The Hermit (34 page)

He scatters a few handfuls of feed around the house so they won’t have to search too hard. He calls out for them a few times, but that has never worked.

He settles Beatriz in her own bed and he sleeps under a blanket on the sofa. He sleeps the sleep of the guilty, waking with a bad conscience – as if he’s forgotten something important. He peers around in the brown darkness of the flat and wonders about the sounds emerging from the building: lift, water spigot, voices.

While the sun is on its way up, he drinks the last of the instant coffee. It’s an expensive brand, Zebrezá, which makes the coffee completely brown and foamy. It’s clear they’ve hired someone to clean the flat, but still he runs a cloth across shelves, tables, and doors. He empties drawers and washes them, sorts everything, then puts it all back. He washes blankets and Raúl’s bed linen. When it comes to cleaning, he’s self-taught and feels unstructured and ineffective. Since he’s lived on the island, he’s never had others clean for him or watched others tidy up. He throws out everything in the cupboards. Afterward, he fills the cupboards again with items he buys at HiperDino.

He eats lunch with Beatriz. Her face is no longer thrilling or meaningful, now seemingly just sculptural elements on a light-brown background. So delicately fastened that they might rustle apart at any time. Cautiously he removes the respirator’s mouthpiece, then pours a little water on his index finger and runs it gently across her lips. He doesn’t hear the words every time, but he has heard them a few times when he’s sitting quietly beside her. When he gets used to the wheezes emerging from the respirator and adopts the same rhythm as her. He needs them, the words. To hear them again. To know what he’s doing and why. To understand himself and feel less alone. He traces his fingers across her lips, follows each little curve, balancing on the cusp of the mouth’s darkness. The index finger which at the slightest mistake slips into the crevice, the woman’s most fascinating orifice. The only place where the contents conquer the form. Annette had an average mouth, he discovered after many years of not knowing why she always seemed so ordinary. She was a nice-looking woman in many ways. She had long, straight hair, which had gradually turned silver. Many of his friends envied him for her breasts, which appeared larger than they really were. But her lips, her mouth: over the years he took them personally. It was his job to make her smile. Yet for each day that he failed, he knew it would only grow harder and harder. Not until he left her did he begin to blame her mother, her family, her social standing. There was so much scepticism and frustration in the family that the four sisters – Annette was the youngest – seldom smiled. As if there were no muscles in their faces.

But Beatriz had had the most incredible smile. She was one of those kinds of women who’d achieved everything with her smile. The little girl who gets to sit in front on the scooter, the big girl who gets her first job, the grown woman who decides which man she will drive crazy.

Help me. Let me go
. The words are so faint that it makes no sense to call them words, just tiny signals in the noise of the respirator. He calls for her, he whispers to her, he feels the heat from her ears. What should I do, Beatriz? What do you want? Her body seems to respond. Her chest rises, a force having taken hold of her, and her face begins to quiver. Then the catheter makes a noise and a greenish liquid oozes into the drainage bag. All at once he is struck by her state of immense vulnerability, and he affixes the respirator’s mouthpiece in place and carefully rolls her onto her other side. She speaks, but he’s the only one who hears, and he’s the only one who can help her now. Normally he wouldn’t want this kind of responsibility or this kind of role, but no one else can do it. There’s no one to complain, no one to reproach him. Only himself. Only his own insistent voice.

He returns to his cleaning with a kind of angry energy. He finds Radio Mucha on Raúl’s nice stereo and hoovers the flat to the sound of loud music. When he reaches the entrance way, he sees a letter leaning against a vase on the chest of drawers. Someone was in the flat. It’s from Emanuel Palabras.

Marcelis’s office, Monday, 1 p.m.

It occurs to him how powerful Emanuel Palabras actually is. He actually managed to make Marcelis schedule a meeting with him. Erhard feels a tickling sensation of delight that’s succeeded by reluctance to spend time with Marcelis, being forced to ask him questions and to learn from him. Marcelis won’t be open and communicative; he’ll brush Erhard off. He’ll presume that Erhard doesn’t understand business economics or leadership or anything but driving a taxi. Marcelis has never been a chauffeur, and he’s probably never even driven a cab. He got things under control at Servicio Canarias, a messenger service known for its expensive prices and unreliable messengers, but Erhard doesn’t know what Marcelis did there, or what he got under control.

