The Zul Enigma

by J M Leitch

  ‘I couldn’t face Elena.’

  ‘And you never saw her again? After that night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you talk to her again?’

  Drew didn’t reply.

  ‘Did you ever talk to her again?’ Carlos repeated.

  Drew’s voice was a whisper. ‘Once.’

  ‘When?’

  Drew was silent.

  ‘I said when?’

  He looked up at Carlos. ‘She called me the day she died.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To tell me she’d left you. Again. For good she said. She told me you’d had a row about starting a family. Said she was at the airport. That she was coming back to me.’

  ‘You bastard!’ Carlos cried out, holding up his hands as if he could use them to block out Drew’s words.

  ‘You wanted to know. Well here it is. I told her to wait, to give it time but she said there was no point. She asked me if I didn’t want her any more, if there was someone else. I told her there had always been someone else, it was the someone in my life I was missing.’

  Carlos’s face contorted and his tears flowed. But Drew felt no remorse. All he wanted now was to punish Carlos for everything he’d put Elena through. Having plunged in the knife, now he wanted to twist it and twist it hard.

  ‘I told her she was running away, that she had to finish with you first, properly, otherwise she’d always regret it. But she was adamant. She said she’d had enough. That she never wanted to see you again. She said she’d been kidding herself for years trying to make it work, but finally she knew she’d never be happy with you. She said you treated her like a plaything and that she didn’t want to be used like that any more. That she wanted to be loved for who she was, not just for the pleasure she gave.

  ‘She said she’d catch the first flight for DC the next morning. I checked the schedules. I tried to call her back. I went to the airport. I met seven flights. Yes, seven flights. But she never showed. I was going mad. I thought you’d got to her, made her change her mind… again. I called you. But your phone was turned off. I left messages all over. Those hours of not knowing,’ Drew shook his head, ‘the worst hours of my life. Then you called and told me she’d been murdered.’

  Drew looked at Carlos, his face twisted with pain. ‘I loved her too, you know.’

  Wailing, Carlos pounded the pillow with his fists.

  ‘At first I blamed you. I didn’t want to see you. I thought I’d kill you if I did. So I didn’t come to the funeral. Not getting out of DC? A load of bollocks – I never even tried. I wanted to say goodbye to her but I couldn’t stomach seeing you. You, who’d been so busy striving for more, you’d been way too stupid to see that you already had everything that mattered.

  ‘So I got pissed and held a wake for her on my own.

  ‘Then the years drifted by. I’d speak to you now and then. And last year I bumped into Joe. When he asked about you, he couldn’t believe we’d still not seen each other…’

  ‘He knows?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! You bastard!’

  ‘It was talking to him made me think, made me realise that in spite of everything, you and me? We’d been mates for a long, long time and I missed it. Joe was right. It was time to put it behind me. So when I started visiting Sophie in Vienna I’d call your office. Finally, this last time, you were in town.’

  ‘If you care so much about our friendship, why tell me all this now? You know how much I loved her – still love her. She was everything to me.’

  Drew shook his head. ‘I never meant to say anything.’

  ‘Did she tell you… did she tell you… she was pregnant?’

  Drew dropped his eyes. ‘No… but,’ and hurried on trying to draw attention away from the lie, ‘one thing I’ve never understood. If you really did love her as much as you say, how could you bear to see her so unhappy?’

  Carlos spoke through his hands as he tried to hold back the sobs. ‘You hate me, don’t you?’

  ‘No, Carlos. I don’t hate you. I never hated you. I just hate what you did to her.’

  CHAPTER 13

  They didn’t speak. They simply drank their way through the rest of the beers, each man silently fighting the host of demons messing with his mind.

  Eventually Carlos curled up on the bed. The stress of all the waiting and worrying over the past few days had done him in even before he’d got to the motel. And now this on top of everything else. Well, it had totally wiped him out.

