by Pablo Poveda
“Good morning, Mr. Caballero,” said a masculine voice. It was him, Rojo. “Are you not working today?”
“It’s too early for your questioning, officer,” I said. I noticed him walk until he was standing next to me. He was dressed as a civilian, and given his mannerism, he must have been in a good mood.
“You left very early last night,” he said with a hint of irony. “I would’ve liked to have a word with you.”
“Don’t you ever take a break?” I said, looking at him behind my sunglasses.
“We’ve made progress on the case,” he continued. “Can we talk while we have our coffee?”
We sat at a table on the terrace. We ordered coffee and oily toast. He took off his sunglasses and placed them on the table. I kept mine on, for I wanted to prevent him from reading my reactions. Rojo wanted to trick me into becoming his friend so that I would yield more information. He was a cop, a sewer rat.
“Is this on the record?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he said. “On the contrary. This is a conversation between two people who have gotten acquainted, understood?”
He asked me to put my cell phone on the table. If we were going to have a confidential conversation, he needed to make sure that I would not go behind his back. Rojo had taken way too many freedoms.
“Why are you doing this?” I tried to appear sympathetic.
“I have my reasons,” he said. “Something doesn’t add up.”
“Really?” I asked. “Any news? Was it really murder?”
“Let’s make something clear,” he said. “Let’s avoid technicalities, okay? I don’t want to draw attention.”
“Alright.”
“Why did you lie to me?” the policeman rebuked me. “You didn’t tell me that Hidalgo was related to Rocamora’s suicide.”
“I guess it no longer matters, does it?”
“You’ll get in big trouble if you do it again.”
“Sure,” I said defiantly, taking another sip. “What do I have to do with any of this, anyway?”
“You are keeping something from me.”
“I’ve told you already,” I insisted. “I don’t know what kind of relationship they had.”
“What did Rocamora say to you?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”
I weighed my answer. I did not have much to lose. Hidalgo had parted this world, and if I did not tell the policeman what he wanted to hear, he would not leave me alone.
“He confessed murder.”
“Interesting. Whose murder?” the policeman inquired.
“A girl’s. He didn’t give me any names. He just mentioned a girl. I guess he couldn’t handle the burden of guilt,” I said. The policeman gazed at the void and was pensive for a few seconds. “Am I still a suspect?”
“What else do you know?”
“That’s it,” I replied.
“Don’t lie to me,” he repeated. “You met with Hidalgo before his death.”
“What would I earn with lying?” I asked. “We hadn’t met in a long time. When I told him Rocamora had killed himself, he left hastily.”
“And what did you do?”
“I followed him.”
“That’s a felony.”
“Alright,” I said, “allow me to rectify. I took a cab. The last time I saw him alive, he entered an apartment building. Who lives there?”
“Nobody,” the policeman said. “He was leasing the apartment. He must have had an affair.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said pretending interest. “He had a home of his own. Hidalgo didn’t need to hide anything.”
“That’s what you think,” the policeman replied. “Not only did he hang himself, but he outlined a path for us to start, an open door.”
“What?” I said astonished. That was a real blow.
“Before he hanged himself, you know, he left a hard disk and several folders with documents on a desk.”
“What’s in them?” I asked, incapable of hiding my excitement.
“It’s confidential.”
“Really?”
“You’ll have to ask his girlfriend,” the officer said.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked.
“The girl,” he said. “Hidalgo was seeing a girl. I saw you coming out with her from the funeral home.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” I said, pulling out a cigarette. I lit it in front of him. “How long have you been following me?”
“Listen.” He leaned toward me. He snatched the cigarette from my lips and tossed it to the ground. “Two people have died, not coincidentally. I have no particular interest in you, but I don’t like you. This is not a movie, but my job. If you give me one good reason, I’ll come after you and make your existence a living hell.”
His words resonated in my skull. The sympathetic police officer mask only lasted so long. I decided not to berate him about my cigarette. Evidently, he did not want anyone to smoke near him.
“You have the wrong suspect,” I replied. “I’m not the kind of person who would do something like that.”
“And who is?” he asked. “You’d be surprised what one is capable of, given the chance”
“You’re wasting your time,” I replied.
“Not at all,” he said confidently. “I know everything about you. I know who you are and how you work.”
“What about her?” I asked about Clara. “What do you know about the girl?”
“What do you know?”
“She was Hidalgo’s girlfriend,” I said. “He never told me anything about her.”
“Then you know nothing,” the policeman replied. “Be careful. She can get you in a lot of trouble.”
“How nice of you.”
“I’m doing my job. Don’t end up like them,” he said. His words were bewildering. Was that a threat? Either Rojo knew something that I ignored, or he was bluffing. He tried to warn me about Clara but only managed to confuse me even more. Or did he mean that? He took his sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, hiding his eyes from me. He pulled out a ten-euro bill and left it on the table. “Coffee’s on me, I have to go. You know where to find me. Keep your mouth shut, we’ll talk soon.”
