Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (4 page)

              His mother reminded him of small things from his childhood. Lucas heard, finally, that he was going to receive a visit from a trustworthy, very good lawyer. He should do what the lawyer said. The five minutes were up and the guard didn’t want any more hugs. It’s just as well that Joana had broken up with him.
What would she and her new friends at the university think?
They surely would be aware of the accusations against him.

              A few hours later he had another visit. It was the lawyer. Lucas didn’t like him. He was elderly, and Lucas couldn’t tell whether he believed his version or not. He had to repeat it several times, enumerating the details. Since he had a photographic memory, it was easy for him to remember everything at the tip of his tongue, but the lawyer wasn’t really pleased with all of that precision. “Your narrative is very perfect, almost superhuman,” he said, as if praising him, but his expression let it slip that he liked less perfection even better.

              He left Lucas a card with his telephone number and advised him to never say anything without him present. He repeated that advice in the tone of an order. No matter what happened, he should just declare, “I will only speak in the presence of my lawyer.” The police did not actually have any real authority to negotiate,” the legal expert said
. 
“Everything they offer you is an illusion. A bullet to the back of the neck as legitimate self-defense, for example, what kind of offer is that?” Silence was the best word. Finally, he should avoid problems with other prisoners and should be as cordial as possible to the officials. His prison record had to stay clean.

              One of the things that irritated him was that his lawyer insisted he was much smaller than Quiroga and the other had a club; both were trained to fight. How had he managed to knock him down? David had knocked down Goliath, for sure, conceded his counsel paternally. “But in this rare case, David was armed with a sling and shot Goliath from a distance.” What the hell kind of word to describe using a sling. Shot.

Chapter 4

The Witness

That night, he slept better and even ate with an appetite. In truth, it wasn’t hard for him to adapt to the Spartan routine in that place. In the morning, they told him to fix himself up since it was a special day. They gave him clothes his mother had left. His favorite jeans, a Gant shirt, a watch, and new loafers. Articles for personal hygiene, including cologne, hair gel and a new toothbrush. Lately, she had been changing his toothbrush frequently. He needed to ask her why. Despite barely having a beard, he decided to shave just so he could use the aftershave. The odor of the aftershave and cologne went well together. He had the nose of a bloodhound and the night vision of an owl, he often thought to himself. They came to get him and gave him his belt. He breathed in deeply. He didn’t know who he was going to meet, but he felt ready for anything.

              They took him down corridors he’d never been in. Lucas turned at the first left and then went to the right, walked up the stairs to then go down the elevator. After several turns, he wound up in the old bald inspector’s office, which was actually right there. The only thing different was a small dusty plastic Christmas tree illuminating his desk.

              “There’s news,” the inspector informed him. “Your coach turned up.”

              He gave a sigh of relief. Things were beginning to return to normal in the midst of that hallucination.

              “Is he here?” Lucas asked.

              “Here? No. So you don’t know that today isn’t visitors’ day?”

              “But what’s he said?”

              “For the time being, nothing,” clarified the inspector. “Maybe he’ll just say whatever it is in the presence of his lawyer.”

              “But is he accused of something? Why isn’t he talking?”

              “Well... he’s playing mute, but we asked one of our collaborators to make him talk. You know our friend well,” said the inspector.

              “Is he going to interrogate him?”

              “No, he’s going to do an autopsy. Just like with Quiroga. Now we only need you, but don’t worry. It won’t cost your parents a red cent.”

              His head went blank and he could only manage to repeat, “I’ll only speak in the presence of my lawyer.”

              “Yours, no. Your mother’s. As long as the money lasts. That’s part of the punishment. We’ll suck your family dry. When everything they’ve squirreled away is gone, we’ll arrange one of our lawyers for you,” the inspector whispered in Lucas’s ear.

              Back in his cell, he imagined being autopsied alive by the redheaded doctor and only being able to move his eyes. He saw the three of them—himself, Quiroga and the coach, nude—cut open like chickens on metal examining tables. The other two had turned purple and stank of rot, but he was well groomed, with combed hair and smelling good. He wasn’t afraid. He felt defeated. Worthless, shaved, perfumed, and with his hair gelled—a clown on sale.

