Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (5 page)

7

S
he was violently awoken by Yiannis’s hologram. The old archivist seemed to be sitting on her stomach, shouting at her. Bruna hated how her invasive and imprudent friend barged into her home with his ungodly hologram calls. The only time she’d restricted his hologram image, the old man became so depressed that the rep had to lift the restriction.

“Get up, Bruna! We’ve got a crisis. Oh my god, a crisis! The girl, Bartolo. You’d better come over, come over right away!”

“I’m on my way,” mumbled the rep, hanging up and activating the call jammer.

A blessed silence descended over her like a cool shower. Lying faceup on the bed with her eyes half-closed, Bruna concentrated on her throbbing temples. Pain. No pain. Pain. No pain. A powerful, rhythmic beat. She turned her head carefully, looking to her right. There, sure enough, on top of the lacquered box on wheels that sometimes served as a bedside table, were a wineglass and an empty bottle of white wine. She sighed. She’d been up late the night before doing a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, drinking nonstop—this bottle, and before that the rest of another one that had already been opened. Alone, and compulsively inserting pieces. Alone, and drinking one glass after another. She knew she was a lost cause when she opened the second bottle. What a way to waste her life, her short life. An obsessive-compulsive drunk. Yiannis had said there was a crisis. But her life was an ongoing crisis.

Bruna rolled to the edge of the mattress, stretched out her hand, grabbed the tube of Algicid from on top of the box, and put two chewable tablets in her mouth. The last two.
A drunk’s typical bedside table: an empty bottle, a wineglass, a tube of painkillers,
she thought as she brooded. While she waited for the Algicid to take effect, she forced herself to review the archivist’s words. “The girl, Bartolo,” he’d shouted. Bartolo was a bubi, an alien pet from Omaá that spoke like a parrot; a helpless, affectionate, squash-nosed extraterrestrial or
bicho
that had become fashionable on Earth. Bruna had inherited him from an earlier case and had become fond of him, although she was irritated by his pigheadedness and his goatlike propensity to eat anything that could be chewed, the source of his nickname, greedy-guts. The rep felt a stab of guilt. She had left Bartolo with Yiannis before her trip to Zone Zero, and she still hadn’t picked him up. The old archivist always ended up burdened with her mistakes. On top of that the man had been severely affected by the news that the girl was going to die, and even more so by the fact that there was a cure but only for people who could afford it. A few teardrops had rolled down his cheeks when she’d told him before his antidepression pump kicked in. Bruna also found the therapeutic discrimination immoral, but being a rep who had little more than three years of life left, she couldn’t take the girl’s brief future too much to heart.

The headache had almost disappeared; a certain dullness was all that remained. Bruna took a steam shower, which was much shorter than she would have liked because her water ration had almost run out. She’d have to stop off at the supermarket to buy a new card and some more bottles of wine. She put on some shorts and a Climatex T-shirt, which supposedly protected against both the heat and the cold, although Bruna had her doubts about the truth of this promotional assertion. But the clothes were comfortable and attractive with their bright zigzags of color. Yiannis’s hologram had arrived about an hour earlier; she checked her list of calls and saw that she had received four more from the archivist. He must be desperate. She grabbed a cup of instant coffee, shook it to heat it, and started to drink it as she headed out of her apartment. She raced down the stairs, not bothering to wait for the slow, battered elevators. When she reached the front entrance, she ran into her neighbor with multiple chemical sensitivity. Fate was always nasty like that: the greater the hurry, the more numerous the obstacles. The man was trying to leave the building inside his protective plastic bubble. It wasn’t a very good bubble; it looked old and resealed in various spots, and the guy had to hold the air-purifying compressor that inflated the bubble in his hand. So he was moving very slowly, no doubt terrified at the possibility that his protective bubble might tear and he’d find himself exposed to some environmental pollution that could kill him. Over the past few decades MCS had worsened; widespread and ongoing contact with artificial substances, omnipresent in daily life, seemed to be driving the human immune system mad. Interestingly, replicants didn’t suffer from it, for reasons that were not at all clear. Perhaps it was because their life span was so short; maybe more exposure to the chemical poisons was required.
Three years, ten months, and ten days.
At least Bruna’s death sentence was good for something.

