by Pablo Poveda
“But that bastard — ”
“You’ll be taken to prison for him. That’s what they want.”
“Can’t you see? Fuck you! Cornelius can’t get away with this.”
“You’re blinded by hatred,” he said. “You need help.”
Blanca and Cornelius got out of sight.
Rojo relieved the pressure on my arms and let go of me.
For a moment, I looked at the policeman and realized the tension and despair in his eyes and countenance. How had he gotten there? How had I found the officer there? I wondered about Violeta, Clara, and Blanca. Why was I still obsessing over Blanca? She was an adult and did not correspond my feelings for her. I turned around and looked at the human swarm a few meters away from us. They behaved like a group of viscous and slippery larvae. I did not recognize my species, famished and lustful.
At that moment, porn was but a child’s play.
13
There I was once again, sitting at the desk by the picture of that woman. The Spanish flag was in the same spot where I had seen it the last time. My hands held a cup of Gatorade. Rojo’s office would eventually turn into my second home. He walked in, coffee in hand, and sat in front of me. He smelled of tobacco, I could tell from the trail he left behind. I felt like smoking too. He walked to the window and looked outside. He made sure we were not being watched and lowered the blinds. What was the officer doing there? Was he part of the Silent Brotherhood? He sat at the desk, spun on the chair, and turned on the screen of his desktop computer. He opened a drawer in a filing cabinet nearby, took out a folder with documents, and placed it before me.
He sighed and sipped from his coffee.
“Open it,” he ordered.
So I did. I started looking through the files in the binder without much interest. Most of them were reports written by him or other police officers. Complaints, news clipped from the press, and some photographs of missing people.
“What is this?” I asked.
“We have been investigating them for some time. I took over the case several months ago.”
That sounded very personal. That woman’s photograph, Rojo’s ex-wife. Everything was strange and confusing. I kept looking. I found pictures of Rocamora’s remains. The first picture showed a dismembered body, torn to pieces by the blades of the grinder. His flesh was cut as though he had run into an airplane propeller. Unrecognizable. Dramatic. I could not see the rest; they were appalling. I put them aside and went on. Then I found pictures of Estrella, lying on the floor, with that fallen-angel face that she always had. Poor Estrella, she deserved better than that death. In the first pictures, she was dressed the way I had found her in the apartment. The rest were part of the coroner’s report and the autopsy. I felt nauseated. Estrella was no longer her, but a cold, lifeless body without an expression or heartbeat. She had been stabbed several times in the flank. That detail sounded familiar, as though I had seen it somewhere else.
Then I saw him.
Antonio Hidalgo. The late rector. My friend.
His neck was bruised, and his face seemed to cry for help like the floor were sinking under his feet.
His jaw was dislodged, and his eyes bulged out of their sockets, almost white. A blow of pain hit me in the back of the head. A jackhammer pounded through my heart. I felt my stomach freeze, and a fire growing inside. I put the photographs down and took a long drink of Gatorade. Rojo studied my reaction.
In the binder, there were also documents related to Hidalgo, Clara, and Rocamora — invoices, registers, and taxing addresses.
“What am I supposed to make of all of this?” I asked.
The police officer observed me. He wanted to see my reaction. He walked back to the cabinet and produced a box. It was the small metal box that Clara kept in the apartment. It was there. The truth was in front of me. As I reached for the box, Rojo clutched it, protecting it from me.
“What do you make of all this?” he asked as though he was laying a riddle for me to answer.
“There is nothing to deduce,” I responded. “You have to stop this. It’s not even fun anymore.”
“You need my help,” he said. “And I need yours.”
Bang!
“Really?” I enunciated, feeling like a peacock spreading its feathers. “How come, Officer?”
“You can either help me,” — he gave me an ultimatum — “or go back to your cell. This time around, no one will bail you out.”
“Wait — ”
“No,” he sentenced. “I’m not waiting any longer. You don’t know it yet, but — ”
“Stop. Keep it to yourself — ”
“this people have been using you,” he continued. “They have done as they will with you.”
I felt a gap open on the floor. I pictured lava spurting from the floor at my feet. It felt as though my chair was plummeting to the void, and I melted because of the infernal heat. I could barely hear what the police officer was telling me. I was too proud to understand that someone had been manipulating me, using me like a gas-station chamois.
“Since when?”
“Rocamora’s calling you was no accident,” he said with a hint of guilt concealed in his words. “He was well aware of who you were.”
“Of course. Hidalgo told him to call me,” I replied upset. “He was looking for help.”
“No, he wasn’t,” he sentenced. I felt like a child lost in the woods, incapable to understand adult logic. What was there for me to understand? I knew the facts. “Rocamora called you because Hidalgo told him to — ”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
“He knew you’d agree — ”
“He was my friend.”
“So, he betrayed you,” the policeman concluded.
“What?”
“Hidalgo betrayed you,” he continued. “You were a pawn in his scheme, but the plan backfired.”
“I’m not following,” I said.
I could feel the bubbles popping at my feet. My pores began to sweat pure stupor.
