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

by Victor del Arbol

  María listened with her head sunk between her shoulders. It was all too horrible, too painful.

  “If what you say is true, Andrés has made a terrible mistake. That girl is innocent, like her father is, and like her grandfather was. They are tormenting them, generation after generation, for a crime that none of them committed. The real murderer of Isabel Mola was my father, Gabriel. My father worked for Publio when he was young. He’s kept the secret all these years.”

  Antonio Marchán looked at María in surprise. It took him a few minutes to react.

  “César knows? Does he know that your father killed Isabel?”

  “I don’t think so. He knows that his father was innocent and that he was condemned by Recasens’s false testimony. I think that’s all.”

  Marchán thought quickly.

  “You shouldn’t tell him that under any circumstances. If you do, Alcalá will lose all trust in you and will clam up. Listen, you have to get César to tell you where he is keeping the information against Publio, at any cost. Deliver the evidence to me. With it and your declaration accusing Lorenzo and Publio of the murder of Recasens, I can get a judge to let me into the Mola house.”

  María felt a stab of distrust. What if that policeman wasn’t what he seemed? And if he were ensnared in Publio’s tentacles as well?

  Just then a waiter approached. Marchán had a call.

  The inspector was surprised. He had given the address of the restaurant in case anything urgent came up, but he wasn’t expecting anyone to call. He went to the bar and picked up the telephone. He spoke for a few seconds. María saw him ask something into the phone somewhat nervously. The inspector could barely restrain his violent impulse to slam the receiver down when he hung up.

  “Forget what I told you. You aren’t going to be able to talk to Alcalá. This morning they stabbed him in his cell.”

  María felt a shudder. She thought of Romero. The deal they had …

  “They stabbed him?”

  “Several stab wounds to the back and arm. He’s out of danger, but they’ve transferred him to the Hospital Clínico. It seems that he’s still not in any condition to talk to anyone. I’ve ordered them to place a guard to watch over him.”

  María’s expression relaxed. Several stab wounds … Perhaps Romero had taken it too far, but he’d gotten César out. The rest was up to her.

  “You don’t look very surprised, María. Did you know something about this?”

  “I was here waiting for you, Inspector. I wasn’t planning on visiting Alcalá today. How could I know?”

  Marchán knew that she was lying. But it was difficult to figure out what kind of lie she was clinging to.

  “I will find out what I can about Fernando Mola, but I suspect he won’t be easy to find. Maybe I should question your father, so he can tell us where he met with him. Where can I find him?”

  “Two days ago I went to see him at our house in San Lorenzo. I suppose he’s still there. Are you going to arrest him?”

  “For a forty-year-old murder whose statute of limitations has already passed? That’s not a question I’d expect you to ask, María.”

  “I meant, are you going to arrest him for shielding Publio? I think my father could tell you many things about that congressman.”

  Marchán felt the weight of María’s hatred toward her father. He shrugged his shoulders and said good-bye, promising that he would take care of putting a discreet tail on Greta and María herself.

  María didn’t leave right away, but soon after. She needed to breathe. The city smelled of asphalt and of that clean atmosphere that sometimes illuminates the winter, like hope. Before her eyes the world was depicted in the usual, unchangeable, everyday way. A thousand years from now, she thought, things wouldn’t be much different than they were now. Other people, dressed differently, would run the same way through the traffic, they would talk at the stoplights, or they would stroll with the same worried or happy faces. The same immutable present where some enter and others exit as part of a tacit agreement between life and death. After all, she said to herself, she wasn’t as special as she used to think. She was just one more particle in that strange and sometimes infuriating universe.

  26

  San Lorenzo, February 11–12, 1981

  It wasn’t hard to find the house. Above the leafy grove peeked out the gleaming roof tiles. Marchán stopped the car on the road. From there he could see the windows and the locked door.

  “I can’t stand the winter. It brings up bad memories,” he said, warming up his hands with the vapor from his mouth.

  His face was purple with cold, and the small glasses he used for driving were steamed up. He was shivering with cold. In the passenger seat was a morning newspaper stained with a little bit of coffee and some crumbs from breakfast. The inspector flipped through it quickly while he decided to leave the car.

  In spite of the circumstances, he felt relatively optimistic for the first time in a long time. The Recasens case had stirred a lot of things up, just as he had hoped when he leaked the news of it to the press. The case had all the morbid and mysterious ingredients needed to attract enough journalists and keep the matter in the limelight for a few days. A spy, a violent death, the name of Congressman Publio dropped enigmatically, the nationwide search order for Ramoneda, painted as a dangerous murderer … That gave him some time and attention. While it lasted, not even the examining judge or his superiors would dare to take him off the case.

  And this time he had a trump card: María’s confession. He could arrest them all if the lawyer didn’t retract at the last minute, or Publio didn’t manage to get rid of her. The first possibility didn’t worry him. He didn’t think that María was the kind of person to get intimidated. He had even gotten the feeling that she wanted to help him, maybe to exonerate herself of responsibilities or suspicion in the Recasens case, or maybe out of a desire for revenge against her ex-husband. No, she would confess. And as far as keeping her alive, his trusted men would take care of protecting her effectively.

