Obsession (Year of Fire) (46 page)

One day he found the boy in the attic, crying. He respected the teenager’s attempt to hide his moment of weakness. His failure to act in the face of danger had humiliated him; it continued to humiliate him every time the police or the agents from the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire interrogated him, although Takumi saw that he nonetheless faced up to them without flinching.

“This place,” Kaito said, “would make a magnificent dojo.”

“What’s a dojo?” asked the young Al-Saud, blushing because his voice was cracked.

“It’s a type of gymnasium where martial arts are taught.” Kaito studied the attic and evaluated the state it was in. “Yes, this would undoubtedly be a good dojo. Would you like to learn how to fight the way you saw me fight when they tried to kidnap you?” He brought up the day on purpose, without hesitating. “I think you have the talent for combat.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen you playing sports at school. You move gracefully, you’re in harmony with your body. You feel comfortable in it.”

His words were incomprehensible. Eliah didn’t know what the Japanese man was talking about, as if he and his body could be two separate entities.

“I don’t share my knowledge with just anyone, Eliah.”

The young Al-Saud looked up and stared at his bodyguard. It was the first time he had ever called him by his name.

“My knowledge can help you to kill a man without any effort. But it’s not about that. You have the balance and control required to determine the right time to turn your body into a lethal weapon. If I teach you, Eliah, no one will ever be able to hurt you.”

“I didn’t know what to do when those men wanted to take my mother and sister. I acted like a coward.”

“A Horse of Fire, a coward? The Horse of Fire doesn’t know fear. It’s not a question of virtue. He’s simply born without that feeling. Were you really scared on the day of the kidnapping? I doubt it. Nobody is as calm as a Horse of Fire in the face of tragedy. Sometimes it can make them seem inhuman.”

“What are you talking about?” Eliah asked.

“I’m talking about you. You were born on February seventh, 1967, which means that you’re a Horse of Fire in the Chinese zodiac.” Al-Saud’s amused smile didn’t offend Kaito. “You didn’t believe in me either when your father hired me. You said that you could knock me down with your little finger, isn’t that right?” Eliah’s beardless cheeks turned red again. “So I advise you not to doubt me when I tell you that your spirit is a Horse of Fire.”

“Okay.” He gave in after a pause. “I do want you to teach me to fight like you did that day.”

“I will, Eliah, but I won’t just be teaching you to fight, but also to respect everything around you, from the smallest to the largest creature. Because every element is part of a whole, nothing is here by chance. I won’t just be your trainer, I’ll become your master. That’s why you’ll call me Master Takumi. You’ll call me Takumi sensei. Say it.”

“Takumi sensei.”

“Takumi sensei,” Al-Saud said and bowed. Then they fell into a hug. “
Bonjour
, Laurette,” he said, greeting the woman.

Matilde thought that the woman was going to burst into tears. She excitedly wrapped Al-Saud in her tubby arms and let out a stream of words that were indecipherable to her; the
Haute-Normandie
accent was even more difficult to understand than the Parisian one. Although
Al-Saud allowed her to hug him, Matilde sensed that these displays of affection made him uncomfortable.

“Sensei, Laurette, this is Matilde, my woman.”

Laurette uttered a little squeal of delight, hugged Matilde and spoke quickly and at length. Matilde, blushing and surprised at how Al-Saud had introduced her, felt ridiculous as she bent down automatically in front of the Japanese man. They went into the house. Laurette continued to prattle on to Matilde. Al-Saud tried to translate, but it didn’t matter how many times he explained that Matilde’s French was limited, the woman kept up her endless, incomprehensible flow. Eventually Kaito said something to her quietly but energetically in Japanese, and Laurette fell silent, still smiling.

The house was built from wood and white stone. They crossed the hall and went down three large steps to enter a huge room. Matilde immediately fell victim to the charm of the place: the hearth with two logs already crackling on an open fire, a large love seat and several more individual brown leather armchairs, cushions scattered all around and an enormous carpet on the parquet floor. Next to the window that looked out onto the back garden, there was a long oak table with a fruit bowl filled with apples, oranges and bananas.

