by Pablo Poveda
I looked at Blanca, discouraged. Had he become a cretin too or was he trying to distance himself by getting obstacles out of the way?
“Don’t worry. We are leaving.”
“Oh,” he exclaimed. “He also mentioned that you have a penchant for trouble, so I’ll tell you one more time. Get away from him and let the police do their job.”
“And what if I don’t?” I inquired.
His face reddened in anger.
“I know who you are,” he said in a soft, yet threatening, voice. “I won’t hesitate to crush you like a worm.”
The threats from the new Homicide Brigade officer did not sit well with me. It was lunchtime and my stomach started to roar. We walked out of there; I kicked a stone stop to unleash my frustration. The guard at the sentry box saw me and laughed. We got in the car, drove to the Paseo de la Explanada, and sat at an outdoor table in La Terraza del Gourmet, a more than decent tapas restaurant with sea views and minimalist design.
“Why do you think he said that?” Blanca asked. “I thought Rojo was someone serious.”
“I told you already,” I replied. “He must be hiding something. He knows too much.”
“Have you considered that Martínez’s death was his reason to resign?”
“Do you think so?” I said. “I’m not sure. I think that they are playing us for fools.”
“Tell me what you are thinking.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I think there is a chance that Martínez was not murdered and is still alive.”
“Right,” she replied. “It’s nonsense.”
“I’m not buying the idea that with that man convicted, everything is over,” I carried on. “Before you appeared, Rojo had shown me a video in which his wife appeared with another woman. It was a homemade video. Therefore, I suppose they are still alive.”
“Remember it was she who abandoned them,” Blanca said. “That woman is within her right to do whatever she wants — ”
“Unless she did it against her will,” I added.
“Which hasn’t been proven.”
“The Finn made a reference to the women,” I replied. “It was him who sent Rojo the footage. So, I think it is likely that he knows his whereabouts, and also that they had been working together.”
“Cut it out, Gabe,” Blanca responded. “I didn’t bring my tin foil hat.”
“We knew that Rojo had spent time in Scandinavia, more precisely, in Finland, while he was looking for his wife,” I reminded her. “What he never told us is what he did there. Yes, she met that psychiatrist who almost got us killed, but I am positive he must have met other people.”
“So, you think the Finn is connected to what happened on the island,” she concluded. “This is getting really tangled — ”
“Not only that,” I continued. “When I asked him the meaning of the crabs, he came up with mythological stuff. A complete nonsense, of course. At first, I thought it didn’t make any sense whatsoever. You know, yet another lunatic playing god, someone who thinks they’re divine, nothing new under the sun — ” the waiter came with two pints of beer and two skewers, left everything on the table, I took a drink from my pint and carried on. “While we were giving our statements, I was thinking about it. What he had said about the Greek mythology.”
“Wow, he brainwashed you while I was about to get raped,” she replied scathingly. “And what conclusion did you draw, Sherlock?”
Awkward silence.
I was about to make a big mistake but did not.
I was not going to tell her. The fact that Blanca and I were not a couple, had turned our friendship into a poker game.
I may have changed my mind and given up any financial or professional gain in all this. But, if I had learned something about journalism, it was that you should never trust another journalist. Telling Blanca Desastres everything I knew — regardless of how much our story united us — would leave me naked and disadvantaged before her. I could not afford to give her the key that unlocked the vault of answers.
“Before I got caught,” I explained, “ I talked to one of the girls swarming the house.”
“You mean the prostitutes?”
“No, not all of them were,” I responded. “She wasn’t. At first glance, I didn’t recognize her, but we had met before. She knows something too.”
“Let’s start with Rojo,” Blanca said. “Do you know where he lives?”
“No,” I answered. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“Great, Gabriel,” she replied. “We need to go back to the station and insist. I can’t think of anything else we can do.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I uttered. “We’ll only make things more difficult. We don’t need to. Now that Rojo has left the corps, we can go after him without the police stepping on our toes.”
“I like your thinking, very clever,” Blanca said. “But someone must have thought of that before us.”
“And acted on it,” I added. “That is why we won’t find Rojo at home. That bastard is always one step ahead. That’s why he told me to hide for 48 hours with the girl. He anticipates every movement. However, not every journalist knows that he has a son, nor that he is looking for his wife. We’ll go to his parents’.”
Blanca had that hopeful gaze, knowing that together, we were capable of anything. She blinked and drew a shy but relaxed smile. I did not need her as much as she needed me.
“We’ll need a phone book, Gabriel,” she said. “It’s time to make some phone calls.”
“A phone book?” I asked confused, “I haven’t used one in decades. Why don’t we use the Internet?”
“Do you intend to find his mother on Facebook?” she replied.
“Who knows. Maybe?”
Phone books had become a collector’s item since the Internet was ubiquitous in all Spanish households. However, not everything was online. Finding a family address was not difficult but did call for information attainable only through offline means. The phone book would provide us with a list of surnames — and we knew Rojo’s — and a series of home addresses to check with a simple phone call. We paid, left the terrace, went to the car, and drove back to the hotel. I searched through the drawers without finding anything. On an old bedside table, a yellowing telephone, that must have been white once, caught my attention. I doubted the room service, as this was not, by any means, a luxurious place. I went down to the bar and saw the woman cleaning the coffee maker.