“Come with me.” He stood up and gestured me to follow him. We walked to another room where there was a laptop plugged into a projector and blue chairs set in rows. It was a conference room. He proceeded to insert a thumb drive into the computer and opened a file. A blurry imaged was projected on the wall. Seconds later, the projector focused automatically.
On the screen, there was a chart with the structure of the Silent Brotherhood. Rojo had done his homework. His chart was far more comprehensive than mine. There were connections and faces. There was a picture of every single subject under surveillance. Cornelius was the head of the group and was connected to a question mark on the diagram. Was this a cell? Rojo’s chart was similar to mine; I just had forgotten to include a crucial subject in all this story, me. At first glance, I was terrified to see how all the links connected to me — Clara, Blanca, Hidalgo, Violeta, Cornelius. There were other people I had never seen in my life and whose pictures were black and white, in the understanding that they no longer were part of the organization.
“Take a deep breath,” the policeman said. “You must feel frustrated.”
“You have managed to surprise me,” I replied and sat down on a chair.
The structure was pyramidal. Rocamora and Hidalgo, along with three other members, conformed a conglomerate of businessmen and high-profile people. A dark-haired man with a mustache and black thick-framed glasses was the director in chief of a famous national newspaper. In turn, this man had been Blanca’s supervisor during her studies and at her first job. Coincidentally, the man in thick-framed glasses and mustache happened to be friends with Ortiz, my editor-in-chief, who also happened to be Hidalgo’s friend. The rector was connected to a group of businessmen in the food and railing industries, who regularly made donations for the university and hired students for summer jobs and internships.
Between Blanca and Cornelius there were less than seven levels. In the past, I had heard that theory that we were all related on a seven-
degree scale. Whether it was intentional or not, Rojo’s chart demonstrated that the seven-degree theory might be accurate, and the world was a used handkerchief full of squashed snot. My head was spinning. Who was Blanca Desastres? What did he intend to do by showing me all that? The web extended farther.
“Where is Clara Montenegro?” I asked. “I don’t see her.”
“There is no Clara Montenegro,” he responded. He walked toward the projector. “The person you are looking for is Sasha Bonilova; she is Ukrainian, but disappeared in Finland.”
“You are trying to confuse me.” Rojo pointed at a blue-eyed blonde who was definitely not Clara. Clara’s hair was brown. “What about the language? She doesn’t even have an accent.”
“People from Eastern countries find Spanish easy to learn,” he explained. “Besides, she is a perfectionist, a chameleon.”
“This is madness,” I said. The last weeks had been a lie. I needed time to assimilate it. “Now you’ll tell me she’s a KGB agent.”
“No,” he replied. “She’s Cornelius’s former sex partner.”
I looked at the chart again.
“But Clara had an affair with Hidalgo,” I said. “It was her who dragged him in all this.”
“I have my theories,” the policeman replied, “but they are not clear, there are many loose ends, too much information that escapes me — ”
“Why don’t you imprison them?” I asked. “And put an end to all of this.”
“I can’t prove anything,” he explained. “Nothing is conclusive, and the prosecution would side with them. I’ll get a search warrant when I am certain as to what to do.”
“You have Cornelius. What else do you need?”
“That’s the wrong approach, Gabriel,” he replied. “My mission is to find the mind behind the murders, not to dismantle a group of people who get together to have orgies. It may sound unethical, but that’s not what I’m here for.”
“So, you’re going to let them continue brainwashing people — ”
“There’ll be time for everything. First, we must find who killed the Estrella, Rocamora, and Hidalgo.”
“Rocamora killed himself. I saw him with my own eyes. And he killed the Estrella. Hidalgo hanged himself in the apartment. There’s everything.”
“No,” Rojo replied. “Much like you, they were undergoing a brainwashing process.”
“Pardon me?” I said. Rojo had a glimpse at the picture of the woman and the child on his desk. He touched the frame and sighed. “Is that your family?”
“Yes,” he answered with a slight faltering in his voice. “It’s my wife... I don’t know whether she’s alive or not. She disappeared years ago. She left us.”
“I’m sorry,” I uttered. That was the proper thing to say. “Have you heard from her?”
“No, she fell in the cobweb of a cult... I think I am to blame.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The usual stuff,” he explained. “It was a time when work consumed me. We had just had a baby, and her world turned upside down. I suggested she take up yoga, sports, you know... Anything but staying home. She didn’t know how to handle solitude. Once, I caught her reading a brochure that a newly-divorced friend of hers had given her. It was about chi kung mixed with universal energy and whatnot. I thought it was a bunch of bullshit, but she seemed to have her hopes up.”
“Was it the Silent Brotherhood?” I asked him at the time I had a sip of Gatorade.
“No. It was a different sect, but in the end, it was more of the same. After the first sessions, she was calmer. Getting to know new people and bonding with others sounded like a good idea, but there was something fishy to it, you know?
