The Summer of Dead Toys

by Antonio Hill

  “Yes?” For a moment his face was expectant, but instantly his expression became one of simple irritation. “No. No! I’m busy now. I’ll call her later.” Rather than hang up, he slammed the receiver down and, directing himself to the sergeant, added: “Joana Vidal.”

  She snorted.

  “Again? ”

  The superintendent shrugged.

  “Nothing new in her case, is there?”

  “Nothing. Did you see the report? It’s as clear as water. The boy got distracted and fell from the window. Pure bad luck.”

  Savall nodded.

  “Good report, by the way. Very thorough. It was the new girl’s, right?”

  “Yes. I made her do it again, but in the end it was good.” Martina smiled. “The girl seems clever.”

  Any praise coming from Andreu had to be taken seriously.

  “Her record is impeccable,” the superintendent said. “First in her class, unbeatable references from her superiors, courses abroad. Even Rosa, who’s merciless with the newbies, wrote a complimentary report. If I remember correctly, she mentions ‘a natural talent’ for investigation.”

  Just as Martina was preparing to give one of her sarcastically feminist commentaries on the gap in talent and average IQ between the men and women of the force, the phone rang again.

  At that moment, in the station’s front office, the young investigator Leire Castro was using that natural talent to satisfy one of the most striking features of her character: curiosity. She’d proposed having a coffee to one of the agents who’d spent weeks giving her discreet yet friendly smiles. He seemed a good guy, she told herself, and giving him what he wanted made her feel somewhat guilty. But since her arrival at the central police station in Plaça Espanya, the enigma that was Héctor Salgado had been challenging her thirst for knowledge, and today, when she was expecting to see him appear at any moment, she couldn’t take it any more.

  So it was that, after a brief preamble of small-talk, with a black coffee in her hands, controlling the desire to smoke, wearing her best smile, Leire got straight to the point. She couldn’t spend half an hour gossiping in the office.

  “What’s he like? Inspector Salgado, I mean.”

  “You don’t know him? Oh yeah, you arrived just as he started his ‘holiday’.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” he continued. “A normal guy, or so he seemed.” He smiled. “You never know with Argentines.”

  Leire did her best to hide her disappointment. She hated generalizations and the individual with the friendly smile automatically lost points. He must have noticed, because he made an effort to expand on his explanation.

  “A couple of days before it all happened I’d have said he was a calm man. Never raised his voice. Efficient. Stubborn but patient. A good cop . . . Thorough, sleuth-style. But suddenly, boom, his mind clouds over and he goes wild. Left us all dumbfounded, to tell the truth. We’ve enough bad press without an inspector losing his head like that.”

  He was right about that, Leire said to herself. She took advantage of her companion’s silence to ask: “What happened? I know the gist, I read something in the papers, but—”

  “What happened was he lost it. No more, no less.” In this respect the guy seemed to have a firm opinion with no hesitation. “No one says it out loud because he’s the inspector and all that, and the super is very fond of him, but it’s true. He beat that guy half to death. They say he turned in his resignation but the super threw it back in his face. He did order him on a month’s ‘holiday’ until the air cleared. And you know the press haven’t fed on the subject. It could have been much worse.”

  Leire took another sip of coffee. It tasted strange. She’d kill for a cigarette but she’d decided not to smoke her first one until after lunch, at least another four hours away. She breathed deeply, to see if filling her lungs with air killed the nicotine cravings. The trick half worked. Her companion threw his plastic cup in the recycling bin.

  “I’ll deny everything I’ve said if need be,” he said, smiling. “You know, all for one and one for all, like the musketeers. But there are things that aren’t right. Now I’ve got to go: duty calls.”

  “Of course,” she nodded, distracted. “See you later.”

