A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  The young man uncovered his head and for a few seconds the pair of them weighed each other up in silence.

  “I’ll leave the two of you alone.” The woman stood and walked off toward a group of people hunched over another fire. They were everywhere, dotting the landscape, hundreds of little bonfires, sources of heat surrounded by clusters of moving shadows. The train had stopped in the middle of the plains.

  Claude offered Elías a tiny roast potato, all of his unspoken excuses implicit in this gesture.

  “This is a treat—half my rations, so don’t waste it.”

  Elías accepted the food. For a few minutes Claude watched him bite into it with patience.

  “It was Michael. He was the first to sign a statement against you, then Martin,” he said finally, contemplating the fire’s bluish flames that seemed no longer to give off warmth, speaking so quietly it was as though he was talking to himself.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  Claude raised his amputated fist like a trophy he was no longer proud of.

  “I was the last to sign,” he replied simply.

  Elías looked away, gazing out to see what was going on beyond the firelight. Despite all the people camped there, the silence was deafening. It was as though they were all alone.

  “And what happened to them?”

  “Our friends turned out to be born survivors. It took them no time to join Igor’s gang—Igor is the prisoner who did this to you. They’re his little toadies; he whistles and they come running, like little lapdogs.”

  Elías shook his head. He found it hard to believe that his old companions could be so fickle—especially Michael.

  “This is the land of prodigies,” Claude said bitterly. “Peasants can be czars. They’re bringing in more prisoners. I don’t know where the hell they’re getting them all from: the ‘land of socialism’ seems to be a never-ending breeding ground for offenders,” he added, driving his point home as he squinted to look out into the darkness.

  Elías said nothing in reply. He still wasn’t ready for Claude’s diatribes. His glance darted from bonfire to bonfire, searching for the woman until he found her. She was holding a little girl, perhaps two years old, in her arms.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Her name is Irina. They say she was a surgeon at a hospital in Kiel. She’s the only reason I didn’t lose my whole hand. You owe her your life, too; she hasn’t left your side for a minute these past days.”

  Elías observed her in the distance. She was ragged, like all of them, dressed in tatters and men’s clothes that were far too big. Filthy and humbled, her skin had the telltale pastiness of tuberculosis. Yet she shone with her own light and dignity, like a sun whose sphere was untouched by its surroundings.

  “And the girl?”

  “Anna. Her daughter.”

  “What happened to the father?”

  Claude shrugged. “She doesn’t talk about him.”

  Elías and Irina exchanged glances for an instant. The determination in her expression was as fierce as it was sorrowful.

  Before dawn, the guards, aided by a horde of prisoners, set upon the people, attempting to force them back onto the train cars. Lying facedown on the ground, Elías awoke with snow piled heavily on the back of his coat. The wet had soaked through his boots and socks and an icy wind lashed his face. He was still very weak and felt dizzy when he tried to sit up. People were breaking camp, and there was no sign of Irina. Claude, too, had disappeared. Guards were recruiting men to haul bundles from an outbuilding to the train. One of them gave him a kick.

  “Get to work!”

  The sack Elías was told to lug was too heavy; he had to drag it between the railroad ties like a dead body. He was weak and feverish with infection, and the sack seemed to weigh a ton. He dragged it two or three yards and collapsed into the snow-covered tracks. Then he stood, tugged on it once more and stumbled yet again. After fifteen seemingly endless minutes, Elías gave up. He was so exhausted that despite being kicked and screamed at by the guards, he didn’t move, deciding it would be better to wait for the snow to bury him alive, as it had others.

  Lying there, Elías began to reminisce about the warmth of his old life, which seemed so far away it was as though it had never existed. He missed things he’d thought long forgotten: his father sitting in a wing-backed armchair reading Chekhov aloud, his mother’s silhouette flickering intermittently in the firelight. Just a few weeks ago he was still a young man ready to take life by storm, walking the streets of Madrid, going to cafeterias, party meetings, movies; he had friends who loved him, plans for the future. Everyone was convinced he was going to overcome fate, break out of the cycle of poverty in which his family had been trapped for generations. Everyone—parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles—had put their entire savings toward his studies, and he promised himself that he would live up to their sacrifice, to make it worth it.

