Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel

by Victor del Arbol

  “He’s okay, considering the circumstances.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Marchán with a slight nod.

  “Before, you said that César was your partner and friend for ten years. Does that mean he no longer is?”

  Marchán smiled bitterly. He was going to say something, but finally he repressed his desire to speak.

  “Eat your breakfast; I’ll pay. And don’t go far. I might have to call you. For the moment, to me, you are as much a suspect as anyone else in the murder of Pedro Recasens.”

  María realized the inspector was serious.

  “And what reason could I have for doing something like this?”

  Marchán looked at her as if he didn’t understand the question.

  “There doesn’t have to be a motive, but in your case it seems clear: guilt.”

  María couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “Guilt?”

  Marchán wondered, somewhat confused, if the lawyer was acting, or if she really didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “If there is anyone who has plenty of reasons to hate Pedro Recasens, it’s César Alcalá. And you feel indebted to him, that’s obvious. You would do anything to redeem yourself in his eyes.” Then he headed off, leaving María perplexed.

  Through the window of the café Lola watched the lawyer from the street. The sheets of water slipping down the glass diffused her face. It was as if the old woman were looking at a ghost.

  18

  Barcelona, two hours later

  It was just a hunch. After all, maybe I’m wasting my time, María said to herself, discouraged in the face of the thousands of files in the hallways of the archive of the Bar Association.

  The air, laden with ancient dust, entered her lungs, catching her by surprise. She smiled with a hint of nostalgia. It had been years since she’d been there. And that smell brought back memories of her student days, the hours and hours spent among those legal briefs. A ladder on a track ran from one end to the other of the bookshelf, which was several yards long as well as wide. There were hundreds, thousands of brown files closed with thick cloth bows, organized by date. Someday all of that would just be fuel for a fire. In the lower level she had seen the new computers. Dozens of civil servants applied themselves to transcribing all that information into digital format. But it would take them years. And they might never finish it all. Times change, she said to herself. But what didn’t change was the apparent calm of that nineteenth-century building.

  The large window let in gobs of light that illuminated the monastic silence. It was strange to see the keenness with which men had tried to order, constrain, and systematize human passions, jealousy, rage, violent death, accusations. That was the justice system, thought María, as she ran her fingers over those shelves: the absurd pretension that human nature could be dominated by the power of the law. Reducing it all to a summary of a few pages, organizing the facts, judging it, archiving it, and forgetting it. That simple. And yet in the silence of that place you could hear the murmur of the written words, of the key players, the screams of the victims, the hatred never forgotten by either party, the pain that never went away. All that order was nothing more than appearances.

  María had contempt for that type of thoughts, which only turned into senseless digression. She focused on her search. She went back with the archive ladder to the year 1942. Judging by the number of summaries, it was a year of intense work. That’s without counting the cases that never got filed, got lost, or were simply never brought to trial. She idly wondered how many of those sentenced in that period she could have defended with the current system. How much evidence had been obtained falsely? How many fake testimonies? How many trial errors? How many innocent people tried, sentenced, executed? It was better not to think about it.

  “Here you are: Trial 2341/1942. The murder of Isabel Mola.”

  She didn’t know what she was looking for, and she wasn’t expecting to find anything in particular. She had familiarized herself with the case in the last few weeks. Isabel, the wife of Guillermo Mola, was killed by Marcelo Alcalá, the teacher of their younger son. César didn’t talk much about it; nobody talked about it. Alcalá also hadn’t been able to tell her why Recasens had insinuated that she and the inspector had this woman’s death as a common link. María had asked her father, but Gabriel didn’t remember anything, beyond that for a while, when they lived in Mérida before she was born, he had done some artisanal casting work for Guillermo Mola and his sons, who were very fond of weapons.

  Yet after talking to Marchán, María had had the feeling that it was a puzzle with all the pieces visible but which didn’t fit together. Perhaps there, in that summary, she would find a clue, something that would allow her to organize her ideas.

  She brought the folder down from the shelf and carried it over to one of the small metal tables that were at either end. She was alone. Apart from students preparing their theses, who were researching case law or simply curious, nobody usually went up to the archive. So nobody would bother her.

