‘How does Javier know all this?’ I wondered as I listened to him. And I recalled the one real conversation I’d had with Luisa, when she appeared to be au fait with these practices too, she had spoken about them and even used certain expressions very similar to those used by her suitor: ‘They bring in a hit man, he does his job, they pay him and he leaves, all in the space of one or two days, and the police never find these killers …’ At the time, I assumed she must have read about it in the newspapers or heard Deverne talk about it, he was, after all, a businessman. But perhaps she had heard Díaz-Varela mention it. They disagreed, though, as to the efficacy of such a method, which he thought unworkable or too problematic, and he sounded far better informed than she. Luisa had added: ‘If something like that had happened, I couldn’t even hate that abstract hit man very much … But I could hate the instigators, that would give me the chance to suspect people right, left and centre, a competitor or someone who felt resentful or hard done by, because every businessman creates victims either accidentally or deliberately, even among close colleagues, as I read again the other day in Covarrubias.’ Then she had picked up the fat green tome and read out part of the definition of ‘envidia’ – or ‘envy’ – written in 1611 no less, when both Shakespeare and Cervantes were still alive, four hundred years ago, and yet it was still valid, it’s distressing to think that some things never change in essence, although it’s also oddly comforting to know that something can still persist without moving a millimetre or changing a word: ‘Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends …’ Javier was recounting this case to me or confessing, but only as a hypothesis, and presumably in order to deny it; I assumed that he was describing what I imagined to have happened, the conclusion I had drawn after hearing him and Ruibérriz talking, so that he could immediately refute it. ‘Perhaps he’s going to deceive me with the truth,’ I thought for the first but not the only time. ‘Perhaps he’s telling me the truth now so that it will seem like a lie. An apparent or genuine lie.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I found out. When you want to know something, there are always ways of finding out. You weigh up the pros and cons, then do some research.’ He gave a very quick response to my question and then fell silent. I thought he was about to add something else, for example, how he had found out. But he didn’t. I had a sense that he was irritated by my interruption, that I had caused him momentarily to lose impetus, or, possibly, the thread of his argument. Perhaps he was more nervous than he seemed. He took a few steps around the room and sat down on the armchair on which he had hung his jacket and on which he had been leaning. He was still there before me, but now he was on the same level. He placed another cigarette between his lips, but without lighting it, and when he began talking again, it bobbed up and down. It didn’t conceal his mouth, but, rather, emphasized it. ‘So using a hit man may, at first, seem like a good way of removing someone. Yet it turns out that there are always risks involved in contacting such people, however careful you are and even if you do so through a third party. Or a fourth or fifth party; in fact, the longer the chain, the more links it has, and the easier it is for one of those links to break, for something to go wrong. In a way, the best thing would be for the person inciting the murder to deal directly with the person carrying it out, with no need for intermediaries. But, of course, no paymaster, no businessman or politician would dare to reveal himself like that, thus laying himself open to blackmail. The fact is that there is no safe method, no appropriate way of ordering or asking for such a thing. Besides which, such an arrangement would inevitably arouse unnecessary suspicions. If it appeared that a man like Miguel had been the victim of some settling of scores or an arranged murder, the police would start looking in all directions, investigating rivals and competitors, then colleagues, anyone with whom he had done business or had dealings, employees who had been dismissed or taken early retirement, and lastly his wife and his friends. It’s far more sensible, far cleaner, if a murder doesn’t look like a murder, if the explanation for the tragedy appears so crystal-clear that there’s no need to question anyone. Or only the person who did the killing.’
Despite knowing that any further interruption might irritate him, I decided to intervene again. Or, rather, I didn’t decide, my tongue simply got the better of me and I couldn’t hold back.
‘You mean the person who did the killing but who knows nothing, not even that it wasn’t his decision, that someone else planted the idea in his head and incited him to murder. The person who very nearly killed the wrong man. I read about it in the press; how, shortly before, he had attacked the chauffeur and might easily have stabbed him, thus ruining your plans; I suppose you had to call him to order: “Look, it’s not him, it’s the other guy who sometimes picks up the car; the man you hit isn’t to blame, he’s just a dogsbody.” The person who did the killing but can’t explain himself or is too ashamed to tell the police, or, rather, the media and everyone else, that his daughters are prostitutes and so prefers to say nothing. The poor madman who refuses to make a statement and doesn’t point the finger at anyone, until, that is, a couple of weeks ago, when he gave you the most almighty fright.’
