"I will. Thanks a lot, Victor." She wondered what he'd think if he could see her now: sweaty, trembling, curled up in an armchair with a sixteen-inch stainless-steel butcher knife in her right hand.
"I... I was also calling to tell you ... something else," he added. "There's been some news." Elisa stiffened. "Are you watching TV?"
Frantically, she snatched up the remote to switch to the channel Victor said it was on. A man stood in front of an apartment building with a mike in his hand.
"... at home in Milan's leafy residential neighborhood near the university has rocked Italy to its core..."
"You knew him, didn't you?"
"Yeah," said Elisa calmly. "What a shame."
Act indifferent. Don't you dare give anything away over the phone.
Victor's voice began the struggle to commence another sentence. Elisa decided it was time to cut him off.
"Sorry, I've got to go ... I'll call you later... Thanks, Victor, really." She didn't even wait for his reply. She hated to be so brusque with Victor, of all people, but there was nothing else she could do. She turned up the volume and hung on every word. The newscaster assured viewers that the police were not ruling anything out, though robbery seemed the most likely motive.
She clung to that idiotic hope as best she could. Yes! Maybe that was it. A simple robbery. After all, I still haven't gotten the call...
The newscaster held an umbrella. The sky was gray in Milan. Elisa felt like she was watching the apocalypse.
THE lights at the Medical Institute at the University of Milan were blazing, despite the fact that almost all the employees had gone home. A light but unrelenting rain fell on the city that night, and the Italian flag drooped from its pole at the entrance of the somber building, a steady stream of water coursing off of it. There, on Via Mangiagalli, a dark car pulled to a stop beneath the flag. The shadow of an umbrella could be seen, and a man waiting in the doorway greeted the two individuals who emerged from the backseat. No one spoke: they all knew who they were and why they were there. The umbrella closed. The silhouettes disappeared.
Their footsteps rang out through the institute's hallways. They all wore dark suits, though the new arrivals also wore overcoats. The man leading their way was the one who'd been waiting in the doorway; he was young, pale, and so nervous that he gave little leaps with each step. He waved his hands around constantly as he spoke. Though his English was good, he had a strong Italian accent "They're making a detailed study ... Still nothing definite. The discovery was made yesterday morning, and it took until today to round up the specialists."
He stopped to open the door to the Dental and Anthropological Forensics Laboratory. Inaugurated in 1995 and remodeled in 2012, it boasted state-of-the-art technology; Europe's top-notch forensic scientists worked here.
The new arrivals hardly noticed the photos and sculptures lining the hallway. They sped past plaster models of three human heads.
"How many witnesses?" asked the older one. His hair was white, thinning on top, though he disguised that by wearing it slightly long. His English was unidentifiable, a blend of several accents.
"Just the woman who cleaned his flat every morning. She was the one who found him. The neighbors hardly saw a thing."
"'Hardly?' What does 'hardly' mean?"
"They heard the cleaning lady scream and questioned her, but no one entered the apartment. They called the police right away."
They'd stopped by a painstakingly detailed anatomical drawing of a woman, no skin, a fetus inside her open uterus. The young man opened a metal door.
"What about the woman?" inquired the white-haired man.
"In the hospital. Sedated. And under protective custody."
"She must not be released until we've spoken to her."
"I've taken care of all that."
The white-haired man spoke with apparent indifference: his face expressionless, hands in pockets. The young man responded in the urgent tones of a lackey. And the third man seemed lost in his own thoughts. He was burly, and his suit and overcoat looked like they were two sizes too small for him. He looked younger than the older man, and older than the young one. He had a crew cut, clear, green eyes, a neck as thick as a Gothic column, and a grayish five-o'clock shadow. It was patently obvious that he was the only one not used to executive attire. He moved determinedly, swinging his arms, and had a military air about him.
They crossed another hallway and entered another room. The young man closed the door behind them.
