“Was there anyone with him?”
The waiter was sure he was alone. He mentioned an elegant man who’d been having coffee at the bar.
“Seemed interested in him, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, like I said, he’s a good-looking young man, and the guy at the bar, I don’t know, I just got the feeling he was gay. Took off right after the kid left.”
The waiter provided him with a rough sketch: tall, dark, in good shape, polite, and well dressed. Like a hundred thousand other executives walking around Barcelona every day.
Lukas let out an insistent, whimpering bark. Alcázar rubbed his eyes and stretched. It was almost midnight. He hadn’t eaten at all, but the ashtray was full. After putting on the dog’s leash, he took Lukas down to the street. It was raining, but Alcázar had never minded walking in the rain. It felt like he breathed better that way. Cecilia’s voice came to him, calling out from the bed: Don’t forget the umbrella. Alcázar didn’t like umbrellas but he used to take one with him so she’d rest easy, sticking it under his arm and circling the block without raising it. He still did; it was like having her company: two old boys and a ghost, out for a walk in the rain.
Alcázar thought about Siaka again as Lukas sniffed a fresh pile of shit. He didn’t know much about the kid, and his file stated only that he’d been arrested a few times for minor offenses: prostitution, robbing tourists at luxury hotels…Suddenly the rain cleared his mind.
He jerked the dog all the way home and rushed to search the Internet for all luxury hotels close to the center. There weren’t that many, maybe half a dozen.
The following morning, he got out a photo of Siaka and did the rounds. They recognized him at most of the hotels, either because a tourist had lodged a complaint or because he’d stayed in one of their suites, always one with a balcony facing the sea. But the dates on which he’d been there were all prior to his appearance at the café-bar. Until he got to Hotel Majestic, across from where the international cruise ships docked. The head of security remembered him perfectly.
“He tried to rob a British woman. Coincidentally, she turned out to be with Scotland Yard.”
“Did she file a complaint?”
“No, she said it wasn’t worth it. The truth is, I think she wanted to avoid calling attention to the matter. She rented the room by the hour, you get me? She did recommend, very coolly, that we do a better job monitoring the people at our hotel.”
“Did she pay?”
The head of security searched their computer records and showed Alcázar a copy of the receipt. The date coincided with the day Siaka was at the café-bar. A few hours earlier he’d been at this hotel. It didn’t necessarily mean anything, but it was an important detail nonetheless. The kid knew that the Matryoshka was after him, and rather than hide or run, he was going about his everyday life. This might indicate that he had no intention of bolting, and that either he was reckless or feeling very sure of Gonzalo’s safety net. The idea that he’d been snatched began turning in his mind. But by whom?
The fact was, Alcázar knew no more than he had to begin with. He phoned Gonzalo.
“Any news from our friend Deep Throat?”
“No, and at this rate I don’t think there will be. Everyone and their mother knows I caved to Agustín González’s wishes. You should hear the lovely messages I’m getting on my answering machine.”
Gonzalo seemed chattier than usual. Maybe the fact that his kid’s condition was improving had perked him up, or maybe it was Anna’s daughter who was doing it. The idiot hadn’t listened to Alcázar and was still seeing her. But that wasn’t his problem—Anna and her old friend Velichko could deal with it.
“I’m sure he’s taken off by now,” Gonzalo added.
Alcázar knew it was a possibility he had to consider, but his instincts told him otherwise.
When Gonzalo hung up, he wondered if he’d done the right thing in hiding Siaka’s message from the ex-inspector. Maybe in some way, he told himself, he still had a chance to do the right thing.
The street was blocked off. Apparently the fight between beggars the night before had been a big deal. There was blood everywhere, and a patrol car had come, the officer asking neighbors what they’d seen. An ambulance was taking one of the men away, his face a bloody pulp. The other was trying to give a muddled description of the attacker. Gonzalo paid no attention; he had other things on his mind.
