Her friend smiled.
“Why is it so hard for you to admit you’re excited?” But seeing Leire’s serious face, she added, “Okay, I’m shutting up, Miss Daisy. I’ll drive, no more questions.”
But she couldn’t keep her mouth shut when they arrived at the address Leire had given her. They found themselves in front of a new building: an invention to alleviate the fact that the city’s apartments, at least the affordable ones, were so much smaller than people needed.
“Coming here is a craving? Eating strawberries is a craving!” María blurted out.
“Wait for me. It’ll only take a moment.”
And, by one of life’s flukes, it did. Leire opened the door of storage room 12, which in fact was practically empty. It didn’t take long to find a sports bag, full of videotapes, and return to the car.
“See, grouchy? Done!” she said as she got in.
“What do you have there?”
Leire unzipped it and pulled a tape partly out.
“Porn,” she told her. “I have to do something at home, don’t I?”
“Well, it must be vintage porn, sweetheart,” she replied. “Don’t tell me you still have a video player at home?”
She didn’t have a video player at home, but it occurred to her to ask in the same shop where she’d rented the film the day before, and she emerged with one for a reasonable price. She spent a few minutes installing it and then started to go through the tapes. Although there weren’t many, Leire felt a good spell of dark-image, fixed-camera, silent cinema was ahead of her. Before inserting one at random she examined them thoroughly: the tapes had only a number identifying them, and Leire told herself that, had Ruth gone to see Omar, he would have marked the tape recording that visit in a special way. It was logical to think so, even with no proof of it, and when she saw that one of the tapes had an asterisk beside the number she decided to begin with that. If she wasn’t right, she hadn’t lost anything.
The camera had to be situated in a corner of the room, because Leire could see Dr. Omar’s desk, with him in profile, and the person who would enter and take a seat across from him. For twenty minutes she watched the fixed image of that desk and the people sitting opposite the doctor, and couldn’t help wondering how they could trust someone so sinister. As she’d imagined, there was no sound on the tapes, so setting aside the disagreeable feeling of seeing that old man, the contents were rather boring. But suddenly, when she was starting to think the asterisk meant nothing, she straightened up in her chair, openmouthed. For the first time in her life, Leire saw Ruth Valldaura alive and moving.
Her heart rate accelerated. So she had gone … “Love creates eternal debts.” And Ruth had loved Héctor Salgado, so it was likely that she would go to see Omar with the intention of helping her ex-husband, accused of having severely beaten the black witch doctor. She cursed the lack of sound with all her heart, moved closer to the screen and focused on their faces. Ruth, half worried, half surprised, scornful at one point; he indifferent, almost sarcastic and, at the end, extremely serious. Then Ruth rose and left quickly, as if wishing to flee from that room she’d entered of her own will.
She watched the recording again and again, not getting much more from it, until her eyes hurt from fixing them on the screen. Frustrated by not managing to understand what they were saying, she was preparing to switch it off when the intercom buzzed. Leire pressed pause on the remote and went to the door.
“Yes?”
“Leire Castro?”
“Yes. Who is it?”
Leire noticed that the television screen was being reflected in the hall mirror, where Dr. Omar’s image was frozen. Wrinkles from evil, not just old age, she thought. The profile of a black vulture.
“You don’t know me, but I think we should talk.”
A middle-aged man’s voice.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
“My name is Andrés Moreno, but my name won’t mean anything to you. I have reason to believe we’re both interested in the same person.”
“Listen, I don’t know-”
“I can give you information about Ruth Valldaura.”
“What?”
The old man seemed to be smiling; one hand raised, a hand with fingers delicate as wire that looked as if they could cut you with a caress.
“You heard. I think there’s something you should know about her. Let me in, please.”
Leire felt a sudden fear and refused. She didn’t plan on letting a stranger into her home and told him so.
“As you wish,” the man replied. “We’ll do something else. I’ll give you my number: call me tomorrow and we’ll arrange a meeting in a public place. Does that seem better?”
Somehow the voice resembled the reflection of the face on the screen, although that was absurd. He didn’t have the accent of an old Nigerian, and neither was it a voice from beyond the grave. Leire noticed that her knees were shaking and she forced herself to calm down.
“All right,” she said, jotting the number down.
“Please call me.”
In the mirror, Dr. Omar was still ecstatic. Immortalized. Threatening as a serpent ready to spit his venom.
AMANDA
28
Seated on one of the chairs in Terminal 1 of the airport, Héctor contemplated a small screen announcing that the flight from Madrid was delayed by forty minutes. Seven years and forty minutes, he mentally corrected. It was the first time in his life he’d welcomed a delay of that kind, and as he watched the terminal shops closing, he thought he needed a little silence, albeit in a public place with black tiles that gave off an almost insulting shine. He hadn’t slept in over forty hours and he closed his eyes just for an instant, to rest them from the light. He didn’t stir from the terminal because he didn’t want to smoke anymore-he’d fought tiredness with nicotine and felt the weight of too much tobacco combined with little food and accumulated fatigue. He looked at his watch. 22:35.
The previous night, that same hour, a cold Sunday of gray, sluggish skies was coming to an end. Guillermo had just arrived and immediately shut himself in his room, saying he’d already eaten, without further explanation. And he, watching Marilyn languishing in The Misfits, that Western played out by actors who would die shortly afterward, chose to let it go. The film hadn’t yet finished when he received the call from Agent Fort from the station, informing him-in a voice not quite concealing a newbie’s hint of excitement-that Saúl Duque, Sílvia Alemany’s assistant, had just contacted the Mossos to confess that he had killed Amanda Bonet.
White death. That was his first thought on entering the bedroom where Amanda lay and Fort had already arrived with Forensics and the court representative. Walls painted ivory white, a bed with immaculate sheets and a young blonde whose pale features would never again recover the flush of the living. The presence of a corpse always disturbed him; it affected everyone, say what they might. However, Amanda’s body exuded a serenity he’d rarely felt at the scene of a sudden death. Her lips seemed to be smiling, as if she’d experienced a sweet vision before leaving this world and slipped toward the beyond, or toward nothingness, her conscience calm and full of hope. Martyrs must die like that, Héctor said to himself, though he doubted Amanda Bonet could qualify as such.
“She took an entire bottle of sleeping pills,” Fort told him.
“She took them?” asked Héctor. Roger Fort’s voice had brought him back to reality, moving him away from tragic fantasies. “I understood on the phone that Saúl Duque had said he was to blame.”
On coming into the apartment, Héctor had seen Saúl sitting on the sofa, so tense he seemed about to split into two, guarded by a judicial agent.
Fort breathed in and exhaled slowly before answering.