Alyssa Grifero had come up with a plan.
In the women's bathroom of Terminal 4 at the Madrid airport, the young fugitive looked at the Nokia anxiously. Her situation was desperate. Her heart almost stopped when suddenly the cell phone began to ring to the beat of Pretty Woman. It was an incoming call.
"It's a sign," she told herself as she checked the identity of the source.
Jaime Vergara was trying to communicate with his friend, only this time she was not the one behind the device. Alyssa waited for the last ring to ring, then counted to ten. Unusual excitement invaded her body. She pressed a key and began to write a text message.
María Vergara raised her eyebrows, almost at noon, when she saw her brother leaving his room completely disheveled and still yawning. Jaime's apartment was located in the neighborhood of Tetuán, a few steps from the roundabout of Cuzco and right above a post office. María had spent the night in the guest room.
She glanced at the digital clock of the living room DVD player. It was eleven twenty, and María was waiting for breakfast together. He said good morning, stretched and dragged his bare feet toward the bathroom.
“What do you want for breakfast?” She asked as he came out, somewhat cleaner. Immediately he realized that he was being rude. “Sorry, I wanted to be in bed lazing and I didn’t feel like talking.”
"Don’t be silly little brother! Come on let's have breakfast, I'm starving.”
María got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen.
“Do you want some toast with grated tomato?” She said as she took two cups from the cupboard. “Coffee?” She suggested. “It is freshly made.”
Jaime nodded, rubbing his eyes.
"They just named your case on TV," her sister informed him from the counter.
"And what did they say?"
"More or less the same as yesterday, but much more summarized. That Juan Shapiro is dead and that his son has denounced the doctor who treated him, that is you. But this time they didn’t mention your name. Calm down, in a few days your story will have become old news by the media.”
Jaime nodded with a lost gaze.
“How are you?” She wanted to know.
Her little brother shrugged and dropped into his own personal chair, one of leather that he had really wanted to get just as soon as the ink was dry from buying the place and from which he had views of the street. The room was simply decorated; it had only one dining room table, a large cabinet where he kept the dishes and glassware, the chair, a sofa and some practical shelves. A 42-inch TV hung from the wall, and an American bar divided the room from the kitchen. Jaime looked at the TV, where the program of events continued.
"I suppose it's a matter of time, but right now I feel like I've been tortured.”
"Somehow that's what happens," María said, then deposited two plates of toast and coffees on the bar. “Come on, sit down, this is ready.”
He obeyed and sat down on a stool in front of her.
"Do you know anything about Mom?" Jaime asked, still stirring the coffee with the spoon.
"She called, she's worried. I've finally calmed her down and saved you this time. But sooner or later you will have to face her.”
“You believe me?” He asked curtly.
She looked at him in disbelief.
"You think I'm innocent, don’t you?" Insisted Jaime.
"Come on Tato, don’t talk nonsense.”
"I'm a good guy, María. I didn’t murder Shapiro.”
María Vergara felt that her brother was worse than she imagined. He was a cheerful man, very vital, and she had never seen him as depressed and resigned as he was now, at the most critical moment of his professional life. She circled the bar and hugged him from behind.
“Tato listen. We both know very well that you haven’t killed that millionaire. You have simply been played. Now it's time to grit your teeth and dance the tune.”
"Dance the tune! The accusation has been a stab in the back. I can’t stay here waiting that those full of rabble rousing journalists to shoot me with questions.”
Mary's face changed.
"You’re not going to leave!"
"It won’t be forever, there's no reason to dramatize. I'll have to come back for the trial. I just have to be smart and stay low for now. Besides, I don’t even have a job.”
"And running away seems like a clever stance?"
Jaime shrugged once more and took the coffee to the sofa, where he deposited his butt. She accompanied him. She took his hand in a sisterly way and carried it to her lap.
