“And what did you tell him?”
“The names. Ursula and Luz López. What else could I have done?”
“I’m struck by that detail: the niece of the woman murdered a year ago was called Ursula López, just like the woman who was murdered in the park. I’m guessing you’ll have heard about that. Quite a coincidence; Ursula isn’t a common name. And the same last name.”
“Maybe it’s the same person.”
“Maybe. We’ll check it out.”
Mirta looks at her with empty eyes. She says nothing.
“Anything else?”
“I told him I didn’t know where they lived.”
“And after that? Anything else?”
“What do you mean, ‘anything else’?”
“Did you tell him anything else, did you give him any other information?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t have anything else to tell him. I haven’t heard from them since Irene was murdered.”
“You worked for the victim, for Irene Salgado, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
The captain swallows saliva, air, frustration. She closes her eyes, talks quietly.
“Look, Mirta. You could be the witness in a murder case. Please try to cooperate. I’ve already told you it’s serious; there are two murders involved here.”
The woman looks out of the window and scratches her cheek with a long red fingernail. She brushes her hair from her face and looks at Leonilda, squinting slightly. She displays a hygienic smile. She’s blonde, her face caked with make-up. She tugs her skirt downwards.
“Mirta, don’t play games with me.”
“I’m not sure.”
“What aren’t you sure about?”
“If I want to carry on with this complaint. I’m afraid of Ricardo. You don’t know him, he’s turned into a monster.”
Leonilda thinks about the other woman who sat in this seat a few days ago, and who is now dead. She bites her lower lip.
“We could give you protection.”
“Right. How long for? My whole life?”
“Of course not.”
Mirta laughs noiselessly, spreads her arms, her palms facing up. “That’s no good to me.”
“And what would be good for you?”
“Nothing. If he finds out I’ve blabbed on him, he’ll wait as long as he needs and then he’ll kill me too.”
Leonilda eyes the expensive outfit and asks herself how this former servant of a murdered lady can afford to spend so much on clothes. But she can’t ask her how she makes a living. That would just frighten her more.
“If you don’t want to file a complaint, then why did you come? Why are you here?”
The woman thinks, looks away.
“Because I’m angry. I want him to pay for what he did. But I’m also afraid. Do you understand that? No, you’re a cop. What would you understand? Nobody hits you, let alone threatens to kill you.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, Mirta. There have been two killings, there’s evidence to suggest it could have been Ricardo, and you show up telling me he asked you about a woman who could be the same person who was subsequently murdered. You’re going to be a witness in this case whether you like it or not.”
“How did they kill her?”
“A .38 bullet in the back, from an inch away. The wound was fatal.”
“Just like Irene, point-blank and with a .38. Where did it happen?”
“At a concert in Villa Biarritz Park; lots of noise, lots of people.”
She thinks. “I’m no snitch.”
“He hit you, he threatened you.”
“And he raped me.”
“You didn’t say that. Do you want to report that?”
Mirta tosses her head as if she has suddenly realized she’s forgotten something important, in a gesture both theatrical and completely wasted on Leonilda. Then she clears her throat a couple of times, as if in preparation for what she is about to say.
“Is it worth it?”
Leonilda doesn’t know what more to say. A very faint feeling of discomfort, a shadow of unease, has installed itself in the region of her diaphragm. As a reflex she touches the bottle of antacid that sits on her desk.
“It would be difficult to prove, it was a few days ago. You should have told us earlier.”
“So —”
“Finish telling me what Ricardo Prieto asked you.”
“He asked me who had inherited the old woman’s money.”
“Irene’s?”
“Yes, my boss. The old lady he murdered. Or not. I don’t know.”
“Why would he want to know that?”
“To find the real culprit for the crime he’d been framed for, he told me.”
“Are you suggesting he might not be guilty?”
“You’re the cop, you should know.”
“And who inherited the dead woman’s money?”
“The nieces.”
“Ursula López?”
“And her sister, Luz.”
“Did you give him their addresses?”
“No, I told you: I don’t know where they live. I told him to look in the phone book.”
“Do you remember anything else? Did he tell you where he’d been? Did he tell you anything about his plans?”
“No.”
Leonilda hears herself swallowing.
“Okay. In a few days you’re going to receive a summons to make a statement. Is there anything else you’d like to add?”
Mirta taps her chin with her index finger and looks at the wall again, the portrait of General Artigas, the image of St Jude, the plastic flowers, pretending to search for a memory. She smiles and shrugs, her lips curling slightly.
“No.”
To Leonilda, these monosyllables sound like a mantra, like a litany.
“You don’t say. Now you’re going to go through that door and I’ll be left here looking at these pretty plastic flowers, and I’ll ask myself what’s wrong with me, what kind of an idiotic face I must have for people to think they don’t need to open their mouths. Leave, and please phone me if you manage to recall anything important. Have a good day, Mirta.”
