Antonio Hill - The Good Suicides

“They threw us out of the metro, so we ran to catch the night bus. And when we were already at the stop, Nelson made me come back.”

His brother elbowed him to continue and Jorge lowered his head. His self-confidence seemed to have suddenly evaporated.

“Tell him,” ordered Nelson, but Jorge just looked away. “Or do you want me to tell him?”

The little brother let out a snort.

“Fuck, I saw it on the platform. Before the doors opened. The metro braked suddenly, without coming right into the station, and then I noticed that there was something on the ground. I grabbed it without anyone seeing.”

“What was it?”

“It was a cell phone, Inspector,” answered Roger Fort, who had joined them after carrying out his orders. “A pretty new iPhone. This.”

Jorge looked at the bag Fort was holding with a mixture of frustration and longing.

“You made your brother come and bring it back?” It was obvious that it was so, but the question came out without thinking.

“We Riberas don’t steal,” answered Nelson, serious. “Also, there are things it’s better not to see.”

The little one rolled his eyes, like someone sick of hearing nonsense. Héctor noticed, and after winking at the elder brother he turned to Jorge with a very severe tone.

“Okay, kid. You and I are going to the station. Agent Fort, bring him.”

“Hey, I haven’t done anything! You can’t-”

“Theft, tampering with a crime scene. Resisting arrest, which is something I’m adding because you are going to resist for sure. And … how old are you? Thirteen? I’m sure the minors’ judge won’t like a kid your age going out ‘partying,’ as you say, in the early hours of the morning at all.”

The kid looked so terrified that Héctor held back.

“If it weren’t … if it weren’t for your brother, who seems a sensible guy, assuring me that he’ll take care of you. And you promise me you’ll listen to him.”

Jorge nodded, with the same fervor as a young shepherd to whom the Virgin appears. Nelson put his arm around his shoulders and, without his brother seeing, returned the inspector’s wink.

“I’ll take care of him, sir.”

The station was almost deserted; only Salgado and Fort remained, along with two cleaners, who, after crossing themselves, got to work and rapidly forgot that the station had been the setting for a violent death. The world must keep turning, thought Héctor, unintentionally falling into cliché. Nonetheless, it was almost horrifying that everything could continue in such a normal way. In a few hours the line would reopen, the platform would fill with people. And only scattered pieces would remain of that woman, kept in black plastic bags.

“We’ve found the bag, Inspector,” said Fort. “The woman was called Sara Mahler.”

“Was she foreign?”

“Born in Austria, according to her passport. But she lived here, she wasn’t a tourist. There’s also a clock-in card in her wallet. She worked in a laboratory. ‘Alemany Cosmetics,’ ” he read.

“The family will have to be contacted, although that can wait until morning. Go back to the station, file the report and start tracking down the relatives. And don’t call them until daytime. We’ll let them have one more night’s sleep.”

Héctor was exhausted. His eyelids were heavy from pure tiredness, and he didn’t even have the energy to tell Fort off for making him come. He wanted to go home, lie down and sleep with no nightmares. He would try those damn sleeping pills, even though the word, mixed with what he’d seen there, made him think of a painless death, but death all the same.

“There is something else I want to show you, sir.”

“Do it. I’ll give you five minutes.” Then he remembered that in barely a few hours he was going on holiday with his son, and thought the sleeping pills would have to wait for another occasion. “Not one more.”

Héctor let himself fall onto the bench and took out a cigarette.

“Don’t tell anyone I smoked here or I’ll plaster you.”

The agent didn’t even respond. He handed the mobile to his superior as he said, “This is the only message. It’s strange-the diary is empty and there are no calls. Therefore, this is what she was reading on the platform, before-”

“Yeah.”

Héctor looked at the screen. It was a message with only two words, written in capitals, with a photo attached.

NEVER FORGET

When he downloaded the photo, Salgado understood why Fort had called him and why that Dominican had dragged his brother by the ear to bring back the damn cell phone.

At first he thought they were kites trapped in a tree. Then, after enlarging the photo and seeing the details properly, he realized they weren’t. There was a tree all right, with thick, solid branches. But what was hanging from them, the three shapes suspended by ropes, were animals. The rigid bodies of three hanged dogs.

New year, new life … although at the moment pretty much like the one before, Leire said to herself as she looked at herself side-on in the mirror. This was another of the treacherously unprecedented components of her current existence. They’d brought it up from the shop, because from the first moment she’d wanted it to decorate the hall of the apartment she’d just moved into and couldn’t yet call home. She kept seeing herself as a whale in it.

But she’d been very lucky. Everyone said so, and she’d ended up shutting up and agreeing. That apartment, with its high ceilings, with two spacious bedrooms and sun in the morning, was without doubt the best of those she’d visited, and the price, which had supposedly come down a lot in recent times, was in fact the maximum her income would permit. The ad promised “views of the Sagrada Familia,” and strictly speaking it didn’t lie. It could be seen from the wooden-framed window that gave access to a diminutive balcony. However, you couldn’t spend the day looking at those needles that stuck out among the buildings in front, however nice they were. What the ad didn’t say, nor did the woman from the estate agency who showed her the apartment mention, was that the pipes were a hundred years old and got blocked; that the bathroom tiles, a shocking orange color that the woman defined as “happy seventies,” tended to leap into the void because of the damp; and that the radiators were more futuristic ornaments and gave off about the same heat as a Chinese vase. Clearly, she was to console herself about the damp, the cold and the toilet cistern, which sometimes gurgled as if an alien were about to emerge from the wastepipe, by going out onto the balcony and admiring the Sagrada Familia. A total luxury if you were Japanese.

In any case, what made the apartment feel strange to her wasn’t its defects, and of course not its views, rather that for the first time in years it didn’t seem wholly hers. One of the two bedrooms had a cradle, a beech wardrobe and a border of yellow ducks running all around the four walls, dividing the two shades of green that her friend María had chosen as the ideal colors for a baby’s room. And not only that: in part of her wardrobe, which had always been for her alone, some masculine garments had gathered almost without warning.

Overwhelmed, Leire Castro went toward the balcony, happy to be able to move around the apartment without boxes in the way. That was definitely a change. “The first of many, right?” she said, directing her words to the child currently living within her. Sometimes he answered with sudden movements; at other times he seemed not to take the hint. She tried to imagine the features of this baby, Abel, floating inside her, but she only managed to give him a wrinkled face, like a sleeping gnome. Would he look like her, or Tomás? Well, if he looked like him it wouldn’t be too bad, she thought with a smile. “Although best if the resemblances are just physical, hey kid? Otherwise, you and I are going to have problems …”