When I came round, my first thought was that it had all been a nightmare and I still hadn’t woken up. However, that fantasy only lasted a few seconds, because the stabbing pain I felt in my arms and wrists, and the panic attack that overwhelmed me the moment I realized my mouth had been gagged, brought it all back to me: I had been taken prisoner by total strangers and, even worse, they spoke languages I didn’t understand, so I couldn’t communicate with them. The scared look on Borja’s face gradually came back to me, as did the punches, his bloody nose and the way he’d been dragged out of the room by men who’d forced him to go back to Barcelona to get that damned statue. I also recalled we were a long way from home, in China, a country where I wouldn’t be missed if I disappeared, because, apart from Borja and our kidnappers, nobody knew I was there.
I could still see the Great Wall through the window and the tears clouding my vision, and it was a chilling reminder that nobody would come to my rescue in such a far-flung spot. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my whole life, and I felt completely numb. I was incapable of thought: all I wanted was to return home and for none of this ever to have happened. Why the hell couldn’t my brother be a normal person with a normal job, as they said in that beer advert? Why did he have to be a Walter Mitty and get involved in these kinds of mess, rather than being happy to contemplate the lives of the wealthy in glossy magazines and on the TV, like the rest of us mortals?
I found it hard to breathe with that gag over my mouth, and my heart was racing. I realized that putting the blame on Borja wasn’t going to help me out of that situation and that I should calm down. I tried to slow my rhythm of breathing for a few minutes by taking deep breaths in and out of my nose; almost imperceptibly, my heart started to beat at a more reasonable rate and I gradually calmed down. My situation was too serious to risk a fatal heart attack.
I took one last deep breath and glanced around me. I concluded I hadn’t been unconscious for very long after they’d taken Borja off: the light coming through the window, an afternoon light that was gently, monotonously turning into dusk, hadn’t really changed. Although I was sitting down, the stance I had been forced to adopt was excruciating, because my arms were tied behind me to the back of the chair and the rough string knotted around my wrists cut into my skin; I could move my feet, which weren’t tied at all, but had pins and needles in my hands and that indicated they were about to lose all feeling because of the lack of any blood flow. What’s more I was very thirsty, and I suddenly realized I’d not eaten or drunk anything for hours. Not that I was hungry… After the long journey I’d been forced to make, my brain had ignored my stomach and concentrated on keeping me alive. Nonetheless, it was so hot in that room that I now felt alarmed when I realized that, if my kidnappers didn’t soon give me water, I would start to dehydrate and hallucinate. I tried to shout to attract their attention, but saw straight away it was very unlikely that my gagged cries would penetrate the stone walls imprisoning me. I listened hard: I could hear nothing on the other side.
In my situation, all I could do was think. At best, I worked out it must take ten to twelve hours to fly from Barcelona to China, and that meant Borja would require more than a day for the round trip, assuming he was travelling by private jet and didn’t have refuelling stops or air-company timetables to worry about. That was a massive number of hours to be stuck in a chair, and the prospect of waiting all that time before Borja appeared with the statue and those men set me free numbed my brain once again. I had no other options. To cap it all, the guys who’d kidnapped us didn’t look like the kind who had scruples. How could we be sure that once they’d got their clutches on the statue, they wouldn’t shoot us in the head and bury our bodies in no-man’s-land?
At the same time, I couldn’t work out why the hell they’d taken us to China if the statue they wanted was hidden in Borja’s flat? It was obvious they were keeping me prisoner as a kind of guarantee that my brother wouldn’t simply make his escape, but I couldn’t for the life of me see the sense in forcing us to make such a long journey that, in Borja’s case, had to be endured three times. Perhaps they thought the statue wasn’t in Barcelona and that he’d hidden it in that corner of the planet, but that didn’t make any sense either, because, as I well knew, my brother had never set foot in China. It was true he had worked on a merchant-navy vessel at some stage in the twenty years he worked abroad and had thus seen the world, but that was years ago, when Borja was still called Pep and didn’t have the contacts he now had. No, it was complete madness. There had to be a simple explanation.
Sitting opposite the motionless landscape framed by that window, I gradually began to lose all notion of time. I suddenly realized I didn’t know what time or day it was, and the monotonous light coming through the window was no clue at all. Perhaps sunset took longer in China than in Barcelona, and afternoons were longer, I pondered, or perhaps only a few minutes had passed since I’d come round from my fainting fit, a few minutes I felt had been never-ending. From childhood, I’d always thought that time passed very slowly in China, a name that still evoked for me the era of the mandarins and great emperors, and that had all belonged to the two thousand years of their feudal period. I am sure my perceptions were shaped by the cliché-ridden films made in the West that I had watched from childhood, but nevertheless the word “China” immediately brought to mind images of ferocious warriors on horseback, women with bandaged feet wearing exquisite silk kimonos, and Fu Manchu. I had to make an effort to remind myself that contemporary China, where we were now, had gone through a first revolution that ended the imperial era, and that the country was presently going through a second revolution, a slow, inexorable transition to rampant capitalism. On the other hand, China still had the death penalty. What if those men handed us over to the Chinese authorities once they’d got their statue back, and they decided to sentence us to death for trafficking a statue that was part of their national heritage?