  She stayed a few moments, remembering what she’d read on the subject of Inspector Salgado. In March, barely four months previously, Héctor Salgado had coordinated an operation against the trafficking of women. His team spent a year tracking a criminal gang that made a living bringing in young African girls, principally Nigerians, to fill various brothels in Vallés and Garraf. The younger the better, of course. Those from the East and South America had gone out of fashion: too clever and too demanding. Clients were requesting young, frightened, black girls to satisfy their basest instincts, and the traffickers found themselves more able to control these illiterate, disorientated girls, taken out of extreme poverty with the vague promise of a future that couldn’t be worse than the present. But it was. Sometimes Leire asked herself how they could be so blind. Had they ever seen one of their predecessors come back, having become a rich woman, capable of lifting her family out of misery? No: it was a flight forward, a desperate route down which many were pushed by their own parents and husbands with no choice. A journey, certainly tinged with a mixture of excitement and suspicion, which ended in a nauseating room where the girls learned that hope was something they couldn’t afford. No longer was it about aspiring to a better life; it was about survival. And the pigs manipulating them—a network of criminals and former prostitutes who had ascended in the ranks—used all means available to make them understand why they were there and what their new, repugnant obligations were.

  She felt a vibration in her trouser pocket and took out her private mobile. A red light flashed, signalling a message. On seeing the name of the sender a smile crossed her face. Javier. Five foot eleven, dark eyes, the right quantity of hair on his bronzed torso and a puma tattooed diagonally just below the abs. And to top it all, a nice guy, Leire said to herself, as she opened that little envelope. “Hey, I just woke up and you’re already gone. Why do u always disappear without saying anything? We’ll see each other tonite and tomorrow you make me breakfast? Miss you. Kisses.”

  Leire stared at her mobile for a moment. That was that with Javier. The boy was charming, no doubt, although he wasn’t exactly a spelling whiz. Nor very mature, she thought, looking at her watch. What’s more, something about that message had set off an inner alarm she recognized and had learned to respect, a twinkling flash that went off when certain members of the opposite sex, after a couple of nights of good sex, started asking for explanations and saying they felt like “taking hot chocolate to bed.” Luckily there weren’t many of them. The majority accepted her game without problems, the healthy no-strings sex that she laid out openly. But there was always someone like Javier who didn’t get it. A pity, Leire told herself, as she tapped out an answer at top speed, that he belonged to that small group of men. “Can’t tonight. I’ll call you. By the way, tonight has a ‘g’ and ‘h’ and no ‘e,’ remember that. See you soon!” She re-read the message and in a fit of compassion she deleted the second part before sending it. An unnecessary cruelty, she reproached herself. The small sealed envelope flew through space and she hoped that Javier would know to read between the lines, but just in case she put the mobile on silent before finishing her coffee.

  The last gulp, already half cold, turned her stomach. A cold sweat soaked her forehead. She breathed deeply a second time, while thinking she couldn’t delay any longer. This morning nausea had to have an explanation. This very day you’ll drop into the pharmacy, she ordered herself firmly, although deep down she knew perfectly well there was no need. The answer to her questions lay in a glorious weekend a month before.

  She came back to herself slowly and some minutes later she felt strong enough to return to her desk. She sat down in front of her computer, ready to concentrate on her work,
just as the door of Superintendent Savall’s office was closing.

  The third man in the office might intend to earn his living as a lawyer, but if he were to be judged by his eloquence and capacity for expression, the future before him was a little gloomy. In his defense, he wasn’t in a comfortable position, and neither the superintendent nor Héctor Salgado was making it any easier for him.

  For the fourth time in ten minutes, Damián Fernández wiped away sweat with the same wrinkled tissue before answering a question.

  “I already told you. I saw Dr. Omar the night before last, around nine.”

  “And did you communicate the proposal that I made to him?”

  Héctor didn’t know what proposal Savall was speaking of, but he could imagine it. He threw an appreciative glance at his boss, although anger shone in the depth of his eyes. Any deal in that bastard’s favor, even in return for saving his neck, left his stomach feeling hollow.

  Fernández nodded. He loosened the knot of his tie as if it were strangling him.