              The calendar dragged by painfully. Night hours were worse than the day, but all were bad. A few days later, he was taken again, but this time the police car was marked, with lights on top. In addition to the Judicial Police investigators, two agents from the Public Security Police’s Special Operations Group were seated in the front.
Two Judicial Police and two from the SOG. My case is out of control,
the young man thought. They took the same route as on the night of the crime. The gym had an abandoned air about it with a large dull artificial Christmas tree off to one side and having no trace of decorations or color. Only two workers were there, looking like they were at a wake, as if the club itself had been done in. Even the new public bathroom recently put in the alley had been removed. The gym had expired either as collateral damage from the two murders or because everything he touched withered away.

              It was a cold but sunny day, with a blue sky that played at being spring in the middle of winter. From the other side of the car window, colorful stores decorated with the festive season’s motifs inspired people circulating, going on with their lives alone or in groups. They did not see him, strolling about unaware that their freedom was apparent, an offer from those who had the power to do so. They were unbound, not free. They were blind, in their seeming contentedness but not entirely happy. He, handcuffed and in the car, was well aware that he was a prisoner. He was as available to those in charge as those walking about unrestrained, but under austere conditions and closer at hand. Or might he know nothing, just being so contaminated by his father’s conspiratorial thoughts and so disappointed with the depressing experience of prison that he could not now see that intangible value of freedom, when he saw it audaciously presented outside of a police car window? Would this be his life? Would he be old when he got out of prison? Would he ever get out? Hadn’t his mother warned him to be like a water bird and leave prison unaffected, continuing to be who he was when and if they freed him? Without always carrying a prison within himself? He had to become that swan, untouchable in his soul no matter how contaminated the lake was. For a few moments, he experienced the miracle of being who he was once again and, then, his previous struggles lost their meaning, seeming like negligible crumbs in the face of the immense pleasure that it is to be free.

              The police car stopped at the first traffic light, just short of the alley. He noticed an old taxi parked at the door of the small street and, incredibly, the driver was the almost albino crook who’d tried to attack him at his house. Next to him was the black guy with the cap. Lucas looked at them. Driving a taxi? The thieves got out of the taxi and, when they saw him, turned toward the police car and quickened their pace. The light turned green and the police took off. They began to run, and Lucas now had his head turned to the rear.
Thieves now chase the police?
he thought. The police noticed the movement and asked “What’s up?” while they turned around. They saw the two muscular operatives break their stride in the road.

              “Back up,” shouted an agent and the SOG turned the car like a top that barely had enough space. The bandits entered the taxi and accelerated as if they were possessed, at great speed, aiming at the patrol car. The police had to swerve to avoid a head-on collision, spinning again in order to chase the taxi. The other SOG had an Uzi submachine gun, but it was as much in hand as in vain. The old limousine accelerated as if it were a ruse, like a Porsche or a Ferrari, and disappeared in the traffic. The police never had a chance.

              “Did you see that?” the cops said to each other. They advised headquarters and went to the Judiciary building. Arriving there, Lucas was called by the Chief Inspector who, this time, was accompanied by a deputy public prosecutor he’d seen at the courthouse and who, in elegance, was on par with Judge Ponces Branco.

              “Who were those two individuals? When had you seen them? Why didn’t you tell us about the attempted assault in your room? And the taxi?” The inspector had a grave air about him, different from the all-powerful, subtly blasé air of their previous encounters. The magistrate remained silent. Things had taken an unexpected turn.

              Lucas didn’t know that the problem had been detected the evening before. That was why SOG was reinforcing the Judiciary Police. A review of security cam videos from a store on the main thoroughfare facing the alley had shown a black car with false diplomatic tags enter the alley but it had never come out. The police reviewed the footage innumerous times: the car was enormous, the tag was from a country that did not have an embassy in Lisbon, and it had never left the alley. It had simply evaporated.

              Lucas’s treatment in prison had become pleasanter. Officials liked him and the guards didn’t distinguish him from other prisoners. Some even tried to get closer to him, but he kept himself closed off.

              Seven days later, he went before the judge again. His lawyer had appeared the prior evening to tell him three things. His coach’s time of death had been estimated as occurring before he was arrested and, therefore, he was a suspect. The police had surveillance camera footage from a store on the main avenue facing the alley and it had shown no one coming out, other than Lucas. Physically, it was evidence against him. The person who called 112, emergency services in Portugal, had been located and she had cleared him, but her testimony was strange, which diminished its value.

