“I remember. I remember it quite clearly,” I said, amazed that I’d never made the connection. “He was a prisoner in a maximum security prison, and he got out to commit burglaries with the guards’ permission. Well, at least here it’s obvious it wasn’t Kloster.”
“It was Kloster,” she said, eyes blazing.
For a moment it all felt unreal. Her mouth was twisted angrily. She’d spoken with absolute conviction, with the dark determination of a fanatic, who will brook no contradiction. But a moment later she was crying quietly, pausing now and then as if the effort of having reached this point had exhausted her. She took a handkerchief from her bag, wringing it helplessly after wiping her eyes. Once she’d recovered, her voice was again controlled, oddly calm and distant.
“At the time, my brother was working in the prison hospital wing. Apparently this is where he met the convict’s wife. Unfortunately he became involved with her. They thought they were safe because the husband was serving a life sentence. They never dreamed that he had an arrangement with the guards to get out and burgle homes. It was a huge scandal in the prison service when it all came to light. The Internal Investigations Department had to carry out a detailed inquiry. That’s when they discovered the letters. Someone had been sending the prisoner anonymous letters, giving details of his wife’s meetings with my brother. The letters were in the court record so I was able to see them. The handwriting had been disguised. And there were deliberate spelling and grammatical mistakes. But I took dictation from Kloster for almost a year and he couldn’t fool me. It was his style—precise, calculating, full of humiliating details. Intended line by line to drive the man crazy. The scenes…the physical scenes were probably made up, but the letters gave very precise descriptions of the bar where they met, the clothes she wore each time, how the two of them made fun of him. Those letters were the real murder weapon. And whoever wrote them was the true murderer.”
“Did you tell the police any of this at the time?”
“I asked to speak to the officer in charge of the case, Superintendent Ramoneda. At first he was very pleasant and seemed willing to listen. I told him everything: about my suing Kloster, Ramiro’s death, my parents’ poisoning, the clues that it was Kloster who wrote the anonymous letters. He listened without saying a word, but I realised he didn’t like the direction things might go in if he decided to take me seriously. After all, for them it was an open-and-shut case. I think he was afraid he might be accused, in the midst of all the scandal, of wanting to absolve the prison service. He asked if I understood the gravity of my accusation and the absolute absence of proof in all that I’d told him. He took down Kloster’s details anyway and said he’d send one of his men to speak to him. A couple of days later I got a call summoning me back to his office. I could tell immediately that something had changed. His tone was both fatherly and slightly threatening. He said that because it was such a delicate matter and there was so much at stake he’d decided to go and see Kloster himself—he had to follow every lead, however absurd. Kloster, he said, had been very courteous—he was about to leave for a reception at the French embassy but had made time. He didn’t tell me about the interview itself but it was obvious that Kloster had impressed him. I’ve no doubt they ended up talking about his novels. Before I could say anything he produced a sheet of paper in my handwriting and laid it on the desk. I recognised it at once: it was the letter I sent Kloster after my parents died. A letter in which I asked his forgiveness for having sued him.”
“You sent Kloster a letter of apology? You didn’t mention it.”
“It was when I came out of hospital. I was confused and terrified. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for everyone close to me to die. I thought that if I asked for forgiveness humbly, pleaded and took all the blame, he’d stop. It was a mistake made in a moment of desperation. But when I tried to explain this to the superintendent he took out another document: the admission form for the psychiatric clinic where I was given the sleep cure. He said he’d had to make inquiries about me too. From his tone, he made it clear he thought he had my measure and wasn’t prepared to waste any more time on me. He asked if I realised that with the same lack of proof somebody sufficiently imaginative, or deranged, might also accuse me. Then he went back to a fatherly tone and advised me to accept that my boyfriend’s death had simply been a careless accident, my parents’ a tragedy, and there was nothing more to it. They’d caught my brother’s killer and this was indeed quite another matter: surely I hadn’t forgotten that they’d caught the brute with my brother’s blood around his mouth? Did I want them to let him go and instead pursue a writer awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion d’honneur with whom I’d had a personal problem of some sort several years ago? He stood up and said he couldn’t help me any further but there was a public prosecutor on the case if I wanted to take my stories to him.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
She looked defeated. “No, I didn’t,” she said.
She lapsed into a long helpless silence, as if now that she’d told me everything she had retreated further into herself. She sat hunched in the armchair, hands with fingers interlaced in her lap, jerking her head and shoulders back and forth in small compulsive movements. She looked on the verge of shivering.
“Don’t you have any other relatives who could help you?”
She shook her head, slowly, resignedly. “All that’s left of my family is my grandmother Margarita. She’s been in an old people’s home for years. And my sister, Valentina, who’s still at school.”
“What happened after that? It’s been a few years since your brother died, hasn’t it?”