Leonilda is left on her own. She won’t hear from Mirta, either in the near future or in all of eternity. She sighs. This was never going to be a good day; that was clear from the start. She opens the azure folder, takes out a photograph which shows a red overcoat and an enlarged bullet hole, scorched around the edges; she leafs through some more photos that repeat the red colour and the burn. She reviews credit card printouts, bank statements, lists of phone calls from and to the victim’s mobile number and her home phone. Statements of neighbours, doormen, family, friends. There’s got to be something here. Santiago, the ex-husband, was in Bolivia on the day of the murder. The victim’s lover, Sergio, was somewhere in Africa, and he hasn’t returned. Maybe there’s nothing in all these papers.
She needs to check if there are two women called Ursula López. She logs on to the identity registration program, keys in the name: two files come up. The photos, personal details and addresses are there. There are two people with the same name. She prints them off. One is the woman who was sitting here, the one who was murdered. And the other? There’s something familiar about her.
She picks up the card with the picture of Jude the Apostle, touches it with the tip of her index finger, mentally asks him for protection against the angels of evil, against the army of darkness. They push their way through life: suffering, stealing, killing. And she doesn’t always feel capable of facing up to them. Sometimes she feels alone. She sighs.
Leonilda thinks again about the two women with the same name: Ursula López, the murder victim, and Ursula López, the niece of a woman murdered some time ago. Too many Ursulas and too many murders. Could the two cases have become mixed up? And, most important of all, could Ricardo, the Hobo, have got confused? Could he have killed one woman believing she was the other? Maybe Ricardo murdered the wrong woman.
&nbs
p; She runs through the case in her mind: a convicted murderer escapes, attempts to discover the whereabouts of the person who accused him of the crime, watches a woman who shares a name with his accuser but is not actually her, and this woman ends up being murdered. At the very least, she has to track down the other Ursula López, because her life could be in danger.
Her phone rings, and she is startled. She loathes telephones: they frighten her. Leonilda puts the card on her desk, leaning it against the lamp so it faces her to offer her strength and protection, and looks at the number on the screen: it’s Skinflint. They talk briefly, she writes down an address and a time in the margin of her notebook. She puts aside her apocalyptic thoughts, already thinking about how to organize the perfect operation. Then she picks up the image of Jude the Apostle and puts it in the breast pocket of her shirt. She gets ready to leave.
XXIII
There is a room, a bed, a woman lying on the bed. Her face is tense, her body taut on the chenille bedspread, which looks vintage but is just old-fashioned.
The woman on the bed has earplugs which isolate her from the noises outside but amplify those inside: every time she swallows it sounds like a tsunami, every time she grinds her teeth it sounds like an earthquake. But from outside, she hears nothing.
On the fifth floor of a dilapidated building where the elevator almost never works, in a room whose walls are painted a shade that thirty years ago was called Nile green, lying on a bed covered with a chenille bedspread that is not vintage but simply old, Ursula is neither sleeping nor watching the television nor listening to the radio; she is not reading, nor is she doing the translations that have been pending for more than a month; she isn’t watching the evening slowly die, the darkness overcoming what is left of the light, the rain beating against the window. Instead, lying on her bed, she slips into her memories and feels an abstract and diffuse rage against everyone who is alive and even against some who are dead.
It’s been raining in Montevideo for hours, and the Old Town is gradually sinking into a watery stupor, a desolate day lit by streetlamps that illuminate nothing. This city of yellow light is like something from a foggy movie. Outside, the temperature is glacial, and inside it’s not much better. Her earplugs protect her against threats.
In bed, Ursula remembers and feels angry, she focuses on her misfortune, tries to make sense of the essence of her bad luck as she wallows in the past. She fails, and this makes her feel even angrier. Her state of mind is one of rigid tension, the kind that precedes danger, and although usually nothing happens, we know that sometimes it does.
In her life, she believes, it’s always the same day. Week after week, month after month, she watches the seasons change, following one another, all the same, their immutability calming and comforting her while also making her desperate and furious. Lying on the bed, she thinks about those television series in which the same characters always find themselves in the same situation, repeating similar dialogue, wearing similar clothes, season after season in an infinite present. And her present is infinite, too, a straight monotonous line that hardly wavers.
As we were saying, she allows herself to slip into her memories, into her past, and accepts all the collateral damage: the feelings of injustice and resentment this gives rise to, because self-pity is the only thing that interrupts the monotony of a dark, rainy afternoon.
When she’s just about to reach the limit, when the tears she’s been waiting for are just starting to well up, the phone on her bedside table rings, once, twice, three times, but all she hears is a high-pitched sound, muted by the foam inserted in her ears that separates her from the world. “Fucking phone, fucking phone,” Ursula shouts at the first ring, and her words echo, amplified, inside her head.
Bad luck: her moment of delicious self-pity is over.
She reaches out to grab the device; she tries to read the number but isn’t wearing her glasses and all she can make out is a blurry line of enormous ants dancing across the blue screen as it continues to ring, the tone hammering her brain like machine-gun fire. She rips out the earplugs. Her head hurts and the sound of the phone drills into her skull. She loathes these high sounds, like needles.
