Death Going Down

by María Angélica Bosco

  “Has señor Iñarra told you why the Examining Magistrate has taken your stepdaughter into custody?”

  “Well, yes, the gist of it.” Gaby moved her hands constantly as she spoke. “I don’t believe she’s got anything to do with this business either.”

  “But do you know if she went to see señor Czerbó last night?”

  “Betty didn’t go anywhere last night. She turned in early.”

  “And what can you tell us about her previous visits to señor Czerbó?”

  Gabriela blushed.

  “I didn’t know about them. If I had done, I would have opposed them.”

  “Would your stepdaughter have listened to your advice?”

  “Betty is haughty and independent,” Gabriela sighed, “I’ve warned her on more than one occasion to be careful.”

  “What can you tell me about the Czerbós?”

  “Very little. I had a neighbourly relationship with them, nothing more.”

  “Can anyone else confirm that your stepdaughter didn’t go out last night?”

  “I don’t know. You can ask our maid when she gets back, but I don’t think her statement—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. The room had suddenly plunged into darkness.

  “My God!” shouted Gabriela. “Agustín’s had an accident. Agustín, Agustín! Are you OK? Can you hear me?”

  “I’m absolutely fine, Gaby. This ruddy machine has done its thing again. You didn’t think to turn off the other lights in the house.”

  “Have you any matches?” Gabriela asked Ericourt. She raised her voice in the dark so he could locate her. “I left my torch in the scullery. I’ll go and put this right. I’ll need to change the fuse.”

  “Gaby, come here,” called Don Agustín.

  The light from the match broke a patch of darkness.

  “Thank you,” said señora Iñarra. “I’ll come back for you right away.”

  There followed a few moments of dark, anxious expectation before Gabriela reappeared at the doorway.

  “Come with me,” she said, illuminating the room with a small pocket torch. “You can wait with Agustín.”

  Señor Iñarra was sitting on the edge of the bed. The torch lit up the short-wave apparatus beside him. Ericourt took a seat in a chair next to the bed. The beam of light slid over the walls and disappeared.

  “My wife will have it fixed in no time,” said Don Agustín jovially. “It’s my fault for having used an amateur electrician. My daughter is right when she accuses me of being overprotective.”

  These last words acted as a fiat lux. The bedroom, suddenly reclaimed by light, presented Ericourt with a new sense of surprise. Gaby came in, and avoiding her husband’s eyes, she spoke directly to the Inspector. She seemed bad-tempered.

  “We can continue our conversation now, señor Ericourt.” She had gone over to the desk and busied herself arranging some documents. “You’ll have to wait to finish your treatment, Agustín. We can’t keep señor Ericourt at the mercy of our domestic inconveniences.”

  Ericourt was struck by the uncomfortable sensation of being a stranger there, like when one watches an animated conversation without being invited to take part.

  “I’ll just trouble you for one more favour, if I may. I’d like you to show me the service rooms.”

  “Of course. This way,” said Gabriela unfalteringly. “Be so kind as to follow me.”

  Her footsteps were as agile and quick as reflex movements. Ericourt followed her along the hallway, struck by how adept and active she was.

  The scullery door opened onto the same hall as Don Agustín’s bedroom. The service rooms were the kitchen, scullery and a narrow hallway that led to the maid’s bathroom and bedroom.

  Ericourt peered through the kitchen’s interior window and carefully examined the position of the cornices and parapets.

  “That’ll be all,” he said, turning round. Gabriela was waiting behind him, staring at the floor. She shuddered when she heard his voice. She must have been thinking about something else.

  “Can I go out this way?” he added, pointing at the service door. “I don’t want to cause you any more trouble.”

  Gabriela did not move from the scullery until after the Inspector had left. The bell was calling her to her husband’s bedroom but she walked straight past and shut herself in her own bedroom, slamming the door to shut out the high-pitched, intermittent tinkling of the bell.

  At the main door Ericourt came across Andrés Torres, who was busy hurling extravagant looks at his colleagues on the opposite pavement. They were all at their posts as if in defiance of the respective managements for having forbidden them from talking until the police interrogations had come to an end. Seeing him dressed in his blue uniform with silver buttons, Inspector Ericourt breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Are you burning any rubbish at the moment?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I need to go down to the basement to look for something in the waste.”

  The rubbish was piled up in the unlit incinerator. Torres, deep in the oppressive silence of protest, took off his livery and put on his leather apron and gloves. His reserved gestures belied the extent of his displeasure.

  “What would you like me to look for, sir?” he asked, brandishing the iron fork like a sceptre.

  “A spare fuse that was thrown down the incinerator chute.”

  People’s modes of expression are limitless. Torres’s head sank between his shoulders, speaking volumes. The soft sound of material being sifted was heard.

  “There’s nothing like what you’re looking for in here,” he said after a short while, standing up straight. The Inspector’s small failure was ample compensation for him.

  “Allow me,” ordered Ericourt, snatching the fork from his hands.

  “But Inspector, you’ll get filthy. Take this at least.” Torres removed his apron and went to put it on the other man. Ericourt ignored him. Among the pile of papers and scraps of food a shiny blue rectangle had appeared. Pushing away the scraps that covered it he saw it was a notebook with an imitation leather cover, almost the size of an exercise book.

