“Hey, if you’re implying I spend my time sending those things, you’re wrong.” He was blushing and his voice was a little sharper than normal. “I got the email as well. I believe the only person here who knew nothing about this until I mentioned it was Amanda.”
“I delete half the emails in my inbox without opening them,” she replied forcefully. “But if I were sending a photo like that I’d have made sure to send it to myself as well. I’m not so stupid, you know.”
“Hey, hey, let’s not get upset here,” César intervened. “Before we start accusing each other, there’s something you haven’t considered, Brais.” He obviously took great pleasure in pointing out something the other man had overlooked. “Clearly only one of us could have taken that photo, God knows why. Perhaps they showed it to someone, or shared it with a friend … That wouldn’t be so unusuaclass="underline" what we saw was a huge shock.”
They all denied having taken it.
“It didn’t even occur to me to take a photo, and I haven’t told anyone about it,” Amanda explained. “Maybe Sara did it … You saw how upset she was about the animals.”
Brais finally spoke up in his characteristically decisive voice.
“Be that as it may, these messages show that someone wants to remind us what happened. And we all know that the dogs are just a symbol. My question is: why? What the hell do they want?”
No one had an answer, or seemed to have, so Sílvia plunged in once again, although she had to wait a moment while a cell phone rang-Amanda’s-who hung up without answering.
“Let’s be logical, Brais. We don’t know why, so the practical thing is to drop it and decide what it is we’re going to do. Look, I’m sure it won’t be long before the Mossos turn up at the lab, even if it’s just a routine visit. After all, two people linked to the labs have died within five months. They have no reason to suspect anything else, but they’ll come to see us because of Sara. They did when the Gaspar thing happened-”
“What Sílvia means,” César interjected, “is that we must act normally. Really Sara’s suicide has nothing to do with us.”
“And if they ask about the photos?” Manel inquired. “We don’t know if she received one as well. Mine arrived some days after her death; maybe the person sending them sent one to her before. And another to Gaspar.”
“Like a kind of death sentence?” César wanted to sound sarcastic, but didn’t quite manage it.
“Well, I’m certainly not thinking of jumping out the window, or shooting myself,” declared Brais, “so they can keep sending photos to me forever.”
“If they ask about the photos we tell them the truth,” said Sílvia. “We have nothing to hide. We found those poor greyhounds, or bloodhounds or whatever they were, hanging from a tree and we did more for them than most people would have. And if, as you say, there is a moron who photographed it and is using it now to play a joke on us, I don’t think it’s very important.”
As she said it, it seemed as though she meant someone to take it personally; however, no one considers themselves a moron, thought César.
“We haven’t considered Octavi,” Amanda said. “Maybe, with all that’s happening to his wife-”
“Octavi would never betray us, Amanda!” Sílvia cut her off. “I’d like to be as sure of everyone as I am of him.”
Amanda colored, an unconscious act that somehow made her even more beautiful. Even Brais, not sensitive to female beauty, had the urge to protect her.
“Are you accusing me of something?” she murmured.
“I’m just saying that if this comes to light, some of us have more to lose than others. But I want to remind you of something: we all share the responsibility; the pact was unanimous.”
The terminology almost made César laugh. Pact, responsibility, unanimous.
“Let’s not move away from the point,” he said when Sílvia cast him a withering look. “Are we all agreed on what we’re going to do?”
Although César didn’t like the expression, the group renewed the pact.
“Don’t be stupid. Don’t you realize that one of them is behind this?”
Sílvia’s question hung in the air, stinging like an insult.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” replied César, although it was obviously a fairly reasonable explanation.
“Oh no? Then how did they know what we did?” She wasn’t annoyed at him, but she needed to blow off some tension.
“Are you sure it was a man on the phone?”
“I’m not sure. The voice sounded strange, as if they were chewing something. What are you thinking?”
“Manel came late, a little before you.”
She exhaled, somewhere between beaten and furious.
“I don’t care who it is. I don’t plan on giving in.”
“Then he’ll go to the police. He has proof, he told you so! He sent us the photo!”
Sílvia took her time before answering.
“I don’t think he’ll do it,” she said finally. “At least for the moment. Going to the police would end all his hopes …”
“And then?”
“He told me that if I don’t deliver the money, someone else will die on Monday.”
César looked at her, incredulous. Could this be the woman he planned to marry in a few months?
“That changes everything, Sílvia, don’t you realize? For the love of God, we have to go to the police and-”
She grabbed his arm.
“Don’t even think about it.” She spoke very slowly and with every syllable she squeezed more tightly. “We’ll do nothing at all. Understand? Nothing.”
20
The 09:10 AVE left Atocha station on time, filled for the most part by businessmen and — women, who, laptops in hand, took advantage of those three hours to work, or at least to look at the screen with intense concentration. Stuffed into their combat uniforms, they threw bombs in the shape of incendiary emails or studied the best plan of attack. Or at least so Víctor Alemany saw them that Friday morning. He was in an especially good mood. Exultant, almost. Although in his outward appearance he wasn’t so very different from those other soldiers, inside he knew his war was about to end, settled with a victory as profitable as it was glorious.
It had been an intense week, the culmination of other sporadic meetings that had begun months before. However much Octavi advised prudence, the whole negotiation had been so long, so irritatingly unending, that by the end of the summer he was on the verge of resolving it by accepting the offer without further delay. And what Víctor wanted above all was to start again, with Paula and without baggage. Without a family business glued to him, a parasitic Siamese twin, for as long as he could remember. For years he’d believed that this had to be the center of his existence: directing the company, moving it forward, making it grow. Something that, contrary to general opinion, he had done. And what for? So his life could change only outwardly: a bigger car, more expensive suits, some absurd journey to a seemingly exotic destination. Boring, indeed, his reality had been until he met Paula. He smiled to think that it was precisely thanks to the company and their new campaigns that he’d ended up meeting Paula de la Fe. He didn’t even recognize her face, since he watched little television and very few soaps. Maybe because of that he treated her more naturally, maybe because of that she noticed him. Or maybe not. It didn’t matter. The result was that he and Paula were together, that boredom was a thing of the past and, little by little, he’d begun really to live, rather than breathing, eating, sleeping and even fucking mechanically.
At fortysomething, Víctor Alemany had fallen in love as only frustrated fortysomethings and ugly adolescents do: wholeheartedly. He wanted to travel with her, spend the day with her, and had he been a monarch of the feudal era he would have laid his kingdom at her feet. Now and again he was seized by a fear of going too far, of throwing away everything that had been his life until then, that this euphoria overwhelming him in the mornings until it almost made him explode was the prelude to a free fall. In these moments he thought of his father, dead in the bed of a young whore not because he was overindulging, as Sílvia said, but because his body wasn’t accustomed to enjoying itself. The heart also rusts, thought Víctor, but he had reacted in time. And once this organ started up, there was no enemy fire that could stop it.