“I’m not here for a story,” Andrew said, drawing closer.
“Get out of here or I’ll shout for help!”
“I was stabbed too. And two other people have met the same fate in similar circumstances. I’m wondering if it’s the same assailant. I just want to know if you remember anything. His face? The weapon he used on you?”
“Are you stupid or what? I was stabbed in the back.”
“And you didn’t see anything coming?”
“I heard footsteps behind me. I was with several other people leaving the park. I felt a presence close in on me. I was lucky—half an inch higher and the bastard would have hit an artery. I would have bled out before I got here. The doctors told me that if the hospital weren’t so close, I wouldn’t have made it.”
“I wasn’t as lucky,” Andrew sighed.
“You look like you’re in good shape.”
Andrew’s face reddened. Simon rolled his eyes.
“Did you lose consciousness immediately?”
“Almost,” McKenzie replied. “I thought I saw my attacker walk past me then run off, but my vision was blurred. I couldn’t give you a description of him. I was on my way to see a customer and he robbed me of ten thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise. It’s the third time I’ve been attacked in five years. This time I’m going to apply for a gun license—authorized beyond the 215 square feet of my jewelry store. But you’re a journalist—did he take anything from you?”
While Andrew and Simon were at Lenox Hill Hospital, Freddy Olson cracked the combination of his padlock and rifled through his colleague’s drawer looking for the password that would give him access to Andrew’s computer.
* * *
“What are we doing now?” Simon asked out on the sidewalk in front of the hospital.
“I’m going to see Valerie.”
“Can I come with you?”
Andrew said nothing.
“I understand. I’ll call you later.”
“Simon, promise not to go back to the paper.”
“I’ll do what I want.”
Simon ran across the road and jumped into a taxi.
* * *
Andrew announced himself at the reception desk. The sergeant on duty made a call and sent him off in the right direction.
Valerie’s workplace didn’t look anything like Andrew had imagined. He found himself in a square courtyard. A long, surprisingly modern building stretched along the far end. The ground floor was occupied by stables. A central door opened onto a long corridor that led to the veterinary offices.
Valerie was in the operating theatre. One of her colleagues sent Andrew to wait in the staff lounge. A police officer jumped up when he entered.
“Any news?” he asked. “Did the operation go well?”
Andrew was taken by surprise once again. This imposing, burly man, whom Andrew normally wouldn’t want to cross, was a nervous wreck.
“No news yet,” Andrew replied, taking a seat. “But don’t worry, Valerie is the best vet in New York. Your dog couldn’t be in better hands.”
“He’s more than a dog, you know,” the man sighed. “He’s my partner and my best friend.”
“What breed is he?” Andrew inquired.
“A retriever.”
“He must look a bit like my best friend, then.”
“Do you have a retriever too?”
“No, mine’s more of a mutt, but very intelligent.”
Valerie came into the room and was amazed to find Andrew there. She told the police officer he could go and see his dog in the recovery room, and that the operation had been successful. He’d be fit for service again in a few weeks, after a period of rehabilitation. The officer rushed out of the room.
“This is a nice surprise.”
“What was wrong with his dog?” Andrew asked.
“A bullet to the abdomen.”
“Will he get a medal?”
“Don’t poke fun. That dog got between an assailant and his victim. I don’t know many men who’d have done that.”
“I wasn’t poking fun,” Andrew said pensively. “Will you show me around?”
Valerie’s office was bright and uncluttered with whitewashed walls and two large windows overlooking the courtyard. Her desk was a glass tabletop set on two antique trestle legs, with just a computer screen and two pots of pens on it. Behind it was a Windsor chair she must have unearthed in a vintage store. Files were piled up on a console table. Andrew looked at the photos standing on a small metal cabinet.
“That’s Colette and me in college.”
“Is she a vet as well?”
“No, a veterinary anesthesiologist.”
“Here are your parents,” Andrew said, peering at another photo. “Your father hasn’t changed! Well, hardly after all these years.”
“Neither physically nor mentally, unfortunately. As narrow-minded as ever, and still convinced he knows better than everyone else.”
“He wasn’t very fond of me when we were teenagers.”
“He hated all my boyfriends.”
“You had that many?”
“A few.”
Valerie pointed at another frame.
“Look at this one,” she said, smiling.
“Wow! Is that me?”
“From back when people called you Ben.”
“Where did you find that photo?”
“I’ve always had it. It was among the few belongings I took with me when I left Poughkeepsie.”
“You kept a photo of me?”
“You were an important part of my life back then.”
“I’m very touched. I’d never have imagined you wanting to take me with you, even in a photo.”
“If I had asked you to come with me, you wouldn’t have, would you?”
“I have no idea.”
“You dreamed of being a journalist. You started the school newspaper all by yourself. You used to jot down everything that happened in your little notebook. I remember you wanting to interview my father about his job, and him sending you packing.”
“I’d forgotten that.”
