Soon it would be spring; you could feel it in the night air and see it the treetops, where early buds, still too weak to survive a late frost, were beginning to bloom. They were like Mei, a new bud that might not be able to bear another frost, thought Mr Who.
In the alley that led to the back of the building where he lived, a prostitute was working a john. She was one of Chang’s girls. They exchanged a look of recognition. Neither merited the other’s sympathy; each of them simply trafficked in other people’s sorrows, made them easier to bear, and carried on their way. That was the sort of people they were, he and the hooker. Lusterless shadows. The john was franticly groping her buttocks, shoving his tongue in her ear. The girl was still looking at Who. Come now, she seemed to be saying, don’t get sentimental. You’ve got your tragedy and I’ve got mine. It’s not like we’re in love. There are those who say hookers are just after easy money. Fools. They have no idea what they’re talking about, he thought. Imagining that that was the destiny Chang had written for Mei was driving him out of his mind.
He walked into the house and took off his shoes in order not to make any noise. He saw the light on in Maribel’s room and went to see if she needed anything, but stopped halfway there, hearing her crying. Maribel always cried alone, and never in the dark. Mr Who had grown up with that sadness since the time he was a child. He’d also learned that it was better to leave her alone.
So he retraced his steps and went to his room.
He took off his jacket and left it on the unmade bed. Then he sat down at the computer and opened the folder with the scanned photos he’d compiled of the one and only vacation the three of them had taken together — a surprise trip in the summer of 1991; he, Maribel and Teo had gone to Menorca. He’d planned to use the pictures to make a slideshow and set it to music. Maribel would be touched by his thoughtfulness.
The trip had been unexpected. Teo never wanted to leave Madrid; at most he’d occasionally go to Toledo or Cáceres, never any farther than that. And yet he was the one who turned up one morning with the plane tickets.
He remembered a ferry that had brought them to some of the island’s coves only accessible by sea. In the photos, his father’s glasses went over his eyebrows. He was half-smiling, twirling his moustache like a matinee idol. Maribel stood beside him. Between them, pressing up against their legs, a boy whose face was pale from the rocking of the boat. The sea frightened him. Leaning against the rail on the observation deck, he watched flocks of seagulls soaring over the frenzied crests of waves that kept crashing in the distance with a dull roar, one after the other.
He must have been happy that summer, although that wasn’t exactly what he remembered. What he did remember were the days when he’d hear them arguing and catch them in the kitchen, composing their expressions with the speed of those trained to conceal shortcomings.
Four months later, Teo was dead and Maribel lay in the hospital with a broken spinal column.
Mr Who let his gaze drift, but suddenly his eyes froze on a spot behind the computer. Behind the wood-panelled wall was where Who kept his secrets hidden. And someone had moved a slat.
Maribel was in her wheelchair beside the bed, stroking one of her tulle dance outfits — the last one she’d worn before her vertebrae had been broken. She stared at Who and her eyes were like glass, unbearably certain. She straightened in her wheelchair and, with a casual gesture, dropped the sheet from Eduardo’s file onto the bed, the one Who had stolen from Martina. On it was the photograph of his father’s killer, the man who had destroyed their lives for no reason.
‘How could you hide something like this from me?’
Mr Who tried to calm her, but Maribel rebuffed his attempts to take her hand, as though he were a leper. Her lips were trembling, and although she seemed to implore him with her gaze, her expression was hard.
‘I didn’t want to reopen old wounds.’
‘How long have you had this?’
