Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (39 page)

“What do expect me to say?” she said with a voice laden with scorn. “That you’re despicable? You already know that.”

Lorenzo felt himself blushing, and that irritated him. He couldn’t stand that perpetual feeling of weakness when he was with María. For once he put aside his characteristic talent for hypocrisy and halfheartedly admitted that he worked for Publio. Point by point he confirmed what Alcalá had told her: that he was using her to get information out of the inspector and then give it to the congressman.

“Yes, I work for Publio. We all work for him, whether we want to or not. César does too, and so do you, although you don’t believe it. We are puppets that he moves as he wishes.” There was no pride or shame in his attitude. Just resignation. As if everything were inevitable.

He tried to explain himself, but his reasons weren’t very convincing. It was the reaction of a guilty man. He felt judged by María’s unappealable silence; she hadn’t been moved in the least by his sudden attack of sincerity. The realm in which Lorenzo moved, with its intrigues, its betrayals, its strategies, and its lies, was completely foreign to her.

She had never shared his world. When they were married and he arrived home exhausted after a long day of work, he expected her to understand that he needed tranquillity and pampering, not to be pulled into absurd arguments about little domestic problems. He expected her to be indulgent, to admire what he did, and to turn his world into her own. Yet María made it clear from the beginning that she wasn’t willing to sacrifice her career or her personality, which was in many aspects more outstanding than Lorenzo’s. It was that vanity, that arrogance in challenging him, that always made him lose his temper, the impossibility of breaking her to his will. Not even by beating her.

The minutes passed laboriously. The scent of the sea, the flowers in the vases, and the smoke from María’s cigarette braided an asphyxiating rope between them. The sound of the silverware used by the other diners grew until it was unbearable. Lorenzo would have rather that she yelled at him, that she insulted him. Anything but that confused silence. He was about to say something when María turned her head slowly. She looked at him the way one looks at a cockroach on the wall.

“Why did you bring me into all this?”

It was a disconcerting question, but logical in a way. It would be easy to say that it had all been a coincidence. But coincidences don’t exist.

“Why?” repeated Lorenzo out loud, as if he didn’t understand the question or the answer seemed too obvious for him to bother replying. He lifted his head beyond the terrace where they were sitting.

The afternoon was bursting with red and gray colors. In the distance he saw the sailboats. They were like restless horses that pitched, tied to each other. Memories of his childhood came into his mind. He had been raised close by there, in the Barceloneta, and he had always secretly dreamed of having one of those pleasure boats, whose decks he would wash on his knees during the months they were moored there, to earn a few pesetas. There was a time when he believed that he too deserved to be one of those rich boat owners who sailed to Ibiza, Cannes, or Corsica in the company of exuberant women and a sun that always shined on them. That was the key to everything. He recognized it for the first time without hesitation. Money, power, rubbing elbows with the big fish. That, and nothing more, had been his only objective in life. And that end had justified all the means.

But suddenly, none of that made any sense. People were dying and killing around him, betraying and lying to each other, but nobody was coming out the winner. No one. Not even Congressman Publio. He had seen the fear in his eyes a few hours earlier, the uncertainty over whether things would turn out badly … Even if his coup succeeded, would he be able to rest? No. Publio was an old man who didn’t have many years left in which to enjoy his victory, and he would squander his last forces fighting against enemies who didn’t even exist yet. That was what life was like for men who had decided at all costs to cling to something as slippery as power.

“What were you expecting from me, Lorenzo? Punishment, revenge? What?”

“You were there at the right moment. My resentment toward you did the rest. It was the moment to punish you, and at the same time pay your father back for the months he made me spend in jail. I saw a way to show you that you’re no better than me, and that your father isn’t either, with his whole overprotective father act. He wanted to protect you from me, and yet he’s the one you should be protecting yourself from.”

“What does my father have to do with all of this?”

Lorenzo looked at her with an enigmatic smile. For the first time, María didn’t know how to decipher what was behind it.

