He gave me names, but my first visit, all the same, was to Parada’s widow. Laura Mendizábal.
“Now, let’s talk about Laura.”
Not the most beautiful dame I’ve seen. Nose far from perfect, could easily shed a kilo or two, no question about that. I’ve known far more attractive women if we’re talking looks and figure. But Laura’s advantage over all the others lay in being more than just flesh and bone. Her skin was fine and white, her body generous with curves and folds, her hair chestnut and wavy, her eyes large, perhaps a touch too much, as if surprised to be alive. But no, it was the soul, more than anything, shining out of those big eyes, a soul that gave itself up with total surrender.
From the moment she opened the door and I explained I was a private eye, she seemed to look at me like I was real.
With her tight silk negligee, I could see from the movements that she only had on a bra and panties underneath. She was drinking something that looked like water, and offered me a glass saying it was vodka.
“No thanks.”
“On duty?”
I could have killed for a witty response, but didn’t dare improvise a joke. People never understand mine.
“Private eyes are always on duty – and we’re never on duty, depending how you look at it. I’d like to talk about your husband, if you don’t mind.”
She glanced up, and I felt a rush of blood. Her eyes were tired from crying, and her sadness surrounded her like a halo, the effect contagious. I had to fight a desire to fold her in my arms and provide soothing consolation.
She seemed frightened and nervous, smoking and drinking compulsively. I didn’t fancy talking about her husband, anyway, leastways not straight after myself. Yes, she knew Bernardo had gambling debts, that he needed money urgently, that he was always broke, pawning and redeeming jewellery, hiding from creditors, begging for a few days’ grace, promising to set up imaginary businesses. He’d never had a gun at home. Of course, his friends . . . who knows about those “friends”, who they were or what they might do. Such things weren’t important for Laura just then. What mattered was that Bernardo was dead and, for her, his death was intimately and agonizingly bound up with memory.
“The worst thing about dying is that you lose your memories,” she said of a sudden. “I like to believe in the transmigration of souls, in reincarnation, in another life. But what use is it being revived in the next life, if we don’t remember anything about this one? It’s like starting out from scratch, as if the previous one had never existed.”
I wasn’t really sure where she was going with all this, and if another person had laid such weird stuff on me I’d have sent them packing. But I felt it was part of an outpouring of pain and helplessness like I’d never seen before. She was simply telling me how much she’d been in love with her husband, and how much she was missing him.
“In heaven, if it exists, we can’t keep our memories of this life because we’d otherwise feel nostalgia, and there’s no room for nostalgia in paradise. That is the great curse of death: the loss of memory. Without memories we are nothing. Amnesia is the equivalent of death. If you lose your memories, you die and in your place another is born, someone confused, lost, dazed. An unknown person is born in your body. What use is it being remembered by others if we don’t even remember anything ourselves? What use is another life to us, however wonderful, if we’re going to lose this one utterly and completely?”
I wished I could have replied with something on that level, but I simply said the only thing that sprang to mind:
“You remember a lot about your husband, don’t you?”
And she replied, crushed by the certainty that her memory would never restore Bernardo’s life:
“How couldn’t I?”
What enormous importance those words have for me now, as I grab Wágner’s shirt and propel him headlong to the other side of the living room.
“Where is Laura?” I ask.
I deliver a kick.
Where is Laura?
After that day I’d lost all interest in crime investigation, and Laura was all I could think of. I picked up the phone, and my fingers ran over the numbers. I knew hers by heart. But what could I say to her?
I tried speaking with friends of Bernardo Parada, colleagues from gambling dens and shady deals, a partner he’d started a business with which made a tidy profit despite having no basis in the real world. Nobody knew a thing. No one remembered anything. “We weren’t close friends,” they’d say. “Bernardo didn’t have any friends.” And a gun? No, no one had ever seen him with a gun in his hands. There was also a woman, the owner of a bar where they’d set up gambling dens from time to time, who hinted that Parada had no friends because his breath was so bad.