“Do you have a phone book by any chance?” I asked tactfully.
She looked at me and laughed.
“Oh God!” she uttered and stopped doing what she was doing. “Honestly, I can’t recall the last time someone asked me this.”
“Not everyone in town is online,” I said. “I am looking for a friend who lives in the area.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “There must be something in the storage room. By the way, that girl — ”
“Yes?” I inquired intrigued.
“She’s crazy for you, kid, can’t you see?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I replied.
“Your loss,” she said cheekily. “Don’t be silly; women suffer a lot for love.”
It must have been the feminine sixth sense that men do not possess. That proverbial feminine intuition that goes unnoticed in our eyes. That woman was sincere, I noticed it in her way of saying it. Wow, Blanca, who would have thought, right? I was perusing that phrase in my head while the woman struggled with a pile of junk in another room. On the television, there was a shark documentary. I grabbed the newspaper, flipped pages at random, and found a small tourist advertisement for Tabarca. I knocked on wood. I wonder if the past was after me. Could it possibly be truth? Would Blanca be chasing me too? I folded the paper and left it next to the display case where they kept the cold tapas. In the kitchen, someone boiled water and cooked seafood. The terrace was beginning to fill with diners who had come in from the beach by car or from nearby houses. A man in apron came out of the kitche
n and called the woman aloud.
“María! For Christ’s sake!” he yelled. “We have to serve the diners.”
María was the waitress, who appeared again like a rabbit coming out of a magician’s hat.
“Coming!” she replied, bringing an old phone book under her arm. “You were lucky, darling. It’s a tad old, but I don’t think much has changed.”
“Thank you for the trouble,” I said with a wink.
“You’re welcome,” she replied. “Mother of God! I’m coming!”
The woman turned around, entered the kitchen, and instantly, came out with a plate of boiled crabs. I jumped on my seat and almost flinched, impressed by the unexpected sight of the crustaceans. “Hey Kid! They won’t bite you!” the woman said with a smile as she walked out the terrace to serve the appetizers.
“Where are they from?” I insisted.
“They’re from the Santa Pola market, where else?”
“But those are marbled crabs,” I mumbled.
“Oh, you mean where they catch them!” she exclaimed with enthusiasm. Talking about fish with coastal people is like talking about video games with a teenager. “They are from Mallorca. They just came in. They’re smaller but delicious. They come in through Dénias pier from Monday to — ”
She did not get to finish her phrase when I darted out of the restaurant, looking for Blanca. She had decided to bathe at the beach while I got the phone book. Then I saw her in a black bikini that revealed all her beauty, her delicate white skin like salt and that wet mane. Her breasts, big yet not huge, under a top with bulgy cups, gave her a buxom appearance. I ran to her with the phone book in hand. Blanca was walking out of the water, but a wave that broke at her knees sent her rolling. We laughed, the breeze hit my face, the sun was bright, and seagulls overflew the restaurant, seeking a fishbone to put in their beaks.
“Are you okay, Gabriel? You’re pale.” she said. “I know my complexion is ghostly white, but I am not dead — ”
“Listen,” I said. I wanted to remind her how beautiful she was, but I did not have the guts. “I know where Rojo is.”
“Wow, you’re fast, aren’t you?” she replied. “What did you find out?”
“I believe he is in Mallorca,” I answered, convinced of my words. “Don’t ask me why, but I have a founded suspicion that he must have gone there.”
“Wait,” she said dubious. “Why would he go there?”
“Before coming back to Alicante,” I told her, “I spent some time in Palma. There I crossed paths with some bloke who tried to kill me.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“I am not!”, I said. “He was the typical rich kid, with a wealthy dad — who believes no one is good enough to hold him accountable for anything — and also an addict.”
“Carry on.”
“First he chased me in his car. I was riding a taxi, and he was after us. The cab driver and I barely got out of that one.”
“What did you do, Gabriel?” Blanca asked. “I find it odd that he chased you for no reason.”
“That doesn’t matter” — I shrugged it off. Blanca fixed her gaze on my pupils in a very inquisitive fashion. “I managed to get away and boarded the first boat that landed in Valencia. I don’t know how, though, the man caught up with me on the boat. He tried to stab me right there! Amidst all the passengers as witnesses!”
“You should start writing that novel that you never got around to writing,” she said ironically. “You have a great imagination.”
“Blanca, I swear,” I said. “That man was under the effect of... something. It was not normal. I had never seen anything like it.”
“And how did it end?” he asked. “You said that you managed to get away with it.”
“I did,” I said and continued weighing my words, “but you won’t believe me. We had a mêlée, and I got rid of him by throwing him into the sea. Pretty much like a gladiator. You know me. Then, the police arrived and while I was giving my statement, we arrived in Dénia. The boat had to take a detour after the incident. At that moment, I didn’t make much of it. But when I was turned over to the local police, Rojo showed up with the other one, Martínez, the dead officer. I was glad to see him — it had been some time — and I hadn’t heard from him since we left him.”
