by Antonio Hill
He nodded, and inhaled deeply. It was clear that a great many ideas, questions and possibilities were thronging in his mind.
“Don’t be angry,” he finally replied. “But I need time to get used to the idea.”
“You’re not the only one. We have approximately seven months for that.”
He stood up and she knew he was leaving.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“Of course.” She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on the table.
“Hey . . .” He came over to her and stroked her cheek. “I’m not running away. I’m just asking for some time out.”
She turned to him, and couldn’t help the irony in her voice.
“Are you out of cigarettes?”
Tomás took a packet out of his shirt pocket.
“No.”
Leire said nothing. She felt the hand move away from her cheek and Tomás taking a step back. She closed her eyes and the next thing she heard was the front door. When she opened them he was gone.
31
Hospital del Mar’s brand-new waiting room was as full as might be expected on a July Saturday, and it took Héctor a moment to locate Sergeant Andreu. In fact, she saw him first and made her way toward him. She put a hand on his shoulder and Héctor turned, startled.
“Martina! What happened?”
“I don’t know. It appears someone broke into her house and attacked her. It’s serious, Héctor. They’ve taken her to the ICU. She hasn’t regained consciousness.”
“Shit.” His expression was so intense the sergeant feared he might lose control. “Héctor, let’s go out for a minute. Right now, we can’t do anything here and . . . I have to talk to you.”
She thought he’d refuse, demand to speak to the doctor, but what he did was ask the inevitable question she’d expected.
“How come you found her?”
The sergeant looked at him intently, trying to discern in that altered expression a sign that might let her decide, know. She didn’t find it, so she merely answered in a low voice, “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Let’s go outside.”
The sun was making the mirrors of the cars sparkle. It was half past three in the afternoon and the thermometer was hitting thirty degrees centigrade. Sweaty, Héctor lit a cigarette and smoked hungrily, but he felt sick and the nicotine tasted foul. He threw the remains of the fag on the ground and stubbed it out.
“Calm down a little, Héctor. Please.”
He put his head back and breathed deeply.
“How did you find her?”
“Wait a minute. There’re a couple of things you should know. There’s news in the Omar case.” She was hoping to see some reaction in her colleague’s face, but all she could make out was interest, a desire to know. “Héctor, I asked you this Wednesday when we had lunch, but just so we’re clear. Did you see Omar on Tuesday?”
“Where is this going?”
“Fuck, just answer! Do you think I’d insist if it wasn’t important?”
He looked at her with a mixture of frustration and rage.
“I’ll say this for the last time. I didn’t see Omar on Tuesday. I didn’t see him again after that day. Got that?”
“What did you do on Tuesday evening?”
“Nothing. I went home.”
“You didn’t speak to your ex or your son?”
Héctor looked away.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“I sat down to wait for someone to remember to call me. It was my birthday.”
Martina couldn’t suppress a guffaw.
“Fuck, Héctor! Hard man of the month, going around whacking suspects, and then sitting down at home to cry that nobody remembers him . . .”
Despite himself, he smiled.
“Well, getting older makes you sensitive.”
“The worst thing is, I believe you, but a witness saw you outside his house on Tuesday evening, around half past eight.” “What are you saying?” he almost shouted.
