“That’s not true.”
“Look at yourself. You’re skin and bones, you’re stooping, your eyes have sunken in, your lips are parched. You look like someone who has crossed the ocean in a fifteenth century ship. Do you have the scurvy?”
“Do I have what?” Natalie asked alertly, as if waiting for someone to finally give a name to her condition.
“Never mind,” Anton suppressed him smile of affection and covered it with fatherly sternness. He leaned towards her, propping an elbow on the table, “I can tell you why you didn’t go to work today. You stayed at home, because you couldn’t take the pressure of the outside world. You have gone to pieces, you have no strength left, no defenses, and you simply can’t handle going out through that door.”
He underlined everything he said with small thumps of middle and forefinger on the edge of the table, except the door, which he indicated with an incline of his head and a swerving of his eyes.
Natalie said nothing. Then she said, “Yes.”
Finally. A board loose in the fence of denial. Anton allowed a brief respite for both while he lit a cigarette, then continued emphasizing his words on the table’s edge, “Since you can’t go through that door, and you are days or maybe hours away from being in a hospital, I, as your father...” he illustrated himself with a thumb, “...am taking you...” a forefinger quickly stabbed into her direction, “...for two-three days out in the open. Somewhere out of town.”
“But Dad, the elections—” Natalie protested feebly.
“Forget the elections for now. What do you think? That you will stay at home today, and tomorrow will be magically better?”
His daughter was on the verge of tears but he knew that he shouldn’t let up. “Even if you do accumulate a minimum of strength in the night and do force yourself tomorrow to go to work—what will that achieve? You will not be capable of doing anything. You will be a hindrance, not a help.”
“I thought I’d go to a doctor,” half sobbed the thin wretch who was his child.
“Yes, but you won’t listen to a doctor who will tell you to take a break, will you? I bet you mean the other kind of doctor, who will give you a pill to make the fear go away. The problem is not the fear. The fear is a signal of something wrong.”
He was gesticulating with his smoking cigarette, hissing through his teeth as if in anger. His anger was of course directed at himself, for not noticing where things were going with his only daughter, for again having allowed himself to not see what he did not want to see. It sounded to Natalie like he was admonishing her for her own stupidity.
“Your job is not to suppress this danger signal,” he hissed. “Your job is to act upon it and fix that which is broken. Not later—right now.”
Natalie didn’t answer but turned away as if to look at the window. She was silently crying, biting her lips, her right hand clutching her left elbow. She looked like she was ten again.
Anton had broken through. He ran a damp hand through his hair and allowed himself to relax a little. Now he could afford some kindness and a hint of ego boosting here and there.
“Now,” he said kindly. “I know that you are a very responsible girl, and I am proud of you. You must remember that your first responsibility is to yourself and to your family, and that’s me.”
He let that sink in before continuing, “no one else cares about you enough to be able to see facts. Instead, they prefer to see what suits them. This is how people function. Even if you are an inch away from dying, they will keep using you, and when you snap and fall on the floor, they will all act surprised.”
A memory resurfaced, a painful memory. A painful memory before, now—a tool.
“I knew a girl once, and she was diagnosed with cancer. Yet instead of retreating and concentrating on herself, she continued going to work, pretending that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. No one told her to get a clue, to just go home, sleep, meditate, eat honey, watch favorite cartoons, do anything to try to get the body and soul back into life mode.
“No, everyone said ‘what spirit, what will, keep fighting’, all that bullshit...and then she died, in only two months. Everyone acted surprised—so damn surprised.”
He got up, circled the table and hugged his daughter’s shoulders, cradling her head in his hands, “When the body is depleted and the mind is in shambles, my dearest daughter, you must forget all the social posing. Right now other people’s compliments, expectations, demands—they don’t mean a thing. They have, at this point in time, lost any meaning, and continuing to cling to them is self-destructive.
“You must concentrate on retrieving yourself back from the brink. When you have achieved that, when your body and mind are in good working order again, then you will return back to your social obligations and you will be as excellent as always.”
He kissed her wet salty eyes and ruffled her hair, “In order to reach this stage, first you must take a step back from the brink. A step away from all of this. That is why today I sleep here on the couch, and tomorrow morning we go to my place, where I collect clothes and stuff, and we leave this city for two or three days. I’ll call your people and tell them that you’re ill.”
“All right, Daddy,” Natalie said and tried to bury her face even deeper into his palms.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
David opened the letter from Andy. It was good news, as far as news went.
After carefully sifting through the images made by the working cameras in the neighborhoods where Georgette and Jane used to live, Fortham had managed to locate a vehicle, which could be that of the killer, and what looked like the killer himself.
Probably. Hopefully.
The figure was with its back to the camera the whole time. Did it look like Mister Greenpants? Could be.
Dave’s phone rang.
“Andy. What’s up?”
“Lots of things,” said Andy in a strange voice, “want me to take you out to lunch?”
