The Heart Tastes Bitter

by Victor del Arbol

  ‘We have to find a doctor to treat it.’

  Who told her there would be time for that, and opened the glove compartment. He showed her two brand new passports and pulled out a couple of plane tickets.

  ‘Beijing?’

  He looked at her as though not understanding her surprise. Where else would they go? She contemplated her own photo in the fake passport, with a false identity. Actually, she thought it looked like someone else, not her. And the girl who’d spent months locked in a clandestine sweatshop was another person too, the one who’d almost been sold like an animal, the one who had Chang’s scratch marks all over one breast. None of those women was Mei; that’s how she felt, those experiences were not hers — they hadn’t managed to pervade her and blot her out entirely. She reached out a hand and laced her fingers through Who’s. She’d go anywhere with him, because there was nothing else she could do. Because she wanted nothing more than to do it.

  Then he began to speak — slowly, allowing the words themselves to choose the form they took, not prohibiting them from being spoken. He told her everything, not holding anything back. Where he came from, who he was, what he’d been doing, what he wanted to do. He told her about Maribel and Teo, about Eduardo and Olga. He explained that he’d left her locked in an abandoned house because he didn’t know what to do with her, that he trusted fate or destiny to make the call. He spoke for so long that when he was done his mouth seemed to have consumed all the world’s desert, his tongue was thick and his lips cracked. And in all that time he didn’t look at Mei once. Not once did he take his eyes off the green shoots and poppies and the man who moved like his own shadow in the distance.

  There was a long silence. A necessary silence.

  Then, after a while, Mei took his chin and forced him to look at her. She searched Who’s eyes for what remained unsaid, things that did not need to be said but she needed to understand. And what she saw was enough.

  ‘We have to go back for her.’

  Mr Who said it was too dangerous to go back. They’d be looking for them; they had to run, now. Someone would find her, they’d hear her cries. He hadn’t left her far from the road. They couldn’t risk it.

  Mei stroked his cheek.

  ‘We have to bring her back to life, so she can be the one to decide.’

  Mr Who started the car. They made it two hundred metres.

  The first bullet shattered the back windshield into a thousand pieces. Then came others, exploding like fireworks. The car veered sharply and rammed into a lamppost.

  ‘Run!’ Who screamed.

  He got out of the car, holding a knife, and took off in the opposite direction to Mei. He was leading them away from her. There was yelling, more gunfire. When Mei turned back to look, she saw Mr Who fighting Chang’s men. One of them shot him in the back, pointblank, and Who’s body was propelled forward. As though he could fly.

  One night earlier, he still hadn’t decided what to do with Olga. He stared at the key to the abandoned house and could not come up with a solution. Contradictory thoughts and feelings swirled through his brain. He kept wondering why he hadn’t killed Eduardo, and the only answer he could come up with was that he didn’t honestly want him to die. And despite it all, he didn’t want to hurt Olga either. She’d told him all the details of her relationship with Teo — the child she’d lost, how she could never have children now. He understood the rage and hatred she’d stockpiled. And deep down he began to feel growing contempt for Teo himself. But another part of him said that Olga was lying, that the man he remembered — his father — couldn’t have done that. He had to find some inner peace.

  He told Maribel everything. He needed for her to be the one to tell him what to do, to tell him that Olga had made it all up. Or at least to show that she herself had had no idea. But far from what he expected, Maribel didn’t seem shocked in the slightest.

  Horrified, Mr Who discovered that his mother knew everything. She’d known the whole time. And she didn’t care.

  ‘You don’t understand. Love conquers all.’

  Mr Who fell silent, looking around in search of a place from which to escape his mother’s scorn, escape the feeling of absolute vulnerability that was gnawing at his guts.

