Valverde

by Ute Cohen

Grunewald

He sat behind the rhododendron shrub and waited for the shrill echo of her voice to fade. It went right through him and he couldn’t bear it anymore. The only comforting part was that she trembled at the sight of him; he awakened something archaic in her, which she herself had no idea was there. Madame was the ringleader: she was affected, babbling with a terrible accent in what she imagined to be French. Her blue-marbled bare feet tested the temperature of the wet grass before she sat down in the covered wicker beach chair. An import from Sylt, just like the bubbly, which she deposited on a wooden table in a bucket filled with ice. With crossed arms, she squinted at the sun, seeming to have forgotten him for a moment. The wind blew the smell of fried chicken over to him. He wondered how she could eat that disgusting food. Putrid meat pumped with chemicals that her Thai housekeeper fried in peanut oil, dabbed with a paper towel, and drizzled with a disgustingly sweet soy sauce. One morning, when Madame was still asleep, the housekeeper had given him a piece to taste. Somehow, in her esoteric-Asian simplicity, she believed that doing him good would bring her happiness. But if he now had to take care of the domestics as well, he wouldn’t get a thing done. He had set himself clear priorities. At the top of the list were the Big Five, and this Asian chow wasn’t going to get in his way. He lay in the grass, hidden by the leathery leaves of the shrub.

Madame unfolded the footrest of the beach chair and looked at her toenails, which were painted the same garish pink as the rhododendron flowers. Back to nature, she probably thought to herself, feeling proud that she was so in touch with the living world. He hated himself for being able to smell her thoughts like a damned dog that would lick her ass for a fucking treat. He was careful not to make the slightest sound. He wouldn’t be able to take her voice a second time.

Valverde. He wondered how she’d come up with that stupid name. Here they were, in the middle of snobbish Grunewald, beside Charlottengrad, Little Russia, and there was nothing even remotely fucking valley-like about it. He squinted and forced himself to think clearly again and, above all, to expel from his mind the fake proletarian slang used by spoiled Grunewald brats and their champagne-sipping tennis moms. Valverde. Maybe they were thinking of that character Valmont, who had at least managed to pull off a halfway decent deflowering and had driven that aristocratic mishpachah to the brink of madness with his intrigues. This lot certainly didn’t underestimate his intelligence, and the fact that he was still considered eligible for liaisons dangereuses even flattered him a little. He had to be disciplined—after all, he knew his weaknesses. As much as he liked to seduce others, he wasn’t immune to sweet talk and flattery. Valverde. He let the sound of his name sail past his ears and dozed in the springtime sun until a cocky bee woke him with its buzzing.

Madame was now sitting in the barbecue area which was done up with terra-cotta tiles, while next to her sat a brunette in her midforties, her head bowed over a portfolio. Behind her stood a blonde, who was fanning herself with a brochure. “We could get rid of the clichés about Russians by turning it into an art project,” said the brunette, and stuck a pencil behind her ear. The blonde, whom he called White Russian due to her fondness for vodka with milk, cooed affirmatively and made a circular motion on her temple with her index finger while she knocked back her drink of choice with the other hand. Madame’s expression remained unchanged, though he sensed that she was suppressing a mocking smile. If the old bag had anything going for her, it was how well she understood the inscrutable emotions going on behind these grotesque masks.

He pricked his ears and eagerly awaited the next episode of this Grunewald soap. Last week (he couldn’t bear more than one episode a week), they’d been talking about the physical assets of the personal trainer, whose endless stamina was unfortunately being overstrained by the newcomers in Hilde-Ephraim-Strasse. He had made a mental note of the name and incorporated it into the “Pentagram of Decadence,” which he’d invented a few months ago. But the brunette and her photo project wouldn’t fit into this constellation. She waved her arms, talking about a movie in which a Russian mafioso falls in love with a nurse. “Then we paint the tattoos on Irina’s body,” she said, “and copy the poses from Eastern Promises down to the last detail.”

