The Hermit (54 page)

– I don’t know. A fortnight ago.

– It was 31 January. Precisely eleven days after Raúl Palabras was seen at your place.

– He wasn’t at my house.

– So you say. What were you doing on Tenerife?

– Talking to some people.

– You think we don’t know what you were doing?

Once again Erhard feels the hooks and wires in his face. It’s as though his eyes are completely bloodshot from the strain.

– How many times in the seventeen years that you’ve lived on this island have you made the short trip to Tenerife to talk to some people? You don’t need to answer that. Zero. Zero fucking times. And you want me to believe that you’re not up to something? That you’re not hiding something?

– You’ve talked to Bernal. You know what I’m doing. I’m doing
your
job. I’m doing what you should have done from the very start.

– That’s what you say, and that’s what everyone thinks you’re doing. But how’s that going for you? Have you found the mother? Have you solved the mystery of the boy’s death?

– No. But I’ve found out more than you were able to.

Hassib grins. – You’d like to think so. Please also figure out why some 17-year-old idiot killed himself by driving into a light pole the other night in Villaverde, or why a young girl choked on her own vomit a few weeks ago.

– That’s not my problem.

– So you say. The fact is, you’re involved in a number of very suspicious activities. Suddenly. Right after Beatrizia Colini dies and Raúl Palabras disappears. Something’s going on. You’re acting peculiar, and there is a connection. Cause and effect.

– I’ve tried to find out what happened to the boy.

Hassib gives the older officer a long look. – Every housewife on the island is talking about the
extranjero
who’s searching for the boy’s mother. One might think you were using the story as a pretext. Listen. We have proof, P-R-O-O-F, that Raúl was at your house in Majanicho. And we have witnesses who tell us that you, the next day, went to the auto workshop and spent an hour and a half cleaning your car. Thoroughly. Very thoroughly.

It must be a bluff. Erhard can practically read it on his face. Hassib likes to take such risks. Because there’s no proof. Of course there’s no proof. Unless someone planted it. Unless someone’s out to frame Erhard for Raúl Palabras’s murder.

– Witnesses and proof, Erhard says. – Seems as though you’re building a case against me. But you’re missing the last piece. You know, a confession.

– That would be nice, Hassib says, grinning the grin of a poker player.

Erhard leans forward. Last try. He has nothing more in the tank.

– It wasn’t me, Hassib. I know you don’t believe me, but look at me. I’m almost seventy, I’m a shrimp, and I’m not even very intelligent. And if that’s not enough, I’m also friends with the man you think I killed, not to mention his father. How? Why? Isn’t that the kind of thing one asks when trying to solve a crime? Here’s your confession: It wasn’t me. Regardless what anyone says, and regardless what you find in my house or in my car, I didn’t do it.

67

They lock the door. Erhard expects them to open it again. But they don’t. The walls are ashen. He’s in a section of the Palace that’s been remodelled with blocky grey cells, high ceilings, and huge armoured doors.

He remains standing for some time – as though sitting equates to an admission of guilt. But after an hour or so, when his legs are so tired they’ve begun to tremble, he’s forced to lean against the wall and glide into a squat. He doesn’t know what will happen to him. When they told him they were arresting him, he stopped listening and simply went with them, down the dreary staircase and through long corridors. He no longer has any sense of where he is in the building. But he guesses they’re going to let him sweat, figuring he’ll blurt out his confession once they stretch the time. Maybe they’re right. Not because of the room or the facilities, the bare, humiliating walls – he’s pretty much OK with all that – but because he feels trapped. He can’t just walk out the door.

He closes his eyes. Squeezes them so hard that he sees explosions of colour on the inside of his eyelids, and he pictures a hot day. Rocks, shimmering heat, his house in Majanicho. The goats trot off ahead of him, as if he’s moving forward, as if he’s a thirsty wayfarer stumbling towards the house. He sees Raúl standing at the front door, Raúl seated in the chair out back, Raúl between the clotheslines, Raúl floating in the air. It’s like a test run, his thoughts striving to eliminate the possibility that Raúl was at his place. But there doesn’t seem to be enough colour to describe the scene. As if the unreality of the image is telling him that Raúl couldn’t have been there. He imagines following Raúl into the house. And he finds Beatriz lying in his bed – in Erhard’s bed – underneath the blankets and sheets. Raúl leafs through the blankets to find her, but she’s no longer there.

