Nobody’s forcing him, believe me. This is all coming from him, Olsen had said.
From Madrid, thousands of kilometres away, Olsen had called him in Australia to tell him that his son was a genius. A twisted, perverted genius. I have proof. So you’d better come and take a look. We need to speak and come to an agreement. I don’t like having to do this, Ian; I sincerely admire you. But my life is going down the pan and I need some liquidity.
‘He was blackmailing me. He threatened to send you the proof. I thought I was going to lose my mind, I couldn’t think straight, didn’t know how to react. I got on the first plane I could and went straight to his house.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She wasn’t attempting to console him, wasn’t saying that together they could have handled anything — gone to the police, hospitalised their son if necessary. No, she was recriminating him for not having involved her in it, for having kept quiet all those years. Absolute contempt trembled in her voice, but she showed no other emotions.
Promise me.
He’d promised. That he would protect Gloria from everything and everyone. Even from herself. His father-in-law had looked at him, one eye cloudy with the gauzy haze over his pupil; the man was going blind. But he could still see — and he’d seen what his daughter’s husband had inside, what he was capable of. Ian remembered the old man’s sad, tragic smile. He was burdened by stories of war, Jews, exile, violins, secret graves. A smile revealed tartar-stained, uneven teeth — the man had always refused dentures and implants — worn down by gnawing his way through life.
Nothing more was ever said. They never brought it up again.
When Ian disembarked from the plane from Australia, foggy with lack of sleep, hair standing on end, large purple bags under his eyes, he knew what he had to do.
Magnus Olsen hadn’t been expecting him so early. It was seven in the morning. He could hear the TV from behind the door, the morning news. Things were happening all over the world, but he didn’t care about any of them. Olsen opened the door, half-dressed, shirt unbuttoned and belt not yet buckled. His hairy gut hung out, belly button like a spider curled up in a hairy black nest, tiny nipples poking out from his sagging breasts. Like a pig. He looked surprised, but not afraid. He looked like he wanted to say, What’s the rush? It’s not that big a deal.
Ian knew what he had to do and how to do it. He didn’t hit him, though, in his neck, he felt the strain of forcing himself not to. He didn’t say a word. Instead he stood looking at the man’s body, calculating his weight. A hundred and ten, hundred and twenty kilos. Nothing but a ball of fat, he thought. A mass of blubber steamrolling over his happiness. Olsen asked him in. He was still barefoot and his toes left little marks on the parquet. There was fresh-brewed coffee, some half-eaten toast on a plate, and a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray in need of emptying. The television blared in the background, clothes were strewn on the sofa. It smelled of cheap hooker. The only window was to the right, facing the building across the street. Which was far away. A thick wood beam crossed the ceiling, dividing the open-plan space in two. It would take the weight.
‘I know you must think I’m a bastard.’ Olsen’s voice sounded respectful and full of sorrow, but his eyes were greedy and scheming. ‘You have to understand that I have no intention of harming you or your family. It’s just that things have become extremely difficult for me and I need money.’ He was moving with his pudgy hands — the same hands that so cockily fondled his wife’s bottom — as if stroking an imaginary ball, talking, defending himself, pretending he was at the end of his tether.
Ian wasn’t listening. He didn’t need the prologue.
‘I’ll pay you, but I want to see the tape first,’ he said, cutting him off.
Magnus Olsen’s expression was that of a man accustomed to living a life of lies and mistrust. He was a good poker player, and a good poker player never shows the aces up his sleeve until just the right moment.
‘Of course, of course, but I don’t have it here right now. I’m not stupid. It’s hidden in a safe place, don’t you worry. When you pay me, I’ll send it to you. Standard procedure.’
So he’d done this to others before, Ian thought. Coaxed out other people’s weaknesses and then taken advantage of them. To him it was just a standard procedure. Ian changed tack. He threatened to go to the police. Olsen let out a cynical laugh. They both knew he wouldn’t do that.
