“Get up against the wall,” a guard says, and he points at Diego, strikes his ribs.
He gets out of bed, walks a few steps and feels the hot sticky liquid on the soles of his feet, working its way between his naked toes. Diego pulls back in horror, in disgust. In a moment of lucidity he erases his prints, looks for a hole, any hole, and slips the shiv into a crack in the wall. He stands with the others, looks at them and sees eyes like jaws, dark and narrow – anxiety, fear, bitterness – so turns his gaze to the leprous walls, corroded by the dampness; he tries not to look at the light from the torches, not to remain motionless, to move as he is ordered.
Vertigo. Everything is spinning. What did the Hobo say about the Candyman? Diego tries to remember the words, feels himself falling.
“Out, everyone out and with your hands up. You too. Move it you fucker, come on, out.”
There are six guards, and the sound of boots in the corridor tells him more are on their way. He staggers out of the cell, everyone exits together, a uniformed gang advances down the corridor: guns, helmets, batons, shouting.
Candyman, they killed the Candyman. The whisper passes from mouth to mouth.
The prisoners move with an arsenal of weapons pointing at them, they are pushed and beaten, pressed up against a wall where they are kept immobile, huddled, trembling with cold and fear. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, a few miles and several light years from this place, Ursula López is just beginning to wake up in her house in the Old Town.
Here in this world, in the prison, Diego sees the red prints left by his bare feet. He feels the blood congealing, starting to form a crust on his heels.
At least this time it wasn’t his blood.
VII
Captain Lima opens the file, leafs through it absent-mindedly, takes another sip of the coffee that is already somewhat bitter by this point in the afternoon, reads a few paragraphs here and there, sighs or yawns. Lost in other thoughts, she turns a couple of pages, raises her gaze and looks outside at the vista of soot-covered walls beyond her office window, thinks about her journey home, the walk along cold dark streets, tries to recall the contents of her fridge. She lowers her gaze and strives to concentrate on the case, to continue with her reading: interrogations, psychiatric evaluations, lists of phone calls, statements, police reports, fingerprint analyses, photographs, paper, paper and more paper.
This wasn’t what Captain Leonilda Lima had expected when she joined the force, this wasn’t the life she wanted but, well, we never get the life we want. Back in the beginning there had been hopes, desires, dreams gradually left by the wayside, projects that came to nothing, but life never turns out like we imagine and the captain, now a little past forty, has known that for a while, even if it doesn’t stop her hankering after what she’s never had.
She’s not exactly pretty. She has a slight squint and her wavy hair never seems to be quite where it should be, but what is a pretty woman, anyway, other than a bundle of ideas and preconceptions? She is beautiful in her own way, with her lazy dark eyes and their yellow flecks that gleam like those of a cat, and her somewhat unruly hair which moves as if it has a will of its own. Apart from that, her body is normal, standard size, no obvious defects. In other words, she would be considered pretty or almost pretty if our tastes weren’t conditioned by such unrealistic aesthetic standards.
This life is not the one she imagined, and she seeks comfort in her work, the language of the reports makes her feel in her element, protected, calm. Words like suspect, accused, crime, victim, corpse, firearm, sharp implement and exit wound shelter her with their familiarity, make her feel useful, needed, make her think she’s doing what needs to be done.
She likes wading through this paperwork, sprinkled with technical terms and acronyms; in this familiar bureaucracy she feels like the tarnished but honest heroine of a moral fable, the mediocre woman who has to hack her way through the maze to reach the tower of the evil wizard and bring him to justice. Leonilda Lima may feel disillusioned, may have witnessed plenty of acts and attitudes that make her feel disappointed with life and even with her profession (and she will surely witness more), but she believes in Justice. With a capital J.
On her third coffee, she finally manages to concentrate. She goes back to the beginning and reads the first reports, simple sentences full of terms she recognizes, hints she decodes, questions that challenge her to find an answer. You might imagine the specific details of each case would disturb her routine because they require her to think about everything each time, but although she feels pleasure at recognizing those words and she loves her routines, Captain Leonilda Lima prefers to avoid procedures which, through repetition, become mechanical and devoid of intelligence. Yes, she loves the routine of her work, but she focuses all her faculties on what she does and exercises a degree of independent judgement, a fact that will be of no little importance for the reader’s future comprehension of this story.