“Er...okay. Is anything wrong?”
“I’ll tell you over lunch. I’ll come and get you in ten minutes.”
“Jeez, you’re scaring me.”
“That’s nothing. You just wait until we sit down somewhere.”
“Heh, okay,” Dave said with an uncertain smile, “I’m here.”
“Okay, bye.”
Now what? Dave massaged his neck for a while, got dressed, and went outside his office building. He looked at the pedestrians, exchanged a few promising glances with a hurrying MILF and two teens who walked past him arm in arm.
The curse of the eternal puberty.
After two more minutes Andy popped up, making his way through a group of white-collar men with shiny black shoes. “Let’s go to the Ham Hamlet,” he said without any preliminaries, his gaze furtive.
* * * *
“I’ll have the chicken soup and a green salad,” Andy told the hovering waiter.
Dave raised an eyebrow. “Are you on a diet?”
“No, just not very hungry you know. The stomach is a bit tightened right now.” This explanation was given through a rather tensed mouth.
“Hmm,” Dave said and felt a flash of indecision about the greasy bacon he was just about to order.
A premonition of something appetite-killing was summoned by Andy’s demeanor. Dave looked up at the waiter’s face, “I’ll have the same. Soup, salad, and a Heineken.”
The waiter nodded and strutted off. Dave looked at Andy.
His friend was obviously wound up tight, and at the same time trying not to show it too much. However, his cheekbones were frozen, betraying the tension in the jaw muscles, and there was a slight slouch in his shoulders; even as he sat there he was slightly stooping as a man does when unconsciously expecting an imminent physical attack.
Andy’s broad shoulders looked thin for so
me reason, as if his red pullover was pulled over his bare bones.
He doesn’t get enough exercise, Dave thought. Such a nice figure should be easily filled up with muscle mass and he’s letting it go to waste.
“So, Mister Fartham,” he asked. “Why are we here?”
Andy chewed on a lip, “Because I have a paranoia of being bugged.”
“Really? Even in my office?”
“Even in your office.”
Things were that serious. Dave pondered for a second, “Then I suppose we should switch off our phones as well. I heard they can be used for bugging people.”
“Good idea,” Andy reached into his jacket pocket, took out his phone and with a sorrowful bleep it went to sleep.
Dave did the same. He made eye contact with Andy. Andy let out a huff of air as in ‘right, let’s begin’, but didn’t.
“Right, let’s begin,” Dave said.
“I’ll start rather from faraway, if you don’t mind,” said Andy watching something out of the corner of his eye.
It was the waiter. He left the beers, putting the wrong bottle in front of each of the two servants of the law. They exchanged bottles and Andy had a quick drink from the neck of the bottle, as was his custom, before pouring it into his glass. He didn’t mind the beer foam, so his manner of pouring was straight down.
Unlike him, Dave held his glass tilted at forty degrees and poured his Heineken slowly. He didn’t like froth.
“So,” Andy said, “I tracked down the car seen in the camera.”
“Good.”
“Not good. It was reported stolen three months ago. I had a brain flash and cross-checked with the vandalized cars list.”
“And?”
“It was found two days ago, burnt out at the edge of town. Near the old dairy.”
“Never heard of it. Whatever; sucks about the car. Sounded like a lead.”
“You don’t say. I got my assistant to look through what the cameras at the other crime scenes have caught, and we found another car,” Andy continued to no exhibit any happiness at this list of successes, “A Magma. Also reported stolen half a year ago. Also found burnt out about a week ago.”
“Are you telling me our man buys stolen cars, and gets rid of them after each crime?” Dave screwed up his face in dislike and slight envy. “That’s a lot of money he’s blowing on his evil hobby.”
“Right, that’s what I thought as well,” agreed Andy immediately, “the guy has a lot of money and doesn’t mind throwing it away.”
“Ah, the soups,” Dave said. The waiter put down the two chicken soups. Andy reached for the black pepper, and Dave reached for the salt. While they were exchanging the spices, the salads arrived as well.
Andy swirled the soup with his spoon, releasing a pleasant smell, and tasted it. “Not bad, not bad at all, actually,” he said. “Anyway. Today we got the report back from the forensic boys at Bayer’s.”
“They found something?”
“Yes. Only one thing, and only at the very last crime scene. Jane, if you remember.”
“Yes, of course I remember. What did they find?”
“They found a human hair. An eyelash to be exact. There was nothing else, not even normal dust, the bastard cleans thoroughly before leaving, but they found the eyelash. A male eyelash.”
This last bit did not faze Dave in the least. He had expected the perp to be male. “And?”
“I ran it through the DNA data base and found a match.”
Dave studied Andy, “You don’t seem to be euphoric about it though.”
“You’re right, I’m not.”
Andy leaned forward, darting glances left and right, “The DNA match is with Joshua Eysenck.”
“Name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“We’ll see if this rings a bell. His father is Roderik Eysenck.”
