A chime announced the end of the intermission. Guzmán returned to his seat. The music had left him in a daze. Gloria seemed tired; she had to be, she was really giving it everything. He gazed at her red fingertips, her fingers still flitting about, all by themselves, as though they had trouble keeping still after the performance.
He had no trouble making it to her dressing room after the concert. Flowers open more doors than picklocks. Guzmán knew Gloria liked calla lilies. She’d worn them on her wedding day twenty years ago, and the day she had signed the divorce papers, several months after her son’s death. But the fake credentials claiming he was a reporter with Allegro magazine conferred an advantage that would vanish the moment she realized he knew nothing about music. Unaware of exactly what he was looking for, Guzmán sensed that this was very much like making his way blindly through a minefield, trusting that luck would keep him from stepping on one. And despite what the scars on his body suggested, he was a lucky guy.
Gloria was smoothing her hair, and greeted him without much enthusiasm.
After introductions, they chatted for a bit, and following the inevitable questions and clichés, Guzmán began to narrow the conversation, in ever-shrinking concentric circles, toward Gloria’s personal life. Why was she retiring now? Was it over the death of her son three-and-a-half years ago? And so on. The woman was slippery, Guzmán thought. Didn’t pull a face, didn’t fluster in the slightest, but also didn’t give anything away. He’d have liked interrogating her in the basement of La Moneda palace a few years ago.
“What’s your view of Arthur Fernández?”
Gloria eyed him coldly.
“What would your view of the man who killed your son be?”
“But from what I understand, it was an accident. An unfortunate coincidence.”
“A coincidence that took my son’s life.”
Guzmán apologized. He was about to end that first gentle foray, before his insistence made her suspicious, when there came a knock on the door.
A man appeared, a man looking like a sour civil servant, more doughy than fat. Though he tried to hide it, straightening up as tall as he could, Guzmán realized that he had a slight limp on the right side. He had brought flowers, a bouquet of orchids. You slipped up, my friend, Guzmán thought. Gloria hated orchids. But to his surprise she complimented the flowers and gave him an affectionate peck on the cheek.
“Let me introduce my good friend, Eduardo. He’s a great painter—he was very successful in the past, and I have no doubt he will be again.”
Guzmán shook Eduardo’s limp hand—the man’s name rang no bells. His interest in painting was as non-existent as it was in music. Still, the conversation immediately took an interesting turn. Eduardo mentioned he’d seen a couple of government officials loading up the violin Gloria had played during the concert. He said it with sorrow.
“They must have paid quite a hefty sum, for you to get rid of it,” Guzmán said, hazarding a guess.
“No more than it cost me to get it back, I can assure you.”
“And how did you come to get it back?”
“That’s one of those stories filled with coincidences. Funnily enough, it was a friend of my husband’s who came across it at an auction in Vienna five years ago. It was in very poor shape, as though out of our care it had been treated like a common, everyday object. The violin’s neck, which my grandfather broke, had been repaired, but it wasn’t the same; it was just some soulless everyday object. Through that friend of my husband’s, I got in touch with one of the best luthiers in Madrid and had him undertake a complete restoration.”
“That’s a lot of effort to only play it for five years.”
Gloria and Eduardo exchanged a knowing glance.
“Regardless, it’s part of the national patrimony now, and that’s a good thing. It’s late and I’m tired, Señor Guzmán. I’m grateful for your attention but I think that’s enough for today.”
“Seems like an interesting story for an article. The Trajectory of El Español: from the fields of Hungary to the display case of Madrid’s Palacio Real.”
This time, Eduardo was the one to offer a weary comment, saying that it struck him as a rather pompous title. Guzmán shot him a look that suggested he was nothing but a bird dropping that had landed on his shoulder. He seriously did not like that sack of shit.
“Maybe so, but it’s a worthwhile story.” He turned to Gloria. “I won’t take up any more of your time. Just one more thing—would it be possible for me to speak to your husband,” he asked intentionally, knowing that Gloria was divorced, “and his friend, the one who found the violin in Vienna?”
