The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  “Minor things. A blown fuse, a leaky valve, a stuck window.” He took another sip, then procured a Hungarian salami from the key closet, cut a few pieces, and placed them on the Neues Deutschland. “It’s ideal work for a retired lathe operator. And everyone here is very nice to me.”

  “This is the gift from the minister of culture, for Tina Feuerbach.” Cayetano placed the largest package on the table. “Where can I put it?”

  “Right here is fine. What is it?”

  “We ourselves don’t know. A present from very high up, if you understand me,” Cayetano said in a dramatically solemn voice, pretending to stroke his nonexistent beard. “But you have to place it somewhere very safe because it’s expensive, fine, and fragile.”

  “Nothing’s ever gotten lost here.”

  “It’s not a matter of getting lost,” Cayetano said as he filled Kurt’s glass again, “but of breaking. It would be an irreparable loss, not only because of its cost and quality, but also because it’s an official package from far away. I’m sure you understand what I’m saying. There could be consequences, for us, and even for you …”

  “Kurt Plenzdorf knows exactly what to do.”

  “What will you do, Grandpa?”

  “I’ll go put it in the apartment right now. That way you can go in peace and I can have a calm conscience. I don’t want any problems with the commander.”

  “Wouldn’t you prefer for me to carry the package?”

  Kurt’s eyes scrutinized his mustachioed guest as Mister Ed went on lamenting the monotony of his lonely stable life. Someone emerged from the elevator, walked past the door with clacking heels, and continued out to Leipziger Strasse.

  “Could it be that you don’t trust me?” Kurt protested, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Not at all. But perhaps you’ve had a little too much to drink.”

  Kurt guffawed and drained another glass in defiance. “This is nothing for Kurt Plenzdorf, former lathe operator at Wehrmacht, the Nationale Volksarmee, and the factory owned by the people of Narva,” he muttered, shielding a burp. “You two stay here and don’t worry. I’ll leave this in Frau Feuerbach’s apartment and come right back. But only on one condition,” he added with a mischievous look.

  “Tell me, Grandpa.”

  “That you leave me the other bottle.”

  “Kein Problem, Herr Plenzdorf.”

  Kurt opened the closet and grabbed one of the keys that hung inside. He hugged the package, pretended to fall for a moment, and headed to the elevator.

  “Didn’t I tell you? That Genosse Plenzdorf is a Prussian from head to toe,” said Margaretchen. “He’ll never let you enter the apartment.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Cayetano said, refilling Kurt’s glass.

  44

  When Kurt returned and hung the key back on its hook, Cayetano gave him the bottle of amber rum, which the groundskeeper jubilantly hid in the water tank of the toilet in his small bathroom. While he was inside, Cayetano pocketed the key and then announced that he was going out to reserve a table at a restaurant on Leipziger Allee.

  Instead of going out, he took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

  The door of 1507 ceded with a creak, its hinges thirsty for oil. This Plenzdorf didn’t fully attend to all his duties, he thought. He found himself in a large dining area, as clean and tidy as a showroom, with a window that framed the buildings of West Berlin. He explored the apartment. On a desk in the study he saw an Olivetti typewriter, a biography of Helene Weigel, and the Tagebücher of Bertolt Brecht. In one of the bedrooms, a photo of Tina Feuerbach displayed caught his attention. She was in a bathing suit, thin and young and smiling. The waves swayed gently behind her. In the kitchen he found an electric bill in the actress’s name. Proof that Feuerbach was her real name! He felt satisfied. When he’d begun the investigation, he had no idea how to proceed, but now he believed that investigation was like life: it presented problems while at the same time offering tools for resolving them. But was Tina Feuerbach the daughter of Beatriz, the widow of Bracamonte? And was the poet her father? He shivered at the thought of Neruda immersed in the cold and instability of Valparaíso, dictating his memoirs to Matilde in La Sebastiana, composing poems, waiting impatiently for news from overseas.

