The Hermit (50 page)

He locks the door behind him, then hurries to the dark bedroom. He hears a strange beeping sound. He runs his hand along the wall and finds the switch that turns on the two reading lamps. The respirator’s warning lamp is blinking and the IV rack has been knocked over. Erhard’s side of the bed is made, but Beatriz’s is empty.

Then he sees her right hand. Still attached to the IV, it’s raised clumsily in the air, so that it appears she’s waving at him. She’s lying on the floor.

He hops onto the bed and grabs her as if she’ll disappear if he doesn’t. She’s curled in an impossible position between tubes and cords, but her eyes sparkle. Both of them. Her mouth quivers, and her hand almost feels warm.

– Bea! My Bea.

She doesn’t respond. Erhard shifts closer, so that he can see her face, her eyes. At first he thinks her pretty face is still pretty, that it still surprises him with its straightforward simplicity, no make-up, no earrings. But then he sees that it’s all ruined. That there’s nothing left to save. He doesn’t know what has changed, but her face is like a mask. As if her eyes and the person behind her face belong to someone else entirely. She blinks. Her eyes have a glossy sheen to them, and her pupils are slightly dilated as though in darkness. They are the eyes of a living being, just not the person he knows. He wants to say her name, to embrace her, if for no other reason than to do so one final time, but it doesn’t seem important. There’s nothing left to embrace, just cells. Assisted by machines, the body breathes, but it’s not Beatriz. Still, as a polite gesture, he strokes her coarse, greasy hair.

–
E
.

Erhard’s nearly certain that it was the machines that beeped. Her lips don’t move, but a sound emerges from between them. –
E
.

– Bea, is that you, Bea? Are you there, Bea?

He stares at her lips. They’re parted slightly, and dry. As if she can’t lick them.

–
Em
…

– Can you hear me, Beatriz? Nod or say yes if you can hear me.

–
E
.

– Beatriz, who did this? Who hurt you?

–
Ema
. The sound emerges as if it’s been forced over her tongue with great effort. Her eyes have begun to flicker. He can’t bear it. All the pain in them. Tears well in Erhard’s eyes.

– It’s important that you answer me, Beatriz. Try. Who did this to you?

–
E
.

Then the sound stops abruptly.

A few seconds pass. Erhard doesn’t dare move. Her eyes remain open, immobile. Erhard sees the red lamp glowing above the bed.

With some difficulty he crawls over and picks up the telephone. He has memorized the doctor’s number, but his fingers struggle to press the big square buttons. It rings far too many times before the doctor answers. Erhard is so relieved he begins to shake.

– Michel, it’s me. She’s talking.

Silence on the other end of the line. – No, he says simply.

– But now she’s… she’s gone again, and the machine is making noise, beeping.

– Is everything in working order?

– No, she fell out of the bed and is wrapped up in tubes and cords.

– Get her back in bed, stabilize her, and let her rest. She might wake again. It may have been her body sending a signal.

– A signal? What do you mean?

– Some patients wake up for a short period during a coma, just before they get a blood clot in the heart or the brain.

Sometimes he despises the doctor’s cool assessments.

He slams the receiver down and pushes himself out of bed, then crosses to the other side of the bed, so he can lift her up. He checks the catheter and the cords, as he’s been taught, places the mouthpiece over her lips, and hears the respirator kick on. Her pulse is low and irregular. The beeping ceases, but the red warning light that illuminates the top of the monitor continues to blink. Her pyjamas have been torn, and he can see her beige-coloured chest, her flabby breasts. Erhard feels terrible; he’s sickened by the sight of his friend, and by the fantasies he entertained about her body. As if her body was what he’d wanted, not her. But now he can see that it was the other way around: since only her body remains, he understands just what it was he’d lusted after. Even her skin is grey like cheap flour.

The drainage bag is nearly full; he finds a new one in the loo and unfastens the old one.

Ema. Her speech had been unintelligible and stuttering, but impossible to mistake. Ema. He wishes she was in a private hospital, far away from here, from Ema, from him. It’s too late for regrets, but maybe he could take a different tack. Maybe he could…

There’s a knock at the door. A cautious, rhythmic knock.

He has no idea who it might be. But it has only been, at most, five minutes since he returned. He sets down the drainage bag and sits quietly, expecting footsteps to trundle down the stairwell, or the lift door to open and close. But he hears nothing. Cautiously, he emerges from the bedroom and crosses to the front door. Another knock.