She reads late into the night, takes notes, organizes her thoughts using the standard techniques and a few tricks she has invented herself and, by the time the clock has passed ten, she has an overview of the case and has even come up with a plan to take the investigation forward.
The captain is no longer in the grip of the bad mood that descended when she was given this minor case, an affair which until yesterday had been in the hands of Captain Leonardo Borda, who suffers from chronic haemorrhoids and has been admitted for surgery first thing tomorrow morning. Also gone is the disappointment she felt at not being assigned the case of the killer nurses, those angels of death at Maciel Hospital who appear to have been responsible for helping dozens of patients, perhaps even hundreds, into the afterlife. This evening she has been getting to grips with the murder of Juan Carlos Lencina, alias the Candyman, an inmate of Santiago Vázquez Prison, and she now feels the familiar enthusiasm as she tackles a file that, so far, is just a question, an accumulation of facts with no apparent logic or explanation, to which she will have to find a solution or acknowledge failure and admit she has been defeated by a superior mind.
She turns to the next page in search of photos, reports, statements, evidence; she sees that a brutal murder has been committed, that there is a blade that has not been found and, above all, there are too many complications in play. A mind, Leonilda thinks, in the end there’s just one mind in which the idea of any crime appears for the first time. And she has to find that person: that’s her job, identifying the real culprit hiding behind all this verbiage.
The captain looks at the photos taken at the scene. A cell, bunk beds, a corpse punctured by stab wounds, mattresses, floor and walls dyed red: quite simply, a bloodbath. She reviews the victim’s record and sees he has no known profession; he appears to have supported himself by picking pockets on buses, mugging old ladies, stealing things when the owner was looking the other way. Nothing special. She doesn’t have the sense that the corpse in this photograph was that of a big-league gangster; rather, this mass of bloody flesh looks like it belongs to a petty criminal.
Leonilda thinks she sees rage and perhaps evil in this case, a chicken thief who was stabbed to death in a cell packed with men who supposedly were asleep, an act as risky as it was savage, an act without apparent justification, one which would have needed a whole rosary of complicity for the perpetrator to get away with it.
Leonilda asks herself why a man like this could have met with such a violent death. Jealousy, money, envy, revenge, sex. Rage.
VIII
Half past two in the morning.
Ursula’s window is slightly open, the curtains are drawn, the blind is halfway down; the room is dimly lit and she has just placed the telescope on the tripod she assembled a moment ago. Five floors below, a taxi rumbles along the cobbles of Calle Sarandí, a homeless guy drags a rattling shopping cart over the irregular surface, a stray dog limps by, trailing one of its hind legs. She observes them from her watchtower, a sentinel in her improvised observation post. Improvised? Not exactly. It’s no coinci
dence that she is here at the window at this time of night putting the finishing touches to her lookout station; it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. We ought to talk about why she can’t get to sleep, why she gets up in the middle of the night, what she is furtively searching for right now, but to do that we’d need to delve back into the distant past, which isn’t possible. Ursula doesn’t like digging around in her memories; even with her analyst she is unable to do that.
For her, spying on her neighbours goes through three stages. First, the bad mood triggered by this inconvenient situation of closing the blind, dimming the lights and setting up the telescope that she takes out of its hiding place and which she will have to dismantle and put away again later. Second, the feeling that comes over her when she looks into other people’s lives, the unchecked arousal. And finally, the sense of guilt at having done something wrong, the remorse that arrives at the end, the certainty that she should not cross this boundary again. But she knows, how well she knows, that her remorse is no more than crocodile tears, that she will do it again, that she will always return to spying and regretting and then spying again.
But let’s be patient: we are still finishing the first stage, the one where she is in a bad mood because of the work and the inconvenience. The telescope is assembled and in place but Ursula hasn’t occupied her vantage point.
