“OH DEAR,” SAID FRANKIE WHEN when she saw me late the next morning in the Plaça del Pi.
“Oh dear what?” I said good-naturedly. I had come ambling down the street, knife-proof leather briefcase containing the photos, my notebook and the adventures of La Grande dangling from my shoulder. I’d spent a productive few hours with María and Cristobel and was ready to revel in the warmth of the spring sunshine.
“I can never understand why some women want to look so… so masculine,” she said.
“I cut my hair, that’s all,” I said. “I don’t look masculine. I look like a middle-aged Irish-American Spanish translator with short hair.”
She pursed her bright red lips, produced a cough from deep inside and lit a Camel. This woman smoked too much.
She changed the subject. “Did you get the photos?”
I tossed the packets on the table. “From the description you gave me,” I said, “there’s no one who looks like Ben.”
“That remains to be seen,” she said. She looked through all the photos carefully, and there must have been at least a hundred. At the end I’d cheated a little and taken pictures of obvious tourists.
“I’m not sure I can take another day of photography,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that the expensive camera had been stolen from me yesterday.
“No, that won’t be necessary,” she said absent-mindedly.
She must have recognized someone. But who?
“What’s the next step?” I asked.
Frankie put the photographs back in their envelopes and then put everything into a plastic purse the size of a small chair. “I don’t think I’m going to need your services right now. I’d like to meet later, later this afternoon or early evening.”
“And I’m just supposed to wait around Barcelona for you to decide how to use me next? Forget it,” I said. “The deal was that I’d come to Barcelona and look for Ben for you and that I’d be paid whether or not I found him. Now you won’t even tell me if I’ve found him or not.”
“You’ll get your money tomorrow,” she said, and she didn’t seem upset at all. “I’ve just got to think through the best way to deal with him.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going shopping,” she said. “And I’d love the name of your hairdresser. Yesterday’s hairdresser,” she amended. “We can meet there at six o’clock.”
I followed her, of course. She wandered up the Ramblas and through the Plaça de Catalunya, crossed the Ronda Universitat and strolled leisurely up the Rambla de Catalunya, looking as if she had all the time in the world. She dawdled in front of shoe stores and pastry shops, she went into boutiques and came out with parcels. At València she turned right towards the Passeig de Gràcia where she went even more slowly. It was driving me crazy watching her sashay along in her pointed shoes, taking small steps and swaying her hips slightly, glancing at her reflection in the windows that she passed, jangling her plastic bracelets and tossing her curls. All the same I had to admire her; it must be fun to enjoy your physical presence so much. Did she know I was following her? She seemed to be making her way towards La Pedrera. I decided to get there before she arrived and so crossed the Passeig de Gràcia and walked quickly in the direction of Provença. Just as I reached La Pedrera I saw two kids, a muscular adolescent boy and what looked like his younger sister, come out of the building and head towards me. They weren’t alone; they were accompanied by April Schauer, foot therapist, in a cream-colored caftan with raspberry and peach silk scarves around her neck and long silver earrings. What a gorgeous woman! I glanced across the wide boulevard but Frankie seemed as lazily oblivious as before, pausing now in front of another shop.
I suppose I should have continued to follow her, but on the spur of the moment I decided to go after April instead. There was more than a coincidence here, I was sure of it.
Within a block April and the two kids vanished into a subway station. I raced after them and tailed them onto the green line. I thought it extremely unlikely that April would recognize me, but I kept my dark glasses on and my feet tucked securely under the seat.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off April, that gypsy with her braided leather bracelets and silver bells around her fat ankles. Were they her kids? The little girl was about six or seven, plain and unremarkable in a short dress and pigtails. The boy had a blond brush cut and was wearing a vest, jeans and Converse high-top sneakers. He was well developed for a youngster, his biceps visible under the rolled-up sleeves of his tee-shirt. He was probably about sixteen—but then I really looked at him and saw I’d made a serious mistake.
High Tops was very much a girl, in fact, a woman, in fact she looked suddenly very much like someone you’d see pitching at a softball game in San Francisco. Once I realized that, I couldn’t understand how I’d been mistaken. The woman had breasts, for christssakes, and a rhinestone stud in one ear, and small hands and feet. It was true she didn’t look like most of the women wandering around Barcelona, but she was still recognizably a woman.
