THE HOTEL WHERE FRANKIE HAD been holed up was in the Barri Xines, not far from the Palau Güell, the town house that Gaudí had built for his favorite patron at a time when the area had been up and coming instead of down and out. Squashed between seedy buildings with store fronts displaying objects both useful and risqué, the palace retained its mystery. Gaudí’s architectural marvel opened up inside with rooms that made you feel as if you were in a huge medieval castle. High ceilings fretted with painted wood, long halls that fooled the eye with their grand perspectives, lovely arched windows that gave, most surprisingly, onto dreary streets and tenements instead of wooded estates or fog-shrouded lakes.
I remembered a story Ana had told me once in her detached, slightly ironic way: One day she’d gone to a reception in the Palau Güell. The reception had been to honor some well-known architect, and they had all been standing around with drinks in their hands chatting in the formal and restrained way of such receptions when someone had happened to notice that across the street was a brightly lit room in which you could see a band of pickpockets spreading watches, gold chains, rings and wallets out on the lumpy bed. Slowly the architects had drifted over to the window until the whole group was there, silently and with great fascination watching the thieves sort through their spoils.
Frankie’s hotel, the no-star Hotel Palacio, wasn’t the worst I’d ever been in—that honor went to a dive in Calcutta and the less said about that the better—but it probably wasn’t where Ben would have liked to imagine Delilah staying. A dirty wooden staircase led up to a small lobby on the second floor, where a pair of pinched sisters glared at me before pointing the way down the dimly lit hall to Frankie’s room.
Frankie was waiting for me, dressed in tights and a sporty royal blue sweater but still somehow managing to suggest a Tennessee Williams heroine in an advanced state of dishabille. She was chain-smoking and her nails were broken and bitten. She began to cry when she saw me.
“You’re the only one who can help me,” she sobbed, throwing herself on the sagging bed over which hung a portrait of the Virgin in blue.
“Before we get into the matter of helping we need to sort a few things out, Frankie.”
“I’m innocent,” she said. “Put it down to a mother’s love. I was desperate at having Delilah taken away from me, taken just like that, without a word of explanation or farewell. I thought, well if they want to behave like that, so can I. I didn’t kidnap her violently, I simply stole in to see her, lifted her gently in my arms and walked off with her.”
“Without anyone’s assistance.”
“Cassandra, would Ben or April help me? After they’d slipped away to Barcelona like thieves?”
“What about Hamilton?”
“Hamilton would have no reason to help me.”
I was puzzled. Surely if any of the three had facilitated the kidnap, now would be the time to betray them. Could it be someone else here in Barcelona? Someone I didn’t know? It might have been lack of sleep, but I was starting to get a headache.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “You got into La Pedrera sometime when April was there alone, before I came over. You had scoped the place out earlier, and assuming you didn’t have an accomplice who let you in, you bribed the portero to make you a key to their apartment. You went in, but before you could get Delilah, Hamilton and then Ben came home and you panicked. You rushed up to the roof where Ben cornered you, then came back downstairs and managed to grab Delilah and take her out to the street and find a taxi. All without help. You came to this hotel where you thought no one would find you, which is in a terrible neighborhood in case you hadn’t noticed… so then what happened?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for the past fifteen minutes, Cassandra. You’ve been wasting valuable time with your accusations.”
“I’ve just been trying to establish a chain of events,” I said. “I have no reason in the world to help you, especially not after you’ve lied to me the way you have.” I made as if to leave.
“Don’t go,” Frankie wailed and grabbed my arm. “I know I’ve lied to you. But I had no choice. You’d never have believed the truth.”
“That’s true,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I wouldn’t have, and maybe I still don’t. Whatever the truth is.”
“The important thing is that Delilah is missing. She’s been missing for two hours already.”
“When did you notice she was gone?”
“This morning. You know in these types of places they don’t have a bathroom in the room but down the hall. About seven this morning Delilah got up and told me she was going to the bathroom. I was half asleep and hardly heard her and must have dropped off again. When I woke up it was eight-thirty and she wasn’t in her bed. I thought she might have gotten lost in the hotel or be downstairs in the lobby, so I went rushing around trying to find her. She wasn’t anywhere. That’s when I called you.”