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret,” Valerie said, walking over to him. “You were much more in love with me than I was with you. But now, when I watch you sleeping at night, I feel like it’s the other way round. Sometimes I say to myself it won’t work, I’m not the woman you hoped for, the wedding won’t happen and you’ll leave me. You can’t imagine how unhappy those thoughts make me.”
Andrew hugged Valerie.
“Well, you’re wrong. You’re the woman I always dreamed of—far more than my dream of becoming a journalist. If you think I’ve waited for you all that time only to leave you . . . ”
“Did you keep a photo of me, Andrew?”
“No. I was too angry that you’d run away from Poughkeepsie without leaving an address. But I never forgot your face. You don’t realize how much I love you.”
Valerie showed Andrew to the operating theatre. The bloody compresses on the linoleum floor made him feel queasy. He walked up to a trolley and scrutinized the array of different-sized surgical instruments laid out on it.
“They’re incredibly sharp, these things, aren’t they?”
“Sharp as scalpels,” Valerie replied.
Andrew leaned over, picked up the longest of them in his fingertips and gauged its weight as he held it by the handle.
“Careful you don’t hurt yourself,” Valerie said, taking it delicately out of his hand.
Andrew noticed how deftly she handled the object. She rolled it between her index and middle finger and placed it back down on the trolley.
“Come with me. Those instruments haven’t been disinfected yet.”
Valerie led Andrew over to the basin fixed to the tiled wall. Sh
e turned on the tap with her elbow, pressed the soap dispenser foot pedal and washed Andrew’s hands between hers.
“Surgery’s very sensual,” Andrew whispered.
“It all depends on who your assistant is,” Valerie replied.
She wrapped her arms around Andrew and kissed him.
* * *
Sitting in the canteen surrounded by police officers suddenly reminded Andrew he was waiting to hear from Inspector Pilguez.
“Is something worrying you?” Valerie asked.
“No, it’s the company. I’m not used to eating among so many uniforms.”
“You get used to it. Anyway, if your conscience is clear, you’re safer here than anywhere else in New York.”
“As long as we don’t go and see your horses.”
“I was planning to show you around the stables once you’d finished your coffee.”
“No way—I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Chicken!”
“Next time, if you don’t mind.”
Valerie looked Andrew in the eye.
“Why did you come today, Andrew?”
“To have coffee with you and to see where you work. You asked me to come and I wanted to.”
“You came all the way across town just to make me happy?”
“And for you to kiss me over a surgical instrument trolley. It’s the romantic in me.”
Valerie walked Andrew outside to hail a taxi. Before shutting the door, he turned to her.
“What did you father do again?”
“He was an industrial designer in a factory.”
“And what did the factory manufacture?”
“Sewing equipment: hem markers, tailors’ scissors, and all sorts of needles, including knitting needles. You used to make fun of him and say he did a woman’s job. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
He kissed Valerie, promised not to be home late and closed the taxi door.
14.
Two men took Rafael out of his cell. One of them dragged him by the hair while the other repeatedly struck his calves with a club to make sure he couldn’t stand up. The pain in his head was so intense he thought his scalp was going to be ripped off. He kept trying to straighten up as they moved forward, but his knees caved in each time from the strength of the blows. His torturers’ little game ceased for a moment when they reached an iron door.
It opened onto a large windowless room. Long red streaks stained the walls. The beaten-earth floor reeked with the unbearable, acrid stench of dried blood and excrement. Two bare bulbs hung from the ceiling.
The light was blinding, unless it was just the contrast with the darkness of the cell where he’d spent two days without being brought food or drink.
They made him strip naked, then forced him into an iron chair cemented into the ground. Two straps were nailed to the armrests and another two to the legs. The leather cut into Rafael’s flesh as they strapped him in.
An army captain wearing a pristinely ironed uniform entered the room. He sat down on the corner of a table, stroked his hand across the wood to remove the dust, and put down his cap. Then he stood up in silence, walked over to Rafael and punched him in the jaw. Rafael tasted blood in his mouth. He didn’t mind; his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth because it was so parched.
“Antonio . . . (a punch shattered his nose), Alfonso . . . (a second his chin), Roberto . . . (a third split his eyebrow open) Sánchez. Will you remember my name or do you want me to say it again?”
Rafael had passed out. A bucketful of stinking water was thrown in his face.
“Repeat my name, scum!” the captain ordered.
“Antonio Alfonso Roberto sonofabitch,” murmured Rafael.
The captain raised his arm, but stopped himself from striking. Instead he smiled and signaled to his two henchmen to get this uncooperative dissident ready.
They fixed copper plates to his chest and thighs so the current would circulate properly, then wrapped bare electric wires around his ankles, wrists and testicles.
The first electric shock propelled his body forwards. He understood why the chair had been fixed to the ground. It felt as if thousands of thorns were rushing through his veins just under his skin.
“Antonio Alfonso Roberto Sánchez,” the captain said again coolly.
Each time Rafael lost consciousness, another bucket of putrid water brought him back to that room and his tortures.