I was still in shock when they got off at Lesseps and started off in the direction of Gaudí’s Parc Güell. April and High Tops were deep in some discussion and the little girl dragged her feet behind them.
After a twenty-minute walk we all arrived at the entrance to Parc Güell, where the blue-and-white-checked undulating tower with the double cross stood across from the porter’s lodge with its billowing crown of creamy tile and bright mosaics. I supposed that April and High Tops had been here before, perhaps many times, for they scarcely gave the two gingerbread houses a second glance, and immediately began to climb the staircase up to the plaza. But the little girl was charmed and delighted by it all. She stopped on the staircase to marvel at the fountain shaped like a big blue lizard and again to stare at the huge columns supporting the square.
It was a pretty wild place, the Parc Güell—a cross between a surreal Disneyland and a Max Ernst painting. Gaudí and his patron Güell had once had enormous visionary plans for this site. It was to have been a garden-city high on a hill overlooking Barcelona, with all sorts of amazing houses and vegetation. But the only houses that had been built were Gaudí’s and Güell’s, and the forest of pillars that held up the plaza, meant to be a porticoed marketplace, had never seen a vendor.
Up on the plaza, scalloped by a winding bench made from broken polychromed ceramics, the view was splendid and vast. The city shimmered in a haze of spring warmth and beyond it the azure Mediterranean promised voyages to distant countries. For a moment I was tempted to abandon this idiotic job and rush down to the offices of the Balearic lines and book a passage to Palma or Ibiza. Then I saw that April and High Tops had found a seat in one of the curves of the serpentine ceramic bench and were unpacking a picnic lunch. I sat down nearby and took out La Grande y su hija, opened it near the beginning and read:
It was the year that most of the population of my village vanished. The young people were the first to go, and at first no one thought it odd: from time immemorial boys had run off to join the circus or the army, girls had joined sweethearts or disappeared to hide the shame of pregnancy. So in the beginning no one paid any attention. But then Pablo Ruíz did not open up his toyshop one morning; and the following week the mayor did not appear in the town square to dedicate the new fountain (which had caused a great scandal when first proposed because of the suggestive draperies of the Botticelli-like Venus). The school eventually closed because first one and then another and finally the third teacher did not appear for class, and sick people grew sicker and often died because the doctor no longer came to his clinic. Babies went without food and lovers without caresses; those who lived for their hatreds found no one left to quarrel with.
Eventually the situation became so bad that those who remained in the village had nothing to eat and no one to eat it with. And those few remaining survivors of the mysterious disappearing plague packed up their possessions and fled.
At first the conversation I overheard was not particularly illuminating. It went something like this:
High Tops: Delilah, I’ve got a chicken sandwich and a cheese sandwich. Which would you like?
Delilah: I’m not hungry.
High Tops: Oh of course you are. It’s way past noon.
April: Children need to develop spontaneous eating habits. If they’re forced they—
Delilah: I want to go play!
High Tops: Oh all right. But then you have to come back and eat something.
[Pause, while Delilah runs off and joins Spanish children kicking a very small ball around.]
April: Don’t you find it hard to be a mother?
High Tops: Oh April, let’s not talk about that again. I love you so much, baby, I can’t stand the thought of not being with you.
April [sighing]: I love you too, sweetheart. But there are so many complications.
High Tops: Oh don’t worry about him.
April: It’s not that I’m worried, but—
High Tops: Honey, I’ve done everything I can and I’ll keep doing everything I can to be near you.
High Tops had forgotten all about Delilah and her lunch and was completely focused on April. Her squarish, rather plain face was illuminated by romantic yearning, and she stroked April’s shoulders and back as April polished off two sandwiches and an apple. In her cream caftan April looked like a Bedouin queen; I could see why High Tops was enamored. Yes, that I understood. But I didn’t understand any of the rest of it. Did these two and Delilah have any connection to Ben and Frankie? Was Ben the “him” not to be worried about?
In a desultory way I read the same paragraph of La Grande over and over:
My mother loved Eduardo with a passion like music, a full symphony that comes, after years of silence, to one in solitary confinement. Eduardo had been predicted long ago, while Cristobel was still married to Raoul, on a sultry day down by the river, when an old gypsy had taken her hand and said, “You will find great love, but never fulfillment.” Cristobel snatched her hand away. “It can’t be great love then.” The gypsy had gazed with enormous sympathy at Cristobel before entering the river and submerging herself in the transparent silver-green eddies. “How little you know about love,” she had said, before the river covered her and bore her along.
