The Armenian cut him off, while his attack dog hung back to make sure he had no escape route. Arthur tried to turn back, but realized there was no way out.
“You don’t have to do this,” he stammered, trying not to lose sight of the enormous skinhead lurking like a hungry wolf behind him. “I’ll pay you anything you want if you let us go. Name your price, anything.”
The Armenian’s eyes glimmered like a torch at the back of a dark cave.
“How much is a daughter’s life worth? How much did you pay to try to get yours back?”
Without thinking, the giant goon leaped at Arthur. Arthur managed to dodge the fist roaring past his ear like a freight train, and instinctively jammed his elbow back as hard as he could, breaking the skinhead’s nose. Stunned, the Armenian’s thug raised his hands to his face with an animal howl, but he didn’t fall. Arthur tried to use his advantage to fell him, but the man writhed in rage and clamped onto his trachea with one hand, immobilizing him, and then raised the other fist to deliver a single, definitive blow.
“Not here!” the Armenian shouted. The giant froze, his fist in midair, trembling with rage. For a few seconds he hesitated, but then finally exhaled and lowered his fist. “To the car.”
* * *
—
He couldn’t tell where they were. Someplace in the mountains, probably, he thought. Far from Madrid. Wherever he looked, all he saw were pine trees and a winding backroad that disappeared behind a hill. It was getting dark. The first stars were twinkling in the hazy dusk. Warm air whispered through the tall grass at Arthur’s feet. They’d taken off his shoes and socks and chained him to a rock. The sharp edges bit into the inside of his wrists, forcing him to bend over to reduce the tension. The Armenian was sitting on a tree stump with a twig in his mouth and a song in his head, humming quietly, eyes half-closed, body swaying slightly to the rhythm. A few meters further on, the Armenian’s gorilla was pissing on a bush, tracing a huge arc with his stream of urine. His nose had swollen up like a potato and his face was stained with dried blood.
The Armenian opened his eyes wide and spat the sprig out.
“When I was a kid, families used to come here to get away from the city for the day. My father would load up the old Seat 600 with folding chairs and a camp table. My mother would bring pig’s snout, ear, and oxtail, and we’d stuff ourselves silly. Back then nobody worried about forest fires—everybody built campfires and they didn’t make people get a municipal license. Things were more straightforward back then. After lunch, my parents would spread a blanket out in the shade and take a siesta while I set off exploring. This stump used to be an amazing old pine tree—huge. They say you can tell how old a tree is by the rings in its trunk and this one was really old. I remember one day I tried to climb to the highest branch, but I fell and cracked my head open. My parents didn’t even realize it until they woke up and saw the blood. After taking me to the clinic, where I got five stitches, my father spent the whole way home smacking me for having ruined his day out, and my mother cried the whole time.”
He gave a little laugh, as though the memory were tragically comic, and then looked at Arthur curiously.
“I bet you’ve never climbed a tree.”
Slowly, night fell over the countryside, enshrouding it in a veil of shadows. Everything was still there, even though it looked like it was gone. The Armenian sighed, gazing out at the bloodstained horizon.
“I’ve often imagined I was just a regular man. That my daughter was climbing this tree—but I wasn’t taking a siesta, I was waiting down below with my arms stretched out wide to catch her in case she fell. It sounds absurd. The things a man imagines when he’s spent half his life locked up; the things he thinks he’ll do when he gets out. But the truth is that no one builds campfires anymore because it’s against the law, and the tree was cut down long ago, and this place has become a dump, full of used condoms and cans and cigarette butts, a place where hookers and junkies come for a day out. And the truth is I no longer have a daughter to worry about her falling and getting hurt.”
He gazed sadly at Arthur and hesitated a moment, trying to calibrate the effect of his words.
“When the cup of bitterness runs over, the heart no longer suffers, because it no longer feels. I stopped torturing myself over things that never were and never will be; I gave up on the questions that no one can answer, because they have no answer, because there is no God to console me. And since that time, the only thing that’s brought me any peace over these past four years has been the knowledge that one day we’d be right here, you and me, just like this, and that before I killed you, I’d speak these words to you.”