The second he got to the office, he took Luisa by the elbow and pulled her to one side.
“The tape from the day Atxaga attacked me—did you put it in the safe?”
“With the rest of my gore collection,” she said facetiously. “Why? You want to get all hot and bothered again?”
Even the idea of seeing those images again made Gonzalo wince; he was still recovering from the injuries. Every night, as he lay there breathing, he thought about the stab wounds and how close they were to his lung. He steeled his nerves and began going over the tape, frame by frame, concentrating on any details he might have missed. There was Tania, leaning over him, distraught. Gonzalo thought about the times they’d made love, about her kiss at the bar and what she’d said: You can believe in this. Because it’s true. Seeing that image, he had no doubt. Tania had saved his life.
He watched her get up, hands bloody, and search frantically for the cell phone in her purse; he watched her call emergency services. Not until the flashing lights of the ambulance were visible on the parking garage ramp did she leave his side, darting to the elevator. Then the paramedics appeared, and shortly thereafter, the police. Gonzalo focused all of his attention on the SUV and its back door, where he’d left the laptop. He’d already gone over this scene dozens of times, searching for something without knowing what he was looking for, sure he wouldn’t find it.
This time, though, he did see something. It had been there all along, so obvious that he hadn’t realized. There it was in the background, in the camera’s gray area, hardly distinguishable from the dark wall. Almost a ghost. Tania and Atxaga had not been the only ones waiting for him in the garage. There was someone else, someone who knew where the security camera was, where it focused, and where to stand so as not to be seen. The figure crouched motionless for a long time, until the paramedics and police were entirely focused on Gonzalo and placing him gently into the ambulance. It was just a minute, but enough time for the shadow behind the SUV to creep up to the side door and take the briefcase with Laura’s computer. Then the figure slipped away between the cars, hugging the wall until he got to the elevator.
And for a fraction of a second, an instant, it was almost possible to see a face.
Gonzalo had no trouble confirming the hunch he’d had since hearing Siaka’s message. The man was Luis.
“On your feet.”
He’d appeared suddenly, making a stealthy approach. Siaka shrank from the kick. It was getting harder and harder to stay alert. He sat up, leaning on one elbow. It took all of his effort not to collapse back down. His bones felt like broken glass.
“You want another dance?” Siaka asked, gazing at his jailer, his eyelid still swollen, dried blood crusted on his face. How long had it been since the last beating? An hour? A day? He’d lost all sense of time, and soon, he knew, he would lose what little sarcasm he had left.
Luis pulled a chair over to the middle of the room.
“Sit.”
Siaka obeyed reluctantly.
“You seem like an educated guy. Didn’t anyone teach you to say please?”
Luis took a step back and examined the kid carefully. He was younger than he looked, and more frightened than his bravado let on. But he was hard, too, no doubt about that.
“Do you know where we are?”
Luis walked over to the enormous window overlooking the sea and gazed out distractedly. The water was an infinite expanse of gray. This would
have been the master suite, with the bed by the window so that every morning when they woke up, the first thing they saw was the beautiful sunrise.
“This was where we were going to build our dream, the dream you and Zinoviev stole from me.”
“I told you already,” Siaka said for the nth time, his stomach lurching, “I had nothing to do with Roberto’s death. I really liked your son.”
Luis came away from the window and inspected the cathedral ceiling carefully. He’d planned to finish it with hardwood. Laura liked the more reddish tones of chestnut and oak, but Luis preferred beech, so light and airy. It didn’t matter anymore. After he was done here, he’d set fire to the house and the insurance would take care of it. Then he’d go back to London and never return. Ever.
“You liked him? How much did you like him? Enough to earn his confidence in addition to Laura’s? Enough for the teachers at his school to know your face so that nobody would be surprised when you came to pick him up five minutes before his mother arrived? Did you like my son enough for him to trust you when you asked him to get into Zinoviev’s car? Was liking him what made you drive to the lake and help Zinoviev kill him?”
