"I'm going down to the grocery store to get some food. Do you want anything special?”
The young woman turned towards him and her face got lost in the backlight.
"You're very kind, but with a little cheese, that's enough. And, of course, I'll pay you for everything when this is over," she said in a low tone that seemed to Vergara close to shame.
"I’ll write down the cheese then. We will have a fondue dinner.”
“Bye!”
"By the way, I like that Nina Simone," he added from the front door.
She gave him a pleased smile.
It was 8:15 pm when Jaime walked out the door of his house leaving Alyssa entertained with his computer. He had a fleeting sense that something was missing. He shook his head and climbed into the elevator with the cheese fondue in his mind.
Grifero sailed aimlessly on the Internet when the bathroom door had opened, letting out a torrent of warm light and then the corresponding cloud of mist. Jaime had come out the door, rubbing his hair with a towel, and he had planted himself in the illuminated area like an island in the darkness of the floor. He was wearing only jeans. Then they both had stared in silence, and Alyssa couldn’t help but notice that his abdominals were still wet. He had said something about the musical thread, and she had held her breath as he approached the room and passed, still bare-chested, inches behind her back. After feeling like a complete idiot when he told her about making the purchase for dinner, she had watched her new roommate walk out the door. She was alone again.
She turned her focus back to the computer. She immediately connected to her Skype account and started a videoconference with Jasper, who was also connected. She updated the events at Oxford in less than fifteen minutes. Although Jasper was shocked to discover that Alyssa had become a hypothetical criminal in the eyes of the rest of the country, there were other things the girl wanted to do before Jaime returned from the supermarket.
When she closed her Skype account and opened her mail, her eyes sparkled. It took less than five minutes to write a private message:
Dorian, I need you to do me a favor. Write this name: Ernesto Shapiro. Find out everything you can about him. I have the hunch that he’s up to his neck in shit, so it won’t cost you a lot of work. I owe you one. And you know, no trace or names, all anonymous.
She pushed the send button and waited. Dorian was online at the time, because he immediately replied:
Easy as pie. Anything else?
Grifero was waiting for that question. She moistened her lips as she weighed the answer:
Yes, there is one more thing, and this is a tad exceptional. You'll have to trust me...
Alyssa's hands trembled as she finished writing the last message and sent it. She then erased the cookies from the computer's memory and turned it off. She undressed and slipped into the shower.
It's a new dawn, It's a new day, It's a new life for me... and I'm feeling good, Nina Simone chanted through the speakers as Alyssa felt the warm water fall on her body.
The computer’s digital clock ticked 4:59 pm, which meant that the peninsula was about to hit six in the afternoon. If Dr. Encinas had conveyed his message correctly, Jaime would connect in a few seconds, it may have been minutes, as she had always considered him a bit unpunctual, and she would finally talk to someone she trusted about everything that was happening to her. She would come into contact with her world again.
The clock digits moved to 5 pm. Sara held an emotional shudder that made her hold her breath. She had been drumming the desk with her fingernails for some minutes. She couldn’t remember exactly, but she would have sworn she'd never been so eager to talk to someone through a damn computer. Had Jaime become her best friend, even though in the last few years they’d only had a few minutes together? The question answered itself when, for some eternal minutes, Sara kept her eyes still on the cloud that accompanied the user Jaime Vergara on the screen. It should be painted green, which would mean that her friend was connected and could start talking. But it was already 5:08 pm and the cloud was still white. Sara's fingernails stopped drumming the desk. With increasing discouragement, she marked quarter past five as a cut-off time. If he had not connected at that time, she would understand that Jaime had decided to move on and not connect. In that case she would no longer consider him her best friend anymore, but a selfish bastard in her long list of selfish shit friends.
She waited until five-twenty, but at that precise moment, more than five thousand miles away; the wings of the butterfly were fluttering at number 53 Orense in Madrid. Sara turned off the computer, clenched her teeth in a gesture of rage, and went out the door of the Internet café.
She was so absorbed in her own misery that she didn’t realize that it was raining hard until she reached the foot of the Carfax tower, where she had to catch the bus back home. Then her eyes fixed on the group, for something had to be seen if her eyelids were open, there a group of young English men and women who said farewell under the protection of their respective umbrellas. Then she looked more closely at them. The first thing she thought was that, perhaps, based on the instruments covers that they carried, it was the band that had passed by while she was hiding from the two police officers next to the liquor store. The second thing that stuck in her head struck her with such a force so enormous that she could not help but moan.
It can’t be true... it can’t be true.
One of the members of the band was a young girl with short hair and pale skin that carried the casing of what appeared to be a violin. The girl was saying goodbye to her companions with a nice hand gesture and then she continued her way under a green pistachio umbrella.
Sara was astonished to see Diana walking down Cornmarket Street under the magical glow of street lamps against the rain. It was almost night.