Standing in the entrance way, it also occurs to him that many others might have keys to the flat. He needs to think more aggressively, be more distrustful, and expect the worst if he wishes to maintain control. He empties the drawers and lays all the keys from a little box on top of the commode, then adds the keys to Raúl’s car and flat. All in all, there are two keys to the flat, three unknown keys, and the car keys. After trying both keys in the door, he goes to the study and scavenges the shelf, looking for a thin blue and white telephone book. He riffles through to L, and selects the only locksmith in the city. A man called Saragó. He punches the number and schedules him for Friday at 8 a.m.

He studies Raúl’s car keys. In some way, it seems more transgressive to take over his car than his flat. The car was one of Raúl’s favourite things. He loved its buttons and its white leather interior and its hum when he drove on FV-1. Taking over the car means pushing Raúl definitively out of the way. But at the same time, Erhard knows why he finds it so difficult. Growing up in his family, he was told that one must earn the good things in life; but in reality, no one ever deserved anything good. It was well known that happiness wasn’t capricious; it was ridiculous. Though his father had toiled and toiled without asking for handouts or assistance, he ended his days filled with spite, and dementia, mean without knowing why, determinedly and repeatedly insisting that he never had anything handed to him. But what’s wrong with having something handed to you, really? What’s wrong with gathering up the crumbs that life throws at you? Why not take hold of the good things in life like some kind of drunken busker, regardless of whether one really earned them or not? Now it’s Erhard’s turn to enjoy the spoils of life, even if he hasn’t earned them.

In the afternoon he drives to dispatch. He’s never been good at endings, the gentle transitions or gradual shifts. He’s not crazy about change, but if it has to be, then it has to be. No reason to camouflage an ugly conclusion. No reason for friendly gestures and kind words. A goodbye is a goodbye.

But that doesn’t make it any easier. Or painless. Leaving Annette and the girls was dreadful. But it was a simple, sharp break – very clear. He didn’t beat around the bush with prevarications, excuses, and nightly calls. He didn’t ask for understanding or forgiveness. One day he followed Mette to school and stood on the stairwell watching her walk down the corridor, the next day he was gone. So even though he’s been part of this company for many years, it ends here, now, today. There is paperwork and stuff to do with the Merc which he leases from TaxiVentura, but he doesn’t wish to explain himself or give a speech while raising a dram. Already when he parks in front of the workshop, people are giving him funny looks. They know, he presumes, though he doesn’t care. He hoovers the car, pounds the floor mats against the grate, washes and dries the panels, washes the headlights and windows, polishes the wheel rims. He empties the glove box and tosses everything in the rubbish bin, and removes the little necklace that dangles from the rearview mirror. He leaves the keys on the table with Anphil, then goes inside. The company’s only female driver, Felia, a no-nonsense woman, is standing at her locker organizing her receipts when he enters. He heads to the corner and begins stuffing the few things he owns into a plastic bag. As soon as he has gathered his things, he leaves.

Dispatch is located on the outskirts of Corralejo, and on the way back he follows a long, gloomy road. When he reaches the end of it, he bumps across a ditch and wends through an overgrown construction site. Cats sit on top of rusty barrels.

He’s travelled this road many times, thousands, but he’s never really noticed the containers. But now he does. Just like on Tenerife, they’re behind a crumpled chain-link fence in an area with greyish-brown asphalt and weeds that poke up through tyres and cracks. He slips through a gap in the fence and drives among the closest containers.

Someone transports the giant containers here. No one sees them do it, apparently; they’re just there, sealed up in once place and opened in another. At night they sail into port stacked on rusty blue supertankers. In the morning they’re lifted onto lorries that haul them onto land and deposit them here on these asphalt fields. The contents are emptied, distributed. The invisible consumer-machine, well-oiled and smooth and insentient. Erhard now recalls what he saw on Tenerife: A container with an old VW. He only saw part of it; in the available light, he could just make out the characteristic headlights. Where do the cars come from? And how are they transported? Erhard doesn’t know. He’s never considered where the island’s cars actually come from. Barcelona? He runs his hand along the rough sides of a container and gazes into the darkness inside. It’s darker than dark. It could easily hold a car.

