At Close Quarters (23 page)

He started the old, trusty grey Mercedes, and slowly drove out of the base, giving the corporal on duty time to lift the barrier after hearing the familiar purring of the engine. That kind of
recognition
, in which man makes direct contact with the objects and machines at his service, would soon be a thing of the past.
Technology
, with its magnetic strips and electronic passwords, would replace the personal touch.

Fifty years before, when he was a young lieutenant just
graduated
from the Zaragoza Academy, any army man with
accurate
instructions and a few weeks’ training could handle all the weapons, resources and instruments that military science had created in the last three thousand years for men to kill other men more efficiently. However, in the last couple of decades, the science of war had become so complex that the efficiency of an army depended entirely on its technological development.
Concepts
like personal courage, strategic intelligence, discipline, honour and acceptance of the rules of engagement – where were they now? It was no longer possible for an officer to be made general at a relatively young age by virtue of his bravery in battle. Those men who had lived by such codes of honour were now reduced to secondary roles. How far in the past was all that! How lost were the times in which young soldiers would march to the battle at dawn and gather together in the evening to share words of heroism, while their young, sweet brides embroidered mottos about loyalty, love and sacrifice in silk flags the colours of the
regiment, kissing the cloth before rushing to volunteer as nurses in a hospital, to clean the blood and dirt of the wounded! How lost were those times of admiration, of bugles and ceremonies, when spurs clicked in the corridors of the base, and no officer could boast of being a good soldier if he was not a good horseman; when a parade demanded as much precision as a dance in which one holds a lady by the waist; when the barracks were held in as much esteem as the ballrooms of a palace! What nostalgia for a past in which one didn’t have to hide one’s uniform, which was a source of pride respected by all, from the highest civil servant to those orderlies who, with only a piece of cloth, made boots and buttons shine to perfection! All was behind him, and now the San Marcial base was the last thing to be liquidated. Bramante, Ucha and many others were young enough to adjust and move on. One was leaving for Afghanistan; the other retiring; others would adapt accordingly to their capacities. But he was too old and tired to feign enthusiasm and physical energy in each of his public appearances. He’d spent the best years of his life trying to build something that might endure when he was gone … and in the end he discovered that his efforts had been all in vain.

He arrived home and hung his jacket on the bare coat rack. His three daughters had left home and married, and since his wife had died he lived alone with Piedad, the nanny and maid who had looked after them and now looked after him: she washed his clothes, cleaned his house, prepared his meals.

The light on the answering machine in the living room was blinking. He listened to the messages from two of his daughters. They asked how he was and said they would call back later. It was now almost midnight, so he guessed they wouldn’t ring before the following day. And yet, when he put the receiver down, he was surprised by the sound of the phone.

‘Dad?’ It was his youngest daughter, Loreto.

‘Yes.’

‘I called earlier and you didn’t answer. Piedad wasn’t in either.’

‘She’s at the cinema with some friends, like every week.’

‘It was late and I didn’t think you would be at the base, so I was worried. Is everything all right?’

‘Yes. I had to catch up on some paperwork. I have to leave everything in order.’

‘So it’s true then, they’re going to close the base down?’

‘Yes, it’s true. I told you.’

‘But it’s so unbelievable. And what are they going to do with it?’

‘Flats.’

‘Flats? You mean they’re going to knock down everything you …? When?’

‘When I am dead,’ he was about to reply, but contained himself in time; his illness was still a secret.

‘I can’t believe they’ll do that with the base … and with you.’

‘They can do it with the base. They can close it down. They can’t do anything to me,’ he commented, with the firmness of someone who has always maintained and observed discipline: not even in front of family and friends would he ever blame a superior for giving an unjust order.

‘Well, they’re forcing you into retirement,’ she replied.

Then he suspected, with a slight feeling of guilt, what it was that his daughters were really worried about. Had they talked amongst themselves about how difficult it would be to have him move in with them, to adjust to new routines; had they discussed with their husbands how long he would stay, what room he would be given? None of his daughters had married an army man, and, although he had no complaints about their husbands, they belonged to a civilian world which felt ill at ease with the rigid military milieu he represented. On occasion he had even wondered whether, deep down, the husbands did not belong to the kind of people who find anything a soldier says suspicious just because it is a soldier who says it.