He wakes up, or perhaps he just opens his eyes without having slept. Something is scuffing along the walls, but there’s nothing in the cell. Except for his own breathing and the flickering white lamp.

Hassib opens the narrow window in the door to ask how Erhard’s doing.

– Terrible.

– Good, the policeman says, and leaves.

He’s served mashed potatoes or maybe they’re just regular potatoes. As he eats, the guards laugh so loudly that he suspects they’ve urinated on his food. This whole experience has been a fucking violation of his human rights, and Spanish law, but he hasn’t the strength to protest. He hasn’t the strength to do anything but sit quietly on the floor holding his water. He doesn’t want to relieve himself down here. If he lies wedged in the corner, he can keep the pain at bay. Hours have passed since the last time he’d had a slash. It was on Tenerife. And his body recalls – the tip of his dick recalls – how it was to empty his bladder: searing pain. Before long it will surrender, before long he won’t be able to hold it any more. His last slash was at the cafe, after the Mai Tai. He’d stood at the black-painted toilet, which reeked of cooking oil, and glared at the small painting of the cafe, while the warm urine ran through his urethra like apple juice through a transparent straw and round and round and finally through the few inches of his dick before squirting into the urinal, splashing first against the wall and then the dark concrete and grate. For minutes he plays out this recollection, and in doing so forgets that he has to go, but then it returns: the feeling that his urine is burning in him or sickening him from within. He doesn’t want to do it here.

It’s their way of getting to him, he knows, their way of breaking him. He’s watched the crime shows, and he’s seen
The French Connection
, the one in which they work over an innocent street urchin until he bursts into tears. That’s what they’re going to do to him, he knows – he can sense it. They’ve probably put some diuretic in the mashed potatoes, and they’re laughing at him behind the door.

Hassib returns to ask how it’s going.

– Terrific, Erhard says.

But the policeman can tell this isn’t the case. The policeman sees Erhard opening and closing his eyes, his dogged struggle to blink himself to forgetfulness.

– Are you in pain, Erhard?

– What the hell does it look like to you?

– Good, Hassib says, slamming the window shut.

More food arrives, soup this time, and Erhard is certain they’ve urinated in it. It smells, it’s lukewarm, and it’s sour. But though he’s hungry and would hardly even care if they’d shat in the soup, he doesn’t want any more liquid in his body. All he wants is to get out of this cell and back to the interrogation room, so he can have a slash there, have it in his trousers, have it all over the damn floor, emptying his bladder. It’s like holding his breath, only worse because it burns and stings. He can keep it up. Has to. He’s survived on cheap tinned food for weeks before; he’s lived on garbage and mouldy bread and tiny fish. He doesn’t need anything. He doesn’t need food. He won’t eat.

After he ignores the third meal they bring him, they finally escort him back to the interrogation room. He can tell by the older coppers, their faces, that they’re not too happy about the situation. They give Hassib uneasy looks. Hassib, who’s in charge. Hassib, who glances at his telephone as though he’s just received an interesting message. They prop Erhard in the chair across from Hassib, and instantly he relaxes his muscles and releases his bladder’s firm grip, and with shooting pain – as if his urethra has been dried out and sealed up for many years – he watches a dark stain spread from his crotch all the way down to his ankles. The others snigger. Wonderful, one says. But Erhard feels no sense of relief, no exhilarating release. The pain is too great. And it continues to sting long after he’s stopped.

Then comes the exhaustion. The urge to make water had kept him awake. Now he’s so tired he can can barely sit up. Hassib notices and shoves him back in the chair. He talks to him, calls his name. Erhard knows he’s being interrogated, he knows they’re trying to drag a confession out of him, but he’s so exhausted that he’s willing to say whatever they want just so they’ll let him sleep. This surprises him. He’s always thought it would require more to break him, that he was a tough nut to crack, but he’s broken. Snapped right in half. His will to do anything but sleep has drained completely out of him. Finally, after several hours, or what seems like several hours, Hassib comes to the point.

– So you admit meeting Raúl Agosto Palabras at your property, Via Majanicho, on the afternoon of 20 January?

– No, y…

– You admit having an argument with Raúl Agosto Palabras at your property, Via Majanicho, on the afternoon of 20 January?