There’s something about that car. It’s reasonable to assume that someone drove it from Puerto, then abandoned it on the beach. The distance from Puerto to Cotillo is around thirty miles, if one drives over Corralejo. It ought to be in Lisbon. The plates were missing.

Facts:

An unknown mother.

A dead boy.

Newspaper fragments from Tenerife.

A stolen vehicle from Amsterdam?

The beach in Cotillo. At low tide.

The most likely scenario is that the mother went with her son from Tenerife to Fuerteventura, maybe in a fishing boat or a private boat or one of the big yachts. Something happens, the boy dies, and the mother wraps him in newspaper from a cafe she’s visited. In Puerto she gets her hands on a stolen car, removes the licence plates, and tries to drive into the water with her already dead child. But the car gets stuck in the sand, and the mother walks out in the sea and drowns herself, leaving the boy’s body in the box on the backseat.

That matches the police’s investigation. Erhard’s latest discovery of the newspaper on Tenerife, and the fact that the car had stood in high water – as it shows in the girl’s photographs from the beach that day – also supports that explanation. And yet, as he stares at a cat running through the container terminal and into a dry bush, he’s convinced it’s something else. Something else entirely.

He studies the container door, the locking mechanism. It locks in place by jamming an arm-length rod downward: this drives a bar in the lower and upper halves of the door into a hole in the hull of the container. Erhard tries the lock a few times. It seems solid and simple. He knows this kind of mechanism from his work; they have an old trailer that locks the same way. With that one the rod goes the other way; it has to be jammed upward instead, which means that the door sometimes opens by itself if one hasn’t shoved the rod all the way up and fastened it with a bar or padlock. But here, gravity ensures that the rod doesn’t loosen. He moves on to another open container, then a third. None have the exact same locking mechanism.

Erhard doesn’t quite know what it means. He continues between the containers and then onto an expansive zone with construction equipment, stacks of plywood. It’s almost five o’clock. He has nothing to do before he meets with Marcelis in three days. For the first time in fifteen years he’s free of dispatch. Downtown, with nothing in his pockets, other than Emanuel Palabras’s promises.

The islands’ tomatoes look like clenched fists. The skins are like apple peel, the juice like egg-white. He picks one at a time. In the bottom left corner of the box he finds three good ones, and one that may be a little too ripe, but smells strange, salty. Three will do. Then he fishes a square chunk of African goat cheese out of a bucket filled with vinegar. He pays with tips from the previous day, from what might have been his final taxi ride – not a memorable event. A solicitor of some kind. Erhard had been more concerned that he picked up Aaz on time.

Just then he sees Cormac. Since it’s siesta, he’s sitting on the stairwell smoking and gazing curiously at Erhard, who is approaching with his purchases.

– On the way up? Cormac asks.

– In a bit. Just need to get my shopping done.

– On the way up the food chain, I mean.

Cormac grins so that it’s impossible not to see where he’s missing teeth in the back of his mouth.

– An old dog can enjoy his last days, Erhard says, exaggerating on purpose.

– The good drivers say you’ve earned it.

– Do they? Erhard’s more surprised than he sounds. – And what do the mean ones say?

Cormac looks at him as he sucks his slender cigarette. The smoke rises as if from his hair. – Ponduel, that devilish bastard, says you’ve brown-nosed your way to the job.

In other words kissed a wealthy man’s ass, Erhard thinks.

– That’s because he doesn’t know what a bad kisser I am.

Cormac laughs. – Others say you’re sniffing around doing police work. But one hears a lot of things in an electronics shop.

– Who says that?

Erhard wants to keep his surprise hidden, but he’s not completely successful.

– My dear wife heard it from one of the girls down at the harbour. That you’re looking for a dead boy’s mother.

Erhard laughs tensely and turns away for the first time. He doesn’t know how to deal with a telltale. Should he deny the story, knowing full well that it might make Cormac even more curious? Or should he play along and confirm the rumour? There’s only one answer: to not care, to laugh it off. But before he says anything, Cormac changes the subject.