The Fencing Master (22 page)

Don Jaime stopped involuntarily, while the intense, all-pervading cold penetrated to his very entrails. He had never before visited a morgue, nor had he imagined that it would be so desolate and gloomy. Half a dozen large marble tables were lined up in the room; on four of them were sheets, beneath which were motionless human forms. He closed his eyes for a moment, filling his lungs, only to exhale at once with digust. There was a strange smell in the air.

"Phenol," said the policeman. "It's used as a disinfectant."

Don Jaime nodded silently. His eyes were fixed on one of the bodies stretched out on a marble table. Protruding from the lower end of the sheet were two human feet. They were yellowish in color and seemed to glow blue in the gaslight.

Campillo followed his gaze. "You've seen him already," the policeman said with a casualness that, to Don Jaime, seemed monstrous. "It's this one over here that interests us."

With his cigar he indicated the next table, again covered by a sheet. Beneath it lay a smaller, more delicate figure.

The policeman blew a dense cloud of smoke and brought Don Jaime to a halt by the covered corpse. "It appeared about midmorning in the river, more or less at the time that you and I were having our little chat in the Palacio de Villaflores. She was probably thrown in there during the night."

"Thrown in?"

"That's what I said." The policeman gave a sarcastic little laugh, as if, despite everything, the matter was not without its humorous side. "I can assure you that this is not a case of suicide, nor an accident. Are you sure you won't follow my advice and have one of these cigars? I'm very much afraid, Señor Astarloa, that it will take you a long time to forget what you're about to see; it's quite shocking. But I need you to complete the identification process, no easy task, especially in this case, as you yourself are about to find out."

While he was talking, he made a sign to the clerk to remove the sheet covering the body. Don Jaime felt a wave of nausea rising from his stomach; he took in desperate gulps of air in order to control it. His legs buckled under him, and he had to grip the marble table to steady himself.

"Do you recognize her?"

Don Jaime forced himself to look at the naked corpse. It was the body of a young woman, of medium height, who might have been quite attractive a few hours before. Her skin was the color of wax, her belly sunk between her pelvic bones, and her breasts, possibly beautiful in life, fell to either side, toward her inert, rigid arms.

"Nice piece of work, eh?" murmured Campillo behind him.

With a supreme effort, Don Jaime looked again at what had once been a face. There were no features, only butchered skin, flesh, and bone. There was no nose, and the mouth was just a dark, lipless hole, through which you could see a few broken teeth. In place of eyes there were two empty red sockets. Her black, abundant hair was dirty and tangled, still bearing traces of slime from the river.

Unable to bear the sight any longer, trembling with horror, Don Jaime moved away from the table. He felt the policeman's hand on his arm, the smell of cigar smoke, and then the voice that reached him in a low whisper.

"Do you recognize her?"

Don Jaime shook his head. Into his troubled mind came the memory of an old nightmare—a blind doll floating in a puddle—but it was the words that Campillo spoke afterward that made a mortal cold slip slowly into the deepest corner of his soul:

"You should recognize her, Señor Astarloa, despite the mutilation. It's your old client, Doña Adela de Otero."

To use the appel (striking the ground with the leading foot) unsettles your opponent and induces a reaction.

It took him a while to realize that the chief of police had been talking to him for some time. They had come up from the basement and were once more at street level, sitting in a small office in the Forensic Institute. Don Jaime was sitting back in his chair, utterly still, staring blankly at a faded engraving on the wall, a Nordic landscape with lakes and fir trees. His hands hung by his sides, and an opaque, expressionless veil seemed to cover his gray eyes.

"The body got caught in the reeds underneath the Toledo Bridge, on the left bank. It's odd that the current didn't carry her farther when you consider the storm we had last night; that leads us to believe that she was thrown into the water shortly before dawn. What I don't understand is why they went to the trouble of carrying her all the way there, instead of leaving her in her apartment."

Campillo paused and looked inquisitively at Don Jaime, as if giving him the opportunity to ask a question. Getting no reaction, he shrugged. He still had the cigar clamped between his teeth and was cleaning the lenses of his glasses with a crumpled handkerchief he had taken from a pocket.