“Héctor, I’m just telling you what I’ve found out. I don’t even have to, so do me a favor and don’t raise your voice.” She went on to tell him Rosa’s testimony, not omitting a single detail, as well as the information obtained at midday in the butcher’s. “That’s why I went to your house. The front door was open and I went up. When I passed the first floor I noticed that the door there wasn’t closed either and it seemed strange. I pushed it and . . . I found that poor woman unconscious on the floor.” Salgado heard his colleague’s story without interrupting her once. While he was listening to her, his brain tried to fit the other pieces into it: those disturbing recordings of him beating Omar and of Ruth on the beach. He didn’t manage to do it, but he thought Andreu deserved to know. He didn’t want to hide anything else from her, so he told her everything as soon as she’d finished. Then they both stayed quiet, thinking, each absorbed in their own doubts and fears. Héctor reacted first and took out his mobile. Nervously, he looked for his son’s number in his contacts and hit the call button. Luckily, Guillermo answered immediately this time. Salgado spoke to him for a couple of minutes, trying to seem normal. Then, without thinking, he called Ruth. The only reply was a cold voice announcing that the phone was turned off or out of signal. Meanwhile Martina Andreu was watching him attentively. He was aware of it, but told himself she was within her rights. There were reasons for her suspicions, and suddenly he realized—the irony of fate—that he would have to put forward the same argument he’d heard from Savall an hour before. Appeal to her friendship, trust, the years of working together.
“Ruth not answering?” she asked when he put away his mobile.
“No. She’s away. At her parents’ apartment in Sitges. I’ll call her again later. She didn’t find the thing with the DVD very amusing, as you can imagine.” He turned to Sergeant Andreu. “I’m scared, Martina. I feel like my whole world is under threat: me, my house, my family . . . And now Carmen. It can’t be a coincidence. Someone is destroying my life.”
“You’re not taking Dr. Omar’s curses seriously, are you?”
He stifled a bitter laugh.
“Right now I could believe anything.” He remembered what the faculty professor had said to him. “But I suppose I must force myself not to fall into that. I’m going to see if there’s any news about Carmen. You needn’t stay.”
She looked at her watch. Ten past four.
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not. Martina, do you believe me? I know all this seems very strange and all I can ask of you right now is blind trust. But it’s important to me. I didn’t go to see Omar, I didn’t order a pig’s head and I have no clue to his whereabouts. I promise you.”
She took a little while to answer, perhaps more than he hoped and less than she might have needed to give a completely honest answer.
“I believe you. But you’re in a real mess, Salgado. That I will say. And I don’t know if anyone can help you out of it this time.”
“Thanks.” Héctor relaxed his shoulders and looked toward the door of the hospital. “I’m going inside.”
“Keep me posted on any news.”
“Likewise.”
Martina Andreu stayed still a moment, watching Héctor disappear through the entrance to the hospital. Then, slowly, she went to the taxi rank, got into the first cab and gave the driver Salgado’s address.
Sitting on a plastic chair in a corridor near the ICU, Héctor watched the comings and goings of the staff and visitors. At first, he looked at them, but as time passed he half-closed his eyes and focused on their footsteps: fast, slow, firm, anxious. And little by little even that faded from his consciousness, immersed in the memories of what had happened to him over the last five days. The flight, the lost suitcase, the meeting with Savall and the visit to Omar’s clinic were mixed up with the statements of the suspects in the Marc Castells case, the image of Gina bleeding to death in the bath and that macabre vision of the drowned girl in the pool in a film as surreal
as it was shocking. He didn’t make the least attempt to put the sequences in order: he let them flow freely in his mind, battle each other to impose themselves on the screen of his memory for a few seconds. Little by little, like the noise surrounding him, these stills began to fade. The chattering calmed, and his brain focused on one particular blurry and poor-quality image, starring him, a violent and brutal Héctor Salgado, beating a defenseless guy with rage. An off-camera voice was added to the image, that of the psychologist, the kid who deep down reminded him of his son. “Think of other moments when you’ve been carried away by rage.” Something he’d refused to do, not just in the past few days but always. But now, waiting for the doctor to give him news of Carmen, that woman who’d treated him almost as a son, he was able to break down the barriers and think of the other moment in his life when rage possessed him: that other day in which everything turned black and all that remained was a bitter taste like bile. His last memory of the first part of his life, the violent end of a phase. Nineteen years putting up with routine beatings at the hands of a “model” father, outwardly a perfect gentleman, every inch an asshole who never hesitated to impose discipline. Why he was normally the target of his rages and not his brother was something the young Héctor had asked himself many times in those nineteen years. That didn’t mean his brother escaped, or anything like it, but as he grew up Héctor noticed a deeper cruelty in the beatings that fell to him. Maybe because his father knew by then that he hated him with all his heart. What he never suspected, not even in the bitterest moments of his childhood, was that there was another victim of these blows, someone who received them behind closed doors, in the intimacy of a bedroom conveniently situated at the other end of a long corridor. How his mother had managed to hide the bruises all those years could be explained only in the context of a home where secrets were the rule and the best thing to do was say little and keep quiet a lot.