  She opened the folder with a fear bordering on the religious. It was like opening a door through which all the ghosts that had played a role in that story could escape on the back of the specks of dust.

  The first thing she found was a police file with edges yellowing from the dampness. The file of Marcelo Alcalá. She was surprised to see in the annotation that the teacher was the leader of a group of communists who had made an attempt on Guillermo Mola’s life, before killing his wife. He didn’t seem like that type of man. The photograph in the police description showed a withered being, ridiculous in a suit jacket with shoulder pads that were too wide and made his shoulders fall forward, lacking any consistency. He held the sign with his arrest number, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his fingers trembling, the fear in his eyes. He clenched his mouth in an expression of abandonment, despair. That must have been shortly before they hanged him. Maybe his sentence had already been handed down, and the prisoner was only waiting for the completion of some bureaucratic steps without being aware of them, like a bundle of merchandise that was moved from here to there in order to give him an execution that was legal, coherent. Everything had to be done following the macabre protocol, of which that poor wretch was merely a spectator.

  She placed the file to one side and opened the declaration. It was typewritten, copied with carbon paper. It was succinct, just a few short sentences.

  I, Marcelo Alcalá, native of Guadalajara, thirty-three years old and a primary school teacher by profession, declare that I am the perpetrator of the murder of Isabel Mola. I declare that I killed her with shots to the head in an abandoned quarry that the army uses for target practice, near the Badajoz highway.

  I also declare that I was the instigator and perpetrator of the assassination attempt on Guillermo Mola on the 12th of October of 1941 in front of the Santa Clara church. I declare that others helped me in that task. Their names are Mateo Sijuán, Albano Rodríguez, Granada Aurelia, Josefa Torres, Buendía Pastor, and Amancio Ojera.

  To whom it may concern.

  January 28, 1942

  Beneath there was a signature in a strange, forced hand. Perhaps they made him sign; maybe that wasn’t even really his signature. Too succinct, too cold. There were no details, no motive. There was no guilt or hatred … And that list of names. Maybe he didn’t even know those people. Just a formality. María checked the dates. Between Marcelo’s confession and his execution barely two days passed.

  “No normal procedure would have allowed such haste,” she said in a soft voice, shaking her head.

  Then she discovered the corner of a photograph in a small compartment. She pulled on it carefully so as not to break it. It was folded in half; the paper was yellowed, and it stuck together as if it had spent so much time stored there that it didn’t want to show itself. María opened it beneath the light of the desk lamp.

  It was a war portrait, of an old war, in black and white. It showed a German ligh
t tank stationed in front of a snowy village; beside the tank posed a tank officer, his face burned from the snow and haggard from hardship, and two operators and artillerymen.

  One of them was Recasens himself. Younger—María barely recognized him beneath a copious layer of grime—but it was definitely him. They all wore tattered dirty German uniforms with the Spanish coat of arms sewn onto the sleeve. Recasens also held in his fingers a flag with the Falangist yoke and arrows. María turned the photograph over: Front of Leningrad, Christmas 1943.

  It didn’t make sense that the photograph, taken two years after the summary, was there. Obviously someone had left it in the folder … Someone who knew that sooner or later she would go there and find it.

  “That’s absurd,” she reproached herself. No one could have foreseen that she was going to have the hunch to go to the archive in search of the summary of the Isabel Mola case that morning. Not even she herself.

  So there must be some other reason: Marchán had said that Pedro Recasens had more than enough reasons to be the object of César Alcalá’s hatred. She had chalked that statement up to the fact that both Recasens and Lorenzo, like Publio himself, had manipulated César in one sense or another, by using the inspector’s daughter’s disappearance. Besides, it was absurd: César didn’t know Recasens personally. The only thing he knew about him was what she had told him.

  Something caught María’s attention. A handwritten page, at the back of the file. The declaration of a witness for the prosecution. A witness who declared, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he’d seen Marcelo Alcalá kill Isabel Mola.

  The witness was Pedro Recasens.

  * * *

  César Alcalá woke up with a start and went over to the threshold of the room without recognizing where he was. He knew that the cage was real, but it seemed like just a hallucination.