On television they were talking about a Spanish woman under twenty who had liquidated a man in cold blood. It had happened in England and half of Europe was looking for her. Jaime changed the channel with his free hand that wasn’t in his sister’s embrace.
"Why don’t you give a sort of press conference and explain what actually happened?" Mary had turned to him and gesticulated as she spoke. “Tell all of them that you didn’t sleep with Shapiro's daughter-in-law, that she was the one who accosted you, and of course you didn’t kill anyone.”
"Okay, I tell the truth, and then what? What do you think will happen?”
"You're a doctor, for Christ's sake, they have to believe you!"
"And they belong to one of the most powerful families in the country, María. They have money to buy the press, the police and justice if they want. And I can’t prove anything.”
"So you're just going to leave, to wait for this to be solved on its own?"
"For now I just want to rest," he said. “I'm up to my ears; I don’t want to think about the subject. Then we’ll see, there should be something that can be done.”
María rested her head on Jaime's shoulder and stroked his arm as if it would give him strength.
They chatted about their things for half an hour more. Then they said goodbye and Jaime was alone in his apartment. He tossed a Coldplay record into the DVD player and began to scrub dishes. His head kept spinning. The Shapiro case was not the only reason for his discouragement. There was Sara. Why didn’t she respond to his emails or his calls? Since the last day on the 12th, when he received that mysterious call that lasted only ten seconds, he hadn’t heard anything more from her.
"Do you remember the strange case I told you about in Madrid, about my mentor's daughter and her brain tumor? Well, you were right. The whole case was rotten! As soon as I've proved it, I'll call you back. Now I have to go. See you later, and thank you!”
Those had been her only words, and he had not even had a chance to respond; Sara hung up instantly. After the strange conversation (monologue, rather), and despite having promised him, she didn’t call him again. A day later, Jaime learned from the news that the case Sara was working on in Ámber had changed a hundred and eighty degrees: Sara was sabotaged by her former mentor, Dr. Salas, who she had spoken of with so much love and hatred, and it all concluded with the surprising death of Alfonso Morales, husband of the patient, on the sand of the beach. What had become of Sara after all this time? Why on earth did she refuse to communicate with him?
When there were no dishes left to wash, he sat down in front of his laptop and checked his e-mail. He didn’t have any new messages, except for junk and spam, which of course he deleted without reading. He opened the sent emails folder. The last eight were addressed to the same person, and none had been answered. Sara, I miss you. He was surprised to experience that sense of nostalgia for a girl who had been out of mind a few days ago. His sister, before leaving the apartment, had advised him to talk to people, to vent, to focus on other things. But Jaime did not need to talk to people. He needed to talk to Sara. Nothing more.
Now Jaime knew that, for some reason, the chance encounter with his old friend in the cafeteria near the Hotel Puerta de América had kindled a burning flame inside.
He stood for several minutes staring at the computer screen, waiting. Every few seconds, He pressed the refresh screen key in case any mail was stuck. Nothing. Was his friend in
danger? Had something serious happened to her? That would be too much for him.
Desperate, he picked up his cell phone and decided to try his luck for the umpteenth time. He looked for her name in the menu and pressed the call key. He waited for it to stop ringing. No one answered. Jaime let out a stifled sigh and the sadness contracted the muscles of his face. Then came the miracle, and his surprise was such that the phone almost slipped out of his hand. Sarita (that's how he kept it in his contact list) had just sent him a text message:
I'm in Madrid and I need to see you. It is important. Please tell me when and where. A kiss. Sara.
Jaime thought he was going to have a heart attack. He stood for several seconds looking at the words, not knowing what to answer. She was in Madrid and wanted to see him urgently. What was happening? The tone of the message wasn’t too informative. Whatever it was, he must and wanted to be reunited with her. He drew in a breath and began to write an answer.
