by Pablo Poveda
“Luck doesn’t smile twice,” he said while pointing the weapon at me.
I clenched my eyes and jaw.
Before firing, a third man entered through the door.
“Stop! Police!” a familiar voice yelled. “Drop the gun!”
The Scandinavian fired twice with perfect aim. The body of the agent collapsed on the ground, and he died on the spot. The criminal abandoned the room.
More gunshots, dropping bodies, cries of alarm, and explosions came from the rest of the house.
I looked at the figure of that man, bleeding out on the floor.
“He’s here!” another voice I recognized announced. It was Rojo. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Where is Blanca?”
“She is out of danger,” he said.
He began to untie me from the chair when he spotted the body of his partner in the corner.
“He saved my life...” I said, “he must have died on the spot.”
Rojo looked affected. He ran to him, but it was already too late. Another policeman who came from the outside, flipped the light switch on.
“Sir, we seized him,” he said, catching his breath. “We caught the kingpin.”
Had he entered a few seconds later, or had he tripped in the living room, it would be my body lying on that floor, lifeless.
We all witnessed the horror.
Two impacts to the chest.
We all were culprit.
Officer Martínez lay lifeless on the ground.
Without shedding a tear and kneeling next to him, Rojo laid the body’s head on the floor and addressed his men.
“This operation has been a failure,” he declared with a somber face. “I will turn in my resignation tomorrow.”
9
The next morning dawned a different color. The covers of local newspapers published the face of Heikki Hämäläinen, a 47-year-old Finn nicknamed Tango among his enemies, due to the difficulty of his name. That man from Turku had been the author of the coastal chaos. Which were his intentions? Journalists fired articles left and right, wielding different hypotheses without any foundation. That very same day, officer Rojo resigned from the corps and was relegated from the investigation.
After the raid, an ambulance took Martínez’s body to the morgue. Blanca and I decided to leave the area and stay in the seaside hostel near La Marina, a provincial hamlet that was part of Elche. We needed to vanish, and I knew that place well. We would have time to think, talk, and understand what had happened. Confess to each other. Rojo, on his side, warned me to get over it. The case was closed for him and should be for us too, and that, it all had gone too far. I understood that it was not easy to lose one of your men on a mission for which one is responsible. The tension in the city caused by political scandals had been nothing more than an appetizer for what was to come. Government personnel was taking a toll for the excesses. The Security Forces were getting cutbacks and they could not afford a public scandal. As for me, I highly doubted that Rojo had resigned to avoid a scandal. I was quite disappointed in him, although I did not have the guts to say it to his face at the time. He had hidden information from me. Maybe that would have been my mistake, to trust a cop.
I woke up on the other side of the bed. In front of me, a translucent cloth curtain, a window, the noise of the waves that broke in the morning. I sat on the mattress and looked at Blanca, who slept by my side. The window to the room overlooked the beach. The Hostel where we stayed was an old but beautiful place, built in the second decade of Francoism. It was a house with wooden blinds and white façade, whose paint was cracking because of humidity. It was one of those endearing beach houses that, over time, had become modest hostels with restaurants and ample terraces. The lack of an urbanization law that contemplated the shores allowed many people to build barely a few meters away from the water. There was nothing much to do, but to have a stroll on Santa Pola’s beaches and take the sun along the bathers, a few meters from the owners’ terraces. I decided to take refuge there for a simple reason — no one would find us there. That place, despite its charm, possessed obscure geography, a difficult-to-clean spot on a map, a vestige of the old Spain — that of Franco’s and the Transition. It was a place where umbrellas featuring beer brands flapped in the wind, boats docked on the shore, and elderly ladies played cards.
I put on my shirt, trousers, and went downstairs. I walked across the bar, greeted the waitress, a woman in her fifties, and sat at the terrace. It was an incredible view — a privilege hard to attain — the smell of the Mediterranean, the morning calm, the squawks of the seagulls, and the sun appearing in the horizon in the middle of a starry sky. The sky was clear and had a light blue tint to it. In the distance, I saw some boats heading to Alicante. The salt mountains of Santa Pola and the antenna that out-stood from Guardamar were also visible. Two contrasting images a few kilometers apart. It was hard to imagine that, a century earlier, there was nothing but sea.
I ordered a coffee, orange juice, and two toasts with tomato for breakfast. Kindly, the woman placed a newspaper on the metal table.
“These northern people... they need more sun,” she said sarcastically, referencing the cover of the newspaper. Upon seeing the headline that read “MAN WHO FROZE THE COAST DETAINED”, I felt disgusted by my own profession. The news mentioned the arrest and fall of an agent, as well as the prostitution network that the Finn managed. There was only one person capable of publishing something like that — Cañete.