  All the energy had been sucked out of his body, leaving it deflated and useless like a punctured tyre. But the one thing that was still working, the thing that he couldn’t silence even though he’d have given anything to do so, was his brain. It churned like a hurdy-gurdy playing out the discordant notes of disbelief, anger, indignation, disgust, hurt and betrayal, over and over again.

  Sure Elena had told him she was miserable. Every time they argued. In fact she told him so often he’d got fed up hearing it but he always thought once she stopped feeling upset her unhappiness vanished. But perhaps it wasn’t like that after all. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to what she said. But he hadn’t. And then one night she left Carlos and went to him looking for a shoulder to cry on and ended up disclosing private details of her life with Carlos, things that should have remained within the realm of man and wife. For Carlos, that humiliation was nearly as painful as the infidelity itself.

  And the bastard took advantage of her. Told her he loved her. Made her think she’d fallen for him. And then he seduced her. What betrayal. Double betrayal. Betrayed by his wife and his best friend.

  In his mind he could imagine them together. He could see Elena’s smile, alive and bright, charged with adoration and intimacy, the smile that until that day she had kept for Carlos alone. He could picture his filthy hands on her body, touching her all over. It made him sick. Sick with fury, sick with jealousy, sick with shame and sick at the invasion of a domain that she’d vowed would remain his forever.

  And more painful than anything, to know she’d run away and planned to go back to him a second time. How could she? Carlos wanted to scream out in pain, to destroy all the sordid thoughts attacking his mind and banish the anguish he felt.

  He couldn’t stop torturing himself by wondering if she would have got on that plane knowing she was carrying his baby. He covered his face, wanting to sink into unconsciousness and make it all go away.

  Carlos was not the only one thinking about Elena. Telling her story awakened all the emotions Drew had kept suppressed for so long.

  Although he’d told Carlos much about what had happened, he hadn’t told him everything. He hadn’t said how, on that first night, he’d been hypnotised by her amber eyes, how he’d smelt the sweet vanilla of her breath, felt it’s warmth caress his face as she kissed him on each cheek before sliding her mouth on top of his. He hadn’t described how she’d unbuttoned his shirt, glided her hands over his chest, down his abdomen and under the waistband of his trousers making him moan and his stomach muscles spasm. He hadn’t mentioned how she’d unzipped her dress, unhooked her bra and guided his hands over the delicious apple-shaped swell of her breasts down, down over her belly and slipped his fingers under white lace and into heaven.

  He hadn’t told Carlos how they had done it right there on the living room floor, oblivious that Lizzie was sleeping just a wall away.

  He couldn’t imagine ever again experiencing the intensity and array of emotions Elena had aroused in him that night. The torment he’d felt on losing the only woman he had ever loved following so quickly on the soaring ecstasy at being united with her had nearly been too much for him to bear, but he’d hidden his true feelings from Carlos for her sake.

  By returning to Carlos, Elena signalled her tacit agreement to move to Vienna. Not only was it what Carlos wanted, but it removed her from an awkward situation. In a way it was a relief for Drew too. Their brief affair had forever changed his relationship with them
both and the deception acted as an invisible barrier. He dealt with it by avoiding them, knowing that soon they’d be out of the country and out of his life.

  In spite of, or was it because of, the depth of his love for Elena, Drew never blamed her for going back to Carlos. Deep down he’d known that was the way it would go. But it didn’t stop him loving her; stop him from hoping that one day she’d come back to him.

  But he never felt any guilt. Nor remorse. The dominant emotion had always been anger. Anger at Carlos for not recognising the value of what he had.

  Then there was the last time he’d spoken to Elena. Had she lived would she really have left Carlos, knowing she was carrying his child? It was something Drew never allowed himself to think about. Elena’s murder had been harrowing enough to deal with, but living with any of the other scenarios that might have panned out would have been impossible.

