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"You haven’t answered my question: Do you regret your behavior in the past, or not?"
"Never ask that question, Morgan, listen to me, because we all regret everything by nature. And besides, we like it.”
“How do we like it?"
"I'll put it another way: the human being has found a way to harm himself and then experience the pleasure of healing. There goes the sixth. Think about it.”
Friday, November 10, 2006
The fifteen minutes set by Jaime Vergara had already expired, and yet the girl was still on his sofa and no one had called the police. Jaime was so baffled that he had to ask Alyssa to repeat what she had just said to make sure he understood correctly. Providing refuge for a fugitive? For the love of God!
He had risen from his chair and stood in front of the window massaging his neck as he watched the traffic. Accumulating information: A complete stranger that the police were looking for all over the country had found Sara's cell phone in England, had flown back to Spain by circumventing border security, and had planted herself at his house posing as his friend and asking for help. She claimed to have killed no one, although she confessed to being the sexual partner of a suicidal madman. Skepticism had seized him when he asked the girl specific questions about her intentions in the Anglo-Saxon country, and she decided to keep her secrets to herself. However, the story had not reached the end, and by then Jaime was too intrigued not to hear the denouement.
"And you, what are you offering in return for my hospitality?" He asked Grifero when he met her gaze again.
She smiled bitterly.
"Sara is in grave danger," she said dryly.
Jaime raised his eyebrows at this resounding statement.
"Go sit in your chair again," Alyssa suggested. “In the meantime, I’ll smoke a cigarette.”
Sara Mora hadn’t looked away from the house since the two policemen entered it. More than fifteen uncomfortable minutes had passed and the detectives were still inside. It was as if the earth had swallowed them. During that time, she weighed very seriously the option of turning around and leaving where she had come, now that they were busy, and avoiding to be found sneaking around. In the end, curiosity was greater than her fear, so that she remained waiting in her position from behind the corner of the store.
Somewhere a street band sounded. In keeping with the intensity with which the melody reached her ears, she guessed that the group was approaching. In fact, a set of flutes, violins, guitars and trumpets soon emerged from a street perpendicular to Cowley Road, a couple of blocks from the liquor store. The musicians turned towards her with the intention of climbing the avenue, so that she faced them. The group consisted of about a dozen men and women. Sara flipped her body so that her back was turned on them (she had decided that the less people saw her hovering around the house, the better it would go for her) and she noticed how the band passed by. When she made sure that they were far enough away so that they couldn’t identify her, she turned back to the sealed house. She was startled to find that at that very moment the front door was opening.
She tensed her body and took refuge behind the corner like a scared cat. Less than eight meters, exactly the width of the liquor store, now separated her from the two policemen. If one of the two turned his neck a little to the right, he would see her. She held her breath and counted to ten in silence.
1, 2, 3..., pleasepleaseplease... 4, 5, 6..., well, it seems they haven’t seen me... 7, 8, 9..., and ten!
She cocked her head slightly to observe with her right eye the activity of the two detectives: they were moving away from the gate and were waiting impatiently for the band to finish passing so that they could cross the road. They seemed worried. Sara leaned a bit more to focus her gaze on the front of the house and made a discovery.
They’d left the door open!
She noticed how, after the agents exchanged a few words in a completely unintelligible English to her from that distance (and even more with the musical banging still sounding in the background), the blonder of the two pointed towards the front. In front of them was a place where, according to the sign on the entrance in bright colors and the poster of Take Away from the window, they served Turkish food to go. They entered it and both figures disappeared behind the door.
Sara was alone again by the liquor store. The little orchestra had passed the number 219 and its popular melodies were now like whispers between the roar of the cars. She watched with suspicion the shadow of the door of the house and she felt a surge of a powerful temptation. If she ran out to the house, she calculated, it wouldn’t take more than five seconds to reach it. Then she could hide inside and camp at her leisure. There was a risk, however, that in those five seconds, one of the two policemen would look that way through the glass of the premises, and that he would detect a mad girl running down the street, look more closely at her, and recognize her as the suspect that they found next to the victim’s corpse the night of the crime.