“That one had a nice thing going with the fuzz,” she told me. In other words, he was a nark, just like Wágner. It even occurred to me he was the one Germán had in mind when he spoke of “candy”, not the jeweller. I concluded this was what Germán had been hiding from me.
When I got home that night, an envelope was waiting for me with no sender’s name. Inside, a typewritten note, unsigned: Parada was the secret informer of Inspector Germán. They used to meet up on certain evenings at a private club called El Choclo. Just go there and you’ll understand everything.
The paranormal exists. The paper wasn’t scented, and there was nothing in its anonymity to make me think of Laura, but holding it in my hands I got an erection. My heart was beating like mad when I rang Germán.
“I’ve heard Bernardo Parada was your candy,” I said.
“Who told you?” he snapped.
He was so sharp I knew right then I’d put my finger on something, but I backed down, making light of the matter.
“Just in case you make out later that I never have a clue what’s going on.”
I suggested dinner, as if there was something else I needed to discuss. When we met up in a bar by the beach, I played dumb (they say I do it brilliantly in the agency: those jokes that everyone finds hilarious, so long as it’s not me telling them). I rambled on about this and that, and made only a couple of vague references to the case. Germán gave me a funny look all the same, and confined himself to monosyllables. We had Martini aperitifs, and then I got him to try some Raimat Abadia, a really fine red. He liked it and, as I was hoping, got pretty plastered. I made sure his glass was never empty. Then Cardhu with the coffee. His head was already weaving a little, but he couldn’t turn down the single malt.
Which was when I brought up El Choclo.
“What’s that? A tango, isn’t it?” he made a stab at resistance.
“A club.”
All resistance useless. After a good meal with plenty of booze, friends can never keep secrets or maintain a successful subterfuge.
“Come on, Germán, cut the crap. Why don’t you want to tell me that Bernardo Parada was your stooge?”
“Informers are supposed to be secret.” It wasn’t the reply I was looking for, and I simply nodded to let him know I was waiting for the bottom line. He smiled, and nodded back in imitation. “Because cakes are cakes. Because when you see the cake, you’ll think it’s something it isn’t.”
On our way to El Choclo, he told me his version of what was going on. A chain of coincidences. The ingredients of the cake were Bernardo Parada,Arturo Wágner and Laura. But everything was the result of pure chance, “don’t think the worst”, don’t get paranoid, reality is never as fiendishly cunning as fiction. He was doing his best to stop me suspecting the very thing he suspected himself.
The club’s name was spelt out in gold letters above a small, dark wooden door, on a ground floor in the San Gervasio district. Germán had a plastic card with a magnetic band that allowed us to gain entrance.
Inside, a woman of a certain age, oozing friendliness and charm, welcomed us with a dazzling array of false teeth. She was delighted to make my acquaintance, and informed Germán that his friends were at the back table, as usual. The police officer then had seco
nd thoughts, regretted having brought me, and turned to try and stop me passing through the bead curtain.
Too late. I sidestepped, and went through, making a beeline for the rear. I already knew what I was going to find, and what I saw was merely a confirmation.
Those big sad eyes, expecting me. Laura recognized me, remembered me, and I sensed a sigh of infinite relief, as if she were shouting, “At last!” and I knew beyond question that she’d written that unsigned note.
To the immense annoyance of Arturo Wágner, who had his arm round her waist, fingers spread wide, pawing her possessively.
According to Germán it had all been the result of pure chance. As soon as Arturo Wágner joined the El Choclo group, he’d been drawn to Laura, had tried to catch her eye. He’d pursued her and eventually got her by being insistent and charming. These things happen. And from the moment Bernardo Parada first met the jeweller, he’d been toying with the idea of a hold-up. He needed the cash, was a bit of a crook, and it was perfectly natural he’d come up with the idea. If we’re a bit twisted, we might also deduce he’d realized Laura would get off with Wágner, providing a further incentive to rob him of his jewels, but that’s as far as it went. One shouldn’t get carried away.