“I know you’ve been checking the file on Isabel Mola’s death. But I suppose you didn’t realize that the summary was missing some important parts.” He put his briefcase on top of his knees and extracted several documents. When the Isabel Mola file fell into his hands just when he needed a reason to force César Alcalá to talk, he had considered it a gift from the gods of vengeance. The appearance of the last name Bengoechea in the death of Isabel was going to allow Lorenzo to link María’s and César’s fates according to his whim, beginning a game of dangerous coincidences. He had kept that part of the summary secret as a future guarantee, a card that he planned to use at his convenience. But everything had gone wrong. And now that nothing mattered, he discovered with a cynical smile that he too had been used in that story.

Lorenzo explained to María all he knew about Isabel Mola’s murder. And he did it with a brutality devoid of sentiment. He stuck to the facts, the way María liked.

There it was, all written out: the bills Gabriel charged Publio, his true identification papers as an intelligence agent, his years as an infiltrated agent in Russia, his reports on Isabel’s meeting with the other conspirators in the attempt on her husband’s life between 1940 and 1941, including Gabriel himself, who had pretended to be their leader. The plan to assassinate Guillermo Mola and later thwart it, and thus dismantle, arrest, and kill all those implicated, including Isabel herself. And there it was, a letter written in Gabriel’s own hand in which he told how he executed Isabel in an abandoned quarry in Badajoz, following Publio’s orders. In that very letter he told of a soldier who had happened to be a witness to Gabriel’s and the woman’s presence in the quarry. Gabriel recommended
neutralizing
him because of the risk that he might say something.

“That soldier was Recasens. Pedro Recasens. My boss at the CESID and the man who hired you to get information from Alcalá. I didn’t know until much later that it was Recasens who had falsely named César’s father as the killer. I wasn’t the one who got you into this, although I naively thought I was. It was Recasens’s idea. He believed that the common past you and César shared would make you trust each other. The only thing I did was transmit the information to Publio and enlist you into our service. But really it was that old jerk who was using us all … That is the whole truth, María.”

They were both silent, immersed in their own contradictions and their own egotism. Lorenzo dared to touch the pale skin of María’s arm. She moved away and shivered, as if all of a sudden she was very cold.

“This is a lie, you are lying…,” she said, her gaze far away, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Everything is remnants of untold truths, lies that sound true, the past, dusty memories … And yet you know it too, María. Inside you know it. I remember your suspicions those years, your father’s strange behavior. How come he never talked about the past? Why did he keep a locked room behind the woodpile? And when you took on the Alcalá case? Do your remember the arguments, his opposition to your accepting the case? You never really wanted to ask yourself who your father was. The cloud of doubts was enough for you to take refuge in. You chose to leave home, become a lawyer, forget San Lorenzo … Now, you have no choice but to face up to it.”

María buried her fingers in her hair. She felt perplexed, shocked, and broken into a thousand pieces.

“I need to get out of here; I can’t breathe,” she said, getting up.

Lorenzo didn’t try to stop her. For the first time he felt close to María, but at the same time far away and above her, like a privileged spectator watching a building, one that always seemed to rest on firm foundations, crumble. He felt the fatalism of prisoners condemned to die who, once they’d accepted their fate, are filled with a deep calm.

“You have to stop seeing César Alcalá and disappear forever, before February 23,” he said, gathering the papers he had just shown María. It wasn’t advice. It was practically an order.

María buttoned her coat with nervous fingers. Her mouth was tense due to a sudden, intense pain.

“Because you decided I should?”

“No. Because Publio ordered me to kill you,” answered Lorenzo. There was no emotion in his face. At most, a skeptical expression on his forehead, knowing that even for María that sounded grotesque. He wasn’t a murderer, and she knew it.

It was impossible to determine if María was playing a role, but she showed no trace of fear. If what Lorenzo was trying to do was intimidate her, he didn’t manage to, rather quite the opposite. The only thing his words provoked was her rage.

