He continues on to Ghirardelli Square and along the pier, then up the hill to Great Meadow Park. From there, he has a superb view of the Golden Gate. He pulls out his binoculars and trains them on it. He recalls the first time he ever drove across it, a year or so before the paper sent him to Poland. He was traveling up the coast with an extremely attractive young woman named Kay. She was about his age, twenty-six or twenty-seven, a lifelong resident of Fresno, the daughter of an almond grower. She’d graduated from Mills—art history—and was working at the museum when they’d met. He’d asked her to dinner because he admired her looks and hoped to sleep with her. They quickly wound up in bed, and it went very well, and when they drove across the bridge that day, they were on the way to a wine-tasting weekend in Napa Valley.
He can’t remember much about any of the wineries, though he does recall that when they were escorted into the tank room at one of the larger ones, they simultaneously turned to each other and referenced the I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy stomps grapes. They laughed, locked hands, and pronounced themselves made for each other. The relationship lasted another month or so, by which time the only thing binding them was sex. And as she noted, not unkindly, “Either of us could find that pretty much anywhere, you know?”
She moved away years ago, and he forgot about her. But lately, she has reappeared in his recollections, if only because she accompanied him on that initial drive across the bridge. Like everyone else, he’d seen pictures of it and had visited San Francisco several times and observed it from a distance. But when they drove across it that day, he was surprised to discover that the real thing was burnt-orange rather than gold and the road surface was in poor condition. Rather than sunny, the afternoon was cloudy, though free of fog, and as they crossed the south viaduct, he was thinking that whereas Yosemite exceeded its reputation for grandeur, the Golden Gate underwhelmed. He was about to voice his disappointment when the shoreline disappeared beneath them and a powerful crosswind struck the car. As he clenched the wheel, vast depths opened on both sides, and in all that yawning emptiness, the world came unmade. Anything seemed possible.
The following autumn, a tidal wave of dissatisfaction hit Eastern Europe, and he was dispatched to record its effects. He took a seat in a colorless café. A woman with dark hair and oversized eyes entered, examined the few patrons, then walked over to his table and said, “I’m Julia. Are you by any chance Richard?”
Yes, by chance, he was. And then, by chance, he wasn’t any longer.
Now about all he can do anymore, even on a perfect fall day with the most beautiful bay in the world at his back and an ocean stretching endlessly before him, is put one foot in front of the other. So that’s what he does, turning and retracing his route to the hotel. On the way, he steps into a liquor store and buys himself a bottle of Bushmills.
When he gets back to his room, it’s midafternoon. He pours a water glass half full of whiskey and carries it over to the armchair near the window. He draws the curtains closed and turns on the reading lamp. Then he sits down with his laptop and props his feet on the divan. He takes a big swallow of Bushmills, turns on the computer, and pops in the memory stick he got from Rupert.
Over the next few hours, a couple of things happen. The level in the bottle drops, and a picture of the woman whom until now he has known only by name begins to emerge. At first in words, almost all of them Spanish. There are text exchanges between her and her mother. Her father became ill back in June and couldn’t go to work. Her mother appreciates the money sent by Jacinta and Andres, as she suspects that contrary to what she’s been told, they struggle to survive in el norte. There are exchanges with her sister in Brooklyn, who repeatedly calls attention to the cost of living in New York. How does Jacinta think she can possibly send their parents more? How much does she think you can earn, even in Manhattan, scrubbing toilets? There are exchanges between Jacinta and her husband, each of them concerned with the mundane: who will pick the kids up, who will take the sitter home, who will cook tonight, who will pick up a can of chiles poblanos, a bottle of Tajin Clásico, which bills can be left until next month and which can’t, the possibility that Andres might be laid off by the body shop, since a lot of people who are involved in wrecks are out of work themselves and can’t afford to fix their damaged cars. There are countless exchanges with someone who has a local number and has been entered in her contacts only as Tia, though it’s clear she’s not a real aunt and is instead the “old lady” neighbors told him about, who often came over in the evenings. In several of these, the woman complains about what she’s being paid and in a couple of exchanges warns Jacinta that she may need to find someone else, that she can’t keep working late hours for los centavos.
And beginning in early July and ending at ten forty-three p.m. on the evening she was murdered, there are numerous exchanges between her and the person the disconnected mobile number belonged to. That individual is entered in her list of contacts as El Entrenador. The coach.
The first thing that surprises Richard about Nick Major’s messages to Jacinta Aguilera is that they are also written in Spanish. Unlike her responses, which are fragmented and filled with typos or English words that the autocorrect function has inserted in place of whatever she was trying to say, they are delivered in impeccably correct, perfectly punctuated prose. No txt-speak from El Entrenador. He always begins with a term of endearment: Mi Querida, Preciosa, Dulzura, Mi Vida. In his initial message, he tells her he appreciates her willingness to share her number with him and promises not to become a nuisance. The conversation they had after the bar closed last night, he says, is the best he’s had with anyone except his daughter in months, if not years. He said things he didn’t even know he was feeling until he said them. That just doesn’t happen to him. He’s in the public eye a lot, and he has to think before he speaks, but last night he didn’t, and this morning he feels a hundred kilos lighter. And he only weighs about a hundred kilos, he jokes, to begin with.