– No, ye…

– You killed him and transported his body in the boot of Señor Palabras’s Mercedes on the evening of 31 January.

– Nyo.

– We have a witness who reports that you carried a large object in the basement below the flat in Calle el Muelle. Is this true?

– Nyo.

And so it continues. He doesn’t know which questions he’s answering, why he’s answering them, or how he should answer. Irrespective of what they say, and irrespective of what he says in his current condition, he’s certain that he’ll be able explain everything later. All he needs is a little sleep, just close his eyes. Just a little.

The chair slides out from underneath him. On the way down, he falls asleep.

68

He has a bulge above his left eye, which is so swollen that he can hardly see. His head is heavy, but he manages to eat a dish consisting of clumps of rice and beef. The urinaters leave him alone. One even enters his cell to help him sit and to put a bowl of food down beside him. He told Erhard he would soon be taken to the basement, where he’d have a bed, a table, and a chair. Maybe even a sliver of a harbour view. All they need is the paperwork. Then you’re allowed guests, the guard had said, a man who resembled a huge mouse standing over Erhard and blocking the light. A bed sounded nice. I’d like you to know, the mouse had said as he headed out the door, that we understand you. Rich people do whatever they please, and sometimes it’s the little guy that has to put an end to it. Although Erhard didn’t exactly know what he meant, he could feel the bulge on his forehead, and he decided it was his punishment for having lived the high life. In Raúl’s flat. In the director’s chair. For peeking underneath a dying woman’s robe.

The food makes him feel better. After some time, impossible to say how long, it dawns on him where he is. The cell is made entirely of some kind of hard wood, unpolished and untreated, so that it hurts a little to lean against the walls. You could easily imagine being inside a container making its way across the Atlantic, a tranquilized, toothless hyena en route to some debt-ridden zoo. At the top of the tallest wall is a round ventilation grate. In the left corner of the cell, a sleek miniature sphere hangs from the ceiling: a surveillance camera. The door is some kind of lightweight metal, with a square window in the centre which can be opened from the outside. He glances around the cell, as if he’ll suddenly discover a hidden passageway or crowbar that no one has ever noticed. But there’s nothing, of course.

After some time braced against the wall, his back and neck ache.

He scuttles to the middle of the cell and lies down flat, stretching his arms and legs like the Vitruvian Man. He considers removing his clothes to complete the image, but he’s not sure it would surprise anyone these days. Already he’s been classified as a sad sack, a mad man. Lying on the cool cement it’s as if he’s clinging to the world, or merging with the Palace, the old stone flooring, the shoddy office furniture, the stacks of reports, and the teeming rubbish bins stuffed with half-eaten pastries. He senses life buzzing around him: footsteps and telephone conversations, a toilet flushing one storey above, coins clinking on a counter at some harbour bar, a car somewhere in the city swerving too close to the pavement. Above all else, he feels Mónica’s pale, wrinkled flesh as she awakes, and the rock-hard bed underneath her soft tush, and the beats of her heart, irregular, staccato. Her home is peaceful; outside her window, a flower sprouts. A bottle washes up on shore again and again. The sleepy eyes of his goats blink against the sun before they sleep. Laurel’s bell tolls among the rocks, a place the goats never go, because it’s shady down there much of the day and far too cold at night. The heat from his cabin, which is ablaze, the five-metre-tall flames that have transformed everything to ash. No smoke, just flames. And when the flames settle, when they finally flare out with a whoosh, he’s back in his cell and all that he feels is the hard, indifferent floor beneath him.

Following his next meal, a gummy dinner of white fish flaking in chunks, papers are thrust through the window of his cell. The charges, the copper tells him. And your confession. Once you’ve signed your name, you’ll be taken to a larger cell. With a TV.

It’s a hazardous document. At once so formal and so meaningless that he almost considers signing it unread. But Erhard’s admissions are so detailed that his signature would make any other interpretation of the case difficult to believe, if not impossible to explain. He makes no sudden movements, but he becomes alert when he sees what he confessed to during the interrogation. His statement is accompanied by witness claims and actual physical proof that Erhard doesn’t know anything about. He needs to think this through. He needs a solicitor, an outsider’s help. Someone. Anyone but Emanuel Palabras. Erhard is convinced that Palabras is the mastermind.