“My husband is in Australia directing a film, and I don’t think he’ll be back for at least six months.”
“Strange for him not to have attended your farewell concert,” Guzmán noted, feigning ignorance.
Gloria touched her knee nervously.
“You don’t know the Welsh.”
“What about his friend? Do you know his name?”
Gloria nodded.
“I can give you his name, but I don’t think it’ll do you much good: Magnus Olsen. From what I understand, he committed suicide a few years ago.”
Guzmán shot her a look of surprise.
“The head of GRETR investment group? I read about his racket and subsequent prosecution in the press. The tsunami his firm’s bankruptcy unleashed hit Chilean companies, too. Though it’s hard to believe someone would kill themselves over a few million euros that weren’t even theirs.”
“What makes you say that?” Eduardo asked. “Maybe remorse got the better of him. He brought entire families, thousands of them, to ruin.”
Eduardo noted the way Guzmán’s lips turned dark and glassy as he let out a growl that was supposed to be a snigger.
“This is the twenty-first century, and we’re not in Japan, my friend,” Guzmán said, flashing him a look like the blade of a knife. “Executives here don’t commit suicide when they lead their companies to disaster—they take the money and run, move to a tax haven and let everyone else take the hit. There’s no such thing as dignity in the business world; results are all that matters. Regardless, he took his secrets to the grave—or to hell, which is where I imagine all speculators end up.”
He turned to Gloria.
“Your husband is Ian Mackenzie, the film director. What would he be doing with a friend like Olsen, a speculator?”
“You’ll have to ask him that when he gets back from Australia,” Gloria replied, not batting an eye.
“I’ll do that. Thanks again for your time.”
Guzmán walked in silence, passing a homeless man writing something on the wall: SIT TIBI TERRA LEVIS—“may the earth rest lightly on you.” What a tragic sentence, a sort of condemnation to unhappiness. Guzmán had once believed that the world expected something of him. A stroke of genius that might bring him closer to the kind of immortality aspired to by painters, musicians, and film directors who got to spend their time working in Australia. Now he knew that was not the case. No one expected anything of him at all. He was common, everyday, like any other guy, a fraud hiding behind a name, a face that would go through life unnoticed. The only thing the world expected of him was a definitive downfall.
And so he thought of Candela. She was his last train to dignity.
* * *
—
Come on, Paco. Don’t be a dumbfuck. Come clean. This could go on all night.”
Bosco was losing patience. “Bosco” was his boss’s nickname at DINA, the national intelligence directorate—he’d gotten it because his hellish view of the world brought to mind the Dutch painter Bosch’s canvases, which he had a soft spot for. He had liked Guzmán, they’d worked together for years. But at night, the Atacama desert got so cold it put them all in a foul mood, and Bosco and his men just wanted to go home.
“Where’s the girl?” As he repeated the question yet again, he delivered a swift kick to his ribs, hard yet restrained. Guzmán could barely move, his hands and feet staked to the ground. He knew Bosco could kick a lot harder than that. He was a good guy, despite it all. He had to prove before his men that there’s nothing worse than a traitor, but at the same time he didn’t want to make it more painful than necessary.
Guzmán wasn’t going to talk. He knew it, Bosco knew it, and his men knew it, too. But they had to follow protocol. Cruelty and violence need to follow an established course in order to achieve results. At the officers’ school they’d been taught how important it was not to let your instincts guide you. We’re not animals, we’re professionals, the interrogation instructor would often repeat, before explaining how much voltage a man can take to the testicles, or a woman can tolerate from an electrode in the anus.
Formalities were important to Bosco. He didn’t see himself as a butcher, didn’t even remove the suede jacket he always wore, or loosen his tie like a two-bit goon. He barely even mussed his hair when beating the living daylights out of whomever he had to; he even offered his victims a bit of clemency, speaking in a soft slow voice, making them think mercy was possible—sometimes their vain hope provided the final push, lurching them into terror, loosening their tongues. Bosco was the hatchet man with the most confessions under his belt.
