All That Followed (23 page)

“I’m afraid of what’s inside,” I said.

“Well, that much is obvious,” he said. “Manolito and I have a bet. He says that it has something to do with a woman, but I said that you have been in here for five years and that any harm a woman could do would have been done a long time ago.”

He continued shaving, smiling at his own shaky logic.

“So what do you think it’s about?” I asked.

“I think it’s news that your mother is dead,” he said, turning to study my expression, as if to verify his hunch.

“Well, thanks so much for the sympathy,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders, then continued to draw the razor across the hollows of his cheeks.

“You know how it is,” he said. “You were here when my father passed last year. There’s nothing for us to do—no funeral to attend, no one we have to console, no grave to tidy up. It’s easier for us, in a way.”

I sat down on the edge of my bunk and tore back the end of the envelope. I could feel Andreas watching as I slid the letter out and unfolded it. It was written in Nere’s neat, slanted script—only a half-page long. I read the letter to the end, then looked at the black square photograph of the sonogram.

“So?” Andreas asked. “Was I right?”

I folded the letter and slid it back into the envelope, then placed the square photograph into the breast pocket of my shirt.

“Yes,” I said. “You were right.”

By now he had finished shaving and was rinsing his face in the small metal sink next to the toilet. As he splashed his freshly shaven face with cold water, he smiled with satisfaction.

“I knew it,” he said. “I can’t wait to tell the old man.”

42. JONI

After I left Mariana’s apartment the night of Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping I crossed the street to the Caledonian, an Irish-style pub that had recently been opened by two men from Orio. The place was nearly empty; a group in their early twenties, including Lulu Cortez’s son Felix, was gathered around a dartboard toward the back of the room, and a couple of strays hovered over their pints of beer at the bar. The walls were overdecorated with Irish knickknacks—plaques with words that might have been Gaelic, photographs of John F. Kennedy and Gerry Adams, framed Guinness posters.

I nodded the bartender over to where I stood.

“You’re the American, no?” he asked me in English. He put his cigarette out in a glass half-filled with water. “You teach at the academy?”

“Yes,” I said, then ordered an Amstel and a Jameson in Spanish. As the bartender tipped the green whiskey bottle down from a shelf behind the bar, I tried to gather the nerve to call the detective. I had no actual proof that Mariana and Robert Duarte were having an affair, after all; she hadn’t told me anything other than that they’d met a few times, that his wife had been unable to join them for one reason or another.

A better man might have been able to say that he was protecting Mariana from the dangers she seemed so oblivious to: not only Duarte’s violent hatred of Jos
é
Antonio and all that he stood for politically but also the way that Duarte had destabilized her, made her more reckless. I’d hoped that introducing her to the Americans would draw her out of herself, distract her from her crazy ruminations about ghosts and organs, but it had the opposite effect. She became more engrossed in her obsessions. She began to cancel our coffee dates at the Boli
ñ
a, and on the rare occasions that she would now invite me up to her apartment, I noticed a new disorder that hadn’t been present before. An empty biscuit wrapper left on the counter, burgundy rings left by a wineglass on the table. And her daughter, Elena, seemed to be lost entirely in Duarte’s wake, a weight to be dragged along after her.

But even then, I knew that I wasn’t just trying to save Mariana. I knew that I was about to betray the only real relationship I’d had in Muriga since Nerea; I was simply summoning up the courage to do it.

When the bartender placed the drinks in front of me, I sipped at the whiskey once, then tipped up the entire glass, chasing it down with half the beer. I drew a stool up to the bar and sat, then removed the detective’s card from my jacket pocket. The whiskey was still warm in my mouth when I asked the bartender for the telephone.

*   *   *

CASTRO ARRIVED
forty-five minutes later. It was nearly one in the morning, but he still wore his perfectly pressed dark suit, and his clear eyes moved with the quickness of a wild dog’s.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” I said.

He waved his hand.

“No, no,” he said. “I was still at the station.” He looked soberly at the three empty pint glasses in front of me. “So,” he said. “What was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

I realized what this must look like—an old drunk alone at a bar. I wanted to explain, but every explanation seemed to begin with Mariana in a way that would sound wrong to the young detective.

“Earlier,” I began. “When we were at the apartment. When you were alone with Mariana.”

He looked at me closely.

“I could hear you. I was in the other room, but I could hear,” I said.

“Fine,” he said cautiously. “I was just trying to make her feel more comfortable in private. She didn’t tell me anything.”

“I know she didn’t,” I said. “Like I said, I could hear you perfectly.”

“So then?”

“So I know what you were asking her,” I said. “Or what I think you were asking her, at least.”

“And what was that?”

The bartender came over and put his hands on the bar.

“Another Amstel?” he asked.

“Why not,” I said, not looking at the young detective.

“And for you?” he said to Castro.

“Nothing,” he said. “No. A
mosto
.”

The bartender seemed annoyed by the order and reached under the bar for the bottle of nonalcoholic grape juice.

“So then,” Castro said. “You were about to tell me what I was asking Mariana Zelaia.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think you were trying to ask if she was having a love affair.”

Castro smiled.

“Crimes of passion are much more common than politically motivated crimes. I had to rule it out,” he said. The bartender slid the two full glasses across the bar toward us, then went back to his cigarette.

“The reason I asked you here,” I said, “is that I don’t think Mariana was entirely truthful in her answer.”

The detective sipped from the brim of his glass, looking at me with interest, if not surprise. He knew much more than he was letting on.

“Go ahead,” he said in a way that you might speak to a young child trying to tell a story of no consequence.

“I think that there was a … a relationship. With another man.”

“And who is this other man?” Castro asked. I took a long drink of the beer, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“There is another American,” I said. “He works at the same school that I do. Duarte. Robert Duarte.”

