Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'Come, come back to me, I'll be patient, I'll wait; but don't delay very much longer,' I thought when I was on the plane, remembering that farewell. And then I quoted to myself a line from a recent poem in English that I'd read during one of my trips with Tupra, on a train: 'Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.'

That was the last thing that happened before everything changed. I asked the stewardess for an English newspaper; I needed to get used to that other country again. I hadn't even looked at a Spanish newspaper that morning, I was still too involved in my own thoughts to bother with the outside world, although a copy of El País lay unopened on my lap. The stewardess offered me The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, and I chose the first two because I can't stand the dreadful decadence into which the third one has fallen under its present Antipodean regime. I glanced at the front page of The Guardian, and my gaze fixed instantly-familiar names always call to us, immediately attract our attention-on a report that must have made my eyes start from their sockets and which sent me straight to the front page of The Independent for reassurance and confirmation that this wasn't some absurd sick joke or a figment of someone's imagination. Both papers carried the story, so it must be true, and although it wasn't a headline or a long item, the report was given due prominence in both: 'Dick Dearlove Arrested Following Boy's Violent Death.' Obviously neither headline said 'Dick Dearlove'; Dearlove is just the name I have taken to calling him by.

I turned immediately to the relevant pages and read them fearfully, eagerly, then with a sense of horror and growing repugnance towards Tupra and myself-in fact, a feeling of self-disgust swept over me at once. The information was incomplete and the facts confused and did little to clarify the succinct, not to say hermetic statements made by Dearlove's spokesman and his lawyers, who were the people who had reported the incident to New Scotland Yard on the morning after the night of the murder, which made one think that they must have had a few hours to weigh up the situation and prepare and agree the best line of defense, about which, on the other hand, they gave little or no detail. In England, as I understand it, unlike in Spain, where there's an irresponsible clamor of voices right from the start, or even a verbal lynching, they take the confidentiality of legal proceedings very seriously indeed and never release any evidence or testimony that will form part of a trial, and no one who might be called on to testify is allowed to give his or her version of events to the press prior to that trial. Lawyers and journalists were thus limited to making veiled hints and prudent, rather discreet speculations as to what actually happened. They suggested a possible kidnapping attempt, a possible burglary, or even a settling of accounts between lovers. The victim was seventeen and apparently either Bulgarian or Russian (no one knew for sure, nor if he had a British passport, although this seemed unlikely) and he was referred to only by his initials, which, curiously enough, were the same as those of his killer, let's say R.D. Whatever the truth of the matter-and I saw at once what must have happened-one thing was sure: two nights ago the singer had stuck a spear, one of several he had hanging in a room next to the dining room, into the chest and throat of that very young young man. This doubtless meant that televisions around the world, especially those in Britain, but in my own country too, not to mention the millions of anonymous or pseudonymous voices on the Internet, would already have had a whole day to dissect the affair. But I had seen neither television nor Internet.

I briefly regretted that the plane had no low, sensationalist rag like The Sun on board, The Sun belonging, of course, to the same Antipodean empire as The Times and being therefore more given to scandal, moralizing and rumor: such newspapers would be rubbing their hands with glee and prepared to risk breaking any law if it meant selling more copies. I had a glance at El País, just in case, but its treatment of the matter was sober and concise and revealed nothing more than its London colleagues claimed to know. My regret was short-lived or was, I should say, merely a moment of naiveté, because I didn't need to know the details or the circumstances or the background or the motives, or even the psychological explanations being pondered by journalists or whoever. It was clear to me that Tupra had projected onto that idol the maximum biographical horror, had plunged him into narrative disgust as if into a butt of disgusting wine, had lit a torch for him and inscribed him in letters of fire on the list of those afflicted by the K-M or Killing-Murdering or Kennedy-Mansfield curse, as it was known in our little group with no name and who knows, by a process of mimesis, in some other loftier place; that Reresby or Ure or Dundas had condemned Dearlove not just to a few years in prison, which, for someone as famous as Dearlove, with such a sordid crime behind him, would be a slow incessant hell-I mean slower and more incessant than for other people-unless, and this was the best-case scenario, those years were interrupted by a swift death at the hands of other prisoners; he had condemned him also to seeing his entire life story and achievements lost beneath a quick lick of grey or off-white or off-color paint, its whole trajectory and construction plunged into immediate oblivion, condemned him to knowing that whenever anyone mentioned or read or heard his name, he or she would always instantly associate it with that final crime. Mothers would even use his name to warn their unwary offspring and, even worse, the message they gave would become distorted and exaggerated over time: 'Be careful who you mix with and who you go around with, you can't trust anyone. Remember what Dickie Dearlove did to that young Russian lad-he took him to his house and slit him open.' And I was as sure of this as I was that Tupra would already have in his possession a recording, a film of these events about which the press were now hypothesizing and which were known to almost no one else; it would doubtless show the whole sequence, from the point where the young Bulgarian, R.D, arrived at Dearlove's house up to the furious, fearsome moment when the latter stuck a spear in him, causing his instant death, although it must have taken two blows-one in the throat and the other in the chest, or possibly the other way round-to silence him completely and put an end to him; and then, perhaps, still blinded by rage and gripped by a childish sense of triumph (a very shortlived emotion and one that he would deplore for the rest of his days), searching the young man's body for the cell phone or tiny camera with which he would have taken his compromising photos and which Dearlove had failed to find when he playfully frisked him on arrival, perhaps because Tupra had told the boy he wouldn't need to carry a phone or camera because a camera would have been hidden somewhere in the house prior to that amorous or commercial assignation, like the gun that was famously waiting for Al Pacino in a restaurant restroom in the first episode of that great masterpiece in three parts, each part better than the last.

Tupra wouldn't need to make use of that tape or DVD (he hadn't, on that occasion, recorded and kept it for future use) in order to persuade Dearlove later on to do or not do something; the important thing had been to make Dearlove aware of just one of the deceptions of which he was the victim and of the irreparable act he had committed in response, so irreparable and unconcealable that his punishment would not be long in coming. Tupra would keep that video simply in order to have it and to watch it when he was alone or to revel in the perfect execution of his plan, the prize item in his collection. It wouldn't be of any further use to him, given that the main deed had been revealed as soon as it was done: Dearlove had done the deed, and the whole world knew about it. He had killed a young man with a spear.