The Butterfly Effect

by Luis A. Santamaría

  Pistachio green.

  A new wave of memories hit her in the chest, and a sad smile was on her face. She looked down at herself on the beige couch as she listened to Paul Simon on the radio and always surrounded by that vivacious pistachio green. Thus she passed her afternoons, in that earthly paradise that someone had created for her.

  No, Sara, no! Focus. She shook her head and returned to the real world: 219 Cowley Road, November 10, 2006.

  The pistachio of old was immediately replaced in her thoughts by the three faces that had entered in her nightmares in the last hours: the slow agent "A" (thus she had decided to call him, because she didn’t remember his name) that of his inquisitive companion semi albino, and the fragile and calm Lennard.

  She turned and climbed the stairs, climbing the carpeted steps two at a time. The reason that she was hovering around number 219 on the night of the murder was that she had been sending correspondence to the same address over the past few years. Not with the intention of reaching the hands of the then unknown Mike Lennard, of course, but the letters had arrived, and therefore Lennard must have received and read them. That explains why he knew me so well from the beginning, and also knew all the details of my story, such as Verónica's pregnancy. Anyway, Sara concluded, the letters were in the house and she had to retrieve them, if those policemen hadn’t found them first. She reasoned that in that case, if the detectives had discovered that the witness of the crime had invested all her youth in sending letters to the house where the murder had been committed, she would become the main suspect.

  She swallowed.

  I have to find those papers anyway, she told herself with a buildup of anguish in her throat.

  She inspected each room on the top floor one by one, and spent more time snooping around Lennard's bedroom, which had once belonged to Diana. With a quick breath, she moved around the room, opening the closets and drawers. There was no trace of the letters. It was as if they had not existed or maybe they were locked up in some cabinet in the police station, she thought with growing annoyance. What if Lennard had destroyed them? That was another of the infinite possibilities. After a few minutes of unsuccessful search, she abandoned the top floor.

  She was going straight for the outside when she ran into something she didn’t expect. In the hall, near the front door, a rustic pedestal table held a fixed telephone. Sara had not even noticed its existence before, because she was too focused on not looking towards the bathroom area. The doctor perceived the corner of a paper that protruded from underneath the apparatus, and, as she approached, the corner of the paper became the edge of a letter that had been handwritten. Something flipped inside her. She reached out, lifted the phone and released the piece of paper, which came close to her face.

  Only the inventor of the Rosetta Stone could understand the excitement of Sara when finding the paper hidden by Mike Lennard a few hours before. She read the first few lines of the first paragraph quietly.

  Diana,

  I’m writing from the bus. It is eight thirty in the afternoon and it is already dark, I think I must be on the verge of arriving. I am exhausted, but the long journey has been worth it, how beautiful this is! It is always said that the weather in England is based on rain, cold and fog (you should see my suitcase, it looks like an Eskimo’s), but today makes a splendid day. It was very, very early when I left Ámber, and the train that took me to Madrid took more than five hours. I took advantage of the breakfast being served in the cafeteria...

  It was her last letter!

  She recognized with absolute clarity the words she had written to Diana the other day, sitting next to Porky on the bus that took her from the airport to Oxford. An isolated tear slid down her eyelid and ran down her cheek. She wiped it quickly with the back of her hand and thought. Now it was clear: Mike Lennard had received the letter (in fact, most likely he would have received all of them, without exception), so that from the beginning he knew when and how she had arrived in the city. That is to say, when he found her inside the Turf Tavern giving her a death scare it hadn’t been a coincidence. He was really looking for her. Would he have any kind of obsession with her? Then she looked at the phone and felt a shiver.

  From here he telephoned me the other day, hours before he was killed. He had my letter in his hands as he spoke to me.

  She made an effort to remember the telephone conversation with Lennard, and concluded that what Mike wanted to confess to her so quickly was that he was in possession of her letters, and that consequently, they had never reached its real addressee, the former tenant of the dwelling.

  A bittersweet moment.

  Sara realized she was wrapped in a cold sweat. She put it in the back pocket of her trousers, it was the only memory of Diana she had found, and left the house trembling with three clear thoughts in her mind, each more disturbing than the last: the first was that her trip to Oxford had resulted in vain. The second, and more painful, that the letters never reached Diana and it was very possible that she would never see her again. And the third and at the same time more shocking, that at this point a photograph of her starred the panel of suspects at the city's police headquarters along with a bunch of letters with her name.

  Alyssa Grifero exhaled the first puff of her cigarette and prepared herself for all the objections Jaime was likely to raise. Meanwhile, he shook his head in disbelief.

  “This is crazy!” Cried Jaime. “Why would Sara be in danger?”

  "Because, like me, she's fully involved in Mike Lennard's murder, only her face hasn’t been on the news yet. That’s something that certainly plays against her.”

  "Alyssa, none of this makes sense.” It was the first time Jaime called her by name, a detail she appreciated. “It’s impossible that Sara hurt someone.”

  "Neither did I, and yet here I am.”

  Alyssa had decided to go to the attack with all the conniving she was capable of.

  "Jaime, I can help you find her and protect her. She needs you and you need me.”

