Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (7 page)

11

T
he long, reddish, braided mustache of Virginio Nissen, the psych-guide, filled the entire screen of Bruna’s mobile.

“Hi, Nissen. Sorry to bother you. Do you have a minute? I wanted to ask if you remember the Russian, the child for whom I’m acting as a guardian.”

“The girl you usually refer to as ‘the monster’?”

“Er, yes, that one. It turns out she’s obsessed with tying everything with a cord. I mean, she has a collection of useless items hanging from a piece of string, each one attached with a knot: a comb, a piece of candy, a key. This string of objects seems to be very important to her. She bit me when I grabbed it, and she hung my greedy-guts from the ceiling when he chewed on the cord.”

“Right.”

“She even attached a knot to me, on the hem of my T-shirt, without my being aware of it. Of course I’m not dangling from her string, but the knot is still there. I haven’t dared undo it. I don’t understand why she does it. That’s what I wanted to ask you, Nissen—do you know what it all means?”

“Let’s see, Husky,” said the psych-guide, stroking his mustache. “Why would you tie up someone?”

“So he couldn’t attack me.”

“That reply is very you, Husky. But don’t think like a combat rep. Why would you tie someone up?”

“So he didn’t escape.”

“You’re close,” Nissen said, laughing, “but once again you’re blinded by that prism of aggression through which you contemplate the world. Listen, the child hasn’t just knotted you. From what you’ve told me, she attaches all sorts of objects to the cord with knots. Not just people. Why? To what end?”

The rep frowned and made an effort to concentrate. The psych-guide watched her from the screen with the same look a mother uses to encourage her baby to take its first steps.

“So that . . . so that they won’t get lost.”

“So they won’t get lost. That’s it, Husky. I think that’s what it is. Imagine the losses this child has suffered.”

Bruna’s fingertips touched the knot still attached to her T-shirt. The girl had knotted her, too. It could be that Gabi simply didn’t want to miss the rest of the story. Or maybe it was unexpected proof of affection for the rep. Maybe the love of monsters was like that. Knots that snare, bites that hurt and tear.

12

A
fter her unsettling session with the tactile, Bruna had spent a fair portion of the evening working on the Loperena case with a sleeping Bartolo curled up on her lap. Ever since the incident with the girl, the bubi was terrified and constantly sought her protection. In fact the greedy-guts was so scared and depressed that even though the rep left him on his own for much of the time, he hadn’t misbehaved, apart from drooling and chewing on the edge of her towels.

First, thanks to the not entirely legal search and decoding software in her possession, Bruna was able to go through the police reports on Alejandro Gand’s death. The case, already closed, had been deemed an accident, and the documents were filed with the lowest security clearance. The crash of the minijet—a machine that was almost eight years old—was attributed to equipment fatigue, bolts that couldn’t sustain the strain, and poorly carried-out inspections. Minijets were frivolous gadgets that tended to break down, so the outcome of the investigation wasn’t surprising. The accident, however, was spectacular and catastrophic. The minijet had lost part of a wing, gone into a spin, and ended up crashing into a wall. Full of fuel, it exploded. Apart from a few scattered remains, both the minijet and Gand’s body were burned to a crisp. Or rather, almost totally vaporized, given the force of the explosion. Luckily, it happened at 3:00 in the morning in a deserted industrial zone, so there were no other casualties.

Next Bruna reviewed the former executive’s record, to the extent that she was able to access it. She tracked his career in the Texaco-Repsol annual reports, the media, all the official photo archives she could find, and a few classified ones. Every life generates a huge amount of information. It took her hours to comb through it. She was desperate for a glass of wine, but she’d have to get up to fetch it, and she didn’t want to wake up the greedy-guts, who was snoring peacefully on her lap.
At least I’m sparing my liver by staying put,
she thought. As Yiannis kept telling her, sometimes acts of kindness toward others are simply a way of looking after ourselves.

