The Angst-Ridden Executive Read Free Page A

big glass door, and as he looked out to check that the Valles countryside was still where it had been the night before, he noticed a car parked at the bottom of the garden stairs, and a man, waiting there, leaning against the bodywork.
    ‘Have you come with a chauffeur?’
    ‘I don’t even have a car, let alone a chauffeur. What I have in this world amounts to more or less nothing. A sweater or two. A girlfriend every now and then. One or two friends. And some languages. German, for example.’
    ‘What do you take me for—an employment agency?’
    ‘No. I’ve come to see you about a mutual friend—Antonio Jauma.’
    ‘He may be a friend of yours, but he’s certainly no friend of mine. I’ve never heard of Antonio Jauma, although I did know a Jauma once—a fellow student of mine. . . ended up as a teacher; a tall, skinny type, a Christian socialist. . . quite unforgettable. He wasn’t an Antonio, though.’
    ‘Antonio Jauma wasn’t tall. He wasn’t a teacher, either. He was a top executive in an international company. He wasn’t a Christian, and if he was progressive it was in a human rather than a political sense. It appears that Jauma had a high opinion of you. I’ll remind you when and where you met: in the United States, on a flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco.’
    ‘The executive!’
    The amused expression that appeared on Carvalho’s face prompted no particular reaction from his visitor. His repeated glances in the direction of an empty chair forced Carvalho to offer him a seat, and, once seated, the visitor slowly and deliberately lit a cigarette, took a deep breath, in order to get his narrative started, and gave Carvalho a detailed resume of his encounter with Jauma miles above the Mojave Desert. Carvalho began to wonder whether he was in the presence of some kind of oral novelist, a habitual monologist with a taste for performing to gatherings of Trappists, a cultured leftist fallen on hard times, and he sensed that the story was probably going to end with a coup de theatre, a carefully weighted punchline which would tie up the threads and give meaning to the whole.
    ‘So anyway. . .’
    A thick exhalation of smoke emerged from the visitor’s mouth and hung in the air like a grey sheet.
    ‘ . . . Antonio Jauma has been murdered.’ He had still not said his all, because his eyes had turned from mischievous to serious, and were searching for something—a suitable prop to enable him to complete his peroration.
    ‘Or at any rate he’s dead.’
    ‘I have to admit that I’d be more interested if he’s been murdered. The fact of his being dead is just a consequence. How did he die? When? Where?’
    ‘Shot through the heart from behind. A perfect shot. Then they dumped his body in a wood near Vich. According to forensic it hadn’t been there long-probably since about one in the morning.’
    ‘What are the police saying?’
    ‘That it was some pimp getting his own back. As you may know, Jauma was a bit of a womanizer, in the oldest and least pleasant sense of the term. As far as the police are concerned, it’s an open and shut case. While he was out on the town, either someone tried blackmailing him and he resisted, or he fell foul of one of the hard men. The body smelt of women’s perfume—of toilet water, in fact. . . a personal hygiene fragrance, if you know what I mean. Eau lustrale pour l’hygiene intime. What’s more, it was dressed normally, but with one exception. No underpants. Instead they found a pair of women’s knickers in his trouser pocket.’ ‘
    ‘All of which suggests a night on the tiles. Seems clear enough.’
    ‘I don’t think so. Neither does his widow.’
    ‘That’s to be expected. She wouldn’t be the first widow to refuse to believe that her husband led a double life.’
    ‘In Concha’s case you could be right. She’s a proper lady, from Valladolid, and she’s never taken Antonio’s sexual inclinations very seriously. However, I too don’t