Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) (8 page)

13

T
he first thing Bruna did was call the widow, but Loperena didn’t answer. Worse still, her mobile was turned off. Full of foreboding, Bruna ran to her client’s building. She identified herself to the automatic doorkeeper, but the artificial voice remained unmoved no matter how much Bruna persisted: “I’m sorry, Bruna Husky, but my records show no authorization for you. I very much regret it, but I cannot allow you access. I suggest you get in touch with Rosario Loperena.”

The rep checked out the door: high-quality reinforced glass and magnetic locks. Nothing like the digital imprint lock she’d hacked earlier. She sighed and resigned herself to calling Paul Lizard. She briefly explained to the inspector what had happened. He already knew about Yárnoz’s murder, but not about Gand’s. She asked him to help her get into her client’s apartment.

“You have a strange propensity for filling the world around you with corpses, Bruna,” Lizard grunted. “Wait for me. I’m on my way.”

Twenty minutes later the rep saw the huge solid body of the policeman in the distance. Whenever they had gone some time without seeing each other, Lizard’s physical power surprised Bruna anew. He was even taller than she was and much stronger, naturally. She watched him as he approached, gigantic but well proportioned, and felt a ridiculous pride together with a certain tension in the pit of her stomach. Something like hunger.

“How’s it going?” asked Lizard, greeting her with a brief nod of his head.

“That’s obvious.”

The policeman headed to the door and presented his emergency code to the eye. The reinforced doors opened. The scanner beeped as it registered Lizard’s gun but allowed them through. The elevator was already waiting for them and took them up to the apartment. The domestic robot was waiting in front of the door.

“Robot CD77.6 at your service for an emergency, Inspector Lizard,” it babbled pleasantly.

“Take us to Rosario Loperena,” commanded Lizard.

The little automaton flickered. “I’m sorry, but she’s not at home.”

“Where has she gone?” asked Bruna.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have that information.”

“When did she leave?”

“Yesterday—Tuesday, July 23—at 13:07.”

“Just after she’d spoken to me,” said the rep. She raised her head and sniffed the surrounding air.

“That smell . . .”

“I can’t smell anything,” said Lizard.

“I can. It smells like death.”

Bruna started to walk through the apartment, tracking the smell, with the inspector following behind her and the automaton bringing up the rear. She stopped in front of a closed door.

“Robot, what’s inside?”

“Rosario Loperena’s bedroom.”

“Unlock the door.”

There was a faint click and the door opened. A sickly sweet, nauseating smell assaulted their nostrils. Rosario Loperena was lying in an enormous pool of congealed blood at the foot of one of the twin beds. Bruna and Lizard leaned over the remains. The smell was so bad that if the rep hadn’t spoken to her the previous morning, she would have sworn Rosario had been dead for at least a few days.

“What destruction! Whoever did this was furious, or was trying hard to find out something,” muttered the policeman.

Loperena’s body was covered with cuts. Most of them seemed superficial, but all of them must have been painful. Bruna contemplated the slashed cheeks and the glassy, bulging eyes of her client with horrified compassion. Then she looked more closely: the eyes looked different. Yes, and the face was different, too. Even taking into account the disfigurement caused by the torture, there was no sign of that outlandish appearance caused by cheap plastic surgery.

“The woman I spoke with wasn’t Rosario Loperena. She was wearing a biosilicone mask to make herself look like Loperena. This must be the real Rosario, and she must have already been dead when I came,” Bruna said angrily.

Just then the domestic robot entered the room with a steam vacuum cleaner and diligently began to clean up the pool of black, gelatinous blood.

“Stop! What are you doing?” yelled Lizard.

The robot stopped.

“It’s dirty. One of my duties is the immediate cleanup of any dirt.”

“Well, you don’t have that function anymore. You’re in emergency mode! The only thing you have to do now is ensure that nobody approaches or touches this corpse.”

“Yes, Inspector Lizard. Understood.”