‘The first time I saw him was by chance, in Parque de El Retiro. He was sketching a woman. I recognised him by the photos you keep, the newspaper clippings from what happened. But I wasn’t sure, so I went back the next day, hoping I’d find him again so I could be positive. He was sitting on the same bench, like he was waiting for someone who never came. For weeks I went back to the same place and followed him. I watched him, tried to imagine what kind of man he was. There was no reason to do it, I didn’t have a plan, didn’t know what I’d do when the time came to confront him. One day I approached him in the metro. I sat beside him on the platform, watched him from up close, saw the scars on his wrists, the wrinkles on his skin, the grey in his hair. I smelled his body and heard his voice. I spoke to him, goaded him — provoked him, really. I wanted to see if he remembered me, if he remembered us, but he didn’t react. I’d pictured the scene so many times before — what I’d do, what I’d say. When the train came, I thought I’d shove him, push him under the tracks, and watch the wheels crush him. But the train pulled in and I stopped; I couldn’t do it. A few weeks later, I happened to meet a person. By chance, I found that piece of paper from his file: it explains everything.’
Maribel threw her head back, as though an invisible hand were pulling her hair, and let out an unbearable wail.
‘Why?’ she managed to ask, gazing at Who with a mixture of incredulity and shock.
Mr Who sat down on the foot of the bed.
‘Because I need to understand the man who killed us.’
He used ‘us’ because that’s how he felt it. Teo was not the only one who died that day; he might even have been the luckiest of the three because he’d died on the spot. But the two of them had had to keep dying a little more each day. From the time he was nine, there was no playing in the house, no laughter, no fresh air. Maribel withdrew from him; she did it gently, slowly, in the same way she withdrew from everything, turning her whole life into darkness — the same permanent darkness she kept in her bedroom. Love, true love, had ended before it began. Mr Who had learned to take care of her in his own way. He smiled, and his smile was different from hers, because when his mother smiled it was nothing but a painted-on expression, while his was a smile of yearning. He longed to win her back, to regain her affection, the devotion he’d hardly had time to experience. But he never again felt her warmth, and little by little he’d descended into his own quiet world, tiptoeing around the house so as not to disturb her. Mr Who stopped being a child, a teenager, lost his youth and became his invalid mother’s shadow.
Maribel lifted his chin with her finger, forcing him to look into her eyes. Mr Who averted his gaze, didn’t want to connect to the reality of that inquisitive look.
‘He was here. This morning.’
Mr Who’s face contorted completely.
He wasn’t expecting that. He felt his throat go dry, the rage boiling up in his stomach. He pictured his mother for a moment, defenceless in her wheelchair, powerless in the presence of that man.
‘Here?’ he asked, as if it would have made a difference had she met him in the supermarket, or turning a corner. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. He told me his name. We looked at each other for a while, and I closed the door on him. He didn’t knock again, but I know he stood there on the other side of the door for a long time. I could hear him. Then he left.’
Maribel gazed around her bedroom. The bed, the armoire, the dresser, the display case with Teo’s coins, the calm air, the pretence that nothing had changed.
‘I want you to put an end to this, son. I don’t want to know that that man is still breathing the same air as us. I don’t want to know that he might come near me.’
Mr Who stood.
‘He won’t. I promise you.’
14
On the wooden countertop lay a newspaper whose front-page headlines told of a tragic fire in a nearby building. The doorwoman stopped reading when Guzmán walked in. She was middle-aged,
and clearly hadn’t waxed her moustache in quite some time. After greeting Guzmán, she leaned on her broom with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, the filter stained with lipstick.
‘The antique dealer’s next door — do you know if they’re closed? No one’s answering the bell,’ he said.
‘Dámaso closes up shop before five o’clock. He won’t be back until Monday.’ She exhaled smoke through the gaps in her teeth as she spoke.
Guzmán feigned annoyance.
‘That’s too bad. I’ve got something he’s really interested in. You couldn’t tell me where he lives, could you?’
She glanced at him with mistrust. Instinctively, she straightened her shoulders, clamped her teeth down on the cigarette, and then — sounding affronted — began enumerating her many chores and responsibilities: sweeping the staircase, taking out the garbage, seeing to the gas men who were coming to do an inspection. How did he expect her to keep track of where every shop owner on the street lived? And even if she did know, why should she tell him? People might think doorwomen talked too much, but she — and with a thumb, she jabbed her own chest emphatically — was not the type to sit at her desk all day reading Hello! or Lecturas. She spent her days working.