I went to the bar and asked for the check.
When I returned to the table, he had left already.
He had jotted down an address on a napkin. He was a man of few words, indeed. I took the napkin and my phone, left the place, and headed downtown.
The conversation with the policeman had left me exhausted. He had recently appeared in my life and had already started to give me headaches. I needed to think, go to the beach promenade next to the rocks, take a few notes, and organize my ideas. Getting drunk and listening to Coltrane would help too. Getting laid would come in handy as well. I needed calmness, but it was impossible to find it among a tide of reddened tourists at almost 100°F.
I needed to know more. The officer had stoked my curiosity. If Clara was really dangerous, I would find out empirically. It was almost noon, and I would need a drink soon. The need to write an article, or at least a few words, corroded me on the inside. I had also lost my notebook. I could not remember where I had left it. My notes, my life. Writing was both my drug and my therapy. It did not matter what I wrote, the need had become a sickly addiction. My head was saturated with information, boiling like a pressure cooker, and I needed to spurt phrases in a chronicle-shaped elixir for the brain. Hundreds of thoughts piled up and brawled in my head, one upon the other without letting me breathe.
I thought about Ortiz and how he would handle the office without me; about my family, I had not called them in weeks. I thought about my banking account — if it still existed — and about all the voluptuous girls with whom I had been in the past. I thought about Manuela, her curvy shape, and how great a summer morning like that would have been, surrounded by cans of beer, making love under the window in her apartment, sweating under the sheets, getting drunk until passing out. If we only were still together. I thought of all t
hose things with a mix of nostalgia and longing, albeit without too much attachment.
One last name crossed my head.
I thought of Blanca Desastres, her unintendedly funny last name, her inherent ill intentions, and how all of that actually aroused me. I caught myself thinking about Blanca like a frustrated teenager, aware that his love interest was way out of his realm of chances. Her face had gotten engraved in my retina and stuck in my mind. The same way a piece of discarded chewing gum sticks to an outsole. I shook my head in disbelief that I was having those thoughts. I blinked to clear my mind, but the girl remained there, in her shirt with Venetian-stripes. It could not be true. Love was a passing state that got solved by having sex with a different person. I could not be in love. I had stopped believing in such nonsense a long time ago. Love is but a TV commercial, a lie. I needed to sleep with someone. Just that. Before I realized it, I had already gotten to the central market square.
I heard a phone ring. I thought it came from a house. Then I realized that it was next to me. It was an old phone booth, ringing in the middle of the street. I looked around me, but no one reacted.
I was tempted by the curiosity of talking to a stranger.
I approached the phone hypnotized by the bell and took the handset.
“Hello?” I said.
“It’s me,” said a feminine voice. It was Clara. “We have to meet. I need to tell you everything.”
“Of course,” I said surprised. “How?”
“On Carlet Street,” she said. “There is a parking building. I’ll see you there in one hour. I’ll be waiting on the top story.”
“Hold on,” I muttered. “Where are you now?”
The call was cut off.
“Shit!” I cursed and slammed the handset.
I walked out the phone booth and looked at the façades, the balconies, and the grocery stores. Clara was nowhere to be seen, and the sun glare blinded me.
* * *
I stuck my finger through the collar of my shirt and took out a golden cross that always hung on my chest. I kissed it. I felt falter, my legs were shaking, and the palms of my hand were rivers of sweat. I walked to the entrance of the parking building. Clara’s choice for a rendezvous point was very well hidden. The parking building was located between two skyscrapers, in the middle of a narrow street that connected two avenues. I went up the stairs toward the top floor. All car parks smell the same — motor oil, burnt tires, gasoline, and exhaust gas. In the dark, I walked on the tarmac when I saw the sunlight coming from the top story. The top floor of the building was an attic. I checked the time, but I did not see any girl.
I walked around and saw the surveillance cameras. Everything was guarded, controlled, and monitored.
I was wondering whether everything had been a bad joke and if I was wasting my time when a Ford Sierra illuminated me with its headlights. I turned around and saw her. It was her, wearing sunglasses inside the vehicle.
She gestured me with her hand, and I approached her.
“Clara?” I said.
“Get in, quickly!” she muttered from the inside.
I got in the passenger seat and fastened my seatbelt. There was something off in that scene. Either the car was too big for her, or she looked tiny in the driver’s seat. I looked at the back seat covertly; it was full of disorganized old books and junk. My feeling that there was something out of place increased. She started the engine and left the parking building very slowly. The car yanked and stalled as she changed gears; she did not look comfortable behind the steering wheel like that was somebody else’s car.
“Is this yours?” I asked.
“The car?” she said. “No. It’s my father’s”
I suspected that she would be lying to any question I asked her, so I decided to keep quiet and save the banal questions.