Cronenberg, he thought. It turned him on the way she rhapsodized with a slight lisp to the other two about a Danish actor whose selfless, criminal energy she admired. At last, someone who seemed to understand him; someone who could handle contradictions, who understood that not all crimes and not all victims were the same.

Madame opened her laptop and pointed with a contrived “Voilà” to the screen. “That was my project in Moscow—radical urban impressionism. It was groundbreaking,” she said in a voice that could break glass, which made him wonder whether he should ask for hazard pay after all, especially for his hearing.

“Fuck!” he yelled, and slapped his bicep. The bee had stung him. At least it was going to die now, the lousy creature. He sucked the poison and stinger from his blood and spat it into the flower bed. The snake tattoo on his arm swelled up, as if it wanted to spew hellfire at the entire deceitful lot of them. Keep calm, he told himself, stepping out from behind the bush with a smile. They stared at him with blatant greed, as if they hadn’t been laid properly in months despite the personal trainer. The other three were now sitting in beach chairs: Rosita Esteban, the Mexican, and Ruth, a retired teacher and bottle-redhead who seemed at first glance to have strayed randomly into the group but in fact was a sly old dog. In a deck chair, her perfectly toned body sheathed in a dark-blue stretch bondage dress, was Nermina. She ran her tongue over her lips and flicked the ash of her Gauloises Blonde onto the manicured lawn. “Valverde, a glass of champagne for you too?” she asked, winking lewdly behind her sunglasses.

He had no desire to consort with the gang. Besides, it would be a strategic mistake. One glance at Madame was enough. With her eyebrows raised and the corners of her mouth rigid, she pressed a fifty-euro bill into his hand and indicated the way out with a slight toss of her head. He tipped his cap lightly and silently left the garden. In the car, he lit a cigarette and kicked the driver’s door, cursing because the damn wreck wouldn’t start yet again. When the engine finally purred, he threw his ciggy out of the window and stepped on the gas. He waited until he was on Königsallee before he turned up the radio, flicking channels between Energy, Jazz, and Flux, where he got sucked into “Emotional Rescue” by the Stones. He snapped his fingers and sang in falsetto: “Nothing I can do to change your mind?” He laughed and wondered if he should eat a curried sausage on the Ku’damm near Bier’s, but then thought better of it. He allowed himself the luxury of this capriciousness because in all other ways, he was as reliable and synchronized as a QuikTrak lawnmower. He himself couldn’t explain why he had taken on all this shit. There was no objective reason for it. It wasn’t like boy racers had mowed down his kids on Ku’damm. Hell, he didn’t even have kids. He couldn’t say that he had been sent by some political power, or that the red-red-green coalition had kicked his ass and given him a justice mission. It was just his damn moralizing conscience, which gnawed at his heart like a rat. The day when Rosita Esteban had washed her children’s eyes out with soap, then stuffed toilet paper into their mouths before making them stand next to the dumpster, because they had been cursing, had, of course, been a turning point. He would have liked nothing better than to grab Rosita by the throat, pull her by the hair out of her toy villa, and throw her into the waste-incineration plant. Instead, he had stayed calm and listened to his heart—that megalomaniac moralist rat. He had to take them all down.

At home in his winged armchair, a relic from his recently deceased neighbor, he thought over his plan. He put aside de Sade and cut himself a slice of black sausage, which he’d fried with lots of onions in goose fat (one of his specialties). How grateful he was for his last jail term. Where else would he have discovered the old Frenchman, if not in the prison yard? (From a philosophy professor who had marched into his wife’s office and pumped her with nine shots, five of them fatal.) From that day on, he knew that all the talk about virtue was only lame bullshit made up by cowards. Evil could not be eliminated, only outsmarted. His goal was to have a successful criminal career, so as not to be thrown to the lions. However, he had to prevent the worst evils, limit the harm people inflicted on each other. He skewered a piece of sausage on his fork, happy that it had ended up crispy and juicy at the same time. He dozed for a while and then went to the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror, his hands resting on the washbasin, he fished out a peppercorn from between his front teeth with his tongue. He spat it into the sink, took out his dentures, and put them in a pink plastic container, not without an admiring look at their sparkling white appearance. Then he lay down on his bed and waited for the devil, or whoever, to suck the thoughts from his brain.

