The Dark Circus

by Ana Ballabriga

  “What?”

  “Which way do I turn?” They were approaching a fork in the road. Elías checked the map and GPS coordinates with his phone. He had an approximate idea where the mine was.

  “Go left.” He said it with a decisiveness he wasn’t really feeling.

  “This is a dirt road.”

  “Good thing this crappy car was never clean to begin with.” He peered at her, his curiosity aroused. “Panicked about what?”

  “Sandra? By the way, I saw her the other day. She’s put on weight, and her outfit . . . but she looked happy.”

  “And she wasn’t when you knew her?”

  “No, she wasn’t. Sorry to say that, but it’s the truth. Don’t take it so hard, silly. You’re too type A. I’m certain she was madly in love with you but knew she couldn’t live up to your expectations. Couldn’t play the eternally perfect, beautiful little wifey you wanted.”

  “That’s absurd! I’m not that shallow.”

  “Would you go back to her now? Chubby, happy, in jeans and a cheap T-shirt?”

  Elías didn’t want to admit it, but his sister was probably right. For him, beauty was essential. He couldn’t imagine loving a woman who neglected her makeup, her clothes, and her lingerie.

  “Well? Would you?” his sister asked again.

  “After what she did to me? Not on your life!”

  “She handled it really badly, I get that. But even if she hadn’t dumped you, there’s no way you’d accept her the way she is. And she knew it.” Elías didn’t respond. “Now where to?”

  “Take a right.”

  Delia twisted the wheel so sharply the car kicked up gravel. They passed the ruins of a mine. A large green cylinder was visible behind the fence, some kind of enormous centrifuge fed by a sluice. It looked like a spaceship.

  “What a crappy road! What are you getting me into, bud? This isn’t exactly an SUV.”

  “Enough complaining from you. You’re getting to be more and more like Mama.”

  His sister gave him an offended look and then snorted with laughter. “Guess I finally got through! I’ve been teasing you all morning, and you’ve just been taking it.”

  “What do you expect? I feel like shit.”

  “Ho, ho! And now we’re using naughty words!” she grinned. “Maybe you are changing your ways. I’d be worried if I were Caridad.”

  “This must be it. Turn in here.”

  “Well, if we wreck ’er, I’ll have the perfect excuse to buy that hybrid I’ve been wanting.”

  She stopped with a jerk and pulled the hand brake, parking diagonally across a track below a little hill. The wooden tower on the crest was equipped with two heavy pulleys that looked like they’d once been used to haul ore up from the depths.

  “Let me elaborate a bit on my opinion of Uncle.” She turned to face him. “He’s always been kind to us, better to you than to me, but we’ve never had much”—she searched for the word and found it in English—“feeling for him. He’s been a great help to Mama, and I’m grateful for that, but I think, in a way, that’s why she never married. I don’t know, Elías. The truth is, I’ve always had trouble figuring him out. No matter how much he’s done for us, I’ve just never trusted him.”

  “You’ve always been a better judge of character than I have.”

  “Seriously, what’s going on with Uncle? I don’t trust the man any farther than I can throw him, but are you suggesting he’s connected to your attack? The man is supposed to be a damn bishop!”

  “We had a difference of opinion, that’s all. He told me to forget about an ongoing investigation.”

  “Why?”

  “It seems he lost confidence in me.”

  “So what are we doing here? Something to do with Uncle?”

  “It has to do with the people who beat me up.”

  “What?”

  Elías opened the passenger door. “Wait here.” He gave her a dark look. “Don’t even think about getting out. It could be dangerous.”

  “Now you’re really scaring me. Whatever you’re going to do, be careful. I don’t want to lose my little brother.”

  “Huh. I was born five minutes after you were.” He got out of the dust-covered sedan, then leaned back down to look at her. “Keep the engine running. And don’t get out, no matter what.”

  “Okay.”

