NOW, THERE WAS ALWAYS THE possibility that April had been run over by a moving vehicle while deep in thought as poor Mr. Gaudí had been by the tram, and that she was lying in a hospital somewhere without her identification or her wits. There was the possibility that she had fallen asleep on a park bench, or broken the law and been carted off to jail, or even that someone in our small circle had done away with her.
But I thought the likeliest thing was that April had simply tricked me and I had fallen for it. Why bother to hide anything when you can simply hide?
I retraced a path to the Hotel Palacio and went back up the grimy stairs to the lobby. One of the sisters was sitting motionless behind the counter. At first I thought she had fallen asleep and simply forgotten to close her eyes, but she snorted out a hostile “Sí, señor?” to let me know I wasn’t going to get away with anything here.
I disregarded the señor and asked politely if she’d been working here this morning when the little girl had gone missing.
“I didn’t see anything,” she said. She was one of those old women who wither rather than softly expand, and on her cheek she had a big black mole with long gray hairs.
I flipped open my wallet to show my London tube pass. “INTERPOL,” I said briefly. “We’re working on a tip from the Guardia Civil. A six-year-old Irish girl was abducted from her home in Dublin yesterday by either the IRA or the UDA. She’s the daughter of the prime minister. We’ve traced her to this hotel.”
The señora’s eyes didn’t blink. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Do you know the penalty for lying to an INTERPOL agent?”
“No vi nada,” she repeated.
Stronger action was required. I took out my wallet again and put a thousand-peseta note on the counter. She looked at it. I placed another on top. She reached for them.
“Not so fast, señora. Do you know the penalty for accepting a bribe?”
She put on a crafty senile expression and began to babble incoherently—something about mothers, I thought, but it was in Catalan, so I couldn’t tell. Her sister, who had an identical mole, only on her forehead, came out of a back room and demanded to know what was going on.
I forewent the INTERPOL story and simply pointed to the pesetas on the counter. “Who took the little girl this morning?”
“A woman who said she was her mother,” the sister said.
If it was Ben I’d kill her. But we already knew that Ben would have a hard time passing as female.
“Was she a large woman?”
The two sisters looked at each other. They nodded.
Well at least I knew now it was April.
“Did she say where she was taking the little girl?”
As one they shook their tiny shrunken heads.
Considering the first sister had addressed me as señor I didn’t put much stock in their answer, but I asked it anyway. “You’re sure the lady was a woman?”
“Sí, sí, madres son mujeres, claro,” the second sister said firmly, as if I were an idiot.
I guessed she had a point. Mothers were women. At least they used to be.
In the back of my mind I’d been harboring a suspicion of Hamilton. How much more convenient it would be if he were involved. But the señora’s answer left me in no doubt: April had come to the hotel this morning and taken Delilah.
The question was, what had she done with her? Another hotel seemed likeliest. But where?
The hot spring sun beat down on me and suddenly I felt rather faint. It’s hard work looking for people and that’s why I’d never been good at Ditchum. I hate hard work.
I noticed a shoeshine stand next door to the Hotel Palacio and went inside.
“Señor.” He showed me a seat with a flourish.
I sighed and told him to give my boots a good shine. I wondered if this was how Frankie had felt when, as a boy who firmly believed he was a girl, everyone had treated him as a boy.
The limpiabotas was an old guy of about seventy who must have seen a lot from this shoeshine stand over the years. The civil war, the Franco years, the change to social democracy. I wondered if he’d seen April and Delilah this morning.
“How early do you open?” I asked.
“Temprano. It’s the best time for me early in the morning when people are going to work.”
“Did you happen to see a fat woman and a little girl, a blond-haired girl about six, come out of the hotel this morning?”
He thought about it. “I saw a little boy and his mother come out of the hotel, but the señora was not fat.”
“You’re sure it was a little boy?”
“Sí, sí.”
It was one thing to call me sir but to mistake Delilah with her pigtails and dresses for a boy, no, that was impossible. Plus, April was a big woman. The sisters had noticed it.
“Thanks anyway,” I said, giving him a tip, and walked back to the Ramblas.
It was about three, mid-siesta, and I suddenly felt too tired to think. I took the metro from Liceu to Diagonal and went straight to my room at Ana’s and lay down in bed. There I fell into a deep sleep.
I dreamed that I was floating along the river in the jungle on a small raft and that the lianas embraced over me, shutting out most of the sun. It was cool and dark emerald green. Blood red parrots chattered overhead, in a language I could almost understand, Catalan perhaps. At first it was pleasant to lie there, floating along, but after a while I began to be anxious. I remembered I was supposed to be looking for someone. From time to time I would pass a hut or something that looked like a hut, but the jungle was dense and the river carried me along quickly; when I cried out no one answered.
Finally, just as twilight deepened the gloom of the jungle even more, just as I began to be really worried, I came in sight of a settlement. As I floated past it I yelled in Spanish, “I am Cristobel’s daughter,” and immediately people began to come out of the huts, to get into their canoes. Five or six of them paddled towards me. I kept saying, “I’m Cristobel’s long-lost daughter,” until I realized they couldn’t understand me and that, in fact, they were probably going to have me for dinner or worse.
They weren’t women and they weren’t men, these villagers. As they grabbed my raft and secured it with ropes to their canoes, I asked stupidly (considering I believed my life in danger), “Has your village ever been featured in National Geographic? Somehow I don’t remember it.”
“Uga-muga,” they said.