* * *

Over breakfast of three fried eggs, a green smoothie—he had to use that thing Madame had given him somehow—and black coffee, he began drawing the pentagram. The article in the Morning Post had been the last straw: “Fraudulent Real-Estate Agents—Bankruptcy, Bad Luck, and Suicide.”

He scrunched his foot into the discarded newspaper on the floor as if it were a disgusting insect and sketched his pentagram on a paper napkin stained with curry sauce. Five names and their crimes. Madame formed the highest spike: a straw woman who covered up the corruption of her sleazy slumlord husband and who had more Louboutins than sense. Red soles on her shoes, perhaps from the pools of blood left behind by her victims on the asphalt? Actually, what did he care about these fake Italian slumlord types? They wove their net into a system, and systems pissed him off as much as ideologies. If it hadn’t been for that little kid from the sixth floor . . . He wiped the grease off his lips with the back of his hand, tapped his pencil on the table, and concentrated.

The next spike: Rosita Esteban, that Mexican slut who strutted in stilettos all over that pussy of a husband until he lay prostrate on the sofa, The Secret blasting through his headphones, incapable of protecting even his children. He stabbed a hole in the pot-bellied b with the tip of the pencil and drew the tip of the third spike: White Russian. He had seen with his own eyes how she’d stirred Cytotec into the milk of her pregnant rival, a Serbian girl who had crawled out of some shithole and landed in the bed of the distillery mogul, and soon that ill-gotten bastard was taken care of!

Speaking of unpleasantness, he was amazed at how it all fit together. The next spike was for Ruth—harmless Ruth with her worn-out shoes, her collection of condos, including the one with the listed garden—who had rammed a stick into her neighbors’ labradoodle’s ass until it had croaked miserably. Valverde had just mowed the lawn and was checking the blades when she had picked up the stick from a pile of leaves, sharpened the end with the kitchen knife, and pushed it into the poor animal’s anus. It would be easy for him to eliminate her. Torture never stops! Zappa would have patted him on the back.

And last but not least, Nermina, that piece of vermin. It was fucked up how often she had given her gullible old man the clap and then blamed him for it. It was only when her hubby groveled for forgiveness that she showed mercy, had him buy her a few rocks from Bulgari, only to hop in the sack with some bartender or odd-jobber from one of her clubs. Valverde couldn’t work out why the others didn’t get sick of hearing her fuck sagas over and over again. He wrinkled his nose and moved the corners of his mouth down in contempt. He mustn’t get sentimental. Being promoted to avenger of cuckolded Grunewald senior citizens was not a job he could take on. He braided the mini pigtail growing from his chin, which he had to put up with until the last drug tests had been done, and pulled on his army jacket.

The skies over Berlin were merciless. The rain drizzled like stinking discharge onto his bald crown. Shoulders hunched, he lurched to his car and drove back to the hell of Grunewald.

* * *

“Should I turn on the sauna?” she asked, reaching for her champagne glass. His cock slunk away like a snake flung into the bushes.

“No, leave it,” he said, patting the bedclothes jovially. “Pussycat,” he added. She liked it when he treated her like a pet and enjoyed punishing him at the next available opportunity in front of her friends.

“Valverde, you’ve done the edge of the lawn really shoddily, and the hedge looks like Edward Scissorhands has had a go at it,” she would say with a brazen wink. Sometimes he felt like cutting her throat with a blade.

She pulled the thong over her hips, some bondage affair with gold rings and leather straps, and sat on a stool in front of a mirror dresser. Skeptically, she eyed the sweep of her eyebrows. “Are you coming to Anja’s birthday party next week?” she asked. “You could help the bartender, and we,” at this, she spread her legs and slid the thong to one side, “we can slip off to the master bedroom.” She shook her blond mane. With her back curved and her ass stretched up in the air, she crawled toward him, purring. She wasn’t beneath trying any kind of stunt and thought it was the ultimate in sexiness to play a big cat.