It was cold in there. The walls and floor were a soft, reflective apple green, like cut glass. Several individuals wearing surgical gear stood in a row, surrounded by tables covered with scientific instruments. They were looking at the door the three men had just come through, as if their mission was none other than to form a sort of welcome committee. One of them, his silvery hair parted down the side, a suit and tie rather incongruously peeking out from beneath his green scrubs, stepped forward. The young man made the introductions.
"Mr. Harrison, Mr. Carter. Dr. Fontana." The doctor nodded his greeting; the white-haired man and the burly one followed suit. "You can speak to them freely, Doctor."
No one said a word. The trace of a smile, or perhaps a grimace, played on the doctor's pale, shiny face; he looked waxen. His right eye was twitching. When he finally spoke, he resembled a ventriloquist's dummy, controlled from a distance.
"I have never seen anything like this ... in all my time in forensics."
The other doctors stood aside, inviting the visitors to step forward. An examination table lay behind them. Overhead lights shone down on a sheet-covered shape. One of the physicians peeled it back.
Aside from the white-haired man and the burly one, no one looked at what lay beneath the sheet. They were watching the visitors' reactions, as if they were the ones who needed to be carefully examined.
The white-haired man opened his mouth, but then closed it again and looked away.
For a moment, the burly man looked at what lay on the table.
He stood there, frowning, his body rigid, as though forcing his eyes to stare at what no one else could keep looking at was the only thing keeping him from fainting.
NIGHT had fallen. Elisa's apartment was an island of light. The apartments around hers were growing dark. She was still sitting in the same position, in front of a television that was no longer on, cradling the enormous knife in her lap. She hadn't eaten all day, nor had she stopped to rest. More than anything, she wanted to do some exercise and then take a long, relaxing shower, but she didn't dare move. She waited.
She'd wait as long as necessary, though she had no idea how long that might be.
They've abandoned you. They lied. You're all alone. And that's not the worst of it. You know what's worse?
The teddy bear's arms were outstretched, his heart-shaped mouth smiling. His black-button eyes reflected a tiny, pale Elisa.
The worst is what's to come. What hasn't happened yet. What's going to happen to you.
Her cell phone suddenly came to life. Like so many things we yearn for (or fear), the arrival of the long-awaited (or feared) event began a new stage for her, a new way of thinking. Even before she picked up, her brain had already begun to formulate and discard hypotheses, to take what had not yet occurred as a given.
She answered on the second ring, sure that it wouldn't be Victor.
It wasn't. It was the call she'd been waiting for.
The message took no more than two seconds. But it was enough to make her burst into tears when she hung up.
Now you know. Finally. Now you know.
She cried for a long time, balled up, still clutching the receiver. Once she got it out of her system, she stood and looked at the clock. She had some time before the meeting. She'd exercise, have a shower, grab a bite to eat... And then she'd decide whether to go it alone or try to find help. She'd thought about trying to ask for help, someone unconnected, someone who knew nothing about any of it and who she could explain it
to in a logical fashion, someone unbiased. But who?
Victor, possibly. Yes, maybe Victor.
But that was risky. And there was an additional problem: how was she going to let him know she needed his help urgently? She had to find a way to get him the message.
First, she had to calm down and think it through. Intelligence had always been her best weapon. She was well aware that human intelligence was far more dangerous than the knife she held.
She thought that if nothing else, at least she'd finally received the call she'd been waiting for since that morning, the one that would decide her fate from that moment on.
The voice had been so unsteady and quavering she almost hadn't recognized it, as if the speaker were as terrified as she was. But there was no doubt that it was the call. The only thing the man had said was exactly what she'd been expecting.
"Zig Zag."
03
AT that moment, Victor Lopera was wondering, somewhat transcendentally, whether he could consider his aeroponic aralias natural or not. On first glance it seemed clear that they indeed formed part of nature, since they were living things, Dizygotheca elegantissima, that breathed and absorbed light and nutrients. But then, nature could never have reproduced them with such exactitude. They were clearly man-made, the product of technology. Victor kept them in clear plastic so he could see the astonishing fractals of their roots, and he controlled their temperature, pH, and growth with electronic instruments. To keep them from growing to their standard five-foot height, he used specific fertilizers. So really, those four dainty aralias, no more than six inches tall, with their bronze, almost silvery leaves, were largely his creations. Without him, and without modern science, they would never have existed. He felt his question rather reasonable.