  Jaime sighed.

  "I've heard enough. I want you to leave my house right now, or else I'll call the police," he exclaimed again, this time raising his voice a little louder. He stood up and, as a threat, picked up the phone from the landline.

  "I don’t think you will. On the contrary, you will work with me in this house and we will form a good team.”

  Jaime shook his head incessantly.

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "Because I'm going to offer you something that no one else can give you and not all the money in the world can buy."

  Jaime was puzzled for a second.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Alyssa's eyes glowed like two fireflies.

  "I can deliver Shapiro to you on a silver platter. I have at my fingertips evidence that he is a liar and a manipulator. Help me, hide me in your house without asking too many questions, and you will make Ernesto Shapiro regret the day he decided to use you.”

  Jaime's legs were so shaken that he had to sit down again. When he gaped at her, Alyssa gave him a wry wink of complicity.

  Chapter 12

  "Seventh lesson, Morgan: we always fight to the end because victory doesn’t taste the same if we don’t take the risk of defeat. It’s because we are aware of what we could stop having, which makes it much more exciting. We love the expression; hairs standing on the back of my neck, because playing close to the heat, near the fire makes us feel alive. That's why I helped my grandson with his naughty plan, and that's why I'm here right now with you, all locked up. You already got it out of me. Happy?”

  Friday, November 10, 2006

  Tallent watched the stars through the skylight of the bedroom ceiling and realized that for months, perhaps years, she had not paid attention to such a beautiful sight of nature. Lying on her bed with her legs outstretched, she felt exhausted. Warm sweat drenched her bare skin, and the brown hair of her bangs had plastered against her forehead. Turning her neck on the pillow, she stared at h
er companion's lethargy. Her breathing was comforting, moving her shoulder blades to the beat. That night they had made love until they could no more.

  She smiled with all the happiness she thought she could experience, and then she fell into a state of semi-consciousness.

  During a period of time that could range from a few seconds to several minutes, her mind traveled through different places in her youth, as in a succession of slides jumping from one to another abruptly. These projections showed, as in a dream, pictures that immortalized those moments that had remained embedded in her heart like glass shards that remain on the floor for days when a glass breaks. Brunet's gaze on the day they met behind the bar of the Red Lion formed the first vision. The same aura of peace she perceived around her appeared to her now. That magical first encounter gave way to Orbison's song, under the snow and with the witness Minifalcon, which accompanied what turned out to be the dance of her life. Then the first time their skin brushed beneath the comforter, which was when she felt the world had been created for her. The last image represented, somewhat imprecise, the ankle injury that she suffered that fateful last day. Tallent’s trance culminated in a crash like the engines of an airplane about to take off.

  Silence.

  She opened her eyes quietly. The stars continued to glow in the closed night. She looked back to her left and found that everything had been real. Brunet slept next to her almost five years later. Just now that she was beginning to give up, to assume that she would never look at her vivacious eyes again. She grabbed the edge of the sheet and pulled it to her head; embarrassed she covered her stupid expression of uncontrollable joy.

  Many hours before the best night of her life, Tallent was giving a loving kiss to her cat Vader. Then she took the violin case and the sports bag, and went out the door of her apartment to the local gym, of which she was a member. It was 10:30 in the morning, and the day seemed, at that moment, dark.

  Sara Mora seemed to float as she left Mike Lennard's house with the last letter to Diana in the pocket of her jacket. With the indecision of someone who leaves prison after a long period between bars, she looked at both sides of the road and chose to walk in the direction in which she had come. She walked the distance of a block, changed to the other sidewalk and went into a pharmacy, where she ordered a box of paroxetine. She had to show her prescription that had been signed by Dr. Encinas so that the pharmacist, a sulky black girl, agreed to sell it.

  Getting the medication, she thought it was time to get her strength back, so she stopped at the first Costa Cafe she found, chose a turkey and cucumber sandwich with a mayo sauce, and devoured it as she looked out the window. The sky seemed apocalyptic, and it wouldn’t be long before nightfall. When she finished eating, she swallowed the first paroxetine pill in the box. Then she resumed her march along the Cowley Road toward the center, which she reached in more than half an hour. She stood just in front of the Carfax tower (popularly known as the meeting point of the city), and asked in a tourist information booth for the nearest cybercafé. Luck smiled at her this time: around the corner, behind the tower, was the C-Work Cyber Cafe.

  Just opening the door of the premises, its painful ambience imitated the vanguard of the film Blade Runner, she found a free station in the back. "As if someone were reserving it for me." She crossed the narrow room and sat down in the only empty chair. After obtaining Internet connection, she acceded to Skype, and logged in with her account, and verified it in the list of contacts that Jaime had not yet connected. The computer clock ticked 16:50. She waited.

  When she left the gym, she was another woman. Tallent had spent almost an hour and a half beating her body. In addition to the forty-five minutes of the routine jogging session and some other series of weights, she had gone through the torture machines, which was what she called the leg machines, to strengthen her injured ankle. As soon as she stepped out the door, she took a deep breath of cold air and blew it out, causing a cloud of mist to come out of her mouth. Even though the day was gray, there was a comforting sense of well being.