Olsen had become the Damocles sword hanging over his head. Ian could pay him, but there was no guarantee he’d get the tape in return, or that there weren’t more copies, or that he wouldn’t continue trying to extort him in the future. He knew he had to get rid of that parasite.
It was quick and violent. Silent. And the silence accentuated the surreal nature of the whole thing as Ian pounced, taking the man off-guard and hurling him to the floor with a kick to the solar plexus. Olsen stumbled backward like a disoriented bear. Without thinking, urged on by his instincts, Ian whipped off Olsen’s belt and wrapped it around his neck. He fought back, pawing the air and trying to strike any which way, the blows landing mostly on Ian’s shoulders. For a fat man he struggled ferociously, kicking, eyes popping out of his sockets. But Ian strangled him with a cold determination he never imagined he could possess.
Killing a human being turned out to be all too easy. And for a long time that discovery troubled him. At night, once he was back in Australia, he’d relive the scene in his mind, the sequence of premeditated movements executed with impeccable discipline. He could see Olsen’s eyes go from disconcerted to irate to fearful and then finally, as the light in them grew dim, to pleading. He felt the pressure of the belt around his knuckles, heard the sound of the leather twisting across Magnus’ trachea, the tapping of his heels on the wood floor and the gurgling of air escaping from his lungs.
‘I didn’t find the tape. I don’t think he had any intention of giving it to me and I didn’t have time to search. I hauled him up to the beam, knotted the belt, and left him hanging.’
Gloria stared, stunned and stupefied, at the man who had once been her husband, the father of her son, and she did not recognise him. She couldn’t imagine him doing anything like that. He was too handsome, too carefree. He was a genius. Not a murderer. His hands, his eyes, his body were made to create things, images. Not destroy them.
‘When the tape arrived, it was already too late for you and me. I couldn’t explain it to you, you wouldn’t have understood,’ Ian said, his voice broken.
Gloria closed her eyes and pressed her fingers into them, as though trying to force her eyeballs back in, so as not to see anything else. Opening her eyes, she looked for a chair and sat down. Her body was trembling. She looked at Arthur’s portrait, right in front of her, and felt infinite bitterness as she contemplated his immortalised expression. How she hated that man! How she hated the entire world at that moment.
A few things made sense now. When Ian had returned from Australia, weeks after Olsen’s death, he’d been absentminded and irritable, and though he blamed it on the exhaustion of filming and on economic troubles, Gloria assumed — naively — that her husband was having some sort of affair, when in fact what was weighing on him was his conscience. Sickened, she replayed one horrible evening — the worst they’d had at that point. She had been practising, going over a few scores. Dolores sat knitting in an armchair. She liked to knit scarves and sweaters, which she then gave as gifts to people, who never wore them.
Gloria heard shouting coming from the office upstairs. Her husband sounded out of control — he was swearing in English and hurling insults that reverberated throughout the house. In the background she could hear her son’s voice screaming, too, although it was drowned out by his father’s booming voice. They were really fighting.
‘I’ll go see what’s going on,’ Dolores had said, looking startled, cocking her head as though that would enable her to hear better.
Gloria ha
d already gotten up.
‘No, I’ll go.’
She’d walked upstairs, and on entering the office, she froze. Her husband had Ian junior cornered between the table and a sofa. His arms were aloft and from where she stood, behind them, it was hard to tell whether he was trying to hug him or strangle him. But when she caught sight of her son’s contorted face and his father’s furious eyes, his intentions became clearer.
Ian junior’s lip was bleeding and he had a mark on his cheek. A few drops of red stained the collar of his shirt. Drops that neither father nor son had noticed but that Gloria honed in on immediately. Incredulous, she barked questions back and forth between the two of them, but neither one answered. Her son wrenched free from the prison of his father’s arms and stormed out of the office, stopping in the doorway to shoot each of them a look a pure hatred.
‘You’re the ones who made me what I am. I wish you were both dead!’