Luis had stationed himself behind the chair so that Siaka couldn’t see him. He’d cuffed Siaka’s hands and feet so tightly to the chair that it was cutting off his circulation.
“I called Laura to tell her, I swear I did. But I couldn’t risk it, I had to go with Zinoviev. He thought I’d earned Roberto’s trust because I offered to follow him and keep my eye on him. I thought…”
“What did you think?”
“I thought that if I was with him, I could do something, help him somehow.”
He really did, he believed it right to the end. He pictured himself tackling Zinoviev, snatching Roberto from him as they walked toward the lake. Siaka tried to gather the courage to do it, to confront the man who had owned him for the past eleven years, the man who held crippling power over him. But by the time he gathered the courage and ran toward them, Roberto was already floating in the lake.
He craned his neck, trying to see Luis. He could hear something, a small motor. An electric drill.
What good is regret? he wondered. None at all. Luis wasn’t going to believe him, no matter what he said; he’d already made up his mind. Luis was going to carve him up, but first he wanted to humiliate him, make Siaka fall to his knees and beg for his life.
“Did Zinoviev beg? Did he? You’re the one who killed him, aren’t you? It wasn’t the Matryoshka, or Laura. It was you.”
Luis grabbed Siaka’s scalp and tugged backward, hard. “Yes, he begged, of course he begged. But it didn’t do him any good. He didn’t answer my question—the same one I’m going to ask you, just once: Why there? Why did you kill my son at the lake where Laura grew up?”
25
BERLIN, APRIL 1945
“Commander, a photo for posterity.”
Elías Gil and the commander of the 4th Company posed in their Internal Security Forces battle uniforms. Elías had just been promoted to commander of the NKVD and awarded the Order of the Red Star for the taking of Berlin; the Communist Party officially recognized him as a hero. Prominent Party members and politicians like Enrique Líster and even Dolores Ibárruri, who’d lost her son Rubén Ruiz in Stalingrad, had sent telegrams of congratulation; and Beria let drop that Elías’s new title—very unusual for a non-Soviet—had been suggested by Stalin himself, who had followed Gil’s exploits in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Warsaw, and finally Berlin. Lies, falsehoods, and propaganda most likely. What did it matter? All he wanted was to end this charade. So he put on a brave face for the army journalists, smiled, and held up the scorched and bloodstained Nazi flag that a propagandist handed him.
“A great victory for all Spanish Communists, comrade!”
Celestino Alonso was political commissar of the 4th Company, composed originally of Spanish combatants led by Commander Pérez Galarza. Since the start of the conflict, they had lost over three-quarters of the company, so this “victory” that the commander so euphorically alluded to could be shared by very few. The last of his comrades had fallen only four hundred yards from the Reichstag, and their bodies were still floating in the River Spree, shot down by the only SS sharpshooters still defending the center of Berlin. To honor them, a young officer had climbed up to the Stephanstrasse plaque with a bucket of paint and renamed it José Díaz Street. A Spanish Communist’s name, tattooed in the heart of Prussia. Despite the air of glory, Elías wasn’t letting any of it go to his head. He especially could not forget the cowardly, incomprehensible decisions he’d been forced to preside over during the four long years of war.
What stung the most was that Soviet troops had called off the seemingly unstoppable Warsaw offensive, after the Polish—knowing that the Red Army vanguard was near—had risen up against the Nazis. Stalin stood by unperturbed as the Germans crushed the uprising, viciously attacking the insurgents. Over 250,000 died in Warsaw, and the city was literally razed. The Nazis, therefore, effectively saved Stalin the trouble of purging a people who would never forget that in 1939 the USSR had invaded them with their allies, the Nazis. War and politics had no time for ideals or heroic gestures. It was all death and suffering, administered at the pleasure of those who massacred because it made sense on paper—the kind of sense that soldiers in the trenches and people on the streets of ravaged cities could not grasp.