The MCS neighbor finally managed to negotiate the gap in the door, and the way became clear. Bruna started to run. Yiannis’s new apartment, into which he’d just moved, was only two blocks away, so close that walking quickly barely reduced the amount of time it took to get there, but the rep liked to use her muscles, feel their elasticity and obedient response under her skin, enjoy the power of her athletic body. So she ran happily for about a minute and arrived at Yiannis’s building. It was a nineteenth-century building—Yiannis had archaic tastes—and the apartment was considerably smaller than the one he’d had before, so the furniture and his immeasurable collection of junk, including an infuriating quantity of paper books, filled the rooms. Yiannis opened the door, flashing a toothy smile. He’d already had his amygdala boost.

“Lucky you’ve arrived, Bruna. We’re in an absurd situation, ha ha! I don’t know whether it calls for tears or laughter! Come in and you’ll see.”

In the middle of the living room, with its incredibly high ceiling, someone had built a precarious, improbable tower out of chairs, stools, and boxes. At the very top, dangling by his paw from an empty hook for a ceiling lamp, was Bartolo, the greedy-guts, sobbing. When he saw Bruna, he started to screech in his baby talk.

“Help! Bartolo good, Bartolo beautiful. Help!”

“I don’t have a tall enough ladder, and I don’t dare climb up there,” said Yiannis dolefully.

“What on earth happened?”

“It was the girl. She became furious with the greedy-guts. I don’t know why.”

“Gabi bad, Gabi bad. Help!”

It was a miracle that the tower constructed by Gabi was still standing. Bruna had no intention of climbing it. She did wonder admiringly how the girl had managed to climb up and down the tower, never mind holding a predictably struggling greedy-guts. A circus act clearly. Bruna tried to take down the girl’s display, but she had no sooner touched the first chair than the whole pile came down, making a tremendous racket.

“By all the species! Just a bit closer and that stool would have split my skull,” seethed Bruna. “Help me push over that piece of furniture.”

Between the two of them they pushed a huge, heavy chest of drawers under the greedy-guts, and Bruna still had to add a small box to stand on before she could reach the cable. She untied the knot and lowered the creature. The trembling animal clung to his owner’s neck, his crest of stiff red hair tousled and his squashed nose wet with tears.

“Bartolo good, Bartolo beautiful. Gabi bad, bad.”

“Yes, yes. Come on, it’s over.”

Bartolo didn’t seem to have suffered any harm apart from a huge fright and the horror of hanging upside down for an hour, so Bruna left the bubi with Yiannis to recover and went to talk to the young Russian. According to Yiannis, the girl was under her bed, but there was no way of making her come out.

Just watch me get you out, you wretched monster,
thought the rep.

The bed was made, but the little Russian’s room seemed empty. Not a sound betrayed the child’s presence.

“Gabi? Gabi! Come out right now.”

Silence.

Bruna bent over and looked under the bed. Right at the back, against the wall, the girl’s eyes were shining in the semidarkness, the fierce, mad eyes of a trapped rat. The rep felt a sudden weight in her chest, a slight choking. She stood upright, not entirely sure what she should do next. She could of course stick her hand under the bed and pull out Gabi, but there was no question the child would bite her again. She could also pull the bed from the wall. But no matter what, knowing how agile the girl was, she would need time to catch her. And then, did she really want to use force? She squatted again to have another look: those eyes, that desperation, that defenselessness. Vermin harassed to the bitter end by its enemies. How could she have received those fatal doses of radiation?

“What happened, Gabi?” Bruna said, sighing as she sat on the floor.

Silence.

“Tell me what happened. I want to understand. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

Silence.

“Maybe this is why,” said Yiannis, coming into the room. “I found all this rubbish in the greedy-guts’ bed.”

A key, a small plastic tiger, a piece of red satin ribbon, a child’s wristwatch, a teaspoon, and the comb Bruna had already seen inside Gabi’s backpack. All the items were knotted together with bits of cord, but the strings were frayed and chewed. There were also faint tooth marks and dried spittle on the satin ribbon. Bartolo had chewed the Russian’s strange treasures.

“Ah. Now I understand. The greedy-guts stole your things and chewed them.”

Silence.

Bruna spread out the revolting remains on the floor right next to the edge of the bed.

“Don’t take it the wrong way. Even though he talks, he’s quite stupid. He’s like a very small child and has this irresistible urge to eat. That’s why he’s called a greedy-guts. It’s his nature. He can’t help it. It happens to all of us, doesn’t it? We often can’t avoid doing what we do. It’s in our nature.”

Silence. Which of them would die first, Gabi or her?

“Look, I’m going to get up and move away. I’ll go over to Yiannis, by the door. You can retrieve your treasures if you like.”

The rep did as she’d promised and stood by the door next to the archivist. A long minute went by with nothing happening. Then the girl’s little hand appeared from under the bed and speedily picked up the objects, like a hungry chick pecking at food. They could hear her dragging herself back toward the wall. Just then a call came in on Bruna’s mobile. It was Lizard. The rep’s heart gave an extra beat.