"When they told me that a body had been found, I ordered them to force the door of the house. We should have done it much sooner, because we found a pretty ugly scene there: signs of a struggle, overturned furniture, and blood, a lot of blood. There was a pool of blood in the bedroom, a trail along the corridor ... It looked, if you'll pardon the expression, as if someone had slaughtered a calf." He looked at Don Jaime, judging the effect of his words. He must have decided that his description was not realistic enough to shock, because he frowned, rubbed more energetically at his spectacles, and continued to list macabre details, all the time watching Don Jaime out of the corner of his eye. "It seems that they killed her in that ... thorough manner, and then took her out under cover of night in order to throw her in the river. I don't know if there was any intermediary stage, you know what I mean, torture or the like, although, given the state they left her in, I'm very much afraid there was. There is no doubt, though, that Señora de Otero had a pretty bad time of it before leaving her apartment on Calle Riaño and that by then she was quite dead "

Campillo paused in order to put his glasses back on, having first held them up to the light with an air of satisfaction.

"Quite dead," he repeated thoughtfully, trying to pick up the thread of his thoughts. "In the bedroom we found tufts of hair that, as we now learn, came from the dead woman. There was a scrap of blue cloth too, possibly torn off in the struggle; it belongs to the dress she was wearing when we found her in the river." The policeman put two fingers into the upper pocket of his jacket and brought out a small silver ring. "The corpse was wearing this on the ring finger of her left hand. Have you ever seen it before?"

Don Jaime's eyelids drooped and then opened again, as if he were waking from a long sleep. He turned slowly toward Campillo. He was very pale; the last drop of blood seemed to have drained from his face. "I'm sorry?"

The policeman shifted in his seat; he had obviously hoped for more cooperation from Don Jaime and was beginning to be annoyed by his behavior, which was very like that of a sleepwalker. After the initial shock, Don Jaime was locked in a stubborn silence, as if this awful murder were a matter of complete indifference to him.

"I asked if you ever saw this ring before."

Don Jaime reached out his hand and took the slender silver ring between his fingers. The painful memory resurfaced of that same ring glinting on brown skin. He placed it on the table.

"It belonged to Adela de Otero," he confirmed in a neutral voice.

Campillo made another attempt. "What I can't understand, Señor Astarloa, is why they should treat her so mercilessly. Revenge perhaps? Maybe they wanted to drag a confession out of her."

"I've no idea."

"Did she have any enemies as far as you know?"

"I've no idea."

"It's terrible to do what they did to her. She must have been very beautiful."

Don Jaime thought of a bare, smooth-skinned neck beneath dark hair gathered at the nape with a mother-of-pearl comb. He remembered a half-open door and the rustle of petticoats; he remembered the warm, pulsing, languorous skin. "I don't exist," she had said to him on that night when everything was possible and nothing happened. Now it was true; she no longer existed. She was just meat rotting on a marble slab.

"Very beautiful," he replied after a while. "Adela de Otero was very beautiful."

The policeman judged that he had wasted enough time on this fencing master. He put the ring away, threw his cigar into the spittoon, and stood up. "You're obviously very upset by the events of the day," he said. "I can understand that. If you like, we could talk again tomorrow morning, when you're rested and have recovered a little. I'm convinced that the deaths of the marquis and this woman are linked, and you are one of the few people who knew them both. Would ten o'clock in my office suit you?"

Don Jaime looked at the policeman as if he were seeing him for the first time. "Am I a suspect?" he asked.

Campillo winked one of his fish eyes. "Who isn't nowadays?" he remarked in a frivolous tone.

But Don Jaime was not satisfied with that reply. "I'm serious. I want to know if I am under suspicion."

Campillo swayed back and forth on his feet, one hand in his trouser pocket. "Not particularly, if that's any consolation," he replied after a few moments. "It's just that I can't rule anything out, and you are the only person I have at hand."

"I'm glad to be of use to you."

The policeman gave a conciliatory smile, as if asking for his understanding. "Don't be offended, Señor Astarloa. After all, I'm sure you'll agree with me that there are loose ends here that insist on tying themselves into knots: two of your clients die; the common factor is fencing. One of them is killed with a fencing foil. Everything turns around the same thing, but what escapes me is the point around which it turns. And your role in this, if indeed you have a role."