Diane Tallent walked with raindrops hitting her umbrella to Walton Street and entered her apartment. She slipped off her soaked boots, undressed, and enjoyed a shower. When she left the bathroom, she wrapped herself in her bathrobe and headed for the kitchen with her hair still wet. She cut a generous piece of homemade cheesecake that waited for her in the refrigerator and completed it with a layer of raspberry jam that she layered over. Then she sat down by the window and watched the storm as she savored the cake.
There was a knock at the door, a fact that startled her; she rarely received a visit. As soon as it opened, a light flashed inside. She put her palm to her mouth in an intuitive gesture and felt her knees flutter.
“Diana. You didn’t answer any of my letters," the visitor said in a neutral tone that seemed to feign resentment.
Tallent's eyes widened so that they seemed to explode. There was only one person on the face of the earth who called her like that.
"I... I moved," was the only sensible thing she was able to articulate.
"I know you moved, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?"
The violinist shrugged and her skin flushed.
"Well, are you going to let me in or not?"
"What... what are you doing here?"
"Well, you're the only person I know in this damn town, and since you didn’t read any of my letters, I wondered if you wanted us to catch up.”
A stupid grin of perplexity flashed across Diana's face before she let the visitor in and offered her a piece of cake.
"Do you prefer coffee or tea?" She suggested as she extracted two cups from the cupboard.
"Coffee with milk, you know that."
Diana smiled even harder. Then she set to work.
"I'm sorry I moved without saying anything," she said, still looking at the coffee pot. “I wanted a little change in my life and I didn’t imagine you would write to me. How did it go?”
Though she had her back to her, she felt Sara watching her with expressionless eyes. Those eyes.
"Diana, I thought something had happened to you," the visitor finally said. “When I saw that you didn’t respond to the letters, I thought I would never see you again, or that you might ha
ve decided to leave me.”
She paused heavily.
"Did you decide to move on?"
The British girl gave a furious smile.
"Don’t even dream it," she said.
"Still, I continued to write letters to you regularly.”
Tallent set the coffee and tea on the table, and looked at Sara with something that resembled fear in her pupils.
"How many... how many did you write to me?"
"A lot, a long time ago I lost count.” Sara drew the last letter from the inside of her jacket and set it down on the wooden table. “This is the last one, a few days ago. I found it in your... well, in your old house.”
"Does Mike still live there?"
"You mean Lennard? He lived, but...” She paused as if she were looking for some good way to announce a tragedy. “He was just murdered”
“OMG.”
The hostess swallowed and sat at the table next to her old friend.
"Why would they want to kill Mike?" She asked, her voice trembling. “He was a phenomenal guy.”
Sara looked up and raised her voice, unaware that she was taking on a defiant tone.
“I don’t know. Did you know him?”
"We met a couple of days when we went out in a group to have a beer, a long time ago. It turned out that his tango teacher studied solfeo with me, and introduced me. When I wanted to change apartments, he told me he was interested, so I talked to him and he stayed with the Cowley Road rental.” Suddenly, a spark flashed in Diana's head. She paused briefly to visualize it, then came to a conclusion: "Wait a minute, that's why the house was sealed!"
"Yes, the police are investigating. They even interrogated me and everything.”
Diana's face darkened slightly.
"They questioned you?" The British wanted to know. “And why were you there?”
"Because I wanted to see you."
The answer rang in Diana's eardrums like a hammer striking an anvil.
"Aren’t you going to read the letter?" Sara insisted, pointing at the paper with a gray, neutral gesture. Her hostile tone of voice from the beginning had subsided, though she was still on alert.
Diana nodded as if obeying the command of an older brother, and she thought something had changed in her the whole time they had not seen each other. She took the paper with respect and read it. As she progressed in the paragraphs, an increasingly thick layer of teardrops were accumulating on her eyelids. She had to swallow a couple of times before continuing the conversation.
"What you're saying here." She lifted the paper up. Her hand trembled, "Is it true? Was he really about to rape you?”
Then Sara brought her chair closer to her friend, took her hand in an act of reconciliation, and explained even the smallest detail of her life in Ámber: the harsh beginnings in the clinic next to a bastard doctor surnamed Salas, the stranger case of his daughter, Verónica Salas, and the conspiracy by which she concluded everything with the death of Verónica's husband. Nor did she omit the attack at her own home by an amputee son of a bitch (who turned out to be Mike Lennard's twin brother), as well as her trip to Oxford and the crime of Cowley Road. All in all, she'd been talking for forty minutes without a break.
When Sara finished her story, Diana was so dazed that she stood up and started toward the living room with her hands over her face. She was shaking.
Sara followed.
"I'm so sorry" sobbed the violinist. “Shit, I wish I'd never moved, so I could have read your letters.”
“I would have gladly answered them! You needed me and I disappeared from your life like a miserable person.”
They stood facing each other like a pair of chess figures of opposite colors.
At that moment, Sara smiled with glee, and Diana knew that every second thereafter would be a serious candidate to become an unforgettable moment. "Okay, I’ve had enough," seemed to suggest Sara's mischievous smile.
She turned to Diana until they were separated by a few centimeters. Gently she opened her bathrobe, put one hand on her breast and stroked, rather brushed, her left collarbone tenderly.
