by David Hewson
‘And the sergeant?’
She didn’t like the expression on his face, one she had seen doctors use before. It had that medical arrogance she had come to know well: it said that it was kinder to tell the lie than to reveal the truth.
‘Sergeant Torrillo is stable. He has a long way to go. He’s unconscious, on life support. You may see him from outside the intensive-care room, but that’s all.’
‘You understand why I want to see him?’
‘I read the papers.’
‘Will he live? Please. Don’t try to spare me. It’s not necessary.’
‘No?’
‘I can take the truth.’
‘The truth . . . the truth is that Sergeant Torrillo is on a life-support system. It’s that which keeps him alive. We can keep him this way for some time. Perhaps even years. But of course that would not be alive in the sense that we know it, and it would be for his family, or the courts, or the medical insurance people, or all three, to decide when it should be switched off.’
Maria shut her eyes for a moment and tried to quell the anger rising within her. The thought of Torrillo – so strong, so full of life – reduced to such a condition infuriated her.
‘You asked me for the truth,’ said the doctor.
‘I’m grateful you gave it. Is there no chance that he may improve?’
The doctor made a half-smile. ‘A chance, yes. What there is not is a probability. He was very severely injured. He lost such a large amount of blood that it may be impossible for him to recover the functions that the life-support system now performs for him. It’s possible, but not likely. All we can do is wait.’
Ten minutes later, after she’d showered, made herself feel more human, she looked at herself in the mirror. The clothes the police had picked were old ones. They looked baggy on her now. In the few days she’d been in the city she’d lost weight. She had changed, was changing. Her face looked older too. There were lines, a dryness to the skin she had not seen before. She combed her hair looking for grey streaks. There were none, but they would come. She was sure of that.
Then she left the room, asked directions, walked along a corridor lit by bright fluorescent lights, past bed after bed, past the rows of silent, pained faces, took a lift to the second floor, asked directions again and walked through a set of folding doors.
Torrillo lay behind a glass wall that went almost from the floor to the ceiling. She could hardly recognize him. His body was covered in wires and tubes and the skeletal metal frames of medical equipment. She was reminded of an engraving she had seen once, from an early edition of Gulliver’s Travels: the hero, unconscious on a beach, being tied by tiny men who crawled over his huge body, pulling ropes, erecting wooden scaffolding, using blocks and tackles and pinions to entrap, to enslave the giant.
There was a shallow movement from his chest. A hint of a breath. Behind his body electronic meters chattered and whirred, painted green phosphor blips on circular screens, threw digital numbers onto LCD panels amidst a mass of wires and clips and gadgetry. Pumps and ventilators rose and fell with a mechanical rhythm that tried to look organic. Was this all that kept him alive? All?
‘No rain,’ said Maria, so close now that her breath briefly clouded the glass with the words. ‘No rain, Bear. Please. No rain.’
THIRTY-NINE
Quemada scraped a horny hand across his sweating bald patch, gazed across the room and sighed. The place looked like the inside of a rubbish bin. Clothes, some clean, some dirty, littered the floor. In the corner, silent, eyes tightly set on some unseen point on the carpet, sat a teenage girl: olive skin, dark eyes, faint prettiness, puppy fat sagging around her jowls. A baby, no more than six months old, with dark curly hair around a face that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in days, played in the mess. Quemada registered the smell of used nappies and stale piss. The kid – the mother, surely – didn’t seem to care. The walls of the room carried a motley collection of religious icons: a few crucifixes, cheap images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Alongside hung more modern idols: pop stars Quemada recognized only by their features, familiar from the weekend magazines. They grinned with perfect white teeth and wore the clothes he’d seen in American baseball on the TV.
He looked at the baby and said, ‘Sometimes they’re doomed from birth.’
Velasco scratched his nose with a long, thin forefinger, then said to the girl, in a voice without warmth, ‘Are you the mother?’
She took her eyes off the carpet for a few seconds and nodded.
