A Not So Perfect Crime Read online

“Well, you know I think she’s delighted. You know how pigheaded she is. She’s determined not to be depressed now she’s in her forties, and ever since she’s been a Buddhist and spends her days eating soya to fend off whatever ...”

  “I’ll probably go Buddhist too,” he said, turning serious as he pulled on his overcoat. “A lot of folk around here,” he was referring to the well-heeled part of town where our office was, “have gone Buddhist recently. Eduard, you’ve just given me an idea.” And he added, as if plotting some thing, “I expect it’s a good way to make contacts without spending a cent ...”

  “That’s your business. But remember we’re expecting you on Saturday night for the party.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be there.”

  It was almost six o’clock and we decided to take the rest of the day off. Borja had a date with Merche, his girlfriend, and I was so cheered up I decided to give Montse a surprise by getting home early. Then I remembered it was Thursday, the day of her literary soirée, and that she wouldn’t get back till the early hours. Nevertheless, I resolved I’d be there to welcome her with the good news. I knew that my lack of work had been worrying her recently.

  Borja announced he would call up his friend Doña Mariona Castany and try to arrange to see her in the morning. If there was any decent gossip on Lídia Font, Mariona Castany was sure to be in the know.

  Although it was out of his way, because I live in Gràcia and our office is, on the contrary, very close to where Borja rents his little bachelor pad, my brother drove me in the Smart to our front door. It had started raining again some time ago.

  “I’m still waiting,” I reminded him as I got out of the car.

  “What? Oh, yes, too true! ...” he exclaimed, elated. “You know what, Eduard? God doesn’t play dice.”

  “And when he does, they’re loaded!” I riposted.

  4

  “You mean Borja-Mari’s coming to the party tomorrow ...” Montse quipped.

  The kids were still in bed and we were having breakfast in the kitchen. It was early and we’d just switched the heating on. It was cold.

  “For Christ’s sake, Montse, one of these days the girls will hear you and repeat that to his face,” I protest whenever my wife cracks this particular joke. “And don’t complain so. Knowing him, I bet he’ll bring you a nice present.”

  Montse likes to make gentle fun of Borja and in private calls him Borja-Mari. If Borja is in itself a snobby name, then Borja-Mari sounds even posher, although obviously there are flesh-and-blood people who are really called that. Nevertheless, Montse’s fond of Borja, even if in her presence (perhaps simply because she is there) my brother over-eggs his pose as an elegant, charming, blasé man of the world. He soon won over our kids, who love him like an uncle though they don’t know that’s what he is really. I’d like to be able to tell my wife Borja is Pep and that he’s my twin brother. But that day is still far off.

  “He’s very peculiar,” said Montse pouring out her second cup of coffee. “I don’t understand how you two managed to pair up ... He’s so different to us! The way he dresses, the stories he tells ... Although I get the impression he’s one of those with the gift of the gab and never a cent to his name.”

  “Darling, in his position and with his contacts, he’s forced to lead a certain life style ...”

  “On his uppers, like you and me,” she retorted. “Even so, he’s not what you’d call evil.”

  “Of course he isn’t. In his way, Borja has a heart of gold,” I tried to defend him, as ever.

  Montse had sussed Borja out a long time ago, but I don’t think she suspects for a moment he is my brother. It’s strange she’s not noticed the similarity that exists between Borja and the portrait of my mother hanging in our dining room, particularly after she immediately spotted how I resemble my father. I’m not looking forward to the day she realizes Borja and my mother are like two peas in a pod, because then we really will have a problem.

  “I reckon I like him because he always makes me laugh. He says such silly things!”

  “That’s why you like him and because he lets you fill his head with all that esoteric nonsense,” I replied, rather envious of my brother’s charms.

  When he comes to lunch or dinner, Borja listens more than politely to Montse’s passionate harangues about how she earns her crust. The benefits of karma, I Ching, feng shui, or the Flowers of whatever ... I think my brother also believes in all these things. Once a friend of Montse drew his astral chart and predicted a wonderful future for him. Now as Pep is no longer Pep but Borja, in his new identity it turns out my brother wasn’t born on his actual birthday. His star as Borja is Aquarius, not Taurus, although Montse and her soulmates claim he’s Aquarian from head to toe.