“Four. He’s letting time pass again. These periods are torture. I almost never leave the flat, and I watch Valentina constantly. I’ve become obsessive about crossroads, and locks, and turning off the gas. But I can’t control Valentina completely any more. I can’t stop her going out with her friends sometimes. My God, sometimes I even follow her without her knowing, to make sure he’s not after her. I only visit my grandmother once a week, on Saturday afternoons, but I’ve left written instructions not to allow in any visitors except Valentina and me. I’m scared he’ll get in there under a pretext, in disguise…”
“But from what you’ve said he seems to prefer indirect methods. Or do you think he’d risk doing something himself?”
“I just don’t know. It’s unbearable not knowing what’ll come next. I’ve tried to take precautions, but you can’t take every single possible precaution. It’s so difficult…I hadn’t seen him again for all this time and even though I never forgot for a moment, the waiting had come to seem unreal, even to me. As if only I was perpetuating it, because only I knew. And him. Until I saw him again yesterday. I think it was carelessness on his part. I think I’ve got a slight advantage for the first time. Or maybe not, maybe he’s so confident that he let me see him, the way he did at the cemetery. I’d just been to visit my grandmother and I went into the antiques shop below the old people’s home. At one point I looked out and saw him standing across the street, staring up at the windows of the home. The traffic lights were red, but he just stood at the kerb, apparently examining the row of windows or an architectural detail. He didn’t see me. He stared up at the building for a few moments, then walked away without crossing the road.”
“Is it an old building? Maybe he genuinely was admiring one of the stained glass windows or the mouldings on the balconies?”
“Maybe. I expect that’s what he’d say. But my grandmother has one of the rooms looking out on to the street.”
“I see. And this was yesterday. Is that why you decided to call me?”
“There’s that, and something else. It would almost be funny, if I could still find anything funny. My sister’s in her final year at school and about a month ago her literature teacher decided they should read a novel by a contemporary author. Of all the writers in Argentina, guess who she chose?”
“I didn’t know Kloster was
recommended reading in schools now. I expect teenagers find his novels pretty stirring.”
“Yes, that’s the right word, if you want to put it tactfully. Valentina was completely gripped by the book—I think she read it in a couple of days. I’ve never seen her so absorbed by a novel. Over the next few weeks she devoured everything by Kloster in the school library. And then…she persuaded her teacher to ask him to come and give a talk to the class. Last night she told me Kloster has agreed. She’s thrilled that she’s going to get to meet him. And she said something that made my blood run cold: she’s going to try to interview him for the school magazine.”
“But haven’t you told her anything all these years? Doesn’t she know…”
“No. I’ve never told her. She was only a child when I worked for Kloster and to her he was just a nameless writer I went to work for every morning. She has no inkling of any of the rest of it. I wanted her to have a normal life, as far as possible. I never dreamed she’d jump into the wolf’s mouth herself. Yesterday, when she told me, I thought I’d start screaming in front of her. I didn’t sleep all night. And suddenly I remembered you.” She looked at me, and I felt she was extending an imploring hand to me. “I remembered that you’re a writer too. I thought you could speak to him. You could speak for me.” She burst into anguished sobs and, as if she no longer cared about holding back, she said, almost screaming: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this, without even knowing why. I just want you to find out.”
I suppose I should have put my arms round her, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I sat frozen, terrified by her violent sobbing, waiting for her to calm down.
“You’re not going to die,” I said. “Nobody else is going to die.”
“I just want to know why,” she said through her tears. “Speak to him and ask him why. Please,” she begged, “will you do this for me?”
∨ The Book of Murder ∧
Four
Once I was back out in the piercing cold night air, I saw the problem, or set of problems, I’d got myself into. So had I believed Luciana? Strange as I find it now, as I walked home through the last traces of that Sunday, to some extent I had believed her, just as you believe in the revolution while you’re reading The Communist Manifesto or Ten Days that Shook the World. At any rate I’d believed her enough to make that stupid promise. The more I thought about it, the harder it seemed to keep. I didn’t know Kloster personally; I’d never even seen him. Ten years earlier, when I wrote for various literary supplements, at a time when I went from literary gatherings to book launches, from round tables to newspaper offices, it would have been impossible not to meet him had he deigned to show his face at such events. But during those years Kloster’s persistent non-appearance had become legendary, and was, I assumed, another expression of his lofty contempt for us. Some of us had even toyed with the idea that Kloster didn’t in fact exist, that he was the joint invention of several writers, like mathematicians’ Nicolas Bourbaki, or of a pair of writers, secret lovers who couldn’t sign their names together. The couple of rather hazy photographs reproduced for years on the flaps of his books could easily have been faked. We joked and speculated and compared, but Kloster was too different, light years from the galaxy of Argentinian writers, like a cold star in the distance. And in the years that followed, when Kloster underwent his spectacular transformation and was frenetically everywhere, I’d made my own journey to the end of the night. On my return—if, that is, I had returned—I’d preferred to keep away from everything and everyone, shutting myself up like a phobic within the four walls of my apartment. I’d never returned to the literary scene and now only went out for walks or to give a class.