It rings again, she picks it up, says hello.
“Hi, it’s me.”
She takes a moment to recognize the voice. A few short words and then silence.
And she waits, pausing for that moment that women of a certain age leave before they move towards their objective. Then she makes the leap into consciousness.
“Shall we meet tonight, Diego?”
“Okay. Where?”
“My place. On the corner of Treinta y Tres and Sarandí, above the shop, apartment 501.”
She can’t believe what she’s just said.
XXIV
Things Ursula never does: coming down the stairs two by two, feeling regret, running, inviting men to her house, sleeping without taking Somnium, stealing a load of money, escaping from the police, fleeing across the rooftops. But in the next few hours she will do all of them.
She gets ready in front of the mirror, combs her hair, applies a little make-up to her cheeks, almost finishes putting on her eyeliner. The house is impregnated with an ominous silence that is shattered by the sound of the buzzer. There are a few moments of anxiety as she waits, arm raised, eye pencil in her right hand, left eye half-closed and the tip of her tongue out, expectant, frozen. Ursula is barely breathing. The buzzer goes off again. She tosses the pencil into the basin, runs out of the bathroom and opens the door. This time she won’t wait for the elevator that never works; instead she runs down the stairs, taking them two at a time without worrying about falling, and reaches the ground floor with a smile on her face.
She opens the door.
“Hello.”
“Ursula, it’s been a while.”
He offers his hand; she accepts.
“How are you? When did you get out?”
“Yesterday.”
“And how does it feel to be free?”
“It’s like coming back to a different city.”
“Did they treat you badly in prison?”
“They treated me like they treat everyone, Ursula.”
“You’re soaking. Come in. No, the elevator hardly ever works.”
They go up the worn marble steps, Ursula leading the way; her heart is not racing or pounding, she skips up the stairs, turns and smiles. She smooths out an imaginary crease in her tightly fitting blouse. She ascends the five flights of stairs without wheezing, reaches the top without becoming short of breath. He follows behind, observing this beautiful woman with her delicious curves.
“This way. In you go.”
“What a beautiful home.”
“I was born here. It’s my father’s house.”
“Does he live with you?”
“No, he died a long time ago. I live alone.”
“So you separated from your husband, Santiago, in the end?”
There’s a silence. A long one.
“And you collect Japanese figurines.”
“Those were my father’s too. He left them to me on condition I look after them. It’s a lot of work, you know. Three hundred and twenty-two figurines, and they all have to be cleaned individually. Brushes, cloths, sponges, several kinds of cleaning fluid, a whole arsenal of tools. I dedicate every Sunday to them.”
“You’ve got a lovely hobby.”
“It’s not my hobby. It was his. My father’s.”
“But now it’s yours.”
“I’m not sure. Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes please.”
Silence.
Diego looks at the floor, then looks through the window, out into the night. Ursula goes to the kitchen and a few minutes later returns to the living room, carrying a tray with two cups, the coffee already served. She places them on the table; on Diego’s saucer is a sachet of sugar, on Ursula’s a sachet of sweetener.
The windows of the city have gradually lit up. Insi
de the house there is barely any light, and the gloom that surrounds them makes the noise of the passing traffic seem more distant. The silence inside has intensified, and in that silence you can hear both the gentle clinking of the coffee cups and the sound of throats being cleared.
“Would you like some water?”
“No, don’t worry. You told me your father was dead. How did he die?”
“He had an accident with Somnium, with sleeping pills.”
“And do you have any other family?”
“A sister, Luz. She’s in Bolivia.”
“That’s great. You’re so lucky to have a sister, believe me. I’m an only child.”
“Absolutely. I adore her.”
Silence, a word-free vacuum, but it’s comfortable, cordial.
“Really, I just wanted to say thanks.”
“What for?”
“For not giving a statement against me, Ursula. For saying you’d never spoken to me, that I never demanded a ransom for your husband. You lied to save me.”
Another silence. Ursula looks at the floor, then out of the window. She hesitates, her soul a tangle of frozen weeds. She’s been thinking all this time, and she still doesn’t know how to tell him.
“Diego, there’s something very important I haven’t told you.”
He stares at her, his eyes wide open.
“I did something unforgivable. I tricked you.”
“You tricked me? But you said I —”
“I didn’t say anything. I never gave a statement, either favourable or unfavourable. I wasn’t summoned.”
“My lawyer told me you said I hadn’t demanded a ransom to release Santiago, your husband —”
“Diego, listen to me.”
“— you said I hadn’t asked for money —”
“Diego —”
“— and I’m grateful because if you’d said I’d asked for money, I would have been accused of kidnapping and extortion, and —”
“I don’t have a husband.”
Another silence, this time more substantial.
“What was that? But what about Santiago?”
“I told you I don’t have a husband. And I never gave evidence in the case of Santiago’s kidnapping.”
Crocodile Tears Page 10