She turns out the final light, places the chair with precision, settles herself neither very close to the edge of the seat nor leaning very heavily on the backrest. She aims the telescope, adjusts the range controls of the German device – a Carl Zeiss Jena inherited from her father – and focuses; she no longer sees the things surrounding her: this gloomy room with obsolete furniture, the display case with the Japanese figurines, the embroidered tablecloth with its faded colours, the slightly worn Persian rugs, the table covered with medicines, the yellowing family photographs sitting on the marble tops of chests of drawers, the walls darkened by the passage of time, her whole house.
Adjusting the instrument, Ursula flies a hundred and fifty yards, passing through the window of a well-lit room with which she is already familiar. In this space, everything is clean and light and uncluttered, everything is modern and complete, the room is painted white, there is a pair of brushed metal lamps with halogen bulbs, some black-and-white photos, a couple of designer armchairs and, in the centre, an enormous square bed. White. She halts when she comes to the couple who are in the middle of their bedtime ritual. The scene is simple and predictable: she undresses and puts on a nightdress, he undresses and slips between the sheets. Once in bed, each takes out a book, reads, sometimes they seem to speak. Ursula waits, ten minutes pass, twenty, she begins to lose hope. This is the worst part; the waiting feels eternal, and there is no certainty that her patience will be rewarded. They might just put down their books and turn out the light.
Ursula watches these people she doesn’t know, who barely move, watches them turn the pages, adjust an arm, tug at the blanket, take a sip from a glass of water.
She has observed other couples in her life: many, truth be told. She hates thinking about it. Even more than that, she hates repeating it and knowing she will repeat it, she struggles every day to repress these memories and above all to repress the impulse, and for long stretches of time she is successful. But sometimes there is something like a glimmer, a spark that becomes a fire, and off she goes and sets up her telescope or stops in front of her downstairs neighbours’ door. Ursula has known where to look for many years.
There is a small warning that her wait is over: the woman puts down her book and, instead of kissing the man on the cheek and turning off her bedside light, she strokes his hair and then strokes him again, beneath the sheets. The man puts down his book, turns to her, moves the sheets aside, strokes her neck and kisses her ears. Ursula breathes heavily, following the feline movements of the man and the woman as they touch each other; she watches as one of the nightgown straps falls, she closes her eyes, sighs, opens her eyes again. She watches them lick one another, imagines each taste, each texture, she can smell the musk of their sweat. She pants. The two have commenced their mating ritual, the man is sitting and she is on top of him, they rock rhythmically, the woman’s head is tilted back and, squatting, she moves up and down, up and down.
At a precise moment, Ursula stops breathing, and the only thing that exists is the image the telescope offers her.
And then the image is gone, and it is just her.
IX
This man who is gripping the steering wheel, his foot pressing hard on the accelerator, his teeth clenched, is Antinucci. He’s flying down Route 8 in his Audi A6 with its new-car smell, driven for the first time last week. It must have cost him a truckload of money, although nobody can really imagine how much he paid to have it brought over from Germany in less than a month, upholstered in the most expensive leather. He’s obsessed with the stuff, as we were saying. His briefcase (or, as he calls it, his attaché), his cartapacio, the armchairs in his office, the surface of his desk; if it was up to him, we suspect he’d cover everything in leather. He’s listening to Dvorak’s New World Symphony and drumming his fingers, tapping the steering wheel in time to the music. On the dashboard he has erected a small altar, very discreet: a couple of images of the Virgin Mary, a St Christopher his mother gave him and a rosary of mother-of-pearl beads that hangs from the rear-view mirror.
We’ve already talked about his appearance, about his obsessive neatness and his somewhat old-fashioned martial air. When he listens to music and feels at peace, from the expression on his face we imagine him growing old in his lawyer’s office; however, we can’t help suspecting that the small scar on his forehead, which might have been left by an unruly branch or the edge of a piece of furniture, was in fact caused by a fist. Perhaps his eyes are his only truly disturbing feature: too large, bulging, with their excessively fleshy lids, almost always hidden by his Ray-Bans, which he says he wears because he suffers from photosensitivity.