They had breasts, but they had penises too; their lank brown hair was long and they had bones in their flat noses. Their eyes were uncivilized and hostile. I hope they don’t try any hanky-panky with me, I worried as they dragged me back to their camp.
The settlement was lit by bonfires and a huge old person was waiting for me with an expression of great disbelief. This person instructed the villagers to undress me. I resisted, less out of modesty than because I had a feeling they were probably going to eat me at some point during the evening, but they prevailed. I was forced to sit in front of this enormous hermaphrodite. Meanwhile the villagers were making rude noises and pointing at my missing appendage.
I tried to explain that María had made me take this journey and that I was looking for my mother, I mean my daughter, but I realized that being both sexes as they were they might not understand the intensely proprietorial relationship between mothers and daughters. I didn’t, in fact, see any children about. The hermaphrodite silenced me with a wave of a torch he/she had been handed. Oh god, now the torture was going to start, I knew it. The huge being took one of my feet in her/his hands and began to stroke my sole with fire.
“It’s funny,” I said. “That doesn’t feel so bad,” but the fire got hotter and hotter, the hermaphrodite’s eyes burned into me, there was something wrong here….
“Cassandra,” said Ana. “Telephone.”
“Thank god you woke me up,” I said, shaking my head dazedly. “I was in a jungle, they were going to eat me, they didn’t understand Spanish, they were doing something to my feet.”
Ana shook my shoulder, “Wake up, Cassandra. Ben is on the telephone.”
I staggered out to the living room. I was never going to consume a big lunch and take a siesta again. Who were those people, what was it all about?
As if she hadn’t stomped away from me in a fury not two hours ago Ben asked, “Did you find April?”
I still hadn’t quite gotten out of the jungle and back to Barcelona. “April?”
“Did April turn up at the market with Delilah?”
“Oh. April. Oh. Delilah. Oh. No.”
“Cassandra—what happened?”
“April never showed up so I went back to the hotel where Frankie had been staying and questioned the women at the desk, and they finally said that a woman who said she was Delilah’s mother took her early this morning.”
Ben dropped the phone and started screaming, “Frankie, you’ve been fucking me over again. You made up the story, Cassandra says. You stole Delilah from yourself!”
In vain I tried to talk to the dangling receiver, “Ben, no, listen. It was April. April who took Delilah. And April who’s disappeared.”
Frankie got on the phone. “Cassandra, you’re lying!” she screamed. “You were there with me this morning, you saw how upset I was. Why are you making this up?”
“Frankie, wait,” I said, but she had dropped the receiver too. I could hear the two of them shouting at each other.
There was nothing to do but hang up and wait till they called me back.
Ana had been listening to all this.
“You mean they’ve lost their little girl again?” she asked.
“Well, I think April has her now,” I said. “April is the foot masseuse I told you about.”
Ana shook her head. “All women want children,” she said glumly.
“Except me and April,” I said. “That’s why I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry,” said Ana, “If you could find my head this morning you can surely find a little girl.” She took my arm. “Come,” she said. “Look at the new house I’m building.”
She led me into the workroom where a cluster of amoeba-like shapes lay about.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Ana admitted. “But you spending so much time at La Pedrera has made me start thinking about Gaudí again. Everything I’ve been doing has been so representational —I thought I’d like to work with organic form again. To get away from the same old boxes.”
She picked up one of the shapes. “These are fiberglass. My idea is that they would be lined with some soft material and that they could clip together in some way, possibly Velcro, so that the child could create the house herself. Sometimes it could be small or narrow, sometimes very open and big. It could have many rooms or few rooms. When she travelled she could take a part of it with her perhaps. Or make a doll house from some of it or a little cave where she could curl up and read.”
She flipped her long braid over her shoulder. “I’m very enthusiastic about it. About the shapes it could take. And how a child might use it.”
The phone rang again.
I answered it cautiously. It was Frankie. “Cassandra, I demand an apology.”
“Look, I never said that you were lying about this morning. All I said was that the two women at the desk maintained that a woman pretending to be Delilah’s mother took her. It must have been someone Delilah knew, therefore I’m guessing it was April. But that’s what I already suspected.”
“But why hasn’t April brought Delilah back? Why hasn’t she contacted us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Have you asked Hamilton?”
“Why would Hamilton know anything about this?”
“He might know something about April that we don’t.”
Ben took the phone. “What did you say about Hamilton?”
“I said, I think there’s more to Hamilton than meets the eye.”
“That’s ridiculous, Cassandra. He’s been suspicious of you, that’s his only interest in all this.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m suspicious of him.”
“Look, you’ve got to find Delilah.”
“Maybe it’s time to call the police.”
“How the hell would we explain all this in Catalan?”
She had a point. “Call the American consulate. They can help.”
“You think they’re going to be more sympathetic to people like us?”
“Don’t you pay taxes like everyone else?”
“Well, I pay taxes. Frankie doesn’t.”
“You’re American citizens who’ve lost their daughter. You have a right to get help.”
“Cassandra—”
“Look, I’m not your mother.” The fatal word slipped out.
“And you don’t have any idea of what it is to be a mother either.”
Frankie grabbed the phone. “And after all the money I paid you.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said coolly and hung up.
“That’s good, Cassandra,” Ana said. “It’s their problem. Let them figure it out.”
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered why I didn’t really trust them to figure anything out, much less do anything about it. They were probably back to shouting blame at each other right now.
“Ana,” I said. “What do you think, do you want to take a little trip to the Barri Gòtic on your moto?”