  At least, Romero had brought him books. They were all over, on the floor, on the shelves, on the table, and on top of the unmade bed. Some were opened with their covers folded back. In prison he had acquired the bad habit of loving books and mistreating them: he wrote in them, underlined what he was interested in, and many were now missing pages. But it was clear that they, the books, also loved him, that they’d grown accustomed to his compulsive reading, to his impossible way of treating them. They were there, scattered, like orphans awaiting the return to their owner. Reading was his emotional crutch.

  He also had cigarettes now. For the first few days he’d looked at the pack nostalgically without daring to touch it, in case it was all just a trick. But then he saw that he could smoke as many as he wanted and, when he ran out, María would diligently bring him another pack. Romero was, undoubtedly, a magician capable of achieving all he set out to.

  It barely seemed like a prison lately, but then sometimes, unexpectedly, the image of his daughter came to him, stripped of the vanity she had in life, her hair messy and tangled, bangs covering her green eyes. And then he again had the thoughts of a free man, thoughts that went beyond those walls, beyond the prison routines like making the bed, seeing María, working in the garden, or strolling with Romero. Then he was hounded by the need to escape his prison, to find her. It was inevitable that he thought about what he would do when he found her: where they would go, what things they’d tell each other, where they would start their new life far from all that horrendous past.

  But the noise of the cell door closing suddenly, the imperative voice of a guard, or the threatening look of another inmate brought him back to his miserable hole.

  That morning Romero was writing, stretched out on his bunk. César Alcalá never asked to whom he was writing those long letters every day. It wasn’t his business. And curiosity was an instinct that in those walls hibernated until it almost vanished. It was Romero himself who spread out the pages on the bedspread with a satisfied air.

  “That’s it, done.”

  César Alcalá looked at him out of the corner of his eye. His cellmate looked really happy. So much so that he pulled a small bottle of gin out from behind a tile and offered him a furtive slug.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  Romero opened his arms, as if it were obvious.

  “It’s finished, my first novel. The subject isn’t very original, I know: it’s about prison.” Romero grew thoughtful. Then he started to pile up the pages filled with cramped handwriting. “Actually it’s not a physical jail, it’s not a building with bars and guards … It’s another kind of prison.”

  For the first time since they’d met, César Alcalá saw Romero unsure, almost ashamed. His cellmate handed him the pile of pages.

  “I’d like you to read it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because, in a way, you are the main character.”

  César Alcalá looked at Romero with surprise.

  Romero looked at the floor, rubbing out a cigarette butt with his shoe. Then he sat in front of the window that looked out on the fenced-in patio. Some prisoners were playing on the basketball court, undeterred by the rain.

  “You can’t fool me with your bitterness, Alcalá. I’ve been here many years, I’ve had all kinds of roommates, good and bad. I’ve seen it all: riots, murders, friendships, love affairs … And I know what’s going on with you. I’ve been watching you. Sooner or later you’ll get out of here. That lawyer who comes to visit you every day will manage to get you out. And then, once you’re outside, you won’t be able to hide behind these four walls.”

  “What’s this all about, Romero?”

  Romero turned toward Alcalá.

  “You read the novel. If you don’t like it, burn it … And if you do like it, burn it anyway. But that won’t change things. I know who you are, and I know what’s inside you, waiting to awaken.”

  In that moment a guard appeared at the cell door. César Alcalá had a visitor.

  “Say hi to your lawyer from me,” said Romero, lying down in his bunk for a smoke.

  When César Alcalá went into the visiting room, María’s face was unflappable, lifeless. She stood there, leaning against the wall with her hands crossed over her purse. She looked like a plaster statue.

  The guard took the inspector’s handcuffs off and left, closing the door. Through the barred glass peephole, he remained attentive.

  “Is everything okay?” asked Alcalá, massaging his wrists.

  María had told him about her headaches and dizzy spells that sometimes meant she had to sit down wherever she was and press her head into her hands, until the dizziness passed, leaving an increasingly insistent migraine that was now almost constant. She had promised that she’d go to the doctor, but César Alcalá didn’t trust that she had. While they weren’t friends, there was at least a current of intuitions between them that allowed them to understand each other without really knowing each other very well.