He’s been driving along Route 8 for two hours in the rain; he’s already stopped at the roadside four times to smoke – two cigarettes an hour, he calculates – and at this thought he feels the urge to stop again, but he can’t because the rain is getting heavier and he can’t see anywhere to pull over and light up without soaking his grey cashmere suit and his shiny Italian leather moccasins. His withdrawal symptoms are making him anxious, causing him to put his foot down; he doesn’t want to go back on his decision not to smoke inside the car, which still smells of the new leather of its upholstery. This smell drives him crazy with delight, we think.
Antinucci wants to give up smoking, he wants to give up cigarettes, he detests his vice, his weakness as he calls it. Hypnosis, acupuncture, addiction treatments, he’s tried everything; he’s spent a fortune on doctors, healers, pills, patches, needles, he’s tried a thousand ways of giving up smoking but he fails time and time again, returning to this filthy habit that makes him hide, that fills him with guilt, that stains his teeth a disgusting yellow so he has to visit the dentist once a month, despite the fear it inspires. He remembers his next dental appointment and checks his mouth in the mirror, curling his upper lip to reveal his teeth, contemplating the microscopic sepia-coloured particles, moving his head and contracting his mouth in a rictus of disgust, of bitterness. Antinucci diverts his gaze and his thoughts elsewhere.
He checks his watch for the second time in five minutes: he has time to spare. He brushes an imaginary speck of dust from the digital display with a blue background that shows the speed in huge numerals, and he settles back into the first-class plane seat, thinks about the comfort and luxury of his car, tries to convince himself of his good fortune, but his lungs continue to cry out, demanding smoke, asking for nicotine.
The miles pass and he can’t find so much as the roof of a bus shelter, not even a tree with thick foliage that could protect him from the liquid inclemency that falls and won’t stop falling. He curses and immediately repents, he must remember
not to use the foul language of his defendants and occasional partners, for God is Everywhere and Omnipresent, and He hears everything.
Antinucci touches his fingertips against the white beads on the rosary which hangs from the mirror, says a short prayer and returns his attention to the road. He slows down, he gradually slows down, he was doing well over a hundred on this empty road. At first, we might think he has simply remembered his duty to drive safely and that he is faithfully complying with it, but we soon see that’s not it: he has slowed down to make a sharp right turn onto a local road. There’s no question of going fast on these ten irregular pothole-ridden miles of stones and sodden earth.
The lawyer is not in a good mood; he’s afraid of getting his gleaming new car bogged down in the mud, he’s annoyed when he thinks that this evening, when he gets back home, there won’t be time to have the car washed, that he’ll have to put it in the garage covered with all this filthy sludge. The idea of keeping something dirty in his house puts him in a bad mood, it irritates him, and the irritation gives him heartburn, causing his lunch to repeat on him and making him aware of the acidity of the wine and the aftertaste of onion and garlic. The garage, its floor polished last week, is as clean and orderly as an operating room, but tonight it’s going to accommodate all this mud and grass and dung.
A Cessna light aircraft flies overhead, starting its descent.
He has just turned off the main road, we were saying: he stops the vehicle at a gate, opens the car door and gets out quickly, looks at the sky, the clouds, the Cessna, resumes or intensifies the grimace we saw a few moments ago when he was checking the nicotine stains on his teeth and, despite the pouring rain, lights the cigarette he has been holding between his fingers for the last ten miles and breathes in deeply, looks at the grey sky again, inhales the smoke, contemplates his black moccasins, mutters something through his teeth. Antinucci thinks about how he comes out into the countryside a lot and that he should have a pair of boots in the back of his car, a raincoat, a tarpaulin; he walks a few steps and opens the wooden gate, splashes his way back, and the expression on his face is unquestionably one of fury. Standing next to the Audi, he carries on smoking for a few seconds under the persistent rain. Then he opens the door, starts the engine, and drives through without bothering to stop and close the gate behind him.
Crocodile Tears Page 4