by David Hewson
The giant started to pull its hands out of its pockets and Maria found herself screaming without knowing when she had started, screaming at the top of her voice as she rolled over the polished floor, struggling to get away from the figure that loomed over her, rolling and rolling, her hands flailing. Her bag opened and scattered its contents on the floor. She saw the hands come slowly out of the folds of the cloth, saw them draw back slowly, fingers unclenching, slowly, deadly slowly, saw white skin, tufts of hair, felt she saw the pores, wide and open and fat and greasy under the sun. And saw the fingers open to reveal empty palms as the room became dark.
Torrillo was first through the door. She was lying on the tiles still shrieking. The man had his back to the toilet, hands high up in the air, fingers waving. Torrillo stood between them. She backed up towards the door, gasping, her cheeks wet.
‘Police,’ Torrillo barked at the man.
‘You OK?’ Menéndez said to her, eyes hooded.
‘He scared me.’ She looked confused.
The man pulled off his hood. He looked about thirty, with a tidy, short-clipped moustache and beard, florid skin, pale-brown unfocused eyes. He continued to wave his hands in the air and swayed gently against the door.
‘I’m all right,’ said Maria.
She picked herself off the floor, brushed the dust from her jeans, straightened her shirt, casually picked up the belongings of her bag, packed them back in. ‘He scared me. That’s all. I couldn’t get out. Then when I did, he was there. It happened so quickly.’
‘The men’s was locked or something,’ the man said. ‘I was just waiting for the lady to come out. I guess I got a bit drowsy.’
The voice was slurred and common. What looked like wine stains spotted the front of the costume. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten anybody. We just drank so much out there on the parade that I had to, like, go to the toilet some time. I didn’t mean to frighten her.’
Torrillo grunted, then frisked him up and down. From a pocket in the robe he took out some coins, a set of car keys, a few thousand pesetas, a packet of cigarettes, a cheap disposable lighter, an ID card. Torrillo looked at the picture on the card, then looked at the man. He matched. Torrillo wrote down the name in his notebook.
The man grasped his groin. ‘I really got to go, please. You get to drink an awful lot at these things.’
Menéndez nodded towards the door.
The penitent carried the hood in one hand and started to lift up the cloak before he even reached the door. Maria saw white, hairy legs, short blue socks, open-toed sandals, then a pair of cream Y-fronts. The man stumbled into the toilet, half-closed the door, and they heard a groan of relief followed by the sound of a stream of liquid hitting water.
She looked at Menéndez and said, downcast, ‘Sorry.’
‘There are hundreds like that out there,’ said Menéndez. ‘You can’t get spooked every time you see one of them.’
‘No,’ she said, and Torrillo noticed there were still tears in her eyes. The two men walked in front to leave her in peace. She followed along the alley, watched Torrillo duck under the arch again, climbed silently into the back of the car.
‘I’m fine now,’ she said.
‘Good,’ Menéndez nodded. ‘There’ll probably be cameras at the press conference. It’s worth bearing in mind.’
Inside the building, on the ground floor, the man in the red robe waited until they were out of earshot, then waited another five minutes, confirming the silence. The flamenco school was finished. The women had gone to see the sights, the processions. The building was empty, save for him and Castañeda. He went to the front door and flipped the inside latch. Then he returned to the washroom, looked at himself in the mirror and smiled.
Calm. No fear. No tics. No doubts.
He tried to remember what he had learned last time out, tried to fix the memories in his head, since he knew that when it all started it happened quickly. Then he straightened the point of the hood, put it back over his head and let himself out of the women’s toilet. He pulled out the set of keys Torrillo had looked at, picked the right one, unlocked the mortise on the men’s toilet door, went in and retrieved the kit he had stashed behind the cistern. It was wrapped in oilcloth and about three feet long. He unrolled it, took out a pair of plastic surgical gloves and rolled them carefully on his hands. Then he walked up the stairs towards the office where Miguel Castañeda now sat bolt upright, talking furiously on the phone.