“Hi, Husky. How’s it going with your little Russian?” inquired the inspector.

“Fine. What do you want?”

Why was she always so cutting? Why did she become nervous? Why was she so rude? Why was she always so weak with Lizard?

“It occurred to me to put the girl’s tracker number into the computer and have a look at her record. I don’t know why I did it. I must have been bored. Anyway, I see that she bit you and that you went to the emergency room yesterday. I also see that the girl has been exposed to very high doses of radiation and that she’s dying.”

“Terrific. Really good,” Bruna said, swallowing her bitter saliva. “If you wanted to impress me with your talent as a detective and your ability to find out everything, I can tell you that I’m even more impressed by your lack of respect for other people’s privacy.”

“Hold on,” Lizard said, frowning. “Just stop for a minute. You always race off. You always make the same mistake. I haven’t finished yet. The bit about the radiation surprised me, as I assume it did you, so I went into the Ministry of Industry’s website to track the nuclear incident report. Here’s the important bit: there was no incident report initiated for Gabi.”

“What do you mean? The doctor told me—”

“The doctor did it. I checked. The protocol for a nuclear incident report was activated by the hospital, and they informed the ministry. But at some stage between the hospital system and the ministry system, the girl’s case disappeared. So I went back to Gabi’s record, and the information about her radiation wasn’t there anymore! I went back into the hospital system, and there was no longer any trace of the nuclear incident report either. In barely twenty minutes, while I was still connected, someone else was on the network deleting everything. An invisible, impenetrable hacker. Someone I couldn’t trace despite all the resources here at the police department. That was what I wanted to tell you. I wasn’t calling to impress you, Bruna. I was calling to warn you.”

Lizard’s fleshy face had a look of genuine concern.

“Be careful,” he added in an almost tender whisper, which penetrated Bruna’s ears like a drill.

And then he hung up without waiting for her response.

8

F
inally, a client with money,
thought Bruna as she stepped into the scanner in the luxurious lobby. She wasn’t carrying a weapon, so the bulletproof sliding door opened without any hesitation.

“Welcome, Bruna Husky. Elevator Three please,” said the automated doorman.

It was the only elevator with open doors. When Bruna stepped inside, it started to rise of its own accord. There were no buttons or floor-level indicators, but having counted from outside, Bruna knew there were ten floors, and she calculated that she must have gone up close to the top, if not all the way up. Mrs. Rosario Loperena had provided only the street number. The elevator doors opened, and the rep came face-to-face with a short anthropomorphic domestic robot. Given that the anthropomorphic design was so inefficient when it came to robots, clearly the sole purpose of this small piece of junk was to receive guests in an elegant manner.

“Good morning, Bruna Husky. Follow me please,” said the gadget in its singsong voice, walking down the hallway on its short legs.

They crossed living rooms with picture windows looking out over the city and the neighboring park, then more corridors, more living rooms and offices. Then they finally entered a fairly small, dimly lit room painted dark blue. Small transparent urns lined the walls, and something inside them was emitting subtle flashes of crystalline fire.

“Please wait here, Bruna Husky. Mrs. Loperena will be with you in a moment.”

Diamonds. The urns contained diamonds. One gem per display case, and there were about twenty of them. Bruna looked around. There were no windows; the room was reinforced. Basically, she was inside a safe. She examined the urns more carefully. Each held a small portrait as well as a diamond. In some cases the portraits were holograms, while in others they were ancient photographs. Bruna mentally reviewed the facts about Rosario Loperena, recently widowed wife of Alejandro Gand. She’d hurriedly searched the Central Archive for the name that very morning after receiving Loperena’s call. Given the disturbing information Lizard had given her the day before, the rep had considered stopping off at the hospital this morning to talk to the doctor, but the widow had seemed anxious about meeting, and Bruna was not in any position to pass up a client, especially one with so much money. Rosario Loperena was from an aristocratic family and had her own inheritance. Her second marriage was to Gand, regional director of Texaco-Repsol for more than twenty years, who had retired six months ago and died four weeks ago in an accident involving his minijet.
How rich do you have to be to own a minijet?
marveled Bruna. The price of the small private vehicle, a car-plane hybrid, was nothing compared to what it would cost to acquire the necessary and incredibly expensive fuel.

“I see you’re admiring my gallery of ancestors.”