Gloria made as if to go after him, but what he said stopped her in her tracks.
‘Don’t even touch me, you Jew bitch. I’m never coming back to this house. As long as he’s here, you can forget about me.’
His words hit her like a blow to the stomach. The words that hurt and wound and kill the most are those spoken by the love of your life. For a mother, the worst form of betrayal, the worst sort of death, is the contempt of her child. The incomprehensible contempt.
Ian left, slamming the door so hard it rattled in its frame, but his words lingered on, rooting Gloria to the spot where she stood. She stared down at her feet wondering what they were doing there, holding her up. Slowly, she raised her eyes to her husband, on the other side of the room. He stood with his back to her, wide and broad-shouldered, with large biceps, strong enough to hang a hundred-and-twenty-kilo pig of a man from a ceiling beam. Strong enough to bear the weight of what he’d done in silence. He leant with his hands and forehead against the wall. As though trapped and trying in vain to push his way out, to escape.
‘What did you do to my son?’
Ian turned slowly to face her. He couldn’t look her in the eye. At that moment, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up his front, to hide the tragedy already set in motion.
‘It was just an argument. You know what he’s like, he’ll get over it.’
He might, but she was never going to forget it.
‘Did you hit him?’
Ian swallowed hard, as though forcing down dry crumbs of bread. Bitter bread.
He’d never before laid a hand on his son. He’d never killed anybody before either. There’s always a first time — and after that it gets easier.
‘He needs help, Gloria. There is something very wrong with our son.’
She wasn’t listening.
‘Did you split his lip?’
Ian was exasperated. He had walked towards her, with something on the tip of his tongue. But at the last minute the words receded and sank back inside him.
‘I did what I had to do.’ His nostrils flared and he was panting. He didn’t know whether to scream or cry. Instead he shook his head in resignation. ‘You don’t understand. We have to take Ian somewhere. We have to get him out of here.’
Out of his life, he should have said. Of his sick brain and festering heart.
‘I want you out of this house,’ was Gloria’s reply.
Blind. She was blind. If he’d told her back then, if he’d just opened up, she could have found a way to fix things, she’d have known what to do. Ian would be alive and that sickening portrait wouldn’t be sitting there.
She didn’t care what it was her son might have done.
‘I want to see it.’ Her physical body was still there but she herself was gone — someplace where she didn’t have to think, so she wouldn’t go insane. ‘I need to see it so that I know it’s true.’
‘You don’t need to see the truth to admit it,’ Ian replied. ‘I destroyed it.’
He was lying, of course; he’d never let his wife see what the fruit of her loins was capable of. Never.
‘There’s another copy. Maybe more than one.’
Ian turned to this new voice coming from the direction of the door. Gloria flinched but didn’t look surprised. She’d known he was there.
Guzmán had been listening from behind the door. He’d granted Gloria that much, allowed her to speak to her husband first — the same way that, before interrogating a detainee, they first let family members speak to them alone in the hopes that they might confess without having to be tortured first. It almost never worked, but he felt better at least trying.
‘I’m guessing you know who I am …’
Ian recognised him immediately, though they’d never spoken before, or even seen each other up close. Over four months, Ian had shadowed that mercenary, always on his heels, erasing all trace of what he discovered. Guzmán walked over to Arthur’s portrait. In it, Arthur looked as though he were full of inner turmoil, like one of those portraits of Middle Age mystics where it’s impossible to distinguish ecstasy from insanity, or vice versa.
‘… and you know why I’m here.’
Ian nodded. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be happening. After he’d killed Olsen, Ian had thought the whole business was dead and buried. Then, one morning, he had received a phone call from someone who spoke eloquently, requesting to speak to him, in person. The man arranged to meet him on the patio of an elegant hotel in the centre of Madrid, in broad daylight.