He pushed open the door and the phone went straight back onto the receiver. The old man looked like a little old bull, walnut brown and full of fury.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he barked in a voice made high by anger. ‘Just walking in like this. You knock before you march in here.’
The man reached into the folds of the oilcloth roll, pulled out the first dart, felt the metal, cool and hard and comforting through the plastic gloves, pulled back his arm, felt the muscles flexing. The little missile flashed through the air, first black, then silver, as it crossed the shadow cast by the Venetian blind.
Castañeda opened his mouth to shout and the dart hit him straight in the left eye, shattered the lens of his glasses, punctured the cornea, then stabbed into the back of the socket, and sent him reeling backwards out of the leather chair. The noise. There was too much noise.
‘Shit!’ said the figure in red.
He dropped the set of tools on the floor, picked up the sword and went to the other side of the office. The old man writhed, pulling at the dart in his face. Blood and mucus oozed out of the frayed socket. Castañeda was on the floor rocking frantically from side to side, gurgling, trying to scream.
The hooded man plunged the sword into the old man’s throat, ran it through the windpipe, almost severing the spinal cord. A fountain of blood shot up the blade. The point bit into the carpet and then the soft wooden beams below, skewering Castañeda to the floor. The old man lay there, becoming still, making low guttural noises.
Just to make sure, he leaned on the blade with all his weight, fixing it firmly in the planks below. Then he went back to the oilcloth roll, picked out some more implements, returned and looked at his handiwork. It wasn’t perfect, but then, even in the ring, you couldn’t get it right all the time. The hooded man wiped his hands on his robe, grabbed two more darts, pulled out an improvised spike made out of a garden fencing tool and a small kitchen knife. Then he set out to bring what artistry he could to the situation.
Twenty minutes later, after he had rifled the filing cabinets, he went downstairs and walked to the toilet to clean up. He took off the cloak and hat, pulled out the sports trousers and pale-blue shirt he had hidden in a plastic refuse sack behind the cistern, washed off the blood from his hands and arms, carefully removed the make-up, the theatrical beard and moustache, then checked in the mirror. He put the costume in the plastic sack, rolled that up in the oilskin, put the items he had taken from the filing cabinet in a wrinkled Continente supermarket bag, looked around to make sure he had left nothing, then walked out of the cubicle.
On his way out, on his way to the door, he saw something on the floor, bent over, examined it, picked it up and put it in his jacket pocket.
‘Dumb fucking cops,’ he muttered.
He walked out into the bright afternoon sun, walked slowly around the barrio, looking at the rubbish-collection containers. When he found one that was almost full to the brim, he looked around to check he was alone, then pushed the bundle underneath the top layer of rubbish. He stood back. It was well hidden by bags of rotting food, empty wine bottles, plastic containers for cheap olive oil. He walked for ten minutes to another part of the barrio, sat down in a small cafe and ordered the menú del día: sopa de picadillo, chuleta de cerdo con patatas, flan, and half a carafe of chilled red wine. Six hundred pesetas. While he was waiting, he used the phone to call the rubbish department, asking for a priority collection at the container he had just used, on the grounds that it was now full and starting to smell. The council official put it
on the afternoon round.
When he finished the meal, he walked to another part of the barrio, let himself into a small door, walked upstairs to a neat, white-walled, two-room apartment, showered, dressed in a clean robe and poured himself a sparkling mineral water.
The interior of the refrigerator reminded him. He went back to the living room and recovered the small plastic bag in which he’d stored Castañeda’s right ear. He removed the dead, waxy piece of flesh and cartilage and placed it in the food container he kept in the ice compartment, alongside those of the Angel Brothers.
He pulled out the bag a little further, stared at the three ears there, put his mouth down close to them and said, very slowly, very clearly, ‘Hello?’
Then waited. Nothing.
Still laughing, he closed the door and went and sat down on the cheap canvas sofa, turned on the TV and started to zap the channels.
The press conference was live on Channel 8. The media now had a name for him: El Matador.