He signaled to his henchman and the giant went to the car and took from the trunk a duffel bag, with a saw and an ax handle sticking out.
The Armenian stood and began to roll up his sleeves. He showed Arthur the sharp blade of a machete, his face darkening into a scowl. The Armenian had sworn he’d take revenge, and he had to keep that promise. He’d earned a reputation and he had to keep it, because men like him needed the respect that they earned spilling blood to survive. So Arthur’s death had to be remembered for years—prisoners huddling together to talk about it on the yard, wardens shivering on hearing the details, new inmates finding out who the Armenian was the second they set foot in the prison.
“I’m going to peel you like an orange, with a machete like the one your father used on Ibrahim; then my friend here is going to chop you up into little pieces, and I’ll scatter your remains around this mountain for kilometers so all the vermin can feast on you. Though I think I’ll save your heart and take it to your wife so that she can see it before I tear her eyes out and kill her too. I know I promised Ibrahim I wouldn’t hurt her, but we both know I can’t keep that promise. There will be nothing left of you, Arthur, nothing left of what you were or what you created in this life. You and your loved ones will never have existed. And the most important thing is that you’re going to die without knowing what happened to your daughter, not knowing whether anything you did—the harm and suffering you caused—was of any use at all.”
TWENTY-FIVE
May always left the scent of storms moving out. In the pond by the house, toads peeked out with their bulging eyes, staring at her. Olga set her suitcase on the ground, reluctant to push the door open. Coming back was a form of defeat, that’s the way she felt about it. The stones on the facade welcomed her with a blunt expression; the weeds growing in a long-forgotten flowerpot greeted her mockingly. She had actually believed she could win, could get out of this place and never come back, push the bounds of her destiny and escape. But here she was again. And her brightly colored wheelie suitcase announced that she was back to stay.
She pushed the door open and walked into the quiet room, which was painfully familiar. Almost nothing had changed. The same furniture—though it had been rearranged—the same pictures on the walls, the same dust and stillness. In the background, she heard the television, on too loud as if trying to fill the asphyxiating silence with sound.
Her mother was sitting in a wicker chair at an oval-shaped mirror, brushing her long, dirty gray hair. It fell dully over her bare shoulders, the pale skin speckled with moles. Naked from the waist up, her dry, shrunken breasts fell over her bellybutton, swinging like pendulums with the movement of her arms.
“Hello, mother.”
The old woman stopped pulling the brush through her tangles and stared at Olga in the mirror. Her dim, faded eyes flickered for an instant beneath her lashes, and then she began brushing her hair again, with determination. As though fourteen years had not passed. Olga walked to her and took the brush from her hands, taking her place like when she was a girl and her mother explained the way to do it so she didn’t yank her hair. Olga gazed at her mother in the reflection. They looked too similar to have such different lives. Bound by an invisible tie. She belonged in that darkness, that smell, that mesmeri
sing sadness where flies hovered over a basket of half-rotten fruit and her mother’s old lovers posed for her in a portrait gallery above the chest of drawers. A gallery of defeats and illusions, failed escapes and promises that none of them had kept. And among them, in one corner, was Teo.
“You can’t stay. You’re not welcome here.”
Olga didn’t have the strength to face up to her and tell her the whole truth. Truth was resentment that turned against her. Her mother had accused her of having spoiled her chance at happiness with the only man who had ever loved her. But she was fooling herself. Teo had never loved anyone but himself.
On the television, they were talking about Arthur. Dead bodies were springing up like poppies along a wheat field. Like red stains. A provincial court judge had opened an investigation that tied the deaths of Gloria and her husband to that of Arthur. The case was under sub judice rule, but press leaks hinted at a major scandal that had all the ingredients of a thriller: underage prostitution, drugs, porn flicks, and murder.