  “Every word.” He cleared his throat. “I told him . . . I told him he didn’t have to accept it. That you had very little on him anyway.” He must have noticed the rage rising in the superintendent’s face but he justified himself immediately. “It’s the truth. With that girl dead, nothing links him to the trafficking . . . They can’t even accuse you of malpractice when you don’t pretend to be a doctor. If they locked you up for that, they’d have to lock up all the fortune-tellers, quacks and holy men in Barcelona . . . the prison couldn’t hold them all. But,” he hastened to say, “I emphasized that the police could be very insistent and, since he was already recovering from the assault,” and saying that word he directed a rapid and nervous glance toward Inspector Salgado, who didn’t turn a hair, “maybe the best thing would be to forget the whole thing . . .”

  The superintendent inhaled deeply.

  “And did you convince him?”

  “I think so . . . Well,” he corrected himself, “the truth is that he just said he’d think it over. And he’d call me the following day to give me an answer.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “No. I called his clinic yesterday, various times, but no one answered. That didn’t surprise me. The doctor doesn’t take calls while he’s working.”

  “So you decided to go to see him first thing this morning?”

  “Yes. I had to have an answer for you, and well . . .” he hesitated, “it’s not as if I have much to do these days.”

  Not for the foreseeable future either, Savall and Salgado thought in unison, but they said nothing.

  “And you went. About nine.”

  Fernández nodded. He swallowed. Pallor was too poetic a word to describe the color of his face.

  “Do you have any water?”

  The superintendent exhaled.

  “Not in here. We’re almost finished. Continue, Señor Fernández, please.”

  “It wasn’t even nine. The bus came immediately and—”

  “Get to the point, please!”

  “Yes. Yes. What I was saying was that, although it was a bit early, I went up anyway and when I went to knock on the door, I saw it was ajar.” He stopped. “Well, I thought I could go in; at the end of the day, maybe something had happened to him.” He swallowed once more; the tissue came apart in his hands when he tried to use it again. “It smelled . . . it smelled strange. Rotten. I called him as I went toward his office, at the end of the corridor . . . That door was ajar as well and . . . I pushed it. Christ!”

  The rest he’d already described at the beginning, his face distorted, before Héctor arrived. The pig’s head on the desk. Blood everywhere. And not a trace of the doctor.

  “Just what we needed,” muttered the super as soon as the nervous lawyer had left the office. “We’ll go back to having the press biting us like vultures.”

  Héctor thought the vultures were hardly biting, but he stopped himself commenting. In any case, he wouldn’t have had time because Savall picked up the receiver and called an extension. Half a minute later, Sergeant Andreu was coming into the office. Martina didn’t know what was happening, but she guessed by her boss’s face it was nothing good, so after winking at Héctor by way of a greeting, she got ready to listen. If the news Savall gave her surprised her as much as it had them, she hid it well. She listened attentively, asked a couple of pertinent questions, and left to carry out her orders. Héctor’s eyes followed her. He almost started on hearing his name.

  “Héctor. Listen carefully because I’m only saying this once. I’ve risked my neck for you. I’ve defended you to the press and the brass. I’ve pulled out all the stops to bury this business. And I’m on the verge of convincing that guy to drop the charges. But if you go near that flat, if you intervene in this investigation even for one minute, I won’t be able to do anything. Understood?”

  Héctor crossed one leg over the other. His intense concentration showed in his face.

  “It’s my head on the chopping-block,” he finally said. “Don’t you think I’ve a right to know why they are cutting it off?”

  “You lost it, Héctor. The same day you came to blows with that swine you gave up your rights. Now you’re facing the consequences.”

  The thing was, Héctor knew all this but at that moment he didn’t care. He couldn’t even manage to repent: the blows he’d showered on Omar seemed to him just and deserved. It was as if the serious Inspector Salgado had regressed to his youth in a Buenos Aires barrio, when disagreements were resolved by punching each other to shit at the school gates. When you’d go home with a split lip but say you’d been hit in the face playing football. A burst of rebellion was still pricking him in the chest: an absurd, break-my-balls thing, decidedly immature for a cop just turned forty-three.