  But Lady Luck had stopped smiling on him. He was going to die an absurd, unexpected death in a land he hadn’t had time to become familiar with. And even if he had learned about the country before his arrival, he could never have grasped what the enormity of the distances and the vastness meant. What he thought of as immense was nothing but the gateway to infinite space.

  Despite all of that, he didn’t feel upset. What he saw around him was so beautiful it was unreal. Incorruptible Mother Nature did as she saw fit with humans, and the only thing for him to do was to stop fighting. Day was breaking in the vast expanse, bare trees and crows on the building’s roof becoming visible in the mist. To his right, a river flowed gently, parallel to the train tracks; beyond that, endless forest.

  Then he saw it: an enormous elk. Beautiful and aloof, the animal emerged from the mist and stopped a few meters away, casting a sidelong glance at Elías with one giant dark glassy eye—king of its world, master of its time—as though attempting to predict the fallen man’s intentions. An apparition! Elías wished he had the strength to approach it slowly, to reach out and touch it.

  Suddenly a loud boom shattered the air, then another, and another. Elías pressed his face to the snow, covering his head with his hands to protect himself. Looking up, he saw the animal rock backward, eyes wild, then its front legs buckled and it fell, dead. Guards continued to shoot it with their rifles, giggling with insane delight, firing long after the animal lay felled and motionless. When silence resumed, everything had died. The crows flew off, cawing; the wind stopped blowing; even the river seemed to stop in its course. All that moved were the rivers of blood streaming from the elk’s nose and mouth, pooling in the soft snow.

  Elías sobbed like a baby.

  The shrill train whistle signaled that it was time to resume their journey. A guard ordered Elías to get up, but he didn’t budge. The man prodded him with the tip of his boot, gauging how much life was left in him, and shrugged, prepared to leave him there like carrion. Elías wouldn’t have minded staying there, staring into the elk’s motionless muddy eyes as the snow soaked up its blood. That would be better than carrying on, suffering this intensely only to die alone a day later, a few meters on.

  “Don’t give them the satisfaction. That’s what they want—for us to die without them having to get their hands dirty. What kind of executioner shirks his own job?”

  A pair of holey old boots with no laces stood inches from his nose. Elías saw a pair of legs bend down in the mist, saw a hand with exceedingly clean, delicate fingers reach out and touch his stiff, frozen hair. It was her: Irina.

  “If they want to finish you off, they’ll have to do better than that.”

  Elías looked up doubtfully into the big gray eyes giving him an urgent, penetrating look. Up, the eyes said. He accepted Irina’s hand, knowing that the woman who held it out was a castaway, too, and that all he could offer her was the promise that they would sink together.

  7

  BARCELONA
, JULY 12, 2002

  The animal was old, but even in captivity it gave off the ferocious air that must have made it leader of the pack when it roamed the miles and miles of its hunting grounds. A transparent partition less than two meters high separated beast from visitors, though at that hour there were very few visitors around. Despite signs in multiple languages prohibiting the throwing of objects and the feeding of animals, the moat around the wolf’s artificial island was overflowing with trash: soda cans, pieces of fruit, ice cream wrappers. Gonzalo even saw a worn-out running shoe. To the right of the enclosure hung an informational plaque: The Great Gray Wolf weighed up to 85 kilos and was found in many parts of Europe, Eurasia, and North America; its teeth were powerful enough to rip apart its prey; primarily cold regions were its natural environment, which explained why the animal’s coat was gray on the back and very white at the paws. King of the Steppe, where nothing could thrive without true survival instincts.

  All of that notwithstanding, this particular wolf’s glory days seemed a thing of the past. It lay in front of a man-made den, muzzle between its front paws. The animal’s gray and white fur was dirty and shedding by the handful. This was molting season, and despite the thermostat in the enclosure being set to a low temperature, a Siberian wolf could never adapt to the muggy heat of a Mediterranean city. The wolf raised its head, ears pressed back, and let out a prolonged yawn. In another time, Gonzalo thought, the yawn would have been accompanied by a long, deep howl that caused half of the animals in the forest to tremble in fear. But years of captivity had eroded the pride in the beast’s almost-white eyes, which now observed him indifferently. Nothing remained of its instincts; there was only sadness and submission.

