Chapter 5

"There are more fish in the sea, everyone told me when I divorced Violeta. Fucking ignorants.”

"Please, Morgan! Nobody wants to eat a fillet of hake fish when they just put a couple pounds of prawns in their stomach, right? I wonder who was the first to say that horrible phrase that everyone repeats but nobody ever wants to hear.”

The complaint had already been filed, and nothing that could or had not been done was of importance. He had no doubt that he held all the cards in his hands, at least, to be the main suspect. He was between a rock and a hard place. The formal complaint had come to the police that morning; he was only waiting for the trial, and, after that, to know the sentencing.

Jaime Vergara looked at his superior, Dr. Ángel Fuenmayor, through the office glass, and paused for a moment. He did not want to discuss the case with him, but he knew the conversation was inevitable. There was still one thing that needed clarification. I'm about to take the first step towards a free fall, he thought, deeply depressed. He knocked, turned the knob, and went into the study, and with his head down he forced himself to smile. Dr. Fuenmayor returned the greeting and invited him to sit down.

“Well let's see. The last time you called me to your office was to tell me about your divorce. What have you done this time?” Jaime teased, trying to sound unconcerned.

"Jaime, don’t upset me. Don’t tell me you don’t know why I called you.” The head of neurosurgery, more sullen than usual, shifted in his chair. "I have received the complaint," said the superior solemnly. “Didn’t you ever think to tell me?”

"Look, what do you want me to say? I suppose all this shit is my problem,” he replied, aggravating the tone of his voice.

Jaime kept scrutinizing his boss's eyes, but he didn’t add any comment. He refused to rush the moment of his crucifixion.

The subordinate raised his eyebrows and then made an annoying chuckle with his mouth.

Fuenmayor merely snorted with an unfriendly face, urging Jaime to take the matter seriously.

"Look, Angel, I gave poor Shapiro some kind of intravenous poison. Then I screwed his son's wife at the foot of the bed,” answered the young man without blinking.

"Jaime, damn it, I'm serious!" The senior doctor raised his voice for the first time. “Do you think this is a game?”

"I'm innocent, Angel, fuck!" Exclaimed the accused, irritated, and struck the desk with his fist demonstrating an extraordinary lack of control. “Do you think I could do something like that?”

After a few seconds of scrupulous silence, the older of the two leaned forward and sought his best doctor out with his eyes.

"Don’t talk to me like I'm your enemy, Jaime," he said condescendingly, and held up a hand. “Wait let me talk, I'm on your side and I plan to help you. I believe in your innocence and we will come out of this.”

“Thanks Angel.” The young doctor recovered his composure and apologized to his boss. “I'm sorry I acted like this, I'm pretty screwed.”

"Nevertheless," said the older, and Vergara waited, with a sinking sensation, which, although clearly predictable, had been on his mind for days, "I have no choice but to suspend you from employment and pay until all this is resolved."

He couldn’t deny that it was a social and professional imposition, more than a punishment. Angel and he were good friends, and Jaime seemed to detect in his eyes a shadow of sadness and disappointment. He couldn’t blame him.

The conversation continued for several more minutes. The question that floated in the air but which the head of neurosurgery did not dare to ask, it was embarrassing and inconceivable, was how he could have been caught with the patient's daughter-in-law in an... affectionate embrace. For him, who thought he knew Jaime as a son, the answer to that question went beyond explainable.

As soon as he left the hospital, a journalist from Telecinco and another from Antena3 assaulted Jaime, both with their respective cameras behind him, on the stairs of the entrance to the building.

"Do you have anything to say about the accusation that places you as Shapiro's killer?" The reporter asked.

"How do you feel, Doctor?" He insisted, bringing the microphone closer to the doctor's jaw.

"Come, tell us something, give us a good exclusive," added Telecinco, who acted as his best friend.

This type of trash journalist had always nauseated Jaime, as he called them, who believed in a right to everything in order to get a story. Now, that he was the one behind the microphone, he would not give them the pleasure of answering.

