“It’s personal.” He couldn’t tell her that he needed to see what had happened to the laptop. “Do you think you could get your hands on it, discreetly? I don’t want anyone to find out.”
“I’ve got a friend down at the command center. I’ll see what I can do…”
Coming from Luisa, this meant: Consider it done.
“Oh, and another thing. Try to get some information on Inspector Alberto Alcázar, anything you can find.”
For once, Luisa didn’t joke. The inspector’s name was enough to make her serious.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Gonzalo smiled. Trouble was a generous term for the situation he had gotten himself embroiled in, with its many fronts.
“I don’t like that guy, Gonzalo. Lately he’s been coming around your father-in-law’s office a lot, and I don’t know how to explain it, but he scares me.”
“Would it bother you less if I told you he’s officially no longer a cop?”
Luisa didn’t seem comforted. Still, she said she’d do what she could to comply with her boss’s wishes.
When did he stop caring about his job? Alcázar couldn’t remember. From among his inventory of excuses and justifications, he’d selected the date of Cecilia’s death as the beginning of the end. But that wasn’t true, and at this stage in the game, who did he think he was fooling? The fact of the matter was that he’d never liked his job, although that didn’t mean that for a few years, while his father was still active on the force, he didn’t enjoy it. He did, but always in a seemingly surreal, disjointed way. It had been like a game, and then the game became too real. Was he going to miss his old routines? Not a chance.
“What have you found out about Atxaga?”
Agustín González was dressed for a formal dinner. He looked good in his black tux and bow tie. You have to be born with a kind of poise in order to make sophistication seem natural, and the old man had been. On walking into the office at Agustín’s house, Alcázar had seen a girl who couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. She wasn’t your typical floozy; this one was refined: Persian-looking features, slim waist, and inconspicuous bust. Agustín—don Agustín—was getting soft; he went for the wild outrageous girls less and less these days. They were all getting old.
“Out of the picture. But as soon as he shows his face, I’ll break it.”
Agustín adjusted his cuff links, which perfectly matched his platinum watch. A watch like that would have been enough to send Cecilia to a private clinic in the U.S. for cancer treatments; that was what all terminally ill rich folks did. It wouldn’t have saved her life, but she’d have gotten a few more months and a less agonizing death. This was what made Alcázar so sick, when it came down to it—not her pain, but his, and the knowledge that if you have money, not even death is the great equalizer. Forget what poor wretches said—the illusory hopes for some sort of final justice, the bullshit about every pig going to slaughter on the Feast of San Martín. It just wasn’t true. Here was the old man in all his splendor, making pacts with the devil. How many people had he fucked over? Too many to count, a fair few of them with Alcázar’s help.
“I admit that if the bastard had finished off my son-in-law, he would have done me a favor.”
“What about your daughter and grandkids? Would he have done them a favor, too?”
“They don’t need him. They’ve got me. I take care of everything, that’s what I do. And now I have to take care of this piece-of-shit property that’s gone from being a headache to a migraine.”
Alcázar stared at a photo on a small side table. In it were Agustín González and the inspector’s father. The image of his own father, so young, shocked him, as it always did. The fifties had been their Golden Age, a time when they were free to make and break all the rules in the book. The lawyer was a minister’s son; the commissioner, a man with no scruples. It was easy to see who’d taken the bigger slice of the pie. But it was also true that this photo was the reason Alcázar was able to rub elbows with the old man, call him tú rather than usted. He recalled afternoons when his father used to take him along to the dog track to take care of business. Like it or not, his dad had paved the way.
“You did a good job on Gonzalo’s crazy mother. How did you convince her to sell?”
Alcázar was evasive. Luckily, there were things even the old man didn’t know about.
“If he starts incompetency proceedings for his mother, the contract won’t be worth the paper it’s written on. And even if he doesn’t, you can’t begin work orders without his twenty-five percent.”