  Gonzalo observed the wolf, waiting for something. He’d have liked the animal to regain its strength, to see—at least once—its body stand erect on the manufactured cardboard-and-stone rockery, howling, reclaiming the legacy of its ancestors. Defiant, free, despite it all. But all the wolf did was lie tamely, licking at its paws. After a few minutes, the animal struggled onto its front legs, shook out like an old stray in the rain, and dragged itself to the darkest corner of the den.

  That’s me, Gonzalo thought. A tame wolf. Since returning from the lake house, he couldn’t stop thinking about the crazy, senseless plan he’d hatched. It was so unlike him, and yet he couldn’t get it out of his head.

  “Excuse me, sir. We’re about to close.”

  Gonzalo cast a sidelong glance at the zookeeper and nodded.

  He didn’t feel like going home and facing the routine of it all. He felt strange, as if something was struggling to surface and he wasn’t sure he could control it. No one knew that he was paying for a little studio in the Barceloneta quarter; he’d rented it a year ago, when on the verge of separating from Lola. She had no idea how close they’d been to splitting up. Gonzalo had gotten over it but decided to hold on to the studio, to have a space that was his exclusively. Sometimes, not very often, he went there when he needed solitude.

  The building had a doorman, a short bald guy whose name Gonzalo didn’t even know. Every time he went to the studio, he’d shrug the man off with a curt greeting. Gonzalo took the elevator up, leaning against a wood-paneled wall in serious need of a layer of varnish. A small mirror returned his reflection: disheveled hair, bags under his eyes, drooping mouth, skin sagging, the knot of his tie too loose.

  Gonzalo was greeted by the desolate image of empty space, the only furniture on the dark parquet floor a wooden table, two chairs, a stereo and VCR, some books, and a mattress and box spring, still wrapped in plastic. There was a pile of CDs, an ashtray, and in the fridge a bottle of mineral water, a couple of pieces of fruit, and some juice. Three incandescent lightbulbs hung from the ceiling where there should have been halogens. The windows had no curtains, and the nineteenth-century Palau de Mar building was visible from the sliding-glass door leading to the balcony. The sounds of the city were a distant buzz. Lights flashed like a heart beating slowly, at rest. Gonzalo dropped a bag containing his dinner onto the marble counter in the kitchen and drank straight from the tap. The water stank of chlorine. Inserting a CD into the player, he turned the volume down low. Aretha Franklin’s throaty voice told him that it wasn’t a good time to be alone. But loneliness didn’t bother him, he’d never minded being on his own.

  Gonzalo went out onto the balcony. There was no breeze and the humid air coming in from the sea felt sticky. The solitude, background music, and being in a space he shared with no one allowed him to pretend he was still twenty years old, his future before him. This was why he was furnishing the place slowly, picturing what it would look like when he was done. Gonzalo was in no rush, felt no need to fuel this fantasy of lost independence. This space was simply his, the last bastion, the only one that he hadn’t given up. For a few hours here, he could be whoever he wanted. It didn’t matter whether it was real; just believing it was possible was enough.

  Gonzalo’s house, his real home, wasn’t far: a ten-minute drive, but symbolically a world away. Lola would have had dinner by now, perhaps be half asleep on the sofa, reading one of those novels featuring a woman who travels to the other side of the world—she loved those. Perhaps waiting for him to call and say that he’d had the meeting with her father, that the merger between their firms was a done deal. Patricia would be in her room, sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the sound of his keys in the door and his fingers typing the code into the alarm so that she could jump out of her bed and run to his arms. Javier would be at his computer, lost in one of the endless conversations he had in chat rooms.

  Someone knocked softly at the door, twice. Gonzalo wasn’t expecting any visitors, no one had ever come here; that was the whole point. The knuckles rapped again, more insistently this time. The light in the hallway was on, and Gonzalo could see a shadow moving in the crack under the door. When he opened it, there stood the doorman, a cardboard box in his arms.

