Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Please don’t go. Look, I’m swallowing my pride and begging you to stay. If you don’t want to sleep with me, if you don’t feel like touching me, you can have the bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa. Or you can take us to your house, we’ll get by in any old corner, I swear we won’t bother you. Just for tonight. I haven’t slept properly for over a week, and if I don’t sleep tonight I think I’m going to go mad.’

‘He’s alive,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘You ran into him,’ I went on, taking my time not because I was guessing step by step, but because everything had suddenly become so clear that I couldn’t process so many bytes at once. ‘Where?’

‘At … You know.’

Yes, I thought. Of course.

‘There, in the tower. That day.’

Now it was my turn to unhook my poker face from the hatstand and adjust it again, and feigning indifference, to ask name, surname, occupation (ha!), go through the list of witnesses with her and rule out the possibility of mistaken identities. I’d save time if I left right now and barged in on Tamerlán shouting ‘I’ve found him! I’ve found the twenty-sixth man!’ It was as if I’d always known: the pack’s incomplete till the death card’s been turned.

‘He was the last in before the doors closed. After ten years he stepped out of my worst nightmares and walked into that room. I was paralysed, it always happens to me with him, I sat there nailed to the chair watching him approach, his eyes drilling into me. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He looked at me the way you look through glass, he walked straight past me as if I wasn’t there: he passed through my body like a ghost through a curtain. That more than anything made me certain he hadn’t changed: it was his signature, unmistakable, and he was writing all over my body again.

‘Was he looking for you?’

‘Do you think he didn’t know where if he’d wanted to? No. He was as surprised as I was. He probably even thought it was me that had finally located him .’ She choked on the smoke with laughing. ‘He went and sat right at the front, lapels turned up, staring at the tip of his shoes all the time. He was there for something else, I assure you: I can tell when he’s on assignment. Though something in him had changed, that’s for sure. Not just the grey hair, the grim mouth, the drooping shoulders … He was hesitant, cautious, as if he didn’t really know what he was doing there. When he was in the army, he was always the boss, and now — they must have discharged him I suppose, he looked “discharged” — he looked like … a clerk. I watched him all the time, and he kept looking at his watch trying to hide, knowing I was watching him; and he was already on his feet when the glass of the other tower had started to crack, get the idea? He knew what was going to happen. He shouted “There he is, the murderer,” before anyone appeared at the window. It was all choreographed, understand? Everything except me being there. So when the cops questioned me, I told them I hadn’t seen anything. I couldn’t care less after everything I’ve seen in my life … Anyway, he never takes risks. Yesterday he sent two guys to check me out. Two heavies, instantly recognisable, they showed police IDs, I had to let them in. We’ve come to ask you a few questions they said, and me I’m screwed, a goner. Lucky the girls were at school. They started asking me about the day at Surprise, about my guests … Just like you.’ She paused, enough to make me uncomfortable. ‘No guests, I told them. They didn’t believe me. One of them kept banging on about a man in a big grey coat with fur lapels and leather buttons; and the more details he added, the more emphatically I said no. If they’ve come to test me, I thought, they’ll get nothing to worry about: all my reflexes, all my resources to come through an interrogation alive returned after ten years as if not a day had passed. He must be laughing in his office, his basement or wherever he is, thinking what a doddle it’ll be to get those jackasses off my back. “That’s my girl,” he’d say afterwards, when they brought him the report. Anyway, he should have known there was no need to send me his messenger buzzards to make me keep my lip buttoned. But that’s the way he operates: always overreacts; he’d never put himself at risk over a worm like me.’

She fell silent and sat there looking at me, waiting for God knows what. But I was too bewildered to tell her not to worry, that the two spooks hadn’t been sent by her ex but by my lord and master — or perhaps that she should worry after all. I was so distracted with what was going round my head that I didn’t react at first when she asked me:

‘So who sent you?’

‘Eh?’

‘Come on. Where do you think I was born? Switzerland? You had me going there for a while with the cheque, and then I got the hots for you, which isn’t difficult in my case. Did he make you learn the Malihuel bit by heart, or did he choose you precisely because of it, because you knew me from there?’

‘Listen to me …’

‘What are you playing at? The good cop? Pulling that nothing face of yours. Are you the one that looks after the small print? “Fuck her first, mate, because afterwards she’ll spit it out without being asked. I know what I’m talking about.” Is that it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You left me enough clues, mind. Surprise, Malvinas … Did you do it because of how useless you are, or did he want me to guess from the start?’

‘Gloria,’ I pleaded. ‘I don’t work for him.’

‘Oh, no? Who do you work for then?’ She’d stood up without bothering to cover herself with the blanket and spoke to me from above, a female defending the nest. I could have sworn the marks on her skin were beginning to fizz like furious bees.

‘I can’t say,’ came my lame reply. I had to get out of there as soon as possible: the piece of metal in my head had started to purr and in a few more minutes things were going to start spinning out of control. Gloria sat down with a sigh, pulled the blanket over her shoulders, lit a cigarette and swore at her sparking lighter.

‘You know what the worst thing about all this is? That — in spite of everything — I don’t want you to go. Must be like he said, mustn’t it? Deep down I must like it. I’m pathetic, aren’t I. Well, that’s it, mission accomplished, you got everything you wanted out of me. What are you waiting for? Another crack while we’re at it?’ She opened her legs in defiance, like two mandibles ready to catch me if I came near. I got up from the sofa and began to walk around the room, clutching my swollen head in my hands, trying to think. The cheque was the only thing that managed to slip under the closed door of pain.

‘Have you got that cheque I gave you?’

‘What, now you want to take it back?’

‘Please. I promise you. Get it for me,’ I pleaded.

‘They didn’t half train you well. You people don’t usually know how to inspire sympathy. All right.’

She went over to the chest of drawers and, turning her back to me, opened a box. She didn’t seem to be worried about me seeing her any more. How beautiful she must have been, I thought, and immediately, remembering the little girl in Malihuel, I corrected myself: how beautiful she was. She turned round, waggling it in her hand the way a dog wags its tail.

‘Here.’

I ripped the cheque in two, then four. She looked on agog as I pulled out two wads of a grand each and handed them to her. She smiled suddenly. She’d realised.

‘It was a fake, wasn’t it. You fobbed me off with a piece of toilet paper. You bastard! And what’s this? To keep me quiet?’

‘No conditions,’ I said to her. ‘A present. Or compensation, if you like. From me.’