Guillermo leaves his car outside the gate and jogs up to them.
“What’s going on here?”
One of the policemen takes a few steps toward him. “And you are?”
“Guillermo Rosensweig. I am Ibrahim Khalil’s lawyer,” he says, struggling to pull out a business card from his coat pocket. He notices that his nose is still running, but now he doesn’t care what he looks like. “I received a phone call telling me that my client has been in an accident. I would like to talk to him right away.”
The policeman’s cap is too large and falls over his coppery forehead. He has to keep pushing the rim up in order to see, but since his hair is greasy it slides back down. His ears stick out like unruly cabbage leaves. He tilts his cap up again and examines the card. “I don’t think you will be able to do that, Don Guillermo. .”
“And why is that?”
“Mr. Khalil is dead.”
“What?” Guillermo screams, confused.
“And I am afraid to say that so is his daughter.”
Guillermo runs his right hand through his thinning hair. His scalp is sweating and begins to itch. He scratches his neck so hard he draws blood. He is totally lost, about to lose the capacity to breathe. The spinning lights and noise further disorient him.
“He’s dead? Ibrahim Khalil is dead?”
“So is his daughter,” the policeman answers.
“If this is your idea of a joke, I don’t find it funny.”
“It’s no joke, Don Guillermo. Samir Mounier, the husband of the deceased woman, has just confirmed that the car that blew up belonged to his wife. She and her father — apparently — were in the car and driving home together. They burned to a crisp, like a pan francés,” he adds, as if he has been waiting all his life to say something as foolish as this.
“Samir Mounier is a joke of a man. He knows nothing. And why isn’t he here now?”
“He has gone off to make arrangements for the funerals.”
It’s all happening too fast. The phone call to the office. His inability to get through to Maryam. His call to Hiba, then to Fernanda. The zigging and zagging to the office and the factory. His mind is fizzling.
“I am telling you that there has been some kind of serious, very serious, mistake here—” Guillermo is grasping at straws, but at this moment he doesn’t know that. He only feels something like the weight of a bulletproof vest pressing heavily against his chest, making him tired and clumsy.
“If you come with me I will show you the car, or what’s left of it. Perhaps you will have something more to add when you see it.”
Guillermo follows the policeman into his car, saying angrily “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t.”
“Be calm, Don Guillermo.”
He gets into the front passenger seat of the police car, which is filthy, full of paper cups, brown towels, empty plastic bags, three sets of sunglasses, garbage bags, balled-up cellophane. He pushes the side lever back so he has more leg room in the car.
All of a sudden he starts getting nervous. Why has he just gotten into a cop car? This is a dangerous situation. They may be kidnapping him. “Where are we going?”
“To the crime scene.”
“Bring me back to the factory!” Guillermo screams, afraid he is being abducted.
The policeman points to the rising smoke blocks away. “That’s where it happened. We are almost there.”
Within a minute they are there, in the middle of an abandoned construction site with gravelly streets. On the side of the road is a blue tow truck with its engine running, starting to lower an enormous metal plate. In the middle of the street lies the burnt carcass of a black Mercedes with a piece of twisted metal — one of the doors? — next to it. The plate is about to scoop up the remains.
The car is surrounded by five or six men in ill-fitting suits. There are more clumps of metal on a sea of sticky, multicolored oil. There’s the faint but unmistakable smell of charred flesh and bones. He sees no bodily remains.
Guillermo pushes himself out of the police car and goes over to look more closely at the car, whose front half, up to the backseat, resembles a brittle charcoal briquette. As soon as he looks at the trunk door he knows it is Maryam’s car because he sees the shreds of a green blanket on the asphalt; Maryam sometimes put it on her father when he felt cold. He crosses to the driver’s side and sees the blown-out door and window, the dashboard turned to pulverized ash and burnt rubber, a blackened iron cross dangling from the roof: the remains of the mirror. On the wired vestiges of the front bucket seats he sees piles of charred mineral compounds, like the simple white residues of old bones.
The passengers have been cremated, largely vaporized.
And then it finally hits Guillermo that Maryam and Ibrahim have ceased to exist. If they are there, they are the small mound of charred white splinters covering the seats.
Guillermo tries to get closer to the car. He sees the passenger door held to the chassis by one little hinge. He touches the door and notices that the metal handle is still hot. One of the detectives stops him.
“This is a crime scene, sir. You cannot touch the evidence.”
“Evidence? What kind of evidence do you need? I mean, don’t you see what’s happened? The passengers have been vaporized. They’re gone. My Maryam is dead!” he hears himself saying, shocked at his own words, seeing an image of her in her tennis outfit with the little pink balls on the heels of her sneakers; and then her voluptuous body stretched out on the Stofella bed. Guillermo tries a second time to touch the handle, open the door maybe, but the hinge has soldered it in place.
“My darling is dead. She’s dead. Oh my God, my love is dead.”
The detective grabs Guillermo by the waist and tries pulling him away. He signals to the policeman who brought him to the scene for help. The cop tosses his oversized cap into his car and scampers over. Both of them pull the grieving lawyer away and sit him down on a curb in front of the half-constructed buildings. The policeman explains to the detective why he brought Guillermo over, that he had just driven to the factory. He adds in a sly whisper that obviously he is the lover of Ibrahim Khalil’s daughter, since the husband has already been there and has left to make the funeral arrangements.
“But he knows nothing,” Guillermo hears.
Filled with thick cumulonimbus clouds that funnel up, the sky has darkened but nobody really notices or cares. It starts to rain, a soft, steady, and enduring patter that douses the burnt cinders and creates new chemical reactions releasing vinegary clouds of smoke into the air. The whole area seems lifeless, like a battlefield filled with stinky corpses.
Guillermo buries his face in his crossed arms and feels the policeman’s hand on his shoulder. He again sees Maryam lying naked on her stomach in the bed at the Stofella, her head resting against her folded arms, her ample breasts, the flatness of her feet, the broad curve of her ankles, her toes hanging over the bed and wiggling, the tattoo of a smiling red bat above the dimple on her left butt cheek. He can hear her slightly husky voice talking to him as he stands by her feet, ready to massage or lick her toes, with their green nail polish. In a dreamlike trance, she is telling him that he can do anything he wants to her body; hurt her even, hurt her more than a bit. She likes pain, as long as he stops when she asks him to stop. She wants to hurt but only a little, perhaps enough to know she is alive, not dreaming, not in a state of unfeeling. Hair pulled back, hard bites on the neck.