Then the robot did something very strange. It turned around full circle and then did it again, and then it came to a halt again in front of the policeman.

“Please, Inspector Lizard, what is a corpse?”

This piece of junk has to be the only innocent being left in the world,
thought Bruna sadly.

14

Oncalo:
no content or meaning related to this word.

Ongalo:
ancient open-pit uranium mine in the Erongo region, part of Namibia before the Unification; when operational, the largest uranium reserve of that zone, but exhausted around 2050.

Ongallow:
(
colloq.
), global English; to be exposed to harsh public criticism.

Honcalo:
no content or meaning related to this word.

Onkalo:
1) Finnish, danger of death. 2) A cursed mythical place in the west of the former Finlandia; the major portion of the region is today one of the Submerged Worlds; sporadic geysers and sulfur emissions have converted the zone into a lethal environment unfit for human life.

The entry on the uranium mine had struck Bruna as interesting. True, she had heard the dying Gand whisper “Oncalo” rather than “Ongalo,” but the business of the mine couldn’t be a coincidence. It inevitably had to be linked to the medical examiner’s preliminary findings, which Lizard had just sent her. Bruna appreciated the fact that Lizard had shared them with her, but he had sent the information to her mobile without adding a single word from him—no comment, no greeting, never mind a kiss. That irritated the techno more than she would have liked to admit. She had once again felt close to the policeman that afternoon in Loperena’s apartment. More than that, in fact: she’d flirted with him, tried to seduce him. She even calmly suggested to him that they could get together later to talk over the case, an invitation the inspector hadn’t taken up. So now Bruna felt she’d made a fool of herself and was an idiot. The icy way in which Lizard had hidden behind the medical examiner’s report made his rejection perfectly clear.

“He’ll think I care,” she grumbled out loud.

She got up from in front of her home screen and did a few back stretches. Then, still grumpy, she walked over to the table with her half-completed jigsaw puzzle and, after trying a few options, placed a couple of pieces. She had a swig of white wine. It was midnight, and she was putting away her third glass on an empty stomach. She tried to call her memorist again, but he continued to be unavailable, so she sat down in front of her screen once more. She connected to the Terra Vision satellites and bought two thirty-second searches, the shortest and cheapest sessions available. Even so, each session cost her the exorbitant sum of four hundred gaias, and in that brief transaction she spent a quarter of her skimpy savings. Unfortunately, Loperena had never gotten around to paying her anything, understandable given that Bruna hadn’t actually met the real Loperena.

Seen from the stratosphere, the Ongalo mine looked exactly like what it had been: a considerable piece of environmental destruction, a leveled mountain, a crater worthy of the surface of the Moon. That said, thirty seconds wasn’t enough time for anything. She downloaded the copy of the picture she was entitled to and then requested the image for Onkalo. Across her screen 3-D letters on a black background flashed the words “We cannot accede to your request. Technical, administrative, or legal difficulties prevent us from acquiring images of ONKALO. Your payment has automatically been refunded. Thank you for using Terra Vision, the eyes of the world.” There were of course many opaque regions in the planet system, starting with the two artificial worlds that orbited Earth—totalitarian Cosmos and the tyrannical theocracy of Labari were antidemocratic and impenetrable societies that used technological shields to prevent being spied on. But apart from these two, there were many other enclaves on the planet that for political, economic, or strategic reasons jealously guarded their privacy. Terra Vision’s eyes on the world were myopic. Nevertheless, Bruna was surprised that Onkalo couldn’t be viewed. What possible motive could there be for hiding a miserable, remote, sulfurous, deserted piece of land?

She’d like to talk it over with Lizard.

She got up and poured herself another glass of wine.
Three years, ten months, and eight days. No, seven days. It’s past midnight. It’s already Thursday. Dammit!

She rang Lizard, and the man’s face, with its close-knit eyebrows, appeared on the screen.

“I want to see you,” said Bruna.

“When?”

“Now. At Oli’s bar.”