Guzmán smiled. And behind the smile, he pondered how easy it would be to wring her little chicken neck with one hand.
‘I understand. I’ll come back on Monday when he opens.’
He walked out onto the street with a sense of relief and sat down at an outdoor café, choosing a table where he could keep an eye on the lobby of the building and the antique dealer’s connected to it. Now all he had to do was wait.
When he’d yet to touch his coffee, the doorwoman left the building and walked down the street, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke in her wake. Guzmán walked back to the building and pushed open the front door. The reception area was empty, inhabited only by the heavy sweetish smell of burning tobacco and the voices that carried through the elevator shaft. Music came from somewhere, a Chilean bolero that Guzmán recognised, by Lucho Gatica: ‘Contigo en la distancia’, it was called.
There’s not a moment of the day
I can stand to be far from you
The music put him at rights with the world for a moment.
The half-door to the woman’s cubicle was open. The newspaper no longer lay on the desk; now, instead, there was a note, scrawled in boxy, childlike letters: ‘Back in five minutes.’ She’d left her broom to stand guard, leaning up against the wall. Guzmán slipped his hand behind the little door and undid the latch. Hanging from a corkboard on the wall were master keys to every unit. To make matters even easier, each one was labelled. He grabbed the one that said Dámaso’s place.
A door beside the elevator led down to the antique shop. Once he’d gone through, Guzmán felt around for the light switch and turned on a fluorescent bulb. To the right stood the door into the shop. To the left, a partial staircase leading down to another closed door. Guzmán decided to investigate.
The storeroom was sizable; everywhere were paintings, boxes of books, dressers, chairs, clocks, tapestries and other assorted items waiting to be catalogued.
For a good while, Guzmán hunted around with no clear idea of what he was searching for. He knew from experience that people lie for one of two reasons: to hide something, or to invent something. In Dámaso’s case, it was clear that he was hiding something. It was just a matter of finding out what that was.
Nothing he came across seemed particularly interesting. Stuff. Just silent stuff, that couldn’t answer his questions. Disappointed, Guzmán sat down on an old trunk with a floral pattern and antique metalwork; he took a slow look around. Sometimes it’s only when you stop looking that you actually see, when you stop searching and open yourself up to coincidence. In one corner was a collection of furniture whose arrangement caught his eye. Although at first glance the storeroom seemed chaotic, in fact it was not. The pieces were grouped by commonalities, whether period, or style, or function.
In one area were the oldest pieces, Napoleonic-style furniture; in another were more baroque objects; in front of those, pieces from the seventies and eighties. But right in front of him, amid rows of paintings and coat stands, mirrors and a few hunting scenes, was an enormous travertine table, on top of a fake tiger-skin rug that was wrinkled around its legs — as though the table had been moved and had dragged the rug with it.
Guzmán shifted objects out of his way to clear a path. Beneath the rug, he discovered a trap door. It took him several attempts and almost all his strength to move the table. Whatever it was underneath there, Dámaso had no way of getting to it without help; the table was far too heavy for someone his age to move alone. And judging by the cobwebs that stretched like chewing gum when he pulled up the hatch, he hadn’t used it in quite some time.
The opening was no more than a metre and a half squared, give or take. It was very dark, and he couldn’t see the bottom or sides; all he saw was the top of a ladder hanging down. It looked like the entrance to an underground bunker. Perhaps it was another storeroom that Dámaso had stopped using years ago.
Feeling his way through the dark like a blind man, using his lighter, Guzmán finally found a light switch. He flipped it and heard an electric buzzing.
Guzmán let out a low, admiring whistle.