  ‘Olga was just a girl. She fell in love with her mother’s lover! Teo was sleeping with both of them, he seduced her — a man thirty years older than her — and got her pregnant and then abandoned both her and the child. And meanwhile he was playing happy family with us. I don’t understand,’ he said, shaking his head and feeling like it was going to explode. ‘I don’t understand how you can forgive something like that. He went to China to get me because you couldn’t have children, but to him I was never anything but a pet to keep you happy — and then he goes and has a child of his own and abandons it like it was scum. And you ask me to sacrifice my life to avenge him? Don’t you care at all about what could happen to me, Maribel?’

  Maribel was furious. She banged her wheelchair arm violently and held up her urine bag, attached to a catheter.

  ‘This is what they did to me. Do you understand that? Them, Eduardo and that thieving whore, they chained me to this fucking bag for the rest of my life. They killed the man I loved. And the bullet that broke my back would have killed you if I hadn’t gotten in its way.’ She gazed at him, her incomprehension bordering insanity, and then proclaimed with utter contempt, ‘I wish I’d never done it. I wish it had killed you instead.’

  Mr Who was silent quite some time before responding.

  ‘I’m leaving, Maribel. I can’t stay here. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to kill Eduardo, or Olga. Deep down they’re as much victims as me, or you.’

  Maribel shouted and cursed him, but he wasn’t listening. Her voice became inaudible to him as he walked out of the apartment.

  The last thing he heard come out of her mouth was the word ‘coward’.

  26

  Guzmán rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. It had been a long night and he hadn’t slept. He dropped the newspaper onto the seat next to him and glanced down at his fingernails, which still had mud under them. The soap hadn’t gotten it all out. He looked up at the runways through the terminal’s enormous windows. The passenger walkway was being hooked up to his plane. An illuminated sign announced the departure of his flight, but he was in no rush. He could sit there and wait while families with children boarded first, then passengers with preferential seating. There weren’t many people, perhaps two dozen.

  For Spain, America was still a far-off continent, despite Columbus’s best efforts. He told himself that in a few minutes it would all be over. This was not the time to get nervous and ruin it all at the last minute. The biggest jobs are brought down by the most trivial details — getting nervous while showing your documentation at check-in, reacting to a seemingly challenging look from the guard at the security checkpoint. Do not smile at flight attendants or offer too many explanations about your luggage. Just a businessman, tired after a long night, overwhelmed by responsibilities. That’s what he looked like. Except for the dirt under his nails.

  He slipped his hands into his pockets and closed his eyes, wondering what the Algerian with the scarred face was doing right now. Wondering if he’d kept his word or gone back on it as soon as Guzmán was gone. Something told him that the guy was trustworthy. One of those rare kinds of men with principles that you come across every once in a while in the gutter — the principles in the gutter, that is, not the man.

  After shooting Ian in the head, he had spent quite some time contemplating the dark stain beginning to pool around him. With his head turned to the side and his eyes wide open, Ian looked like a herbivore drinking his own blood, on the lookout for predators. Guzmán didn’t know why he stood there staring at the man. He’d already seen what he needed to see and heard what he needed to hear. But there he was, absorbed, watching the slow sticky spreading of that stain. He wonde
red why he’d killed him without actually needing to. He felt no guilt, just perplexity. You’re losing it. Over a woman you don’t even know, someone who wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about you if she weren’t in here, Bosco had told him one night, shortly before Atacama, when Guzmán confessed that he was falling for Candela’s eyes. Maybe his mentor was right; maybe he’d be right now, too: Candela didn’t love him, she was afraid of him and simply clung to the hope of anything that might get her out of the DINA cells. Olsen’s widow would have despised him under any other circumstances, but she’d had no choice but to trust him. Nothing’s going to happen to you, Guzmán had promised her, and she’d believed him because it was the only thing she could do. And now she was dead. They were both dead.

  He made a mental note of Ian Mackenzie’s last words and walked out of the room, locking it from the outside and leaving the key in the door. Gloria was sitting on a step halfway up the stairs. She was leaning her head against the wall and rocking back and forth, her fists buried in a knit cardigan. Judging by her face, she’d lost her senses; she looked completely out of it.