Guzmán had been his right-hand man—who now found himself tied and staked to the ground by his old colleagues, as his boss approached with the blowtorch they always kept in the trunk of the old blue Chevrolet with Santiago plates. Guzmán knew what came next; two days earlier some other poor wretch—some poor guy who was now six feet under a mound of red earth—had felt its flame on his skin. And Guzmán himself had been the one who slowly burned his face.
Screaming in the desert is demoralizing. There’s no echo. Your voice has no obstacles to bounce off, and so is simply lost in the night. There’s no one around to help you, and even if there were, they certainly wouldn’t dare approach the circle of light cast by the Chevy’s headlights.
“A Spaniard? Some skinny bitch with no tits? That’s who you’re going through this for?” Bosco’s voice was wriggling into his brain like a snake. It was a pomade that soothed his burning hand, the singed hair giving off a smell like fried pork skins, nails hanging off his fingers. The bastard was good, Guzmán had to grant him that. You almost felt sorry for him, almost believed that the whole thing disgusted him, the way he covered his mouth with a handkerchief, feigning a well-rehearsed look of horror. Bosco could have just taken out his Beretta and shot him. But Guzmán wasn’t going to get off that easily. That would come later, at the end, and it might not even be necessary. Maybe they’d beat and burn him to death first.
There could be no dissent among the ranks of DINA. No one would have batted an eye at his going down to the basement every night to interrogate the Basque woman that they’d nabbed at the planetarium. The victim’s cries, the grunting of a tormentor raping her, those were normal, despite the guards’ disgust with her body—a bag of bones, no tits. And that was precisely what put them on alert. The silence. When Guzmán went down to the basement there was no music.
“How could you be such an idiot? Falling in love with a prisoner! That kind of shit happens in soap operas, not in real life—and not to one of my best fucking men, God dammit!”
Candela must have been long gone by then, following the trails crisscrossing the desert that everyone said was uncrossable. But nothing is impossible when you’ve got an iron will to live. She was safe in the hands of some bootleggers who brought in drugs and weapons, taking routes that only they knew. At that time of night, beneath that same sky, she must be nearing salvation, foot by foot, minute by minute. All under the same starry sky. Follow Capricorn, the goat, he’d told her. And she’d looked at him with her extraordinary eyes, such a tiny thing, terrified, all eyes. Where’s Capricorn? she’d asked. Up there, east of Sagittarius. It was easy to see, they were in early August and all you had to do was draw a straight line over from Vega, crossing the Milky Way until you got to Algedi and Dabih, the horns of the goat.
And there he was, gazing south of the equator. There is no place on earth more beautiful than the Atacama desert, and no place like its night sky to make you feel both connected to and apart from the universe. Even the horrific pain of a knife slicing through your foreskin can seem like it will come to an end. But in order to endure the pain, you have to keep from fainting, keep your tears from blurring the hundreds of thousands of stars twinkling in the sky above your twitching face. It doesn’t matter if you shout; no one is going to hear you, even up there. But unlike the silence of the agony down below, the indifference of the heavens is a promise of peace. Soon it will end, and it will all disappear.
“Got to cauterize that, we don’t want you to bleed to death like a little piggy. Come on, man, don’t be an arsehole. If I don’t get that bitch back I’ll be demoted for having trusted you. And we can’t have that, my friend. My family’s got to eat, my kids go to that fucking English school that costs an arm and a leg.”
Guzmán listened to Bosco—the man actually sounded miserable, the blade in his hand, his hands bleeding. He’d put on rubber gloves and rolled up his sleeves for this. He could have had the others do it but he didn’t want things to get out of hand, didn’t want them to slip up as they cut. Lacerating a penis is like peeling an apple, you have to do it all in one piece, without letting it fall off. Guzmán knew that—he personally had helped increase the ranks of secret eunuchs crowding the universities and secret meeting halls throughout half of Latin America and Spain. He was almost glad Bosco had taken the reins.