  In the drawer of a nightstand in a small second bedroom, he found pills, condoms, and a novel by Harry Thürk. Whose room was this? Did it belong to a son or daughter, or a lover of Tina’s? It didn’t matter. He should return to the first floor soon; every moment he spent inspecting the premises was like playing with fire. As he crossed the living room one more time, he saw the animal on the shelf, placed discreetly behind a glass door. It was a miniature llama, no taller than a bottle of beer, made with authentic hide and draped in a colorful blanket embroidered with the word “Bolivia.” Behind the llama stood a photograph.

  He opened the glass door and picked up the photo. A couple smiled at the camera, their arms around each other: the man had gray around his temples and the woman had light hair and eyes. They were posing beside a bronze plaque that read “Club Social.” On the back of the photograph, someone had written, Santa Cruz, Bolivia, March 1967. At that moment, he heard someone turn a key in the front door. He put the photo in his pocket, grabbed a beer stein, and quickly hid behind the door to the studio. From that vantage point, through the crack, he’d be able to make out who was coming in.

  It was a man. He was wearing a dark suit, and he was burly, with short hair and a flat nose that gave him the air of a boxer. Was he Tina’s partner, or a Stasi agent on his trail? Or could he be from the Chilean army? A chill ran up his spine as he realized that if this guy came into the studio, he would inevitably discover him on the way out. He watched the man close the apartment door and pause in the hall, where he looked at himself in the mirror for a few seconds. Cayetano pressed the beer stein between his hands as the man approached the studio, adjusting the knot of his tie.

  Cayetano knocked him down with one fierce blow, summoning the unflinching power of a Teófilo Stevenson. The man fell flat on his face on the carpet. Blood trickled from the nape of his neck. Cayetano feared he’d sent him on to the next world.

  He wiped his fingerprints from the beer stein with his handkerchief, as criminals did in Maigret novels, and left the apartment. He rushed down the stairs. His heart pumped furiously and blood filled his head, disconcerting him and muddying his thoughts. He stopped on a landing to catch his breath. The smell of fried garlic and garbage in the stairwell made him nauseous.

  Then, all of a sudden, he was plunged into total darkness. They’ve caught me! he thought. But he stayed put, crouching, pricking his ears and holding his breath. He heard no steps. He waited without moving or making a sound. He broke into a cold sweat; his legs shook. But he heard nothing. Nobody seemed to be following him. It must have been an automatic switch, he thought as he groped the wall for a button. He found one, pressed it, and sighed with relief when the stairwell flooded with light. He lit a cigarette to calm himself. He couldn’t return to Kurt’s room in such a state. That would make him suspicious. He continued down the stairs, then, suddenly, the image in the photograph he’d picked up in the apartment passed before his eyes like a slow-motion movie scene, and he realized who the woman in the picture was. He took it out of his pocket, hand trembling, and stopped to examine it again. He couldn’t believe it. It was as if a veil had suddenly fallen from his eyes. That woman was Beatriz, the widow of Bracamonte!

  45

  It was the winter’s fault, for colluding against Wehrmacht with the Bolsheviks. At Stalingrad, I lost my little finger and two toes from my right foot. It was a miracle I didn’t freeze to death,” the doorman said to Margaretchen as Cayetano returned to the room. “Did you get a table?”

  “Yes, very close by, Grandpa, at the Sofia. I hope Bulgarian food is at least as good as Cuban. How’s that rum treating you?”

  The television was now running an ad for the latest Audi model. Plenzdorf
glanced at the bottle, nodded, and poured himself another drink. Then he said, “They made us rebuild Siberian towns and then denazified us.” He poured a glass for Cayetano. Only one piece of the Hungarian salami remained. “At the prison camp, I studied historical materialism and dialectics, and became a Stalinist. And in October of 1949, just before the tovarich founded East Germany, they transported me with thousands of ex-soldiers on a cargo train to Frankfurt. We arrived in Berlin singing ‘The Internationale.’ Ten years before that, we’d left here intoning the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied.’ That’s history for you—the rest is all hot air,” he muttered, glass in hand.

  Cayetano drank the rum in one fast shot to calm his nerves. “It’s time for us to go, Margaretchen,” he said.

