Karin also told me that if I decided to go to the gym it could go on her account. I didn’t say yes and didn’t say no, didn’t make any commitment, but had decided that both this and anything else related with my son would be paid for by me, with what I earned working for them. For the moment, my own body separated him from them and they couldn’t do anything about it, and when this was all over they’d never have any contact with him. Only the little pullovers I was working on, less and less frequently, would be some kind of memento. Of course I’d never put anything Karin made on him. In this, too, Karin had shown her true colours. Once she’d lured me to her with the bait of showing me how to knit, she’d hardly touched her knitting needles again. Her pullover still lacked sleeves and neck, and it didn’t look as if she had any intention of finishing it, even though it was so tiny. Karin was no homemaker. When she was at home it was because she had no choice in the matter. Today she’d bounced back with a vengeance, because she’d got the idea into her head of having a little excursion to an antiques market in one of the inland towns of the region. I had to tell her that they packed up the stalls at midday, and in addition Fred might get angry again if we got back too late. Karin shrugged. She didn’t take Fred seriously. Then I had to tell her something that in some sense was true: that Fred was with her through thick and thin, that Fred was there when she wasn’t feeling well, and that Fred didn’t care about getting rid of jewellery in exchange for a medicine that was very good for her. Fred lived for her, and she had to reward him by not making him worry.
“You can see for yourself, can’t you?” she said. “I got the best. They all envied me. There were times that even Alice envied me. She would have liked to snatch him from me but she couldn’t. She only managed to get hold of my jewels.”
I wondered if she’d ever loved the real Fred, if she’d really loved him with all his defects, or whether the romance-novel Fred had elbowed out the real one. He really did seem to love her just as she was, with her arthritis, her witch face, her fantasies and her evil. Well, perhaps if it wasn’t for her, the abyss would be waiting for him. The important thing was that after this little chat she agreed to go home and I could keep my appointment with Julián. The fact that, right now, someone from outside this house who bore no resemblance whatsoever to Fred and Karin was waiting for me gave me wings and the will to fight.
In order to keep talking about Fred, and so she wouldn’t come up with another of her excuses to keep on having fun, I asked her how she’d realized she was in love with him. She had to think about it. Maybe she was trying to dredge up some words she’d read in one of her novels.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s something you can’t explain.”
That’s the kind of thing I’d say if someone asked me about Santi. But what I felt for Alberto was like doing a parachute jump. I just knew it, even though it was too long since I’d seen Alberto and I’d never done a parachute jump.
Julián
In my dreams I heard someone knocking on the door. I opened my eyes and it was Sandra tapping on the window with her knuckles. I cursed myself for having gone to sleep. If she hadn’t seen the car… Then again, it was also true that I felt more alert after my little snooze. Sandra had got back a bit of colour in her cheeks, as if she was getting used to her unrequited love and, since she’d taken to wearing her mountain boots, she looked taller. We went into the ice-cream parlour and sat at our usual table. We already had our usual bench and our usual table. In the midst of so much uncertainty, so many doubts and suspicions, we’d been creating some small degree of order. I didn’t know whether it was because of what was happening, but Sandra seemed much more mature than when I saw her on the beach for the first time and subsequently in her little house. It was as if five years had gone by for her, or maybe ten, flying by.
“They’ll probably give us the results of the tests tomorrow. I bow down before you, Sandra. You’re very brave, but I don’t want you to go on being so brave. Has anyone noticed anything about those used syringes?”
She shook her head, but Sandra hadn’t yet learnt to lie categorically. Those greenish eyes of hers – slightly downwards-sloping so some people mightn’t find them beautiful, but I loved them – weren’t so categorical. They had that sparkly flash that eyes sometimes have when someone is trying to deceive someone else.
“Has Frida noticed anything?” I didn’t give her time to answer. “Frida’s a lethal weapon. I’ve been checking her out. Her name is Frida… Well, it’s better that you don’t know what she’s called as you might let it slip. She lives in a farm with several other young people who probably belong to the Brotherhood. Two of them, Martín and your beloved, are low-level members, at the orders of this gang of old crocks they’re so devoted to. The old crocks reward them handsomely. Probably each and every one of them has to prove that he or she is worthy of a tidy sum in some tax haven somewhere and, meanwhile, they belong to a group with ideology, with weapons, with its own religion and a past, which is what makes them feel special. I’ve seen Frida, I’ve followed her, and have confirmed that she’s cold and pitiless and would do anything they ordered her to do, because, for her, the only law that exists is the law of the group and anything outside that is unreal. I’m not sure if you understand what I’m saying.”
In fact I hadn’t seen Frida killing anyone, but it was very easy for me to imagine her killing Elfe or anyone else the bosses told her to kill. Who would be her immediate boss? Heim, Sebastian, Otto, Alice? It was unlikely that she’d have to defer to the authority of a foreigner like Fredrik Christensen.