"I see your problem, but I'm sorry to say that I can't help you."

"Not as sorry as I. You will understand, though, that the way things are, I cannot rule you out as an accomplice. At my age, and with all I've seen during my years in this job, and given these circumstances, I wouldn't even rule out my own dear mother."

"To put it bluntly, then, I'm under surveillance."

Campillo winced, as if such an expression, applied to the fencing master, was excessive. "Let's just say that I am in need of your cooperation, Señor Astarloa. You have an appointment with me in my office tomorrow morning. And I ask you, with all due respect, not to leave the city and to remain contactable."

Don Jaime nodded silently, abstractedly, while he got to his feet and picked up his hat and cane. "Have you interrogated the maid?" he asked.

"What maid?"

"The maid who worked in Doña Adela's house. I think her name was Lucía."

"Ah, yes, sorry, I didn't quite understand. Yes, the maid, of course ... Well, no, we haven't. I mean we haven't been able to locate her. According to the concierge's wife, she was dismissed about a week ago and hasn't been back. Needless to say, I'm moving heaven and earth to find her."

"And what else did the concierges in the building tell you?"

"They weren't much use either. Last night, what with the storm that broke over Madrid, they didn't hear a thing. As regards Señora de Otero, they know little. And if they do know something, they're not saying, either out of prudence or out of fear. It wasn't her apartment; she rented it three months ago through a third party, a commercial agent whom we have also questioned but to no avail. She moved in with very little luggage. Nobody knows where she came from, although there are indications that she lived for some time abroad ... I'll see you tomorrow, Señor Astarloa. Don't forget, we have an appointment."

Don Jaime looked at him coldly. "I won't forget. Goodnight."

H
E
stood for a long time in the middle of the street, leaning on his walking stick, looking up at the black sky; the blanket of clouds had parted to reveal a few stars. Anyone passing would have been surprised by the expression on his face, which was just barely lit by the pale flame of the gaslights. His gaunt features seemed carved out of stone, like lava that had just solidified beneath a glacial blast of air. It wasn't only his face. He felt his heart beating very slowly in his breast, calm and deliberate, like the pulse in his temples. He didn't know why—he refused to go too deeply into it—but from the moment he beheld the naked, mutilated body of Adela de Otero, the confusion that had been tormenting him vanished as if by magic. It seemed that the icy air of the morgue had left a cold residue inside him. His mind was now clear; he could feel the perfect control he had over the smallest muscles in his body. It was as if the world about him had returned to its exact dimensions and he could once again study it with his old serenity, in his usual distant manner.

For some reason the death of Adela de Otero had liberated him from the shame and humiliation that had tormented him to the point of madness during the last few weeks. He felt a kind of perverse satisfaction at learning that he had been deceived not by an executioner but by a victim. This changed things. He had the sad consolation of knowing that the plot had not been dreamed up by a woman but meticulously carried out by someone completely without scruples, a cruel murderer, a callous swine, whose identity remained a mystery but who might be waiting for him only a few steps away, thanks to the documents that Cárceles must have deciphered by now in Don Jaime's apartment on Calle Bordadores. It was time to turn the page. The puppet refused to play anymore; he had broken free of the strings. Now he would act on his own initiative; that was why he had said nothing to the police. With the confusion gone, he was filled instead by a cold anger, by an immense, lucid, calm hatred.

Don Jaime took a deep breath of cool night air, gripped his walking stick firmly, and set off toward home. The moment to learn the truth had arrived, because the hour of vengeance was tolling.

H
E
had to take a rather circuitous route. Although it was already eleven at night, the streets were full of people. Squads of soldiers and mounted policemen were patrolling everywhere, and on the corner of Calle Hileras he saw the remains of a barricade that several local people were dismantling under the supervision of the police. Near the Plaza Mayor he heard the distant hubbub of a crowd, and halberdiers from the Civil Guard were patrolling outside the Teatro Real with bayonets fixed. It looked as if there would be trouble that night, but Don Jaime barely noticed what was going on around him, so immersed was he in his own thoughts. He hurried up the steps and opened the door, expecting to find Cárceles there, but the apartment was empty.