Díaz-Varela gave a faint smile, which was, how can I put it, cordial and pleasant. It wasn’t cynical or paternalistic or mocking, it wasn’t disagreeable, not even in that sombre context. It was as if he were merely acknowledging that my reaction was as he had expected, that everything was following the path he had foreseen. He flicked his lighter on and off a couple of times but still did not light his cigarette. I, on other hand, lit one of my own. He continued talking with his cigarette between his lips, it would end up getting stuck to one lip, probably his top lip, the one I liked to touch. He appeared unperturbed by my interruption.
‘Yes, that was an unexpected stroke of luck, his adamant refusal to make a statement. I hadn’t been counting on being so lucky. I had simply thought that, in his delirium, he would give a confused account of events, a garbled version, from which the police would glean only that he had been seized by some kind of angry fit, the product of a sick, absurd fixation and a few imaginary voices. After all, what could Miguel possibly have to do with a prostitution ring and the white-slave trade? But it was even better when he refused to say a word. That way there wasn’t the slightest risk that he would involve third parties, however phantasmagorical; nor that he would mention strange calls to a mobile phone that either didn’t exist or couldn’t be found and that had never been registered in his name, a voice whispering in his ear, pointing the finger at Miguel, persuading him that Miguel was the cause of his daughters’ misfortune. I understand that the police tracked the daughters down, but that they refused to go and see their father. Apparently, they’d had no contact with him for several years, had never got on with him, found him utterly impossible and had washed their hands of him; the beggar had, therefore, been alone in the world for some time. And while the girls did, it seems, work as prostitutes, they did so of their own free will, assuming, of course, that the will can remain intact in the face of necessity; let’s just say that, given the various forms of slavery available to them, they chose prostitution and they’re not doing too badly, they have no complaints. I understand that, although they’re not high-ranking whores, only medium-ranking ones, they get by all right and are not, at least, at the bottom of the heap. Their father wanted nothing more to do with them, nor they with him; he had probably always been a very angry man. And doubtless, afterwards, in his solitude, in his increasingly unstable mental state, he remembered them as children rather than as young women, more as promises than disappointments, and convinced himself
that they had been forced into prostitution. He didn’t erase the fact, but perhaps he did expunge the reasons and the circumstances, replacing them with others that he found more acceptable, albeit more enraging, but then rage gives energy and life. I don’t know, maybe he needed to keep those children safely stored away in his imagination, they would have been all he could salvage from the past, those two figures, the best memory from the best times. I don’t know who or what he was before he became a beggar; why bother trying to find out; all such stories are sad ones, you only have to think about the person those men, or even worse, those women had once been, when they still had no inkling of the wretched future awaiting them, it’s always painful to glimpse someone’s oblivious past life. All I know is that he had been a widower for years, and perhaps that was the beginning of the slippery slope. There was no point looking into his background, I forbade Ruibérriz to tell me anything he happened to uncover, I already had a bad conscience about using Canella as a tool, but silenced my conscience with the idea that at least he would be better off wherever they put him, wherever he is now, than in the clapped-out old car he used to sleep in. He would be better looked after and better cared for, and, besides, he clearly was a danger to society. It’s best for everyone that he’s no longer living on the streets.’ – ‘He had a bad conscience?’ I thought. ‘What a joke. In the middle of what he’s telling me, and which I pretty much knew already, he’s trying to present himself not as some heartless creature, but as a man with scruples. That’s probably normal, I imagine most killers try to do the same thing, especially when they’re found out; at least those who aren’t hit men, those who kill once and never again, or so they hope, or else they think of it as an exception, almost like a terrible accident in which they find themselves caught up against their will (like a parenthesis, in a way, after which they can simply carry on): “No, I didn’t want it to happen. It was a moment of blindness, of panic, the dead man forced me to do it really. If he hadn’t kept going on and on and taken things too far, if he had been more understanding, if he hadn’t kept pressuring me or eclipsing me, if he had just disappeared … It really grieves me, you know.” Yes, it must be unbearable knowing what you have done, and you’re bound, therefore, to lose yourself slightly. And yes, he’s right, it is painful to catch a glimpse of someone’s oblivious past life, for example that of poor Desvern, whose luck ran out on the morning of his birthday, poor man, while he was having breakfast with Luisa and I was enjoying watching them from a distance, as on any other innocuous morning. Yes, what a joke,’ I thought again, and noticed that I was blushing. But I remained silent, said nothing, kept my indignation