  ‘I want to see Arthur dead. I’ll pay you double, triple what he paid you,’ she said almost inaudibly.

  ‘That’s no longer possible, Gloria. My job here is done.’

  She lifted her head and looked up at him. Her eyes and nose were red. She’d been behind the door the whole time and had done nothing to stop him, aside from claw at herself until she bled.

  ‘I’ll give you whatever you want. You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. I don’t care what he did or what he was. He was mine.’

  Guzmán shook his head. He sat down beside her and looked at her with something that bordered, if not on admiration then at least on understanding.

  ‘You should have hired me, not that namby-pamby painter. Now you’ve got two dead bodies — one that you can’t get out of your head and the other in that room — and a ruined painting. In my opinion, you’re going to have a fuck of a time getting over all this.’

  He tucked her hair back from her pale sweaty face and kissed her forehead.

  ‘It’s too late, Gloria.’

  He called to give Arthur the address where they should meet, but Arthur didn’t answer. So he left him a voicemail with directions and told him to be there in an hour’s time. He could picture the man’s face, guess what he was going to say, envision his nervous gestures, the way he’d hang on whatever Guzmán said or did. Guzmán was now genuinely intrigued to find Aroha, so that he could finally see her up close.

  The place wasn’t far. Just a twenty-minute drive outside of Madrid on National Highway Five, on the way to Badajoz. She’d been there the whole time, a stone’s throw away, almost close enough to reach out and touch. And yet an impossible distance to cover.

  ‘When I put her in the trunk, she was still breathing. She was very high and pretty banged up. But she was alive,’ Ian had told him.

  To the right was a prefab unit inside a parking lot full of abandoned camper vans. They were old and rusty, with flat tyres, their trailers and licence plates all faded. Cats dozed beneath the trailers, and it was almost impossible to read the LOT FOR SALE sign buried in the tall grass. A chain-link fence surrounded the place, but it was full of holes and in several places had actually collapsed. Off to the right was a field full of thistles and a cement basketball court with faintly visible lines. It had only one hoop, nailed to a broken wooden panel that now served as a goldfinch nest. Further off in the distance was the crumbling roof of a windowless cabin that had once served as a changing room.

  The national highway was less than one hundred metres away. Cars had sped by at all hours of the day and night for four years, and no one suspected what the place concealed. Guzmán got out of the car, leaned on the hood and lit the last remaining cigarette of his favourite brand. Tossing the empty pack down on the ground, he tried to identify the place where Ian Mackenzie senior had taken Aroha out of the trunk.

  ‘I had no intention of hurting her,’ he’d sworn. ‘I wanted to get her out of the place where Ian kept her drugged and locked up night and day. It was a noxious place, worse than anything you could possibly imagine. I didn’t want the police to find her in those conditions. That would have been the end for my son.’

  Guzmán had a pretty good imagination. And as far as noxious places went, he was pretty sure he knew them all. He should have taken Ian on a little tour of the DINA cells, or the basement of the Directorate General of Security right there in Spain not so long ago.

  He tried to picture the sequence of events. It must have been night-time. Four years ago that place would still have been at least somewhat busy during the day, the sales office for the trailer lot was still in business and the sports complex would have been full of kids who came on a minibus from a nearby suburb to use the basketball court. Ian would have made sure there was nobody around before opening the trunk. Aroha was probably out of it from the drugs, but not so much so that she didn’t realise something was very wrong. No doubt she kicked and screamed, trying to escape the stranger who’d brought her there.

  And then Ian had hit her over the head with a shovel.

  ‘All I wanted to do was stun her, make her shut up so she wouldn’t attract attention.’ He was lying. From the start he’d decided to kill her and bury the body someplace no one would find it. Ian’s only concern was to erase any sign that could tie his family to the film club. That was the only reason he’d brought Aroha to such an out-of-the-way place. To murder her.