He discovered it by accident, one Friday afternoon when he returned early from hockey training because he’d twisted his ankle. He thought no one would be home, since his brother also had training that day, and his mother had said she and his father would be visiting one of his aunts, who was old and unwell. Because of that, he arrived at what he thought was an empty flat, ready to enjoy the solitude that all teenagers long for. He made no noise—that was one of his father’s rules—and that let him hear, with absolute clarity, the rhythmic blows followed by muffled screams. And then something exploded in his brain. Everything around him disappeared except the door in front of him, which he pushed decisively, and his father’s face, going from surprise to panic when his younger son without a second’s hesitation swung the stick into his chest and kept hitting him on the back, again and again, until his mother’s screams brought him back to himself. The following day, still recovering from the beating, his father arranged for this outcast son to continue his schooling in Barcelona, a city in which he had relatives. Héctor understood that this was the best solution: starting again, not looking back. The only thing that he regretted was abandoning his mother, but she convinced him that there was no danger, that what had happened that day was in no way a regular occurrence. He left and forced himself to forget; but this afternoon, sitting on a plastic chair while the memory unfolded clearly in his mind, the anguish vanished to be replaced by a strange feeling of peace, bittersweet but true, that he hadn’t felt since then. And he told himself, calmly, that if injustice and helplessness were the only things that had triggered his rage, in his youth just the same as a few months ago, he didn’t give a damn about the consequences. Let the world say what it will.
He didn’t know how much time had passed, but he noticed a hand jogging his shoulder. Opening his eyes, he saw a figure in white who told him, with an expression designed for giving bad news, that Carmen Reyes González was out of danger, although they were keeping her under observation for at least another twenty-four hours and, of course, it would take a while for her to recover completely. He added, in a routine voice that sounded to Héctor like malicious admonition, that while there didn’t seem to be serious lesions apart from the contusion, they couldn’t rule out complications in the next few hours, due to the patient’s age. He could go in to see her, but only for a moment. And before allowing him in, the doctor with the undertaker’s face commented, in an admiring tone that was hardly professional, that the tenacity with which the older generation clung to life never ceased to amaze him. “They’re cut from a different cloth,” he said, shaking his head as if, in view of what the world was, this was incomprehensible
32
Leire looked at her watch and couldn’t help an irritated gesture. Why did all men disappear when you needed them? I’m starting to talk like María, she thought. But what was certain was that, despite Tomás’s hardly dignified exit, he wasn’t the target of her criticizms at that moment. The inspector had said he would call her mid-afternoon to finalize details. Well, fine; even though “mid-afternoon” wasn’t a precise term, she thought that at least he might have bothered to show signs of life. She resisted calling him; after all, Salgado was her superior and the last thing she wanted to do was fall out with a boss.
In any case, she had done her duties that afternoon, she told herself, satisfied. In order, she’d cleared the table and thrown out the croquettes; cried for a while—something she put down to this state of sensitive foolishness and not to anything else; and then, after showering and dressing informally, as she had agreed with the inspector, she’d gone to the station to carry out the first part of her orders. Task number one was done in a moment: one Inés Alonso Valls was flying from Dublin to Barcelona the following day on a flight that was arriving at 09.25 a.m., local time. She’d run her details without finding anything that seemed important. The girl was twenty-one, she had spent a year studying in Ireland and was the daughter of Matías Alonso and Isabel Valls. Her father had died eighteen years previously, when Inés was very small, but her mother was still alive. Leire had noted the address, just as Salgado had said. As for task number two . . . Leire looked at her watch again, as if her eyes could speed it up. She wanted to make this call, but it was early.