She didn’t risk it. She looked around to see that she wasn’t catching anyone's attention, pressing her body against the wall, she kept her eyes fixed on the entrance to the Turkish restaurant. At that moment her wristwatch marked three-ten.
Alfred Horner was still carrying Sara's letters in his head as he crossed the front door and joined his companion in the doorway of Mike Lennard's home. He rearranged his arm bandage before sitting at the bar. They both stared at the road thoughtfully.
"Looks like we've wasted our time getting back here,” Thomas said, not looking away from the front.
Horner did not speak.
"What do we do now, Fred? Any ideas?”
"They sound good," he remarked.
“What?”
“The band. They’re good.”
He saw Carroll turning to him and looking at him as if he were looking at someone who had just uttered a supreme stupidity. What his companion was unaware of was the whirlwind of ideas that he was spinning around in his head that prevented him from thinking of anything else. S-A-R-A-M-O-R-A...
He shrugged to hide his distraction.
"I don’t know, let's go back to the police station and continue the investigation. We'll go over Lennard's past, shall we?” Horner proposed the first thing with meaning that occurred to him, for what his body was asking for was in fact a time for reflection.
“Wait a minute.” Carroll raised his hand, taking the lead role this time. “We're going to snoop a little more before we go.”
He accompanied the proposal pointing to the road, which at that time was occupied by the members of the aforementioned musical group. Horner followed the imaginary line drawn by Carroll's finger and looked over the slow-moving musicians, oblivious to the detectives' conversation. Across the street was Ahmets, a small, humble-looking place that seemed to offer Turkish food.
"You’re craving kebab, Tom?" He asked ironically.
"No, fuck, but it's the closest restaurant to Lennard's house. If he minimally liked Turkish food, surely the owner of the premises knew him, and in that case he could give us some information about him.”
Horner gave his companion a smile of admiration.
“Great idea.”
“Thank you. In addition, he could have even witnessed the crime. We won’t lose anything by asking.”
"Well, although I think you're optimistic. The murder took place around midnight, and at that time it was already closed.”
“What do you mean, these Turkish places never close!”
Carroll gave his partner an affectionate punch on the shoulder and set out to cross the street, now free after the passage of the musical procession. Horner followed without suspecting that the woman who was in all his thoughts was watching them a few paces away.
A middle-aged man with curly hair, a swarthy complexion and sparse in words was attending Ahmets. He identified himself as Mirsad, and didn’t seem intimidated when Thomas Carroll showed him the plaque that credited him as a police officer. On the contrary, he dedicated a smile full of arrogance to the pair of detectives.
"We won’t take up your time for long, Mirsad. There will only be a few questions.”
Carroll paused in case the man wanted to say anything. Then he cleared his throat and began a brief interrogation in which Horner remained in the background.
"Well, did you know the man who lived in the opposite house, number 219?"
"I don’t know who lives on this street. I go to my business and then I leave.” Mirsad spoke with a strong Arabic accent.
"His name was Mike Lennard. Does that name sound familiar?”
Mirsad shrugged and shook his head.
"He was a Caucasian man, dark-haired and upper middle class.” Carroll accompanied the description by showing a photograph of Lennard they had printed that morning at the police station. “Have you ever seen him in this place?”
The restaurant owner peered at the image for less than a second.
"He doesn’t look familiar, but dozens of customers come here every day. I can’t tell. Why? What has this guy done?”
"This man was killed last night in his own house. Right across from your place.”
Mirsad changed his face. He looked at the portrait again, this time with interest.
"I have not seen him in my life, I swear."
"Didn’t you see or hear anything that caught your eye last night?"
“We shut down at night. If we were open, I would have known.”
Thomas turned to look at his partner and gave him a gesture that recognized that he was right about the times of the Turkish restaurants in Oxford. Then he continued:
"What time did you close yesterday?"
“At midnight.”
"At that time the firing had already occurred, according to witnesses and the coroner's opinion. Although the police cars, that is we, the investigators, didn’t arrive until at least a quarter past twelve," he calculated.
"I don’t know what to say to you. Here we usually have the TV on, maybe we had it at such a high volume that it didn’t let us hear what happened in that house.”
Carroll squinted at the other side of the bar and found that there was indeed a television.