Still, Commander Gil posed with his men for the Red Army magazine, made patriotic declarations, and strolled among the smoldering ruins looking proud, trailed after by a camera crew from the NKVD Documentation Service. Pure theater, in which everyone had a part to play. Someone had written on a wall a famous line by the poet and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg:
German cities burn and I feel joy.
Elías trembled in rage. No doubt the ever-present, sensationalistic journalist had averted his eyes from the German soldiers piled up—hands tied behind their back, a shot to the head—beneath his ominous verse. They were just kids, young men who hadn’t had the chance to fire a single shot from their obsolete rifles.
“Make sure to record that,” he ordered the cameraman accompanying him.
“But, Comrade Commander, that would go against directives. No acts of cruelty.”
Elías Gil spat on the fire-blackened ground his hero’s boots walked.
“I said, film it. It might give that idiot Ehrenburg heartburn, but I’m sure he’ll write an epic poem to get over it.”
It drove Elías insane. He couldn’t care less if the Nazis had done much the same in the territories they occupied. Their men carried the red flag, paraded and sang songs commemorating Leningrad and Stalingrad, and then sullied their names by literally raping girls to death, stealing, plundering, and giving free rein to the basest of instincts. Over the course of those first few days, Elías didn’t hesitate to have soldiers as well as officers in his own army shot, executed; other force commanders did the same.
“We are not barbarians; we’re Soviets.”
He no longer knew what he was. All he wanted was to go home. And where was that? Wherever Esperanza was.
Not everything was sheer horror, though. In Tegel, Elías had seen soldiers freely give their rations to hungry local children, unprompted by camera crews or propaganda. Field hospitals and medics treated injured civilians and German soldiers with the same professional care they gave to their own troops. There were even cases of Soviet soldiers and German girls falling in love, starting families who would one day face mistrust from both sides.
Slowly, military units returned to a state of discipline and, after the initial days of chaos, Berlin went from being a death trap for its citizens to an occupied city. On April 25, Soviet and American troops met on the River Elbe, near Torgau. Five days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, leaving Admiral Karl Dönitz to sue for peace, after pointlessly attempting to convince the Allies to j
oin forces against the Soviet Union. On May 2, Marshal Zhukov informed Stalin that Berlin had been conquered. The red flag flew above the Reichstag, over the bodies of 150,000 Soviet soldiers killed in combat. Germany officially surrendered unconditionally on May 7, 1945.
He should have been out celebrating with the rest of the officers and soldiers occupying the German capital, yet that night Elías was drinking alone in a seedy bar on the shores of the River Spree. Yes, it was true that artillery no longer boomed and bombs no longer fell, that the tanks would soon be decommissioned and the soldiers sent home in endless convoys, but for Elías and the NKVD, the war was not over, simply shifting fronts.
The man he was awaiting appeared five minutes later, glanced around cautiously and, judging himself to be safe, approached one of the girls. German women now sold their bodies for almost nothing—a scrap of food, a few cigarettes, some clothing. Had they fallen on the American side, they’d have been far luckier, but this was the Soviet side and men like the one who had just walked in didn’t pay in chocolates and silk stockings. Elías watched him follow a redhead with hard features up the stairs. He waited five more minutes, smoking a cigarette and finishing his drink, and then headed up himself.
The door was unlocked; the redhead had kept her word. Elías turned the handle and walked in. The woman was washing her crotch at a small chamber pot; the man had taken off his shirt.
“What’s going on here? Who are you?”
Elías gave the woman a meaningful glance, and she pulled up her panties and rushed out, pausing briefly to take the money Elías had promised her.
“You’ve got a poor memory, Pierre. Or is that no longer the name you go by? Should I call you the baker?”
The Argelès baker’s jaw dropped. He should have recognized Elías immediately. War changed people, no doubt, but the patch over his right eye and the green intensity of his left were unmistakable.
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