If Kloster and I had utterly failed to coincide, something separated us even more. When Kloster had done something unforgivable—have his first big success—the machinery of petty resentments in the literary world had cranked into action against him. What had once been a well-guarded secret, passed quietly with bewildered admiration amongst connoisseurs of the obscure, was now in full view, at the same democratic price as the work of any other Argentinian author, and, in the great wave of recognition, Kloster’s earlier novels reappeared. Ordinary readers in their thousands suddenly purchased those early books, which had once circulated like passwords among the cognoscenti. It could mean only one thing: Kloster couldn’t be as good as we’d thought and we had, quickly, to backtrack and shoot him down. To my shame, I was part of the firing squad, with an article full of irony about the writer I most admired. It had been just after Luciana stopped working for me and I was still feeling hurt at the thought—the conviction—that she’d gone back to him. And though almost ten years had passed and the article had appeared in an obscure journal that now no longer even existed, I was only too familiar with the tangled web of literary intrigue: someone had no doubt placed it in front of him at some stage, and if he’d read it, and was even half as vindictive as Luciana believed, he would not have forgiven me.
I couldn’t even contemplate phoning him and saying my name. He’d hang up before I could get a sentence out. I thought of increasingly crazy possibilities: turn up at his door, engineer a meeting in the street, give a false name and pretend to be a journalist. But even if I cleared the first hurdle, even if I managed to enter Kloster’s fortress of fame and we exchanged a few words, how on earth could I talk to him about Luciana, broach the real subject, without the conversation’s ending before it began? I fell asleep, annoyed with myself for having got into a mess that wasn’t mine and that I was desperate to get out of. Why did I say yes when everything inside me was saying no, I wondered again. We always treat women too well, as Queneau might have said. Even their ghosts, I thought in the oppressive darkness of my bedroom, unable to picture the face of the real Luciana from ten years ago.
♦
I awoke the next day feeling as if I’d had a drunken night out but that, despite the hangover, my senses and my equanimity had been returned to me. In the warm, familiar sunlight coming through the window, I felt myself swing towards scepticism, and the suspicion that I’d been ensnared in a series of careful lies told by an apparition from the past. Desperate for caffeine, I went out to have breakfast in a bar, and as I reviewed Luciana’s story in search of contradictions and errors I realised, with that same lucid calm, that if I had now decided to doubt what I’d heard, it was mainly to get out of this ludicrous mission.
I didn’t have classes that Monday, but I had to go to El Bajo to collect the tickets for my flight on Wednesday to Salinas, where I was to give a postgraduate course at the Universidad del Oeste. The offices of one of the newspapers for which I’d once written reviews were also in El Bajo. I decided that before doing anything it would be worth consulting the archives to confirm the most salient facts, at least.
When I got to the old building by the river, I too felt like a ghost haunting a place that no longer existed. Like a cathedral under restoration, the façade was unrecognisable, hidden behind scaffolding. I searched for the entrance amongst temporary signs and boardwalks. Someone who had come outside to smoke greeted me from a distance without much surprise or enthusiasm; I returned the greeting automatically, not entirely sure who it was. Inside the receptionists were new, but the basement where the archives were kept was unchanged, as if it was too difficult to shift the past. I went down the stairs and again breathed in the smell of damp exuded by the peeling walls, and felt the sagging floorboards creak beneath my feet, betraying my presence. I was alone down there and assumed the librarian had gone for lunch. I searched the shelves myself. The first three deaths had taken place before newspapers were digitised but I soon found the box files containing the copies for each year. I almost missed the first item as it occupied only a tiny space at the bottom of a page. Headed ‘Lifeguard Drowns’, the article didn’t mention Luciana. It simply stated that the rescue operation had been unsuccessful, and that cold and exhaustion had caused the young lifeguard to suffer massive cramps, despite his being very fit.
That was all, with no further details the following day. I supposed that no one in the resort wanted to publicise a drowning at the start of the season.
The item about her parents’ poisoning, on the other hand, near the end of the next box file, took up over half a page. There was a rather blurry photograph of a tree with some fungi beneath it, and a comparative diagram of Amanita phalloides and an edible mushroom. An arrow indicated where the volva had become detached, as Luciana had explained. The article mentioned that the couple had three children, but that none of them was with them at the house at the time. It didn’t give their names, and Luciana’s surname was so common that I wouldn’t have registered the item even if I’d read it back then. There was a slightly shorter article the following day, explaining that a search of the little wood had confirmed the presence of the poisonous species. It mentioned how spores could be carried considerable distances on the wind and warned of the dangers of amateur mushroom gathering.
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