‘You can get help with the kid, you know,’ Quemada said. ‘From the social. They’ll show you how to do things.’
Her face creased into the kind of teenage sneer – insolence and stupidity all mixed up into some bilious cocktail – that Quemada knew only too well.
‘The social? They come here. All the time. You know what Maggi tells them? She says, “Fuck off, we look after our own.”’
‘Well, I guess if that’s correct they won’t want to come back, will they? If that’s correct and, looking at the kid, I somehow wonder.’
‘He’s OK,’ she said, that sneer on her face again. ‘We wash him, we feed him. He’s just between changes, that’s all.’
Quemada sniffed the air and said, ‘Long between, smells like.’
The girl stared at the carpet again.
‘You on your own?’
In a small voice, the girl said, ‘Yes.’
‘And this Maggi. She’s what? Sister?’
‘She’s my mamma.’
‘Jesus!’ said Velasco. ‘If my kids called me by my name they’d get a good hiding. I ask: What’s the world coming to?’
‘I always call her Maggi. Everybody calls her Maggi.’
‘How old are you?’
The eyes bored a hole in the carpet. ‘Sixteen.’
‘Starting a little young, aren’t we?’
The girl said nothing.
‘So where is Maggi?’
‘Out working.’
‘Exactly what kind of work is that?’
‘She works in a bar.’
‘Any particular side of the counter?’
The girl’s eyes blazed at them. ‘Ask her yourself.’
‘I intend to,’ said Quemada. ‘When are you expecting her back?’
‘Sometimes she works late.’
‘I’ll bet she does,’ said Velasco. ‘We’ll wait.’
The two cops threw some clothes off a sofa onto the floor and sat down. The coverlet felt damp.
‘You gonna offer us a coffee?’ asked Quemada.
‘Fuck off,’ she replied, to no one in particular.
‘I take it that’s a reply in the negative. You ever heard of Antonio Alvarez?’
They watched her face for some sign of recognition. There was none. She shook her head.
‘Maybe some friend of your mamma’s?’
‘Maggi’s got lots of friends.’
‘Working in a bar like that,’ said Quemada, ‘it’s sort of a congenial environment.’
Velasco turned and muttered to him, ‘This kid knows nothing. We could be here hours.’
‘Yeah,’ said Quemada. ‘Tell you what. We give it thirty minutes. If she’s not back by then, we’ll try somewhere else.’
Velasco looked at him. ‘You think there might be something here? It’s worth it?’
‘I think it’s better sitting on a sofa, even this stinking dirty sofa, for half an hour instead of sweating to death in that car, like we do most days. Take a break, man. Relax.’
‘Huh,’ Velasco grunted, then leaned back into the sofa, reached into his pocket, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one.
The girl looked at him, hoping.
‘Too young,’ he said. ‘For lots of things.’
They watched the smoke dance through the sluggish hot air, watched the flies buzz pointlessly around the curling plume. Just as Velasco was stubbing it out in a brimming ashtray set on the floor, they heard a noise at the front door.
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br /> ‘She’s back,’ said the girl and Quemada wondered, for a moment, if he’d seen terror or one of its relatives flash briefly across her face.
Maggi Bartolomé was a big-boned, blowsy woman somewhere in her mid-forties. Her face was overlaid with make-up and her hair was tied back severely in a bun. She wore a typical whore’s uniform: a tight red shiny skirt, cut short above the knee, yellow blouse with a deep cleavage exposing full, tanned breasts and a gold chain around a neck that was starting to show signs of age. She took one look at them, then swore. Quemada smiled: he’d worked the Vice beat for a while. He knew the crowd.
‘Maggi,’ he said. ‘And I never knew your real name.’
She peered at him myopically, grimaced, opened a drawer, then pulled out a pair of cheap tortoiseshell spectacles and put them on. The glasses changed her appearance entirely. She turned into a headmistress all dressed up and painted for a risqué part in the annual school show.
‘I know you?’