He began to feel unpleasant cramps in his stomach, and he was getting cold, where strong gusts of wind turned the north of the Paseo de la Castellana into a desolate place. He raised his hand and stopped the first taxi that passed, and hurriedly got in to get away from the journalistic parasites as soon as possible. He didn’t want to go home and did not know where to go, so he ordered the taxi driver to take him to the roundabout of Alonso Martinez, which was the first place that came to mind. When he reached his destination and got out of the car, he stood on the sidewalk, uncertain, not quite sure where to go. Finally, he decided to cross the street to the Grand Café Santander.

Shortly after ordering a latte and a portion of carrot cake, an informative breakthrough began on the television. After some news related to the Gaza war and Baghdad massacre, it was his turn. Fortunately, the scoop did not last more than ten seconds:

This morning, the young doctor Jaime Vergara, from the hospital in La Paz, has been identified as the main suspect in the death of the famous businessman Juan Shapiro. "It's a premeditated homicide," Shapiro's son said. We will expand the details of the story in the information on Chanel 3.

A couple of weeks ago, just before Juan Shapiro died, an increasingly heavy sensation and unpleasantness had formed inside his stomach. However, the depression had not taken possession of him until that morning, when he left Doctor Fuenmayor's office and felt completely helpless. His own state of mind surprised him. From the first moment of this story he knew that he had fallen into a trap. As soon as his old patient died and the complaint was filed, he knew that if there was no miracle, he would be fucked. They would condemn him and he would have to say goodbye to everything he had achieved in his years as a doctor. At first, of course, he had received the charge with surprise. Then he waited for confirmation for the date of the trial, which was still in the air, in a reasonably carefree manner. But now, once he had talked the subject over with his mentor, uneasiness began to overwhelm him.

As he bit the first piece of cake, he felt as if the cake had become a knot inside his mouth. He had a hard time swallowing it and set the plate aside.

This was all new to Jaime. He had never been accused by anyone, and he had never done anything illegal, except when, at the age of twelve, the Muslim man who sold candy in the neighborhood shop caught him taking a pack of chewing gum without paying for it. He considered himself an impulsive and vehement man, but he was not a delinquent, much less a criminal. The complaint was important, nothing more and nothing less than a serious charge of homicide. In his favor he had his innocence, which he had to prove by all means, and the support of a whole army of doctors who would support him in sworn statements.

Taking an optimistic position, he hoped to be cleared and avoid imprisonment. However, since the economic point of view, the issue was catastrophic. Having not yet reached his thirties, Jaime's savings were limited, despite having a respected neurosurgeon salary. He did some quick calculations while drinking coffee and concluded that he lacked the strength to assess how much the expenses would be. By prudently managing his money, he would be able to pay both the legal costs and the remuneration of a lawyer. The problem was that his boss had stopped paying him until; at least, until the case was concluded.

He weighed the possibility of selling the house and the car, which would evaporate into nothing. At the turn of the millennium, as soon as he left the faculty and encouraged by his large monthly salary in his first job as a doctor, he decided to look for a fixed address. He discarded several houses until he found a fifty-square-meter flat in Cuzco, right next to La Castellana. The previous owner had bought and renovated the house with a taste that dazzled Jaime, but when the previous owner married and his wife became pregnant, they decided to move to a larger apartment, so the newly qualified doctor was able to buy the house he was looking for at a very good price. The house only needed a few touches, such as pulling a couple of partitions and covering the terrace with huge windows, perfect for watching the cars coming and going along Orense Street without needing to get wet when it rained or go crazy with the horns or engine noise. It was the perfect nest for a confirmed bachelor, though he really hoped to find a partner to turn the nest into a family home.

Three years later, with all the money he had saved and the loan from a good bank, Jaime fulfilled his most biggest dream: he bought a new Porsche 911 Carrera out of the factory, metallic gray and with garnet leather seats. Its three hundred and fifty horsepower made it reach a hundred kilometers an hour in less than five seconds. Now, with more than a hundred thousand kilometers on its wheels, the value of the vehicle had been reduced to less than half the original price, and also the car sector was not at its best. Jaime knew that he could not buy a car like that now, so he wanted to keep it.

But the tragedy of losing the house and the car was nothing compared to the immense loss of prestige he had just suffered, possibly irreparable.

