“It’s black, not red.”
“Socorro said it was red. That woman from Staten Island, a friend of María Paz’s.”
“Socorro is a manipulating freak. Take anything she says with a grain of salt. My car is black, a black Lamborghini.”
“So what the hell are we doing in a blue Ford Fiesta?”
“Let’s just say they made me hang up my driving gloves, too many speeding tickets.”
“And that’s why you need me to take you to Manninpox? Couldn’t you just have hired a driver?”
“So you’re telling me that the renowned Mr. Rose who taught María Paz’s writing workshop was your son,” Pro Bono said, changing topics.
“He was.”
“And he was murdered?”
“I didn’t say that. I said he was killed.”
“Are you certain?”
“Only death is certain, as the saying goes.”
“How do you know he wasn’t murdered?”
“Murdered by whom? Cleve had no enemies. He was a good boy.”
“Everyone who deals with María Paz makes enemies.”
“Cleve was simply her teacher. He didn’t have any dealings with her.”
“Or so you would think. Look, Rose, maybe it’s best if you just keep your eyes on the road. Didn’t anybody teach you that when the line is solid you can’t cross over it?”
Rose lowered the windows to see if the cold air would help a bit. All this bossing around unsettled him, as did not knowing the purpose of their trip, and the cologne of this character, which filled the car with the aroma of something like horses. Pro Bono’s person, like his office, was infused with the supposedly aristocratic smell of horses, but not just the whiff of any old horse grazing in the field — more like the smell of a Thoroughbred’s riding saddle. Rose had a wealthy friend obsessed with equestrianism who had told him once how much money it took to develop and maintain a champion. Rose had thought it absurd; it was more than the friend spent on himself. Pro Bono smelled like that ilk of horses and could not stop himself from blurting out commands on how to drive: slow down, watch out for that car, light is about to turn red, start veering right, look out.
“Who’s the one without a license?” Rose protested. “Just let me drive.”
“You’re not very good.”
“You want to get out? I can still drop you off at the bus station and go back to sleep. If I’m not all that good, it’s because you’re driving me crazy with your tyrannical little orders.”
“Fine, I’ll shut up and you focus on the road.”
“How about this? You shut up and listen to me,” Rose said, taking an off-ramp and parking the car on the shoulder. He let go of the wheel and faced Pro Bono. “Look, I’m not quite sure what you want, but I can tell you what I’m looking for. The only thing I’m interested in is finding out what happened to my boy. Is that clear? You, María Paz, that Socorro woman, I couldn’t care less about any of you. I just want to know what happened to Cleve. I’m not sure what that has to do with María Paz. Maybe nothing. But for now, she is the only lead I have. Now if you can kindly tell me what made you change your mind about me from one day to the next, that would be a good start.”
“I realized I need you to find María Paz.”
“I’ll take you to Manninpox and our partnership ends there.”
They drove on in silence and a couple of hours later got off the main highway and took an old road that wound up the mountains through a forest of trees. Everything seemed wonderful out there at the end of fall. The flock of geese against the deep blue of the sky, the light breeze past the almost bare branches, the fiery colors of the landscape, the smell of wet earth. It’s the same every year, Cleve, exactly the same. And yet you should see it, son, it still startles one as if there had never been such a lustrous season, thought Rose. And since he couldn’t help but feel better, he tried to make peace with the character dozing beside him, painfully shrunken under his hump, yet peaceful, stripped at last of his armor of arrogance, reduced to his true state of an old man that for who knows how many years, eighty at least, had had to make his way in the world with that weight on his back.
“Do you need to lean the chair back a bit?” Rose asked when Pro Bono opened his eyes. “The lever is there on your right. You’ll be more comfortable.”
“I wasn’t made for comfort, my friend,” Pro Bono said, shutting his eyes again. But a bit later, more fully alert now, he asked Rose, “Do you know the great thing about my Lamborghini?”
“Everything,” Rose said, “everything must be great about your Lamborghini.”
“The best thing is the driver’s seat, custom made for my size out of carbon fiber fabric. La Casa del Toro ordered it especially for me. A full-fledged Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, a relentless mechanical force, made expressly so that a cripple like me could drive it two hundred miles per hour. What do you think of that?”
“What else can I think? No wonder they suspended your damn license. But listen, I was thinking… Mandra X, or Mandrax. You know? Mandrax, the barbiturate. Those little blue-and-white capsules that were big in nightclubs moons ago. Do you remember them? No? Well, yeah, you’re not much a nightclub person, I take it.”
“Filicide with Mandrax? Could be. Good job, Rose! Maybe you’re brighter than you look.”
“Don’t expect any miracles from me, Señor Attorney. I am a man broken by sorrow, very simple.”
Mandra X, real name Magdalena Krueger, was serving life in Manninpox and was in fact German, as María Paz had guessed. She was born in a place where two rivers come together to form the Danube. As was the case with Jesus Christ, nothing is known about the first thirty years of her life. It was at that point that she made her entrance into the history books when she turned herself in to the Idaho authorities after murdering her three children in cold blood. The lead-up to the trial was a huge controversy and caused quite a scandal in the press. She was convicted by public opinion from the start, but there was a movement led by several human rights groups and pro-euthanasia organizations in her support. In the end, she was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, destined to remain behind bars throughout this lifetime and the next two. Pro Bono was silent about whatever legal intricacies led her from the judgment of an Idaho jury to a prison in upstate New York. All he confirmed was that Mandra X had been taken to Manninpox, and there she would remain forever and ever. She had been spared the death penalty because of a single mitigating detaiclass="underline" according to the record, the victims, the children who happened to be triplets, suffered from a debilitating combination of worsening birth defects that included blindness, deafness, and mental retardation. She had been fully devoted to them until they were thirteen years old, and at that time had decided to do them in with an overdose of narcotics, all three of them at once, making sure to take precautions so they would not suffer or realize what she was doing. “I just put them to sleep, put them to sleep forever,” she declared to the press with a measured calm that one reporter called breathtaking.
Mandra X told the judge that from the moment they were born she had known that there would come a time when life would become unlivable for them. She still had plenty of strength left and had up to that time relied on a family inheritance to be able to remain at home and care for them. But the children could not go to any type of school, and because they could not tell night from day, there was always one of them awake, demanding her attention. Caring for them was a Herculean undertaking. To make matters worse, the money from the inheritance was dwindling fast and they could not live on the welfare check from the state. On the day the children turned twelve, Mandra X had been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. It had gone into remission, but she became obsessed with the idea that soon it would return. The last thing she wanted was to die and leave them alone.