Sandra nodded and said something. It took me a couple of minutes to get the whole picture. They wanted, at any price, to bring her into the Brotherhood, which meant that Fred and Karin understood that she was seeing too much and they needed to get her more embroiled. Otherwise, Alice and Otto could have given the order to liquidate her, which wouldn’t bother Frida in the slightest, since Sandra hadn’t been obliged to prove herself as she had, or to go through the same training, or to work as a cleaner, however much they trusted you, or to lead an almost monastic life in order to join the Brotherhood. She’d be very jealous of Sandra and would be dying to do her in or beat her up.
“The thing is,” Sandra said, “I don’t know whether or not she’s noticed what happened with the used syringes. You can’t tell what she’s thinking.”
“My advice is that you don’t go back there today, and that you go to Madrid, to some friend’s house where they can’t track you down. Have you told them about Santi?”
She nodded.
“Go to some neighbourhood on the periphery where it will be impossible for them to find you.”
“I don’t want to run away,” she answered. “I don’t want to have the sensation that they’re after me. I’m going to wait a little longer. If we have more proof, the police might act and do something about them. Why didn’t you want me to go to the hotel?”
“Because you never know who’s watching. It wouldn’t be good if they connect me with you. They might discover who I am and then you’re lost. Leave your messages for me under the stone and I’ll leave mine for you there too.”
“I have to tell you something,” Sandra continued, looking really crushed. “Yesterday I brought Karin here. She didn’t get out of the car. I told her I needed to stop to use the toilet. It was after the episode with her jewellery. We were on our way home, but then I thought that you might have left me some kind of message. And, lo and behold, you’d gone and left it under a stone. What an idea!”
“What’s this about the jewellery?”
From what Sandra told me, she was in it up to her neck. She’d witnessed the wheelings and dealings of Karin and Alice, injections in exchange for jewels stolen from the Jews. Karin was still buying more life for herself with the lives of the people she’d helped to kill or that she’d killed herself. I made no comment. Sandra described the scene between Karin and Alice in the presence of Frida and herself. I told her that they
most probably still saw Fredrik as a second-rate Nazi and that’s why he didn’t have direct access to purchasing the liquid. It might also be that Otto and Alice had cornered the market for themselves. It was said that Karin, in her splendid malevolent youth, had got into the Führer’s good books and had wormed her way up to his inner circle. First, she managed to bring her husband to his attention as being worthy of the Gold Cross and then, as a result of that, it seemed to be substantiated that Karin had had some sort of relationship with Hitler, to whom she might have dropped a word in favour of Otto at some delicate point of their lives. Karin might have some moral advantage over Alice, but Alice had everything. She had the elixir of eternal youth.
But where did they get this liquid from? From some laboratory in the area or did they get it sent from outside? In my tailing of Otto I never saw anything strange, but that was probably because I hadn’t realized he was after something.
7
The Talisman
Sandra
Julián told me that if I didn’t get out of there, and fast, I’d have no alternative but to join the Brotherhood, and if I did, it would mark me for the rest of my days as a Nazi sympathizer, and he wasn’t going to be around to tell the world that I was a mole, a heroine who’d worked to unmask a criminal gang. He could perhaps write to the organization for which he and his friend had worked so long pursuing Nazis, but they’d think it was some sort of lunacy, wouldn’t even remember that he was still alive and wouldn’t even be aware that Salva, his friend, had died after devoting his whole life to seeking justice. I said that they might listen to me and he obstinately shook his head.
“Then… it’s just us two,” I concluded. “You’re old and I’m less and less agile. We can’t handle this.”
“There are three of us: you, me and Salva. He got me on the track and would have somehow found a way to help us a little more. The organization, with all the means it has at its disposal, hasn’t been capable of discovering what you and I have found out all by ourselves. Opportunity and courage together can do more than an organization. At this stage, anyone coming in from outside could make some error and destroy all our work. Either you go, or you stay, but we’re alone.”
“If anything happens to me, I’d like you to call my family and tell them what I’ve done.” I took the turquoise napkin from under my cutlery and wrote down the address and phone number of my parents, and Santi’s too. “If something bad happens to our son, I don’t think Santi could ever forgive me, but I’d like him to understand that I didn’t go looking for danger.”
Over these past few weeks, I’d learnt that it’s impossible to live without danger. Neither my son nor I, however much I tried, could be completely safe. Everything is danger, and you can’t know which of the dangers will be the one that kills you. There are dangers that fly up in your face and others lurking in ambush behind the scenes. You can’t know which kind is worse.
Julián listened to me with a great deal of attention, looking at me as if it was the first time he’d ever heard me speak. Then he put his hand in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging over the back of his chair, and pulled out a little plastic bag with something inside it.
“This is for you. It’s a talisman. It will do you more good now than it can do for me.”
What the bag contained was simply sand, sun-toasted sand. Some of the grains were still shiny. I put it in my trouser pocket. It was some time now since I’d stopped thinking that Julián was crazy. He was a very wise man and very practical too. What was crazy was the world.
