Bad In Bardino

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Book excerpt

1

I was woken up by the sound of my mobile ringing. My head hurt and felt like it was about the size of a watermelon. I supposed that I might have had one or two too many the night before, as I sat up and grabbed the phone. 'Hello?'

'Is that Arthur Blakey, the private investigator?' a feminine voice asked.

'It is indeed.'

'Oh Mr. Blakey, I've heard that you are an expert when it comes to finding people, is that right?' Whoever she was, she spoke English with a foreign accent. Germanic, I should have said.

'Only when I manage to do it.'

'Do what?'

'Find them.'

'This is no laughing matter, Mr. Blakey.' She didn't seem to go for my line in humour. A lot of people don't, not that it's ever bothered me much.

'Never said it was.'

She went quiet for a moment and as I waited to hear what she was going to say next I could picture her in my mind's eye, or thought I could. I reckoned she was a pretty brunette. They often are, when I picture them. Not brunette necessarily, I don't mean, but pretty. I don't know why, but they just seem to come out that way. I suppose you could say I'm an optimist by nature. Maybe you have to be if you're going to last very long in my line of work. You get to see a lot of nasty stuff working as a private investigator, and you can't let it get to you. They should put having the ability to forget and bounce back from things in the job description.

Anyway, as I was saying, I pictured her as a pretty brunette, but kind of prim and proper in an old fashioned sort of way; and right now, I imagined how her brow might look as it furrowed in a cross expression. Then she said, 'Could you find somebody for me?'

'I could certainly try.'

'I should be most grateful if you would.'

I found her old-world tone of voice faintly amusing, or I would have done if my head hadn't been giving me so much grief. It must have been that last drink that did it, the last one or two, anyway. It or they were responsible for setting up the little arrangement the inside of my head currently appeared to be failing to enjoy with a rhythm section that featured some young skinhead thug on the drums. 'I shouldn't be too grateful,' I said. 'I don't come cheap.'

'How much?'

'Three hundred euros a day plus expenses,' I said. 'And another thousand if I find whoever it is I'll be looking for, half of which I get upfront.'

'And what if you don't find her?'

'You get the five hundred back.'

'I see…well that sounds reasonable,' she said. 'So you'll find her for me, then?'

'Find who?'

'My sister Gisela, Mr. Blakey… She's disappeared, you see.'

'I'd need a last name.'

'It's Schwartz.'

'And you are?'

'Inge,' she replied. 'Inge Schwartz.'

'Where are you now?'

'I'm in the street outside your office…the door is locked.'

'Yes, I've been called away,' I said. 'If you could come back in about an hour, I'll see you then.'

'Why so long?'

'There's a man I've been chasing and I've just caught up with him, only he's armed with a gun and–'

'Oh dear…do you want me to call the police?'

'No, I can handle it.'

'But it sounds as though this man is dangerous.'

'I can deal with him,' I said. Besides, I might have added, some of the cops in Bardino don't like me much, and I don't like them any better. But I decided to keep this last thought to myself. And anyway, I was only kidding her about chasing a man with a gun. Not that I don't chase armed men around a lot, because I do; only I wasn't doing so right then. What I was doing was sitting up in bed, having just woken up. 'Okay, well if you'd like to call round to my office in about an hour, I'll see you then,' I told her and hung up.

I looked at my watch. It had just turned half-past ten, which is late for some people to be lying in bed, perhaps, but par for the course for me when I'm not working. I'd just successfully solved a tricky murder investigation and made myself enough to last me for the next couple of months, so I was in no desperate hurry to find new clients. Of course if a suitable case came my way, then so much the better; but if it didn't, there was nothing to prevent me from sleeping late and enjoying a little time taking it easy.

I put my mobile back down on the bedside cabinet and scratched my head as I wondered what the sisters of nice Germanic girls were doing coming to places like Bardino and forgetting to call or write home. I was still wondering about this as I got dressed, then left the flat and headed for my office, which was just a few minutes' walk away, over on Calle Veracruz. I went in through the narrow doorway, which is squeezed in between a shop that sells watches on one side and a ladies' shoe shop on the other, then climbed the stairs. I took out my key and opened the door with the frosted glass window, bearing the legend ARTHUR BLAKEY, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, then entered. The solid oak desk was in that state of ordered perfection normally only achieved by the unemployed, and behind it the venetian blinds were partially drawn, so that the room was striped with shadow. There were two upright chairs on this side of the desk, and my more comfortable swivel number was on the other side. I went and sat in my chair and swiveled around on it a little as I waited for Inge Schwartz to show.

2

The very moment I opened the door to her, I realized I was all wrong about Inge Schwartz: she was no pretty brunette, not at all. She was a blonde, for a start.