We left the parking building by another exit and merged in the traffic. The radio was off. Clara drove with her sunglasses on. She had not taken them off at any moment. I looked at her with the corner of the eye and understood why. She was hiding part of her face. I was able to tell a bruise on her right eye. She wanted to conceal the fact that she had been beaten.
We drove in silence until we arrived at the apartment building where I had followed Hidalgo. A trip whose memory was still fresh in my memory.
“I want to show you something,” she said. She looked upset. We parked next to a coffee shop on a corner. We entered the establishment and Clara sat at a table. I followed. “Let me buy you something.”
I did not refuse.
The waiter approached our table.
“What are you having?”
“Coffee,” she said.
“Whiskey and coke,” I added. Clara looked at me with surprise. The waiter did not look baffled in the least. He was used to people ordering alcohol at any moment during the day.
“Coming,” said the man and left.
“Are you going to take off your glasses?” I asked.
“No,” she said. I don’t want to draw attention.”
“You already have,” I replied. “I doubt anything will change.”
The waiter returned, placed the coffee, a bowl of French fries, and a whiskey and coke in a highball glass on the table.
“I’d like to pay the check now,” Clara said, giving him a ten-euro note, “please.”
“As you wish,” said the man a with a hint of bewilderment.
“Look, Gabriel,” she started saying. “There is something that you have to know.”
“Carry on, please,” I said after taking a drink. “What is all this about?”
“Hidalgo was not my friend,” she said. “She was my lover.”
“Boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Call it what you will,” she said. “We didn’t live together; none of us was ready to take that step and decided to draw a line between each other’s life, so we rented an apartment to be together. We met at the faculty. He wasn’t my teacher; I didn’t even know he was one. He was at a crossroads of his life.”
“How did you two get acquainted?” I asked holding the cold glass in my hand.
“At a session.”
“What kind of session?”
“Therapy,” she answered. “I see you only met the old Hidalgo.”
“Go on,” I said angrily. I took a pen out of my pocket and started jotting down on a napkin that thanked me for my visit. I had never heard of that side of my friend that that woman was revealing to me.
“I worked at an organization that helped troubled people,” she said. “I’m a psychologist. One morning, I was there, reading a book, when I saw him come into the premises. He was depressed, his face revealed a deep sadness. His voice captivated me. He looked timid, as though he gave a lot of thought to anything he did. I asked him to calm down and signed him up for the first session. I promised not to disclose his identity.”
“When did that happen?” I asked incredulously.
“Before he got appointed rector,” she said with a nostalgic smile. “By no means was it a coincidence. Everything came down to that.”
“He never sought responsibilities,” I replied. “What happened?”
“Hidalgo came asking for help and got it. At first, he only listened to the stories of others. Then, he opened up to the group. He told us about his divorce, his financial problems, his son — ”
“He had a son?” I asked astonished.
“No,” she said. “Not anymore. He died after a year. That’s the reason for his separation.”
“Wow,” I said, trying to digest the hard blow of information. “He never told me.”
“He also told us about you,” she continued.
“What did he say?”
“He never referred to you as a friend,” she explained. “He never even told us your name. He spoke about an inner demon, a creature that had dragged him to an abyss of debauchery. He wanted to get rid of you but couldn’t break up the bond that kept you together. You were his drug, he felt free around
you, but the moment he returned home, he would witness his life falling to pieces.”
“Are you mocking me?” I said. Her words bristled my hair. A cold sweat ran down my spine. I was the antagonist in Hidalgo’s story. “I never forced him.”
“I know,” she said. “In his eyes you were like a demi-god.”
“I think Hidalgo lost his mind.” I took another drink of the whiskey. “Now I understand why he avoided me all this time.”
“He needed help,” she said. “We took care of him.”
“Did you, really?” I asked offended. “Why did he hang himself then?”
“He wanted to protect me,” she answered. “It was my fault. I encouraged him to do it.”
“To commit suicide?”
“When he gave up drinking and managed to forget about you,” the girl explained, “he became another person, a new being. Unrecognizable, admirable.”
“So I saw,” I interjected. “And you encouraged him to do what?”
“I fell in love with him but never told him,” she continued. “We had eaten out once and again, but we never got to do anything. Once, I invited him to spend the weekend with us, at a retirement of silence. That’s how he got to meet the rest of the group. Our family.”
The story got darker with every word that came out of her mouth. I could not believe that Hidalgo had been brainwashed up to the point that he had forgotten about me. Clara was right. He was another person when I saw him at the restaurant. Then I wondered what he had done for them to want to kill him.
“That’s how he was appointed rector, isn’t it?” I deduced.
She nodded in agreement.
“He developed a skill to empathize with others that not everyone liked,” she continued. “Antonio shone with light of his own, and our guide got jealous.”
“Your guide...” I uttered. “Eerie.”
“The rest is history,” she said. “Gabriel, you have to publish this and let the people know — ”
“That Hidalgo had joined a cult?” I said, disturbed by my own words. “Is that what you want me to tell?”