  He closed the door, circled the hill, and climbed to the mine opening. He encountered a padlocked gate but easily popped it open with his knife. Using the flashlight on his phone, he stepped forward into the claustrophobic blackness. The tunnel had been cut through pure rock with pickaxes long ago. The shaft sloped steeply downward but eventually opened up into a natural cave with a ceiling up to twelve feet high. A side opening was partly obstructed by stalagmites, and Elías spotted water beyond them. It had a reddish tint: one of the mining region’s infamous acid lakes.

  He caught sight of something floating in the water. It was a mass of grayish-brown cloth, reminiscent of the dun-colored robes of the Carmelite sisters. He looked around and found a wooden pole that looked like it had once held a miner’s lamp. He used it to agitate the water so the cloth-covered object bobbed closer, then he prodded the shape with the pole. It turned over, and Elías recoiled in horror. A distorted face was visible in the sodden mass, bloated and blackened. Most of the skin and hair were already gone. He took a photo with his phone, turned on his heel, and hobbled quickly toward the exit. He emerged from the depths, snapped the padlock back in place, and made his way to the car as quickly as he could.

  He pretended to be calm as he got in. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “Nah, this place is nothing but a junkyard.”

  A junkyard, a recycling center, and a crematorium where clever Midas disposed of anything that got in his way. A deserted place where, in four or five days, the corrosive waters would completely dissolve a corpse.

  33

  They threw her in a van with tinted windows and drove for half an hour. They stopped at a building designed to look like a ship. A neon sign flashed its name: THE MERMAIDS. They dragged her through the back door and forced her upstairs. There, they unlocked a bedroom, stripped her, and cuffed her hands and feet to an iron bed frame, legs spread, body stretched out on bare boards. No mattress. The first man came in fifteen minutes later. He pulled off his trousers without a word, climbed onto her, penetrated her, and pounded away until he reached orgasm. The men took turns all night long. After the fifth one, L lost count. She closed her eyes, drifted away from the unbearable present, and abandoned her body to its fate. She eventually regained consciousness and became aware of excruciating pain in her genitals, her wrists, and her ankles; then she felt the burn of a full bladder. She urinated on herself.

  Not long afterward, Midas appeared in the doorway.

  “I know who you are and why you’re planning to kill the bishop,” he announced calmly. “We’ve been to your uncle’s house. Now we need just two things from you, bitch. First, you’ll tell me where the painting is, and then you’ll give me the formula for W. Do that and I’ll release you.” L said nothing. “Fine, it’s just matter of time. Take as much as you need.”

  Midas left. L decided her only chance was to induce a trance state, a discipline she’d mastered that would all but stop her vital signs. She kept mental count of the heartbeats like hammer blows. She’d managed to reduce them to four or five per minute by the time the door opened again.

  A man placed a tray with a chorizo sausage and some stale bread on the floor. He held out a glass of water. “Thirsty?”

  She didn’t reply.

  He tilted the glass and slowly poured the liquid onto the floor. “Then I’ll give you something else to drink.”

  He stood next to the bed frame, dropped his trousers, and masturbated until he ejaculated on her face. She kept her eyes shut and didn’t move. He left.

  The room remained absolutely silent for a couple of hours, and then t
wo women came in. One stepped on the tray and overturned the food into the mess of water and urine. The other placed a bucket next to the bed. The two of them methodically sponged her off. “Now you’re ready for tonight,” the first one said in a dead voice.

  They mopped the floor and left.

  L again relaxed her muscles and concentrated on her breathing, gradually slowing it and reducing her heartbeat: four beats per minute, then three. Two. One. She lay there cold and completely inert. Her heart was virtually still, her mind was blank. The first man came into the bedroom, lowered his trousers, and tried to straddle her again. But when he made contact with her frigid body, he jerked away.

  “What the fuck!” He put his palm in front of her lips and detected no breath. He leaped to his feet and rushed out. “She’s dead!”

  A couple of Midas’s gorillas came in right away. One checked her pulse. “She’s dead. What’ll we do now?”

  “If Midas finds out, he’ll kill us.” He took out his keys and unlocked the cuffs. The two of them rolled her off the bed frame onto the floor. “You know how to do CPR?”

  “They pay me to kill people. Not to save ’em.”

  “Shit, it can’t be that hard. I’ve seen it in the movies.”

