Guillermo Martinez - The Book of Murder

“But you didn’t,” I said.

She looked defeated. “No, I didn’t,” she said.

She lapsed into a long helpless silence, as if now that she’d told me everything she had retreated further into herself. She sat hunched in the armchair, hands with fingers interlaced in her lap, jerking her head and shoulders back and forth in small compulsive movements. She looked on the verge of shivering.

“Don’t you have any other relatives who could help you?”

She shook her head, slowly, resignedly. “All that’s left of my family is my grandmother Margarita. She’s been in an old people’s home for years. And my sister, Valentina, who’s still at school.”

“What happened after that? It’s been a few years since your brother died, hasn’t it?”

“Four. He’s letting time pass again. These periods are torture. I almost never leave the flat, and I watch Valentina constantly. I’ve become obsessive about crossroads, and locks, and turning off the gas. But I can’t control Valentina completely any more. I can’t stop her going out with her friends sometimes. My God, sometimes I even follow her without her knowing, to make sure he’s not after her. I only visit my grandmother once a week, on Saturday afternoons, but I’ve left written instructions not to allow in any visitors except Valentina and me. I’m scared he’ll get in there under a pretext, in disguise…”

“But from what you’ve said he seems to prefer indirect methods. Or do you think he’d risk doing something himself?”

“I just don’t know. It’s unbearable not knowing what’ll come next. I’ve tried to take precautions, but you can’t take every single possible precaution. It’s so difficult…I hadn’t seen him again for all this time and even though I never forgot for a moment, the waiting had come to seem unreal, even to me. As if only I was perpetuating it, because only I knew. And him. Until I saw him again yesterday. I think it was carelessness on his part. I think I’ve got a slight advantage for the first time. Or maybe not, maybe he’s so confident that he let me see him, the way he did at the cemetery. I’d just been to visit my grandmother and I went into the antiques shop below the old people’s home. At one point I looked out and saw him standing across the street, staring up at the windows of the home. The traffic lights were red, but he just stood at the kerb, apparently examining the row of windows or an architectural detail. He didn’t see me. He stared up at the building for a few moments, then walked away without crossing the road.”

“Is it an old building? Maybe he genuinely was admiring one of the stained glass windows or the mouldings on the balconies?”

“Maybe. I expect that’s what he’d say. But my grandmother has one of the rooms looking out on to the street.”

“I see. And this was yesterday. Is that why you decided to call me?”

“There’s that, and something else. It would almost be funny, if I could still find anything funny. My sister’s in her final year at school and about a month ago her literature teacher decided they should read a novel by a contemporary author. Of all the writers in Argentina, guess who she chose?”

“I didn’t know Kloster was recommended reading in schools now. I expect teenagers find his novels pretty stirring.”

“Yes, that’s the right word, if you want to put it tactfully. Valentina was completely gripped by the book-I think she read it in a couple of days. I’ve never seen her so absorbed by a novel. Over the next few weeks she devoured everything by Kloster in the school library. And then…she persuaded her teacher to ask him to come and give a talk to the class. Last night she told me Kloster has agreed. She’s thrilled that she’s going to get to meet him. And she said something that made my blood run cold: she’s going to try to interview him for the school magazine.”

“But haven’t you told her anything all these years? Doesn’t she know…”

“No. I’ve never told her. She was only a child when I worked for Kloster and to her he was just a nameless writer I went to work for every morning. She has no inkling of any of the rest of it. I wanted her to have a normal life, as far as possible. I never dreamed she’d jump into the wolf’s mouth herself. Yesterday, when she told me, I thought I’d start screaming in front of her. I didn’t sleep all night. And suddenly I remembered you.” She looked at me, and I felt she was extending an imploring hand to me. “I remembered that you’re a writer too. I thought you could speak to him. You could speak for me.” She burst into anguished sobs and, as if she no longer cared about holding back, she said, almost screaming: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this, without even knowing why. I just want you to find out.”

I suppose I should have put my arms round her, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I sat frozen, terrified by her violent sobbing, waiting for her to calm down.

“You’re not going to die,” I said. “Nobody else is going to die.”

“I just want to know why,” she said through her tears. “Speak to him and ask him why. Please,” she begged, “will you do this for me?”

Once I was back out in the piercing cold night air, I saw the problem, or set of problems, I’d got myself into. So had I believed Luciana? Strange as I find it now, as I walked home through the last traces of that Sunday, to some extent I had believed her, just as you believe in the revolution while you’re reading The Communist Manifesto or Ten Days that Shook the World. At any rate I’d believed her enough to make that stupid promise. The more I thought about it, the harder it seemed to keep. I didn’t know Kloster personally; I’d never even seen him. Ten years earlier, when I wrote for various literary supplements, at a time when I went from literary gatherings to book launches, from round tables to newspaper offices, it would have been impossible not to meet him had he deigned to show his face at such events. But during those years Kloster’s persistent non-appearance had become legendary, and was, I assumed, another expression of his lofty contempt for us. Some of us had even toyed with the idea that Kloster didn’t in fact exist, that he was the joint invention of several writers, like mathematicians’ Nicolas Bourbaki, or of a pair of writers, secret lovers who couldn’t sign their names together. The couple of rather hazy photographs reproduced for years on the flaps of his books could easily have been faked. We joked and speculated and compared, but Kloster was too different, light years from the galaxy of Argentinian writers, like a cold star in the distance. And in the years that followed, when Kloster underwent his spectacular transformation and was frenetically everywhere, I’d made my own journey to the end of the night. On my return-if, that is, I had returned-I’d preferred to keep away from everything and everyone, shutting myself up like a phobic within the four walls of my apartment. I’d never returned to the literary scene and now only went out for walks or to give a class.

If Kloster and I had utterly failed to coincide, something separated us even more. When Kloster had done something unforgivable-have his first big success-the machinery of petty resentments in the literary world had cranked into action against him. What had once been a well-guarded secret, passed quietly with bewildered admiration amongst connoisseurs of the obscure, was now in full view, at the same democratic price as the work of any other Argentinian author, and, in the great wave of recognition, Kloster’s earlier novels reappeared. Ordinary readers in their thousands suddenly purchased those early books, which had once circulated like passwords among the cognoscenti. It could mean only one thing: Kloster couldn’t be as good as we’d thought and we had, quickly, to backtrack and shoot him down. To my shame, I was part of the firing squad, with an article full of irony about the writer I most admired. It had been just after Luciana stopped working for me and I was still feeling hurt at the thought-the conviction-that she’d gone back to him. And though almost ten years had passed and the article had appeared in an obscure journal that now no longer even existed, I was only too familiar with the tangled web of literary intrigue: someone had no doubt placed it in front of him at some stage, and if he’d read it, and was even half as vindictive as Luciana believed, he would not have forgiven me.