Agustín González inspected his nose, teeth, and cheeks in the dresser mirror. He wasn’t stupid enough to be fooled by his own mesmerizing appearance but did feel satisfied at what he saw. A world where everything was always coming up daisies, that was what was expected of him and that was what he, the consummate actor, was going to present. Still, maybe tonight his self-assurance—even with a girl as gorgeous as the one waiting in the living room for his arm—wouldn’t be enough to convince his clients that the lakeside project was running along smoothly, full steam ahead. People like that didn’t care about fireworks. They had no interest in bells and whistles. What they wanted were facts, data. And until now this was what he’d offered them. But Alcázar was right: He had a problem on his hands. And to powerful people—infinitely more powerful than he was—problems were like wrinkles in the red carpet: Someone had to smooth them out before they walked by, and that was his job.
“I don’t know what kind of trick you played on Esperanza, but pull another one out of your hat and convince her idiot son to sell.”
“I’m all out of rabbits.”
Agustín González adjusted his bow tie and frowned, noticing how low his jowls hung.
“Well, hunt one down wherever you can. Time’s running out, Alberto. I bet your father would have known what to do.”
He’d seen the old man give that look before, the empty glimmer in his eyes that said to hell with scruples, morals, good and evil. He was made of sterner stuff, he lived in that limbo where gods live, impatiently watching the strife of mere men. He didn’t want to be troubled with details, unseemly or otherwise. He wanted the contract on his table. That was what he was saying when he brought up Alcázar’s father. But Agustín didn’t understand that times had changed. Gods no longer raised their arms in Fascist salute, went hunting with “El Caudillo” Franco, or whoring with his son-in-law, the Marquis of Villaverde. You couldn’t toss dead bodies in a ditch or throw them out the police station window these days. But the old man didn’t realize that. Or he did but didn’t give a shit.
“You do know we’re in a bind here, right?”
Agustín González examined his own face, now transformed, in the mirror. “What do you mean?”
Alcázar stroked his mustache. Even the gods had pimples on their asses. He pointed to the hand-painted Russian dolls Laura had given him. They were beautiful, inexpressive but brightly colored, dressed as peasants, with floral handkerchiefs tied around their heads. The old man had insisted on buying them when he saw them in Alcázar’s office. He wanted them as a trophy, like the deer, boar, and wolf heads he displayed in the library, from a time when all of Spain was a private hunting preserve for those of his class.
“If it’s true that your son-in-law has grounds to reopen the case—”
Agustín González was irritated but didn’t raise his voice. He never lost his sense of decorum, never came out of character. “He’s got nothing.”
“What if he does?”
Agustín smiled, consulted his platinum watch. The young lady with Persian features would be getting impatient.
“Then you do whatever it takes to get it from him.”
“Whatever it takes?”
The old man shifted his gaze from the inspector with scorn.
“You know, I really miss your father. You never had t
o repeat things with him.”
11
NAZINO ISLAND, SIBERIA, EARLY MAY 1933
Things were slipping away. Nothing seemed real, and at the same time everything seemed all too real. Confronted by this impossibility, Elías clung to Irina each night. Slowly, after Anna had fallen asleep, she would take off her clothes and lie beside him, like a leaf falling into his arms. A leaf that sometimes trembled and others seemed not to know he was there. Making love in silence, surrounded by strangers—stretched out at the back of the barge, pretending to sleep or turning away to give them a modicum of privacy—was not easy. At daybreak, as the sun began to peek out hesitantly, she would dress in the same silence, a silence that hurt Elías. Except at night, Irina refused his touch. Any sign of affection only heightened her fear and panic, as if she sensed what everyone feared and no one said aloud. The closer they got to Nazino, the less willing she was to harbor any illusions of hope. The ship charted its maddeningly slow path through the waters of the River Tom, nothing to see but the endless sterile landscape of sandy banks and small islets. No possible life.