“Kill me? It’s one thing to beat defenseless women, and it’s another thing entirely to try to kill a person willing to defend herself. I remember your expression of terror when I put a knife to your balls the day I decided to stand up to you. You showed who you were, a coward. Just like everyone of your type. You hit, you manipulate and threaten when you know you are strong. And your strength is the weakness of the woman you crush under your heel. But if that woman bares her teeth, you run like a rat. Kill me, you say? God knows that I’m the one who should shoot you down right here, right now, asshole. So you can save your advice. I know perfectly well what I have to do … And believe me, you and your friends aren’t going to like it one bit.”

Lorenzo swallowed hard. He felt increasingly small and ridiculous. And at the same time he was struggling to rise above that feeling and answer emphatically.

“Publio wants me to kill you. If I don’t do it, he’ll send Ramoneda. Although first he’ll have him kill me. I think you should go far away; go find your girlfriend and forget all about this. You might still have a chance.”

But María was no longer listening to him. She left the restaurant, slamming the door. Her gait was energetic and sure. But if you looked closely, you would notice a slight trembling in her shoulders and a weakness in her legs.

24

Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter

María crossed the deserted plaza Sant Felip Neri, leaving the church to her right and entering into the narrow streets that led to the old Jewish quarter. The sound of her heels stuck in the vaults yellowed from dampness. They were insecure steps, like those of a child learning to walk. With her face sunk into her coat collar, she was another shadow in the landscape, hiding from the light. She passed a drunk, who pissed on his own miserable frame that leaned against a wall. The drunk barely opened his eyes when he saw that ghost pass with wavering steps. María lifted her gin bottle in a toast. She wasn’t drunk enough yet to fall down beside that stranger, even though she’d been drinking nonstop since she’d left Lorenzo in the restaurant.

She hadn’t gotten drunk in years, not since her university days, when getting drunk was part of the ritual of her circle of friends at the Comtal pension. In those days, drinking gave María tremors that she could barely conceal. But now she didn’t even feel nauseous. She wanted to erase it all, forget everything, but what she was, what she knew, was still there, stuck in her head, immune to the gin. She wanted that voice to stop talking, to not lift up a cloud of dust as it stomped around inside her brain. It was all phantasmagorical: the memory of the ground at her mother’s frozen grave. The hard ground and the black earth. That grave in that small-town cemetery in the Pyrenees shouldn’t be her mother’s; it should be her father’s. She didn’t understand why. The metalworker was a stranger; he wasn’t part of the family. All he did was make swords, knives, and katanas for the Mola family, but he was nobody, he was nothing. A murderer. He had no right to put flowers on her mother’s grave every day, to enjoy her company.

María stumbled as she reached a pitted wooden door, eroded by the dampness. She took a piece of paper out of her pocket and checked, without really needing to, the street number. She knew that place perfectly, but for the first time in a long while she felt insecure, unable to pick up the metal doorknocker and push the partially open half of the door with her shoulder. She looked up. Above her she only saw a portion of sky and dozens of plastic window boxes hanging on the balcony railings. She couldn’t hold back a shudder. That place was perfect in its grayness and neglect. Her perfect place. The Comtal pension.

Finally, she pushed the door without knocking and crossed the small tiled patio. Everything was the same as it had been in her student years, when it was against the rules to bring boys up to the rooms and she snuck Lorenzo through the back, getting past the always attentive landlady: the same broken tiles in the corner, the large earthenware jars with dried flowers, the stone well. She approached it and looked in carefully. She had always been afraid of heights and depths. She couldn’t see the bottom of the well. It was like a black hole that drew her like a magnet. She made an effort and managed to pull herself away from that blind eye. From it emerged moaning and shouts, as if it were the antechamber to hell itself.

She went one by one up the ceramic steps that led to the roof of the upper floor. The door to the room was open wide. From inside came a smell of freshly brewed coffee and a melody on a record player. She recognized it immediately and smiled to herself. She went in. A feminine figure with its back to her, hands resting on the table with the record player, seemed to be contemplating the music more than listening to it.