only person who could see in that face, now the wrong side of fifty, the shy but determined little twenty-something hungry for new experiences and ready to take on the world she had once been. Though the image in the mirror became increasingly unpleasant by the day, she still believed she had a lifetime ahead of her, as if the now half-visible horizon of old age and death was a distant nightmare that didn't become either her or the array of projects still bubbling in her head. Marina usually tried to avoid thinking of such things, but mirrors didn't lie and the years passed relentlessly by, and even more so now. However reluctantly, she had to accept she was mature and menopausal, and that time was taking its toll. And tonight she was exhausted. It was what she most hated about the cruel process of growing old. Not the wrinkles, not the way the years slowly and implacably aged her body, but the exhaustion she'd suddenly feel that prevented her from reliving the razzamatazz twenties she still mentally inhabited. For some time she'd felt her body clock saying enough is enough and
she'd tamely become resigned to taking herself early to bed.

She stepped out of the lift and rummaged in her bag until she found the key to no. 507, her room. Whenever she came to Barcelona, Marina stayed at the Ritz and in this bedroom. It wasn't particularly spacious, but it looked out on the Gran Via and Marina liked to gaze at the city's thoroughfares and terraces from that vantage point. The bath and its large mosaic surround of pink and white tiles was inspired by designs from ancient Rome and the whole ostentatious decor verged on the baroque. The friezes and mouldings on the ceiling and walls were painted a tawny gold and matched the tapestry of gilded flowers on the wall, the counterpane and curtains. It wasn't the most expensive suite she could have afforded, but she preferred it for sentimental reasons. Room 507 was the first one she stayed in when she could allow herself the luxury of residing at the Ritz, and over the years that room had become familiar territory and part of her life-story. She liked the feeling of returning, of knowing she was surrounded by objects and furniture she already knew, like the two bronze naked athletes locked in a struggle in front of the fireplace who always made her smile. They reminded her of the
palazzo
she owned in Tuscany, where she felt so much at home. Marina Dolç had turned Italy into her second birthplace and had spent long periods there for years. As everyone remarked, friends and enemies alike, she was an eccentric, wealthy Catalan sybarite who'd chosen to live between the landscape of pines and holm oaks of her modernist house in the Vallès and the vines and olive trees around her Renaissance palace in Tuscany. The novelist hoarded within its walls paintings and sculptures of a value and beauty that sent a shiver down the spine.

She switched the light on and took her shoes off. It was a coolish fourteen degrees inside and she decided a hot shower was in order before going to bed. She was worn out, even though it was only a few minutes past two. She'd drunk and smoked far too much and was dying to unzip her tight-fitting silk dress and feel the warm water massaging her back .

She'd not even begun to undress when there was a knock at the door. She glanced at the clock and heaved a second deep sigh of resignation as she stifled her annoyance at that untimely visit. She struggled to squeeze her swollen feet back into her high-heeled sandals, tucked her belly in and walked over to the door, ready to put a pleasant face on it. It was not the moment to display a fit of bad temper, she told herself, repressing a yawn. Perhaps she'd left something in the bar, or her mobile was switched off and it was something urgent related to the prize. She'd find out soon enough. Her first interview was at ten, and if she didn't go to bed now, she'd wake up with bags under her eyes and a face out of sorts. She always stocked her suitcase with up-market lotions when travelling, but was well aware make-up and creams couldn't work miracles, whatever the advertisements claimed. Tonight prudence counselled Marina to get between those sheets as soon as she could.

She breezily opened the door and was amazed to discover who was knocking at that late hour. Nonetheless she invited her visitor in, the last person she'd been expecting to see, and found herself unable to suppress a smile. Perhaps the idea was to apologize or attempt to
ruin her big night. She'd soon know. Marina might be tired, but she felt strong enough to put on an affable, even accommodating front.

“Would you like a drink? I expect there's whisky?” she asked, stooping to inspect the little bottles in the minibar.

Those were her last words. A sharp stab of pain in the parietal area of her skull, total darkness she experienced for the briefest couple of moments, and it was all over. The other four, five or six blows didn't hurt. She had ceased to exist. Flecked with heavy, whitish brain matter, her dark, almost black blood began to seep onto the carpet, which absorbed it like blotting paper and framed her shattered head in a large purple halo. Within seconds, the rusty iron stench of blood began to meld with the other smells floating in the bedroom that had unexpectedly transmuted into a mortuary chamber. The chemical fragrance from the red roses her publishers had sent hours before. Her own expensive floral scent, a musk-based perfume. And the icy breath from the familiar face that had ended her life so unexpectedly.