  Guzmán checked the time on his watch. Arthur was late. Maybe it was better that way. Guzmán walked around the place, stepping over piles of dog shit, used condoms and human excrement, yellowed old scraps of newspaper smeared with shit, needles, the eyeless carcass of a dead cat, its smooth cranium and sharp teeth intact. The teeth are always the last thing to go. They’re too hard for worms. A flock of collared doves took off in a chaotic flurry, leaving a trail of feathers on the rotten roof of the building. From the outside, you could make out an old mattress in one corner, juice boxes and a supermarket cart full of stolen scrap metal. There were also remainders of leftover food, but no people. Perhaps whoever lived there had hidden when they heard him. Or maybe they only came back at night, to sleep.

  Then Guzmán heard the sound of an engine behind him. He turned thinking that Arthur had finally arrived, but the car that parked beside his was someone else’s. For a few seconds, the driver was hidden in shadow inside the vehicle, which sat with the engine running. Whoever was inside it was watching him.

  Ibrahim turned off the ignition and eyed warily the silhouette walking toward the hut.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said to Andrea, opening the car door.

  ‘Who is it?’ she asked, halfway through a yawn that turned quickly to a whimper.

  ‘Guzmán. The man your husband is using to find Aroha.’ He should have used the past tense.

  Andrea bit her lip.

  ‘Then it’s true … she’s here.’

  Ibrahim was breathing heavily. He flexed and tensed his entire body. He still harboured the diminishing hope that it was not the case. The last time she was seen was here. She was alive, the Armenian had assured him. That meant that no one had seen her dead.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll be right back.’

  He still hadn’t told her that the police had found her husband’s body in the mountains, horrifically mutilated. He didn’t know how to say it. Accepting the idea of death in theory, as something vague and faraway, was one thing; seeing the concrete real-life consequences of a decision made from a distance was something very different. Nor had he told Andrea that he’d hidden from the Armenian a piece of information that might have saved Arthur’s life: he had neglected to mention the photos Warden Ordóñez had shown them in the café that day, photos that proved Ian had kidnapped the girl and that, had it not been for Arthur running her over, she would probably have ha
d the same fate as Aroha. As paradoxical as it might seem, her accidental death had likely saved the Armenian’s daughter a tremendous amount of suffering. Contemplating that was a form of deceit, he knew that. But the Armenian’s mind was a labyrinth in which logic and common sense were lost. That fact might have led him to show more clemency. Ibrahim had no idea whether Arthur had told him or not, whether he’d appealed to the man’s compassion as he was being flayed alive. Regardless, if he had, it hadn’t done him any good.

  Ibrahim was walking slowly toward Guzmán, aware that he was traversing a minefield. The hired gun might have already known what happened to Arthur, and probably didn’t care, but Ibrahim had no idea how loyal he might be, or what he was capable of. He’d only seen him a couple of times, but he knew a dangerous man when he saw one — and Guzmán was one for sure. So he tread cautiously, prepared to fight. It had rained and the ground beneath his feet squished, oozing dirty mud that stuck to the soles of his shoes. But sheer will forced him to take one step after the other.

  Guzmán’s face was red and he was unshaven. That would have been normal for anyone flying economy, prepared to deal with the turbulence at the back of the plane. But sitting in first class, right next to the cabin door, he was conspicuous.

  ‘Are you feeling alright, sir?’ asked a pretty flight attendant with the poise of a model who’d failed just prior to achieving mega-fame on the catwalk. Nothing like the girls on low-cost carriers.

  What I need, you can’t give me, thought Guzmán, flashing a smile intended to send her on her way.

  ‘I’m fine thanks. Flying makes me a little nervous.’

  ‘Oh, you just relax, sir. We’ll take off in a few minutes, and this is going to be a very smooth flight, you’ll see.’ When a pretty girl tries to console you, you’re more prone to believing her lies, he thought.