Giles Blunt - Breaking Lorca

“I am in no position to forgive anyone,” she said. “Even if I wanted to.”

“Lorca! Ignacio, where are you?” Michael Viera’s voice came from behind and above them.

Lorca hid her face against her knees. Victor stepped out from the willow. Viera looked down at him from halfway up the hill.

“She is here with me,” Victor said. “We are coming now.”

“Let’s hurry, please, Ignacio. It’s starting to rain.”

In the shelter of the willow, they had not noticed the rain. By the time they rejoined Helen, who was waiting for them on a bench near the Obelisk, the sky had turned charcoal.

“Did you have a nice time?” Helen asked Lorca brightly. “Enjoy your little walk? We had a dandy time wondering where you were.”

“Leave her alone,” Viera said. “Let’s get to the subway before we get soaked.”

Lorca was silent. As the others said goodbye, she scuffed at the dirt with her shoe. Victor watched them pick their way through the diehard skaters, Viera carrying the basket in one hand and guiding his wife with the other. Lorca kept her distance from them and moved in a careful, hunched posture, bent as if over a wound.

NINETEEN

VICTOR TOLD HIMSELF he wanted no contact with the Viera family for a while. He stayed away for the next few weeks, working his split shifts at Le Parisien, spending his breaks in the library or sometimes in a cheap coffee shop with a newspaper, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Lorca.

His home, if you could call it that, was a rundown SRO hotel on West Ninety-fourth Street, one of the last of these crumbling hostelries on the upper West Side. It was a shabby, depressing place. Victor had a hot plate in his room, a small sink, a wobbly iron bed and peeling wallpaper. The bathroom was along a dingy hallway. Half the time the light didn’t work, and even though Victor had twice scrubbed the place himself, the tub and sink were always filthy.

The Royal Court Hotel, as it was grandly named, was an hour’s walk from the restaurant. To save money, Victor walked it every day, despite almost constant rain.

One wet day, he stopped beside the Belvedere fountain in the middle of Central Park. The rental boats were stacked up onshore; the lake was empty except for a squadron of ducks paddling toward the iron bridge. Victor stood at the water’s edge and stared across the lake at the willows where he had talked with Lorca. He stood there for quite a while.

That was three weeks after the picnic. A Sunday.

The following week, as he was cutting through the park one night on his way home after work, he strode purposefully past the fountain with its wide-winged angel. He had resolved before entering the park that he would not stop there, he wouldn’t think about Lorca.

One glance, however-what could that hurt? A single glance could not do any harm. And so Victor allowed him self this single glance across the lake and kept moving. But then he rounded the bottom of the lake and noticed a waterside gazebo. A moment later he was sitting on a bench inside the gazebo, and telling himself he would stay just five minutes. Five minutes to enjoy the moonlight rippling on the water, the satin glow of the lamps among the trees.

He stayed for over an hour.

When he rose to leave, his legs were damp and stiff. I’m like a man who haunts the scene of his crime, he thought. But that was not quite accurate, because his crimes against Lorca had been committed in another country.

Later, as he lay in his narrow, tumorous bed at the Royal Court, he could not remember what he had been thinking for that hour. What had passed through his mind as he stared across the water? What were his thoughts as he gazed at the moonlight on the willows? He could not remember. He remembered Lorca’s trembling shoulders and her broken tooth. He remembered her harsh voice and her unshed tears.

Victor switched on his ceiling light, tugging on a length of string he had rigged above his bed for the purpose. He reached under his mattress and extracted from among the bedsprings a wristwatch. It was a Bulova heavy with features he did not understand, dials within dials. He read the inscription on the back: To M. from J .

He switched off the light.

The watch dial glowed in the dark.

“I am sorry.”

The loudness of his own voice startled him.

“I am sorry,” he repeated more softly.

The dial glowed as if he held a part of Lorca’s life throbbing in his hand. Maybe it would be all right to call the Vieras, an inner voice suggested. Nothing wrong with that. Just to see what they’re up to, he told himself.

Just to see how she’s doing.

Victor stopped by Mike Viera’s office unannounced. He was surprised to see Lorca sitting behind the receptionist’s desk. She was busy on the phone, and Viera’s door was closed. Victor sat in the tiny waiting area and watched her over top of a Sports Illustrated . She was arranging a meeting between Viera and another attorney, speaking quietly into the phone. Instead of her usual faded jeans and work shirt, she was dressed in a neatly pressed blouse and skirt. Except for the chipped tooth, she looked like any other professional New Yorker. Should I ask her now, he wondered? Or is it too soon?

“The Frisbee champion,” she said when she hung up. “How are you?”

“I am very well, Miss Viera. How are you?”

She shrugged. “My brother has chosen to enslave me.”

“You look like you’ve been doing this all your life. Very professional.”

Before he could say anything more, the office door swung open and a woman came out. She was perhaps thirty, with heavy eyebrows that gave her a sad appearance. Her complexion was pebbled from burnt-out acne. She said to Lorca, “I have to see him again next week. I have to bring my mother.”

Lorca reached for a calendar. Mike Viera waved for Victor to enter.

“Come in! Come in, Ignacio! What a pleasant surprise,” he said, shutting the door behind them. “I wanted to ask you to come to dinner next week. I was afraid after Lorca’s distressing episode in the park we would never see you again.” He gestured for Victor to sit on the couch.

“I enjoyed our picnic,” Victor said. “It was a wonderful afternoon.”

“So you’ll come for dinner on Saturday?”

“I would like to, very much.”

“Good. It’s settled. Eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock, Saturday.” Yes, he thought. I should ask her now.

Victor sat down on the vinyl sofa, and a stack of files slid to the floor. He knelt and tried to balance the files into a loose pile against the wall.

“Leave them, Ignacio. It’s nothing. Tell me how you like my new receptionist. The old one called in sick too often.”

“It looks like you have a perfect arrangement now.”

Viera emptied a full ashtray into the wastebasket and lit himself a cigarette. He took a drag and contemplated the stream of smoke as he exhaled. “ To be honest, I am already a little regretting my decision to hire Lorca. She scares the clients, I think.” Viera stared up at the ceiling, as if debating whether he should go on.

“But she looked like she was doing very well to me.”

“Today is a good day. Three days ago it was a different story. At home, maybe nine o’clock, I go to ask her something and I can’t find her anywhere. I look in the basement, I look in the garage, even in the crawl space above the garage. Finally, you know where I found her? Under the bed. She was hiding under her bed, shaking like a leaf. Some boys had been letting off firecrackers on the street.”

“At the little school, the first thing they do is destroy your nerves. Stop you sleeping. Scream at you all the time. It makes the interrogation worse.”