Southern Seas by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

dressed as an English City gent. He took a lot of care over the way he dressed. Another time, he met her in Cape Town. I don’t know what he was dressed as, but I do know that he arrived on time.’
    ‘Didn’t they travel out together?’
    ‘No. That way, it was more romantic.’
    ‘Could she afford the trips?’
    ‘The Vilardells have as much money as the Stuart Pedrells, if not more. Lita got married very young to an ultra-rich merchant shipowner, and had two or three daughters by him. Then one day, her husband found her in bed with the Sabadell centre-forward. He took the daughters, and Lita took off for Cordoba with a flamenco guitarist. There was also a wild affair with a Marseilles gangster who marked her with a flick knife. When she gets drunk, she swears she’s even had it off with Giscard d’Estaing. But no one takes her seriously. She’s a pathological liar. The affair with Stuart Pedrell lasted for ages. It was a very stable relationship, almost as if Stuart had married for a second time. You men are disgusting: you always want to marry the women you sleep with. So that you can own them for life. Anyway, no point in my getting all worked up …’
    ‘What are people round here saying about his death?’
    ‘I’m a bit out of touch with that crowd, really. I hardly see them at all. Maybe a customer now and then. They say it was another case of womanizing. He’d started going off the deep end a bit. Age spares no man, particularly those who discover their flies at forty. My father’s generation was very different. In those days, they’d get married, and while they were doing up the family apartment, they’d set one up on the side for their wife’s hairdresser, or her manicurist. That’s what my father did for Paquita, my mother’s dressmaker. A really cute woman. Sometimes I go to see her in Pamplona. I managed to pull some strings and get her into an old people’s home. She’s had a bad stroke … As for Stuart Pedrell, he was a victim of Francoite puritanism, the same as Jordi Pujol.’
    ‘How was he getting on with Lita Vilardell before he disappeared?’
    ‘Normal enough. They’d have dinner together once a week,and both enrolled on a course about Tantra art. I know that, because we met there once.’
    ‘Has she observed a period of mourning?’
    ‘Who? Vilardell?’
    Teresa Marsé laughed so hard that the wicker chair groaned under her.
    ‘Sure. She probably set her coil at half-mast.’

 

    ‘The señorita is out at a music lesson, but she said that you should wait. She won’t be long.’
    The cleaning woman carried on hoovering the carpet. Carvalho walked to a balcony that looked out over Sarriá and beyond Vía Augusta, to the hazy landscape of a city drowning in a sea of carbon monoxide. Sub-tropical plants in glazed tile window boxes. A pair of beach chairs, with blue canvas and white-painted wooden frames. One was badly worn; the other was the exclusive domain of a dachshund bitch who lifted her head, to cast a wary glance at Carvalho, and then barked and jumped down, trailing her teats, and came over to sniff his trousers. She wrinkled her nose, unpleasantly surprised at the smell of another bitch. She started yapping at Carvalho. He tried to make friends, bringing to bear all his recently acquired authority as a dog owner. But the dog shot under its deck chair, from where it continued to express its radical incompatibility with the intruder.
    ‘She’s very spoilt,’ the cleaning woman shouted over the din of the vacuum cleaner. ‘But she doesn’t bite.’
    Carvalho stroked a banana palm that was obviously blighted by urban pollution—condemned to the fate of a botanical orangutan in the zoo of this classy penthouse suite. He leaned over thebalcony and looked down the smart Sarriá thoroughfare, where a few towers still survived in their garden settings.
    ‘The señorita!’ called the herald, and at that moment Adela Vilardell appeared before Carvalho, clutching