The Zul Enigma (23 page)

‘That moment decided it.
I just stood there like it was the first time I’d ever been close to a woman
before. My heart was pounding and,’ Drew shook his head, ‘the next thing I know
we’re kissing and… and I couldn’t have held back if my life depended on it.’

Carlos sat motionless,
no emotion showing in his stone-hard eyes.

‘Later we talk. I tell
her that I’d always loved her right from when I first clapped eyes on her at
the interview, fresh out of Uni with her Masters Degree, way before she ever
met you. I tell her how I’d hidden it all those years, how I never did
understand why she wouldn’t go out with me back then. She says she wanted to
but she was scared because I was her boss. She was scared of my reputation.
Scared of being hurt and ending up one of my exes. She says she never imagined
I could love any woman, let alone her.

‘And at last we both
have what we’d always wanted. But at what cost?

‘We make a plan. Elena
goes to a café for breakfast. She calls in sick. I wake up Lizzie. I tell her
something urgent’s come up, that the trip to Virginia Beach is off, and I put
her in a cab to the airport for the first plane back to Seattle. Elena knows
you’ve got a briefing that morning. She calls your office to make sure you’re
there, then goes home and packs. She writes you a note saying she meant what she
said and that she’ll be in touch on Monday to talk divorce. She tells you not
to try looking for her. I knew you wouldn’t call me – you thought I was
going away with Lizzie. But instead of taking Lizzie to Virginia Beach, I take
your wife.’

‘
¡Hijo de puta!
’
Carlos struggled off the bed and lurched towards the bathroom. Drew heard him
retching and the toilet flush and flush again, then the taps running. Carlos
walked back in, his face grey. He collapsed like a house of cards on the bed.

Drew shook his head.
‘This is ridicu…’

‘Finish it,’ Carlos
ordered.

Drew continued in a
monotone. ‘We start back late Sunday afternoon. The closer we get to my place
the quieter Elena is. She’s scared. Scared of seeing you. She knows you’ll be
hysterical, that you’ll have been looking for her everywhere. She knows you’ll
pressure her to come back. She says she feels so guilty, that she doesn’t know
how to tell you what’s happened. And that’s when we decide. Not to tell you.
Not yet. Then she takes her hand out of mine to brush away her tears and
doesn’t put it back. We spend the rest of the journey in silence, and the
closer I get to home the further I feel from Elena.

‘We get back and I park
in the basement. But when I walk into the living room I remember I left my iPod
in the car. So I drop the bags on the floor and go down for it. When I get in
the lift to come back up it stops at the ground floor. And who should get in?
Well, you must remember.’

Carlos was shaking. He
held his head in his hands and the tears streamed down his face.

‘It was you. You dropped
by to see if I was back. I nearly shit myself when I saw you. When you asked me
where Lizzie was and I said she’d left I was trying to convince myself it
wasn’t really a lie. I opened the front door praying Elena wouldn’t be standing
there and I prayed again when we went in the living room. But she must have
heard our voices and made herself scarce. I really needed that whisky I poured.

‘Then I had to listen to
you as you went off on an emotional crescendo, arms flying like a windmill,
telling me your side of the story. If you hadn’t been so wound up, you’d have
seen how my hand trembled every time I took a sip of Scotch.

‘When she walked in from
the spare room looking so pale, so scared? Right then I knew I’d lost her and…’
Drew massaged his eyes with the heels of his hands as if by doing so he could
rub out the picture of Elena in his mind, ‘… and that the weekend had been a
dream. A taste of something perfect that was too good to be true. I knew right
then Elena and I would never be together. So I left you two and went into my
room.

‘When you knocked on the
door you were beaming. You couldn’t stop thanking me enough for letting Elena
stay. You said you’d worked it all out, that she was going home with you and
when I looked over your shoulder I saw her standing in the middle of the living
room staring at her feet, white faced and blank. She looked translucent, like a
ghost. Then she lifted her head and I saw one small tear, like a little grey
pearl, roll down her cheek. She held my gaze and pressing her lips together
gave the tiniest shake of her head and shrugged. Then her face crumpled and she
turned away to pick up her bag.