No, he wouldn’t move in with any of them, he would endure at home, with Piedad. The military club and those friends who were still alive would satisfy his needs for social life, and if there came a time when his legs were no longer able to carry him down
the street, and his shaking hands no longer could hold a glass without spilling water or cut a piece of bread without hurting his fingers, and by midnight he didn’t remember what he’d done in the morning … if there came a day when his own decrepitude filled him with bitterness and there was nothing to hang on to, well, one didn’t need much strength to put a gun to one’s temple. In the past, life, the simple fact of living, had seemed to him a marvel. Misfortune, worries, disappointments had all been brief and
manageable
, and he had promptly reconciled himself with something like happiness. But life had lost its interest; the three or four things worth breathing for had disappeared. He listened admiringly to acquaintances who had overcome serious illnesses like cancer or pancreatitis: ‘It happened three years ago, so I’ve defeated death for three years.’ But he didn’t share their enthusiasm. He didn’t mind dying, so long as he was able to decide where and when. It wouldn’t be long now. Ever since the doctors had told him that the hepatitis he’d had twenty years before was developing into a hepatic cirrhosis, he’d known that two years was the longest he had. Since then, that sweet smell of rotten apples had never left him: it pervaded his pillow, his clothes, the armchair where he watched TV, his breath and sweat.

Piedad, not knowing what it was, kept saying for a month:

‘It smells of apples, how weird. I haven’t bought any for months.’

But later she must have noticed it was him, that the hepatic foetor emanated from his body, and she made no further
comments
. She did something else, though: she started putting apples in the cupboards, among the clothes, in the fruit bowl, for him to think that she hadn’t noticed. One morning, when he was looking for a shirt and an apple rolled out of his wardrobe, he smiled to himself, thanking her silently for her crude compassion, and let her believe that she could carry on deceiving him.

Both had fought a silent duel to see who better resisted ageing, but now that she had won, he found her sympathy touching and, on a couple of occasions, he had held back a tear, refusing to be a crying old man. All that remained was to live out whatever time
he had in the best possible way before pain or anxiety became unbearable. In old age, the body just endures; only when one is young can it heal, he told himself as he pressed the palm of his hand on his belly, near his liver. He was a sick man who had no chance of recovering. The same illness that took away his appetite was weakening his legs; the same illness that had made his breasts grow was knitting a web of capillaries under the skin of his face which had scared his grandchildren the last time they’d visited.

He had often heard that a serious illness changes one’s outlook on life. That values change and the ill person stops caring about some things and starts appreciating others. But he hadn’t felt any substantial changes: he held the same beliefs and hated the same things as ever. His dislike of Olmedo had been the same before and after learning he was ill. Ever since Olmedo had arrived, the colonel had felt there would be trouble, because the provincial calm that he’d managed to establish in San Marcial did not square with Olmedo’s fresh ideas. However, Castroviejo had never given in to the temptation of boycotting Olmedo’s work, hiding information from him or putting obstacles in the way of his reports. He had played fair, observing the rules that he’d been taught to observe, and the military code he’d learned even before first putting on the uniform. That’s why he thought Olmedo would not refuse the only favour that he had gone to ask of him: that, when the San Marcial base was turned into plots of land for flats, they did not demolish the main pavilion; that they at least leave
standing
that building that held so many memories of effort and
sacrifice
and pain, but also of honour and glory, being the oldest, most solid and most representative building in the compound.
Castroviejo
didn’t want his grandchildren to have to ask him: ‘Grandad, where was the base where you used to be a soldier?’ No doubt, Olmedo could see to that, he had prestige and resources enough to come up with architectural, or heritage, or historical arguments to prevent it being knocked down and turned into a crowded block of flats or a public garden where dogs would shit. It was such an easy favour to grant!

