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

by Victor del Arbol

  The man stopped in front of a small abandoned building. He pushed the half-open door and entered into the dark. Fernando hesitated, looking left and right. He was comforted in a certain way by touching the pistol that Recasens had gotten for him. He was hoping that Pedro’s plan would work. Anyway, it was their only chance of getting Andrés out of the sanitarium. He went into the building behind the man, who had headed toward one corner.

  “Do you have my money?” the man said confidently. This wasn’t his first time. Recasens had studied the staff at the sanitarium for weeks. And that orderly was the perfect candidate for bribing. His name was Gregorio; he was a rough guy from Málaga, used to dealing with the more aggressive patients. Andrés was in his care.

  “How do I know you are going to come through on your part?”

  “You don’t, but I imagine that before coming, you checked out my reputation. I never let my clients down.”

  Fernando felt his fists clenching. Of course he had checked out that fiend. Gregorio sold the patients’ drugs, he stole their belongings, and if necessary, he got sexual favors for deviant clients whose outward appearance was impeccable. The patients were like his own personal supermarket. Fernando had no choice but to trust in such an individual.

  “How are you going to get him out of there?”

  Gregorio preferred not to go into details. That was his business. The only thing that Fernando had to worry about was being there at three in the morning with the car engine running and the lights off in front of the side entrance to the building. That was the deal. Fernando handed him an envelope with the money they had agreed on. Gregorio counted it with expert fingers and smiled in satisfaction. He put the envelope away and headed for the door. At the last minute he seemed to remember something.

  “This morning he had a visitor. It attracted my attention because usually nobody comes to visit him.”

  “A visitor?”

  Gregorio nodded.

  “He left his name in the register at the entrance. Somebody named Publio. He was alone with him for half an hour. I don’t know what he said to him, but when that man left, we had to sedate Andrés. He was beside himself … I thought you’d want to know.” Gregorio scampered through the door, out into the shadows of the street.

  Fernando remained a few more minutes thinking about what Publio could have said to Andrés. Nothing good could come from his father’s lackey, of that he was sure. In any case, in a few hours he could ask Andrés himself in person.

  He circled around the surrounding streets a few times in the car, an old cream-colored Citröen. He was nervous and smoked nonstop. Twenty minutes before the agreed time he parked the car at a corner from which he could see the sanatorium building. There were barely any lights on in the upper floors, where the offices of the workers and nurses must have been. The other lights were turned off. The air scratched at the windowpanes with tree branches, and the jamb of a poorly shut door slammed against a wall.

  Suddenly, Fernando thought he saw someone in one of the top-floor windows. It was a fleeting moment, and he thought that perhaps it had been the shadow of a branch. But then a glow began to grow in that same window. At first it was a flickering light, as if someone was walking around the room with a candle. Then it started to grow until it illuminated the room completely. Little by little, a column of smoke began to solidify as it went out. The first flames soon licked the windowsill. It was a fire.

  Fernando got out of the car. The fire quickly grew fiercer, leaping from one room to another on the top floor. Curiously, he also saw the silhouettes of workers and nurses on the lower levels illuminated by the lights in the hallways. They hadn’t realized the danger the entire building was in. Fernando was shocked. Was that the orderly’s plan for getting his brother out? All of a sudden someone fell from the window, screaming.

  * * *

  An hour before, Gregorio the orderly smiled with satisfaction, as he forced a senile old woman to swallow her soup down with brutal thrusts of the spoon. He hated that job, but it had its perks. Like that night. Easy money, like he got for taking photos of naked old people fornicating in the bathroom that he sold to the lawyer on Urgell Street. Or like they gave him for pawning the jewels he stole from Herminia, the crazy lady on the third floor. Getting Andrés out of there wasn’t going to be much more difficult, and he’d been very well paid. The only thing he had to do was wait. He would start a fire in the access hallways. He would use gasoline to make it burn faster. Nothing too serious, just enough to make them have to evacuate the building. Then in the tumult and confusion it wouldn’t be hard for him to get Andrés to the car of the man who had hired him. He didn’t know what interest this psychopath could hold for anyone, but that wasn’t his business. The man had already paid him, and he would be very happy to get rid of a vicious brute like Andrés. And most of the interns and doctors would feel the same way. Nobody could get anywhere near that beast without putting themselves at risk.

  When his shift ended he came up with an excuse to stay in the break room on the upper floor. He had prepared a can of gasoline beneath his desk. He gathered a few rags from the laundry service and soaked them. He had decided it would be best to put them beneath the mattress of Andrés’s bed. Once the fire was announced, Andrés would be the first one evacuated. He searched for the key to his room on the board.

  * * *

  That night, Andrés had a strange dream. He woke up thinking it had been real, and he jumped from his bed in anguish. It took him a little while to realize that he was still there, locked up in that depressing place. He went over to the window. The air made the windowpane rattle. He saw the dark yard. Beyond the fence there was a car parked. He shook his head, swollen from the sleeping pills they gave him. For a moment he had believed that he was far from there, on a snowy mountain like the ones his mother described in the samurai stories. Except in his dream that mountain was real, and his mother was kneeling before him dressed as a Japanese grand dame, with a green silk kimono and a hairdo filled with precious stones and flowers. His mother took off his clothes to bathe him like when he was a boy. Except in the dream he wasn’t a boy, he was a man. His mother wet a sponge in a bucket and cleaned his body. But the water was blood, and his body was stained as if he were mutilated or wounded. He wanted to go, but his mother forced him to stay still with her firm but affectionate words, just as she did when as a boy he tried to escape his nightly bath.