‘That was the last time
I saw her.’

After all the talking,
Drew’s mouth was parched. He grabbed another beer, sucked it half empty and
sank down on the other bed, back against the wall, forearms resting on his
knees, head hanging in between.

Carlos rocked to and
fro. After a while, in a flat voice he said, ‘So that’s why I hardly ever saw
you again. Before we left DC. That’s why you didn’t show up at the leaving
party. You couldn’t face me.’

‘I couldn’t face Elena.’

‘And you never saw her
again? After that night?’

‘No.’

‘Did you talk to her
again?’

Drew didn’t reply.

‘Did you ever talk to
her again?’ Carlos repeated.

Drew’s voice was a
whisper. ‘Once.’

‘When?’

Drew was silent.

‘I said when?’

He looked up at Carlos.
‘She called me the day she died.’

‘What?’

‘To tell me she’d left
you. Again. For good she said. She told me you’d had a row about starting a
family. Said she was at the airport. That she was coming back to me.’

‘You bastard!’ Carlos
cried out, holding up his hands as if he could use them to block out Drew’s
words.

‘You wanted to know.
Well here it is. I told her to wait, to give it time but she said there was no
point. She asked me if I didn’t want her any more, if there was someone else. I
told her there had always been someone else, it was the some
one
in my
life I was missing.’

Carlos’s face contorted
and his tears flowed. But Drew felt no remorse. All he wanted now was to punish
Carlos for everything he’d put Elena through. Having plunged in the knife, now
he wanted to twist it and twist it hard.

‘I told her she was
running away, that she had to finish with you first, properly, otherwise she’d
always regret it. But she was adamant. She said she’d had enough. That she
never wanted to see you again. She said she’d been kidding herself for years
trying to make it work, but finally she knew she’d never be happy with you. She
said you treated her like a plaything and that she didn’t want to be used like
that any more. That she wanted to be loved for who she was, not just for the
pleasure she gave.

‘She said she’d catch
the first flight for DC the next morning. I checked the schedules. I tried to
call her back. I went to the airport. I met seven flights. Yes, seven flights.
But she never showed. I was going mad. I thought you’d got to her, made her
change her mind… again. I called you. But your phone was turned off. I left
messages all over. Those hours of not knowing,’ Drew shook his head, ‘the worst
hours of my life. Then you called and told me she’d been murdered.’

Drew looked at Carlos,
his face twisted with pain. ‘I loved her too, you know.’

Wailing, Carlos pounded
the pillow with his fists.

‘At first I blamed you.
I didn’t want to see you. I thought I’d kill you if I did. So I didn’t come to
the funeral. Not getting out of DC? A load of bollocks – I never even
tried. I wanted to say goodbye to her but I couldn’t stomach seeing you. You,
who’d been so busy striving for more, you’d been way too stupid to see that you
already had everything that mattered.

‘So I got pissed and
held a wake for her on my own.

‘Then the years drifted
by. I’d speak to you now and then. And last year I bumped into Joe. When he asked
about you, he couldn’t believe we’d still not seen each other…’

‘
He
knows?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jesus Christ! You
bastard!’

‘It was talking to him
made me think, made me realise that in spite of everything, you and me? We’d
been mates for a long, long time and I missed it. Joe was right. It was time to
put it behind me. So when I started visiting Sophie in Vienna I’d call your
office. Finally, this last time, you were in town.’

‘If you care so much
about our friendship, why tell me all this now? You know how much I loved her
– still love her. She was everything to me.’

Drew shook his head. ‘I
never meant to say anything.’

‘Did she tell you… did
she tell you… she was pregnant?’

Drew dropped his eyes.
‘No… but,’ and hurried on trying to draw attention away from the lie, ‘one
thing I’ve never understood. If you really did love her as much as you say, how
could you bear to see her so unhappy?’