He grinned. He liked it. The cops were on the screen, the big one silent, the old one, the captain, talking – talking about precautions and vigilance and the need for information. They gave a Freephone number and promised confidentiality. From the calm expressions on their faces it was obvious they knew nothing about Castañeda.
The camera angle shifted to the side and, for the first time, he could see that she was standing behind them, watching, attentive, fair hair loosely combed and tied back with a ribbon, clean pale skin. She looked different from the kind of women he’d known, the little cows on the street. Then her face moved, started looking for the camera. She turned, right, then left, then right again, looked into the camera, looked through, looked into him, searching, quizzical. For a moment, the world stopped moving, the buzz subsided. He was quiet inside. Alone with her. It felt good.
He reached over for his jacket, reached inside the pocket and pulled out the address book. It had a shiny, plasticized cover with a pattern of flowers and was no more than a few millimetres thick. Most of the pages were blank. The few entries in the book were written in hard, black ink, in a fine, feminine hand. They were old. They were all in the north of the country. He flicked to the front. On the owner’s page there was her name, an address in Salamanca, a work address, a phone number, a fax. On the same page, scribbled in recent pencil in the same hand, was another address, this time in the city, not far from where he was now. Just her name against it.
He closed the book, fingered the cover, felt its texture, looked at the woman on the screen, her hands clasped demurely in front of her. He thought of how many times those fingers must have used the book, wondered how many of the entries in the pages belonged to her lovers, what they might have done together in the long, dark nights. Imagination was everything. More real than the world he could touch. He looked at her closely, tried to dream what she would be like, how her skin was to touch, how it would feel to push hard into her and feel the flesh give gently, moistly, like a rose, opening.
When he was hard enough, slowly, in front of the TV, he started to masturbate, one hand on his penis, the other on the address book.
The programme broke for the ads: Don’t forget your summer Casera; Buy a Renault Clio now; Drink Osborne brandy and meet beautiful women. He felt it approaching, the pressure beginning to build. He rubbed the base of his penis with the little book, gently, feeling the cold, shiny cover against his skin. Then, when it was getting closer, he opened up the middle pages, held them open beneath the pink, livid head. It was all over, with a small, involuntary spurt that made him arch a little upwards. He reached for a tissue from the box on the table in front of him and wiped the semen carefully off the page. The ink looked fuzzy on an address somewhere in Madrid.
He examined his fingers, saw bloodstains alongside the cuticle, tut-tutted and went back into the bathroom to look for a nailbrush.
TWELVE
‘El Matador. El Matador? Jesus! That’s wonderful. That is all we need. Semana Santa. Tourists. Crazies. Drunks. As if that isn’t bad enough, we got the press ramping it all up with “El Matador”. Who thinks of these things?’
Torrillo was talking to himself out of the window as the car sped through the suburbs. Menéndez was in the front passenger seat, on the car phone, making notes, speaking occasionally. Maria sat in the back and watched the world go by. This was part of the city the tourists never saw. Grim high-rise apartments rose among junkyards and rubbish tips. Tanned figures in grubby clothes walked slowly, aimlessly around the pavements. A few checked through the refuse, picking for something worth acquiring. They passed an olive-pressing plant, the air filled with an overpowering, acrid smell. By the side of the road, twenty feet high, were small mountains of husks, dry and brown under the sun. More small factories, a tyre plant, car scrapyards, a roadside stall selling fruit – oranges, green watermelons, avocados and tomatoes. They left the high rises behind, then the factories began to peter out. Small allotments, with low, leafy vegetable crops, spread out across the red earth, the odd shack dotted between the fields. Men and women worked on the land, dressed in black, stooped underneath frayed straw hats, hacking at the earth with the simple tools in their hands.
Menéndez’s phone call went on and on. Torrillo let his anger burn out of him. Maria sat in the back wondering: Will this story let me sleep tonight? And out of nowhere, as sharp as a sickle, came the thought, sudden and cold and cruel. The green mask and the red velvet walls.