Bruna was searching for a man or woman who might be Gand’s lover. She assumed it would be a woman, since the guy’s profile demonstrated a marked heterosexuality. Who else would want to steal a funerary diamond of scant value from a house full of so many other valuable items, unless it was because of a bond of affection or a desire for sentimental revenge? Or at least that was the conclusion suggested by the widow’s words: “I have a suspicion that it’s someone close to me, and perhaps I don’t fancy the police knowing what’s happened.” Bruna pictured a spiteful lover who would not have been welcome at the formal funeral and who, furious at being treated like a dirty secret, had decided to keep the diamond remains of the man she considered more hers than the actual widow’s. The rep had asked Loperena if she suspected that her husband had been keeping anything from her, but the woman was too proud to admit anything: “That’s for you to find out.”

Of course that’s precisely what Bruna was trying to do. But she hadn’t found any solid leads. Eventually, in desperation she decided to go and see the man who had been Gand’s personal secretary at Texaco-Repsol for twenty years. The slight, insignificant-looking little man appeared beside the director in the photo archives more often than anyone else, including Loperena. What a personal secretary who’d spent twenty years at the side of the dead man didn’t know, no one would.

So Bruna finally woke up the greedy-guts, got up from her chair, and drank three glasses of white wine in a row before getting into bed and sleeping for four very restless hours. The next morning, as soon as the office opened she called the personal secretary, Roberto Belmonte, and arranged an appointment at 11:00.

That was where she was now, seated in front of him.

“I don’t know anything. I know nothing about the stolen funerary diamond. I know absolutely nothing. Tell his wife that from me,” Belmonte repeated for the third or fourth time.

The expression on his twitchy face showed worry and fear. Too much worry and too much fear. What was scaring the secretary so much? The fury of the widow? Her revenge for his role as an accomplice in a possible infidelity?

“As far as I’m aware, in the time I worked for him, my boss never had any mistresses. And I would know, since I was in charge of his entire schedule, both public and private. Of course I never saw him again after his retirement six months ago. I know nothing about what might have happened during that time.”

He was lying. Bruna had seen pictures of the secretary and Gand together in the last few months at official receptions and meetings. They had kept in touch. The rep was about to mention this to see how he’d respond, but something held her back. The secretary’s unexpected stammering and his obvious and incomprehensible anxiety surprised her. By all the species, asking him about his dead ex-boss’s possible lovers didn’t seem so serious, so worrying, so dangerous. Or maybe it was?

She decided to go with her instinct. She thanked Belmonte, shook his limp, sweaty hand, and left. She exited the huge corporate building, walking at a steady pace as if she knew exactly where she was going and making sure the security cameras picked her up. It was true. She knew exactly where she was going. On her way into the Texaco-Repsol headquarters, she had automatically made a mental note of the building’s surroundings, as she always did in case she had to make a quick getaway. She recalled there was a sky-tram stop some seventy meters from the main entrance, on the other side of the traffic circle and the travelators. She walked to the stop and sat down on the long bench, which was half-hidden by a public screen. It was a good spot: she had a good view of the entrance to the Texaco-Repsol building, and an awning protected her from the blazing sun, protection she would need because the wait might be lengthy—and useless. Bruna was working on the assumption that her visit with Belmonte had frightened him so much that he’d want to make direct physical contact with someone. Nothing better had occurred to her, so she decided to summon up all her patience and sit it out.

The long bench she was sitting on emptied and filled up several times with successive waves of passengers, and the replicant became increasingly doubtful. More than two hours passed, and it was only her obsessive stubbornness that kept her there. What if the secretary had nothing to hide and he was just a nervous scaredy-cat? What if his obvious fear was nothing more than the fear so many weak men felt in her presence, because of her height, her shaved head, her tiger eyes, and the mere fact that she was a damned tattooed combat rep? Sometimes Bruna forgot she was a monster.

It was 14:00, lunchtime, and a stream of people began to emerge from the Texaco-Repsol building. Bruna sat upright, alert. Yes, there was Belmonte. The secretary turned right and was walking up the street. The rep stood up and followed him on the opposite sidewalk. Two blocks farther along he went into a fast-food outlet. Bruna watched him line up, order something, and pay. He came out holding a thermal bag and walked on. He turned the corner and, after walking about a hundred meters, entered a plant park and sat down on a bench. Bruna hid behind a lilac bush from where she could see Belmonte. The secretary had removed a tub from the bag and was pretending to eat, but he kept glancing around, wide-eyed and anxious, his plastic spoon hovering in midair halfway to his open mouth. The rep smiled. He was hopeless at pretending. But her smile suddenly froze, her body tensed, and she sensed danger. Someone was watching her. She could feel it. Her sixth sense was warning her that she, the hunter, was in turn being hunted. She glanced around stealthily. A complete 360-degree sweep. But she didn’t see anyone suspicious. And yet Lizard had told her to be careful.