The British allowed herself to be touched, absolutely amazed and expectant. Their gazes crossed.
As she caressed her, Sara reached up to kiss the corner of her mouth.
Time stopped.
"Brunet," Tallent blurted, her eyes nearly closed.
"You're the reason I came back to this damn town, mate," Sara whispered in her ear, and kissed her again.
"How I've missed you," Diana said with a groan, then jumped astride Sara. They kissed with desire.
Vader watched from the kitchen table as he lapped at the tea, which had gone cold from his owner.
The fluttering of the butterfly had just caused a hurricane.
Chapter 13
"May I ask you something, Doctor?"
"You're very questioning this morning. Shoot, Morgan.”
"Do you believe in God?"
"The truth is that in my long career as a surgeon I have discovered that the walls of the hospitals hear prayers more sincere than those of the churches. This leads me to think about airports.”
“What about airports?”
"Which undoubtedly witness more sincere hugs than wedding altars. This has been the eighth lesson. I hope you're taking notes, Morgan.”
“I get it.”
"And my answer is that I wish.”
“Sorry?”
"I wish I were a true believer. I envy those guys.”
Saturday, November 11, 2006
A bank of dense clouds, which had magically materialized in the blue sky, gradually passed in front of the sun, which caused the outside temperature to drop a few degrees and that the video room at the Oxford Police Station stayed in the shadows. Horner didn’t seem to notice. As he meditated, he tapped his index finger against the edge of the videotape. On the other side of the door, the usual hustle and bustle in the corridors of an ever-fluorescent police station didn’t seem to alter his relaxed introspection.
Thomas Carroll opened the door with a bang just as Alfred sat down to push the tape into the VHS player. He looked worried.
"Newbies," was the blonde’s welcoming announcement. The only thing that he carried was a plastic cup containing the disgusting hot drink that some called coffee from the machine.
Alfred frowned as he did that time, when Ania knocked on his door just as the decisive tennis match for the 2005 Wimbledon final between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer was about to be played.
"Wait a minute, Tom. Let's look at this, and then tell me what it is," he said, and without waiting for a response, he slipped the tape in and pressed play.
Carroll snorted, frowning and sat down next to his companion in a padded chair between the center table and the audio-visual equipment. The darkness almost invaded the room. He took a sip of the bitter coffee and focused his attention on the screen.
The recording began with a static take as it could not be otherwise, since it had been filmed by a fixed camera on the ceiling of the Ahmets that focused directly on the door of the establishment, so that it encompassed the corner of the counter, the entrance of the whole building, and, behind the door glass, also part of the street. The quality of the image was, under an optimistic prism, mediocre, but at least it had color. It contained no audio.
"We're not going to see much with this shot," Thomas said, still staring at the monitor. By the tone used, it was clear to Alfred that Tom wanted to finish the film session so he could have all his attention and be able to tell him the news about the case.
"Well, we'll see."
According to the digital clock that had been superimposed on a corner of the recording, the camera had begun filming at 10:30 in the morning, which was probably the opening hour of the venue. Horner picked up the remote control and pressed the super fast forward button until the clock struck at 9:00 p.m., and from there he slowed down to X2, so that they could sense if there was some kind of suspicious movement without the need to l
ose too much time. They spent more than fifteen minutes watching a fast-paced film whose only argument was the continuous rattling of citizens (most of them young immigrants) entering the premises, eating something in record time, and marching again. By 21:30, the Ahmets was already buzzing with excitement. When the clock in the picture was 21 hours, 37 minutes and 15 seconds, Alfred pressed the pause button.
"A very rough looking girl," he said aloud as the frozen image focused on a hooded, soaked figure coming through the door. She had on essentially dark tones, and although there was no corner of her face from the sharp angle of the lens, it was evident that she was a young woman: she was to be no more than five feet, and her legs were slender and in shape. Horner captured the image mentally and kept it along with his most irrational memories.
He pressed the button again and the image ran again, this time at normal speed.
"She ordered a kebab for take out. And she seems uneasy.” Horner informed everything in a rough voice that was drawing his attention.
"What the fuck," cried the blond more to himself. “Who would be doing that, who thinks of ordering takeout food? Wouldn’t it be better to use that money in an umbrella? Or in a taxi to take her home?”
"Strange, isn’t it?" Alfred said, in a sarcastic tone, he turned his head to Carroll for the first time as if in a statement of "I told you so."
Thomas nodded shyly, as if he had interpreted the gesture perfectly and decided to let it pass.
"She's eating it on the street, by the door," Horner said, pointing to the screen and showing more excitement as the hooded woman left the room with her dinner and began to gobble it up right there under the canopy that protected the facade of rain. “Wait! She has thrown it in the bin!”
"Why did she do that? She had more than half left. How bad is that fucking Turkish food?”
What they saw next prevented Carroll from finishing the sentence and caused both cops to lean toward the screen with extreme intrigue.
"She ran out onto the road!" The semi albino added with more excitement in his voice than he intended to show.
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