  She then entered a Tesco supermarket and bought biscuits and a bunch of bananas, two of which she ate on the road on the way to Exeter College. She spent the morning in the Exeter auditorium, rehearsing violin pieces with the Oxford Symphony Orchestra. She was surprised that it wasn’t raining when, four hours later, she returned to the street with her umbrella with her. She made a new stop to fill her stomach and then waited standing by the bus stop in front of the Ashmolean Museum. The first had arrived, though Mark, Jennifer, and the rest of the band were soon to come.

  At one-thirty they started the song with a funny rendition of Glenn Miller's In the mood. Mark, the orchestra's leading trumpeter, was a good friend of one of the town’s representatives. Three weeks earlier, he had asked her as a favor to bring together the youngest boys in the group to form a street band of about ten members. The reason was none other than the autumn music festival that the representative in question had been determined to organize and promote, as he was a fan of outdoor concerts. Mark thought the idea was amusing, and the fact of gaining an extra pay for a job that seemed to him pleasurable ended up convincing him. The band simply had to dedicate two hours a day, from Monday to Friday, to walk the streets of the city interpreting some classical music. Each participating orchestra was assigned an area of the city, and Mark and Tallent had been awarded the Cowley neighborhood.

  The mechanism that moves the wings of the butterfly was about to start functioning.

  About two forty-five in the afternoon, when the band had been wandering around Cowley Road for an hour, they passed a sealed building in the doorway in which a patrol car had been parked. This impressed Tallent so much that she almost made a few mistakes on a couple notes. Frowning, and still moving the bow of the violin to the beat of the music, she fixed her gaze on the facade of the house. At that moment she detected from the corner of her eye the figure of a woman who, according to the silhouette of her body, was young. She was in the street, with her back to the road and in an unnatural posture. She seemed tense, and there was something in her that caused, now for her to make a mistake on a note.

  Nobody noticed the mistake (or at least no one showed it), and when the band passed the house, two very serious men came out the front door with the determination to cross the street. Would they be the patrol car cops? Everyone asked the same question with the exception of the young violinist, who kept thinking about the same issue.

  A few blocks later, when the song was over and they were getting ready to start the next one, Tallent explained to her companions that she was feeling bad and that she needed to stop for a while. She persuaded them to continue without her. Mark nodded without asking any questions and the band continued to interpret the music while Tallent, who felt like a miserable liar to her friends, went walking back on the road to Cowley Road. In the next few minutes she crossed where the police car had been, which had already left the sealed building, and reached the point where she had seen the woman hiding behind the corner. An imaginary stone fell on Tallent when she saw no trace of her at 219 Cowley Road.

  She shrugged and, cursing her stupidity, ran out to find the band. When she found it a few blocks later, she put on her best innocent face to explain that she had only suffered a slight dizziness and was already much better, so she resumed walking with her companions. Tallent's violin rang again in the streets of southeast Oxford.

  A few minutes later the first drops of what was going to be a good downpour began to fall, forcing the band representing the Oxford Symphony Orchestra to suspend their music tour.

  The butterfly fluttered its wings.

  Tallent, Mark, and the other members stored their respective instruments and got on a bus that would take them to the center of the city, specifically to the historical Carfax tower. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon.

  Jaime Vergara felt reborn after the hot shower he had just enjoyed. As soon as he left the bathroom, he was seized by a comforting soul mu
sic that, he was sure, had never before sounded in his apartment. Black music simply wasn’t cataloged. He looked about him with a peculiar detachment from one who had just awakened from a long nap. The floor was dark, except for the whitish light that indirectly spread from the monitor of his computer, placed on a desk inside the bedroom. Alyssa was sitting in front of the screen, so that the artificial glow illuminated part of her face. Jaime stared for a few seconds and wondered if the picture disturbed him or, on the contrary, amazed him.

  "Do you mind if I use your computer for a while?" She had asked, just before he locked herself in the bathroom. He had nodded. Total, once accepted that he was giving asylum to a fugitive persecuted by the law, what more could he do than for her to use his things? "You can use it, as long as it’s not for illegal purposes," he had jokingly replied, though his throat croaked as soon as he uttered the sentence. No matter how convincing the young woman might appear in her story, in the end Jaime did not believe that she had the power to present evidence against Ernesto Shapiro. How could she help me with that? It is totally impossible. By God, she's just a child!

  But there was something about her, a kind of gleam in her gaze that suggested sincerity and determination. She was a peculiar human being, of that there was no doubt, but from there to being a criminal that was a long stretch. And considering that he was in a dead end, it was worth taking the risk and to try his luck. In addition, they had something in common: they both had problems with the law. So yes, she could use his computer, she could sleep on his sofa, and she could be his friend.

  "Do you like Nina Simone? I'll take it off if you want," she said from the darkness when she realized that Jaime was watching her.

  He watched her with concern and looked at her disheveled hair, which gleamed by the computer. Ignoring the comment, he entered the bedroom, passed behind Alyssa being careful not to touch her and looked for a shirt and a sweater in the closet. Then he turned to her.