He rubbed his cock, pulled on a rubber, and waited for her to straddle him. It wasn’t so bad, he thought, and afterward she was bound to offer him a joint and tell him the gossip. Actually, she didn’t have much in common with the other four, except for her insatiable greed, which was manifested in her sex addiction: the others were compulsive torturers, gluttons, or alcoholics. He felt a small spark of pity. Somehow it was a waste that such a hot piece of ass should wither away at home. He tenderly stroked her back.

“I just want to make one thing clear,” she said. “You’re going to man the bar!” She blinked at him with her green eyes. “Roarrr!”

* * *

Another one of those fags, he thought, loosening the tie around his neck that had been fastened too tightly by a waitress. The bartender straightened his upper body, bent his knees slightly, and shook the cocktail shaker in an affected pose. Old Böhlke himself was standing at the bar, roasting a bullock tenderloin, while the Asian housekeepers arranged the African buffet. Madame’s voice trilled from the upper floor, complaining about the champagne: “Veuve Clicquot! When you know that the CEO of Chateau Berlin only drinks Roederer Cristal!”

Valverde polished a glass with a linen cloth and squinted over at Nermina. She was engrossed in conversation with the brunette artist, whose four kids had demolished the buffet and were now lounging with mango maracuja cocktails on Fatboys on the lawn. He wondered how she made ends meet with so many kids. Russian satire was hardly a lucrative source of income.

“Valverde, two Moscow mules!” The fat man propped his arms on the bar and pulled out two cigars from a leather case. “Romeo y Julieta,” he said, cutting the cigars. “Brought to me by Dmitri last week.” He patted the other man on the shoulder, a tall blond guy with a well-toned body under his tailored suit, and said, “Thanks, dear fellow! The Riva model is fantastic!”

“Just wait till you see what’s on Lake Como,” the blond guy answered, exhaling cigar smoke.

“And there she is, the queen of the evening.”

Madame was standing next to them, a glass in her hand, her lips drawn into a thin smile. “Please excuse us for a moment, Mario,” she said, and pulled Monsieur over to the piano. She whispered something in his ear, screwing her left hand into a fist, and turned abruptly in Ruth’s direction. She greeted Ruth exuberantly, while Monsieur, his back bent, made a last attempt to hold her back. With a dismissive wave of his hand, he finally gave up and returned to the bar.

“I have a few things to fix,” he said vaguely, knocking back his vodka in one go.

Valverde looked at him pityingly. What an idiot! Letting himself be bossed around by that tyrant and making a fool of himself. He failed to understand how these businessmen, who had snared half of Berlin in their sham real-estate web, could kowtow to their money-grabbing wives. Tomorrow Monsieur would surprise her again with a short trip to the Côte or to Sylt, just so she could complain about the crowds and how stressful it was. Fuck, if Ruth started her 1968 schtick along with her commune stories, he’d spill frying fat all over her shoes. One of his pet hates was when these women, who could all afford yachts, came on all modest and sashayed about in red shoes talking about their Maoist past.

“Valverde!”

He placed a cocktail on the bar, which the White Russian snapped up immediately. With a wink, she dropped into a lounge chair and leaned back with her eyes closed, as if having one of her intoxicating yoga highs, while her financier was probably thrusting his cock into another anorexic Ku’damm street girl, until he would eventually force himself to show up here with an air of innocence. Hopefully she wouldn’t ram her high heels in his face when one of her friends reported her husband’s latest sexual escapades, like she had done the last time. He slipped on black latex gloves, sliced ​​a cucumber, and opened a bottle of Lillet. The French were back in fashion! Hugos had been put on ice a long time ago. He laughed at his own stupid joke and granted himself an aquavit.