Germán couldn’t accept the obvious because he was the one who’d introduced the jeweller, and he felt guilty towards his informer for having set up the explosive cocktail. He couldn’t accept the final disastrous outcome either, because there wasn’t any proof and also because it was simply too awful. As far as he was concerned, Laura simply went away somewhere.
Arturo Wágner, on that evening, after the evident shock of seeing me there, put his hand on Laura’s shoulder and steered her firmly towards the exit. He excused himself with “We’d better be going,” and avoided my eyes.
Did he guess in that split second that Laura had sent me the anonymous note? “That private detective came to El Choclo all thanks to you; he twigged because you betrayed me.”
Laura, on the other hand, kept her eyes firmly on mine. She was sending out a desperate signal, a plea for help of which I remained unaware and which I was unable to act on. She was telling me, “How couldn’t I remember Bernardo?” and that changed everything. I might have seen her as a two-faced bitch happily throwing herself into the arms of her husband’s assassin, if she hadn’t said with such sadness: “How couldn’t I remember him?” That look and those words about memory and death, and that anonymous note – they changed everything.
Arturo Wágner had acquired her, taken possession of her, and she found herself in his arms with an indifference that might easily have been mistaken for happiness. Many might have seen her as a shameless hussy delighting in Bernardo’s death but, if you knew how to listen to her, how to recognize the message of helplessness in her eyes, you would find things weren’t quite as straightforward as they might appear. Laura was the prisoner of that artificial, perfumed creature, and I failed to save her life when the two of them walked past me and out of the club with indecent haste.
Words on the tip of my tongue: “She has nothing to do with this; I worked it out with no need for her anonymous note; I’d have come to El Choclo anyway, even if she hadn’t sent a thing.”
And I can picture that monster back in his flat, beating her with his belt and ordering her to confess: “You told him where he could find us, didn’t you?”
I’ve only seen Laura twice in my life, and I know I’ll never see her again, and that is the worst thing that’s ever befallen me. It’s why I believe I’m entitled to beat up Arturo in a way I’ve never beaten up another. Who knows, maybe I’m going mad.
“Where is Laura?”
“She dropped me, she left me!”
“You killed her!”
Would I have to tell him what happened? He, the cynic, claimed he loved her, that he was hopelessly in love with her from the moment he first set eyes on her, that Bernardo found out and for that reason had him at gunpoint and was set on shooting him.
I seize him by the jaw to shut him up, bang his head against the wall, and scream an inch from his face, breathing right into his nostrils and spattering him with saliva:
“He didn’t want to kill you! You’re the one that wanted to kill him because he scared you, because you knew he could turn nasty, because you were terrifi ed by the possibility of his finding out about your affair with Laura. So you suggested to Parada that he do a fake hold-up and have the jewellery disappear, so you could claim on the insurance! And when he appeared in the parking lot by himself, with a gun like you said to give the robbery an authentic touch, you shot him.”
“He was planning to shoot me.”
“You shot him in the back” – I take him by surprise. I throw him in a corner like a rag doll. “You shot him in the back, ‘as he was fleeing’. You were frightened, absolutely terrified. Just like you were frightened and terrified the other day, when I came into El Choclo and saw your hand on Laura’s waist, and you thought, ‘He’s got me.’You thought Laura had ratted on you, didn’t you? That she’d told me everything because you knew she didn’t love you. She stayed with you out of sheer apathy, because thanks to your stupidity her husband had died, and if even that stupidity didn’t last, then what a useless death it was. But she didn’t love you. She despised you for being a murderer and a coward, and that’s why she betrayed you. And you, you coward and murderer, you killed again. Got rid of her. Where is she now?”
All this in a furious rant, accompanied by kicks to his stomach and head. “Where is she?” With great difficulty I stop myself killing him, so that he can lead me to where he buried the corpse. “Where is she?” And I finally convince him by saying that if he tells me where she is, he’ll have a chance to escape on the way, while we’re heading to wherever it is he says. He’ll have at least an hour, two hours to live. A lot of things can happen in two hours.
He admits, finally, that it’s all true, that he killed her and buried her, and agrees to take me to the place where he dug the grave.