The sound of approaching voices halted my ramblings. The door opened and in walked Borja, flanked by our kidnappers. He looked scared and came over to ask me how I was. I nodded to the effect that I was fine, perplexed but happy to see him back so quickly. He used words and gestures to ask our captors to remove the gag from my mouth, which they did.
“You all right?” he asked anxiously. His nose had stopped bleeding but looked very swollen.
“I’m fine,” I said soothingly. “What about you? What happened?”
“I’m all right too… Everything is fine, don’t you worry.”
“Amigo good,” interjected the kidnapper with a smattering of Spanish, grabbing Borja by the arm and pulling him away from me. “Now you give the cosa to him,” he added, pointing to the man who was presumably the boss.
Borja nodded and put his hand in his pocket. He carefully took the statue out and handed it to the man, who took it, looked at it in a state of shock, and finally shouted, “What the fuckeeng hell is that?”
He inspected the piece closely from every angle. Turned it round, upside down and weighed it in his hand. The expression on his face showed his mounting anger.
“You must be kiddeeng me? What the bloody sheet is that?” he bawled.
“What’s up with him? What’s he saying?” Borja asked.
“I don’t know. I think he was expecting something else,” I whispered.
“It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” asked Borja, looking disconcerted. “Nosotros go ahora. Marchar,” he added, pointing at the door.
In a rage, the man threw the statue to the other side of the room. Luckily, it fell on the bed and didn’t break. I was nonplussed, even more so by how Borja had managed to do the China–Barcelona round trip so quickly. Could I really have been unconscious for over twenty-four hours?
The man produced a pistol and put it to my head. Borja started shouting hysterically.
“No, no! Please, please! I brought you the estatua! You querer más?”
“You pulled a fast one, you bastardo! You friend muerto now!”
“Eduard, I don’t understand! I’ve… brought them the statue… I don’t understand what they want now…” he clamoured, bursting into tears.
“Fuckeeng bastardo! That’s the last straw!” he shouted, quite beside himself.
“But the statue is verdad! Not mentira!” Borja yelped again while the two men pinned him down. “Please! He not culpa! Please! What the fuck do you want?”
I felt the pistol’s cold barrel against my temple and started to shake. Borja flushed a bright red, and his eyes bulged out of their sockets as he struggled to get free of the men pinning his arms down. They were too strong for him and all his efforts were futile.
“Let me go, you shits!” cried Borja. “If you harm my brother I will kill you! Get that? I will kill you!”
“Si us plau, please…” I begged. “Tengo mujer e hijos… Wife. Children…” I added, trying to remember the words I knew in English.
“Bye, bye, amigo!” said the guy holding a pistol to my head.
“No!” shouted Borja.
The guy held the gun steady. His hand began to move and I knew he was about to shoot. I closed my eyes, realizing my pleas were to no avail, and suddenly Borja stopped shouting and the curses of my executioner faded, as if the world had suddenly hit the silent mode key. Images began to churn through my brain: the first time I held Arnau in my arms, the day the twins were born, the first kiss I gave Montse in that pumpkin-coloured 2CV, and Pep and me paddling on the beach with my father while my mother shouted and waved to us from under the sunshade to come and have lunch. My mother’s face was all smiles and freckles, an eternally young thirty-something because the car accident meant she and Father would never grow old. Turning points in my life.
I felt someone trying to free my hands and the sound returning. I opened my eyes. There were shouts and shots outside, and the man aiming his pistol at me had gone. Borja was the only person in the room and he was trying to cut the string tying my hands to the chair with a small, blunt knife.
“Are you all right, Eduard? Are you all right?” he repeated. By the time I managed to say “yes”, he added, “Almost there. We’ve got to scarper and fast!”
“What on earth has happened?”
“I don’t know. Some men ran into the warehouse, those guys left the room and started a right shindig!”
“Are those shots?”
“Yes, they are. We should beat it quick. Follow me! I know where there’s an exit!”
As soon as I got up from the chair, I felt my legs were still responding even though I’d been sitting in that same position for hours. I followed Borja and could see my prison was inside a big warehouse that was in complete darkness. There was a smell of gunpowder in the air.
“This way!” whispered Borja. “I know a place where we can get out of here!”
We saw two of our kidnappers lying in pools of blood on the ground, but didn’t stop to find out whether they were dead. I could still hear shouting and shooting. The hangar we’d entered was full of strange objects, the pitch black hindered our escape operation and it was easy to stumble over. We decided to crawl over the ground, to dodge the bullets and avoid being spotted, and we reached a corner where a small door was concealed behind some boxes. It wasn’t locked and Borja opened it. The sunlight was dazzling.
“What the hell!…” I exclaimed in astonishment.
The door led to a street that was very familiar. We weren’t in remote China, but in Poblenou, in the small area that had been refurbished for the Olympic Games and where old hangars and warehouses had survived.
“We’re in Barcelona!” I shouted, tears in my eyes and jumping for joy. “Pep. We’re in Barcelona! In Barcelona!”
“We’d better clear off,” he said, looking both ways and walking on. “There are two cop cars over there and I’m sure more are on their way.”
“We’re in Barcelona!” I whooped.
“Yes, lad, we’re in Barcelona. And we are still alive and kicking!” he added with a smile.