  “Caramba, señor Inspector, if you’d told me you were looking for a notebook I could’ve found that too.”

  Ericourt brushed off the cover of the notebook with his handkerchief. He put it in his pocket as if wanting to shield it from the caretaker’s curious gaze, which was boring into it.

  “It’s fine. Tell me one thing: señor Soler’s apartment is directly above the Czerbós’s, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Torres’s face lit up. His expression changed instantly from resentment to amiability.

  “Let’s go,” said Ericourt peremptorily.

  An officer was keeping watch at the main door. He wouldn’t move from there now. Andrés Torres had been right after all.

  7

  Where is Emilio Villalba?

  The laundry was a small rectangular space, a corridor almost entirely filled by white counters and cupboards on one side, and shelves with red oilcloth curtains over the washing machines on the other.

  “Can I help?” a woman asked Blasi. Her dishevelled head emerged from among the white canvas bags she was emptying. Her face looked as if it had been sculpted by a child from a ball of red clay. Her hair had all the charm of a wire brush that someone had attempted to fix in a perm.

  “I’m looking for a young man who works here, your delivery lad. What’s his name?”

  “Why do you want him? He’s not here.”

  Blasi showed his ID card. The woman’s face suddenly changed colour. Now it seemed as if it were moulded from the insides of a loaf of bread.

  “Wait a minute, I’ll go and get my husband,” she said, disappearing between the blocks of white enamel and glass where water, soap and clothes were dancing an infernal sarabande.

  Her husband appeared, a rough man in shirtsleeves showing dense reddish hair on his forearms and at the top of his chest. He spoke with a Pol
ish accent.

  “Good afternoon, sir, how can I help you?” he asked in a syrupy voice.

  “I’m looking for your delivery lad. What’s his name and where does he live?”

  “Emilio Villalba. He hasn’t come to work since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Is he ill?”

  The man raised his hands, opened his mouth and arched his eyebrows in a gesture that perfectly illustrated both irony and doubt.

  “How should I know?”

  “Quite easily, by asking.”

  “He doesn’t have a telephone.”

  “Does he often miss work?”

  The woman let out a laugh. She had not aimed to be cordial and had absolutely fulfilled this intention.

  “Ha, ha! Half the week, at least. He’ll be back.”

  “Is he the one who delivers to number nine, Calle Santa Fe?”

  “Yes, he’s our only delivery lad.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Wait a moment,” said the man. He took a battered, stained exercise book out of a drawer. The place’s neatness had its limits. The pages of notes revealed their assistants never stayed long in the job.

  “Here it is. He lives at number forty-nine, Calle Paraguay.”

  “Thank you. If Villalba does show up, tell him to report to the police station,” said Blasi.

  The building on Calle Paraguay was a tenement like so many in the poor areas of Palermo, close to the railway tracks. On its flaking, faded front there was a sign painted with irregular black letters on yellowing wood which read: “Lodgings.”

  The woman washing clothes in the sink in the yard said Emilio Villalba had not been back there the previous evening or that whole day.

  “Do you know where he might be?” asked Blasi. “Does he have family in Buenos Aires?”

  “That one? Who knows! They come and go. There’s a good reason I charge upfront.”

  “What kind of lad is he?”

  “Same as all the others.” The woman pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her forearm. “Round here all they talk about is their ‘dead cert’ bets.”

  “What are the names of his roommates and where do they work? You can at least tell me that.” The slap of damp fabric which had so far accompanied the conversation suddenly stopped.

  “Come with me to the store on the corner and I’ll show you them,” the woman suggested. “They’ll be playing dice about now. If they’re not there ask the storekeeper, he knows them.”

  They had not arrived yet, of course. Blasi sat down to wait for them in front of a glass of caña. He glanced around the narrow store with its boarded floor. The tables were shiny from use. The bottles placed untidily on the shelves suggested carelessness of ordinary routine. The storekeeper studied Blasi’s movements with dark, evasive little eyes and his head tilted to one side.

  Blasi did not get his hopes up. Like so many young men of his age and social standing, Emilio Villalba must have had only acquaintances rather than friends, people with whom he worked, lived or slept. His human contact would be limited to receiving and handing over laundry tickets from or to his employers or getting tips about the weekend races from his roommates. The kind of person who brushes past others every day, their lives as different as sun and rain. Distanced from one another more through indifference and overwork than they might be in time and space. Orphans of spirit, unable to build meaningful relationships, concerned only about their right to sleep in a bed, to eat and drink and enjoy their Saturday ‘loves’. Selfish and protective of their meagre pleasures because they are the only things that give them a sense of the marvellous adventure God has bestowed on every man: life itself.

  The notebook with blue covers lay open on Santiago Ericourt’s desk, picking up the beam of light cast by the lamp with its green shade. More than a diary, it was a long, written confession that seemed to follow a series of sudden impulses. The dotted lines signalled different entries. Ericourt was rereading the pages.