  Kurt invited them to stay for some Bockwürste with mustard in his office, which he could prepare in a matter of minutes. It would be cheaper than taking their apéritif in a restaurant on Leipziger Allee.

  “Please don’t worry,” said Cayetano. “The embassy is footing the bill for lunch.”

  “Well, then. I’d like to be a diplomat myself,” Kurt huffed, eyes full of envy.

  “Didn’t you need to go to the bathroom?” Cayetano asked Margaretchen.

  “Oh, in that case, allow me to go in first and make sure everything’s in order, gnädige Frau. You know how messy we men can be,” Kurt said, tottering into the bathroom.

  As he wiped the sink with a sponge and moved cardboard boxes off the toilet, Margaretchen waited behind him. Cayetano used the moment when both their backs were turned to him to return the key to its hook in the closet.

  Before they left, at the insistence of the Genosse lathe operator, they drank a toast of amber rum in honor of “Papaíto Stalin,” whom Plenzdorf still admired, and then Cayetano and Margaretchen left for Leipziger Allee, where they caught a bus for Alexanderplatz. It occurred to Cayetano that what he’d just done was a far cry from anything in Simenon’s novels, though he’d seen this kind of trick pulled off in the movies Goldfinger and The 39 Steps. The poet wasn’t much of a film buff, he realized. He’d never heard him make any movie references.

  “I found what I needed,” Cayetano told her, clinging to the handrail of the Ikarus. “Kurt helped me despite himself. Chances are he’ll never know what happened.”

  “But Tina will suspect something when she receives a present from a stranger,” Margaretchen pointed out.

  “She’ll think it’s from some anonymous admirer. And in any case, she’ll be more surprised by something else …”

  They exited at Alexanderplatz and walked around the plaza, which at that hour was packed with Polish and Soviet tourists.

  “Listen to me, Margaretchen,” Cayetano said, pausing beside the World Clock. “We should part ways right now, for your own safety. I’d like nothing more than for you to come back to Chile with me. But we have to say good-bye.”

  Her eyes immediately grew damp, and he could imagine her thoughts precisely: such was love for her with men from the West. They crossed the Wall into East Berlin, took a girl out to eat and dance at places reserved for Westerners, slept with them, and then disappeared behind the Wall, never to return.

  “You’re leaving?” she asked, wiping her tears with her fingers.

  “I have no choice.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  Margaretchen embraced him and hid her face in his chest. They stood that way for a long time, not saying anything, unable to find any words of comfort. Cayetano thought that life truly was as the poet described it: a parade of disguises and surprises, a play without a preestablished script. Around them, the city continued to vibrate, indifferent.

  “At least let me accompany you to Friedrichstrasse,” she said, disheveled, her eyes red from alcohol and emotion.

  “You can’t come with me.” He kissed her forehead. Time was not on his side. The man in the apartment would wake up and alert the Stasi, who in turn would waste no time in alerting the border guards. The border would close on him like a submarine hatch. Nobody would be able to help him. Not even the poet. Maigret had never faced such an urgent situation, he thought.

  He kissed her firmly, inhaled her breath scented with rum and youth, and tasted the faint sourness of that skin whose warm and pleasant touch he would sorely miss. He held her tightly, recalling the balcony of her apartment, with its view of the Brandenburg countryside. In other circumstances, he thought, he could have had a chance at happiness with this young woman.

  “If you return, you know I’ll be waiting,” she said as she let go of his hand.

  “Good luck, Margaretchen,” he mumbled before diving into the crowds of Alexanderplatz. He didn’t dare turn around for one last look.

  MATILDE

  46

  Once he’d safely crossed the Wall, Cayetano took the subway to the Tempelhof Airport, his mouth bitter and dry, his exhaustion steadily becoming intolerable as the empty, clattering train sought refuge from the tunnels’ darkness in brightly lit stations. As the train sped through the bowels of Berlin, Cayetano glimpsed his reflection in the window. He saw himself, but something else far more important: his own eyes, behind their glasses, fixing their gaze on him.