'Perhaps you'd like to come in?' I said.

'Perhaps I would.'

I closed the door behind her and tried hard not to look her up and down too many times. I failed miserably in this, though, because she was a stunner. What's more, she knew it. She was honey blonde hair, neatly bobbed by an adept hand, tawny skin, china-blue eyes, red-painted bee-stung mouth, and bone structure that would have made Rodin throw away his chisel. She was slender in all the right places and less slender–in fact not slender at all–in all the right places, too, and she came wrapped in a fuchsia-coloured linen dress that she wore with a cream jacket of the same material and black court shoes.

She shrugged off her jacket and handed it to me like I was the doorman at some posh joint. The garment smelt of her perfume - Chanel No 5, if I wasn't mistaken. She said, 'I've brought some things for you.' She opened her handbag, a neat little Kelly number, took out an A3-sized manila envelope and handed it to me.

I took a look inside. There was a wad of money in it, as well as a photograph and a piece of paper. I took out the wad of money and riffled it. Then I counted it quickly and slipped it into the breast pocket of my jacket. Next I took out the photograph and had a look at it. It was a photograph of a girl of about eighteen or so. 'She looks a little like a younger version of you,' I said.

'We aren't sisters for nothing, Mr. Blakey.'

For a brief moment I was almost tempted to tell her she could dispense with the Mister business and just call me ‘Art’, short for ‘Arthur’, like everyone else I knew; but then I came to my senses and said instead, 'When was this photo taken?'

'Two or three years ago…it's the only one of her I could find.'

'How old is your sister now?'

'Twenty-one.’

I looked at the photograph. Her sister sure was a beautiful-looking girl. I took out the sheet of paper and examined it. It had been torn from a letter-writing pad, and so it shouldn't have surprised me, I don't suppose, to find that a letter had been written on it. What did surprise me, though, was the nature of the letter itself. I'm no graphologist, but the large spidery scrawl seemed decidedly childish to me, more like what a thirteen-year-old might produce than the sort of thing you'd expect from an adult, even a young one; and I noticed that none of the i's were dotted, which might suggest an absence of feelings of self-worth in the writer. Then there was the subject matter of the letter. It read like a young girl writing home from summer camp, where she was in the busy flurry of her first affair, and not at all like the letter of a young woman who had come to Bardino to live and then perhaps taken a wrong turning in her life and dropped out of contact. In short, there was an innocence bordering on outright childishness about the writing that struck me as a little odd, given that the date at the top of the page was June of this year.

'Please take a seat,' I said, and Miss Schwartz duly parked herself on one of the two upright chairs. She crossed her legs neatly at the knee, smoothed her dress down, and her foot kept time with some imaginary music that may or may not have been playing through her mind. From the expression on her face, though, music seemed to be the last thing she was concerned about.

'Is this letter the last you've heard from her?' I said as I sat in my padded swivel number.

She nodded and bit down on her lower lip, and for a terrible moment it looked like she might be about to break down in tears. Even while this was taking place, however, I continued to wonder whether I should believe what I was witnessing. Whether I could safely assume, in other words, that what I was seeing, or being permitted to watch, was in fact 'for real'.

I took a deep breath, puffed out my cheeks like a blowfish, and turned my attention back to the letter. Having taken note of the local address at the top of the page, I asked Miss Schwartz if she had called round to the place to see if her sister was still living there. She replied in the affirmative, shutting her eyes, as if she were being weighed down by heavy emotions. The person who was currently residing there, she explained, had told her that Gisela took off somewhere a couple of weeks ago. Where she'd gone and why, the man didn't know. Neither had he known when she was likely to return. All he'd been able to tell her was that she'd packed in her job and skipped town.

I figured that I would make the address, which was nearby as it happened, in the Bocanazo, my first port of call. Then I asked Miss Schwartz if she and Gisela had been brought up together and by the same parents; and if so, then where were they from? 'Yes,' was the answer to my first question, and 'Hamburg in Germany' her reply to the one that followed. I'd never been to the city and, beyond its geographical location, knew next to nothing about the place.

'So you will take the case?'

'I've taken your money, haven't I?'

'Do you think you can find my sister for me, Mr. Blakey?'

'Most probably…but what if she doesn't want to be found?'

'What on earth do you mean by that?'

'Imagine she's fallen in love with some lucky young brute and shacked up with him, but she doesn't want Daddy to find out.'

'Daddy passed away last year, sadly.'

'Well Mummy, then.'

'She died three years ago.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be.'

'Do you have any other siblings?'

She shook her head and sighed, then took a delicate chew on her lower lip. 'It's not like her, to fail to write or call like this.'

'Did you have an argument with Gisela?'