The afternoon was heating up and I was tired. I had missed my own lunch by now and hadn’t dared even stop for a mineral water at the bar for fear of losing them. I was becoming extremely cranky and planning how I would take it out on Frankie when I met her later. Then things began to get more interesting.
April and High Tops had stopped talking some time ago and were merely keeping half an eye on Delilah as they lolled in the sun. I’d gotten up for just a minute to walk and stretch myself and had immediately lost my seat to yet another tourist with a flight bag reading EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION. Now I was restlessly wandering out of hearing distance with Gloria de los Angeles’s bestseller under my arm. Suddenly I noticed that High Tops was barefoot and had her right foot in April’s lap. I wished it could have been me. Or perhaps not, because obviously the public practice of Reflexology was not usual in Spain, and April and High Tops soon began to excite a disquieted interest among the other visitors to the plaza. Well, it did look pretty erotic. April had her serpent eyes fastened on High Tops’ stubby white foot as if it were a morsel she was about to strike and swallow whole. High Tops had flung her shoulders back in a pose of great abandonment and was groaning in a manner not particularly suited to public places.
The situation was ripe for chastisement, and if the police had happened by, High Tops and April might have been forced to re-shoe and desist, but instead, a youngish man walked up casually to them and starting talking in English.
Medium height, regular-looking, wearing jeans. It was Ben. It must be Ben. If I were describing him I would have thought to mention that he was quite good-looking, in spite of a receding hairline and a tendency to plumpness around the middle. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, nor did April and High Tops seem at all alarmed to see him. They greeted him warmly and then both exclaimed in great surprise. Something had happened that they wanted to hear about. Was it Frankie’s arrival in Barcelona?
I pretended that a certain mosaic pattern near them was intensely fascinating to me, but I was afraid to get too close. As a result I heard only fragments of their conversation.
Ben: … Going to Barcelona wasn’t part of the agreement. She’s angry.
April: … No right to be angry… It’s not as if…
High Tops: … absolutely impossible to discuss…
Ben: They’re her feelings.
They must be talking about Frankie. Her feelings. She’s angry. Then Ben knew Frankie was in Barcelona. Frankie had gone to see him at La Pedrera after I took off after April and High Tops. My job was over. But why did I feel so uneasy?
I wondered what the papers were that Frankie wanted Ben to sign, and whether he had come to Barcelona to avoid Frankie rather than just for a visit. I wondered how April and High Tops knew Ben and whether they also knew Frankie. I wondered why April and High Tops had mentioned being worried about Ben but were now treating him in a perfectly friendly, even confidential way.
But it had become too hot for speculation. I didn’t have an interest in getting much more involved. All I wanted was my money and to say good-bye to Frankie.
I spent the rest of the afternoon working on La Grande y su hija back at Ana’s. Ana was absorbed in her seashell house and with her usual single-minded intensity was affixing a mosaic of real shells all around its opening. I wondered what it would be like to have Ana make a house for me.
“Wouldn’t you like a room like a nun’s?” she asked.
“Are you kidding? A hard single bed with a crucifix above it?”
“But your life is so complicated, Cassandra, you live in so many places. Think if you had a little white room with a painting of the sea, a room you could always return to.”
“You’re talking to an Irish Catholic girl who grew up in a little white room and couldn’t wait to get out of it.”
Ana shook her head. “But that room is still your center. You need that room.”
“And where might this room be, might I ask?”
“Why, right here in my apartment,” she said. “Next to the nursery.”
I waited until after six to meet Frankie at Carmen’s salon. For a minute I thought of donning my turban again, but in the end decided to brave it. So what if Carmen had a knife? I had taken karate for six weeks. And in Kyoto, too.
But Frankie wasn’t there when I arrived and I had to face Carmen’s wrath alone.
“Ay, ay, ay!” she screamed. “Where is it? Where’s your hair? Yesterday you had too much. Now you have none.”
“It will grow back,” I promised.
“Where did you go? Who did this butchering job? I will kill her.”
I admitted that I’d done it myself and she screamed again, as if I’d confessed to performing an appendectomy on my own body.