I took a look at the interior pages, looking for something worthwhile, but I did not find anything. Cañete had turned the newspaper into a sensationalist tabloid like The Sun. In a way, it was the only way to save the newspaper from the crisis in the news media. The Internet was killing everyone off. I looked at the picture of that scumbag again. Who are you? I asked him. I looked at his cold, calm countenance. There was something else to his eyes than his mere expression. It took me a moment to find the connection between that man and Officer Rojo, Francisco Rojo.
One year earlier, during a drunken night, all that cult mess at the countertop of the bar. While talking about his wife, he told me that he had visited Finland, hence his love for vodka. What I never thought was for their paths to cross. Who was behind that façade? The second thing that surprised me the most was not hearing his name all this time — Francisco Vicente Rojo. Ironic. A lead that gave me a start, a place to begin my research. There, away from civilization, among birds, fishermen, and some other lost tourists, I breathed the sea breeze and asked Neptune to lead my instinct to solve the puzzle. That was my meditation — talking to the sea, feeling the waves, the salty air entering my lungs. Absolute calm.
The rattling of sandals on the tiles warned me of a visitor.
“Good morning,” said Blanca. She was gorgeous, dressed in a black and white striped T-shirt and short white jeans. Her hair disheveled and pulled back. The waitress brought the breakfast and put it on the table. Blanca took the orange juice and gave it a big drink. “Thank you. I needed it.”
The woman looked at me rascally.
“Enjoy, darling,” she replied. “That and a bath, are the two best things to restore energy.”
Too bad the energy the woman was talking about was a different kind. I sipped the coffee and left the newspaper on the table.
“Did you see his face?” I asked.
“No,” she said embarrassedly. “I don’t remember much.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I haven’t thanked you yet... You didn’t have to come in.”
She gave the juice another drink.
“We were lucky,” she replied. “They didn’t get to touch me. The police force arrived just in time when they were trying to take my clothes off. I guess this is the end. Case solved. He’ll get convicted and, hopefully, extradited.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “Rojo was hiding information from me. This doesn’t end here.”
“I don’t care!” she answered nervously. The waitress looked at
us from the inside. “Leave it there, will you? You have gone too far this time.”
“Rojo knows that man’s story, Blanca,” I replied. “He implied it in the room.”
“He might’ve been trying to confuse you, Gabriel,” she said incredulously. “You often believe everything they tell you.”
“Come on, don’t get started,” I told her. “You can’t just give up now, you’re not like that, Blanca. We both know that all of this is very strange, implausible. This story, the homicides, everything that is going on in general. We are not made for this and yet, here we are. You’d be lying if you said otherwise.”
The waitress brought coffee and toast with cheese and olive oil. Blanca kept silent, poured a spoonful of sugar in the coffee, stirred it, and took a sip. Then she took a breath.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You cannot understand. Either you are blind, you don’t realize it, or you don’t want to see it.”
“Can you cut to the chase, please?” I said. That bothered her.
“You are a jerk,” she berated me. “If you took a few steps back, you would realize that this all is because of you, Gabriel. All of it” — I noticed her voice soften — “Still, I am sorry to tell you that you are wrong. I am not who you think I am — people change, time makes us change. Time is relentless, you know. I am no longer the same girl you met last summer, even though it has only been that — one single year — I feel like it’s been a decade, Gabriel. It feels like a damn decade. The island, us, leaving everything, starting something anew, having faith again, seeing you leave. I may have deserved it, but enough already, don’t you think? I may be confused, but I know that I won’t risk my life again for a wimp.”
“It is not your fault... really,” I replied.
“Why, Gabriel?” she asked. She was hurt. “Why like this?”
Under the morning sun, seagulls dived for fish in the ocean, waves broke against the shore, and the foamy water bathed the sands. That was the scenery I did not imagine for a conversation I expected.
“I knew that one day I would have to come clean,” I said. “I am sorry, Blanca. I truly am. I was such an idiot.”
“You keep saying it, and it starts to sound old.”
“No,” I answered. “I really mean it. I am so regretful — ”
“Save your excuses, Gabriel,” she replied. “You didn’t have the guts to do it at its moment, why should I trust you will have the guts to tell me the truth now?”
“I was a coward,” I said, looking into her eyes. The woman at the bar watched us as though we were reenacting a soap opera. Blanca’s pupils dilated like two umbrellas. “I regretted it, a lot... about all, Blanca. I was a coward, fearful, but a cowardly bastard nonetheless — the situation, your family, your parents, and everything surpassed me. I felt lost, that’s what happened. I didn’t know what to do.”
Like a work of magic, my words changed Blanca Desastres’s countenance. A sparkle radiated in her eyes when she heard them. I was not tricking her, every word I said was truth. I knew that one day, she would ask me about it, yet one is never ready to talk after a breakup with the person they love. I felt my heart pound like my Porsche’s engine when I pushed it to full throttle. Maybe it was the beginning of reconciliation, a signal that the flame between us had not entirely died, and that Blanca would give me another chance. If so, the latter would be anything but simple. Blanca could hold a grudge, tough-minded, and very untraditional when it came to men. During our relationship, she had made it clear that second chances were only given by Samaritans. She was a plain woman who did not enjoy half measures. It ran in the family. I was there, dumbfounded, waiting for her to say something.