‘Guess I shouldn’t be offended. You must run into a lot of cops in your line of business.’
‘Too many,’ she said and peered at him again. ‘I don’t remember you.’
‘Four or five years ago, we cautioned you. Hustling for business outside the cathedral. Personally, I don’t mind you hustling, but maybe it’s best if you do it some way away from God, you understand. God and the tourists, though if you listen to the city council, you’d think maybe they’re the same thing.’
‘You cautioned me?’
‘Yeah. Then you walked on your way.’
‘You didn’t expect no favours?’
‘No.’
‘I should’ve remembered that. Usually I wind up doing something with your sad little pricks before I get to leave. You just let me go without nothing and I don’t remember it. Funny. Guess I must be getting old.’
Quemada smiled, a smile that said ‘Guess so’, and stayed silent.
‘So state your business and leave,’ she said. ‘You got no reason to hassle us.’
‘We don’t want to hassle you, Maggi. Really we don’t. We just want some information on one of your customers. One of your old customers.’
‘You think I’m the kind of hooker who knows their names?’
‘You knew this one,’ said Velasco. ‘Antonio Alvarez.’
She looked at them as if they had come from another planet, her eyes big white circles staring through the glasses.
‘Shit!’ she said, then walked to the sideboard, pulled out a bottle of cheap brandy and filled a long tumbler with the oily brown fluid. ‘I never thought I’d hear about him again. I never wanted to.’
‘It’s important,’ said Quemada. ‘This is nothing to do with you, with your business. We don’t want to lay anything at your door. We just want you to tell us everything you know about old Antonio. And then we go. No problems.’
‘That’s a promise?’
‘We’re chasing bigger fish than whores, Maggi. Much bigger fish.’
‘Dead fish. You know that, don’t you?’
Velasco nodded. ‘We’re not dumb. We still want to ask some questions.’
The woman took a big gulp of the brandy, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. A labourer’s habit, thought Quemada.
‘You.’ She looked at the girl. ‘Take the baby. Go upstairs. Change her; she stinks. Change her like I showed you how. You should know how to do it by now. If you don’t look after her properly I’m giving her up to the social . . .’
‘No!’ the kid squawked.
‘She’s a human being. Not a doll. You stay up there with her. You don’t come down till I tell you. Turn on the radio. I want to hear the radio, I don’t want you listening through the floor. You understand?’
The girl swore and scooped up the child roughly from the floor, went into the kitchen, reappeared carrying a can of beer, then left the room. They heard the thud of footsteps, hard and deliberate on the stairs, then through the floor above. The sound of cheap pop music playing through a tinny radio began to boom above them.
‘Little cow always wants to put it on when I need some peace and quiet. She can play it when I do want it for a change.’
Quemada looked around the place, then realized what had been bothering him. There were no toys. Not a rag doll, not a cloth book. Nothing.
He watched Maggi Bartolomé pull a cigarette out of the packet with a long, artificial, shiny pink fingernail, watched her light it, then suck through cracked, painted lips, and said to himself again, ‘Sometimes they’re just doomed from birth.’
FORTY
She had no idea how long she’d watched Torrillo, following the movement of his great chest rising and falling in shallow breaths, the lights flashing and winking at her without meaning. Here, in the hospital, time seemed to be frozen. Nothing moved, nothing changed. The slow, relentless fading of the present into emptiness was imperceptible, a tiny, feeble beating beneath a flat, evanescent normality. Yet the beating was there, primal in its cruelty, ticking off the seconds, the days, the hours, in a fog of antiseptic, the mirrored surfaces of white tiles, the metronomic clicking of heels on polished stone floors.
Maria stood up and tried to quell the sudden sense of giddiness. She was soaked in sweat. The clothes stuck uncomfortably to her skin like a new, ill-fitting layer to her body, a sticky chrysalis only half-shed.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, sang a voice somewhere back in her head and, for the second time in a few days, she found herself looking back at the old Maria – the young Maria – ten years or more distant, and wondering to herself: Was that me? Was that really me? And if it was, what happened in the distance between us? What’s happening between the me-now and the me-to-come? What is the me-to-come? What will she look like? What shapes her?