Erhard retreats a few steps and turns away from the door. – Who is it? he shouts from the living room, so that it sounds farther away.

– Señor Director, are you home?

A dumb question. It’s the downstairs neighbour. She knocks again.

– One moment, he says. He closes the bedroom door. He doesn’t know what to think about this neighbour. If she’s a hardboiled prostitute she seems almost comically naive. But she’s suspiciously persistent. She could be doing some house calls. Or maybe she’s just lonely.

He opens the door, but only enough to peer out.

– Am I disturbing you? Are you alone?

She laughs. She’s wearing the same clothes she wore the other times he’s seen her. She appears to be under the influence of something; her nose is crimson.

– It’s OK.

– Are you alone? she repeats.

– Yes, I…

A man suddenly appears. He’d been hiding along the wall and now forces his way into Erhard’s flat. He grabs Erhard’s shirt and shoves him against the wall. But Erhard slides free and stumbles down his corridor, the man at his heels. Erhard’s surprised, but not shocked. His neighbour’s strange questions seemed like a warning of some kind. He has seen this man’s face before: a narrow, bearded face concealed by dark sunglasses – like someone from an old Italian comedy. All he’s missing is a straw hat and a cigar. He’s lean and muscular, and there’s an angry, controlled force in his hands that have just torn Erhard’s shirt to tatters and now reach for Erhard’s throat and shoulders.

Erhard backs up against the bedroom door; here, the long corridor is dark. He sees the girl behind the man’s shoulder, unperturbed, watchful, as if she’s waiting for this to be over with. He doesn’t even bother calling for help. She’s the only one who can hear him, and she won’t help him at all.

He wants to ask why. Why are you doing this? But he already knows the answer. The man is there to get rid of him. It has something to do with the boy. It has something to do with the ship and the sailors and Emanuel Palabras. Maybe this man is the boy’s father? Or the boy’s mother’s boyfriend? Maybe he’s one of the men from the ship? Maybe he’s been sent by Palabras himself, just as his neighbour was probably bought and paid for by Palabras from the very day Erhard moved in. The most confusing thing is that he’s seen this man before. What if he’s been following Erhard for a while? What if he saw him on a plane or in Santa Cruz or in the rearview mirror on his way to the office or down the street? Or what if he was some interesting-looking customer he noticed at Silón’s shop? Shit, for all he knows the downstairs neighbour is the boy’s mother.

It has been at least eight years since Erhard was in a fight. Even then, it didn’t turn out too well for him. Even then he was too old to do much damage. He’d split his eyebrow and hurt his knuckles. Today might be much worse. Today it’ll hardly be a fight – more like a wrestling match. What’s important is sheer strength and durability. Erhard can’t compete with this compact, muscular man. Through the man’s light-blue shirt he can feel his arms like steel pipes, and he can smell him, too: roasted chestnuts, or smoke, and sweat on the far end of the sour spectrum. The sweat of adrenalin. He tries to recall the man’s face beneath the sunglasses, but – despite Erhard’s ability to remember faces – he can’t place this man.

Erhard wriggles from side to side, trying to knock the sunglasses off so that he can see his eyes – he pictures blue eyes – but the man resists him. It’s not really a wrestling match, because the man’s not interested in fighting. He’s holding a strip of hard plastic, and he tries to loop it around Erhard’s throat. Twice he misses, and the strip sweeps through Erhard’s hair. The third time he finally slips it over Erhard’s head and down to his neck.

– Fucking dog! Erhard shouts, throwing punches with all his might at the man’s face and managing to pry the strip away from his neck.

But the man quickly shields himself with his elbows and forearms. Suddenly, the bedroom door swings open and both men stumble into the dark room. Erhard has a small advantage because he’s familiar with the space; he steps to the side and hears the man thump against the low bed rail. He leaps at Erhard and once again wraps the strip around Erhard’s throat, harder this time, and friction alone causes his skin to burn. Erhard cries out, drained. The man crosses his arms and yanks on the strip of plastic, tightening it. Erhard feels a burst of pain, and now he’s frightened, surprised at the man’s brutality. He almost wants to give up. Giving up seems the easier path. In a way it already is over; he can’t win. He glides down the wall and the man constricts the strip even further. Erhard lets go of the man’s hands. As long as he doesn’t gasp for breath, he keeps his panic at a distance.