“There is always a leader. These sons of bitches always follow the same scheme. There is always a totem, pastor, or incarnation of a supreme being. The brainwashing begins from day one, little by little, opening your intellectual hunger. There goes the first spoonful, then the second. You don’t even realize it, but the poison is already inside of you.
“First, you start seeing the world differently — full of potential and mysticism. Everything turns a different shade; you are no longer alone; you share your ideas, the others listen to you and reinforce the message, which begins to reflect in your beliefs. The process continues while they tell you that you are undertaking a purely individual journey of your own, so you become unaware of their manipulation.
“Then the meetings start, you meet the leader. One day, coincidentally, you receive unexpected help from them. You wonder how they knew that you needed that kind of help. Then they ask you for a favor of utmost importance, and you can’t refuse because they are your life — more important than your family, your friends, your child.
“One day, the leader comes to you and asks for something you can’t refuse because you are the first one who wants to satisfy his needs. By then, hypnosis is no longer needed, for there is no more powerful enchantment than embracing of your own distorted reality.
“She disappeared, along ten other women — amongst whom was Sasha Bonilova — one morning in 2001. They all left a note, a letter to their families, asking them not to look for them and to forget about them. They were leaving of their own accord, aware of what they were leaving behind and carrying their beloved ones in their hearts. The letters were meant to prevent the police from starting a search protocol, but we did it anyway.”
“How did it end?” I asked. Officer Rojo was shedding his layers like an onion before me. His story was heartrending.
“We found five of the women,” he continued. “Well, their corpses.”
“Were they murdered?”
“No,” he said. “They took their own lives out of free will. They appeared in Galicia, at the bottom of a cliff. They jumped off the edge. I suppose that, at some point, they recovered from the trance, and upon realizing the cult had abducted them, decided that suicide was the best way to cope with — ”
“Was she among them?” I asked.
“No, she wasn’t,” said the policeman resignedly. “She must’ve decided to carry on along with the other five. You know? When I heard they had been found, I wished she was one of them and put an end to all of this. It pains me to think that she is still alive and can’t find it in her to return to her son.”
“That’s a fucked-up story,” I replied, trying to demonstrate sympathy.
“I doubt everyone who joins this kind of organizations is a victim,” he responded in a severe tone. “For many, it’s their salvation. Families are self-centered, absorbing, and demanding; we are taught to think the opposite, but not everyone who escapes one does it because they’ve been brainwashed. Learning this cost me dearly, but I have to acknowledge it.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“That we find the murderer,” he answered with conviction. “This girl, Estrella. Did you really know her?”
“Yes... she didn’t deserve such a fate,” I replied disheartened.
“Indeed.”
“What made you change your mind?” I asked confused. “What convinced you that I didn’t do it?”
“The box.”
“Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed. “What the hell is in that goddamn box?”
“Photographs, hand-written letters, emails...” he said. “We found key information to reconstruct the chart.”
“Can I have a look?” I asked. Curiosity gnawed on my marrow.
“Sure,” he agreed. “You might be able to spot something we missed.”
He turned off the projector, and we left the room.
By then, the headquarters had emptied. Someone had turned off the lights of the corridor and the rest of the offices.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“This is odd,” he said. He flipped the switch, but the lights would not turn on. “The fuse-box might have shorted, wait here.”
The policeman gave several strides forward. I heard the rubber of his boots against the floor at every step. When he approached the
entrance, a door opened toward him, smashing him against the wall. The blow resonated loudly.
“What the fuck!” Rojo shouted, from the tiles of the floor. “Freeze!”
“Officer!” I shouted and ran to him.
I could hardly see anything.
Someone left the office swiftly. We heard their steps. Amidst the gloom, I helped Rojo to stand up.
“Run, go after him!” he told me.
Blinded, I ran in a straight line, fumbling the wall with my fingertips. I heard policemen chatting at the main door, but everything was dark, and the only source of light was the lampposts on the street.
“What the fuck!” Rojo shouted at the dumbfounded officers. “What the hell are you doing? Seize him!”
The officers’ confused murmur filled the foyer. Two police officers raced to a patrol car and darted away. The blackout had taken everyone by surprise. The lights went back on, and Rojo ran to his office. I followed him.
“I knew it,” he said. “Shit!”
They had taken the box.
“Only the killer could be interested in the box,” I mentioned. “This isn’t the first time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They tried to run me over,” I explained. “I had an appointment with Clara shortly after you found Hidalgo hanged. She told me where to find the box and gave me a set of keys. I intended to fetch the box that afternoon, but someone had followed me. They tried to hit me with a car.”
“What happened then?”
“Blanca showed up on a scooter,” I replied. “Had she not been around — ”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“I don’t know. I was afraid, I suppose,” I replied. “Clara told me the contents of the box would clear me.”
“Why did she do it?”
“She said that she sought justice.”
“For Hidalgo?”
“Yes, but I’m starting to think there is more to it than she told me.”
“We have to interrogate her.”
“It’s not that easy,” I replied. “She always calls from a different phone number.”
“We’ll bait her,” Rojo sentenced. “Then we’ll trace her.”