Just then a man sat down at the other end of the bench from the secretary. Belmonte almost dropped his tub of food. Bruna switched her attention to the recent arrival: he was on the short side, middle-aged, with a lackluster gray ponytail falling down his back. There was something vaguely familiar about him. Something recognizable that Bruna couldn’t quite grasp. She’d seen that profile before somewhere. The secretary, clumsy and agitated, placed something on the seat and covered it with his tub. Then he stood up and hurried off. The stranger calmly waited for a few minutes and then got up, lifted up the tub, took what was underneath it, put it in his pocket, threw the tub in the recycling bin, and turned around to walk off.

A memory popped up into Bruna’s head like a cork bobbing up in water.

She had seen him as a little girl in her parents’ house. Her fake parents. It was a memory from her early childhood, one of the many they’d implanted in her. Yes, the man was older, fatter, and now had a lank ponytail, but there was no question it was him. Yárnoz. That was his name. A friend of her parents. By which she meant, Nopal’s parents, given that her memorist had filled her mind with his own memories. Which meant that Nopal had to know who this guy was.

The surprise at recognizing him caused Bruna to relax. Much to her relief she no longer felt like she was being watched. Maybe it had been a false alarm. She shrugged the way dogs do when they’re overloaded with adrenaline, and set off in pursuit of Yárnoz, who was already disappearing into the distance. She followed him onto a couple of travelators and then the subway. Forty minutes later he entered a building on Bravo Murillo Street. She waited a few seconds and then walked up to the entrance. It had a conventional digital-recognition lock, a very basic version, and she had a program on her mobile that unlocked it. She placed her screen up against the eye of the lock and bombarded it with a million digital imprints emitted at high speed. The mechanism lasted fifteen seconds before it clicked and opened. Bruna slipped inside quickly; it was an old-fashioned lobby, well maintained, middle-class. According to the mailbox, Yárnoz lived on the first floor, right-hand apartment. She crept up the stairs and found the apartment door was ajar. In the silence on the landing, she clearly heard a thick, liquid gurgling sound, a terrible death rattle. She pushed open the door, crossed the small hall in one stride, and entered what appeared to be the main room. Yárnoz was kneeling by the window next to a man stretched out on the floor. He turned toward Bruna, his eyes wild and his hands bloodstained. He leaped up and threw himself out of the open window. The rep rushed to the window and leaned out. Down on the street Yárnoz was already getting up, ready to run away, when suddenly he did something very odd: he threw back his arms and shoulders and arched his trunk in an unbelievable manner, forming a gigantic arc with his body. He seemed to hang in the air for a moment in that impossible position before collapsing like a punctured inflatable doll. That was when Bruna realized that his chest had exploded. Clearly, he had been shot with a silent black-plasma gun, an illegal weapon because of its ferocious destructive power. A black car with no license plates accelerated up the street and disappeared, no doubt with the assassin inside.

A rasping sound behind her forced Bruna’s attention back to the wounded man on the floor. She walked over to him and squatted down, and her heart began to race. It was Gand!
By all the damned species!
It had to be Gand or his twin brother. His throat had been slit, and he was soaked in blood. The scene was unreal, and life seemed to have taken on the dizzy rhythm of a nightmare.

“Gand,” she said.

The man opened his eyes wide. His body was shaking uncontrollably. He tried to speak, but the slit in his throat opened up. A pinkish bubble appeared at the edges of the cut. Bruna applied pressure to the wound with her hand, trying to stop the hemorrhaging. She could feel a warm, sticky throb against her palm.

“Gand, what happened? I’m a detective hired by your wife.”

Another rasp and an incomprehensible mumble.

“What?”

“She doesn’t . . . On-ca-lo . . . ,” whispered the man. “On-ca-lo . . .”

His eyes rolled, he went into violent convulsions, and a trickle of reddish saliva dribbled between his lips. The hectic sequence of the last few minutes’ events came to a sudden end. After the flurry of activity, now there was only silence, stillness, and the nauseating stench of blood. Alejandro Gand had just died for the second time.