Irina had a small book of poems that she kept hidden. Elías sometimes saw her reading it. Occasionally, she’d look up and fix her stony gaze on the riverbank, lost in the distance, and no one could bring her back. She’d recite a poem in her contralto voice, always the same poem. And when she got to the end, she’d stop and blink, as though the final verses had been erased from her memory. Then she’d cover her mouth with her hands and begin to cry. Elías had tried to console her, but she only looked at him—coldly, hurtfully—from the corner of her eye, refusing to share the pain that was hers alone. A night or two later, she’d come back to him, lie by his side on the rotting wood of the barge’s floor, curl up in his arms and kiss his wrists, the palms of his hands, his chest. Elías had learned that it was pointless to ask her anything and took comfort in that moment, breathing in her body not through his nose but with his fingers, his mouth, his skin. He’d hold her until he felt, once again, that spark of life being rekindled, the warmth that he so needed.
For several weeks the barge made its way glacially forward, until they reached the confluence of the Tom and the Ob, chunks of ice melting in the coming spring. At this point the currents became powerful, the river filled with gorges, and large islands appeared, barren but for sparse clusters of black spruce and fetid swamps. The barge was forced to reduce speed to keep from running aground in the muddy sand. It cleaved its way through the water, churning up frothy white crests ahead, its wake disappearing almost instantly behind. And then finally, one morning, the boat’s engine stopped whirring, and they turned right, toward the shore, coming to a stop at an old abandoned dock. Someone with a macabre sense of humor had posted a wooden sign: WELCOME TO THE ISLAND OF NAZINO. ENJOY THE SCENERY. IT WILL BE YOUR GRAVE.
There was nothing to see. Nazino was a remote island some three kilometers long and over one kilometer wide, at the confluence of the Ob and Nazino rivers, an uninhabited territory with a few clusters of pines and huge expanses of murky swamp, which in the summer became a breeding ground for all manner of insects. Out beyond the southern shore lay the vast expanse of the steppe, inaccessible.
“They can’t leave us here,” Elías murmured, when the prisoners were forced to disembark.
In total there were more than two thousand people, guarded by some fifty poorly equipped soldiers and a handful of exceedingly young officers. The only structures were a very few makeshift barracks for the guards, which had been thrown together from the remnants of old fishing shacks abandoned long ago. No living quarters, no administration, no medical unit, no latrines. Nothing but a few old canvas tents, surrounded by bolts of barbed wire that hadn’t even been unrolled. The authorities hadn’t bothered to put up more than a few watchtowers, close to the shore and wooded areas; no one in their right mind would attempt to escape. There was simply nowhere to go. Tomsk was more than 800 kilometers away; Moscow might have been around the corner and still no one could possibly reach it.
Prisoner brigades were organized. They were ordered to erect their own prison, to build with their own hands the very structures that would incarcerate them, and yet there were almost no tools, wood, or nails. Each brigade was led by an auxiliary police officer of sorts, whom the guards had recruited from among the common prisoners. When it was Elías’s turn to be assigned a brigade, the officer pointed to Igor Stern, who was to be his leader. This was not a coincidence. Igor gave a sardonic salute from the tent he’d already appropriated. Claude, Irina, and Anna were sent to another brigade. At least Claude would be nearby. Elías knew the Frenchman would do anything within his ability to protect them, though this was slim comfort. Nothing could be done without the consent of men like Igor and his ilk, and from the first moment they made it clear to Elías that his life was going to become a nightmare far worse than it had been thus far.
Elías often bumped into Michael—with his shadow, Martin, always trailing close behind. They tried to avoid each other, but when an encounter was inevitable, Michael would fix him with a furious gaze, as though somehow Elías were to blame for what he had become. Martin would offer a guilty, timid smile and even sneak him food or clothing when no one was looking. His excuses and justifications were pathetic and infuriated Elías, especially when he then went on to rob or beat someone mercilessly, simply to please Michael. For the time being, Igor Stern was too busy organizing his thieving operation and imposing a reign of terror to worry about Elías. But when they crossed paths, he’d smile callously to remind him that they had unfinished business.