She had been hit with the base of the heavy bronze statuette she'd only just received as the winner of the Sixth Edition of the Golden Apple Fiction Prize: a misshapen fruit with a bite taken out, clutched by a hand attached to a square of Thassos marble that served as a pedestal. A few strands of hair were stuck to the bloodstained edge.

The killer put the statuette down next to the body and, taking care not to step in the blood slowly spreading all around, fingered the writer's wrist, looking for her diamond-encrusted white-gold watch. The murderer moved the minute-hand twenty minutes on and picked up the statuette again and struck the watch-face, using enough force to break but not smash it, so as not to destroy the hands and the time they were recording. He then placed the statuette back beside the motionless body and bent over Marina Dolç. The writer was face down, eyes open, hair bloodied. She breathed no more.

The assassin spent a few seconds checking that everything was in order, walked towards the door, and left the room after making sure nobody was in the corridor; he silently closed the door, and took the lift to the bar in the basement under the entrance lobby. The killer entered the bar and mingled unobtrusively with the other guests while reclaiming a previously abandoned gin-and-tonic. Less than a quarter of an hour had passed, but the ice had melted. Heart beating normally and hands steady, the murderer asked the barman what the time was, and repeated his answer loudly, thanked him and ordered another gin-and-tonic. Everybody was chatting excitedly, louder than necessary, under the euphoric influence of alcohol. No one had noticed the absence of the killer, who had discreetly rejoined a little group that was now pontificating on the subject of the evils endemic to contemporary literature, and nobody noticed that the killer's eyes were decanting an icy cold that could have frozen the drinks the guests were still raising in toasts.

4

Amadeu Cabestany arrived at the Up & Down club at around half-past one. Bad-tempered and slightly tipsy, he'd left some time before the end of the big literary party being held at the Ritz, a traditional, luxury hotel on the right side of the Eixample in Barcelona that had changed owners and name and was now the Palace Hotel. But Amadeu Cabestany wasn't just irritated. He was also fed up. Everyone must have noticed the filthy mood he got into when he discovered he was runner-up for a prize that had been snatched from his grasp, as he'd put it. He felt humiliated, ridiculous and betrayed, and hadn't acted at all tactfully. However, nobody had batted an eyelid.

He stoically stood at the bar in the Ritz with the winner and the rest of those invited, until around one. Then he decided he'd had enough and it was time to leave. He bade goodbye, not entirely gracefully, to a few people, including Marina Dolç, and went up to his room, hovering between despondency and rage. He knew nobody would miss him, except perhaps his agent, Clàudia, with whom he occasionally shared a bed. However, that possibility was no consolation. Depressed and disappointed, Amadeu Cabestany simply felt like wallowing in self-pity, and who could deny he was a past master at that?

Back in his bedroom, he decided he hadn't the energy to talk to anyone, least of all his wife, and switched his mobile off. He also realized he'd never get to sleep, however hard he tried. And not because the din from the party reached his room in that five-star hotel, which it didn't, but because down in the bar a select band of literati who hadn't the slightest literary taste were euphorically celebrating with Marina Dolç the prize that had just been snatched from him. To rub salt into his wounds, Amadeu remembered that the undeserving winner was lodged in the room next to his, an absurd coincidence that meant his mood, stoked by envy and whisky, turned even darker.

He'd still not taken his jacket off when he had a sudden change of mind. Rather than trying to sleep or drink himself silly on the contents of the minibar, he decided to go out. The receptionist was the only person left in the lobby, but he could hear the racket the party-goers were creating in the bar downstairs. Unconsciously he scowled contemptuously in their direction, though nobody noticed, and muttered “bastards” under his breath, though nobody heard him. He thrust his hands into his pockets and strode out of the hotel, determined to salvage a scrap of pride, confront that fresh defeat and seek out a bar where he could lick his wounds in style with a proper dose of alcohol.