“Well, the staff are enjoying themselves.” Rosita Esteban stood in front of him in her off-the-shoulder gown and straightened hair, an uneven swelling on her forehead. The Botox injection had probably not spread properly. “Champagne, please!” she said, and clacked her red-lacquered nails on the bar top. She took the glass with her fingertips and brought it to her mouth. “Herbert,” she said, pushing her husband hard in the back toward a woman who was barely able to suppress her obvious boredom. Her other half stole a glance at his watch, TAG Heuer or some other nautical bullshit. “Herbert,” Rosita Esteban began again, “feels great since he’s been reading The Secret. We’re living life in the fast lane. Happiness, money, love. Every night he listens to a chapter and goes to sleep with the recipe for success in his ears.”

And you lock your kids down in the basement until they scratch at the door with thirst, he thought, and smiled at her. No doubt, he would have to destroy them all in one go. He poured another aquavit and wondered how he would immortalize all five on his body. The tattoo would have to be very special. Maybe five intertwined snakes?

“Valverde.” The sound of the brunette’s voice was enchanting. “Thanks for the wonderful service,” she said, smiling at him. “Children, come on,” she called, and then addressing Madame, “I have to get up early tomorrow. Work calls. Thank you so much for the recommendation. If you think of anyone else who needs tutoring—”

“Oh what a shaaaaame,” Madame trilled, “you’re so welcome! I’m rising early tomorrow too, for my tennis class.”

The brunette smiled and picked up the youngest child before leaving the garden through the side entrance.

Over the next two hours he served cocktails at top speed and wiped lipstick stains off the crystal glasses. When he went into the living room at around two o’clock in the morning, they were all sitting on the sofas, summing up the evening. Madame was complaining about the outrageous brats who had wolfed down every last crumb of the chocolate cake. “Absolutely no control over her kids! No wonder her husband left her.”

White Russian nodded, straightening a line of coke on the glass table with the back of a narrow comb.

“But she is sweet. Did you see the tits?” Nermina asked, looking provocatively in his direction.

Rosita Esteban chewed on her sunglasses, lost in thought, and muttered, bored, “Oh, come on!” She straightened her back and said, “Sure. Zero ambition, that one. I have to get going. Visions, what we need are visions.” She looked at Madame and added, “I think we could use her. She can expand the network downward, stabilize it.”

Ruth nodded. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.” The others looked at her in surprise. “Don’t stare at me like that! Business and revolutions are not mutually exclusive. We learned that in Bavaria in seventh grade.”

“And I always thought that the revolution devours its children,” said White Russian, shaking her head and rubbing her nose. They laughed.

“Will you bring us some more pretzel sticks, Valverde?” Madame asked. “I’m feeling so retro today.”

* * *

Throat lozenges, ibuprofen, Zopiclone, Zyrtec, the blue pills. He took the brown vial out of the cupboard, on which someone had stuck a cross with a red Band-Aid a long time ago, and narrowed his eyes. Psychopax was written in pink letters on the label. His first thought was to hurl the thing into the trash. It reminded him of the time when she was still around to breathe a kiss on his mouth in the morning, when the room was fragrant from the smell of her hair, like freshly cut grass. He put the vial back in the metal cupboard almost tenderly, next to a stack of benzodiazepines in various dosages. He clung tightly to the edge of the sink and took a deep breath. He’d certainly need that stuff. But now he needed the damn amoxicillin. Why had he been dumb enough to let Nermina give him a blow job? And then, of course, she’d wanted her reward. He liked her taste. Actually, it was hard to resist. Or rather, he hadn’t thought about it for a second. There were two packs left. That should be enough. He pushed two tablets out of the strip and swallowed them with a handful of water from the tap. For that alone she deserved a thrashing. Who knows where she’d picked up that shit again! He opened his fly and peed in the toilet bowl, not without grimacing in pain. Hopefully it wasn’t something worse. He sprayed the toilet with Lysol and carefully wiped it with a sponge.