  He knelt next to her, tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and blew into her lungs. L’s chest inflated and her heart began to thump. As soon as her brain awoke, she snapped her jaws shut. The thug recoiled with a cry and leaped up with his face covered in blood.

  L flicked the caps off the vials of W she’d hidden in either fist and gulped down the contents. When the other hit man appeared over her, she kicked him in the face.

  L was rocked back by the impact of the drug. She felt the W take over her body. A jolt like electricity rippled across her skin, and energy surged through her muscles. She sat up.

  The second thug gaped in amazement, then tried to kick her. She deflected his foot with one hand and punched him in the balls with the other. He fell in a heap. L bounded to her feet, grabbed his head from behind, pressed a knee against his back, and twisted. Bones cracked and the neck gave way as she broke his spine. She let go and his face smashed against the floor.

  L turned her attention back to the first thug. He was frantically pressing a handkerchief to his mouth in an effort to stop the bleeding. He backed away and reached for his pistol. L saw a book on the floor, a heavy tome some previous client must have left. She grabbed and hurled it with unerring aim, hitting his wrist as he raised the gun. He didn’t drop the weapon, but he stumbled, giving her time to leap forward and deliver a furious blow to his chest. With the crack of splintering bone, his rib cage caved in and crushed his heart and lungs. He vomited blood and fell to the floor. She glimpsed a face directly from hell with bulging eyes and dirty teeth bared in the snarl of his distorted mouth.

  L pulled bloody clothing off the first corpse and put it on, seized the pistol in one hand and the book in the other, and slipped out into the hall. She found another thug standing over a man huddling terrified in a chair, surely the one who’d run out to report her death. L took aim at the gorilla’s head and blasted away. She pointed the gun at the man in the chair, who cowered and covered his face. Instead of shooting him, she gave him a tremendous kick that sent him sprawling, frantically scrabbling along the floor, sobbing, and trying to find someplace to hide. L raced down the hall. Women’s heads popped out of doorways; she fired a shot into the ceiling to scare them away. She heard two shots fired behind her and a bullet nicked her shoulder. She zigzagged and shielded her head with the book as she fired back.

  A bullet slammed into the book just as she reached the emergency exit. Outside on the fire escape, she came face-to-face with another thug. The man raised a pistol, but she used the book as a mace and rammed the weapon out of his hand. Two other men opened fire from below, so she threw herself over the man in front of her and pushed. The two of them tumbled from the second floor. As they fell, she let go of everything else, grabbed him, and forced his head back. They crashed into the pavement, her adversary’s brains splashing across her face. L grabbed the pistol again and rolled to one side to take shelter behind the body. She fired at the other two thugs, drilling one through the throat and the other in the chest. She approached and found one was still breathing. She lifted a foot and stomped his head as hard as she could. She felt no emotion at all. She watched, indifferent and icy, as his eyes burst from their sockets and his brains erupted through his nose.

  A door opened upstairs and more shots were fired. She retreated a couple of steps, tripped over something, and fell. The book. She shielded her head with it again. She caught a glimpse of the title, Philosophy in the Bedroom, just as the impact of a bullet sent it flying from her hands. L rolled across the ground, grabbed the book, and took off. The Marquis de Sade assisted her one more time by knocking out a client who’d just parked his car. She took the car keys and tore off at full speed.

  34

  Even after two days of bed rest, Elías ached all over, his face was still swollen, and he could hardly move his right hand. He’d wanted to talk to Alicia Silva before renewing his efforts to trace the stolen painting, but now the two investigations had begun to converge. Midas was the repugnant link between them. The attack and the horrid discovery in the mine had only strengthened Elías’s resolve. Having his uncle mixed up in this bloody business was all the more reason to act. He was determined to get to the bottom of it no matter the cost.

  Tentegorra was a wild area abutting the pine forest on the slopes below Monte Roldán. Portús Beach was visible in the distance. It was a perfect spot for surveillance, and only a five-minute drive from town.