  Had he killed the flat-nosed man in the dark suit? he wondered as he tried to break the stare of his own eyes. There they were. They examined him severely, fiercely. He turned his gaze to the reflection of his hands, resting on his knees. Had he done it? Had he actually murdered someone? He, the son of a melancholy Cuban musician, whose fine, large hands knew only how to caress his brass instrument, his wife, and his little son, Cayetano? Did this make him a criminal? The train pulled into a new station. He had always believed that murderers chose to become what they were, that their souls had rotted early in life, that their destinies were forged with every step they took. Now, however, he realized that destiny could play tricks on you, that it could wait around any corner, in the middle of the night, ready to expose you to an enemy, put a weapon in your hand, and give you a reason to kill. Because Cayetano could have chosen not to strike the man. He hadn’t been entirely sure the man was following him, or that he would definitely have discovered Cayetano behind the door. He hid his hands in his pant pockets as the train picked up speed again. Destiny—at least his own, he thought—was a train that ran madly on its rails, destroying everything in its path and rattling its passengers before reaching a moment of peace.

  He was a different man, now. He was no longer that person whose clean hands had shyly knocked on the wooden door of the poet’s house in Valparaíso. No, his hands were no longer the ones that had gently traced the curve of his wife’s throat; or the ones that had reached for his glasses, buttoned his shirt, and tied his shoes in the morning; or the ones that on sleepless nights, full of anxiety, had pulled the covers over his own face in the vague hope that the sun would soon rise and bring clear light. He would never be the same again. He was not a violent man. He didn’t believe in violence. In fact, he feared it. All he could do was imagine that the flat-nosed man, who surely had a wife and children, had only lain unconscious for a while and then risen with nothing more than a terrible headache. Oh, our Father, Cayetano whispered as the train approached the station, make that man rise to his feet again.

  At Tempelhof, he took the first available flight to Frankfurt am Main, and checked into a hotel normally reserved for romantic trysts near the central station, on Kaiserstrasse, where prostitutes in miniskirts and low-cut blouses waited on corners. Pimps smoked and watched from the shadows, while drug addicts, pale as death, with bloodshot eyes, rummaged through trash cans. Despite all that, Cayetano felt safe now. He figured that once Markus discovered the dirty trick he’d played, he would free the Chilean army officers to go after him. He’d have to be careful. At night, after enjoying lamb and beer from Munich at a Kurdish restaurant, he called Merluza, the diplomat.

  “Thank you for everything. I’m going back to Santiago,” he informed Merluza. He could hear that, at his apartment in Pankow
, Merluza had the television turned on to the news show Aktuelle Kamera, which described the record-breaking production of state businesses and farming cooperatives in the German Democratic Republic. At that breakneck pace, socialism would annihilate the West before the end of the millennium, Cayetano thought sarcastically.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Merluza replied. “It was a pleasure. Where are you?”

  “In the West.” He preferred to keep the details vague. “About to board a plane.”

  “Did Comrade Valentina help you?”

  “Everything turned out swimmingly.”

  “Well, as you know, if you need any more help, I’m here. And send my expressions of solidarity to Unidad Popular. Tell them I’m part of the struggle here in these trenches. The fascists will not win.”

  “They won’t, Merluza,” Cayetano said without conviction.

  “Before you go,” Merluza added, “did you hear the truck drivers in Chile are starting their national strike and saying they’ll keep it up until the current government falls? Hunger and chaos await us, Cayetano.”

  He kept his own commentary to himself and hung up. He immediately asked the operator to put him in touch with the poet, in Valparaíso. He was in luck. He didn’t have to wait very long.

  “I’m speaking to you from Frankfurt am Main, Don Pablo. How are you?” He imagined him wrapped in his poncho, weathering his autumnal days, waiting for this call.

  “Better, now that I hear your voice. I’m going over my memoirs, and Matilde is downstairs, making me a chicken casserole. One of those healthy ones, with lots of oregano. Afterward I’ll drink my secret Oporto, you know how it is. What news have you got for me?”

  His nasal voice sounded exhausted, his breathing somewhat ragged. But he also sounded distant, as though he knew someone else was listening and had to pretend the news in question pertained to some everyday matter, a foreign first edition, perhaps, or one of those rare objects he collected.