She thought of the time, two years ago, when Luis had returned from the hospital and told her of the tests. They had sat around the little kitchen table where, only the week before, they had made the decision, finally, to have children, to become, in his words (no, not hers, not hers) ‘whole’, and felt its presence there. Unknown, unseen, life-threatening. This thing that came from somewhere – where? – outside and entered his body, poisoned his being. This thing that they did not know, could not put a correct name to, this thing that was eating him.
That night, she had looked into his face, across the table, and seen his death. There was something behind his pale-grey eyes, a part of him that was gone already. His face, so full, so healthy, was becoming lined. His skin was turning sallow. The tests showed nothing, nothing except that he was dying, of some interior wasting, some mysterious canker that consumed the tissue, the fibre, the nerves, the very engine of his being.
After the conversation had fallen into silence, they had gone to bed and made love, slowly, without joy, thinking it could be the last time. They were wrong. For two, perhaps three weeks – she could no longer remember, those days were a blur – he had clung on to normality, and the proximity of death seemed to fire their hunger. In the morning, the afternoon, the evening, he would suddenly take her hand and she would follow. What happened was not simply sexual. It was an act of defiance, their way of spiting death itself. Then the disease, the thing fought back. He faded, before her eyes. She could not bring back the memory of how he looked in those last few weeks. Something blocked out the sight of that ravaged face, that skeletal frame, the fragile shell of a human being, lying still and lifeless on a hospital bed, eyes glinting dully, like lead, in the weak afternoon light.
Twelve weeks after that evening around the table he died. She had stayed at the bedside for the best part of a day and a night, holding his hand, feeling the wan, cold parchment that was once his skin. And then he had simply ceased to breathe.
A week before she had sat in the bathroom looking at her urine in the small, clear plastic container, watching it change colour, tears of rage streaming down her cheeks. He was still lucid then, but she did not tell him. What did you say? Was life something you could pass on, like a game of tag in a children’s playground?
After the funeral, the small secular ceremony she could scarcely remember, she drove to the airport, caught the connection to Madrid, queued at the counter for a flight to London, landed at Heathrow, caught the Tube into the city, checked into a hotel. She had seen the ad on the Tube-station wall,
wrote down the number on her wrist, called the moment she got to the room. They saw her the next morning, carried out the ‘procedure’ the following day. She remembered lying on her back, staring at the powder-white ceiling, trying to will herself into its nothingness, trying not to look at the walls, the red velvet walls. An anonymous face in a pale-green mask bent over her, there was a mild probing inside, too indefinable to describe as pain, and then, in a few minutes, it was over. As she walked out of the room, a little unsteadily, she saw, in a surgical dish, a little pool of blood and tissue, saw the surgeon notice her and then bark something at the nurse, who snatched the dish away, poured the contents into a container by the basins. It was over. Two deaths in as many weeks, and the rest of that year remains a blur. Save for the dreams: a small pool of blood and tissue lying in a silver medical basin. Moving. In the end that died too. Or maybe it just went to sleep.
The green mask and the red velvet walls.
She focused on the view again and realized they were now in open countryside. The light was mellowing into the late gold of the early evening. Menéndez was off the phone, scribbling as best he could as the car bounced along a dusty country road. Without turning around, he seemed to have been following her, seemed to have recognized that her reverie was over.
‘The bullfighter, El Guapo, has been in the city these past four days,’ Menéndez said. ‘Quemada and Velasco are looking for him now and checking on the Angel Brothers’ contacts. El Guapo’s real name is Jaime Mateo. He comes from Santa Cruz. There may be a connection. Cristina Lucena was taken into a nursing home this morning. There is a chance she has pneumonia.’
‘Did anything come of the press conference?’ Maria asked.
‘There are half a dozen calls. Mostly cranks probably. We’re looking at them.’
‘Castañeda been calling the top brass?’
‘Not that I’ve heard.’
Torrillo laughed. ‘Now that’s interesting. Struck me as the sort who’d be on the phone to his friends every time he got a parking ticket.’