The policeman seemed to hesitate for a moment. His face clouded over. “Okay,” he said, and hung up.

The alcohol inside the rep’s body turned to fire: hot blood ran through her veins and surged like a wave up to her brain. She stood up and realized she was drunk. It was a torrid night. Her apartment was like an oven because she could only afford four hours of air-conditioning a day—the fees for contaminating activities had gone through the roof in the past few years—and she had already reached her quota by late afternoon, when the sun had been bombarding her windows. She was drenched in sweat, so she took a quick steam shower. Naked, the better to enjoy the fleeting trace of moisture on her skin, she fed the greedy-guts and then, hands on hips and her strong legs apart, planted herself in front of her cupboard and pondered what to wear.

She didn’t want to think about Lizard’s body.

She didn’t really know why she’d asked him to meet her.
To talk about the case of course. To talk about the case.

She remembered herself in the policeman’s arms, fitting snugly against his welcoming chest, eager and passionate, penetrated by him. Candlelight and the caressing gaze of the man’s green eyes returning her own. You couldn’t be any closer. Body against body and a needy heart.

She erased the memory with difficulty. Bruna knew exactly how to deal with her sexual needs, but emotional needs were disconcerting, reducing her to a helpless and pathetic creature. A ridiculous technohuman.

She grunted. Forcing herself to keep her mind blank, she put on a neon-blue sleeveless blouse with slits down the sides, and a light, mercurial miniskirt of metallic chiffon. She scratched the bubi’s head and headed for the street. A foul smell rose from the scorched sidewalk, snaking up her legs and caressing her sex. Bruna wasn’t wearing any panties. Normally, she would have jogged to Oli’s bar, but right now she preferred to walk slowly, getting pleasure from the feel of the metallic skirt brushing against her pubis, the sensual freedom of that open and accessible cavity. A flower, a volcano. The blind frenzy of one body fusing itself with another. That brutal life impulse, too much like a death impulse.

Ongalo. Ongallow. Onkalo.
Bruna forced herself to think about the case as a self-defense mechanism. The preliminary report from the medical examiner sent to her by Lizard contained two striking facts. The first was that Gand’s left arm was missing. It had been cleanly amputated at the shoulder recently and replaced with a bionic arm. The most likely explanation was that the limb had been used to provide a source of DNA for the official investigation of the minijet accident. The conflagration had been of such a force that the body wasn’t found, but there were enough bits of the arm to validate the death of Alejandro Gand. The rep could easily picture the awful scene: someone leaving the recently amputated arm in the minijet before crashing it, maybe putting it inside a special protective container so that the explosion wouldn’t degrade the DNA. In any event, somebody had wanted people to think that the former director of Texaco-Repsol was dead. Did they kidnap him, compel him, mutilate him? Or was it Gand himself who orchestrated the deception? The prosthesis was top quality, and the amputation was a surgical masterpiece. Bruna didn’t think that a kidnapper would take so much trouble or spend so much money on his victim. It had to be Gand who organized the fake accident. But why? What motive could be powerful enough to warrant the sacrifice of an arm?

The medical examiner’s other discovery was even more spectacular and disturbing: both Gand and Yárnoz had received a considerable dose of radiation. Certainly not as much as the little Russian, but enough for it to be a health risk for both of them. The rep shivered. Suddenly the whole world seemed to have become radioactive; that was why the information about the former uranium mine was so compelling. A stolen diamond, a fake widow, a dead wife, a feigned accident, two genuine corpses, an amputated arm, a health-alert report gone missing, and radiation everywhere. Bruna tried to focus to link the multiple threads in the same way that she tried to figure out the fragmented picture formed by the individual pieces of her gigantic jigsaw puzzles. But her mind was too befuddled by wine, and her ideas seemed to stick to each other sluggishly, as if they were coated with molasses. She shook her head to get rid of her sense of foreboding.