              When the session began, a witness was called, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who maintained that she’d been in a room on the fourth floor and had clearly seen the entire scene, without turning on the light in the window. She was a professional babysitter who was working in an apartment in the building that evening. The young men had fought and the big one had fallen. The small one had spit in his face and then immediately left, entering the main thoroughfare. A door across from the gym’s entrance had opened and a good looking fellow, with white hair and a small case, had appeared. He kneeled near the large young man on the ground, opened the case and took something out, but the young man stood up suddenly and ran toward the gym. The man raised his left arm and the kid fell face down. She thought it was a shot, although she had heard nothing. The man then approached the inert fighter, turned him over and did something to his face, closed the case, and went in the door he had come out of.

              The witness had a concrete problem in terms of facts: other than the one to the gym, there was no other door in the alley. There were things in his favor. On the 112 recording, she said the two men had fought and, afterwards, a third seemed to have shot the one on the ground and then fled through a door across from the gym. Lucas had already referred to a new, public toilet in the alley in his deposition.

              The judge interrogated her, but she insisted firmly on what she’d seen. Confronted with the nonexistence of the door, she confirmed that even though there was no other door, that night there had been one. Questioned if it could have been a porta-potty, she said it did not seem to be. She remembered a door.

              Regarding the supposed public bathroom, the police peremptorily refuted its existence. Municipal authorities denied placing that equipment; there was neither water nor a sewer in that location, no one had seen it, and video in the authorities’ possession did not reveal the entrance of any similar structure into that alleyway. Worse yet, on that same night, there were multiple photographs of the crime scene and there was no lavatory, much less a door. Nevertheless, not considering that detail, the police seemed less convinced that Lucas was the murderer. They still presented that thesis, but perfunctorily, out of duty, without passion. The public ministry’s magistrate spoke in a monotone to assert that he saw no reason to change the investigation’s position. The prosecution stood by idly.

              Lucas’s lawyer defended him eloquently. He took the facts and constructed the most favorable version that was still believable.  The elderly gentleman with a necktie surprised Lucas with an instrument of war of which he was unaware: words. Pronounced calmly and in their entirety. Having arrived at a point, the next one was as clear as water. Achieving one level, the next was evident to everyone. Along the way, he slipped grains of sand into the police’s version. Small grains, but they jammed the judicial machine’s gears. Whoever arrived at this point and heard him would have been surprised that anyone could have had the idea of looking for the young man, leaving the true assassin loose on the streets. His lawyer highlighted this: there is a murderer loose on Lisbon’s streets and judicial authorities were wasting resources in vain with his client. Lucas was convinced of his own innocence, until he’d awakened to the fact that he knew very well he hadn’t killed anyone. He just wasn’t sure that he’d go home free that day because the judge maintained a serene face, immune to the web his lawyer had knit.

              Ponces Branco declared a recess.

              “The longer the recess, the better,” explained his lawyer. “He’s reading. The more he reads, the better,” his lawyer said.

              Three hours later, he returned to declare that Lucas would be held under house arrest, with an electronic ankle monitor and police stationed at his door. He would not be free, but his happiness was so great it was like gliding on the wind, like seagulls on the Tagus River or the smell of the breeze from the sea while fishing early in the morning. He breathed in the entire day in just one gulp—free, yes, without guards, chamber pots, schedules, anonymity dissolved in the prisoners’ soup filling the jail’s large pots. He went home in his lawyer’s car. His brother ran to him, leaping into his arms, with a small Tyrannosaurus in his hand, shouting, “Brother, brother, you escaped, good.” His mother received him, intensely, repeating, “I knew, Lucas, I knew.” His father, his eyes brimming with liquid, gave him a strong, quick hug. He put his hands on Lucas’s face and said to him, “We have to figure this out, boy. You and I.”

              They’d set up their nativity scene and had outdone themselves. To compensate for the lack of a Christmas tree, which his father wouldn’t let in the house, “neither that nor Coca Cola,”
the manager at Lucas’s house had more than one hundred figures. Little houses with their own lights and small creeks with real running water that moved water wheels. Lucas looked at the small Aramaic village delighted with the colors, less bright but more diverse than the Christmas pines.