  “I’ve told you a thousand times that natural medicine and Buddhism aren’t at all esoteric!” insisted Montse, who’d got out of bed in fighting mood. “What’s more, it’s how I earn my living. And not so badly, as you may have noticed!”

  “True enough,” I had to demur. “You know, love, you can just ignore me.”

  At the end of the day Montse with her Alternative Centre earns a sight more than I do. And OK, what they get up to isn’t in any way esoteric, as she never tires of telling me, but the place does happen to call itself Isis, which is pretty strange. That’s what’s advertised on the board over the doorway and on the pink and lilac promotional leaflets that she and her partners scatter around the neighbourhood: The Isis Alternative Centre for Natural Wellbeing. If they had to give it a woman’s name, they could have chosen any Jill, Jane or Juliet. I think it’s no coincidence she and her cronies went for the name of an Egyptian goddess who was the object of a rather idiosyncratic cult of the Romans (by the way, in the Sants district there’s a clip-joint that boasts the same name, but I’ve been very careful not to mention that fact to Montse in case she gets the wrong idea).

  Yes, Montse earns, but not that much. The two of us earn enough to get by, although she’s right in one thing: we may not be millionaires now but our life now is infinitely superior to what it was before. There’s no comparison and it’s all down to Borja.

  Now while I’m familiar with every fad followed in Montse’s Centre, in too much gruesome detail for my liking, my wife has little clue as to my line of work. She thinks I prepare financial reports for big companies: feasibility studies, whether a business is profitable or needs an injection of capital, and such like. She also thinks I act as an investment consultant to individuals and entrepreneurs. She’s aware that discretion is a basic aspect of my work, a condition imposed by my clients, and thus accepts I can never reveal very much about what I do that gets us to the end of the month. In fact, I could make up any old story without a worry in the world, and often do, since Montse, like most mortals, hasn’t a clue about high finance. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve learned that when you have money it’s easier to make more, and that to amass a fortune, as Borja tells me, you must pretend you’re rich from day one.

  “I’ll have to spend the whole of tomorrow in the kitchen. Can you go to the Bolet bakery and buy the cake?” Montse asked. “Better make it a big one, right? And chocolate ... While you’re about it, get some cava.”

  Montse was born in Sarrià and we only ever buy cakes from Bolet’s, the small bakery that competes with the patisserie that belonged to Foix the Catalan poet. My wife comes from a not very well-off family like mine, but as a loyal daughter of old Sarrià, she hankers after her old haunts.

  Nowadays Sarrià is a neighbourhood for all sorts, where top executives rub shoulders with snobby ladies, university professors, South American maids and the usual grandmas and grandpas living on modest pensions, but the district retains a charm many other areas in Barcelona have lost or never had. The vicinity of the main square, with the church, town hall and market, retains that village aura of which the locals are so proud, with its old two-storey houses that have almost all been restored and the quiet, clean streets, some still adorned with exotic plants s
prouting in big earthenware pots by house doorways. Joana, my mother-in-law, who’s a widow, still lives in the same old, non-centrally heated flat where Montse and her sister were born and she refuses point blank to give it up. Although she calls it “her home”, she in fact rents, and I’m well aware the children of the owners read the deaths column full of hope every morning and dream about how they’ll spend their inheritance when they sell the building for a small fortune. The flat where my mother-in-law lives is “infested with a sitting tenant”, as they say nowadays.

  “Bolet’s isn’t exactly next door to the office,” I retorted. “And I wasn’t planning on going in tomorrow as it’s Saturday ...” I could see Montse wasn’t about to relent, so I added: “All right, I’ll ask Borja to drive me there. We could probably drop by at lunchtime or this afternoon.”

  “Even better.”