It wasn’t a storeroom, garage or tool shed. The walls were insulated with natural fiber, and from the ceiling hung small gooseneck halogen lamps. In the centre of the room were two dozen red, comfortable-looking theatre seats with cushioned backs, and in front of them a huge screen with an overhead projector and DVD player. This was a screening room, a private movie theatre. So the old man had lied, and this was where his lie began: it must have been the meeting place for the film club Olsen’s wife had told him about.
In a display case stood a near-identical copy of the first projector to be manufactured by the Lumière factory in 1895. Beside it was a metal box with several of the films first shown in Lyon the same year, shorts that lasted no more than ten minutes: Le jardinière, L’Arroseur arrosé, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière de Lyon. They must have been worth a small fortune. Maybe the old man was naturally distrustful and wanted to keep it a secret so he wouldn’t be robbed. The people who met there must have been a very select group of collectors, bon vivants who delighted in being able to enjoy their marvels in private. It wasn’t unusual for the rich to pay astronomical prices to be able to enjoy works of art privately. Often they were anonymous, people who sent employees to auctions to bid for them, so they wouldn’t have to show their faces. There had even been cases, much discussed in the media, of very important people who’d bought art stolen from museums or other places, just so they could have the exclusive privilege of owning whatever they wanted. Maybe that’s what got those freaks off, Guzmán thought, scanning the room slowly — having what no one else could have. Maybe.
But there was something that still didn’t add up. He didn’t know what it was, but it was there, in plain sight, challenging him, waiting for him to put the pieces together.
Bosco had always advised him to have patience when he started a ‘file’. That was what they called them at the National Intelligence Directorate, rather than cases or investigations. By the time the ‘files’ reached his hands it was never a matter of discovering some hidden truth. They didn’t need proof, didn’t have to follow clues or pretend to be cops, detectives you read about in novels. They weren’t there to waste time. They were there to crack their ‘files’: get confessions, names, dates and addresses. Signed statements, admissions of guilt. As far as DINA — the directorate — was concerned, no one was ever innocent. Ever. They were all guilty of whatever they’d been accused of, even when they hadn’t formally been accused of anything. They didn’t go into the basement cells of La Moneda palace in the hopes of a fair trial or some improbable absolution. Anyone who fell into the hands of Bosco and his team of inter
rogators (they didn’t like to use the words ‘torturers’ or ‘executioners’; that reduced the importance of their work) was going to confess their guilt. Their ‘file’ was going to be closed and sent to the archives. And still they had to be patient: ponder the use of force; set the stage of terror; decide whether to play it nice or be hard; find a crack in the prisoner’s resistance; spend day and night searching, for days, weeks, months (no one had ever held out more than three months) until they found it.
The weakness could be a childhood fear (he himself had been afraid of dogs ever since the time, as a boy, he’d seen his brother ripped apart by a wild pack, while they were combing through the debris at the dump south of Santiago); it could be a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a father or mother. It could be wounded pride, vanity, fear of betrayal or being denounced by colleagues. It could be sexual humiliation, lack of affection, anything. And when they discovered it, when they got a whiff of the weakness, that was it. That was when they pounced, merciless until they’d reached all the way to the bottom of the prisoners’ very souls. Then they got everything, hollowed them out and then delivered their bodies to the grim reaper — and a common grave.
‘What are you hiding, you old bastard? What are you keeping from me?’
The time had come to change tactics, Guzmán decided. Spain might not be Chile in the days of the Pinochet junta, might not even be the Spain of the GAL — the so-called Antiterrorist Liberation Groups, which were really death squads fighting the forces of the separatist ETA. But men were still men, and they still reacted to the same stimuli. And he still had contacts, people who owed him favours, feared him, and just a few who actually held him in some regard. He might not be an orthodox cop, or even a typical private investigator. He wasn’t Mr Clean or Dirty Harry. He hated those clichés. Guzmán was something else. Something they’d never seen in Spain. And the feeling that he didn’t have everything under control annoyed and frustrated him. So he was going to fix that.
The Heart Tastes Bitter Page 28