“That’s a good story, Gabriel,” she said sympathetically, “but I fail to see the relevance. He was doing his job; you were lucky it wasn’t someone else. That ordeal wouldn’t have come in cheap.”
“You’re wrong,” I replied. “I thought so at first. I thought I’d been lucky that Rojo showed up. Although it may have been him who was lucky it was me on that boat.”
“You lost me, Gabriel.”
“Forget what I was doing there, instead ask yourself ‘what was Rojo, the head of the Homicide Brigade, doing at the pier so far away from his area?’ ”
“He might’ve been looking for someone,” she answered. “The Corps responds to one single command line.”
“He was out of his jurisdiction,” I replied. “I didn’t even have to sign a statement. When we got into the car, we heard other officers on the radio, reporting fights, altercations, and attacks in various parts of the city. He asked me not to tell anything, and again, I didn’t make much of it, like summer sprees and nothing more. Then I arrived in Alicante and saw it with my own eyes. When I turned to Rojo, the bombshell had already gone off. And you know the rest.”
Blanca stayed quiet, wrapped in a blue and white striped towel. She looked incredibly beautiful under the sunlight.
“Are you implying that Rojo knew what was going on, even before it happened?” she finally asked. “That he knew the drugs were being smuggled through Dénia from Mallorca, and that the only way to access their circle was through the fish market and fishing boats.”
“You figured that out yourself, gorgeous,” I complimented her, “but it makes a lot of sense.”
“If the drug is being introduced in fishing boats,” she continued, “that means that the logistics are carried out from the island.”
“Harbor area, touristic, hundreds of daily flights, an enclosed region, far from the peninsula, but more accessible than the Canary Islands,” I added. “The perfect place to go unnoticed.”
“Do you think Rojo is on his way to Palma in Mallorca?”
“I have no doubt about it,” I replied.
“We have to interrogate the Finn,” she said.
“He’ll lie to us,” I replied, “but we can try.”
“Hold on. This all seems to me like a fictional story, Gabriel,” she said grabbing my arm. “Really. I find it difficult to believe. However, aren’t these the kind of stories that people should find out about? Stories that show the world is not what it seems.”
“After all these years, I’ve learned one thing,” I replied. “People just want to read good stories.”
11
I was never a person who trusted others’ hypotheses too much. Reflection is an activity to do oneself, although it is said that two heads are better than one, the paradigms for solving situations are different in each case. Blanca was bold. I knew that from the first day I met her. Journalism is a profession that relies on intuition first and on facts second. How information is attained depends on the steps you decide to take to get it. There is no scientific model, an exact pattern that applies to the process of extracting and digesting information. The journalist is a whole entity in it of itself, eyes that see, ears that listen, the hand that writes, and at the same time, a mind that interprets. As is in almost everything, it is not the journalist who creates the news, but the people. Our job — to sell an interesting product.
In that situation, Blanca and I were facing a series of facts that made no sense whatsoever. It was time to recap, organize what we had, and not to take a wrong step.
We needed to find proof that someone was smuggling the drug through the port of Dénia. And there was a possibility that the Finn was only a mere intermediary who took over the te
rritory and its localized market. In case none of it was true, we would have nothing, but a series of isolated facts, a lunatic drug trafficker, and a dead cop. A house of cards in full collapse.
Also, there was something very strange about Rojo’s resignation. Each passing day, I had a hunch that I knew him even less than I came to think. Why had he lied to me? My inquiries turned the policeman into an abstract figure. I came to doubt his resignation and deduced that it was a personal move, a way to disengage from the Corps and carry out personal revenge. So, we had to find Rojo, find out whether there was a connection between him, Mallorca and the crabs, and prevent him from discovering us.
If it was true, I wondered what was on the island. I did not feel like going back to that place. It was as though that island were chasing me, which almost completely demoralized me. The summer continued, political scandals were about to break out, and any news originated in the summer would be relegated to the background.
I called the five phone numbers in the phone book without any success, using all possible logical combinations of surnames based on Rojo’s name. Blanca was ready with her hair still wet and a white shirt through which her underwear was visible.
“Nothing,” I uttered when I hung up from the last call. “They know nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“There has to be something,” she said. “We must go to the jail.”
“That’s stupid. They know me there.”
“No,” she answered. “I’ll go. You will go to the fish market.”
“What for?”
“It hasn’t been even 48 hours,” she replied. “I don’t think Rojo is so stupid as to leave without an infiltrated informer.”
“Do you still think your intuition is right?” I asked her.
“Do you have a better idea?”
I did not.
“Think it through, Blanca,” I told her. “This story is no joke.”
She looked at me, reflective.
“Like all of them,” she answered. “In case you make up your mind, take a tour of the port, okay? I’ll pay the Finn a visit in jail; I’ll let you know if there is anything. Let me know if you decide to find anything, okay?”