There was little movement in the station that Saturday, so she didn’t have anything to distract her and it left her time free to think. Inevitably her mind went back to Tomás and the conversation with him that afternoon, but also, and for the first time, she realized he wasn’t the only person to whom she should communicate the news: there were her parents, of course, and, all going well, sooner or later her bosses too. After the summer, she said to herself. First she had to get used to the idea herself and she didn’t feel like listening to reproaches or advice. Also, she’d heard thousands of times that it was best to wait until after three months had passed before announcing it. And for the first time she began to think of that being, who up until now had just brought on morning sickness, as someone who in less than a year would be lying beside her in a hospital bed. She saw herself alone with a crying baby and the image, although fleeting, was more terrifying than comforting. She didn’t want to keep going over it, so, in view of the fact that the inspector still hadn’t called, she picked up the landline and dialled her friend María’s number. Right now Santi and the villagers of Africa seemed a fascinating topic of conversation.
By one of life’s coincidences, Leire wasn’t the only one thinking of Africa that afternoon. And not just because the heat besieging Barcelona that day was closer to that continent than to moderate Europe, even in its south.
The sun was still punishing when the taxi left Martina Andreu at the door of the block of flats where Héctor Salgado lived. A pair of agents were guarding the door on the first floor, anxious to leave: there was nothing else to do there and they were happy to go. When they emerged, one of them commented that the stairwell smelled awful, and she merely nodded. She’d noticed it before, although perhaps not so strongly, but she didn’t want to keep them, nor did they want to stay. The sergeant wanted to be alone, without witnesses in u
niform, to explore on her own. Something told her the assault on Carmen wasn’t a random incident. Héctor was right: too many things were happening around him, none of them good. On the other hand, the statements of the witnesses—Rosa and the butcher—were still fresh in her mind. Héctor could ask blind faith of her and she gave it, as a friend. But the part of her that was a cop demanded proof. Tangible proof that might counter the effect of these testimonies, which in all honesty she had no reason to doubt.
Once alone, she closed the door of Carmen’s flat and took a quick look around. She’d found her in the short passage separating the hall from the kitchen. The attack had been faceon, so it stood to reason that the poor woman had opened the door to a stranger who had attacked her after entering. But for what? They hadn’t searched the house—nothing seemed to be missing; there were no drawers on the floor or open cupboards. Maybe the guy had got scared after the assault and opted to get out of there? No, she didn’t like that explanation at all. Carmen had been hit twice with a metallic object. There was no trace of the weapon in the flat. Fuck, there was no trace of anything in this flat, cursed the sergeant. She looked toward the cupboard that hid the electricity meter. If she wasn’t mistaken, there were the keys to Héctor Salgado’s flat. Someone else might have felt a pang of conscience, but not her. It was what she had to do.
Keys in hand, she went up the stairs. The foul smell became more intense for a moment, then faded. Martina was in a hurry to search the inspector’s flat before he decided to return. The qualms hit her when chance awarded her first prize and the key chosen turned in the lock, but she rejected them without banishing them completely, as if putting them in a recycling bin. Once inside, however, she considered what she was doing there and what she hoped to find. The blinds were lowered and she switched on the light. She scanned the flat. Nothing seemed out of place. She went to the kitchen and opened the fridge, where she just saw some beers and a jug of what looked like gazpacho. She couldn’t imagine Héctor making it, in all honesty, and it seemed homemade. From the kitchen she returned to the dining room and from there she walked to the bedroom. Unmade bed, suitcase open in a corner . . . The typical state of a single man’s room. Or a separated one.