“But why? You were beautiful with my haircut. Now you’re ugly. Ugly. Ugly!” She grabbed my arm and shoved me in front of one of the mirrors.
I thought I looked rather handsome.
“Your beautiful curls,” she moaned. “I can’t bear it.”
But at that moment Frankie entered and Carmen was diverted.
“This is Frankie,” I introduced them. “Carmen.”
Carmen gave a sharp intake of breath, and I thought she was probably jealous, no doubt imagining that Frankie and I had a relationship beyond that of client and investigator.
Frankie bussed me on the cheek. “I’ve had such a successful day,” she enthused.
“Yes?”
“I found some absolutely fabulous clothes. Terribly European.”
She sat down in the chair and I wondered what she thought Carmen could do for her. Those corkscrew auburn curls looked perfectly wonderful to me.
“Take it off, darling,” she said in English to Carmen with a wave.
And Carmen did.
I gasped.
“You mean you didn’t know it was a wig, Cassandra?” Frankie said to me in the mirror. “That’s wonderful.”
The woman in the mirror looked completely different. She had chin-length limp hair that had been forced to change color once too often and was now an unprepossessing shade of burnt toast. The wig had made Frankie’s features pretty; without it her chin was too sharp, her nose too big, her eyes too small.
But as an actress she must be used to changing her appearance all the time, and to think nothing of it.
“Don’t cut off too much, darling,” Frankie told Carmen. “I like it as full as you can make it.”
I translated, minus the darling, as Carmen picked up an over-processed lock and let it drop significantly before brusquely pointing to the wash basins.
“When you said you had a successful day, I thought it was because you’d met with Ben finally,” I said while she was being shampooed.
“Ben?”
“I saw you go into La Pedrera just after… two women and a little girl came out. I followed them to the Parc Güell and heard all about you.”
Frankie blanched slightly. But it could have been Carmen energetically scrubbing at the roots of her hair.
“And then I saw Ben come up to the two women and—”
“Ben came up to the two women?” Frankie repeated.
“Well, obviously Ben is staying with them and their little girl.”
Frankie yelped in pain. “Not—so—hard. Por favor.”
“Well, isn’t he?” I demanded.
“Yes.” Frankie sighed.
I followed them back to the styling chair. Carmen looked grim, I supposed because we were talking in English and Frankie was treating her like a hairdresser. She hated that.
“And you met with Ben today, didn’t you?”
Frankie pondered this while looking at her sallow complexion in the mirror. “Yes, briefly.”
“Well, you’ve gotten what you came for, haven’t you?”
“Not exactly.” Her eyes followed Carmen’s scissors closely. “You see, I couldn’t get him to sign the papers. I’ll have to do a little more persuading.”
“But my part in all this is finished.”
“I might need a little help persuading—”
“Absolutely not.”
“All I want you to do is sit near us at a restaurant tomorrow. When the time is right I’ll introduce you.”
“Well…”
“And then I’ll give you your check for two thousand plus today’s and tomorrow’s expenses and you can be on your way.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said moodily. But we both knew I’d help her out yet again.
Carmen was blow-drying Frankie’s hair. She hadn’t done a bad job with the cutting—Carmen would never do a bad job— but neither had she thrown herself into it. Frankie seemed too distracted to notice.
“So you followed the two women, hmmm?” she asked. “Where did you say they went?”
“To the Parc Güell. It looks like they probably eat their lunch there regularly. And that’s where Ben joined them.”
“I’ve heard of that park,” said Frankie. “I hope I can sightsee a little while I’m here.”
Carmen stood back and handed Frankie a mirror so she could check the back of her head. It was a nice style job, if you liked pageboys. I knew Carmen didn’t.
“Thank you dear,” Frankie said indifferently as she got out her red purse.
“You pay the cashier,” I whispered, as Carmen’s eyes smoldered at this final insult. She flicked the towel off Frankie’s shoulders as if it were a bullfighter’s cape.
I accompanied Frankie to the door.
“Cassandra,” Carmen called sternly after me. “Can we talk a minute?”
“I’m late to meet Ana,” I said, hoping to avoid another lecture, this time on American manners. “Can you call me tonight?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I suppose it’s not that important.”
I’ve never lost my nerve when it really counted, but I’m a complete coward when it comes to facing an angry woman. As usual, I escaped.