The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (28 page)

“Where are you holding him?” Manchego shouted at the top of his voice. “Confess, damn it!”

Gaby, Berta, and Asunción opened their eyes as wide as dinner plates.

“Are you accusing us of kidnapping?” said Berta in disbelief.

“Of kidnapping, obstruction of justice, theft, capital flight, fraud, everything.”

It was Berta's turn to get angry.

“Well, if that's what you think of me, you worthless cop, I don't care if you know the whole truth, however much it hurts. You idiot, you stupid yokel!”

Marlow Craftsman thumped the table once more, daring to
interrupt what to all intents and purposes, and to his amazement, looked like a lovers' quarrel.

“Tell me once and for all where my son is!”

Berta sat down, defeated. She spoke slowly, in an English that was comprehensible even to Manchego. She punctuated her speech with gestures, sighs, tears, and tissues. She explained about the fake García Lorca poems, Atticus's stay with the Heredia family, Soleá's cousin's cave, the Spanish guitar. She said that Atticus had been free at all times—free to return to Madrid and close down the magazine, free to throw them all out on the street, free to go home to England—and if he hadn't done so yet, you'll have to ask him yourself, Mr. Craftsman, I can't guess what's keeping him in Granada, other than perhaps an unrequited love that's got him wandering around like a lost soul, begging on street corners. A cruel, pitiless, unrequited love, the kind that burns you on the inside, the kind that comes with disillusion, disappointment—the worst kind. And as she said the last bit she was looking at Manchego, in the hope that he would read between the lines and understand what she wanted to say to him, and would be capable of forgiving her.

But Manchego had been absent from the office for some time. Not physically—his big, ungainly body was still there, leaning against the wall, with one hand covering his eyes like a blindfold—but in spirit. His soul had escaped the physical being that housed it through some mystic crevice and was instead hovering over the scene. The inspector had a true out-of-body experience as he observed his own desolation from above. It was so embarrassing to watch: a couple of tears rolling down his cheeks, Berta begging his forgiveness, Craftsman speechless, Asunción about to faint for the second time, and Gaby fanning her as if her life depended on it.

Manchego's soul flew out through the open window. It looked down on the roofs of Madrid's historic center, the Royal Palace, the cupola of the Almuneda cathedral, and the Moorish gardens.

It was a gray, cold, sad day. He wished it was Saturday so he could spend all day curled up in bed.

CHAPTER 44

I
f there's one thing that luxury hotels and state-funded hospitals have in common, it's the possibility that people determined to get their jobs done, no matter what, might burst in when you least expect it: Checking blood pressure, temperature, or antibiotics, stocking the minibar, changing the bedclothes, or cleaning the bathroom are seemingly tasks that must be carried out regardless of the patient's need for rest or the guest's state of undress.

“Excuse me, madam, I've come to change the towels,” said a maid, standing in the middle of Moira's room, ignoring the fact that she was sprawled out on the bed with a cold compress on her forehead. “Or would you rather I came back later?”

“Who are you? What are you doing in my room? Where am I?” Moira replied in English.

She had woken up horribly disoriented after dreaming that her rosebushes, instead of tea roses, were flowering with red carnations.

“I think I'll come back later,” the maid decided, spinning around and fleeing. “It's just that you didn't put the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door . . .” At that moment, the phone rang.

“Mrs. Craftsman? It's the concierge. I wanted to check if everything is all right. If you're happy with your room.”

“Yes. It's fine. Thank you.”

Someone knocked on the door.

“Minibar service, shall I bring you some ice?”

“I don't want ice!”

“Your chauffeur is waiting for you.”

“My chauffeur?”

The maid came back in.

“Now that you're awake, I'd better change the towels, if that's all right, while my colleague brings the ice.”

“Laundry service,” said another voice. “I'll leave your clean shoes on the sofa. Have a nice day.”

“I have a message for you, Mrs. Craftsman,” she heard the concierge say before the receiver fell heavily and cut off the call.

“Get out of here, all of you!” she shouted, managing to make herself heard over the racket.

Moira took such an attack on her privacy as a sign from on high that she couldn't spend all day waiting for Marlow. Knowing him, he would probably come back empty-handed. Marlow had never been very pushy. On the contrary, he was an excessively careful man who had dared ask her to marry him only when she threatened to end their relationship if he didn't propose. She bought the ring, she organized the wedding, she brought the children up, and she, in consultation with her black planner, decided what her husband fancied doing at any given moment.

“Moira, dear, do I fancy going to watch the Wimbledon final on Sunday with Charles Bestman?” he might ask her, covering the mouthpiece of the phone in their Kent home.

“No, darling, you fancy staying here to have tea with your mother, who's coming down from London.”

“Thank you for the kind offer, Charles, but I don't fancy it this time.”

And that would be that.

•  •  •

It was time that she stepped in to investigate Atticus's mysterious disappearance herself, thought Moira, and with renewed strength she jumped up from the bed, got dressed in the first clothes she pulled out of the suitcase, which happened to be a tweed suit and a felt hat, and went out into the cold Madrid street. Just as the concierge had informed her, there was a uniformed chauffeur waiting for her outside the door.

“Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Craftsman,” said the chauffeur in perfect English. “Would you like me to take you to Calle Serrano, El Corte Inglés, the Museo del Prado, or anywhere else in particular?”

Moira consulted her black notebook. “Take me to number 5, Calle del Alamillo,” she replied, sounding very serious.