Alyssa stepped out of the bathroom as another woman. Her beautiful black eyes were hidden behind sunglasses that covered almost her face, and a dark, tight-fitting T-shirt almost showed off her navel that appeared above the button of her pants. She also wore a new lip color, as red as the throbbing of her heart as when she left the airport and set foot in Madrid. She had a mission. Everything she needed to know was now focused on the Nokia N80, which, by accident, she had kicked the night before.
She got into the first free taxi she found and indicated to the driver a very specific direction to go. He lost five seconds in admiring, through the rearview mirror, the beauty of the young woman who watched him above the glasses with peculiar sensuality. So stunned was he that he didn’t even notice that in the back seat of his Toyota he had the homicide suspect with which they had opened all the news that morning.
The vehicle started and took direction to the center of the capital. Alyssa felt radiant. She wasn’t able to take her eyes off the Nokia throughout the trip.
Sara! I'm so glad to hear from you! Meet me on
my floor. Street Orense, number 53. I'll wait for
you here. I hope you are well. A kiss. Jaime.
Chapter 8
"I thought I understood that you’re married, aren’t you, Morgan?"
"Indeed, I’m a man with a ring.”
"Then you'll know there are women who inflame your soul, don’t you? A woman who appears at the precise moment that even the perfume on her neck scorches you with a scent just by being close to her. Here where I’m at, I, myself become small in her eyes, because she was so overwhelming, and when I least expected it, that woman became my world, I didn’t know how to live without her! I wanted to feel that fire until eternity, because I had never felt so alive. As they say if you desire scabies, then it doesn’t itch. She was the dart that goes to the center of the target, the ball with the winning number, and the goal in the last second of the game. Now we return to the sad reality. Lesson number three.”
"I've gotten lost, Salas. Are you talking about your wife now?”
“My ex-wife: Violeta. If people were water, I would be mud, and she, a tsunami.”
Friday, November 10, 2006
As soon as he woke up, Rafael Salas left his narrow bedroom and went without breakfast to the lounge room. He advanced through the many corridors that crossed his path and got lost on a couple of occasions (he hadn’t yet memorized the journey), so he had to retrace his steps. When he finally reached the front door of the room, he remained motionless. He had plans to be in the lounge room with Dr. Grau at the earliest hour of the morning. Apparently, his concept of early morning differed with that of the director of the center. He leaned sideways on the old wooden frame of the door and valued very seriously whether to enter or, on the contrary, turn around, hide behind some corner of the labyrinthine corridors and wait for the doctor in silence. He chose the path of courage and stepped forward. That morning he wore the white shirt with which he entered the center, only with the top two buttons unbuttoned, his trousers, and a doctor's robe that before the end of the day, one of the nurses after great insistence on his part had given it to him.
Watching what was happening inside the room, he experienced the same feeling of uneasiness that he had on the first day, when Dr. Grau entered his room (without knocking on the door), interrupted his conversation with Saul Morgan (without apologizing), and accompanied him to the same room where he was now with the purpose of introducing him to the legion of stupid people. If he had ever had the idea of writing his memoirs, Rafael thought then, he would not fail to describe how much he was affected by what he saw when he formed an overall picture of the room. What was in there, in the way they all called it the lounge room, that so terrified even to such an extent the ruthless Dr. Salas? He couldn’t even explain it to himself, for at that first moment he didn’t dare fix his gaze directly on any other person present. If he had been a child, if he were Oli, for example, and not a wrinkled old man, he would have sought shelter under Dr. Grau's arm and kept his eyes closed. "No," he said instantly, "Oli would never lower himself to such an act of cowardice." It was not the physical violence of the individualities that frightened him, he was not in a maximum-security prison, for God's sake, but in a Psychiatric Center. But the anarchy of the group as a whole, the random movements and disconnected sounds, reminded Salas of a nursery. He was in front of an army of adult children, drooling and crying. And they looked sick. The first thing he noticed while repressing a grimace was that they were all different from what was supposed to be normal. At a glance, he found that most of the prisoners had malformations on different parts of the body: hunchbacks, dwarfs, quadriplegics who lived in wheelchairs, cripples and giants. But all of them didn’t traumatize him, who had spent his life opening skulls to keep them from ending up just like the ones in front of him. Those who gave the sinister air to the room were the others. Their faces and bodies were well configured, yet they didn’t follow a pattern of logical behavior, they were ghosts enclosed within four walls. In the end he felt uneasy and had no choice, and as Grau introduced him one by one, he dared to look them in the face. After all, how would he know them, how would he be able to help them and take care of them, if he didn’t even dare approach them?