She wiped the palms of her hands on her top, tried to breathe deeply and slowly. This sweat, this giddiness . . . it was not just the heat, not just the hospital. The wound was almost forgotten. It nagged her no more than a mosquito bite. She was afraid. Afraid to go on. To confront Cristina Lucena. To meet what lurked behind that ancient, grey face.
Again she wiped her hands, as if trying to rid herself of some stain. Then she closed her eyes and tried to focus. There were shapes, red and black and violet, swimming in the dark. This world was out of balance. She took one final look at Torrillo and walked out into the corridor.
The clock said 3 p.m. Soon she would be able to leave. The police guard would come, drive her home, let her think. But before then she had to see, had to speak with the old woman. She felt for the piece of paper in her pocket, then searched for the geriatric ward, walking down the long, echoing corridors at a steady pace.
The knowledge hung in the air, like static waiting for the coming of the storm, a deep, basal certainty: she might never see Bear alive again.
FORTY-ONE
Maggi Bartolomé sucked at the cigarette until the end glowed red and fiery, then she poured herself another brandy.
‘Do you two mind if I get out of this junk?’ she asked.
Quemada raised an eyebrow. ‘Now you’re not gonna do anything stupid like trying to run away? It’s real hot out there, and I’m too old and too tired to start chasing women down the street.’
‘I’m not going to run away,’ she said, laughing at him. ‘I have to look like this to earn a living. Doesn’t mean I want to wear it in my own home.’
‘OK,’ said Velasco. ‘But don’t be long. The captain hates paying overtime.’
‘You cops hate paying for anything,’ she said, then walked upstairs. They heard the radio turn down for a moment, the sound of low voices, movement. A shower came on somewhere. They waited. Then she came back down again wearing cheap jeans, a nylon top and no make-up. She looked like someone completely different: older, sure, thought Quemada, but not worse. In another life . . . what? He wondered for a moment, then mentally kicked himself: you don’t get another life.
She picked up the drink, stubbed out the cigarette, lit another straight away
.
‘Why me?’ she said. ‘Of all people.’
Velasco said, ‘You laid a complaint. In 1960. You said he raped you, repeatedly. We’d like to know more.’
‘That was over thirty years ago. The bastard’s dead. You want to know more?’
‘I thought I just said that.’
‘Mind telling me why?’
‘We don’t mind, Maggi,’ Quemada cut in, working on the basis that you give a little, you get a little. ‘You read about these murders in the city?’
‘You mean those arty guys and stuff? One of you cops got hit too?’
‘Right.’
‘What’s a dead guy got to do with it?’
‘We don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Thing is, there’s kind of a connection between him and some of the people who got killed. You heard of La Soledad?’
‘Just the stories. You know. Everyone heard the stories.’
‘He never mentioned it.’
‘You think we talked?’
‘What did you do, Maggi?’ Quemada asked.
‘You want the details? This something for the cops’ Christmas party, right?’
‘No. This is serious. Really serious. We know what you said happened when you laid those complaints. We need to know what really happened. Who else he was messing with. That kind of thing.’
She stubbed out the cigarette, walked to the stairwell, then yelled upstairs for the girl to turn the radio up. Some pop song got louder.
‘We just pass it on, you know. My mother to me. Me to her. You get knocked up with some kid, your life just goes to shit. Like it’s automatic.’
She gazed at nothing in particular.
‘If it hadn’t been for Antonio, I wouldn’t have started this “career”. That’s true. Really. That, at least, began with me, you see. My mother, she just cleaned hotels, cleaned people’s houses, that kind of stuff. My father was gone. Maybe dead. Maybe not. She never really let on.’
‘Your mother’s dead now?’
She nodded. ‘Ten, fifteen years ago. Don’t ask me exactly. I never spoke to her much once I realized.’