A sudden need to go to the toilet made him stand up. He tried but didn’t manage to empty his bladder. On coming back, he slumped on the armchair and closed his eyes, trying not to think of anything until Piedad came back from the cinema, but he felt a hint of fear at falling asleep and never waking up. Under his drooping eyelids small fleeting sparks went by like tiny ephemeral comets with a life of their own, independent from his will to see them or not. He opened his eyes, frightened, wondering whether that might be another symptom of his illness.

He was relieved to hear the key being introduced softly into the lock. He closed his eyes once again and called out:

‘Piedad!’

‘Do you still trust Bramante will answer your questions without making up some new lie?’

‘Yes, his previous alibi is useless now. And I don’t mind if he does it willingly or unwillingly, so long as we can make progress.’

Perhaps it was arrogance that had made him list his address and full name – García Bramante, J. – in the telephone directory. He lived in a street in the centre of town, and Cupido and Alkalino walked over there unhurriedly, almost strolling along the wide pavements where the bars had put up tables for all the people who had gone out in the warm spring weather: it was one of those days when the street ceased to be a place of passage and became the scene of a chaotic, colourful spectacle. A radiant yellow sun was starting to tan winter’s translucent skin, giving it a healthier look. And the bright sunlight sharpened people’s eyes. All the girls seemed to have turned into women and decided to spill out into the street. Alkalino watched with admiration and astonishment life’s organic plenitude, that fertile abundance, that whirlpool of curves which, with each movement, caused shakes and quakes of feminine flesh which seemed to reproduce the vibrations of the earth on which they walked.

They didn’t know the exact floor on which Bramante lived, but on the third try someone told them. Cupido pressed the button and presently recognised his voice, too loud even on the intercom.

‘Ricardo Cupido?’ Bramante repeated when Cupido told him that he would like to have a word with him.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve said all I have to say.’

‘Of course you did,’ Cupido replied. ‘But other people talk too. There’s someone who tells us you were not at the gym that evening.’

In the silence that followed they imagined Bramante behind the door, twelve or fifteen metres above them, with a serious, worried expression as he unnecessarily squeezed the receiver. Then they heard a feminine voice asking: ‘Who is it? What –’ before his hand had time to cover the mouthpiece. Then, after another wait of several slow seconds, two simple words were heard, uttered in the same tone in which Bramante might have ordered a recruit to pick something up or run ten laps around the pitch:

‘Come up.’

They pushed the door and took the lift. After ringing the bell they still had to wait a few seconds before Bramante opened and let them in.

‘Good afternoon.’

The woman did not rise from the sofa, but only tilted her head to greet them with a curious, slightly sarcastic gesture. Cupido remembered her as part of a group of women who were laughing the day of the pledge of allegiance. She barely deigned to look at Alkalino’s dark, badly shaven face, as if wondering why he didn’t buy proper razor blades, but she stared at Cupido, whom she had seen just once before, at the party, as if she were surprised how accurately she remembered him.

‘So you’re still worrying about all that?’ asked Bramante without making a single movement that might be construed as an invitation to sit down. ‘I thought the case was closed.’

‘I wish it was.’

‘So?’ He made a gesture of surprise opening his arms and showing his big, almost ostentatious, tense muscles – too tense for someone who’s just at home – as though he were challenging him to a fight.

‘We needed to check a few things, and we discovered you were not at the gym on that day.’

Even before he’d finished he noticed the spark of hot, hormonal
anger that shook him and, at the same time, how the woman on the sofa, though still motionless, grew tense.

‘Says who? A psychic that …’

‘The attendance register at the gym,’ interrupted Cupido, without giving any further details.

‘I see,’ he said, appearing relaxed. He crossed his arms, so that he no longer looked like he was threatening them but rather protecting himself. ‘The attendance register. But machines often fail, and perhaps that day the box with my name on it was not ticked. A misunderstanding that can confuse any curious person who takes the trouble to check it.’

‘Maybe that’s what it was,’ said Cupido. Now he knew that Bramante was aware he’d been at the gym, in the office, for a few minutes, time enough to see he’d been absent. And, by the same token, he guessed Bramante had solved the problem by ticking the box. ‘A technical problem, easy to solve so long as …’

‘As what?’

‘As long as no one testifies that the machine didn’t fail.’