Look up at the sky, he told himself. Don’t listen to your screams. It doesn’t matter if they rip off your finger. The smell of burning flesh at his crotch, blood evaporating in the blowtorch’s heat. Don’t die, look up, look up at the sky. Is that one Orion? Is that one…?
He wished he could have found Capricorn.
He wished he hadn’t betrayed Candela to save his own life, at the cost of his penis, an amputated finger and a horrifically burned hand.
Guzmán clucked his tongue, scornful. He was getting old, thinking too much about the past—and that was the sign of a small future.
It was time to get to work.
* * *
—
He didn’t have much trouble finding Mía Börjn, despite the fact that she’d changed her name to Irena Wlörking in an attempt to be less identifiable. In a half-empty Costa Dorada town, it wasn’t often you came across women over six-feet tall, looking like Nordic models. The blonde—that was what they called her when he’d gone into a bar to ask; she lived in “the ghost town.” No one knew she was Magnus Olsen’s widow, and they’d probably never even heard her husband’s name anyway. People live in ignorance—and that made things easier for guys like Guzmán.
You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out how that part of the planned community had gotten its nickname. A collection of half-built homes perched on a hill far from the town’s center. Abandoned cranes swayed lazily against their counterweights like colossal weathervanes, and everywhere were piles of debris, construction materials, chain-link fencing and rusted promotional signs featuring a virtual re-creation of what was supposed to have been paradise on earth: streets paved with blacktop, parks full of palms and exotic trees, water features with spouting fountains, swimming pools and Mediterranean gardens, rosy-cheeked children, smiling mothers, well-trained dogs, and fathers who looked proud and satisfied beside their enormous all-terrain vehicles. All that remained of that dream was the air of a nuclear holocaust, the crusty neglect of all that would soon be completely taken over by overgrown brush and garbage. Although Phase One of the construction had been completed, there couldn’t have been more than a dozen villas, which had clearly been eked out just before the real estate collapse.
Mía—or Irena
, as she now called herself—lived in the house closest to the scenic Mediterranean overlook. Despite the fact that the house looked luxurious, it wasn’t, not at all. The front gate was rusted and didn’t close properly, and Guzmán could see that where the intercom should have been was nothing but a gaping hole—the device had never been hooked up—so he simply pushed open the gate, which yielded with a creak. The front yard was unfinished, a wasteland of unpruned shrubs, overgrown plants and a prairie of tall weedy grass. In one corner lay a bicycle and a few toys strewn around. Behind the house, he heard children’s voices and let himself be guided by them, making his way to the back. Beside the pool stood a statuesque woman fishing leaves from the bottom of the pool with a long pole.
“Mrs. Olsen?”
The woman looked up. Why on earth they’d called her the blonde he had no idea. Her skin was dark as a Tuareg and she had jet-black hair, short with long bangs, though it could have been dyed.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice hostile. Her expression was less than friendly. The woman had a perfect face, taut skin; she’d certainly had work done. It was clear that she was far older than she appeared at first glance. Still, she must have been pretty—very pretty, in fact—when she was young; and she still could have been, had she been willing to age naturally over time, rather than fight it with the scalpel. But that was what rich businessmen who bought women like her valued: high cheekbones, wrinkle-free necks, enormous erect breasts, thighs and hips free of flab. Homogeneity, in short—uniformity, and the recognition of their superiority over mere mortals. Guzmán imagined that this woman had been little more than a possession, an expensive piece in Olsen’s collection of exotic objects. The two children running around nearby—blond, almost albino, staring at him with the budding animosity they’d learned at elitist private schools—had been her insurance, her guarantee that he couldn’t simply kick her out of paradise when he got bored and decided to exchange her for a newer and more exiting model, like he did with his sports cars.
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