to myself, the indignation he so feared in women, and realized, just in time, that I had, at some point in his speech (but when?), lost any notion that what Díaz-Varela was telling me was still a hypothesis, or a gloss on my deductions based on what I had heard, and therefore, according to him, a fiction. His narrative or retelling had started out that way, as a mere illustration of my conjectures, a verbalization of my suspicions, and had, as far as I was concerned, imperceptibly taken on an air or aura of truth, I had started listening to it as if it were an out-and-out confession and was true. There was still the possibility that it wasn’t, according to him, of course (I would never know more than what he told me, and so I would never know anything for sure; yes, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that after all these centuries of practice, after so many incredible advances and inventions, we still have no way of knowing when someone is lying; naturally, this both benefits and prejudices all of us equally, and may be our one remaining redoubt of freedom). I wondered why he had allowed that, why he had tried to give the ring of truth to something that would, inevitably, be denied later on. After his last words, I found it hard to wait for that probable, previously announced negation (he had begun by saying: ‘I don’t want to leave any mark on you that has no reason to exist’); and yet that was what would happen, I couldn’t leave now: I must hear the worst, keep waiting, be patient. These thoughts swept through my mind like a gust of wind, because he didn’t stop speaking, but only paused for a second. ‘Anyway, his unexpected silence was like a blessing, like a confirmation that I had been right about my dangerous plan, and it was very dangerous, you know: that man Canella could have remained immune to my intrigues, or he could have become convinced that Miguel was to blame for his daughters’ moral perdition, but then taken it no further, and there would have been no consequences whatsoever.’
Once again, my tongue ran away with me, after I had reined it in only a moment before, a fat lot of good that had done me. I tried to make my words sound more like a reminder than an accusation or a reproach, although they were doubtless both those things (however, I didn’t want to irritate him too much).
‘But you were the ones who provided him with a knife, weren’t you? And not just any knife, but one that was particularly dangerous and harmful, not to mention illegal. That had its consequences, didn’t it?’
Díaz-Varela looked at me in surprise for a moment, and for the first time he seemed uncertain. He said nothing, perhaps he was rapidly trying to recall whether he had talked to Ruibérriz about the knife while I was spying on them. In the two weeks that had passed since then, he must have reconstructed every detail of what they had said on that occasion, he must have gauged precisely what and how much I had found out – doubtless with the collaboration of his friend, whom he would have informed of the mishap; suddenly I felt very troubled by the idea that Ruibérriz should know about my indiscretion, given the way he had looked at me – even though he was unaware then that I had only joined the conversation belatedly and, at times, had caught only fragments. He would have decided to imagine the worst and taken it for granted that I had heard everything, hence Javier’s decision to phone me and neutralize me with the truth or with something that appeared to be the truth or a partial truth. And yet he hadn’t noticed that they had mentioned the weapon, still less that they had bought it and given it to the gorrilla. I myself wasn’t quite sure and thought perhaps that they hadn’t, but I only became aware of this when I saw his puzzlement, the sudden wave of uncertainty that assailed him about his recollections and his meticulous recapitulations of what had been said. It was quite possible that I had deduced this fact and then taken it as read. He could no longer be sure, he must have asked himself quickly if I knew more than I should know, and how I knew. This gave me time to realize that, while I had used the second-person plural several times, to include Ruibérriz and his anonymous envoy (I had said: ‘But you were the ones who provided him with a knife, weren’t you?’), he spoke always in the first-person singular (he had said: ‘I had been right about my dangerous plans’), as if he were taking sole responsibility for the crime, as if it were a matter for him alone, even though the manipulation of the actual killer had required the assistance of at least two accomplices, those who had done the work without him having to intervene personally or become involved. He had stayed well away from the dirt and gore, from the gorrilla and his stabbings, from the mobile phone and the asphalt, from the body of his best friend lying in a puddle of blood. He’d had no contact with any of that; and so when it came to telling someone about it, it was strange that he didn’t take advantage of that non-participation, quite the contrary. That he didn’t distribute the blame among the other participants, which is always a sure way of reducing one’s own culpability, even though it’s clear who pulled the strings and who wrote the plot and who gave the order. Conspirators have known this since time immemorial, as have spontaneous, leaderless mobs, urged on by anonymous instigators who do not stand out and to whom no one can put a name: there’s nothing like sharing round the guilt if you want to emerge from a murky situation smellin
g of roses.