We’re making for the front door when the bell goes. It’s none other than the police. “Open up! What’s going on? Police! Open up!” We’ve been making too much noise, and the neighbours have taken fright. Arturo Wágner gives a leap of joy and runs to open the door. I have no choice but to trip him, and he sails headlong onto the floor. Then, perfectly conscious of what I’d doing, with the fanatical awareness of the truly mad, I break his neck. I kill him. I then say:
“Don’t run. I’ll open it myself.”
Inspector Germán will look at me as if some complex message was tattooed on my forehead – in code.
“But in God’s name, what’s he done to you? Why did you pick a fight with Wágner?”
I’ll avoid his gaze, and try to regain my composure, and find some answers. I’ll tell my friend that he’s right and that I’m in the wrong. What’ll she be to me, that poor girl, whom I’ve only seen twice in my entire life? I’ll also think a lot about the size and consequences of catastrophes. But, above all, I’ll make an effort to remember Laura, to keep her in my memory. Because if I don’t, then who will?
Translation by Martin Davies
My Vacation in the Numbers Racket
Howard Engel
Dear Benny,
I was thinking of you all alone in that hotel room of yours with the frost making leaf-prints on your windows, so I thought I’d see if I couldn’t get this cassette machine working long enough to send you a letter. I think I’ve pushed the right button, but I don’t think I’ve got the courage to try playing it back in case I wipe what I think I’ve recorded.
You’ll be surprised to hear that your father and I are in Sarasota. You thought we were still in Miami, where I meant to send you a postcard, but things just happened too fast to send you a postcard. Right from the beginning this winter hasn’t been like any other winter we’ve ever spent in Florida. I’ll try to tell you what happened if I can still remember.
One thing I remember, and I’ll start there, is
the Red Cap. That’s the place your father and I went with Shirl. Do you remember Shirl? She’s that blonde that if it wasn’t for me I think your father might have been nuts about back a few years. She used to work in his store, and then she started doing her hair up and moved to the millinery shop in the Leonard Hotel. That’s where she used to hang out until she met Dave Steiner. He was the first man she ever met who had his shirts made to order. Dave might be a little shady in his business life but he was always generous where Shirl was concerned. We have been visiting them every winter for a few days since we started going to Miami. Which brings me back to the Red Cap, the lounge on the edge of Miami where Shirl and Dave used to take us. It’s a kind of bar, but a real joint, if you know what I mean. Even for down there it’s a joint. They call it the Red Cap, and it’s a sort of Last Chance Saloon because it’s open all night and it’s so far away from everything. It’s located right in the middle of these big, big . . . What-do-you-call-’ems? You know, storage tanks for gas? A huge field of them. And right across the road from the bar is the whole electric whatchamacallit for the whole city of Miami. A power station, not a sub-station or anything like that. And this joint just sits there in the middle of all that gas and electricity with its peeling sign winking on and off like it was something to be proud of.
They have a piano player there, some drunk that comes in all the time. They told me he used to be somebody but you could have fooled me. He leaned into the keyboard like he was protecting it with his body. I don’t think I ever saw him look up, not even when the girl replaced his empty glass with a full one. He wasn’t the only musician. When they finished their club dates, jazz musicians drop around on their way home. There was always some sort of jam session going on if you came in late enough.
The night I met Stone Eyes was the night it all started to happen. Dave and your father were out looking after some business together and were going to pick us up at the Red Cap. Shirl parked her convertible in back and we walked into that neon haze around the front door. So just before she starts telling jokes with the owner, Shirl tells me not to talk to anybody she doesn’t introduce me to first. It’s a safety precaution, I know that. But you know me; I’m always the little juvenile delinquent. And so I started talking to this tall guy sitting at the bar. He had eyes that looked like they were made of stone. I’d never in my life seen eyes like that. They looked like they were really made of stone. Anyway, I know you’re going to say that we were all pretty stoned and sure, we were, because it was after four in the morning and Dave and Manny were busy like I told you.
The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Page 54