  “Just bringing you a delivery. Someone dropped this off downstairs.”

  Gonzalo shot the doorman a skeptical look. These were not normal delivery hours. The doorman read his surprise correctly.

  “A black kid brought it, insisted that I deliver it in person, directly to your hands.” He neglected to add that the kid was good-looking and well dressed, and that he’d given him a generous tip—in dollars—to ensure that he actually did it.

  Gonzalo looked at the box. “There must be some mistake.”

  The doorman pointed to a name, written on the box, in marker. His name.

  Gonzalo thanked the doorman, took the box, and closed the door on his expectant face. He took it to the kitchen, set it on the countertop, and opened the refrigerator. After pouring himself a large glass of pineapple juice, he sat down and stared at the package. Finally, he resolved to open it. Inside was a laptop. The most-used keys had sticky fingerprints. His eyes went to a photograph at the bottom of the box. It was partially burned, as if whoever had set fire to the photo quickly had a change of heart and extinguished the flame before it was destroyed.

  “Oh, my God,” he murmured, recognizing the image.

  In it were two large fir trees, a frozen lake and, a short distance beyond it, the house. His house. Laura was smiling, wrapped in a fleece, wild hair covering her forehead. Large eyes peeked out from beneath her bangs as though she was spying from behind the curtains. The burned part of the photo was beyond recognition—all he could discern was an arm and a hand, holding a boy’s. A hand with clean nails and fingers that looked strong, like the arm. A black hand.

  He turned the photo over. One word was written on the back, in capital letters: MATRYOSHKA. Gonzalo turned on the computer, and when the screen asked for a password, instinctively typed in the word. The computer unlocked, showing a series of icons over a background photo of Laura, Luis, and their son Roberto on a beach with a sign at the roadside: ARGELÈS DE LA MARENDA. A vacation photo from the south of France, they l
ooked happy. Was this Laura’s computer?

  He clicked on the first icon and an Excel spreadsheet opened, revealing a sea of codes and numbers. Gonzalo didn’t completely understand it but got the impression it was an exhaustive list of bank transfers, account numbers, and initials that might refer to names. Of what? People? Companies? In several places he saw the initials ZV, with black ticks next to them. Zinoviev? The other icons were similar: They contained lists of ports all over Europe and what might have been the names of German, British, French, Dutch, and Spanish container ships. Dates of arrival were listed, along with the ports of exit, many in Africa and Central America, but also some in Canada and Russia. Beside each entry was a list of names, and a number: Assam, Miriam, Bodski, Remedios, Matthew, Jérôme, Louise, Siaka, Pedro, Paula, Nicole, and on and on, there must have been a hundred. The accompanying numbers were almost all single digit, although a few were double. The highest number was 15, the lowest, 2.

  One folder was labeled Confidential. Gonzalo clicked, but it was password-protected. He guessed a password at random: Laura. A window popped up informing him that he had two more tries before the folder would be automatically blocked. He gave up and instead tried opening a folder containing photos. Zinoviev appeared in almost every one. They’d been taken from a distance with a zoom lens. In some the man was alone, in others accompanied, often by a tall young man—a good-looking, well-dressed black man. Gonzalo returned his gaze to the burned photo. Was it his hand there, holding Roberto’s? Was this the man who’d just delivered the laptop?

  For a long time, he observed Zinoviev’s tattooed face. According to Inspector Alcázar, Laura had killed this man, but how could she have done it the way the police had claimed? Not by shooting him but by hanging him from a beam, using her handcuffs, after savagely torturing him, probably for hours. The man’s fierce appearance and his height—at least six feet tall—and girth made it seem highly unlikely that his sister could have done anything of the sort. It would have required a tremendous amount of physical strength to overpower this man and then toss him around like a rag doll, and no doubt he’d have put up a violent struggle. The medical examiner had said there were no traces of skin or blood on Laura not belonging to her. When Luis asked if Gonzalo thought Laura had killed and tortured this man, he’d instinctively said no. Now he was almost convinced.