  Yet there was something that worried Marchán. Without César’s testimony and without the evidence he was hiding against Publio, none of all that held water. He had to get irrefutable proof, proof that would make the congressman fall without any of his powerful friends daring to intercede on his behalf or cover up for him. And without Marta, dead or alive, César wasn’t going to talk.

  And that was where the appearance of Fernando Mola seemed crucial. He had to find him and persuade him to take him to the house where Andrés was hiding. And the way to get to him was through the old man who lived in that house in the mountains.

  He got out of the car in a foul mood, trying to convince himself that the hours traveling to San Lorenzo and the cold he was feeling were all going to be worth it.

  He crossed the gate into the front garden and lifted the doorknocker. He didn’t know what kind of man Gabriel would be. The only idea he had gotten of him was through María’s eyes. And the scorn she felt toward her father was clear. How could he blame her for that? Maybe it would be interesting to have a conversation, even though the murder of Isabel Mola had only relative interest for Marchán.

  Nobody came to open the door, and it was locked from inside. He didn’t see anyone around. He took a stroll around the house, making sure to avoid the irrigation channels for the garden. The house seemed deserted.

  He was so absorbed looking at the windows that he didn’t see a car approach until it stopped beside him. The door opened, and a woman’s legs emerged.

  “Who are you?” she asked suspiciously when she saw Marchán. The inspector identified himself. Somewhat assuaged, and led by growing curiosity, she said that she was Gabriel’s nurse.

  “I was until a month ago, to be more specific. Gabriel owes me my pay for the last few weeks. A couple of days ago we agreed that he should come by my house. But he hasn’t come, so I decided to stop by and get what he owes me. And what are you doing here, Officer?”

  March�
�n had a strange premonition. Those intuitions that are absurd and have no basis in anything rational, but that almost always end up being right.

  “Do you have keys to the house?”

  The nurse said yes, she still had a set. She searched through her bag somewhat nervously.

  “Here they are.”

  Marchán asked her to open the door but didn’t let her enter the house.

  The smell that came from inside the house was confirmation of his suspicion. He went into the living room shrouded in shadow and stopped in front of the staircase that led to the second floor. Slowly he removed his wool gloves and unbuttoned his coat as he looked around. The silence was absolute. He perked up his ears. From some part of the upper floor came a slight moan, like that of a newborn kitten. He followed the intermittent, almost imperceptible, sound to the half-open bathroom door. The first thing he saw was a shoe and then a leg whose pants were stained with dried blood.

  He had to push the door with his shoulder in order to be able to get in. Gabriel’s body was laid out on the floor with his head to one side, in a large puddle of coagulated blood. The walls, the mirror, and the shower curtain were all splattered with ruby-colored water. Marchán leaned over the cold body. Gabriel’s face was half destroyed. A bit beyond his right hand there was a pistol. Gabriel had shot himself. And yet he was still breathing. He wasn’t dead. Not completely. His lungs released air with a very weak whistle. His eyes were fixed on the wall, but when the inspector spoke to him they blinked. He had lost a lot of blood and the shot had ravaged his head, but he had survived. The inspector had seen other similar cases. Suicides who regretted their decision at the last fraction of a second and managed to imperceptibly shift the trajectory of the bullet.

  “What have you done?” he murmured as he took his pulse.

  Gabriel didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He could barely stay awake. His brain was like a lightbulb about to burn out; it had very brief flashes and then periods of darkness. He had spent two days and nights that way. Aware of being alive but unable to move, to articulate a single word, or to spit out the blood he was drowning in. He barely heard Marchán’s voice and then the screams of the nurse, the hands on him, the tubes, the stretcher the paramedics took him down on. The ambulance siren. The feeling of movement. It was like being in a display window, like being invisible, like touching the sleeping extremities of his own body.

  He didn’t recognize his daughter in the hospital. He saw her crying without understanding exactly what that expression that contorted her pretty face was, or why that dampness from her eyes was falling onto him and she didn’t notice.

  He had a blurred memory of the day he found his wife dead. He asked the cold cadaver why she had decided to hang herself, instead of punishing him. That was an anguished, pained, and enormous why. Now he understood. There had been no response. It was like asking God why things happened the way they happened, what designs He used to arbitrarily mark people’s fate.

  27

  Hospital Clínico, Barcelona, February 12, 1981

  The doctor checked a graph beside the bed and shook his head, surprised.

  “It’s incredible that the bullet didn’t kill him. It destroyed half of his brain, and yet, even with the cancer weakening his defenses, he’s still alive. Of course, your father is a fighter. He will recover, at least a part of him will.”

  María observed her father, sedated into sleep and with his head bandaged. A tube in his nose helped him breathe. She examined that tormented man, almost with terror, wondered how much he had suffered, how deep and bare his hatred must be. A sterile and useless hatred that kept him from dying and resting.