“It’s fine don’t worry. We have no further questions for you.” He saved the close-up of Lennard in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a business card. “If you remember anything useful about this man or any strange event that happened in the neighborhood yesterday, call me at this number.”
Mirsad accepted the card and nodded. When Carroll was crossing the door, Horner opened his mouth for the first time since they entered the room:
"Is that camera working?"
On the roof, next to the doorframe, an old security camera pointed towards the exit from inside the restaurant. Horner had discovered it, and taking into account the position of the target, he was sure it recorded everything that happened at an important place outside the premises.
"Yes, of course it works," said the Turk, almost offended by the question.
"In that case we're going to need a copy of yesterday’s tape, Mirsad."
Sara stepped through the opening of the front door of the house immediately after the detectives' car disappeared into the horizon, down the street. Although the vehicle was already out of sight, she had left her hiding place with a jump (she was getting fed up with the damn corner of the liquor store) and sprinted to the threshold. She entered the number 219 between gasps, caused in equal proportions by the emotion and the effort.
Keeping her eyes on the front (in this particular case, towards a storage closet that Lennard had placed in the hall) became Sara's first challenge inside the house. The reason was simple: the first door on the left that was just next to the entrance hall was the bathroom door. The last person to leave it (possibly one of the police officers a few minutes ago) had left the door open. If the doctor had turned her neck in that direction, her gaze would have landed flat on the scene of the tragedy that she had not yet permitted herself to see.
Better not to torture herself, she prevailed. Let's keep going.
She had a singular nostalgic moment when she set her feet in the largest room of the house, which served as a living room. She kept herself absorbed in silent observation of every corner, and felt how she traveled in time. She discovered that she had been there before, many years ago that it felt more like centuries. And yet, now it was as if she had never left, as if everything lived from then on was not of the slightest importance.
She found that quite a lot of furniture had been moved, and some even replaced with newer ones. Dozens of magazines, most of them specialized in dance classes and cooking classes, were piled up on the floor next to an old beige sofa. The television cables, the mini-cassette speakers, and the console controls hung from the cabinet to the little table like a futuristic and arbitrary spider's web that contributed to the deep general disorder.
"No doubt it's a man's room now," Sara said, pursing her lips as a patient mother trying to teach a disobedient son.
She noticed the color of the walls, light gray, and made an effort to remember the painting it had in the past. It was not necessary to think very hard, for in the thin separation between the skirting board and the wall; one could perceive the color on which Mike Lennard had probably decided to paint his dull gray.
Pistachio green.
A new wave of memories hit her in the chest, and a sad smile was on her face. She looked down at herself on the beige couch as she listened to Paul Simon on the radio and always surrounded by that vivacious pistachio green. Thus she passed her afternoons, in that earthly paradise that someone had created for her.
No, Sara, no! Focus. She shook her head and returned to the real world: 219 Cowley Road, November 10, 2006.
The pistachio of old was immediately replaced in her thoughts by the three faces that had entered in her nightmares in the last hours: the slow agent "A" (thus she had decided to call him, because she didn’t remember his name) that of his inquisitive companion semi albino, and the fragile and calm Lennard.
She turned and climbed the stairs, climbing the carpeted steps two at a time. The reason that she was hovering around number 219 on the night of the murder was that she had been sending correspondence to the same address over the past few years. Not with the intention of reaching the hands of the then unknown Mike Lennard, of course, but the letters had arrived, and therefore Lennard must have received and read them. That explains why he knew me so well from the beginning, and also knew all the details of my story, such as Verónica's pregnancy. Anyway, Sara concluded, the letters were in the house and she had to retrieve them, if those policemen hadn’t found them first. She reasoned that in that case, if the detectives had discovered that the witness of the crime had invested all her youth in sending letters to the house where the murder had been committed, she would become the main suspect.
She swallowed.
I have to find those papers anyway, she told herself with a buildup of anguish in her throat.
She inspected each room on the top floor one by one, and spent more time snooping around Lennard's bedroom, which had once belonged to Diana. With a quick breath, she moved around the room, opening the closets and drawers. There was no trace of the letters. It was as if they had not existed or maybe they were locked up in some cabinet in the police station, she thought with growing annoyance. What if Lennard had destroyed them? That was another of the infinite possibilities. After a few minutes of unsuccessful search, she abandoned the top floor.