  “Headaches again?”

  María looked at the inspector for more than a minute in silence. She slowly opened her purse and took out an old, yellowed piece of paper.

  “Do you know what this is? I put my reputation on the line taking it out of the archive of the Bar Association without permission.”

  César Alcalá took the page and examined it carefully. Then he was plunged into a deep, thoughtful silence.

  “Did you lie to me, César?” asked María. With a tone of voice that answered its own question, in the affirmative.

  César Alcalá ran a hand over his forehead. He turned his back to María, who remained pressed to the wall, wondering if it was time to be honest with her.

  “Lying, telling half-truths, keeping things quiet … what’s the difference?”

  María got mad. The last thing she needed at that moment was for him to make her feel stupid.

  “Don’t use that cynical tone with me. I’m not your cellmate or one of the guards that watch over you.”

  César Alcalá looked at her coldly.

  “There isn’t an ounce of irony in my words. I’m speaking completely seriously … You want to kno
w if I knew Recasens? Yes, I knew him. Does that mean I lied to you? It means much more than that, but there are answers that I can’t give you.”

  That was too much for María, who let her indignation fly.

  “You knew about Pedro Recasens long before he showed up in my life. He is the man who turned in your father. It was his declaration that sent him to the gallows. This declaration. And all this time you let me go on and on about the old colonel, as if you didn’t know who he was.”

  César Alcalá looked at her without saying anything. Prison had taught him to take things calmly. Before wasting words he preferred to listen carefully, examining the cutting look the woman gave him, her tense fingers wrinkling the declaration by old Recasens. María was still the same arrogant, vain, conceited lawyer who had sent him to prison. She was trying to discipline that arrogance, but without realizing it she was acting like they were in court and he was once again on trial.

  “You are very sure that you know me, aren’t you, María?” he said calmly. “Nothing escapes your control. You trust your intelligence and your intuition to the end.” After a pause, he added, “But you shouldn’t make the same error twice: you made a mistake judging people years ago. That should have taught you that you can’t know what is in someone’s soul. Maybe everything in the files on your desk is black and white. But here, with real people, that Manichean perspective doesn’t fly: we humans are painted in shades of gray. Like me. Like you.”

  María didn’t know what to say. She was rarely caught off guard. But César had just done it. The words she had wanted to say vanished in her mind.

  César Alcalá felt satisfied, noting the lawyer’s confusion. With a more decisive tone, but without losing his cool, he continued.

  “For you I’m a prisoner, although you make an effort to erase that stigma from your mind. But you can’t; I see it in your eyes. I wanted to kill a man, and I almost did. I am guilty, and therefore my imprisonment could be considered fair. That’s why my attitude bugs you. You think that I should be grateful for your company, your friendship. You think that I don’t show you enough admiration or respect in spite of the fact that you spend your time and energy in helping me find a lead on my daughter’s disappearance or a legal loophole that can get me out of here … And you’re right. I’m not grateful to you; I don’t owe you anything, I don’t feel indebted to you, and of course I don’t consider myself your friend. I know why you are here: for Publio. Not for me. Recasens and your ex-husband convinced you to do something good, a noble and just action: ‘Convince that stubborn guy to tell you where he is hiding the evidence against Publio. Promise him that we’ll find his daughter, that we’ll get him out off jail, whatever it takes. But convince him.’ That’s what they told you, right? But you don’t care that the evidence that I’m hiding is the only guarantee—perhaps false, maybe an illusion—but the only one I have, that my daughter is still alive. As long as I don’t talk, she keeps breathing. That’s not your concern, is it? As soon as I tell you where those papers are, you’ll disappear, because your just mission will be accomplished. Then you’ll walk through those somber gates and never return. You will go out into the street with hasty steps to breathe fresh air and thank God for your freedom. And I don’t judge you for that. I have no right to do so. Maybe you’re right. I am a prisoner. And therefore, guilty. But what about you? You are also carrying around an outstanding guilt, a guilt that isn’t yours to bear, by the way, but which you’re responsible for, in spite of it all. And just as I pay for mine, you should pay for yours.