  All the bottles were empty and Drew grabbed his coat muttering, ‘A couple of beers isn’t going to get it.’ A long night stretched ahead and the only way he could imagine getting through it was drunk. Blind drunk. He assumed, had they been talking, Carlos would have agreed.

  Drew left Carlos lying on the bed with his shoes on and his arms folded over his face. When he returned with two bottles of Black Label half an hour later Carlos hadn’t moved. Drew found two grimy glasses in the bathroom and after giving them a rinse planted them still dripping on the table. He opened the front door and broke up some icicles hanging from the roof outside.

  ‘Whisky. Want some?’

  Carlos didn’t reply.

  ‘Do you want some?’ Drew repeated louder, nudging him on the shoulder with the bottle.

  Carlos grunted.

  Drew took that as a “yes” and poured a slug into each glass. He put one on the bedside table and lifted the other to his mouth. Narrowing his eyes against the fumes, he gulped down half the measure. ‘Brrrrrrr,’ he shivered. He swallowed the rest and refilled the glass.

  ‘Carlos?’

  No reply

  ‘Come on mate,’ Drew leaned over and shook him, but Carlos punched his arm away.

  ‘¡Hijo de puta!’ Carlos hissed.

  ‘Carlos, there’s something I need to say.’

  Carlos kept his arms crossed over his face.

  ‘It sounds harsh but I need to explain.’ Drew paused. ‘The truth is I don’t regret what happened. Those few days with Elena, well, I’ve never known anything like it. I feel like crap telling you but you need to know… she wasn’t like the others. It was no casual affair. I was in love with her. I really was.’

  Carlos sat up. ‘You took advantage of my wife! She came to you as a friend. To talk. And you screwed her.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘How was it like? She forced you? She came to you because she was upset. For Christ’s sake, we’d had a horrible argument.’

  ‘That’s all you ever did Carlos – argue.’

  ‘You talk like it was all my fault. It takes two you know.’

  Drew shook his head. ‘You forget how well I knew you. I knew exactly how you operated, I’d watched you often enough.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You used to goad her into having a row to avoid talking about stuff you didn’t want to talk about. And then you’d blame her for starting it.’

  ‘Not true!’

  ‘The day she died? That’s exactly what you did, isn’t it? You lied about not wanting a baby. You told me the other night all you really wanted was more time to get used to the idea… but if that was true, why didn’t you just tell her? Huh?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because you wanted to wind her up, piss her off and have a blazing ruckus, because it was a subject you didn’t want to discuss right then.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant. Why didn’t she tell me? Why did she play that game with me? If I’d known, I’d’ve taken her seriously.’

  ‘Why did you have to know she was pregnant before you could take her seriously?’

  ‘I… don’t you see… don’t you get it? I know. I know. It was bad enough that she was murdered. But knowing she’d been raped and assaulted too? I’ve been beating myself up over it ever since.’

  He fell back onto the bed, covered his face and wept.

  ‘Carlos. Don’t do this to yourself. She’s been dead over three years. Nothing can change that.’

  Carlos took his hands away from his face revealing eyes tormented with agony. ‘But you changed something tonight. All the years Elena and I were together I never once questioned her loyalty. But you just ruined all that. Didn’t you? You poisoned the way I think about her. You couldn’t even leave me that, could you? ¡Hijo de puta!’

  Drew turned his face to the wall.

  ***

  Five men burst in the door just after four in the morning. Two startled Carlos awake by ripping the bed cover off him. They rolled him onto his stomach and wrenched his arms behind his back. He felt something being twisted round his wrists and jerked tight.

  ‘What’s going…’ he mumbled into the pillow, but was silenced by cold metal pressing into the side of his head.

  An unfamiliar voice drifted down.

  ‘Good morning Dr Maiz. It’s your early morning call.’

  Muffled noises came from the other bed and the same voice said, ‘Now gentlemen, it’s pointless struggling so don’t even bother.’