I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty. “Do you think she could have gone out in the street?” If she had there was no telling what could have happened to her.
But Frankie refused to believe that, perhaps because it was too horrible a thought, the idea of Delilah being picked up by thieves who might either try to ransom her or sell her. “I’m sure it was Ben,” she said.
“But Ben had no idea where you’d taken Delilah,” I said. “She thought you’d gone off to the airport and back to San Francisco. We spent half the night there and at the train station.”
“If only I had gone back to San Francisco,” Frankie groaned.
“So how could Ben have known you were still here in Barcelona?”
“I told her.”
“You told her!”
“Of course,” Frankie said. “I’m not like her and April. I wouldn’t want them to worry.”
“Well, if you told them then why are you surprised they found you? Or came and got Delilah?”
“Because I didn’t tell them where I was. There are hundreds of hotels in Barcelona. How could they have known it was this one?”
A good question. If I hadn’t been able to find Frankie in the best hotels, how could Ben and April, who spoke little Spanish, have found Frankie in one of the worst hotels?
“I didn’t even call them,” said Frankie. “I sent a message with a taxi driver to their apartment. All it said was ‘Delilah is safe with me. I will be contacting you soon to work out new custody arrangements.’”
I didn’t know what to think. I preferred to think that April and Ben had somehow gotten the hotel’s name from the taxi driver rather than that Delilah had been nabbed off the street by professional childnappers, but it was still all very confusing. If April and Ben knew where Delilah was why hadn’t they contacted me? I’d searched out Hamilton last night, but he hadn’t said a word. Perhaps they hadn’t told him?
“Frankie,” I said. “If you think Ben and April have Delilah and you know where they’re staying, why don’t you just go there and talk about it with them? What do you need me for?”
Frankie’s thin lips quivered. “I need you to go with me.”
“But why?”
“Because. Because I’m afraid of them.” And Frankie burst into tears again.
This was not the way I had envisioned my stay in Barcelona, speeding around in taxis with bereft mothers. Before I’d always taken this city at a leisurely pace: long mornings reading newspapers and books in cafés, which drifted into serious lunches with Ana and other friends; afternoons spent napping and strolling along the streets, stopping in bookstores and again in cafés; resplendent evenings full of food and music and talk.
Now I had the feeling that even Gaudí’s architecture, which had always been a lovely backdrop for my wanderings, was never going to be the same for me.
We screeched up in front of the door to La Pedrera and went inside and up the elevator. Frankie was clutching my arm and smoking non-stop. My headache wasn’t getting any better.
We knocked and April came to the door. She looked from me to Frankie with wide-open dark eyes. I couldn’t read their expression. “Ben,” she called, a little unsteadily. “Ben, they’ve brought Delilah back.”
Then she noticed that Delilah wasn’t with us, but not in time to warn Ben, who came rushing out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around her midriff. What’s she got that I haven’t, I thought. Except fifteen years or so and a tattoo of a dancing woman on her back shoulder.
“Where is she, where’s Delilah?”
“I thought you had her,” shrieked Frankie.
“Oh my god,” said April. And fainted.
Neither Ben nor Frankie seemed to notice April’s unconscious state, so it was left to me to bring her around with water from a vase of flowers, while Ben and Frankie screamed at each other. Or perhaps it was the screaming that brought her around.
“What have you done with Delilah?”
“Why are you pretending you don’t have her?” Frankie grabbed Ben’s arm and Ben’s towel slipped off, revealing rock-hard thighs and an abdomen like a knotted slab of maple.
“April, April dear,” I was murmuring. “Wake up April, are you all right? Do you want me to rub your feet?”
“You stole her right from under my very eyes and you think I have her?”
“You’re the one who has her. You took her this morning when the poor little thing had to go to the bathroom.”
“What are you talking about? I had no idea where you were. How could I have taken her?”
“I sent you a message. That’s how you found me. Don’t pretend you didn’t get it.”
