Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘The other one now?’ Freddy’s voice shook me out of the spell. He was looking at Canal; Canal was looking at me.

‘No. Go down and keep watch. Nobody’s to touch him till the cops get here. Good idea, the model.’ Then turning to César: ‘I can just see the headlines: MOGUL DESTROYS DR EAM, THEN COMMITS SUICIDE.’

César, mute all this time, was looking down out of the broken window, the wind blowing his hair in his eyes.

‘Can I go down too?’ he asked.

‘Not a good idea. They saw enough of you last time. Twice would look suspicious.’

‘What about Tornero?’ asked Freddy, pointing to his partner, who by now was marooned in his own blood like an isle flottante.

Canal shook his head. Freddy shrugged his shoulders, once, and his back disappeared down the tunnel. After the crunch of his soles on the broken glass, silence fell. Canal nibbled a cuticle, lost in thought. César had been squatting on the floor. He stood up, holding one half of the prism. He put a hand into it, scooping out a little of its filth and breaking it up in his fingers till it fell to the floor.

‘What I always suspected. Another one of his stories. No gold, just shit.’

He picked up his father’s pants from the floor and wiped his hands on them, then screwed them into a ball and tossed them onto the desk. He walked round it and sat on the throne, then crossed his legs and rested his forearms on the armrest.

‘So? What do you feel?’ Canal asked him.

‘Nothing.’

César had his eyes firmly fixed on the carpet.

‘It all went pretty well, didn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you worried about something?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to answer me in monosyllables all night?’

‘Leave me alone, Cleo. We’re not in a session.’

‘That’s what I thought. I spend months training you for this and in the end you can’t do it. I could groom someone to stand in for your father, the way I did with your brother, but it won’t be the same now. I’ll have to rethink the whole orientation of your therapy.’

‘What are you insinuating? That it’s my fault?’

‘Yet again you’ve let others do your work for you.’

Getting up from his chair, César retrieved the silver riding-crop from the floor and cracked it several times on the edge of the desk as if whipping it into a gallop.

‘Shut up! You sound just like him! That’s why I killed him, understand! So that nobody ever talks to me like that again!’

‘You see? I’m right. As you haven’t reached closure, you still have all the hatred inside you and you discharge it on the person nearest at hand.’

César slumped back in his throne, sulking.

‘Well, that’s that. Best laid schemes, eh Félix?’

He was looking at me. I was still there. I say ‘there’, but I didn’t really know where. I’d managed to stay out of it so far, keep invisible for most of the time as if watching it all from another room, through the mirror. I don’t really know how I do it. What I do know is that I learned it ten years ago: I’m in the thick of it all but everything happens … around me, brushing past me, barely touching. A survival trick. It always works, up to a point. As long as I manage to feel nothing.

‘So now what do we do? Sit here and wait?’

‘I have a better idea,’ said Canal. ‘We’ll find out how much he knows.’

‘Shouldn’t we wait for Freddy for that?’

Canal smiled.

‘Leave it to me.’

He handed his gun to César, who accepted it limply and rested it on the glass, pointing at me. Then he disappeared into his private cubicle. César looked at me with something approaching annoyance, as if we were sharing a long lift journey and he was obliged to make conversation.

‘So the old man was thinking of adopting you, was he?’

‘I doubt I’d have accepted,’ I said to him.

He smiled mirthlessly.

‘It isn’t that attractive from the inside, is it.’

‘It must have its compensations, I suppose.’

‘Yes, if you survive the suicide attempts. Ah well. He’s dead now. And everything’s mine. Wasn’t such a bad plan, was it?’

‘Your father would be proud of you. Are you going to run the company now?’

‘Are you mad? I’m going to flog it. Control will be handed to a plc, and Canal and I will be shareholders. We’ve already sorted out the restructuring. We’re going to rotate all the mirrors so nobody really knows where the boss is. It’ll be a democracy. A democracy without the people. That whole personalised, hierarchic deal is too vulnerable. The spider’s mistake.’

He paused, waiting for me to ask. He didn’t yet have his father’s declamatory gifts, but he wasn’t wasting a second trying them out. And I, of course, slipped effortlessly into my role as privileged interlocutor, as if he counted me one of the assets of his inheritance.

‘Which one?’

‘From the centre of the web it can move all the threads. Control all its prey. But it’s easy for its enemies to find it there. It occurred to me while I was watching Caligula .’

‘It’s good to have models. Especially when you’re young.’

‘You’re funny. You wouldn’t have made such a bad brother. Certainly better than the other one. He was worse dead than alive. You know what inspiration Caligula gave me?’

‘You’re going to make your horse chairman of the board.’

‘No. Something he said. “I wish the Romans had just one head and I could cut it off with one stroke.”’

‘And?’

‘ He was the one who just had one head. You know what?’

‘What.’

‘I can’t forgive you for what you saw that day.’

Canal came back carrying a doctor’s bag in one hand and a syringe in the other. He rested both hands on the desk and took back his gun.

‘Do me a favour. Bring the couch in from reception.’

‘In here?’

‘We won’t be comfortable in there. Believe me. It’ll be fun.’

‘Huh!’

Skirting the pool of blood in which floated the island of Tornero’s body, César disappeared into the tunnel of broken mirrors.

‘Get undressed, please, Sr Félix,’ Canal said in a professional tone.

I pulled a wry face and made a classic Porteño gesture at him, pecking the air with my upturned fingers.

‘Don’t worry about your pride and joy. It’s nothing sexual. Although in a few minutes you’re going to wish it was.’

When I took off my jacket, Tamerlán’s confession and the cheque fell on the floor. Canal gestured to me to take a few steps back, and went and picked them up. The cheque he barely looked at before tearing it into little pieces, but the document he read with growing interest as César came over, preceded by the tinkling sound of a Christmas sleigh sliding over splintered glass.

‘Read this.’

They looked at each other pleased.

‘That’s the cherry on top.’

‘Reads just like a suicide note: he confesses to his crimes, then jumps out of the window. Pure Hollywood.’

‘And it says nothing about me.’

‘No. It doesn’t mention you at all.’

They both turned towards me.

‘Actually you’ve saved us a whole heap of trouble.’

‘Yes. There’s no way he’d have written this for us. How did you do it?’

‘We’re indebted to you.’

‘What shall we do? Let him go?’

Canal picked up the syringe from the desk, held it up and squeezed. A thin, vertical jet spurted out of the needle and opened into a fountain that nearly reached the ceiling. He kept squeezing until it was half empty.

‘He’s bound to survive this dose. It’s the best we can offer you, Félix. Now finish undressing, please.’

I did so, leaving my underpants on, though I knew what he was going to say.