We agreed to meet the next day, here, at eight when the results of the tests would presumably be available and, if we had any message, we could leave it under stone C. I went back to the house feeling relatively happy, because the situation I’d got myself into was moving in the right direction, because I wasn’t alone, because Julián was there and because, for once in my life, I wanted to finish something I’d started. What I wasn’t counting on was a new scare.
I walked cheerfully into Villa Sol. It was half-past five and Fred and Karin looked as if they’d just got up from their siesta, stretching, yawning and trying to get their wits together. I offered to make them some tea and they thought that was a great idea. Fred turned the television on and tuned in to a game of tennis, probably the Davis Cup, while Karin went up to her room to change after having her usual siesta on the couch, filling the whole place with her snoring.
When I’d put the water on to boil, I needed to go to the loo, so I went to what the magazines call the guest bathroom. On the way, I had to go past the library-den, and I saw that the door was ajar, which meant there was some visitor, perhaps Martín working on the accounts. It wasn’t good for me to be on bad terms with Martín, so I stuck my head around the door thinking I’d greet him, say hello Martín, how are things, do you want a cup of tea? But I saw that there was no one there. Fred was totally into the match, shouting away to himself, and Karin hadn’t come down yet, maybe because she was curling her hair, imitating the ancient ringlets of her youth. I crept in, very stealthily, alert to the slightest sound but knowing that I had to overcome my fear and make the most of this chance. I was walking on the Persian rug, the one I’d seen Frida beating, so I wasn’t making a sound and I didn’t dare to open any drawers, though I did want to check out what had been left on top of things. I went to the writing desk, the writing desk that was taboo for my eyes, and my heart missed a beat.
Lying on it was a photo of Julián. I looked and looked again. There was nothing written on the back, just the photo. He was wearing his present clothes, the beige jacket we’d bought together, with its brown leather cuffs and collar, and his cravat. He looked like an old film actor. No one would ever guess he’d gone through so much suffering in his life. The photo had been taken in the street, in one of the streets in the town. I retreated from the forbidden territory with my heart thumping at a thousand beats an hour and left the door as I’d found it. Fred was still talking to himself and I couldn’t hear Karin. I went into the toilet, peed, flushed and washed my hands. I almost screamed when I opened the door and found myself face to face with Karin.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I answered, surprised.
“I took the kettle off the fire,” she said. “It was whistling non-stop.”
“Time really flies, doesn’t it,” I commented by way of explanation.
The den door was still ajar, just as I’d left it. Karin apparently hadn’t noticed and hadn’t closed it.
Fred was still caught up in the match and Karin sat down at his side. As I prepared the tray with the gold-decorated cups, the sugar bowl, even though no one took sugar, and teaspoons, I was wondering whether they hadn’t closed the den door because they already considered me a member of the Brotherhood, or because, and this had my hair standing on end, they wanted me to see that they’d discovered Julián. Of course it would have been worse if the two of us had been in the photo together. So, the way things stood, there was still a chance that they hadn’t connected me with him. Would that really be possible? I caressed my pocket where I was carrying the little bag of sand so all its magical power would be transferred to me, and started to pour the tea. Then I sat down in what had come to be my armchair.
“I think I’ll go to the hairdresser’s,” I said, running my hand through my hair. “It’s months since I had a haircut.”
It was true, my short hair had turned into long hair and the reddish streak had faded. Now I sometimes pulled it back in a ponytail. Julián was so right: if you have truths to hand there’s no need to resort to lies. You forget the lies you tell and then they get you into trouble. Truths don’t. What I hadn’t counted on was that Karin loved the idea of going to the hairdresser’s.
“Me too,” she said. “I want to come too. I want them to give me a perm. I’m sick of using rollers.”
Karin always had the words “I want” in her mouth, as if just by saying it she was going to attract everything she des
ired towards her.
Fred looked sideways at us without paying too much attention. In spite of everything, he was grateful to me for keeping his wife entertained.
The fact is I was trying, by whatever means I could, to go and see Julián. After our meeting he most probably would have gone back to the hotel to rest and, despite all his warnings about my not going there, this was more important. I needed to find a way to alert him, to tell him that he was now being monitored by the Brotherhood, and they knew what he looked like. Yet I couldn’t go back on this business of Karin and the hairdresser. Karin had got herself excited. When the injections were still having their effect, it didn’t take much to get her excited.
“Let’s go then,” I said. “If you don’t have any particular preference, I think I’ve seen one that looks very good on the seafront.”
“I’m fed up with my usual one. I want to try something new,” she said, laughing and looking at Fred.
Fred joined in the joke.
“Good luck, darling,” he said and laughed too.
Fred didn’t seem to need the injections. He probably tried not to need them so Karin could have them all.
The fact that monsters can also feel love did my head in, because if they knew what love was they’d have to know what suffering was too.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 25