A staircase at the far end of the room led to an internal balcony, which jutted out over the living room. Matilde wondered what the view was like from above and started to climb. Al-Saud’s cell phone rang, and he looked at the screen before answering.

“I have to take this call,” he said, and Matilde nodded.

She saw him cross the living room, enter another room and close the door behind him. Kaito smiled at her and gestured for her to go up. Laurette and the Japanese man took care of the luggage.

“It’s going to snow tonight,” Takumi told her; Matilde could understand his slow, deliberate French. “The house has an excellent heating system, miss.”

“Monsieur Kaito, please call me Matilde. It would be a pleasure for me.”

“Well then, Matilde it is.”

They moved across the balcony. Matilde stopped and looked at the room below her; from there she saw, a few feet from the hearth, a piece of furniture that housed the hi-fi and hundreds of CDs. She smiled. Eliah’s passion for music was starting to have an influence on her. She resumed
her tour. On the top floor, Kaito explained, there were four bedrooms and a gymnasium.

“This is Eliah’s room.”

“It’s very cozy. What beautiful flowers!” she exclaimed, and went over to the chest of drawers to smell them; there were many bright colors—violet, white, fuchsia—in the bunch. “Oh, what an exquisite smell. What kind of flower are they? I don’t know it.”

“
Jacinthe
,” Laurette hurried to answer, and explained that it was very rare to have them at this time of year; she grew them in the greenhouse.

“Laurette, let’s let Matilde freshen up and settle in. In half an hour we’ll serve lunch. The bathroom is in there.”

“Thank you, Takumi. Thank you, Laurette.” Matilde smiled at them. She felt wonderful.

Al-Saud closed the door of the study to answer the call.

“Talk to me, Tony.”

“I’m at Lefortovo’s.” He called Vladimir Chevrikov by his nom de guerre. “We have the material ready.”

“What can you tell me?”

“It’s even better than we were hoping for. Everything is here. He photographed the laboratory, the substances, the employees handling them, reports, inventory documents, place of origin, the shipping invoices. Basically, it’s a scoop. Do you want me to contact the journalist to start executing the plan?”

“No. Let’s wait. I want to see about the other evidence before we contact the Dutchman.”

“Do you want me to take care of it? Or Mike?”

Al-Saud weighed up the advisability of confronting Roy Blahetter again. He wondered whether he would be able to control his urge to reduce him to a blubbering wreck.

“Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll take care of it. Keep me posted on everything, any time.”

Al-Saud went back into the living room. Laurette’s voice floated out from the kitchen, talking about Matilde—so tiny, so beautiful, but how
old could she be? She guessed twenty, and wasn’t that a little young for Eliah? She must be a good person; anyone who recognized the beauty of her hyacinths couldn’t be bad—Al-Saud shook his head and smiled. He bounded upstairs. He went into his bedroom and found her on the terrace. She had put on her jacket and gone out to admire the countryside. The wind was tousling her hair. What a beautiful image! He felt her jolt when he wrapped his arms around her from behind and pressed her against his chest to calm her. They stood in silence. From there they could see the stables, two long, thin, parallel constructions with whitewashed walls and gabled roofs covered with Spanish tiles.

“Do you like riding?”

“I love it. But I haven’t been on a horse in years.”

“Do you know how to ride?”

“I had an instructor when I was little. And when we went to my grandparents’ country house, it was hard to get me off the horse. I just wanted to ride and ride. But then we lost the country house and the horses, and I never rode again.”

Al-Saud wanted to know everything about her, not just because he yearned to know her profoundly, but also because of what Juana had told him, that Matilde would tell him her sorrows when he had earned her trust.

“What happened with the country house? Why did they lose it?”

He thought she wouldn’t answer until he heard her sigh.

“We lost everything. The country house, the horses, the family mansion, the jewels, the paintings, the cars, everything, everything.” She turned around in his embrace and put her cheek on his leather jacket. “My father swindled many people. He was a bank director and when it failed, it left many people with nothing at all. We would get insulting phone calls, people abused us outside our house. The lawyers locked themselves in the study with my father and my grandparents. They were so worried. My father was drinking in the morning. My mother was crying in her room. My grandmother Celia called my father every bad name under the sun. One day they came to seize the house and everything inside of it. It was so horrible!” Her voice failed her.