  “And no one remembers the girl?” asked Héctor bitterly. A poor defense, but it was the only one he had.

  “Let’s see if you get this into your head, Salgado.” To his regret, Savall had raised his voice. “As far as we know, there wasn’t the least contact between Dr. Omar and the girl in question after the flat where the girls were kept was taken apart. We couldn’t even show there was any beforehand without the girl’s word. She was in the centre for minors. Somehow they managed to do . . . that . . . to them.”

  Héctor nodded.

  “I know the facts, chief.”

  But the facts didn’t manage to convey the horror. The intensely panicked face of a little girl, even in death. Kira wasn’t fifteen, didn’t speak a word of Spanish or of any language other than her own and yet she’d managed to make herself heard. She was slight, very slim and in her smooth, doll-like face her eyes shone, a color somewhere between amber and chestnut that he’d never seen before. Like the others, Kira had taken part in a ceremony before leaving her country in search of a better future. They called them ju-ju rites, in which, after drinking water used to wash a corpse, the young girls offered pubic hair or menstrual blood, which was collected before an altar. They then promised never to report their traffickers, to pay the supposed debts incurred by their journey and generally to obey without question. The punishment for whoever did not comply with these promises was a horrible death, for her or for the relatives she’d left behind. Kira suffered it herself: nobody would have said so fragile a body could contain so much blood. Héctor tried to block the image from his mind, that same vision that at the time had made him lose his head and go in search of Dr. Omar to extract every bone from his body. That individual’s name had come up during the investigation: in theory his only function had been to attend to the girls’ health. But the fear betrayed by the girls on hearing his name indicated that the doctor’s duties went further than purely medical attention. Not one had dared speak of him. He took precautions and the girls were brought to his clinic individually or in pairs. The most he could be accused of was of not asking questions, and that was a very weak accusation for a witch doctor who ran a squalid clinic and tended to illegal immigrants. But that wasn’t e
nough for Héctor; he’d chosen to lean on the youngest, the most frightened, with the help of an interpreter. All it had achieved was that Kira said, in a very quiet voice, that the doctor had examined her to check whether she was still a virgin and in passing he’d reminded her that she must do what those men said. Nothing else. The following day, her child’s hand took up a pair of scissors and made her body a fountain of blood. In Héctor’s eighteen years in the police force he’d never seen anything like it, and he’d seen a lot: from junkies without a healthy piece of skin to inject into, to victims of every type of violence. But nothing like this. A macabre, perverse sensation emanated from Kira’s mutilated body, something unreal which he couldn’t put into words. Something belonging to the realm of nightmares.

  “Another thing,” Savall continued, as if the previous point had already been agreed without argument. “Before being reinstated, you have to attend some sessions with a force psychologist. It’s mandatory. Your first appointment is tomorrow at eleven. So do what you can to appear sane. Starting with a shave.”

  Héctor didn’t protest; in fact, he already knew. Suddenly, and in spite of all the good resolutions he’d made on the long flight back, he didn’t give a shit about any of it. Any of it except the bloody pig’s head.

  “Can I go?”

  “One moment. I don’t want statements to the press, not even a hint of one. As far as you’re concerned, all of this is ongoing and you have no comment. Have I made myself clear?”

  Seeing Héctor nod, Savall exhaled and smiled. Salgado got up, ready to leave, but the superintendent didn’t seem disposed to let him go yet.

  “How was Buenos Aires?”

  “Well, you know . . . it’s like the Perito Moreno glacier: from time to time it looks like it’s going to fall to pieces but the block stays firm.”

  “It’s a fantastic city. And you’ve put on weight!”

  “Too many barbecues. Each Sunday I had one in a different friend’s house. It’s difficult to resist.” The phone on Savall’s desk rang again and Héctor wanted to take advantage of the moment to get out of that office once and for all.