Bramante looked at him for a couple of seconds in silence, concentrating, as if he was repeating to himself the last sentence to make sure he’d heard it right the first time.

‘I see,’ he said again. ‘Someone … a psychic might guess … But I’d like to see a psychic try,’ he stammered out the clumsy threat with difficulty, not sure he’d chosen the right words, perhaps wondering whether he was not making a second mistake.

Cupido saw his anger increase from one word to the next and thought of Olmedo, who was so different, who liked trim uniforms as much as a well turned phrase, a well constructed argument, a solid case. A hundred years earlier Bramante would have been a good soldier, someone who would never challenge an order even if it was unjust, so long as it was clear and brief; he was disciplined, coarse, severe, trustworthy, incapable of treason because he lacked initiative; he was passionate about the sound of swords clinking, barracks songs and the colours of the flag; he would never appreciate his soldiers less than his weapons.

‘You mean my husband was seen outside the gym at that time?’

Cupido was not surprised that it was she who spoke. She had actually taken her time to come to his help.

‘I mean someone saw your husband was not in the gym at that time,’ he corrected.

‘But, even if that were true, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean at all that he was near Olmedo. The world is big enough, and there are plenty of places to go, you know,’ she said, her voice filled with the same kind of gentle, self-confident sarcasm that shone in her eyes.

‘Of course,’ agreed Cupido. ‘This is not substantial enough to be considered evidence. But it can complicate matters.’

The woman looked at her husband and then at the detective, gauging their strength and weapons.

‘Better to avoid complications,’ she suggested, as if she could foresee the outcome of the showdown.

‘Yes,’ said Cupido tersely. He guessed she would not carry on talking in front of her husband, and not out of fear or respect, but because of what she’d said a moment ago: to avoid complications, not to disturb that lazy, sensual comfort she inhabited.

‘But even if those complications arose,’ said Bramante, once again in a surly tone, breaking the pact of silence that seemed to have been made between his wife and the detective, ‘even if they arose, there would always have to be some psychic who dared tell me that on that afternoon …’

‘José,’ put in the woman, gently yet firmly.

‘… I wasn’t …’

‘José,’ she interrupted again, wiser than him to realise that there are conflicts that not only cannot be solved through violence, but that violence makes worse. Or perhaps she just saw how
ineffectual
her husband’s threats were to the tall detective, who listened calmly, as if the warning did not concern him, or was something trivial.

At that moment Bramante looked at her, and then seemed to give in, brooding in silence, even though he still exhibited his
muscles, as if waiting for that psychic messenger he kept
mentioning
to arrive. There was nothing left to say. Cupido left them his phone number, and a little later Bramante walked them politely to the door.

Barely an hour and a quarter later, when Cupido and Alkalino returned back home after stopping for a bite to eat, the telephone rang, and the detective recognised the feminine voice who was asking to see him, because she had something important to tell him.

‘When and where,’ asked Cupido.

‘Now, at your place. I’m out in the street, at a pay phone. Give me your address. I won’t be long.’

They saw her get out of the cab and look up at the windows of the building, convinced that the two men were watching her. She rang the bell and pushed the door on hearing the buzz. Cupido was waiting for her at the door, and stepped to one side to let her in.

The woman walked without hesitating into the small living room and sat on one of the two armchairs. She opened her handbag and took out a pack of cigarettes and a flat golden lighter.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked, already with a cigarette between her red lips, and without waiting for an answer she lit it. Then she blew the smoke directly in front of her and looked at the coffee table as if looking for an ashtray. There were none in the house, so Cupido fetched a small plate from the kitchen.

‘What did you want to tell me?’ he asked, thinking of Alkalino, who, sitting on his hard-backed chair behind the half open door of his dark room, would be listening intently not only to the woman’s words but also to her tone for any hesitations, or a quickness or slowness to reply.

‘It wasn’t my husband,’ she said. ‘Maybe he did not go to the gym that evening. I guess you wouldn’t claim that if you hadn’t checked. But my husband didn’t go to Olmedo’s house and shoot him in the chest.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

The woman smiled, impartial and kind, undisturbed by the detective’s words.