  Andrés went back to bed. He wanted to close his eyes again, but he couldn’t get back his mother’s image. Then he heard the door lock turn. Someone appeared in the threshold. He recognized Gregorio, an orderly. He hated that horrible bastard. He saw him leave some rags on the floor by the door, and others beneath his bed. What was that smell? He pretended to be sleeping. He didn’t want them to tie him to the bed or inject him with more drugs. Soon he saw a flash beneath the bed, and the thick smoke gripped his throat … Fire … It took him a few seconds to realize what the orderly was doing. He was setting fire to his room!

  He got up coughing, covering his mouth. He ran toward the door, which was ajar, but the orderly grabbed him by the neck, covering his mouth.

  “Not yet,” he whispered in his ear. “We have to wait until it’s all chaotic.”

  Andrés tried to get loose, but the orderly was strong and held him immobile. This was because of Publio, he thought quickly. Andrés hadn’t wanted the papers he had brought. His father had granted Publio part of the family inheritance in exchange for taking care of him for the rest of his life. But Andrés hadn’t wanted to sign because what Publio planned was not taking care of him but leaving him locked up forever in some horrible place like this. So Publio had told the orderly to kill him. He was going to die, and they would pretend it had been an accident. Dying by fire seemed shameful to him. He twisted with all his strength, but the orderly didn’t let him go. The fire grew, the mattress and curtains ablaze. The cloud of smoke was starting to asphyxiate him.

  “Calm down, stupid, or you’ll ru
in everything,” the orderly said. But Andrés wasn’t listening to him; the only thing he heard was the crackling of the flames growing more and more virulent. He took advantage of a second when the orderly loosened the pressure on his neck to hit him over the head. Stunned, the orderly stepped back toward the window. His nose was bleeding. Andrés took a running start and pushed him. The orderly fell backward, crashing through the glass panes and falling into the void.

  Andrés trembled. His sinewy body was sweating. He felt the heat around him, but he didn’t move. He was hypnotized in front of the window’s broken glass. In the hallway screams could be heard. The fire was spreading rapidly. It devoured doors, armchairs, and curtains voraciously. It smelled of burning skin. Andrés looked at his right arm. His robe was on fire. It was his skin that was burning. He ran into the wall to put out his burning clothes and went into the hallway. The lights hadn’t gone out. In the middle of the thick smoke and the flames that licked the floor, walls, and ceiling—creating an infernal tunnel—he saw the patients on his floor running senselessly, like scared rats. Some were like shooting stars. They ran burning and shot through the windows. Others barely moved. They were still, leaning against the wall, fascinated by the fire’s forward march. But most ran in a mob toward the stairs. Andrés did, too. He pushed his way through, hitting, kicking, and biting. But it was impossible. The staircase was narrow, barely letting two or three people go down at once. In the middle of the hysteria, the patients had surged there in a mass, creating a jam. Some had fallen and others stepped on them without thinking twice, but not even they were able to get through. Until the stairs, which were wooden with iron supports, were also consumed in flames. Andrés retreated, trying to protect himself from the smoke. It was impossible to breathe; he couldn’t see anything; his eyes were tearing. He tried to reach a window to get some fresh air, but everyone else was doing the same thing. Soon Andrés felt a very intense heat on his back and the nape of his neck. He was on fire. His scalp lit up like dry straw. Desperate, with no place to grab onto, he threw himself into the wall of people who were crowded by the windows. Nobody tried to help him. They moved away from him. Andrés spun around like a madman, howling and trying to put out the fire that spread mercilessly over his body. He fell to his knees in the middle of a circle of horrified faces.

  * * *

  The firemen took more than four hours to get to the top floor of the sanatorium. They said there had been no survivors. Some unidentifiable cadavers were sent directly to the morgue in bags. Others, still dying, were covered with bandages and taken to the hospitals of San Juan de Dios and San Pablo, where they died soon after being admitted. More than twenty people perished in that horrific fire.

  Well into the morning, Fernando stood by the fence around the sanitarium where anguished family members had gathered, along with morbidly curious onlookers and journalists sniffing out a tragic story. The police didn’t let anyone pass, and they didn’t give out any information. When the firemen finally left, two armed guards remained, keeping watch at the entrance gate.

  Fernando still stayed for several hours in front of the building’s blackened face. Part of the roof had collapsed, burying many people. The broken pipes oozed water, and the smoking ashes scattered the revolting smell of human flesh around the neighborhood.

  When days later the list of the dead was published, he found out that his brother, Andrés, had been one of the first to die.