“Ant . . . Alfonso . . . Rob . . . ánchez,” he mumbled after the sixth electric shock.
“Claims to be an intellectual and doesn’t even know how to pronounce a name correctly,” the captain sneered.
He lifted Rafael’s chin with the end of his rod, then slashed it across his cheek.
Rafael’s only thoughts were of Isabel and María Luz, and of not dishonoring his family by begging for mercy.
“Where’s your goddam printing works?” the captain asked.
At the mention of the place, Rafael escaped momentarily from the reality of his swollen face and battered body by imagining himself within the room’s blue, peeling walls, inhaling the smell of paper and ink and the methylated spirits his friends used to make the duplicating machine work. These olfactory recollections restored an inkling of lucidity.
Another electric shock bolted through him. He began convulsing and his sphincter muscles opened. Blood-tinged urine trickled down his legs. His eyes, tongue and genitals had been burned to ash. He lost consciousness.
The doctor accompanying the captain listened to Rafael’s heart, examined his pupils and said that was enough for today if they wanted to keep their prisoner alive. Captain Antonio Alfonso Roberto Sánchez definitely did. If he’d wanted to kill him, he could have simply put a bullet in his head. He wanted to take pleasure in Rafael’s suffering, not his death, to make him pay for his treason.
As the men dragged him back to his cell, Rafael regained consciousness. He suffered the worst torture yet when he heard Captain Sánchez call out from the end of the corridor: “Bring me his wife.”
Isabel and Rafael spent two months at ESMA. They had their eyelids stuck open with surgical tape to prevent them from sleeping. If they drifted into unconsciousness, they were kicked and beaten awake.
During their time at ESMA, Isabel and Rafael, who didn’t once cross each other’s paths in the corridor leading to the torture room, became more and more dissociated from a world in which humanity existed. Through the long days and nights that passed without them knowing the difference, they sank deeper and deeper into a dark abyss that even the most fervent of believers could not imagine.
Yet, when Captain Sánchez had them brought to the room where he tortured them, he spoke of the treachery they had committed against their homeland and against God. As he uttered the word “God,” Sánchez would hit them even harder.
The captain had Isabel’s eyes gouged out. But one light refused to go out in her: María Luz’s face. Sometimes she wished her daughter’s features would disappear so she could give in to death. Only death would set her free. Only death would restore her humanity.
One evening, when Captain Sánchez was bored, he had Rafael’s genitals severed. One of his men cut them off with a pair of scissors. The doctor stitched up the wound. They had no intention of letting all the blood drain from his body.
At the beginning of their second month of captivity, they had the tape ripped off their eyes, and their eyelids came off in the process. Each time the captain summoned back his victims, they lost a little more of their human appearance. Isabel was unrecognizable. Her face and breasts were covered with burns from cigarettes the captain put out on her skin (he smoked two packs a day). Her intestines, also charred from the electric torture, couldn’t digest the gruel she was force-fed with a spoon. Her nostrils had long ago stopped smelling the odor of her own excrement, in which
she lay. Reduced to this animal state, Isabel held on to the image of María Luz’s face in the shadows, uttering her name over and over again.
One morning, the captain tired of his task. Neither Rafael nor Isabel would reveal the address of their printing works. He didn’t care; he never had. A captain of his rank had more important things to do than track down some old copy machine. Looking at his victims with disgust, he was delighted to have achieved at least part of his mission: breaking the spirits of two immoral individuals who had disowned their homeland and refused to submit to the only regime capable of restoring to Argentina the greatness it deserved. Captain Sánchez was a devoted patriot. God would reward his devotion.
At dusk, the doctor went into Isabel’s cell. In a final moment of irony, he disinfected the crook of her arm with a cotton swab soaked in alcohol before administering an injection of Pentothal. The drug sent her into a deep sleep, but did not kill her. That was the idea. Rafael was given the same treatment in his cell at the other end of the corridor.
Once night fell, they were transported in the back of a van to a clandestine airfield in the sprawling Buenos Aires suburbs. A twin-engine Air Force plane was waiting for them in a hangar. Isabel and Rafael were laid out in the cabin alongside twenty or so other lifeless prisoners guarded by four soldiers. With the cargo loaded, the aircraft took off without lights. Its pilot had been given instructions to fly towards the river, then head in a southeasterly direction at very low altitude. He was instructed not to go anywhere near the coast of Uruguay. When he reached the ocean he should turn around and fly back to his point of departure. A routine mission.
Major Ortiz followed these instructions to the letter. The aircraft climbed into the Argentinean sky, flew across the Río de la Plata and reached its destination an hour later.
Once there, the soldiers opened the rear door and in a matter of minutes threw the ten men and ten women, all unconscious but alive, into the sea below. The roar of the engines shielded their ears from the thud of the bodies as they hit the waves and sank. Schools of sharks had made a habit of lurking in these gloomy waters, waiting for the meal that fell from the sky at the same time every evening.