April groaned and her eyelashes fluttered. I had to fight down a terrible desire to kiss her. April, I wanted to say, what are we doing with these two crazy people? Let’s just you and me go away together, I know we’re meant for each other. Her black eyes opened and she stared at me. According to the film script she should have murmured, “Darling, I knew it was you all the time.” But instead she croaked, “Where am I?”
“You’ve always been like this,” Ben shouted. “One lie after another, one excuse after another. I could give a damn if you’d had surgery to become an elephant, if only you’d be honest for once.”
“You don’t know a thing about honesty. Or human kindness. If you’d been honest or kind you never would have left San Francisco without telling me. Do you think it’s been easy finding you? I had to give up my job, everything to follow you.”
I assisted April to an upright position, but she seemed not to want to take part in the debate.
Frankie continued, “The only reason I took Delilah in the first place was to get you to agree to new custody arrangements.”
“Kidnapping is no way to get me to agree to anything.”
“Well, we’re even now. I don’t have Delilah and neither do you,” Frankie said smugly. But then reality hit her. “Then she really has been kidnapped by white slave traders.”
The two of them burst into shocked tears and then resumed accusing each other.
April said, “I think I need some fresh air.”
I walked April as gently as an invalid through the tiny Pasage de la Concepción that led from Gràcia to the Rambla de Catalunya, and seated her at an outdoor café sheltered from the sun. On either side of us traffic flashed by; it wasn’t the quietest place for a conversation, but in Barcelona there aren’t many quiet places. I often sat at this café, for it was just across from Ana’s apartment building.
“Poor April,” I said several times, encouragingly, but she only nodded her frizzy black hair. She looked a little older this morning, wearing a gold caftan that could have been a bathrobe, her darkly-haired legs shoved into Birkenstocks. I still adored her though.
I ordered tea and ensaimadas, the Catalan version of sweet turnovers.
“I feel so guilty,” she said finally, in a low monotone. “Women are supposed to love kids, women are supposed to want kids, women are supposed to be crazy about babies and children. Well, I don’t love kids, I mean, as a rule, as a species. And I can’t stand how central children can be to someone’s life, how parents can fight the way they do over a child.”
“One thing I’ll say for big Catholic families is that no one gets any special attention. The fighting was all between us when I was growing up.” I paused. “Are you saying you don’t like Delilah?”
“I wanted to like Delilah….”
“But right from the beginning she was a bone of contention.”
April shook her head. “I didn’t even know that Ben had a daughter at first. I probably wouldn’t have gotten involved with her if I’d known. But does she look like a mother?”
I had to shake my head. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door to Ana’s apartment building open and a large, brightly painted papier-mâché arm protrude. Today Ana was taking her maternal construction to the home of the prospective mother.
“Of course she doesn’t,” said April, chewing on her sticky pastry. “She looks like a bodybuilder, she looks like a bulldyke, she looks like…”
“A boy.”
“How was I supposed to know she had a daughter? She never mentioned her. It was all ‘Oh, April you’re the only one for me. April I’ll love you till I die.’ It was flowers and cards and phone calls until I gave in.”
“And then you found out about Delilah. And Frankie.”
“She wasn’t only a mother, but a mother in a custody dispute. Not only a custody dispute, but a dispute about gender. About who was a real woman, who had the right to be the mother.”
Ana, with her long braid tucked up under a workmanlike beret, was loading arms and legs into the back seat of the car she’d borrowed. She couldn’t quite get the thighs to fit and had opened one of the back windows. The pair of red and yellow legs protruded wildly and disjointedly.
“Maybe I could have helped them,” April said, as if to herself. “Maybe I could have gotten them to reconcile. But that would have meant committing myself to the relationship.”
“And you couldn’t,” I said, “because there was Delilah.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“But then why did the three of you come to Barcelona to get away from Frankie?”
April had finished her ensaimada and was dabbing delicately at the plate with a finger. “That’s what everyone thinks,” she said. “But I came here by myself. Ben followed me. And let me tell you, it’s been very difficult. I haven’t had a moment’s peace for a week.”