  23

  Barcelona, February 8, 1981

  Lorenzo sank into the backseat of the official car. He had barely slept. He gave the chauffeur the address and hid the dark bags under his eyes behind thick sunglasses. The National Radio station was emitting a political talk show. Everything seemed impregnated with politics that February. The moment, 7:40 in the afternoon of January 29, still lingered in the minds of all Spaniards, when the programming on TVE had been interrupted for Suárez to make his famous declaration: “I irrevocably present my resignation as prime minister.” From that moment on, the shocks were constant and Spaniards lived glued to the news programs on the television and radio. The sessions of congress had started in which the members were to choose Suárez’s successor: Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo. Although his investiture was scheduled for the afternoon of February 23, the television stations and newspapers had been bombarding the public for days in order to familiarize them with the austere, gray face of the government’s new strongman.

  “Something serious is going to happen, and it’s going to happen soon,” declared Lorenzo’s chauffeur, not taking his eyes off the highway.

  Lorenzo nodded in silence. He knew what he was talking about. He had spent years in secret talks with the military men who were going to stage the coup, ever since the failed Galaxia attempt. He knew that the problem hadn’t been eradicated, and that the wound hadn’t even been cauterized. The military men humiliated by ETA, the apathy of a government coming apart at the seams, and a society in the midst of a sea change were fertile ground for Publio and his nostalgic reactionaries, which included Tejero, Milans, and Admiral Armada himself. Those people weren’t going to let the moment of instability pass, an opportunity for them to grab the reins, as General Franco had done in such a bloody way more than forty years earlier.

  But all that, while important, was the least of Lorenzo’s worries at that moment. Something more urgent had his attention. He asked the chauffeur to turn off the radio. He needed to think, to gauge his options and anticipate events. He had also had an argument with his wife. In those moments of tension, the last thing he needed was a family fight. Although physically they were very different, sometimes his wife reminded him of María. She embodied the same visceral impulses, the same look of superiority in spite of everything, the same pride. Sometimes he even discovered in his wife’s expressions a look, a perplexed expression, a smile of María’s. Maybe that was why he lost his temper with her and ended up hitting her.

  He looked at his knuckles. His hand hurt, and he felt bad for having hit his wife in the face that morning. She had ended up on the floor of the bathroom with a split lip. He knew that he’d gone too far, but the worst part was that his son had seen everything. He recriminated himself for not having the cold-bloodedness to close the door to the room, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He made a mental note that he should buy some candy on the way home, and maybe send a bouquet of flowers from the office to his wife with an apologetic note.

  But he’d do that later. Now he had to focus on his meeting with the congressman. He didn’t like Publio calling him to his house so unexpectedly. That didn’t bode well at all. He leaned toward the closed window to see the vague coastline that grew larger, with the profile of the mountain of Montjuïc and the towers of Sant Adrià emerging in the distance. In the pocket of his jacket he felt the wrinkled press clipping that had announced the death of Recasens that morning. He wondered who that homicide detective named Marchán was. He was smart; he had delayed publication of the news of the murder by several days, and now he was announcing to the press that the Criminal Police would be in charge of the investigation. The best part was his not-very-diplomatic way of having slipped in the suspicion that it was not just a simple homicide: “Certain indications make us suspect that the death of Colonel Recasens could be connected with high political authorities and the state security organizations, which is why we are going to request the protection of the Supreme Court.” That would make it difficult to transfer the investigations to the CESID for a few more days, and even after he’d gotten around the obstacle of the Supreme Court, Lorenzo would have to take over the proceedings discreetly in order to not attract the attention of the press.

  All this gave the inspector a margin of a few days to continue on the case, and at the same time it was his way of covering his back in the face of possible retaliations. Yes, that inspector was definitely rather clever. He should investigate him thoroughly and find out what interest he could have in the Recasens case. Maybe he was only looking for some press at
tention and a raise. In that case it would be easy to reach an agreement with him. But if he was looking for something else, it would be harder to get rid of him. Lorenzo imagined that that was what Publio wanted to talk about. He’d soon know. The car was making its way along the street where the congressman lived when in Barcelona.

  * * *

  Publio received him in a small office filled with leather-bound books on mahogany shelves. It smelled of cigar tobacco, and beside two large baroque style armchairs there was a box of Havanas and a device to trim the ends.

  “I suppose you’ve read the newspaper this morning,” said the congressman as he took one of the Havanas and made it crunch between his fingers by his ear. “What do we know about this Marchán?”

  Lorenzo examined Publio’s broken profile. In spite of the years he looked lively, but the pressure of those days was leaving a mark.

  “Not much. He worked for a few years with César Alcalá. But he didn’t testify in his favor in the Ramoneda case. I don’t think he’s ever visited him in jail. Alcalá doesn’t consider him his friend, more like a traitor. He confirmed that for me himself when I went to see him in prison.” Lorenzo left out telling Publio that during his last visit he had noticed a quite worrisome change in attitude in the inspector. He had refused to tell him what he had talked to María about in the last few weeks, and he demanded more credible evidence that his daughter was still alive. The handwritten notes that Lorenzo brought him every fifteen days signed by Marta weren’t enough anymore, he’d said. It was something important enough to mention to Publio, but he didn’t. He could tell that the congressman was about to blow his top.