“I just need a couple of days to get my thoughts straight. Then I’ll leave and you’ll never hear from me again.”
She went up to her old room and found a bare mattress, no sheets or pillow. The desk was covered in dust, and on opening a drawer she found a rat had used her school notebooks as its nest. There were cobwebs everywhere, enshrouding the room. No one had been in there since she’d left. She opened her suitcase and stared down at the portfolio tucked between her blouses. After finding out about Gloria’s suicide, Eduardo had refused to see her, or speak to her once Who let her go. Nor had he accepted the rest of the money he was owed for the commission.
One after the other, Olga thumbtacked the sketches to the wall and then sat on the edge of the bed to contemplate them. They created a unique sequence: in each successive drawing the lines grew stronger and more assured until finally they became something solid, as if each successive sketch peeled off another layer of the onion in order to reveal its core. And there at the center, Eduardo had stopped. As if he’d been unable to take it any further. It was like the autopsy of a cadaver, but it made more sense now. She’d seen the pictures of Arthur on TV, flayed and mutilated in the most horrific way. But what had most caught her attention was the killers’ determination to disfigure his face, as if trying to erase his existence, destroy the tangle of experiences and emotions that were superimposed in Eduardo’s work. Without those eyes staring out darkly, without that hard mouth and slightly crooked nose, Arthur was nothing.
Her mother walked in without knocking. The door wasn’t locked. She stepped in and her eyes went straight to the sketches on the wall. She glanced at them, shocked because she’d never seen them before. Her mother looked displeased. She didn’t like them, or perhaps she didn’t like that they were hanging on the wall. Seeing Olga there, sitting on the edge of the bed with her suitcase still packed, knees pressed tightly together, hands held to her stomach, she looked like a schoolgirl. Perhaps her mother felt a slight tremor of guilt, nostalgia, and even love. But if so, it was buried too deep to reach the surface.
“What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into?” she asked suspiciously. What kind of trouble have you gotten me into, was what she meant.
Olga glanced up, giving her mother a look of pity. Sometimes, there are people you want to love and just can’t figure out how. With so many accumulated misunderstandings you end up losing the way, and it’s impossible to get back on track.
“There are two police officers downstairs, asking for you.”
Olga inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with air, and nodded. Sometimes all you can do is accept things the way they are because they can’t be any other way. Everything else is just pie in the sky. An illusion. Realizing that made her feel lighthearted for the first time in a very long time. She was liberated by the idea of no longer fighting the impossible. And so Olga walked down the stairs free of the weight on her shoulders, and greeted the policemen.
They wanted to ask about Gloria and Ian’s murders. They’d found the shredded remains of Arthur’s portrait and knew she had been the intermediary between Eduardo and the divorced couple. She wasn’t being accused of anything, one of them took pains to stress, they knew she was innocent.
Olga smiled sadly. Innocent. Free of blame, blessed as a newborn baby. She lifted her head and saw her mother at the foot of the stairs in her nightgown, her hair wet, wearing black socks, arms crossed over her chest. She was veiled in a soft darkness, staring at her in silence. A silence full of reproach and contempt. It was inevitable.
When Who had taken her to an abandoned house, Olga’d thought he was planning to kill her. But he didn’t do it straightaway. Instead, he locked her up in a room for two days and two nights. She thought he was going to leave her there to die of hunger and thirst. Maybe, she thought during those two long nights, Mr. Who was trying to make her lose her mind.
Olga spent all that time sitting in the exact same position, elbows on her bent knees, staring at the door, alert to any sound or the slightest change in the light filtering in beneath it. At first, she was so terrified she couldn’t think or sleep. But slowly, she started to remember things long forgotten, brief instances that hadn’t been that important to begin with but now popped into her head and made her smile, or laugh out loud, or cry the calm tears of nostalgia, or the wracking tears of desperation. As if the darkness forced her to see better, she was able to see Teo clearly, as though he—or his ghost—were sitting right in front of her, reproaching her with that condescending look he had given her for what she’d done. And it made her furious. Because that ghost, who used to jiggle the arm of his metal-framed glasses back and forth in his fingers, didn’t feel guilty at all, and in fact he was accusing her.