The girl switches on the bedroom light and shrieks. – What the hell?

She must have seen Beatriz.

– What the hell is
that
? she screeches like a banshee.

The man turns his head slightly and looks down at the bed. For a moment the strip around Erhard’s throat goes slack, allowing Erhard to gasp for breath. His fingers and brain tingle with oxygen until the man turns his attention back to Erhard and now, in earnest, twists the strip. Erhard imagines it slicing through the loose, old flesh of his throat like a cheese slicer.

When Erhard drops his hand to the nightstand, he touches something warm and soft that at first he thinks is Beatriz. But then he realizes what it is and, sparked by the energy from his last burst of oxygen, he lifts the drainage bag and smashes it against the man’s face. His sunglasses fall to the floor, and the warm liquid splashes on his head, runs into his eyes and down his neck. At first it doesn’t seem to affect him, just irritates him, then all of a sudden his face begins to twitch. Under the light of the lamp Erhard sees his blue eyes, and he remembers those eyes. He
has
seen them before.

The man’s eyes darken and he squeezes them shut, screaming shrilly. The stench is stronger than urine. It’s a sickening, hideous, rotten odour, and anyone would flee from it.

After a few moments, the girls screams again. – What the hell is that? But she doesn’t stand in the doorway long enough to find out. Erhard hears her footfalls, her curses and screams. – You said it would be easy, you said…

Erhard doesn’t listen any more. He gets to his feet without knowing where this energy reserve was stored, and shoves the man back, back, back. The strip of plastic drops to the floor and the man, absorbed by the stinking wetness that clings to him, stumbles backward to gain his footing. With all his might, Erhard shoves the man against the edge of the doorframe. He hears the man’s ribs crack, and the air exiting his body with a dry pop. The man gasps for breath and stands vulnerably as Erhard – not knowing what else to do – picks up the IV rack that’s leaning against the wall and smashes it into the man’s head, the five metal wheels landing with a solid plunk. Erhard regrets it immediately. Watching the rack travel towards the man’s confused face, he thinks,
Shit, I’m going to kill him, I’m going to kill him now.

The rack slams against the man’s head like five baseball bats simultaneously striking him, and blood gushes from his face. Erhard expects to see him fall to the floor, but he drops to his knee and turns, half-stumbling, half-running out of the bedroom and into the corridor. Erhard considers all the knives in the kitchen and somehow finds enough strength to chase the man, shouting and screaming angrily, desperately, even using a few choice Danish words – words he hasn’t uttered in years.

Just as the girl’s about to open the front door, she screams at the man stumbling towards her and following her out.
Bloody fuckin’ ’ell
, Erhard hears the man say in a low, furious voice while the pair run down the stairwell. He considers chasing them, but doesn’t know what the point of that would be. Beatriz has, in a way, saved him. He closes the door and locks it, then hustles back to the bedroom to rearrange all of her equipment. The foot of the IV rack is broken beyond repair; two of the wheels are bent, but if he clamps the rack under the bed, it will still stand. He slips into the bed beside her and begins to feel his pulse racing, then falling. The memory of the strip of plastic around his throat slowly fades, as if the blood cells in his skin are only now returning to normal. The stench of urine fills the entire room, but he doesn’t care.

It occurs to him what it means.

It means he can no longer stay in the flat. Surely the man will try again. And maybe he’ll get others to assist him next time. He will return. He will be better prepared. Humiliated now, he will be angrier than Erhard could handle.

Erhard can’t go back to the house. It would be too easy to find him there. He would be alone and exposed. He needs to keep busy, and close to others. That would be best. The only way. Better yet would be if he disappears, if he boards a plane or a boat as quickly as possible.

But what about Beatriz?

He needs to move Beatriz before something happens to him. The doctor won’t take her, he knows. He has to find a place for her where she can be taken care of if he’s not around. He thinks of a few options, but none are any good. He wishes Emanuel Palabras was an option. It’s his daughter-in-law, and he has the means to take care of her better than Erhard ever could. But Palabras. The heavy-set man in his bathrobe-like Bordeaux silk jackets is a manipulating, shameless devil. Erhard doesn’t know why he’s done it or how, but it’s surely no coincidence that his name crops up everywhere. He’s the man pulling all the strings.