“I still want your coat.”
Typhus and dysentery soon ravaged the camp. The only rations were woefully insufficient sacks of flour, which many people cooked after mixing it with the filthy, toxic water. People were starting to die of dehydration, high fever, and hunger—the hunger was appalling. What few rabbits and squirrels there had been soon disappeared, and even the rats that had been on the barge with them were highly coveted. There were almost no birds flying overhead on their way to warmer, less rainy climes. The brigades led by prisoners worked piecemeal, clearing scrub, raising columns, and moving tons and tons of sandy ground, sometimes with their bare hands. None of it seemed at all logical, unless the aim was to exhaust what little energy the deportees had left.
Soon an air of madness and disease hovered over the island, the silence was unbearable; it was like an insane asylum where empty shells of people wandered from place to place, absent, hollow, hopeless.
Although the brigades were kept separate during the day, at night they all congregated on the barges moored at the dock. This was the only shelter they had. Elías would find Irina and Claude, and they would comfort one another by telling stories, trying to remind one another they were still human, that they had a past and maybe a future. But their hopes and memories soon became a sickness almost as debilitating as typhus, for by evoking the past or thinking about the future they lost the will to face the present. And in the end, even those attachments dissolved. Day-to-day survival became their only topic of conversation: where you could get a potato, where to steal a cape, which guard might be kinder, how to avoid being clubbed by Igor’s lieutenants.
Only Elías still clung to the belief that the whole nightmare would end, refusing to admit that this mayhem could possibly be the result of a premeditated plan on the part of the authorities. There was no logic to it, no conceivable reason they would decimate people this way. After all, he repeated obsessively, he was a Communist, he’d committed no crime. And his constant mantra was that Stalin could not possibly know what was going on; the Great Father would never allow these atrocities. The first few days, Claude retorted with caustic rejoinders and the two of them would become embroiled in political and ideological arguments. Though they never came to blows, they did sometimes spend a couple of days angry with each other. And Elías couldn’t help seeing that his friend was even more vehement when Irina was ar
ound, just as he could not help noticing that on at least a couple of occasions, Claude had pretended to be asleep, eyes half closed, while actually spying on Irina and him as they made love in silence.
In the last week of April, Claude’s condition grew markedly worse. His fever rose higher and higher, and the stump where his fingers had once been became reinfected. Like a sick dog, he crawled off to be alone, avoiding company, including theirs. He would find out-of-the-way corners and hunker down, his back to the world. Irina could do little for him with no medicine, no quinine, and no clean bandages, yet still she refused to leave his side.
“You have to eat something,” Elías insisted when his friend refused even a small ladleful of the viscous soup given out once a day.
“Why?”
“Because I need you by my side. Without you, I’ll never be able to keep going.”
Claude smiled for a moment, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and almost made a teasing face but then stopped himself. He drank a little but vomited it up almost immediately.
“And what makes you think you’ll be able to keep going if I’m alive?” he asked, eyes glassy, wiping his mouth on the back of his festering hand. “Have you seen what things are like in this godforsaken place? Yesterday I saw a group of prisoners drag a woman into the forest. Guess who was among them?”
Elías could imagine. Michael’s savagery was becoming notorious. Elías and Claude had argued about their former friend’s horrific transformation. Elías could not conceive of an educated, hardworking idealist—a civilized man—undergoing such a metamorphosis. Claude’s view was that Michael had always been a psychopath just as dangerous as Igor, but up until the moment they met, their circumstances had been different. Michael had concealed his contempt beneath a patina of sophistication and restraint, but in the current environment of absolute impunity, where the law of the jungle reigned supreme, his criminal potential had been exposed. In his opinion, Michael would have behaved with similar cruelty—subtler, perhaps, but cruel nonetheless—as a commissar or even a father. His was a somber but categorical conclusion.
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