She doesn’t respond. Over the next ten days, she receives more than eighty texts from her mother and has several increasingly heated exchanges with her sister. Their father is close to death, he needs surgery, the wait may be too long. There’s only one way to move him ahead. Everything has a price, ya sabes, querida, ya sabes como es.
On July 14th, another text from Major. He’s glad they talked again last night, that she trusted him enough to share her troubles. He has a few himself, not like hers, but troubles nevertheless, and he wouldn’t mind sharing those sometime, if she’s open to hearing about them. As for her mother’s problems, he’d be happy to help solve them. Do her parents have a bank account? And does she know the number?
Evidently, the answer to both questions was yes. Three days later, there’s an ardent text from her mother, her gratitude hard to behold when you already know the ultimate cost. A few days later, her father undergoes surgery, the nature of which is impossible to discover from the texts. Subsequent messages from her mother indicate he’s recovering, though still unable to work.
Jacinta begins to reply to Major’s lengthy texts, but usually in just a few words. The contrast between what she writes to him and what he writes to her is stark and jarring. She has given him back his life, he tells her on the 22nd of July. Some people think he’s the best in the country at what he does; he’s already received feelers from two NFL teams whose coaches will be let go if they fail to make the playoffs, but what is that kind of success worth if you feel like you’re suffocating each morning when you wake up? Her replies concern logistics. He’s to park at the back of the lot, please, away from the big light. They must go someplace else next time. Please do not do that again with the phone. It scared her, because once you make something like that, it exists forever. No, she can’t, not tonight, her husband will be pumping gas at his other job, and there is no one to stay with the children. She does not wish to wound him. Her husband is a good man; he works hard for their family but is also gripped by fierce pride. This cannot contin
ue.
He understands, he does, Sirenita, Florecita, but just once. Just once all night. There’s a place they could go, one of the rich men who supports the program owns it, a lodge in the foothills, no one will know, he will pay the woman who looks after her children, she can say her friend from work suffered a loss in her family, that she’s mad with grief, she has to help her through it, she can’t be left alone. Hasn’t he helped her mother? Hasn’t he helped her and Andres? He doesn’t know him, but he respects him; he wouldn’t hurt her and her family for the world. One night. One night all night long. The season will start soon, and then he’ll leave her alone. So help him God—and yes, he does believe in God. He knows what they’re doing is wrong.
Tomorrow morning, when Richard wakes with a hangover the likes of which he has not known since his twenties, he will not be able to recall if this is the point at which he quit reading through the texts for a while and looked at the handful of photos Jacinta had on her phone the night she died, of if he read all the way through the last few exchanges between her and Nick Major and perhaps even watched the lone video before looking at the photos. It will all run together, just as so many things must have run together in the mind of her husband the night he took their lives.
She has long, dark hair with plenty of natural wave. Her eyes, like Julia’s, are hazel-toned. Her oldest son has a burr cut; he’s standing in front of their house, grinning at the camera, spinning a soccer ball. The younger boy is missing two front teeth. The toddler is captured in the act of eating what looks like a Twinkie. Cream filling smeared on her chin. Andres? One assumes he took the photos using her phone, since he appears in none of them and she appears in several. Given what was on that phone, she should have guarded it with her life. How unskilled she must have been at dissembling.
The other thing he will not be able to say with any certainty tomorrow morning is when he rose from the armchair and turned on the TV. UCC versus Boise State on the blue field where so many confused birds plummet to their death. He won’t recall the score, and he won’t be able to say how long he watched before turning his attention back to the laptop, or how he retained enough clarity to tap out his reconstruction of that August evening, the last of the Aguileras’ lives. What he will remember about the football game is a single play and its aftermath. On a pitch-out toward the UCC bench, one of the Boise receivers delivers a crushing blindside block on a Cowboy linebacker, driving hard and low at his knee. The player goes one way, his knee the other. He lies on the ground, writhing. For an instant and an instant only, as if even the camera operator is embarrassed by the absence his lens has captured, there’s a close-up of Nick Major, who calmly sips Gatorade, betraying no reaction to his player’s pain. He could leave the scene of an accident and never glance back.
Tuesday, August 18th
4:17 p.m.
Andres sends Jacinta a text telling her they’ve called from the gas station where he’s been working part time. They can use him again tonight for four or five hours, so she will need to get the old woman to stay with the kids. Between then and 5:15, Jacinta places three calls to the number of the woman listed as Tia. The first couple last only five seconds, indicating that she reached voicemail and hung up. The third lasts twenty-four seconds: long enough for her to have listened to the greeting and left a message.
5:21 p.m.
The sitter sends a text saying that as she has repeatedly told Jacinta, she cannot continue to work late hours for so little. Por favor no me llame de nuevo.
5:23 p.m.
Jacinta calls Andres. The call lasts thirty-one seconds.