  “I do not know how much longer I can bear this torture. All my life I have been a coward, afraid to take responsibility for my actions, seeking the protection of others to solve my problems. This is how I was educated and fear has led me to live a constant lie, but what about him?

  “It is some time since I have felt any pity towards him. I feel repulsed by his ability to put on an act and drag others into playing along. I ask myself why we have such fear of violence. Violence is as healthy as the electric discharges in the atmosphere. It is much worse to go on living a fiction as we do, breathing the foul air of a swamp. How else could we call the supposed tolerance that unites us?

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  “There was a time when the word ‘morning’ held the fresh taste of freedom for me. Now it means nothing. Nothing can free me from myself. I tried it and failed.

  “There is no use deceiving myself. I am a cowardly woman and my supposed freedom is a new form of cowardice. Everything scares me, he knows that. He must know the truth. Why does he not say anything? His silence makes him more contemptible in my eyes.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  “Since last night I feel my life does not belong to me, as if I were a puppet whose strings everyone pulls as they please. I think the sympathy that drew me to Rita was a way of justifying myself. It is strange. However, people cannot bear to see their shortcomings in others.

  “He knew. What he has tried to do is monstrous. Why am I so surprised? How could I have expected more from someone capable of taking pretence to such a degree of perfection? I envy Betty her ability to see the world with open eyes. At least she knows how to face up to her life.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  “My God! Now I know why you have punished me. I have sinned against love, against sincerity, I lied when you gave me the strength to be truthful, you gave me the sense to renounce deception and I took refuge in it like the weak do. Sins against the spirit do not ever deserve pardon in your eyes, Lord.”

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  The telephone was ringing insistently. Ericourt lifted the receiver. It was Blasi. His attempts to find Emilio Villalba had so far proved fruitless.

  “Who’s that?”

  “The lad from the laundry. He was in the Czerbós’s apartment.” Blasi paused. “I found out he installed something or other at the Iñarras’s place.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Ericourt was drawing geometric figures on a piece of paper.

  “Can you hear me, sir? I’ve arranged to meet his roommates.”

  “Fine. Leave that. I’ve got another job for you. Come back here.”

  He hung up. He took his private folder out of one of the desk drawers. Idly leafing through, he ran his gaze over the different headings written in capitals: AGUSTÍN IÑARRA, GABRIELA DE IÑARRA, BEATRIZ IÑARRA, RITA CZERBÓ, BORIS CZERBÓ (crossed out), ADOLFO LUCHTER, GUSTAVO EIDINGER, FRANCISCO SOLER.

  He slowly wrote another name on a blank sheet. He made sure the letters matched the handwriting of the previous ones: EMILIO VILLALBA.

  He picked up the telephone and dialled an internal line.

  “Sergeant Portela? Did the Magistrate send señorita Iñarra home? Did someone go with her? Perfect.”

  With a satisfied sigh he leant back in his chair. While he waited for Blasi to arrive he passed the time writing a few lines on the sheet he had just added to the report.

  The shadow slipped into the Czerbós’s kitchen. Rita was in her bedroom at the end of the hall, and the footsteps, although stealthy, rang out in the silence of her fear. Her hands desperately grasped the covers.

  “He’s back,” she murmured in a strained voice. The words stuck in her throat and seemed to tighten around her chest like an iron ring. “They’re back… they’ll always come back…”

  From the dark, empty space came faces contorted by torture. Faces that had one day smiled at her in her home far away in Germany, but had then been disfigured by death before disappearing fo
rever from the world of the living. Rita trembled under the blankets.

  “They’ll always come back, Boris… I’m scared… I can’t make them go away.”

  The footsteps had stopped. Rita fixed her eyes on the double-locked door.

  She heard the click of a kitchen window catch. Fear vibrated in the air around her, and with it, the sound of a body sliding carefully through the darkness. The fear then intensified, paralysing her.

  “Boris… I love you so much… you’ve been the only one for me… Boris…”

  With her senses alert, waiting for the cloud of agony that would confuse all those images with that of pleasure, Rita repeated the name that had given her life meaning.

  “Boris…”

  She heard the distant creak of a window.

  Rita then felt the iron ring split into lacerating, destructive barbs, like hooks in a torture chamber that swelled in her throat and tore a scream from her. Rita burst into semiconscious, hysterical sobs that convulsed her body.

  She got out of bed and opened the door. Her teary eyes fixed on the door to Boris’s empty room. With her plaits hanging down her back and her face bathed in tears, she looked very like a little girl who goes to her brother’s room at night to say sorry for having made him angry that afternoon.

  Yet behind the door there was nothing but darkness and silence. Rita didn’t dare turn on the light. Boris’s face was not there. That face, full of satisfaction when he made her scream by pulling her hair or sticking a pin into an insect, had disappeared from that room and that home forever.

  “Boris, where are you?”

  Rita went into the deserted kitchen, where the mysterious presence that had woken her filled the air with traces of fear. She went out into the service hallway. The black space of the courtyard drew her like the abyss of a dream. Arms trailed down the walls like long snakes, calling her. They were the same arms that used to grasp and grip her when she went to bed with her heart in tatters, having guessed from Boris’s silence that the following day another of her friends would know the horror of betrayal.