Then he ambled into the kitchen and tossed lettuce, a banana, and two carrots into the smoothie blender. The steady whir brought clarity to his thoughts. Nermina had let slip that they wanted to use the brunette for real-estate transactions that were too hot for them to deal with personally. They already had a notary, an old acquaintance with a law firm on Hohenzollerndamm. “Wears gold-rimmed glasses,” she’d said, “an old West Berliner, you know the kind.” He didn’t know, and it didn’t interest him in the slightest who played what part in this gory business. But what had gotten to him was the fact that they wanted to drag this woman and her kids into their shit. Her smile. Sweet and red like cherries. His likeness was reflected in the windowpane, his expression strange and meek. He wiped over it agitatedly with a dish towel. Then he drank a big gulp of juice, grabbed a piece of salami from the fridge, and sat down in his armchair. On the radio, “Night Train” by James Brown was playing. He closed his eyes and let places pass by his mind’s eye. Miami, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia. At some point he would get there, across the Atlantic, drive down Route 66, and chase alligators in the New York subway.

A fire truck siren made him start. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock. Still plenty of time. He loosened his shoulders and tapped his knuckles against his teeth. Firm. Nermina knew about his dentures. It turned her on, she said. She would have liked it even better if he had gold teeth like Jaws from James Bond. She was definitely off her fucking rocker and he felt almost sorry for her.

He took the notepad from the side table and read through the shopping list. He struggled over the size of the brush. Cable ties were still among the supplies he needed. He first had to test the gold-foil washi tape. There was no way he could take any chances.

* * *

At Halensee he parked the car directly outside the hardware store. He took a shopping cart and decided to have a stroll through the garden section. A sleepy saleswoman was trundling some potted plants through the corridors on a trolley. Pansies, dark purple and yellow, gleamed next to a stack of bark mulch. For a moment he hesitated, then decided on the balcony arrangement: Tyrolean hanging carnations, petunias, and million bells. Just don’t get sentimental, he thought, taking the escalator to the ground floor, where he ordered a double espresso in the bakery. She would have certainly chosen the lilac pansies. He shooed the thought away with a bite into the cookie the shop assistant had put on his saucer, then paid and went back to the packaging department. He selected two types of gold tapes and tested them for tensile strength. His decided on the high-gloss, extremely durable sort. Then he strolled into the paint section and headed for gold paints and varnishes. Ecological, water-soluble. The chemical industry had clearly made progress. He picked up a pot of Maya Gold Decor but put it back on the shelf as it wasn’t suitable, then opted for BOND-age Brilliance. At the cash register, he pulled a crisp fifty out of his wallet, complimenting the cashier on her butterfly tattoo, even though it made him want to barf. He was exhilarated: adrenaline was rushing through his veins, closely followed by endorphins. Then he headed downtown and bought two scoops of lemon sorbet and a scoop of mocha at the ice cream parlor. The taste reminded him of Sorrento when they had sat high on the rock, eating gelato al limon, and in their minds, Caruso sang, “Te voglio bene assaje.” Did he actually wipe a tear from his eyes? They deserved nothing less, those corrupt creatures to whom love meant nothing.

* * *

He could not properly decipher the drawing. The brunette had left it lying on the dining room table after the last discussion about her art project. He was sure that they would never get it underway. The bitching was in full swing. Which camera? Should Madame take the photos or should they hire a pro? Which network should they use? Where would they exhibit? After all, they were not allowed to jeopardize the main business. The director of the Chateau Berlin was definitely out of the question because, in his cock-driven stupidity, he’d set his mind on marrying that teenage escort girl. And anyway, he hadn’t quite understood the project. The drawings contradicted each other. At some point, they would drive the brunette and her kids mad or make her a scapegoat when the Russian community were at their throats. Exposing the decadence of Russian women with kitsch photography? Was there ever a more stupid idea? They themselves were the very spearhead of decadence!

Once again, he studied the drawing in detail. A rococo structure of flesh and blood, that’s how he imagined it. De Sade would love his idea. Classical and in gold, like their faucets, very Grunewald. He clapped his hands, rolled up the drawing, and grabbed the plastic bag from the bathroom.