His reputation had gone to hell. In the future, unless the trial proved him innocent, many patients would think twice before entrusting their lives to a neurosurgeon who has been charged with homicide within the hospital. He knew he could count on his colleagues by profession, most of them aware of the dirty and unfair game he had been victim to, but from now on they were going to look at him with a magnifying glass. Whispers and glances were waiting for him through the corridors and back stabbing behind him. And he could not afford the slightest error. If of course one day he managed to recover his work.

He, a simple doctor treating a patient, had swallowed the hook, line and sinker, falling squarely into the trap of a dark, ambitious, conspiratorial family. How could he have been so stupid? He was convinced that this vile bastard was in those moments uncorking a bottle of champagne next to his famous lawyer and with a stupid smile on his lips. Jaime felt humiliated.

The Shapiro case was born, in a most chaotic way, at the entrance of the La Paz hospital in an emergency vehicle on the morning of June 21, the day when the spring gave way to witness summer. Everything happened in a matter of seconds. Jaime had just left the bathroom when he watched the attendants pushing a stretcher carrying an older man. That at first sight was unconscious. "A sixty-year-old man who has collapsed on the street twenty minutes ago!” One of the medical technicians informed him as he made his way down the ER corridors.

“Upon our arrival, the patient was without a pulse. After the emergency resuscitation, we managed to keep the vital signs." Vergara and his team soon got down to work. After diagnosing a stroke in the patient, Jaime spent five hours in the operating room trying to drain the cerebral hemorrhage to avoid an excessive increase of intracranial pressure. He managed to save his life, at least temporarily: the man had fallen into a coma, and neither Vergara nor any other hospital doctor would have wagered a single euro on his coming out of it.

At about five o'clock that afternoon, Jaime hadn’t yet put anything in his stomach, so he decided to make a quick visit to the hospital cafeteria, where he ordered a latte and a donut. From the bar he glanced at the television set, where they were broadcasting a romantic sensationalist program, and he looked away. Still, he sensed something that made him focus on the screen again. At the bottom of the screen, a label repeated over and over again like a carousel. Vergara's eyes narrowed to read:

The businessman Juan Shapiro, owner of many of the most important fashion companies in the country, hospitalized urgently this morning at the hospital in La Paz, Madrid.

The young doctor raised his eyebrows. "So the old man is a celebrity," he mused silently, regretting his ignorance.

The news was embedded in his brain. It didn’t matter at all that his new patient was a rich man, after all his work was going to be the same, and so was his responsibility. But there was something else. Shapiro. That surname sounded familiar. And not as that of someone famous, but rather as the distant memory of something that seemed to come from a past life.

"Hey man, Jaime!" Exclaimed a voice to his right. The man turned in a reflex act. "What a fucking coincidence!”

Until the newcomer arrived and shook his hand, Jaime recognized him. A pleasant smile crossed his face.

“Ernesto? Ernesto Shapiro!” He repeated cheerfully. “Hey, I'm so sorry about your father. We will do everything we can for him.”

In school, in the late eighties, Jaime Vergara and Ernesto Shapiro had been more than simple friends, they had even played on the neighborhood soccer team. The friendship ended naturally, with no more reason than distancing, after the last day of the last year of school. Each one took his way to different universities and during the last ten years they had not see each other again. At that moment, when they met unexpectedly in the cafeteria of La Paz Hospital, they looked at each other with funny curiosity. Ernesto's complexion was reddish, and his curly black hair more tangled than Jaime remembered.

Jaime's mood had suddenly improved. He invited his old friend to a coffee and they chatted at one of the cafeteria tables around a plateful of delicious cream, meringue and chocolate rolls.

Then the conversation became a friendly verbal duel about what each had done after school. They discovered that their lives could not have been more different. Ernesto Shapiro went from high school to college, and from there to the prestigious Harvard University, Massachusetts, where he studied economics as the first-born son of a powerful entrepreneur. From there he took the leap into the business world, ending up in his father's franchise and always under his protection. Vergara graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Madrid, and his entire professional life had been dedicated to study, open and repair human brains. After the two old friends took a long look at the funny anecdotes of childhood, the conversation began to revolve around the present, Ernesto's father, and his relentless illness. Shapiro put down the mug of beer, he had asked for it after he had finished the coffee and rolls, although Jaime didn’t join him, and looked at his friend seriously.