The rep turned around. Rosario Loperena was of uncertain age and had a rather strange face. How odd that a woman of her social standing would have such disastrous plastic surgery, although Bruna knew that some people insisted on cutting and stuffing and stretching over and over again, until they turned into absolute monstrosities.

“Bruna Husky,” stated the woman rather than asking, as if she were bestowing the name on her.

Arrogant, very arrogant. One of those people who managed to seem as if they were looking down their noses even at people who were much taller than they were.

“Indeed. And you are Rosario Loperena, I presume.”

“Who else? Apart from which, I’m sure you’ve already seen my face. I’m sure you researched me before coming, right?”

“Of course,” Bruna replied, but she didn’t add that her prospective client looked much more natural in the pictures, which probably just meant that the pictures had been photoshopped. The world was a mad game of appearances. “Did you say this is your gallery of ancestors?”

“Yes. My family, as you no doubt know, is very old. My mother decided that after her death we should convert her ashes into a synthetic diamond. It was my husband who had the idea, a few years ago, that we should exhume the remains of all my ancestors, cremate them, and convert them into diamonds. The poor man didn’t realize that he would soon find himself here as well.”

The woman’s overfixed face wrinkled slightly in what might have been an expression of sorrow.

“I thought the body had never been recovered—your husband’s. I read that the minijet crashed and burst into flames.”

“True. It was almost totally destroyed, but they found a few bits that hadn’t burned, among them some pieces of arm. The diamond is mainly made from those remains, but I also added a few bits of the minijet in the hope that my husband’s heart and brain might be among them. So the gem included some of the vehicle. Not that it matters. He really liked his minijet.”

Bruna looked at her suspiciously—but no, the woman was serious. “Why do you say ‘included’? Why the past tense?”

“Alejandro’s remains have been stolen. They’ve taken his diamond,” Rosario replied, gesturing melodramatically, operatically, at an empty case Bruna hadn’t noticed.

The rep moved closer. It was a display cabinet like all the others, seemingly intact, but there was nothing inside it. No diamond, no photo.

“They took the photo as well?”

“I hadn’t put one in there yet. What happened to your arm?”

The bandage they’d put on it in the hospital was quite dramatic. Bruna regretted not having exchanged it for a more discreet patch.

“I was bitten by a rat in a Zero zone.”

“Hmm, dangerous. Rats tend to carry foul, nasty diseases.”

“Have you or anyone else touched anything?”

“No. It was like this when I discovered it this morning. The display cases each have an electromagnetic lock that is activated at the back by punching in a code. They all have the same code: 0302. My birthday.”

“The alarm didn’t go off?”

“The cases aren’t connected to the alarm. The artificial diamonds are in fact not valuable, apart from their incalculable sentimental value. That’s why it’s so strange that they’d steal my husband’s. Just that one. Why? What for?”

“But you’ve got them inside this sort of safe.”

“Yes, and the reinforced room does have an alarm. It didn’t go off, and nobody forced it. Somebody knew how to get in, and that’s definitely not easy. The password changes randomly every week. But the strangest thing of all is that those boxes along the wall contain jewels that are much more valuable than the diamonds, and they didn’t touch them. I assure you it’s a fine collection. As you well know, you can never be too thin or have enough jewelry.”

“Who knows about the existence of this room?”

The woman burst into a false laugh. She was wearing an iridescent blue Chinese-inspired silk dress with a high collar, sleeves down to her wrists, and a skirt that came to the middle of her calf. It clung to her skeletal body like a second skin. Just looking at it made you feel hot, despite the temperature in the house being perfect.

“Half of Madrid has been in here, my dear. We used to bring the guests in after dinner to have a look at the gallery of ancestors. Not everyone can boast about knowing the twelve generations that preceded them. That’s about three hundred and sixty years. Do you know that only seventy generations separate us from the birth of Christ? Assuming that he was born when they say he was. The ancients are very imprecise. What about you? How many ancestors do you know? Oh, forgive me, what a scatterbrain I am,” Loperena said, laughing as she formed a circle with her botoxed lips and made as if to cover her mouth.

The silly gesture could have come straight out of an early silent movie. Bruna snarled to herself. The bitch had said it on purpose.

“Why me?” Bruna growled. “Why have you come to me? Why didn’t you call the police or a well-known detective agency?”

Loperena stood straight, and her small eyes flashed. “Because I have a suspicion that it’s someone close to me, and perhaps I don’t fancy the police knowing what’s happened. And because I think a technohuman without money and with virtually no clients is going to be more receptive to my needs and my wishes. I do my research, too, dear.”

Intelligence and spite. That was what that face revealed when it stopped hiding behind its insipid pouts.