* * *

Nermina had persuaded them. Somehow, he had managed to get her thinking about a weekend free of radiation and toxins. The colors could not have complemented each other any better. The black cube, which one of their star architects had planted in the Uckermark landscape, along with a sculpture of Berlin’s bear mascot, was the perfect setting, not to mention the logistics and timing.

The gravel crunched underfoot as he walked from the parking lot to the main entrance. They had certainly heard him coming and were happy for the change. He rang the bell. Nermina opened the door and tweaked him between the legs by way of greeting. One, two bottles of champagne? He took off his military jacket and followed her into the living room. The image that presented itself to him seemed like a cheap copy of a Newton photo. In purple negligees, Ruth and Madame were lolling in front of the roaring open fire, while Rosita Esteban was eating the remains of a roast chicken. White Russian was standing on a wooden table and dancing in an emerald gown to a schmaltzy song. “Love is in the air,” she slurred, and tried to stick the stem of her cocktail glass into her bra. When she saw him, she stumbled and almost fell off the table.

Nermina, laughing, propped her up. “I thought a little backup wouldn’t do us any harm. Will you freshen our drinks, Valverde?” she said, winking.

He greeted them with a friendly smile and went into the kitchen. He knew the house. Nermina had once taken him there when her husband was on a business trip or screwing around. Without the blue pills, he could not have survived that weekend.

He mixed the cocktails and brought them into the living room on an Oriental brass tray. Nermina grabbed a glass and danced over to the fireplace. She pulled the cucumber slice out of the glass and sucked on it. Then she raised a toast: “To us, girls! The Grunewald Quintet! Cheers!” She lifted her glass. “So, how about it? Cul sec! Down in one!” She emptied her glass in one gulp. Ruth hesitated for a moment, but eventually did the same.

* * *

Rosita Esteban was the heaviest. She didn’t make a peep. The dose was enough. He pulled her to the wall with both hands and leaned her back against a sideboard. Then he took toilet paper from the plastic bag and stuffed it in her mouth. He looked around the room, pulled up a chair with pointed, tapering legs, and turned it over. He picked up Ruth from the floor—she was lighter than she seemed—lifted her skirt, and positioned her on the chair leg next to Rosita Esteban. When he tugged off White Russian’s high heel and drilled into her eye, he had to pause for a moment. Fluid and tissue dripped from her eye socket. With a roll of paper towels, he dried the spot and smoothed the wound. He spared Nermina. He kissed her between the legs one more time and draped her over the other three, her back sagging. Madame’s turn came last. He opened her purse, pulled out a bundle of bills, tucked them firmly into her hair, and dropped a lit match onto her mane, which then caught fire. When her scalp blackened, he extinguished her head with tonic water and leaned her back-to-back with Nermina. He pulled out a folded sheet from the breast pocket of his shirt and put on his reading glasses. He took a few steps back and compared his work to the drawing. She would be proud of him. He nodded benevolently and began wrapping the golden tape around the quintet. For a moment he thought he heard a faint whimper as he touched Rosita Esteban’s leg. He listened until the last sound died away, and no trace of breath could be felt whatsoever, then quickened his movements, diligently checking that the overall expression of his work was preserved. Then he opened the paint pot and dipped a thick brush into it. In large, even strokes he began to apply the golden paint to the quintet. He took his time, refining Nermina’s breast and décolleté and making corrections to White Russian’s eye socket.

It was already dawn by the time he sat on the leather sofa and made a toast to her health.

When he heard the first lark, he closed the door behind him and drove back to Grunewald.

* * *

Nervously, he tugged at his goatee and straightened his back. The bell made no sound. He pushed down the handle of the garden gate, which was still unlocked, and knocked on the glass front door. She blinked from behind the curtain of the kitchen window, pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, and opened the door with a toy car in her hand.

“Valverde,” she said.

“Lemon?” he asked, holding an ice cream out toward her.