  It was too hot in the room, and she felt dazed, boxed into those four white walls. She decided to go down to the cafeteria and have a coffee. In the lobby she found Inspector Marchán talking to various uniformed officers. He wore a tie with the knot loosened, and his hair was messy. He looked tired. María felt obliged to thank him for having found her father still alive, but she did it unenthusiastically. The inspector also answered with sarcasm.

  “That wasn’t my intention, and I don’t think your father will thank me for it when he regains consciousness. I have the feeling I stuck my nose into something personal. Suicide always is.”

  “You don’t sound like a police officer, Inspector.”

  “And you don’t sound like an afflicted daughter. But that’s not my business.”

  María observed the movement of the uniformed officers beside the elevators. So much vigilance seemed excessive to her, and she said so. But Marchán corrected her.

  “Those officers aren’t here to guard your father; they’re here to keep watch over César Alcalá. They are about to bring him upstairs.” The inspector maintained a calculated silence before adding, “It’s strange how sometimes people’s fates cross and get tangled up. Two men who have never met, united by the same death, find each other forty years later in the same hospital. Separated by a few walls. If I liked tragedy, I would say it’s not realistic. But here they are … And you between them.” He looked at the lawyer suspiciously, but she didn’t seem concerned.

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “I know you’re plotting something, but I don’t know what it is. You already knew that Alcalá had been attacked in jail and that they were going to transfer him. For a lawyer you are very bad at hiding your own emotions. You’ve lied to me again, and I don’t know to what end. But I want to warn you: if you think that you are going to help César by facilitating his escape, forget about it. The only thing it will accomplish is hurting him and making the investigation more difficult. The only way is the legal one. Persuade him to talk, to tell where he’s hiding that damn file on Publio.”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself? You used to be partners; you try to persuade him.”

  “Inspector Alcalá and I have nothing to talk about. Be warned, María.” Even though Marchán’s voice didn’t reveal any emotion, his eyes reflected the severity of a detective interrogating a suspect.

  María went into the cafeteria, filled at that hour with hospital staff and the family members of admitted patients. The hustle and bustle was more typical of a market than a place filled with convalescents. She had to wait with a plastic tray in the self-service line. She served herself a small sesame roll and a very strong coffee. As she was searching for coins in her pocket to pay, someone beat her to it.

  “Let me get this one. You look tired; a long night at the bedside of a family member, I guess.”

  It was an older man, polite and pleasant looking. But María wasn’t in the mood for conversation, much less flirting with a stranger who was probably twice her age. She thanked him with a forced smile and left the line. Even though she didn’t turn around, she felt the stranger’s gaze on the nape of her neck. She went to sit down at a table far from the entrance.

  She barely touched her roll, playing with the breadcrumbs. She drank some coffee. She would have liked to go out for a smoke. Outside the cafeteria she saw an interior yard with skeletal palm trees and a lawn of poorly maintained grass. The light from outside was filtered through a skylight that rain rang out on. She focused on that senseless greenhouse. It seemed purely decorative, since the doors were closed with chains and no one could go in. She could only contemplate it, something lovely but useless.

  Then, without any rational link, the reality of her disease rose up in front of her eyes again. The events of the last few hours had almost made her forget about it. Now, in the first moment when she’d had a little peace, that reality emerged again. María touched her temple with the tips of her fingers, as if she could touch the tumor that was developing in her brain.

  She didn’t realize that the man who had paid for her sandwich had come over to her table with a tray in his hand.

  “Do you mind if I sit beside you?” It was a rhetorical question. Without waiting for an answer, he sat down and meticulously removed the top of a small jar of peach marmalade. “The food here is di
sgusting, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but I would like to be alone,” said María, uncomfortable.

  The man nodded pleasantly, but he kept spreading marmalade onto a piece of toast with the tip of a plastic knife.

  “I understand. When we feel that death is near, we need to withdraw. It’s inevitable to think about what we’ve done and stopped doing. We see our inevitable end in the deaths of others. But the truth is it’s a completely useless exercise. You can’t intellectualize an entire life of emotions and sentiments, not even when we fear dying. My advice, María, is not to get dragged into melancholy or nostalgia. That will only bring you suffering and be a waste of your time.”

  María made a brusque gesture with her hand, which was totally involuntary and turned over the steaming cup of coffee onto the Formica table.

  “Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

  The man meticulously began to wipe up the spilled coffee with a paper napkin.

  “My name is Fernando. I believe your father has told you about me. I should say that I am sorry about what happened, but honestly, that’s not the case. I imagine you can understand why.”

  María felt a momentary burst of rage and guilt. That old man had no right to be there, with his regal pose filled with cynicism, recriminating her with the double meaning of his words.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your mother, but what happened was not my fault.”

  “Fault? No one said that. In the end, you may be as much of a victim as my mother, as Marcelo, or as poor Recasens. However, sometimes we feel the need to repair the damage others have done and find relief from a burden we unfairly carry on our shoulders. I have the feeling that you are one of those people, María.”