She was going straight for the outside when she ran into something she didn’t expect. In the hall, near the front door, a rustic pedestal table held a fixed telephone. Sara had not even noticed its existence before, because she was too focused on not looking towards the bathroom area. The doctor perceived the corner of a paper that protruded from underneath the apparatus, and, as she approached, the corner of the paper became the edge of a letter that had been handwritten. Something flipped inside her. She reached out, lifted the phone and released the piece of paper, which came close to her face.
Only the inventor of the Rosetta Stone could understand the excitement of Sara when finding the paper hidden by Mike Lennard a few hours before. She read the first few lines of the first paragraph quietly.
Diana,
I’m writing from the bus. It is eight thirty in the afternoon and it is already dark, I think I must be on the verge of arriving. I am exhausted, but the long journey has been worth it, how beautiful this is! It is always said that the weather in England is based on rain, cold and fog (you should see my suitcase, it looks like an Eskimo’s), but today makes a splendid day. It was very, very early when I left Ámber, and the train that took me to Madrid took more than five hours. I took advantage of the breakfast being served in the cafeteria...
It was her last letter!
She recognized with absolute clarity the words she had written to Diana the other day, sitting next to Porky on the bus that took her from the airport to Oxford. An isolated tear slid down her eyelid and ran down her cheek. She wiped it quickly with the back of her hand and thought. Now it was clear: Mike Lennard had received the letter (in fact, most likely he would have received all of them, without exception), so that from the beginning he knew when and how she had arrived in the city. That is to say, when he found her inside the Turf Tavern giving her a death scare it hadn’t been a coincidence. He was really looking for her. Would he have any kind of obsession with her? Then she looked at the phone and felt a shiver.
From here he telephoned me the other day, hours before he was killed. He had my letter in his hands as he spoke to me.
She made an effort to remember the telephone conversation with Lennard, and concluded that what Mike wanted to confess to her so quickly was that he was in possession of her letters, and that consequently, they had never reached its real addressee, the former tenant of the dwelling.
A bittersweet moment.
Sara realized she was wrapped in a cold sweat. She put it in the back pocket of her trousers, it was the only memory of Diana she had found, and left the house trembling with three clear thoughts in her mind, each more disturbing than the last: the first was that her trip to Oxford had resulted in vain. The second, and more painful, that the letters never reached Diana and it was very possible that she would never see her again. And the third and at the same time more shocking, that at this point a photograph of her starred the panel of suspects at the city's police headquarters along with a bunch of letters with her name.
Alyssa Grifero exhaled the first puff of her cigarette and prepared herself for all the objections Jaime was likely to raise. Meanwhile, he shook his head in disbelief.
“This is crazy!” Cried Jaime. “Why would Sara be in danger?”
"Because, like me, she's fully involved in Mike Lennard's murder, only her face hasn’t been on the news yet. That’s something that certainly plays against her.”
"Alyssa, none of this makes sense.” It was the first time Jaime called her by name, a detail she appreciated. “It’s impossible that Sara hurt someone.”
"Neither did I, and yet here I am.”
Alyssa had decided to go to the attack with all the conniving she was capable of.
"Jaime, I can help you find her and protect her. She needs you and you need me.”
Jaime sighed.
"I've heard enough. I want you to leave my house right now, or else I'll call the police," he exclaimed again, this time raising his voice a little louder. He stood up and, as a threat, picked up the phone from the landline.
"I don’t think you will. On the contrary, you will work with me in this house and we will form a good team.”
Jaime shook his head incessantly.
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because I'm going to offer you something that no one else can give you and not all the money in the world can buy."
Jaime was puzzled for a second.
“What are you talking about?”
Alyssa's eyes glowed like two fireflies.
"I can deliver Shapiro to you on a silver platter. I have at my fingertips evidence that he is a liar and a manipulator. Help me, hide me in your house without asking too many questions, and you will make Ernesto Shapiro regret the day he decided to use you.”
Jaime's legs were so shaken that he had to sit down again. When he gaped at her, Alyssa gave him a wry wink of complicity.