Manuel Rivas - All Is Silence

He hung up. Passed his hand over his neck again. Took a deep breath.

‘Good, let’s see to that debt, shall we, piano tuner? You killed the dogs now, didn’t you? Well, right underneath the doghouse is the bag with the money.’

They left the office. The warehouse was empty. The automatic shutters started to rise. Neither henchman had time to ask what was going on. Chumbo, Inverno and half a dozen armed men overpowered them.

‘Where’s the other guy?’ asked Brinco.

‘In the fridge, taking some fresh air,’ said Inverno, pointing to one of the cold storage rooms.

Brinco rummaged in his assailant’s pocket. Found what he was looking for. Tautened the piano string.

‘You know? I just felt a strange pleasure, something I’d never felt before.’

Milton decided to place the call reserved for extreme circumstances.

If happiness is to travel from cold to hot, he’d gone in the opposite direction. From a hot sweat, the atmosphere of a large hotel’s kitchen and the euphoria of someone who has the power of intimidation and uses it, to the cold sweat of someone whose internal affairs have been badly disturbed. As a boy he’d lived in Moravia, in a settlement raised on a mountain of rubbish. He’d grown on top of the discarded waste of Medellín’s rich quarters. There the floor of his home gave off a sticky smell through the cracks, the methane that emanates from decomposition. The senses learn. They reject the base smell in order to perceive the rest. But the day comes when the methane sweeps away all the laboriously constructed scents. And the settlement burns. Moravia burns.

Which is why he always took quick decisions, a ‘Do it!’ whenever he got a whiff of methane. As now. There was a telephone in the kitchen, which he’d been watching for hours. He decided to take every precaution. He removed his head chef’s uniform, put on a holster and jacket. Loaded the magazine in his automatic.

‘I’ll be back in a minute. Pay attention to the phone. Don’t go to sleep on me.’

He made the call from a public booth in a small square next to the Hotel Coruña Road. He had no idea who Palindrome was, but he knew it would work. Palindrome answered. Yes, sir. Milton here. From Madrid, that’s right. It was an emergency. He’d lost track of some men he’d sent to Galicia. They were his best archangels, though he didn’t say this. They’d gone to collect a debt. An office job. They were supposed to call. In a maximum of twelve hours. But he hadn’t heard from them for a day and a half. The debtor? Brinco’s group. In Noitía.

There was a silence. He couldn’t tell what the silence smelled of because his head was overwhelmed by methane.

‘Understood. Thank you for the information. First of all, calm. And no noise.’

In the hotel lobby, a receptionist gestured with his hand, came out from behind the counter and rushed over to him. ‘Boss. We got a call in reception. A strange call. They said they’ve left the piano at the door to the warehouse.’

‘The piano?’

‘That’s what they said. Nothing else. A piano for Milton.’

That’s right. Everything so clean. The stink of methane.

‘Warn the kitchen! Tell everybody to go to the entrance to the warehouse. With their weapons!’

The warehouse was reached down an alleyway that opened out into a patio at the back of the hotel. Milton’s men took up position there and at the entrance to the alley. The only thing in the way, right in the middle of the patio, was a large crate. Water poured out from between the boards. Two metres long and half a metre wide, more or less. Everything required by a man packed in ice who’d come to deliver a piano string.

Inverno communicated with Chumbo by means of a walkie-talkie. He occupied the shade next to the sea gate of Romance Manor. Sentinel for Leda and Santiago. By the shore, the water around his waist, the boy was swimming, or pretending to swim, with some goggles. Each dive was followed by a series of shouts and gestures aimed at attracting his mother’s attention.

Leda watched him. Returned his attention. She was alone, sitting on a towel on the beach, wearing a printed T-shirt that seemed to attract all the breeze.

On a boat anchored next to some rocks that acted as a natural embankment, dressed in sea clothes, pretending to be a fisherman seeing to his nets, was Chumbo, holding a Winchester kept out of sight on deck.

There were two more people, hidden, but taking part in this unfolding drama. Fins and Mara on a dune, behind the marram’s herbal screen. The rumours of a settling of scores in Brinco’s circle had brought them here, to this oblique position as the capo’s bodyguards. But the capo was nowhere to be seen.

Mara whispered ironically to Fins, ‘Everybody watching the lady of the shipwrecks.’

And the lady of the shipwrecks watching everything. She was blinded for a moment by the sun glinting on the water. She set about reconstructing everything. First of all, the child. His greeting calmed her. She’d been like this for days. An activated inner sense that kept her on the alert. Permanently ill at ease. Checking out every single place, trying to turn any sound into a murmur, a source of information.

A diver emerged on the port side of the boat where Chumbo was. Chumbo had his back to him. When he turned, alerted by the splashing, the diver fired a harpoon into his chest.

Reality is an outer layer. There is a hidden world. And in this hidden world there is a conflict of forces which for her take on the shape of currents, underwater angels. For years the sea has sent her good signals. Even at the time of the accident, when the explosion sank Lucho Malpica’s boat, her father was saved. He almost couldn’t swim. The current took him in its arms, after he’d chafed himself against rock after rock, and deposited him on the beach.

Leda got up in a state of agitation. Surveyed the blanket of water, the glittering crumbs, that infinite, ephemeral silverwork a hand of wind had wrought on the sunny sea. She suddenly felt this was a place of horror. She couldn’t shout. She ran and could hear — a sticky, faulty sound — the whistle of her own drowning.

Santiago finally reappeared. Took off his goggles and waved at his mother.

‘How long can you stay under without breathing?’

‘You what?’

‘How long can you stay under without breathing?’

Leda heard a violent roar. She quickly identified where it was. It was coming from the palafittic horizon of the mussel rafts. It was a speedboat heading quickly towards the beach. Inverno came out of his lookout post by the sea gate of Romance Manor. Tried to speak to Chumbo, but got no answer. All he could hear was the sea moaning. The strangest thing was that Chumbo was there, on his boat. Inverno could perceive his silhouette in the distance. He had his back to him. Must have been trying to work out the nature of this piercing sound approaching over the sea.

He decided to expose himself and head for Leda and the child while trying to establish communication with Chumbo.

‘Chumbo, can you hear me? Over.’

The sound of interference like a hum.

Something burning tore into his shoulder. Another bullet smashed his head open.

How could Chumbo possibly kill Inverno? Even for something like that, he’d have asked for permission.

But there he was, firing a rifle from the deck. That blasted Judas.

Instead of taking to her heels, Leda did something surprising. She took Inverno’s weapon, protected the child behind her and aimed at the place of betrayal. Let him see what rotten wood he was really made of.

‘Chumbo, you son of a bitch!’

But the marksman responded by carefully aiming his precision rifle. Leda realised her reaction was absurd and they had no way out. Chumbo was part of the enemy. The marksman wasn’t going to stop the speedboat roaring towards them.