“Babe!” the waitress shouted from the bar. “Tell him something, the poor man is going to die of grief.”
Blanca looked at the woman and laughed. I joined her. The waves kept breaking against the shore. A radio sounded in the distance. The tension between us eased.
“I accept your apologies, Gabe,” she told me, softening her voice. “I guess there will be more time to talk about this.”
“Yes,” I said, relieved. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Give me a reason instead.”
“For what?”
“For unpacking and staying. Give me a good reason to investigate this.”
I felt a tremor.
“They,” I said. “I do it for them, those missing women. I don’t believe they abandoned their beloved ones out of free will.”
“What are you implying?”
“There is something else, and Rojo knows it. And so does that man,” I added. “It is a very murky story.”
“You are so fond of trouble.”
“No, it’s not just that,” I said. “Innocent people have taken the toll for me.”
“Most of them were users, they knew what they were getting into.”
“There was a kid, an intern,” I explained. “I grew fond of him. He was a bit of a geek, a newly graduate, and well-intended.”
“What was his name?”
“Bordonado,” I said. “I found his body in my bathtub.”
“Bastards.”
“Yes,” I said looking down at the table. “That’s why I need you. You’re the only one I can trust.”
Blanca moved closer and rested her hand on mine. She touched my face with her fingers.
“This is the last time, Gabriel,” she said. “The last one.”
I looked up, and we smiled together. Another wave broke on the shore. From the radio at the bar, the news reported the success of operation TORNADO. The forces of law and order had seized two shipments containing fifty kilos of amphetamine, hidden on a private property, and in two illegal brothels on the Santa Pola highway. State forces had put an end to the clandestine activities of a cheap drug and human trafficking network, that consisted of fifteen men of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian nationality who were led by Heikki Hämäläinen of Finnish origin, aka Tango, and nicknamed “The Crab” by the local press. The report presented some statements.
Blanca and I looked at each other in relief.
The following news opened with the resignation of officer Rojo, head of Alicante Homicide Brigade.
10
Whenever something occurs, there will always be someone demanding an explanation. It is inevitable — a father to his daughter, a wife to her husband, a boss to his employee. For journalists, explanations are given at press conferences. Making a public decision unilaterally, without questions from curious, only leads to confusion, data concealment, and the exacerbation of overlooked issues. That officer Rojo did not give way to questions during the press conference did not surprise us. He always allowed the same people to ask, the ones who were professional and did not cross the fine line between exchanging information and pettiness. But I deserved to know.
* * *
Blanca did not have a chance to put on her bikini because after several unanswered calls and text messages, she and I got in the car and headed to Alicante. I felt alive and happy again to feel the leather of the steering wheel on my fingertips and the speed on my bottom. One more time, like not long ago, Blanca and I were driving down the streets of the capital city, looking for news, following leads, falling in love with the profession once more. We crossed the main avenue, drove by the train station, and turned until we reached the central district police station. As usual, a group of interns swarmed like flies, searching for something to report and go back to the newsroom. We got out of the sports cars, walked to the door, and I asked for Rojo.
“He’s not in,” a policeman on duty replied. “Don’t you read the news?”
“Can I talk to a superior?” I asked.
“We are not allowing journalists.”
“I am a friend of his,” I said. “I have relevant information for you superior.”
The police officer, a young man in his twenties, blond and with shaved sideburns, left the sentry box and entered the police station. He led t
he way, a path I already knew too well.
We entered in Rojo’s former office, changed, clean and disinfected. His wife’s photo frame on the desk had been replaced by a paper calendar. The desktop computer was still in its places, as were the stacks of papers and documents the officer kept. At the office we were greeted by a fifty-year-old man with short gray hair. He was physically imposing although not as much as Rojo. He introduced himself as Officer Ramírez.
“Sit down,” he told us. Officer Ramírez wore his service uniform. “Well, what do you have to tell me?”
“I can’t reach Mr. Rojo. Where is he?”
“I’m afraid that is none of your business,” he replied. “Don’t make me waste my time.”
“Do you know where the wake of Agent Martínez will be?” I asked. His gaze fired two cannon shots at us.
“Leave the dead alone,” he said raising his voice. “What is all this about?”
“Rojo was my friend,” I explained. “I don’t believe he wouldn’t leave a message for me.”
The officer got up and headed to the door. He opened it and told us out.
“Rojo only told us to send a journalist and his girlfriend to hell if they showed up. Which is both of you,” he said. “So, don’t bother looking for him and leave him alone. Don’t insist.”