He concluded that they were natural, after all. Maybe not unconditionally, but they were definitely natural. For Victor, the issue did not merely apply to plant life. Answering that question was a declaration of faith (or skepticism) in progress and technology. And he was committed to science. He firmly believed that science was another form of nature, and, like Teilhard de Chardin, even a new way to conceive of religion. His optimistic outlook on life had begun when he was a child and saw that his father, who had been a surgeon, could modify life and correct mistakes.
Even though he admired his father tremendously, he had not opted for a "biological" career like his brother, who was also a surgeon, or his sister, a vet. He had chosen to go into physics. He thought his siblings' jobs were too hectic; he liked peace and quiet. At one point, he'd even considered a career as a professional chess player, since his math and logic skills were remarkable, but he'd soon learned that competition was stressful, too. It wasn't that he was idle, far from it; he just liked peace to reign on the outside so he could psychologically battle enigmas, ask questions like the one about his aralias, and solve complicated riddles and puzzles.
He filled one of the sprinklers with a new fertilizer he was going to try exclusively on Aralia A. He'd put them each into their own little stalls so he could experiment on each one individually. At first, he'd toyed with the idea of giving them more original names, but he ended up opting for the first four letters of the alphabet.
"Come on, now, why are you making that face?" he whispered affectionately as he snapped the sprinkler head shut. "Don't you trust me? You should learn from C, who always adapts so well to change. You've got to learn to adapt, little one. You and I could both take some lessons from C."
He stood there for a minute, wondering why he'd just said that. Lately, he seemed more melancholy than usual, as if he, too, needed some new fertilizer. But, good heavens, that was just pop psychology. He thought of himself as a happy man. He liked teaching, and he had plenty of free time to read, take care of his plants, and work on his puzzles. He had the best family in the world, and his parents, though they were retired and now getting old, were still in good health. He was an exemplary uncle to his nieces and nephews, his brother's kids, who adored him. Who else had that much love, peace, and quiet in their lives?
It was true he was alone. But that was his choice. He was master of his own destiny. Why ruin everything by rushing into some relationship with a woman who could never make him happy? At thirty-four, he still felt young and hadn't given up hope. Life was a waiting game: an aralia didn't bloom in two minutes, and nor did love. One of these days, he'd meet someone, or someone he knew would give him a call...
"And then, bam! I'll blossom like C," he said aloud, and laughed. Just then the phone rang.
As he walked over to a bookcase in his small dining room to answer it, he speculated on who it could be. Given the hour, it was probably his brother, who had been pestering him for a few months to go over the accounts at the private surgical clinic he ran. "You're the math genius; how hard would it be to give me a hand?" Luis Lopera—or Luis'll Opera, as he jokingly pronounced it (operar was Spanish for "operate," so "Louis'll Operate" had been a long-standing pun among the family surgeons)—didn't trust computers and wanted Victor to go through the files himself to make sure all was in order. Victor had grown tired of telling him that mathematicians specialized, just like surgeons. A brain surgeon couldn't, just like that, perform heart transplants. Likewise, he worked on elementary particles, not on tallying up a grocery bill. If anything, his brother needed his stubborn brain operated on.
He fished the receiver out from a sea of framed photos (nieces and nephews, sister, parents, Teilhard de Chardin, the monk and scientist Georges Lemaitre, Einstein). Stifling a yawn, he said, "Hello?"
"Victor? It's Elisa."
His sense of tedium shattered like a pane of glass. It was like suddenly waking from a dream.
"Hi." Victor's mind was racing. "How're you feeling?"
"Better, thanks... At first I thought it was allergies, but now I'm pretty sure it's just a cold..."
"Good! Glad to hear it. Did you see the report?"
"What report?"