Dave choked on his soup, “Minister Eysenck?.”
“Not so loud, for Christ’s sake,” Andy hissed. “Yes, exactly, Minister Eysenck. He ain’t a minister for four years—he’s a senator now.”
“Yeah, I remember him. He was the one who pushed through the last outsourcing of the police, wasn’t he?”
“That’s the man.”
“Shit. Well, where do we stand then?”
“We stand in shit up to our necks, Dave. He’s got a terrific pull. He could squash us. No, he won’t even squash us, he’ll squish us. Like bugs.”
Dave saw that Andy meant every word. “We have evidence, don’t we?”
“First of all, I don’t know how strong his connections are. Maybe if he gives the word the evidence and the correspondence concerning it will disappear tomorrow and everyone will swear it never existed.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow. Second, even if the evidence is still there—we still don’t have anything. Out of three cases that we know of, we only found one eyelash at one place. This is far from enough. You know what will happen. He’ll say that this is all a clumsy attempt at framing his son. He’ll say that the police are playing a political game. He’ll ask questions in the Senate.”
Andy clutched his spoon with sudden savagery, “You can bet that Daddy will give his son an iron cast alibi for each of the days we are looking for. No one will want to touch this case with only one eyelash to go on.”
A moment of silence ensued. The sounds of the Ham Hamlet flooded back in.
“Then we must find more evidence,” Dave said.
“Yes, we must find more evidence. We have to be very careful about it.”
Now David was grateful for the soup. His own stomach was also now capable only of absorbing unobtrusive warm greasy water without outright mutiny.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Anton’s car left the boundaries of the city. Soon the traffic on the highway thinned out, and after twenty miles, they reached the first hints of forest.
Natalie sat slouched, uncommunicative, not paying attention to anything, her eyes focused on the glove compartment.
Anton pressed a button and the side windows crept lower obediently. The air stung their faces and whispered with a promise of snow.
It was soon fulfilled.
As the car climbed further up the road, calm, gaunt pines superseded their more colorful broad-leaved brethren. Here the first glistening patches of snow appeared among the dead-looking grass and the hardened mud.
“Dad, it’s cold,” Natalie said, looking with distaste at the drab panorama. The road had leveled out again, but they had already reached the altitude of the season’s first snow.
Anton darted a look at his daughter and raised her window shut, but left a two inch opening on his side. Through this thin entrance air currents worried Anton’s hair.
Natalie understood that Anton had wanted to get her out of the city because he associated the city with stress and the countryside with relaxation, but for her the surrounding nature was not really less threatening than the urbanscapes they had just left behind. The lack of straight lines made the desolation more organic is all.
She suppressed a shiver and returned to gazing at the glove compartment. Focusing on one immobile point helped her keep in check the nausea encouraged by the car’s oily movements.
After another hour Anton transferred the car onto a modest driveway, following it they passed a sloping garden that would not awake again until spring, and pulled over by the hotel.
It was a white, two story wooden building, with a row of ten balconies on the second floor.
Natalie knew that the first floor housed only the reception lobby and the restaurant. She knew this, because she recognized the hotel.
“Aw, Dad.” She looked at him smiling for some reason, even a trifle bashfully. “I know this place. This is the ‘Ortega’. I haven’t been here since I was lit
tle.”
Anton withdrew his gaze from the looming mountains and grinned at her, “I still come here from time to time. Mister Guerrero still runs the place. Alone now. Mrs. Guerrero passed away five years ago.”
They piled out of the car and took their luggage. A mere two travel bags and a backpack. Anton leaned on the trunk until it clicked shut and looked at his daughter. Already she was in somewhat better spirits.
The front door was a wooden grid of ten-inch squares of smoky green glass. A real small bell rang too, pushed by the door as it opened. Anton walked in, held the door for Natalie, and then closed it with a soft creak, agitating the bell once more.
They walked along the carpet covering the wooden floor to the reception.
There was no one there, but a shout of “Coming,” was heard from the direction of the restaurant.
A fat man emerged, an old fat man, who still had large tufts of black hair left on his head, and blue, carelessly shaven double chins, which kept a habitual smile.
It was Mister Guerrero.
Even before he reached them, he spouted his welcoming tirade, laced with apologetic nuances for him not being at the reception desk. “Hello, welcome, glad, of course, sorry, a pie, lunch, mountains, season, not many people, city,” was what could be heard from his torrent of greetings, before he recognized Anton.
“Mister Martorino, so good to see you.” He slapped his hands together, “I did not expect you before the summer.”
Anton nodded towards Natalie, “This is my daughter, if you remember her.”
“Of course, little bella Natalie. How you loved my cat. Dead long ago, I’m afraid. Do you want some lunch, or the rooms directly?”
Anton looked at Natalie. She needed rest. She needed many hours of sleep in an environment without the constant buzz of the accumulated city sounds, and she needed a few fortifying breakfasts, lunches and dinners, if she was to stabilize.
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