  “We’ll be quite a crowd. I’ll have to buy at least half a dozen bottles. I don’t know whether there’s room in the Smart ...”

  “More like a dozen I’d say,” she added dryly. “As the day after’s Sunday and nobody has to be up at the crack of dawn ...”

  “A dozen! So how many people have you invited?” I sighed. “I saw the pantry shelves were weighed down with bottles of wine. Are you sure we’ll have enough chairs?”

  In a word, Montse was going to celebrate in style on Saturday night. Who’d have thought she’d like the idea of hitting forty? The fact is she didn’t look forty. She wore her age lightly, not like me. I sometimes look at her and can still see the same idealistic young girl I fell in love with all those years ago.

  “Would you rather see to supper?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, and in a tone of voice that made it clear the question was purely rhetorical.

  Sometimes Montse is implacable. I’m sure if she knew what I was really up to she’d not be at all amused. As Borja says, my wife is a lefty who’s recycled herself into anything labelled alternative: alternative diets, alternative medicine, alternative cosmetics, alternative ecology and a good few other alternative options. Now she’s taken up Buddhism, like most of her friends, because it’s an alternative philosophy of life rather than a religion. She still gathers her hair into a single plait, wears flat shoes and ethnic clothes, and, for sure, always smells wonderful thanks to the concoctions they use at the Centre. Luckily, Montse has nothing in common with those lipo-suctioned, silicone-padded women my work often brings me into contact with. Though she sometimes gives you the impression she’s a bit out of this world, Montse is real enough. Every single inch of her.

  It’s true I also often feel ill at ease in my new profession. Given my political ideas I can hardly feel proud of the way I now earn my living, but, as Borja usually reminds me, I used to work for vampires in white collars and not for an NGO. Naturally, my brother and I have never got involved in any off-limits business. We’ve never touched traffic in drugs, women or immigrants, or anything like that. We could say to a degree that we act as trustworthy stewards to the rich. Besides, I have to admit that the strange trade I now pursue is what saved my marriage. It’s most likely that if Borja hadn’t appeared so opportunely, Montse and I would now be separated – if not divorced – and my little son, Arnau, wouldn’t even exist.

  We had been going through a bad patch. Montse and I were fed up, bored with our respective jobs and the life we were leading, working long hours to pay the mortgage and the children’s schooling, and with hardly any time for ourselves. Montse was earning her living as a counsellor in a secondary school, which meant she wiped noses for a wage that even the pupils reckoned was pathetic. After fifteen years as a school psychologist, she couldn’t face any more juvenile delinquents, mafiosi fathers, sadistic adolescents, racist mothers, pregnant teenagers and skinheads, not to mention an acquiescent Authority too politically correct to even hear a mention of such things. Despite being a leftwing feminist, she’d concluded it was necessary to bring back uniforms, corporal punishment, iron discipline and rote learning. Naturally stubborn, she refused to take sick leave for her depression, and I could see her going downhill fast and was powerless to help. The Authority described the school where she had a permanent post as “challenging”, and Laia and Aina, our identical twins, were also going through a difficult time. They were fighting at home and their teachers kept sending us silly notes blaming us for their bad behaviour. Personally, I didn’t think things were that bad but Montse had become disturbingly paranoid and saw tragedies looming on every side. One day she spotted a tattoo on Laia’s leg and went berserk. It was only a transfer but Laia got a good hiding. For a couple of months Montse felt remorse for the blows she’d given out, convinced she’d traumatized our daughter for life, and began to take Prozac. Unfortunately, the artificial improvement in her state of mind, relative to the quantity of pills she ingested, was accompanied by a gradual decrease in her libido, to put it politely. In other words, one side effect was to put me on bread and water.

