Chapter Twenty-Three
The guitarist isn’t doing William any favours.
It may be a genuinely old bodega, with its gnarled beams and hanging hams, an authentic five-star haunt for TripAdvised, pre-processional tourists (“best tapas in town – be prepared to stand”), but he deems it far too early for music.
Not too early, however, for the overpriced and rather large Scotch he is downing morosely in the semi-darkness.
He glares at the offending musician, back-lit by a morning sun that lingers, like an underage customer, at the doorway.
If the guy rashly asks him for a request, he already knows what it is likely to be.
William rummages in his laptop bag. Even he is sufficiently self-aware to know that he is totally obsessed with – and permanently lopsided by – the contents of this particular hand luggage.
His bulky laptop, the old-fashioned jotting pads, diary, power bank, back-up power bank, EEC travel adaptor plugs, a selection of coloured pens.
And, of course, the stacks of business cards and company brochures.
Luisa jokes with him, although the digs are not so jokey these days, that he carries enough cards to give one to every person he passes in the street. And that most people already have one.
He slips out one of the glossy brochures.
Matheson Sutherland, Marketing Consultants.
He had wanted a pithy slogan stripped across the bottom of the front cover (‘We mind your own business’ or the like) but Sandy had thrown that idea right out of the park.
Told him it was the old advertising copywriter coming out.
Prospective clients, he had opined (as he tends to do, in that smarmy, seductive brogue) want testimonials from their fellows or, even more potently, their betters, not off-the-shelf platitudes.
He flicks open the brochure.
Staring out at him in full colour is that familiar and to him rather bland face, smiling with appropriate yet not overweening confidence.
Neighbouring him, in a similar square of his own, is Sandy Matheson.
His dearest friend from uni days, perceptive matchmaker and longtime partner, looking unnecessarily handsome and un-balding.
The wavy, dirty-blond hair has hardly changed, thinks William, either in style or generosity, from that honeymoon picture in Luisa’s accursed album.
Nor has that smile beneath the fine Roman nose; a smile reeking of a well-born assurance, one that the guy hasn’t just slapped on for some smarmy photographer.
William closes the brochure and throws it back with some force into his bag.
“Okay, Senora Sutherland,” he announces into the darkness, half-rising from his hard wooden seat, “the second so-called honeymoon is over!”
The offending document lands next to the paperback he has just bunged in there from his bedside, more out of habit than design. He knows bloody well that he is not going to waste good festering time on a novel, however tense and well-written.
Yet something about it catches his eye.
It is probably the deliberate dimness of the bodega, in contrast with the already glaring sun, but the vaguest disconnect just registers in his 40%-proof breakfasted brain.
He removes the paperback until it picks up the light.
The first barely downed slug of whisky moves swiftly back up into his throat.
In his hand he holds a brand-new paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code.
What the hell—?
He turns it over and around, as if – like some basic yet still impressive conjuring trick – it will revert to John Le Carré’s The Night Manager before his very eyes.
It doesn’t.
So he drops it and burrows somewhat frantically back inside his bag, just in case the ‘manager’ is still lingering somewhere in one of the many convenient nooks. Perhaps the rogue Dan Brown has simply been slipped in while he wasn’t looking, by some kindly, book-sharing stranger.
And then he remembers.
Last night. The Yellow Café.
Just before they were quitting that hostelry of madness, William had spotted a paperback novel that had slithered out of his younger self’s open and somewhat tatty sports bag.
So, of course, he had graciously tucked Mr le Carré safely back in.
Who wouldn’t? Allowing the young man to continue with its reading, hopefully to the dramatic end this time round.
A pastime he clearly enjoyed and that William still does, given the time. Which, of course, he rarely is.
He picks up the celebrated yet unfamiliar novel again, but this time his hand trembles so violently that he is scared the chunky new book is going to slip right out and topple his not quite empty glass.
So he gently sets the bestselling thriller back down on the table and drains his Scotch. For safety’s sake.
The sweat that runs down his face has nothing to do with the temperature of a city on the boil. No fan is going to ease it.
He has to speak to her.
Now.