Carlos spoke through his
hands as he tried to hold back the sobs. ‘You hate me, don’t you?’

‘No, Carlos. I don’t
hate you. I never hated you. I just hate what you did to her.’

CHAPTER 13

They didn’t speak. They simply drank their way through the rest of the beers,
each man silently fighting the host of demons messing with his mind.

Eventually Carlos curled
up on the bed. The stress of all the waiting and worrying over the past few
days had done him in even before he’d got to the motel. And now this on top of
everything else. Well, it had totally wiped him out.

All the energy had been
sucked out of his body, leaving it deflated and useless like a punctured tyre.
But the one thing that
was
still working, the thing that he couldn’t
silence even though he’d have given anything to do so, was his brain. It
churned like a hurdy-gurdy playing out the discordant notes of disbelief, anger,
indignation, disgust, hurt and betrayal, over and over again.

Sure Elena had told him
she was miserable. Every time they argued. In fact she told him so often he’d
got fed up hearing it but he always thought once she stopped feeling upset her
unhappiness vanished. But perhaps it wasn’t like that after all. Perhaps he
should have paid more attention to what she said. But he hadn’t. And then one
night she left Carlos and went to
him
looking for a shoulder to cry on
and ended up disclosing private details of her life with Carlos, things that
should have remained within the realm of man and wife. For Carlos, that
humiliation was nearly as painful as the infidelity itself.

And the bastard took
advantage of her. Told her he loved her. Made her think she’d fallen for him.
And then he seduced her. What betrayal. Double betrayal. Betrayed by his wife
and
his best friend.

In his mind he could
imagine them together. He could see Elena’s smile, alive and bright, charged
with adoration and intimacy, the smile that until that day she had kept for
Carlos alone. He could picture
his
filthy hands on her body, touching
her all over. It made him sick. Sick with fury, sick with jealousy, sick with
shame and sick at the invasion of a domain that she’d vowed would remain his
forever.

And more painful than
anything, to know she’d run away and planned to go back to
him
a second
time. How could she? Carlos wanted to scream out in pain, to destroy all the
sordid thoughts attacking his mind and banish the anguish he felt.

 
He couldn’t stop torturing himself by
wondering if she would have got on that plane knowing she was carrying his
baby. He covered his face, wanting to sink into unconsciousness and make it all
go away.

Carlos was not the only one thinking about Elena. Telling her story awakened
all the emotions Drew had kept suppressed for so long.

Although he’d told
Carlos much about what had happened, he hadn’t told him everything. He hadn’t
said how, on that first night, he’d been hypnotised by her amber eyes, how he’d
smelt the sweet vanilla of her breath, felt it’s warmth caress his face as she
kissed him on each cheek before sliding her mouth on top of his. He hadn’t
described how she’d unbuttoned his shirt, glided her hands over his chest, down
his abdomen and under the waistband of his trousers making him moan and his
stomach muscles spasm. He hadn’t mentioned how she’d unzipped her dress,
unhooked her bra and guided his hands over the delicious apple-shaped swell of
her breasts down, down over her belly and slipped his fingers under white lace
and into heaven.

He hadn’t told Carlos
how they had done it right there on the living room floor, oblivious that
Lizzie was sleeping just a wall away.

He couldn’t imagine ever
again experiencing the intensity and array of emotions Elena had aroused in him
that night. The torment he’d felt on losing the only woman he had ever loved
following so quickly on the soaring ecstasy at being united with her had nearly
been too much for him to bear, but he’d hidden his true feelings from Carlos for
her sake.

By returning to Carlos,
Elena signalled her tacit agreement to move to Vienna. Not only was it what
Carlos wanted, but it removed her from an awkward situation. In a way it was a
relief for Drew too. Their brief affair had forever changed his relationship
with them both and the deception acted as an invisible barrier. He dealt with
it by avoiding them, knowing that soon they’d be out of the country and out of
his life.