On the morning of the third day, she heard the sound of car tires braking outside the gate. Stunned and petrified, Olga crawled to the door to peek through a crack.
She could make out the silhouette of a woman but couldn’t see her clearly through the car’s dusty windshield. The woman lowered the window a couple of centimeters and looked out with a pair of brown, almond-shaped eyes that seemed to stare at her, to know that she was there peeking out the crack in the door. Olga withdrew, forced back by the intensity of the woman’s gaze. She heard the car door open and the crunch of footsteps on the dusty ground, heard the rusty gate open and the metallic clink of the chain lock banging against the door as it closed. The door opened and light streamed in, blinding Olga.
It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust.
“It’s OK, I’m not going to hurt you. My name is Mei.” She held out a hand, indicating that Olga should come with her.
Olga followed her to the car unsteadily, using her hand as a visor against the brightness of the sun.
Mei opened a bottle of water and offered it to her with a look somewhere between compassion and troubled curiosity. Olga drank like a desperate camel. Water dribbled down her neck leaving streaks through the grime on her skin from the two days and nights of sleeping on the floor of that pigsty.
“Slowly.” Mei’s voice was beautiful, peaceful.
Olga drank more slowly. Then she accepted the sandwich that the girl offered her, breaking it into tiny bits and swallowing them with difficulty. Olga ate, though she wasn’t hungry. Her stomach had shrunk. As she chewed the ham sandwich, she stared at Mei, whose eyes were on the road, occasionally giving her a quick sidelong glance as she drove. They were on the road back to Madrid.
“What are you going to do with me now?” she asked those eyes, which were frowning—Mei wrapped up in her own thoughts.
“Nothing,” the girl replied. “Don’t worry. It’s all over.”
Olga gazed at the unfamiliar hand and felt calmer. She believed her.
“Get some rest,” she said.
Olga tried to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. Her heart was pounding. She felt a bit calmer—though she didn’t
know why—when they got to the suburbs of Madrid. Until she realized that the streets were becoming more familiar. Mei was taking her home.
When she stopped the car at her front door and asked her to get out, Olga hesitated, disconcerted. The girl who’d done nothing but look at her with a sort of curious tenderness now gave her a wide smile of encouragement.
“Good luck. Now you’re going to have to pick up the pieces of your life and make something new of it.”
Olga looked at her uncomprehendingly.
“Where’s Mr. Who?”
The girl stroked Olga’s cheek affectionately.
“No one can hurt him now.”
Mei pulled away and drove down the street, swallowed up by the Madrid traffic in no time at all.
Olga didn’t see her crying.
* * *
—
Three hours earlier, Mei was already dead. The men surrounding her sat smoking, ignoring her, passing butts from which to light fresh cigarettes. On the dirty glass table sat beer cans, lines of coke, and leftover pizza, as well as an overflowing ashtray. Chang’s hand on her shoulder held her firmly down in a chair.
“Come on, sweetheart, try it,” he said, pointing to the white powder on the table. But Mei refused. Nor did she voluntarily submit to being groped by that old man, who squeezed one of her breasts so hard she thought he might tear it off.
“Is she a virgin?” asked one of the men there.
Chang burst out laughing.
“Are you a virgin, Mei? Do you have at least one orifice intact?”
The men ogled her greedily. They had bought her, the way you buy a head of cattle. She could do nothing but give in to their filthy mouths, their impertinent hands, which they could hardly contain. They would use her the way they’d used other of Chang’s workers, and then they’d take her to a brothel in some random city, where she would be forced to prostitute herself at all hours of the day and night until she was beyond exhausted. And when she was no longer any use to them, she’d finish out her days sickly and consumptive, rummaging through the rubbish in alleyways to survive.
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