The detective removed from his jacket pocket the same notepad that he had earlier at the apartment and flipped to a blank page.

“Duarte,” he said as he wrote. “A Basque name.”

I nodded.

“His family is Basque,” I said.

“So how does this Duarte know Mariana Zelaia?” Castro asked.

I dragged a finger through a bit of spilled beer on the bar, not knowing exactly how to answer.

“I introduced them,” I said finally. “About three months ago. Maybe four.”

The detective raised his eyebrows, as if this was the most interesting thing I had told him so far.

“And how did you become aware of this supposed affair?” he asked.

“Well,” I stammered. I felt as if I had unexpectedly become a suspect myself in Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping. “I don’t have any definite proof, I suppose. It’s just a feeling I have. The way she talks about him. The way they act when I run into them having coffee on the street.”

“I see,” Castro said. “But you don’t have any actual proof of this affair.”

“I saw them once,” I said. “At a bar on the way out of town.”

I realized how stupid it must sound, wondered if I really had seen anything incriminating that afternoon. The detective flipped his notebook closed and pushed his half-full glass of
mosto
back across the bar.

“Well, it’s certainly something that we’ll follow up on,” he said. “Is there anything else that you wanted to speak to me about?”

“No,” I said. “That was it.”

The detective stood up to leave, rubbing his bald head with the palm of his hand as if still in concentration. He told me that he’d be in contact if he had any further questions, but instead of turning toward the door he lingered, regarding me curiously.

“Can I ask you something?” he said finally.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“I mean, she’s your friend,” he said. “Mariana Zelaia.”

“Yes,” I said. “She is.”

“So why are you telling me about this supposed affair?”

The bar seemed to fill with a momentary silence, only the high pipe of an Irish flute playing from a set of speakers behind the bar.

“Jos
é
Antonio was a friend of mine too,” I said finally. “I just wanted to do whatever I could to help.”

The young detective closed his clear blue eyes, as if suddenly understanding. When he opened his eyes, he nodded and turned to leave. What surprised me was not that I had lied to the detective but that I had already begun to speak of Mariana’s husband in the past tense.

43. MARIANA

The night of the kidnapping, after the policemen and Joni had left the apartment, there was a knock on the door just after midnight. Elena was asleep in her crib in the nursery, and the sudden noise clattered through the silence of the apartment, startling my mother and me as we sat numbly in the kitchen. The two of us rushed down the dark hallway, and when I peered through the peephole, I half-expected to find Jos
é
Antonio standing in the blue light of the entryway, his dark suit sagging with the heavy rain that fell outside. Instead, I found the bald little detective waiting on the other side of the door, studying the black metal cage surrounding the elevator shaft as if it held some missing clue.

“I’m sorry to stop in this late,” he said when I opened the door. He shuffled a bit where he stood, then held his hand open toward the apartment. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” I said, standing aside. He nodded briefly to my mother, then led us back to the living room and gestured for us to sit down. He remained standing between where we sat on the sofa and the hallway where we had entered, as if to prevent us from escaping.

“I wanted to stop by before you heard from the news,” he said, nodding to the muted television, where a photograph of Jos
é
Antonio was being displayed on a news program from San Sebasti
á
n. A jagged pain arrived just under the scar from the operation, and for the first time, it occurred to me that Jos
é
Antonio would never return home. Castro stepped across the room and turned the television off.

“We’ve received a message from the people who have your husband,” he said.
Have your husband
, I thought. He was still alive.

“Who is it?” my mother said. “Do you know where he is? Is he all right?”

Castro held up a hand to slow her down.

“We think we know who it is,” he said. “It appears to be politically motivated.”

“ETA?” my mother said, putting a hand over her mouth.

“Shhhh…,” I said, gripping my mother’s leg. “Let the detective speak.”

Castro seemed to appreciate this gesture; he sat down on the edge of one of the chairs across from us, his hands on his knees.

“We believe it’s a local group that has ties to the separatist cause. But no, we don’t believe it’s the ETA.”

“Thank the Lord,” my mother said, pushing closer on the sofa, taking my hand in hers.

Castro made the motion as if to slow her down again, then turned to me. I looked past the detective, to a bookshelf that was lined with small framed photographs. Elena’s first week, swaddled in embroidered white cotton blankets that Jos
é
Antonio’s parents had sent us. I barely recognized myself as the woman in the next photograph, sipping at the hole cut into the top of a green coconut during our first vacation together.

I settled on a last photograph taken earlier that year. It had been the first warm day of summer, and Jos
é
Antonio sat in the white wicker chairs of La Joya with Elena propped on his knee. Behind them, two old men batted a tennis ball back and forth on the beach with
paletas
, and Jos
é
Antonio jokingly held his empty beer glass to Elena’s mouth. I hadn’t really thought about my husband for months—I had replaced him with the American, and with a dead man I had never met.

“Mariana,” the detective said, as if preparing me for something. “This isn’t necessarily a good thing.”

He leaned closer from the edge of his chair. “If it had been the ETA, it would be more predictable. We’ve done this before with them—there’s a ransom, or a demand. We have people with them. We know what they are going to do, more or less. With these people—the ones who have Jos
é
Antonio—we don’t know what they’ll do.”

“They’re local,” I said.

Castro nodded, and as if on cue, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a large white envelope. He placed it on the low table between us, then reached in and removed a series of photographs. He spread them out over the top of the old magazines on the table, seven photographs in all. Three of them had white borders, as if they were snapshots printed at a commercial photo shop. The other four were obviously from police records; these photographs were taken head-on, their subjects wearing somber, bleak expressions.

“We believe this is the person who organized your husband’s kidnapping,” he said, tapping a finger on one of the police photos. “Do you recognize him?”