  As for me, I’d been working far too many years in a bank in the morning and as an accountant for a small computer firm in the afternoon, and couldn’t take anymore. I’d become a respectable, timorous bank clerk whose only hope in terms of changing his life was to win the jackpot in the Christmas Lottery. To make things worse, the bank where I worked had been taken over by a bigger fish and the new bosses decided to reorganize the staff via a wave of redundancies and a canny restructuring of the workforce. In my case, thanks to the fact I’d worked there for twenty years and was still too young to take early retirement, the generous sods offered me two options: either to accept voluntary redundancy, with compensation that was hardly generous, or to go to work in Lleida. Monte refused point blank to change city, and I wasn’t exactly grabbed by the prospect of spending a minimum of four hours a day risking my life in a train. But if that was not enough, there was another problem. A problem that went by the name of Raquel.

  The fact is that quite unintentionally (at one of those office parties, after soaking every one of my neurons in a whisky whose name I’d rather not remember) I embarked on an affair with a married colleague, and didn’t know how to extricate myself. What started as a straw I’d grasped when plastered turned into a nightmare. Raquel, for that was her name, was stricken and talked about separation, divorce and starting a new life together. I won’t go so far as to say she was harassing me, but she came pretty close. She even threatened to show up at our place and tell Montse about our so-called relationship, as she dubbed it. This really shook me up, and what with Raquel and the reorganization at the bank I was at my wits’ end.

  I won’t deny that initially I quite liked Raquel. She was good in bed, very hot in fact, though I don’t understand why the hell she fancied me, given I’m quite run-of-the mill between the sheets. I’m not trying to justify myself by saying she was the one to make the first move at the party, or the one who booked a hotel room a few days later, or the one ringing and texting me all the time, but this is what happened after Montse had been on Prozac for several weeks.

  The fact is that the affair, for want of a better word, had taken a turn for the worse and I was scared. I was still in love with Montse and besides that there were my daughters. I fancied Raquel but wasn’t in love with her. I’d not considered the possibility of separating from my wife for one second, and even less so for someone like Raquel. All things being equal, there are women you’d spend the night with (particularly if it’s a freebie), but not necessarily the next day. Montse was for life, even though neither of us knew how to climb out of that black hole swallowing everything except our mortgage repayments and instalments on the car.

  Borja appeared at that precise moment. My brother came back into my life the same way he’d left it, out of the blue, with no prior warning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. One day, after fifteen years without a single sighting, he swanked elegantly outside the branch of the bank where I worked and suggested I should resign from my job and become a partner in this strange enterprise we now have on
our hands and which legally doesn’t exist.

  He’d lived abroad, as I knew, and in all that time our only contact had been via the occasional postcards he wrote me and the letters I sent to a post box in Paris. One such letter had invited him to our wedding but he never came. What he did was to send me a set of very fine crystal goblets that arrived in equally fine fragments. I was tremendously upset and went round antique shops until I’d collected a dozen of something similar that cost me an arm and a leg. I said nothing to Montse. To justify the expenditure, I invented a couple of yobs who’d mugged me with a syringe when I came out of the metro. It was the second lie I’d told her since we’d been going together.

  “Hey, kid brother, how are you?” he rasped that day when I emerged from the bank. It was almost three clock and he’d obviously been waiting for me for some time. “Still working here? You’ve put on weight ...” he said looking me up and down.

  I hardly recognized him. His hair was cut short and he exuded the same elegantly sophisticated style he now assumes. I was so delighted and surprised I couldn’t think what to say when I finally did react. I immediately invited him home for lunch.

  “Fine but first we have to talk,” he said, smiling enigmatically. “I’ll come to your place, if you like, but you shouldn’t tell your wife (Montse, isn’t it?) or anyone I’m your brother.” He paused while a bemused look spread over my face. “I must tell you that I’m not Pep anymore. I’m Borja from now on. Borja Masdéu-Canals Sáez de Astorga. Yes, you heard right! ...” And he proudly showed me a high quality business card. My amazement increased in leaps and bounds.

  “Fuck, things have changed in all this time!” I exclaimed. “Although you’ve obviously changed much more than your name ...”

  I was happy to see my brother again, but also rather hurt by all those years he dropped out of my life. Borja isn’t just my only brother; he’s also my twin. And fifteen years, I remember thinking, is a hell of a long time. Perhaps too long.