"On the news ... about Marini's death."
"Oh, yeah. Poor guy." That was the extent of the sorrow she expressed.
"You were in Zurich with him, weren't you?" Victor began. But Elisa spoke over him, rushing to get to the heart of the matter.
"Yeah. Listen, Victor. I was calling..." She stopped, then she giggled. "You're going to think this is idiotic, I'm sure ... But it's really important to me. OK?"
"OK."
He frowned and tensed up. Elisa's voice was carefree and bubbly. And that was exactly what worried him, because he thought he knew her pretty well, and carefree and bubbly were two things she was not.
"Well, it's my neighbor, you see... She's got a teenage son, a really nice kid... Anyway, she just found out that he really loves those word puzzles ... you know, those rebuses you do from the paper? Turns out he's got all kinds of books and magazines. So, I told her I'm friends with the number one rebus puzzler. And it turns out that he's been trying to solve one, and he can't do it. He's really worked up about it, and his mother's worried that he'll give up on this wholesome hobby and take up something more questionable instead. And when she told me about the specific puzzle in question, I realized that I knew that one because you'd told me about it, but I can't remember the answer. So I thought, 'I need help. And Victor's the only one who can help me. Do you understand?"
"Of course. Which one is it?" Victor had picked up on Elisa's strange intonation and felt shivers descend, like unexpected visitors from another planet. Was he imagining it, or was she trying to tell him something else, something he could only pick up on by reading between the lines?
"It's the one with the steak and the atom, remember?" She burst out laughing. "You do remember that one, don't you?"
"Sure, that one was..."
"Listen," she cut him off. "I don't need you to tell me the answer. Just do what it says, tonight. It's urgent. Do it as soon as you possibly can. I'm relying on you." Suddenly she cackled again. "The kid's mother is relying on you, too. Thanks, Victor. Bye."
&nb
sp; There was a click, and then the dial tone.
The hair on Victor's neck stood up as if the phone had given him an electric shock.
RARELY in his life had he had this feeling.
His sweaty hands slid down the steering wheel, his heart was pounding harder and harder, his chest hurt, and he felt like no matter how deeply he inhaled, he couldn't get enough air into his lungs. For Victor, this had only ever meant the possibility of sex.
The few times he had gone out with girls who he knew, or suspected, he could end up in bed with, he'd felt the same sort of torment. Unfortunately, or fortunately, none of them ever made passes at him, and his dates had always ended with a quick peck and the promise of a phone call.
But what about this? What kind of bed could he end up in tonight? This date was with none other than Elisa Robledo.
Whoa!
He'd been to her house before, sure (they were friends, after all, or he liked to think they were), but always with other colleagues and never so late at night; the other times being for some sort of celebration (Christmas, the end of the semester) or to work on organizing a seminar together. He'd fantasized about this ever since they met, ten years ago, at an unforgettable party on the Alighieri campus. But he'd never imagined it might come about in such a strange way.
Besides, he would have sworn sex wasn't exactly what Elisa was at home waiting for.
Thinking about it, he laughed, and it did him good, put him slightly more at ease. He pictured Elisa in her underwear, giving him a hug when he arrived, kissing him and whispering provocatively, "Hello, Victor. Glad you got the message. Come on in." His laughter swelled like a balloon in his stomach, until finally it popped and his customary serious nature returned. He ran through all the things he'd thought, done, and fantasized about since the bizarre phone call an hour ago: doubts, nerves, the desire to call her back and ask for an explanation (but she'd told him not to), the rebus. Paradoxically, the word puzzle was, in this case, the easiest thing to understand. He remembered the answer perfectly, though he'd still rushed to pull out his photo album and find the clipping. It was a recent one, and showed what looked like a side of beef, an atom, an eye, and finally the word "how" repeated three times. The question was "Where's the party?" He'd solved it in less than five minutes the day it was published. The words "meat," "atom," "I," and the repeated "how" made the sentence "Meat+Atom+I+Hows"; said quickly, it was "Meet at my house."
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