A few minutes later, having swapped Madrid's wide modern avenues for the narrow streets of its center, Moira's heart sank to the pit of her stomach. She couldn't believe that her son had had to survive among those old houses and narrow pavements. Calle del Alamillo was tiny, and the green-painted plywood door to number 5 felt to her like the entrance to hell, and the stench in the hallway—a kind of cooked fart and burned-on grease—was surely worse than the smell of brimstone.

She struggled up two flights of stairs and rang the bell of the right-hand flat without the least hope of anyone opening the door.
Her plan was to ring the bell a couple of times and then try her luck with the neighbors' flats, to ask after Atticus, try to get information about the people he knew, his habits, and anything that might shed light on where he could be.

To her surprise, the door to the left-hand flat immediately opened behind her.

“Can I help you?” asked an old woman wearing a sky-blue woolen dressing gown and slippers.

Seeing Moira's stunned expression, Señora Susana felt obliged to give some kind of explanation.

“I'm Señora Susana, the neighbor. I have a bell connected to that flat, you see. The police installed it for me after what happened a few weeks ago, I almost died of shock, some guy came in to burgle the flat and he pushed me down the stairs, dear Lord, I nearly didn't live to tell the tale. If you're looking for
Míster Crasman
, madam, then I have to inform you that unfortunately we haven't seen him for six months, we think he might've been kidnapped, it's awful, either that or he's dead, or something, because it's just so strange, there's been no sign of him, and he was such a nice, polite young man. He left his coat and everything. And here I am, wanting to rent the flat out again, but what happens? I tell people about the kidnapping and the theft, and no one dares stay.” Señora Susana paused for a moment and frowned. “You aren't here, by any chance, to ask about the flat? It really is a great little place, with all modern conveniences, clean as anything, furnished and tastefully decorated—”

“
No comprendo
,” replied Moira in her awful accent.

“You don't understand me?” replied Susana. “Come on, come in, we'll have a coffee and I'll explain it to you slowly, and then, if
you want, I'll unlock the flat and we can have a look. You're going to love it, I've got it done up so nicely.”

Susana pushed Moira Craftsman into her flat and made her sit down on the sofa in the living room. While she boiled water and heated milk, her cat rubbed itself against the terrified Englishwoman's leg. Moira had assumed that in Spain everyone would speak perfect English, perhaps slightly contaminated with an American accent from watching Hollywood films, but comprehensible nonetheless, and she had assumed that cultural differences wouldn't be a serious impediment to understanding the locals.

How wrong she was.

The old woman was still talking at the top of her voice from the kitchen, even louder now that she knew her guest was foreign, and Moira still couldn't understand a word.

A few minutes later she returned with the coffee on a little tray covered by a crocheted cloth and sat in front of Moira, not once stopping to draw breath.

“It's eight hundred square feet: a spacious bedroom, gas stove, bathroom, and living room with a color TV. The maintenance costs are low, each person takes their own rubbish out, because we haven't had a caretaker for years, since what happened with poor Angelines, who was eighty years old and as fresh as a daisy but social services took her to a home because they said she shouldn't be working at her age, and she lasted two weeks. We didn't even have time to go and see her at the home, to take her sweets or anything. She died of a broken heart, you know?”

Moira was trying to interject and ask if the woman knew where her son was, but every time she drew breath to say his name, her host had already started her next sentence. She seemed
to have the ability to talk without pausing for breath, inhaling and exhaling without breaking her flow.

At long last, after more than ten minutes of unintelligible speech, Señora Susana got up, took Moira by the arm as if they were old friends, and led her to see the flat that was up for rent.

Moira's eyes filled with tears when she saw where Atticus had spent his last days. The place smelled stale and damp, it was cold, and the shadow of the building opposite meant that hardly any light filtered in through the windows.

“Why are you crying? Are those tears of joy? I did tell you how lovely it was.”

Moira shook off the housewife and decided to explore that miserable residence on her own. The living room was clean and empty, the kitchen was abandoned, the bathroom was closed, and the bedroom was in semidarkness. She managed to heave the blind up.

“The lad only spent three nights here. He didn't have time to enjoy it,” Señora Susana was saying as she followed Moira around the house. “The police were the worst, they covered everything in white dust looking for fingerprints and went through all the drawers. But, as you can see, it's all spick-and-span again now.”

Moira opened the wardrobe. To her surprise, hanging there was the Burberry coat she had given Atticus the previous Christmas. She hurriedly unhooked it, grabbed it with both hands, and brought it up to her face. She buried her nose in it, breathed in its scent, kissed it, put it on over her tweed jacket, and wiped her tears on the sleeve.

“What are you doing?” Susana exclaimed. “Put that coat back where you found it at once, madam!”

Moira ignored the old woman's protests. She put her hands
in the pockets of the coat and pulled out a piece of paper folded twice, with a strange message written on it in pencil: “Arcángel Melones, Granada, 8 a.m.” This had to be a lead. She recognized the word “Granada” and was amazed that the police had searched the flat and forgotten to check the pockets. She got ready to hurry off and tell Marlow about her find—but she hadn't counted on Señora Susana's wrinkled little figure blocking her way as she tried to escape and her shrill voice alerting all her neighbors: “Get the thief! Get the thief!” After the first break-in, the residents of the building had prepared themselves—“They won't catch us off guard again!”—by installing an automatic lock on the main door and making sure there were buckets of water, tomatoes, and rotten eggs at the ready: They planned to hurl these from the stairs at any good-for-nothing delinquent who came in to ransack the place.