She arrived at Oli’s. The tiny bar was full. Some thirty people were crammed into the small rectangular space. Ten stools were lined up in front of the long counter, and there were another ten or so flush against the opposite wall, underneath a small shelf for customers’ drinks. The layout—long and narrow—was like a train carriage. A welcoming carriage in which to pass the night. Bruna paused at the entrance. She couldn’t see the inspector.

“What’s up, Husky? If you’re looking for Lizard, he’s down the back.” Squeezed in behind the bar, with her enormous breasts spilling over it, Oli Oliar emphasized her words with a nod. The rep made her way through the customers: humans, other technos, and at least one mutant—because the guy with hair covering one side of his face had to be the victim of the biological alterations provoked by too much teleportation. It was a pleasant mix of every conceivable sentient being, and Bruna had even come across the occasional alien in the bar, although there were few such
bichos
on Earth. This mélange was a trademark of the establishment, a collateral effect of the expansiveness in both body and spirit of Oli, who shared her magnanimity with all beings.

The inspector was propped up against the very end of the counter. He squeezed up against the wall to make room for Bruna.

“You took your time,” he said by way of a greeting as he finished off all but the ice in his wide-rimmed glass.

“I see you find my absence eternal,” she replied mockingly, instantly regretting it.

“What did you want to see me about?”

Bruna’s mouth went dry. She thought about her bare sex underneath her short skirt and felt ridiculous and fragile. “Thank you for sending me the preliminary forensic findings,” she murmured.

“I should think so. If they find out I’m sharing information with you, I’m in deep trouble,” he answered angrily.

“Yes, I know. Thank you, thanks. And forgive me for what I said a moment ago. I’m a bit drunk.”

“How strange . . .”

Oli Oliar, a majestic whale plowing through the narrow channel behind the bar, arrived at that moment and deposited a glass of wine, another of whiskey, and a plate of tapas in front of them. In an astonishing and difficult maneuver, she turned around, holding the tray aloft because there was no way she would fit if she lowered her arms, and moved away without saying a word.

“Speaking of being drunk,” said Lizard, raising his fresh drink.

He drank almost all of it in one gulp.
Maybe he’s nervous, too,
Bruna thought. She looked at her glass of white wine and decided not to touch it. Instead, she picked up a piece of toast topped with salmon and took a bite. It was delicious, as always. She silently thanked Oli for her discreet and protective affection. There she was at the other end of the counter attending to a customer, her smile luminous, and her black skin as burnished as a fine piece of well-polished leather.
Queen of the night, elephantine fairy godmother.
At times Bruna suspected that her unusual obesity might be a TP disorder, a mutation brought on by teleportation. Maybe that explained her ability to empathize, to be in tune with weirdos, filling her bar with the strangest bunch of regulars in Madrid. “Dwarfs have a sort of sixth sense that enables them to recognize each other at a glance,” Oli used to say, quoting an ancient writer whose name the rep didn’t remember, in reference to the attraction her little space held for such scarcely conventional beings. It had to be said that they were all decent, friendly monsters—all but Bruna. Because Bruna didn’t exactly see herself as a friendly soul.

She glanced around. How many of these people would have killed someone? Since there was no other combat rep present, it was likely that no one else had. Bruna’s hands shook. Sometimes—very rarely—her dead returned: an unexpected, eerie whirlwind, a lashing angst in her chest. She looked at Lizard, who had picked up another of the tapas and was eating it.
Yes, he had, and he also bore the weight of those bodies.

“Gand organized his own disappearance,” said the inspector, his mouth full.

“Yes, that’s my theory, too. That’s why he cut off his arm.”

“It’s more than a theory. Yárnoz had a piece of paper in his pocket, the one you saw him pick up in the park,” Lizard said, before reading from the screen on his wrist: “I think your wife is in danger. A combat rep and private detective, Bruna Husky, has just been to see me. She says your wife has hired her to investigate the robbery of the diamond! I’ve rung Rosario, but the number is disconnected. I fear the worst. I await instructions.”