‘Don’t you think I know him? Do you think that after twelve years of living with him, listening to his opinions, sleeping in the same bed as him, I still don’t know him well enough?’

‘Let’s say there’s always the possibility that there could be secrets in a marriage.’

‘I guess so. But in this case José is not the one in possession of a secret.’

‘Do you mean you are?’

She tipped the ash onto the plate with a deft movement of her index finger, which ended in a nail painted an intense red, not too short and not too sharp, but curved, hard and shiny enough to put one in mind of the paws of a powerful, amoral female feline.

‘I’m not here to talk about myself, but to defend my husband. My secrets are mine. As for José’s, he doesn’t have any, he wouldn’t be able to keep them. He’s too naïve for intrigues, has never learned how to do that kind of thing. He thinks that in his profession being strong is enough.’

‘And is that not the case? Isn’t strength what matters most?’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘One day, at the base, they were discussing that, and I heard Olmedo say that the result of a battle depends as much on the strength of the one giving the blows as on the resistance to pain and suffering of the one receiving them.’

‘So you knew Olmedo?’

‘Yes, he was the kind of man everyone criticised so much that your curiosity is awakened. Despite what my husband said of him, I think he was a very intelligent officer.’

Cupido found this declaration odd, almost astonishing.

‘Are you surprised that I speak well of him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You shouldn’t be. We speak well of the dead to make up for how badly we speak of the living – a matter of conscience. But I’ll never praise him in front of my husband.’

‘He didn’t like him.’

‘Like him? José hated him.’

‘It would seem that what he had against Olmedo was more than professional rivalry.’

‘My husband thought he was a traitor. And I’ve often heard him express his scorn of traitors. “A soldier will use everything you’ve taught him against you,” he says. Anyway, I’m hoping you won’t use this information against him.’

‘You wouldn’t be providing it if you didn’t have some other information that makes it irrelevant. Right?’

‘Right,’ she smiled, and still took another drag at her cigarette, holding the toasted filter between her red-tipped middle and index fingers. ‘Yes, because there was someone else who wasn’t where they were supposed to be at the time Olmedo died.’

‘Who?’ asked Cupido steadily.

‘Dr Lesmes Beltrán. We both work at the same hospital. Do you know of his troubles with Olmedo?’

‘Yes.’

‘He had serious reasons to hate him.’

‘How do
you
know?’

‘I’m a nurse. I work in the maternity ward. That evening we had a patient who asked for an epidural. It wasn’t the moment to give the injection yet, but Dr Beltrán, who was meant to be on duty, went out for an hour. I happened to see him get in his car, drive out of the car park and head for the centre of town.’

‘As in your husband’s case, his absence does not prove that he went near Olmedo on that evening,’ Cupido remarked.

‘But it must have been an important matter. At least important enough for him to risk leaving when, if there had been any complications with the birth, anyone could have found out he wasn’t there. Important enough for him to lie when he returned.’

‘How so?’

‘He’d been gone for almost an hour when the patient started complaining a bit. We nurses know what to do in those cases, how to calm them down, ask them to be patient. But I used that excuse to look for him. I called his house. He hadn’t been there
and his wife thought he was in the hospital. When he returned some ten minutes later I told him I’d been looking for him because the patient was complaining. He told me he’d been around the whole time, though he’d gone out to smoke a cigarette and had later popped by the pharmacy to collect some doses of anaesthetics and check on the stock. All lies of course. His car was not in the staff car park during all that time.’

As though it were planned, she finished her cigarette at the same time as her story. She stubbed it out on the plate as if sneering at the vulgar object. She put away the pack and lighter in her bag and made as if to rise from the armchair.

‘Thank you for the information. It’s important,’ said the detective.

‘Thank me by finding out the truth, so we can all sleep in peace.’

‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Sure, why not? You’ve barely asked me any.’

‘He doesn’t know, right?’

‘That Beltrán left the hospital when …?’

‘That you’ve come here to tell me,’ he interrupted.

‘No, he doesn’t.’

Cupido nodded, as he did whenever he confirmed the unwelcome suspicion that his trade had altered his character, had turned him into a pessimist, always on the lookout for deceit and the basest motives.