The first person he met was a man in his fifties, bald and with a beard, and so physically normal that it came to Salas’ mind the ironmonger on his street in Ámber. His peculiarity was that he kept talking, almost in whispers, about the process of photosynthesis in plants. And yet he was not addressing anyone in particular. He also nodded, and sometimes even raised his voice as if he were arguing with someone from the real world, but his eyes simply stared into infinity.
"His name is Cándido, but here he is known as the Tertullian, because of his obvious interest in the debate," Grau had explained with the naturalness of a guide in a zoo who runs a tour.
"The process known as photosynthesis consists in the manufacture of food for vegetables by means of light, from water, mineral salts and carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen; photosynthesis is done during the day because it is the only period in which there is sunlight; photosynthesis takes place in leaves; in photosynthesis, the stem carries the raw sap to the leaves and collects the processed sap.” Cándido expounded his knowledge to no one in particular, interestingly behaving with his raised chin.
"What's wrong?" Salas wanted to know, struggling to keep his voice steady.
"He has severe hallucinations, but he’s getting better."
“Getting better? This man is like a fucking watering can with holes all over. He’s not even aware that we are here, by his side, talking about him.”
"Oh, you should have seen him when he came in almost two years ago: he was not sleeping, he barely ate, and his verbal duels were screaming matches.” After the explanation, the director of the center hardened his face as if he were about to strangle a tourist who has fed the apes without permission. “And don’t disrespect him that way, neither he or anyone else. Even if he doesn’t look at you, he listen
s to everything you say. You’ll learn about it.”
On that day all the inmates had been introduced to him, and there they were again in the lounge room, while he waited for his appointment with the director. The room was devoid of furniture, with the exception of a wooden board that circled the entire perimeter as a backless bench, and six tables in the center containing simple three-in-a-row table games. On one of the walls, a pair of windows provided a minimum of natural light. According to the mental calculations of the old doctor, the room had to be about a hundred square meters, which, considering the number of patients that occupied it daily seemed fair to him.
Salas felt a sense of deja vu when he realized that all the inmates were doing exactly the same thing as that first day: absolutely nothing. It was Cándido the Tertullian, demonstrating to a plastic spoon that Coppola was, and not Scorsese, the director of the trilogy of The Godfather. Pedrito, a hopeless troublemaker, who found special fun spitting in the faces of the other patients, the boxer boy, who spent his time stamping punches against the wall until his knuckles became raw (he especially caught Salas’ attention by his particular behavior), and Maruja, an endearing old woman that walked bent on her walking oak stick, and that did not present any apparent incapacity. Until Salas caught her standing in front of a mirror that covered one of the dining room walls; then her expression changed, she faced her own reflection with an energy that only God knew where she got it, and threatened it, pointing at it with her walking stick. "Don’t look at me!” She shouted then, and whenever she came across a reflecting surface, she saw the devil, "I've told you a thousand times to stop looking at me, witch!"
As he studied these and the rest of the patients from the doorway, Rafael watched with disgust as a young pale-skinned skinhead, whose name he didn’t remember, pulled down his pants and, as naturally as blowing a bubble gum with his mouth, squatted down and began to defecate on the floor itself. WTF, but what the hell does this boy do? Salas wasn’t able to tell if his stupor was due to such an extreme act of social indecency, or to the fact that no one present had even spared him a minimum of attention. What kind of social debris surrounded him?
The Butterfly Effect Page 10