Ana was struggling to fit the body’s head into the passenger seat, where it sat, smiling benignly, like a totemic goddess. Something snapped into place. I stared at April in her rather tired caftan/bathrobe and for the first time her musky scents and freckled cleavage didn’t overwhelm me.
“You drugged Delilah with some kind of herbal knock-out drops, didn’t you? Then let Frankie in so she could kidnap her, didn’t you? And then when I turned up at seven-thirty, you kept me occupied so you’d have an alibi, didn’t you?”
April stared at me sadly. Her black hair looked grayer in the sunlight and her vibrant voice quavered. “I’m not a bad person. I’d never want you to think I’m a bad person.”
“Didn’t you think about how frightened Ben would be?”
“It was only going to be overnight, Frankie said. She wasn’t going to take Delilah out of the city. It was a negotiating tool. I thought, I guess I thought that Ben needed to be scared. I guess I thought they’d all go back to San Francisco.”
“How did Frankie persuade you? I thought you didn’t like Frankie.”
“I don’t know if I do like Frankie,” April said unhappily. “But it’s not because of who she is or what she’s become.” She started to cry. “It’s all so complicated. You’d never understand. And now Delilah’s really gone.”
“Then there’s no possibility that Ben really did steal Delilah out of the hotel this morning?”
“Ben and I slept until nine-thirty. We were exhausted, we’d been up half the night.”
“But Frankie sent a message that Delilah was safe.”
“That’s a message we never got.”
“Why is Hamilton so suspicious of you?”
That shook April up. “What makes you think he’s suspicious of me?”
“He didn’t want to let you out of his sight all last night.”
“He’s not suspicious of me. We’re old friends.”
“Since when?”
“Since high school. We… played in the orchestra together.”
“Where was that?”
“Just what is your point, Cassandra?” A harshness I’d never heard before came into April’s voice. She set her cup of tea down with a clatter.
“My point is that there’s something funny going on between you and Hamilton.”
“You’re the one who’s suspicious,” she turned it on me. “Working for Frankie, hounding us to Barcelona. You’d be the likeliest to have taken Delilah this morning. It’s something Frankie cooked up, I’m sure of it. Pretending that Delilah was kidnapped when Frankie has just got her stashed somewhere.”
For a second her guess rang true. God, it was just the kind of thing that Frankie might do. But then I remembered Frankie’s anguish in the hotel. She couldn’t fake that, could she?
“Are you ready to go back to La Pedrera and talk about this sensibly?” I asked instead.
“You go,” she said, struggling for serenity. “I need a little time alone. This fighting between Frankie and Ben may not be old to you, but it is to me. I can’t face it.”
“You can’t pretend all this isn’t happening, April,” I said. “Delilah is gone, and naturally Frankie and Ben are upset. They’re her parents.”
“I know,” she said. After a minute she added, “There’s something I’d like to tell you, but not right now. Could you give me a couple hours to work up to it? We could meet for lunch at the market off the Ramblas, the Mercat Sant Josep. There’s a restaurant there, Hamilton took me once.”
“I’m not sure I should let you out of my sight,” I said. “Why can’t you tell me now?”
“Because…” Her voice changed. “What’s that? Somebody is running down the street with a… a head.”
I followed her pointing finger. Ana had left the car unlocked while she went back upstairs to get more body parts and someone, a young boy, was indeed dashing across the Rambla de Catalunya with the peacefully smiling red and yellow papier-mâché head of Ana’s birthing house.
I jumped up from my chair and tore after him, but he was too quick for me. I chased him down the center walkway, but lost him in the end down a side street.
Ana was standing by the car when I returned empty-handed. A small crowd of passersby and neighbors had gathered to tell her what had happened and to discuss, in very loud voices, how things were going to the dogs in Barcelona. Now they were stealing art, right out of cars!
“The head’s not the important bit,” I tried to reassure Ana. “Many women become mothers without using their heads.”
“I’m late,” Ana snapped, slamming the door of the car and driving off in a temper.
I turned back to the café and the foot masseuse of my dreams. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.
April was gone.