"My father is the heart of the company, my friend. You have to make him survive or everything will be lost.”

"As I've told you before, I'll do all I can for him," he assured him. “It’s a really bad situation, but I think we'll save him.”

"I didn’t know she was so close to her father-in-law," he said. “In fact, you didn’t tell me you were married.”

"Yes, and this morning she's in a sort of anxiety attack." Shapiro leaned forward until his ribs rested on the edge of the table. “When she comes here, keep her calm.”

"You have to reassure her, dammit. You are a doctor; she will believe you more than me. Invite her to a coffee, be affectionate with her, and tell her what all doctors always tell the relatives, that everything’s going to be okay! You'll like her, she's a great gal.”

"Okay, I told you I will, don’t worry," the doctor repeated, somewhat uncomfortable with the subject of conversation. “Well, I have to go back to work. I shouldn’t spend so much time in the cafeteria," he said, and both friends stood up.

"No more talk, I'm glad to see you, my friend.” Ernesto gave Jaime a bear hug. “I really appreciate it, by the way.” He lifted the beer mug and lifted it in the air. “Cheers!”

During the following summer weeks, while Vergara witnessed the null progress of Juan Shapiro's health, he received several visits from Renata Shapiro, the spouse of his childhood friend. Her appearance surprised him at first glance. For some reason he had the idea that she would be a vulgar woman, perhaps a few kilos more and aged by the anxiety that Ernesto had sworn she suffered after her father-in-law's heart attack. The woman was good looking. Not that she had a cleavage that made him lose himself in her, or that she had a crazy ass or lips that invited him to fantasize with tasting them. She used to come dressed in simple jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt, and she liked to knot her brown mane in a ponytail that made her appear younger than the thirty-four years she actually had. But Jaime, being a single man, she seemed to be an attractive woman and being honest with himself, one with which he would have definitely tried to sleep with, if he had known her in a pub.

Every time Shapiro's daughter-in-law approached the bed to see that her father-in-law was still comatose, she collapsed. Often, especially if her husband did not accompany her, she would throw herself into Jaime's arms for comfort. Then she would remain in that position for a long time, sobbing. On those occasions, with the distraught wife of his old friend hanging around his neck, the doctor often remembered that afternoon on the first day of summer in the hospital cafeteria. "You have to reassure her... anxiety attack..." Jaime wondered why his patient's daughter-in-law was much more affected than his own son, but soon his thoughts were flying into dirtier fantasies when he felt Renata's crotch touching his own.

To ward off the inappropriate thoughts that came upon him, and following the advice of his childhood friend, Jaime used to accompany the woman to the cafeteria, where he ordered a couple of coffees and invited her to sit at a table next to him. In this way, she freed herself from her sorrows for a moment, and he from his dark temptations.

One day in September, she settled into the cafeteria chair a few inches away from him. They had ordered, as usual, two coffees with milk and two croissants stuffed with ham and cheese. She had no ponytail, she had let go of her flowing hair, and her lips were wearing some crimson lip color. Jaime declined to give importance to these details until Renata, as usual very affected by the situation of her father-in-law, accompanied the phrase "thank you for everything you’ve done for us" with a hand movement under the table. Then Vergara felt her grip his right hand and he rested it on her feminine thigh, a few millimeters from her zipper. It all happened in a few seconds. There, in the sight of companions, patients, relatives of patients and waiters, sweet Renata laid her lips against the doctor's neck and kissed him until reaching the earlobe. Meanwhile, she slowly pushed his hand toward the hip area. Jaime stopped suddenly, and allowed nothing else to happen except for those wet moments. Stupidly, however, it had already been done.

Juan Shapiro died on November 7. Immediately after the funeral, a complaint landed in the police station in the name of Ernesto Shapiro. The accusation was accompanied by a series of large photographs taken from the hallways of the hospital, behind the door of Shapiro's room, or from the waiting room next to the cafeteria. They saw Dr. Jaime Vergara in a more than affectionate manner with the daughter-in-law of the recently deceased powerful man.