As he lived in Vic and was unfamiliar with the nightlife in Barcelona of more recent years, he'd no idea where to go. After meandering in the vicinity of the hotel, he decided to take a taxi and ask the driver to drop him somewhere peaceful where he could have a quiet drink.
The driver hesitated at first, but when he realized that the customer in the back seat wasn't from Barcelona and was elegantly dressed if slightly plastered and didn't look the type to go to strip clubs, he opted to take him to the Up & Down club via the longest route he could think of: along Gran Via to Plaça Tetuan, and then up and down the Passeig de Sant Joan to Diagonal before heading to Numància. It was almost one thirty when he dropped Amadeu outside one of the city's sassiest, most famous discos.

To tell the truth, both his age, on the cusp of thirty-seven, and his outfit would jar in that club, but the three doormen who were busy fending off the vulgar middle classes let him in without even making him pay. Perhaps the fact he was dressed all in black led them to think he was one of them, so they'd ignored him completely.

By now the place was in full swing, and most denizens were high on alcohol, hormones or pills. Amadeu sought out the area dedicated to smokers that was in the basement and jam-packed. He made his way gingerly to the bar through the crowd of youngsters and ordered a whisky. The average age was very early twenties and, unlike Amadeu, guys and girls were wearing jeans. Most of the guys had sleek, combed-back hair, immaculately ironed shirts tucked into their trousers and white or seablue jerseys buttoned to the neck. Others, the slightly more daring kind, sported two-day-old stubble and lurid sweatshirts. As for the girls, those brazen hussies wore torn jeans and high-heeled sandals and were baring breast. Nearly all flaunted fake tans and long hair dyed blonde.

That crowd, Amadeu quickly concluded, belonged to a generation and social class that were not his own. It struck him yet again that nobody recognized him or took the least interest in him, though that was hardly headline news. Amadeu Cabestany had the peculiar virtue of passing unnoticed wherever he went and his regrettable anonymity was only too familiar. However, possibly because his liver was working overtime that night while his neurons aimlessly sloshed in a sea of disappointment, Amadeu couldn't but wonder – surely relishing this self-inflicted torture – how on earth none of these young people had read a single one of his books or recognized his face. He had participated to no avail in three or four cultural programmes on Catalan television, and often wrote literary reviews in local newspapers and magazines. Amadeu had never understood why, but since his days at primary school he'd possessed that curious ability to pass unnoticed. On this occasion, his little black outfit made him almost invisible in the din and the darkness.

And that was despite the fact Amadeu had changed his style – his hairdresser and wife called it his “look” – a number of times in the hope he might gain more charisma. At the beginning of his career he'd let his hair grow long and tied it in a ponytail. Particularly when he was into poetry. Later, in his experimental novelist phase, he opted for a crew-cut and a little earring, but that risqué option only lasted till the night a complete stranger tried to stroke his bum, while whispering that his earring was a badge of gayness and that he shouldn't take it amiss if some hunk of muscle made rude suggestions in his ear-hole. Amadeu ditched his earring the next morning, and decided to let his hair grow again in attempt to reassert his own masculinity. Unfortunately, he now discovered he had bald patches and was forced to drop the idea.

Resigned to the indifference of his contemporaries in general and those enjoying themselves in that disco in particular, Amadeu Cabestany gulped down a second whisky and smoked half a packet of Camel Lights, realizing that, as his psychoanalyst would remind him in the emergency session he'd book as soon as he was back in Vic, his negative outlook and pose as a writer
manqué
only deepened a depression that he'd diagnosed as chronic years ago. Amadeu stood and observed the strutting, canoodling or gyrating couples around him and concluded that disco wasn't for him, but, rather than simply walking out (which is what his psychoanalyst would have advised), he vigorously ordered a third whisky, dead set on getting drunk. The strobe lights and thunderous din helped to numb him, which was what he was craving, although the music was hardly what he was used to and sounded dreadful. When a rumba blared out, boisterously sung by Rosario, the daughter of Lola Flores, Amadeu Cabestany tried to hear in his head the aria ‘
Sola, perduta, abandonata
' from
Manon Lescaut
, one of his favourites from his teenage years. Amadeu had always thought that Abbé Prévost's hapless character and himself had lots in common, although he couldn't pinpoint what exactly. In any case, he had to deal with this fresh failure in the great metropolis and right then whisky seemed the best antidote.