The man was middle-aged, handsome and distinguished. He wore an Italian suit and had gold cufflinks that matched his tiepin. His intense brown eyes twinkled wittily and his brows were subtly waxed into a perfect arch above his eyes. He never said what his name was, but from the start he made it very clear that he was acting as an intermediary for a group of people who, for obvious reasons, could not be named publically. For obvious reasons, he repeated several times. The two of them looked like decent, civilised people just having a coffee, discussing the terms of a business deal. The man — who wore too much cologne and asked Ian not to smoke when he went to light a cigarette — claimed to be abreast of the situation Ian had gotten involved in, and added, ripping open a packet of sugar and stirring less than half of it into his coffee, that Olsen had not committed suicide. We know you killed him. But don’t let that worry you. That man would have turned into a real headache for some of those I represent. It was simply a matter of time until someone solved the problem — so in a way we should be grateful to you.
They would make sure that Ian had no trouble with the police. And that his son didn’t either. Needless to say, the club’s activities had been suspended — he didn’t say ‘terminated’. In exchange, they asked him to forget what he knew. Quid pro quo, he’d said with an academic smile. You just go back to Australia and carry on with your work — which, from what I hear, is marvellous. You’ve got influential admirers and they’ll provide all the funding you need in the future. It was best to not even contemplate the alternative. For obvious reasons, he said again. He didn’t need to spell them out: what today was being viewed as a suicide could turn into murder tomorrow. Evidence could be found proving his son guilty of rape, and Ian junior would never survive prison. Kids today aren’t like our generation. Not to mention what it would do to Gloria, not just professionally but spiritually, to have the whole thing come to light. Between you and me, the rich can’t stand having to account for their actions. It makes them too like other mortals, accountability does. And they’re not willing to stoop that low, for obvious reasons.
‘That wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. They said they’d take care of everything.’
‘But then Arthur came on the scene,’ said Guzmán, ‘and he introduced a variable that neither of you had taken into account. Although, wasn’t it obvious that a father like him would never stand there with his arms crossed while his daughter was missing?’
Glor
ia was rocking softly in her chair, a death grip on the wrinkled handkerchief in her hands. She wore the expression of someone who’s just vomited. Contorted. Her eyes had turned dull black, reflecting no light.
‘Arthur received a copy of that tape and saw what Ian had done to his daughter. It wasn’t an accident. He ran Ian over on purpose … And you knew,’ Gloria said, staring straight at her husband. She understood now, and yet she did not want to understand, did not want the clarity of knowing that when she gave her husband the news over the phone, his devastation was far more heartbreaking than even her own. Because he was filled with silence, guilt, and regret. ‘It was your fault.’
Ian didn’t try to defend himself. Unknowingly, he’d put his own son in the firing line, not seeing that he was flinging the gates of doom wide open. There was no point telling himself that his son had a sick nature and that sooner or later the depraved Tagger side would have found another way to take hold.
‘You killed Dámaso, and then Olsen’s widow. You thought they’d blame me for it, the way they did with Dámaso. But you let the children live. That speaks well of your honour, but it was a mistake. Kids talk — they have good memories and they like police uniforms. I’d say it won’t be long until some officers pay you a visit.’
Ian said nothing in reply. He went to Gloria and knelt before her, trying to get her to look at him.
‘I didn’t tell you I’d come back because I didn’t want to drag you into it. I wanted to keep you safe. But when I called and you told me you’d hired the artist that that crazy police officer had told you about to paint a portrait of Arthur, I felt powerless. It was like I was stuck in quicksand, sinking deeper and deeper, and this is where I ended up. I tried to convince you to leave, but you’re so stubborn. You always do things your way. And that was when I realised I had to put an end to this once and for all. Getting Olsen out of the way wasn’t enough. There were other people who knew what Ian had done, people who could keep coming back again and again, threatening us, blackmailing us with other tapes. And I wasn’t prepared to let them do that to you. That much, at least, I wanted you to have. Yes, I killed those people. But they were already dead, condemned even if they didn’t know it. There was no way they’d have let them live, not after Arthur started stirring shit up.’
The Heart Tastes Bitter Page 46