5:25 p.m.
Another call to Andres. Eight seconds. Either it went to voicemail and she hung up, or he answered and she hung up on him after an unpleasant exchange, or he hung up on her.
5:27 p.m.
Another call to Tia. Ten seconds. Nobody has a good word tonight for Jacinta Aguilera.
5:29 p.m.
She places a call to the Golden Palomino. It lasts a minute, sixteen seconds. This is when she phones in sick.
After that, what does she do? The evaporative cooler isn’t working, and it’s miserably hot. But she’s got three children to feed, so she fixes dinner. (The police report noted that part of a badly burned casserole was found in the oven, which was still set at 375 when the officers arrived, and that this contributed to the stifling heat alluded to by J. G. when he and I talked on the street that night.) Maybe after feeding the kids, she reads to them for a while, or maybe she parks them in front of the TV.
8:18 p.m.
She sends her mother a text asking how her father is doing. Her mother will not reply until the following morning, by which time her daughter will be dead.
8: 26 p.m.
She sends a text to her sister in Brooklyn apologizing for some of the things she recently said to her. We know her sister never replied, but of course, she would have found out within a day or two that Jacinta was no longer alive.
10: 30 p.m.
According to what the manager of the all-night gas station on West Jensen told Maria, Andres leaves work.
10:36 p.m.
A phone call from Andres. Nine seconds. He’s probably calling to ask her to warm up some dinner.
10:43 p.m.
The text comes with a twenty-one-second video file attached. El Entrenador most likely thinks she’s at work. She last answered him nine days ago, begging him not to write to her again. He doesn’t know that the phone is lying on the kitchen counter when the text tone sounds, or that her husband, who’s worn out, stressed, and suspicious, is standing nearby.
Nick Major clearly appreciates the power of technology. He just doesn’t appreciate it enough.
Most Americans of a certain age recall the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Set in a fictional German POW camp during World War II, it chronicles the adventures of the American prisoner of war Captain Robert Hogan and his merry band of saboteurs. They are surrounded by a cast of bumbling Germans, chief among them Sergeant Schultz and Colonel Klink. As a child, Richard loved the show, though his mother hated it. For her, Nazi Germany could never be a source of laughter.
Richard remembers when the actor who played Hogan—Bob Crane—was murdered. The man eventually brought to trial and acquitted was a video specialist who had taught Crane how to surreptitiously film himself having sex with countless women. The AV equipment required at the time was apparently elaborate.
Whereas all Nick Major needed was his cell phone.
The text that came with the video he sent Jacinta shortly before she died said No me digas que no lo ama. Don’t tell me you didn’t love it.
We see only her face, aglow from perspiration. Her eyes are closed, her dark hair spread out on a white pillow. She’s breathing rapidly, lips parted, teeth clenched.
“Oh, baby,” a male voice grunts. “Oh, yeah, baby, yeah. You’re my own little personal porn star.”
On Monday morning, Bogdan’s sister Teresa appears at his door with a guy named Roman, who smells strongly of cologne. His silver hair rises into a gravity-defying pompadour. When he removes his leather jacket, revealing a white shirt unbuttoned about halfway to the navel, Bogdan sees a gold cross glistening amid wiry chest hair.
Teresa offers a critical appraisal of her brother, whom she last saw several years ago: “Cheeks a little sallow, belly appears to have a load of concrete in it, and you still haven’t gotten rid of that mole. Overall, not too bad.”
“Don’t let your sister get to you,” Roman urges. “She has a huge mole herself on the inside of her right thigh. They probably run in your family.”
“Beats the hell out of the toe funguses that run in yours,” Teresa says.
She walks around the room as if she’s considering purchasing it. If she chose, she could probably buy the entire building. In 1990, she and her late husband acquired and restored a decrepit Zakopane pension. Last week Bogdan learned that she now owns three others. The second is also in Zakopane, the third is in Krynica, and
the fourth is halfway across the country, in the Sudeten Mountains. Until they spoke at length, he had no idea how well-off she’d become. On the other hand, she seemed to know exactly how far he’d fallen, probably because she’s had a few conversations with Krysia. “It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot here for us to do,” she says, gesturing at the small pile of clothes he’s laid out on the daybed alongside a few stacks of books. “Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s about all I add up to.”
“Whose furniture?”
“It came with the place.”
“Okay, then, let’s make it happen, guys.”
Roman has brought several flattened boxes, and they pack them and tape them while she stands on the balcony and smokes. When they’ve finished, she asks if he’d like her to take a photo of the place to serve as a reminder, and he tells her no, that he’ll remember it the rest of his life. They grab the clothes and the boxes, and he switches off the light and leaves the key in the door, as instructed by the slumlord.
He and Roman trail her down the sidewalk. She’s always walked as if she were contesting a race. That’s probably what keeps her looking so athletic. The other day, she told him she had exactly two bad habits: men and cigarettes. She said the second was harder to control than the first.
While they walk, he asks Roman how long they’ve been together.
The other man laughs. “We aren’t really together,” he says.
The Unmade World Page 20