  As Carlos was hoisted upright he became aware of a fearful pounding in his head. He felt dizzy, dehydrated and disorientated. Then the fog in his mind cleared to be replaced by memories of the previous night. Once again he felt that sickening sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He closed his eyes, willing everything to be a bad dream, although he knew very well it wasn’t.

  An icy wind blew in the doorway where a man dressed in black was standing with a pump action shotgun. It was dark outside. One lone, dim bedside light lit the room and Carlos could see Drew being held face down on his bed by two other men.

  Carlos looked at the empty bottles strewn over the floor and the curled up remains of last night’s sandwiches littering the cracked glass top table. The room stank of stale food and beer and whisky and shards of glass glittered in the loops of the carpet.

  In front of him stood a man with a Glock semi-automatic. In spite of the gun he was holding, he smiled and said in a cheery voice, ‘Sorry to wake you so early, but I need you both to come with me.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, give me a moment.’

  ‘You’re not going to try and pull another fast one, are you Dr Maiz?’

  Drew’s voice, ragged from booze, came from the other bed. ‘Look at the poor bugger for pity’s sake. He’s in no state to pull a curtain…’ his sentence cut short when he was yanked to standing.

  After four of the men had secured Carlos and Drew, the fifth searched the room and after giving the all clear, took up his position in the doorway again.

  ‘So you had a bit of a party last night?’ the chatty man said, appraising the mess. ‘I didn’t know you swung both ways Doctors,’ and he grinned looking first at Carlos and then at Drew.

  ‘If you’re trying to be funny, you’re doing a piss awful job,’ Drew replied.

  The man laughed. ‘You Limeys! You have a quaint way of putting things. Anyhow, I sure hope you both had a good time, because it’s the last party you’ll be attending for a quite a while.’

  Carlos couldn’t stand listening to more inane banter. He went to move towards the bathroom but the man barred his way.

  ‘And where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘I need the toilet.’

  ‘Listen, buddy, you’re wearing plasticuffs and no one’s going to volunteer fishing around in there on your behalf,’ he nodded at Carlos’s crotch, ‘with the possible exception of your good doctor friend. So you can just forget it and get a move on outside.’

  He grabbed Carlos’s coat, flung it over his shoulders back to front and did up the top button beh
ind him. Another man did the same to Drew. Then they pushed them stumbling out of the room across the icy path and over the gravel car park into two separate cars.

  Thelma, wearing a mauve nylon quilted dressing gown, was standing by the doorway to the office. Drew caught a glimpse of her before his eyes were duck taped and he wished he hadn’t thrown the bottle at the wall.

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘You’re confident there’s nothing more to it?’ Bob leaned back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, fingers steepled together and rocked himself back and forth. On the opposite side of the desk Anita sat as stiff as a mannequin, while Barbara Lord gathered up her files.

  ‘We’re positive. Maiz may be suffering from some psychological disorder, but when he’s lucid he’s no liar.’

  ‘And you believe he ran on impulse?’

  ‘Sure. At the meeting yesterday he refused to accept he could be suffering with depression let alone anything more serious and quite frankly, by just talking to him, it’s hard to believe he’s crazy enough to have cooked up the “Zul” scenario, even in his unconscious mind. Whatever his problem is, it has to be very deep-seated.’

  ‘You believe he doesn’t think he’s sick?’

  ‘Yes. He’s innocent of any wilful wrong-doing.’

  ‘He could’ve torpedoed my entire administration…’

  ‘When we confronted him yesterday, it hit him hard. It’ll be a while before he’ll accept it. We pushed him into a corner and for a man used to being head honcho in his own world, it aggravated the hell out of him. I’ve spoken to the doctors and they agree. His running was a predictable gut reaction.’

  ‘If that’s the case, why weren’t we prepared?’

  ‘A truck broadsided the car, sir. Both our men were knocked unconscious and hospitalised. It was pure luck Maiz wasn’t injured as well. We can’t blame our guys for Maiz escaping, any more than we can blame him for running.’