  He sat in his sister’s sedan, eavesdropping on Midas’s house with his directional microphone and fiddling nervously with his mirror cube. He caught a few snatches of speech that suggested Midas was leaving for a business appointment in Torrevieja. Accompanied by a bodyguard, Midas emerged from his mansion the size of an apartment block. He appeared to live there alone, without a wife or children.

  A half hour after Midas’s Mercedes had driven away, Elías decided the coast was clear. He called up one of the wireless codes he’d recorded on his watch while casing Midas’s office. He approached the mansion, and—bingo!—the gate opened. Elías closed it quietly behind him. A picnic table and wooden chairs stood beneath a towering ficus and a carob tree. Next to them was a covered swimming pool. The fountain in the center of the lawn featured a life-size golden mermaid. Her face was distraught and her arms stretched toward the house in fruitless pleading. Thin streams of water flowed like tears from her eyes.

  The ground-floor windows and doors were covered by metal security shutters. He tried his luck with the second code, and the shutters magically rolled up.

  The front door required a physical key, and there were bars across the downstairs windows, which Elías used to climb to the second-story balcony. He peeked inside and spotted an alarm panel next to the door. He opened the photo app of his phone and swiped through the pictures he’d taken of the notebook in Midas’s safe. Luckily he’d programmed automatic backups to the cloud; otherwise, he’d have lost them when his attackers smashed the other phone. He found the code and committed it to memory, then applied the edge of a credit card to the latch of the balcony door. When it released, he pushed it open and swiftly punched the code into the alarm panel. A double beep confirmed it was disarmed. He let out a sigh of relief.

  The very spacious bedroom held an enormous square bed, fifteen feet on every side, behind which hung an honest-to-God Van Gogh. Dazzled by the sight, Elías moved closer. It was the first version of Doctor Paul Gachet, a legendary painting worth a fortune. Ryoei Saito had paid more than eighty million dollars for it at a Christie’s auction in 1990. The Japanese magnate, already bent beneath the weight of his seventy-five years, insisted the Van Gogh would be burned after he died. He passed away six years later. The fate of the painting had never been revealed.

  Some claimed he’d sold i
t before his death, but the generally accepted hypothesis was that Saito had, in fact, made sure it was burned so he could take it with him to the grave. But Elías had proof to the contrary: the painting was still intact, and somehow, whether sold or stolen, it was now in the hands of a Spanish sculptor turned gangster.

  Incredible.

  This display of the man’s power and reach frightened him. He’d underestimated Midas. He stood there, spellbound by the painting, relishing the colors, the use of light, and the bold brushwork. He turned to survey the other walls and noticed what looked like a complete set of the eighty engravings of Goya’s Caprichos. Of that vast treasure trove, he approached number 74, Don’t shout, fool. It depicted an ugly, stupid woman pretending to scramble in panic as two monks climb through the window, yet clearly delighted by this intrusion. Elías noted the use of blue ink, the dimensions of the paper, and certain imperfections due to wear on the plates. This print had to be from one of the last editions of the nineteenth century.

  This bedroom was as good as any museum, but the longer he stayed, the more likely it was he would be discovered. One door opened to a bathroom and the other led to the hall. He found another bath and two bedrooms with more traditional decor, one with a queen-sized bed and the other with twin beds. The door at the far end of the hall was locked. He used the credit card trick to open it.

  The space beyond was a good deal larger than the other rooms and nothing like a bedroom. It was set up as an exhibition hall. Along the walls stood a number of large cases displaying gold statues of animals and life-size human figures. He was surprised to find one of a leering nude woman stretched out on her back, arms held out to receive a lover and legs spread wide to reveal her genitals. The thing looked like a sex doll made of pure gold. Elías gauged the aperture between her legs and concluded that Midas must have commissioned it for exactly that purpose.

  There were artworks by Africans, Chinese, South Asians, Thais, Aztecs, Mayans, and, of course, Spaniards. And there was the smoking gun, newly installed in a place of honor: the reliquary of the Cross of Caravaca. In a nearby case, Elías spotted something even more damning: four gold teeth, each engraved with a letter, forming the word SCOT. Alicia’s uncle’s teeth. His stomach knotted in disgust, and he had an urge to vomit.