“Shh. Enough. Don’t tell me more,” he said to her, and tightened his arms around her, trying to bolster her with his strength and energy.

Matilde lifted her face, and Al-Saud, moved by the sight of her enormous eyes brimming with tears, felt a knot in his throat.

“Matilde,” he lamented and buried his face in her neck. “Matilde. My love. Matilde.”

“One morning,” she continued, “my father came to my room and said that he was going out for a few hours, but that he would be back to take me to Juana’s birthday party. I was happy because for once he was sober, well dressed and had even put on cologne. He hugged and kissed me and told me that he loved me with all his heart. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t speak. How I regretted it! I should have said, ‘I love you so much, Daddy!’ Instead I said nothing. And he never came back. That morning he went to court to plead guilty and they threw him in jail.”

Al-Saud wasn’t expecting this kind of confession. He didn’t know that his aunt Sofía’s brother had been imprisoned for fraud.

Matilde stuck out her chin and faced him with a determined look.

“He was in jail for five years. Since he didn’t have any money at all, he couldn’t pay to get into the VIP section, so he had to see out his time with the common criminals, with the worst kind of people. I don’t want to imagine what he must have gone through!”

“Don’t think about that! I’m sure that your father knows how to take care of himself.”
What a stupid thing to say!
He chastised himself, overcome by impotence.

Matilde shook her head.

“I don’t know, Eliah, I don’t know. He always seemed so defeated.”

“You went to visit him?”

“I was the only one in my family who went to visit him, except for my grandfather Esteban. But my grandfather died—from the pain, I think—soon afterward. After that, I was the only one who visited. Juana and Ezequiel would go with me. Juana’s father brought us. They were my family. They were always my family.” Suddenly, Matilde regained her composure. “Eliah, don’t judge my father harshly. He’s not a bad person. He made a mistake, he got confused, lost, but I know he didn’t do those things intentionally or in bad faith. I promise you!”

“I know, I know.”

“I love him so much! I don’t know why. In truth, he wasn’t a very good father. He was an alcoholic, got along terribly with my mother, had
lovers and was never at home. But I love him, Eliah. Maybe because I know he loves me with all his heart, just like he told me the day when…” Matilde let out a raw sob, and Al-Saud regretted having reminded her of so much pain. He held her, absorbed her spasms, rocked her in his arms and kissed her head. Between kisses, he whispered, “Matilde,
mon amour, ne pleures pas, je t’en prie. Je suis désolé. Ne pleures pas, s’il te plaît.
” Minutes later he felt her body relax. He cradled her face in his hands and asked her to look at him.

“Just for having given life to a creature as magnificent as you, your father deserves all my respect.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice shaking and her vision blurred.

Lunch with the Kaito couple—Matilde was surprised to find out that Takumi and Laurette were married—helped to dissipate the last vestiges of the sadness caused by the revelation on the balcony. Matilde was wearing a riding outfit belonging to Yasmín, which was a little big on her. Her boots were also a little large, so Eliah had filled them with cotton.

“What size do you wear?” he asked in wonder as he knelt in front of her with her foot in his hand.

“Four and a half.”

“It’s the smallest adult foot I’ve ever seen in my life.” He kissed her instep, and every toe, and had started moving up her naked calf when Laurette announced, from the bottom floor, that lunch was served.

“It’s just for this meal,” Al-Saud apologized. “The rest of the time we’ll be completely alone, I promise.”

They looked at each other. Matilde’s eyes and nose were still red from crying. Al-Saud’s eyes lingered on her heart-shaped mouth, which was the color of a maraschino cherry. He couldn’t remember ever having seen lips this beautiful. He put his hand on her cheek, and she rested her face in its hollow.

“Forgive me for making you sad. I only want you to be happy.”

“Eliah, no one has made me happier than you.”

He wanted to ask her,
Why, Matilde? Why do I make you happy? Why am I your savior? Because I showed you how to make love? Do you love me, Matilde?
As usual, he remained silent.

During lunch, Laurette spoke enough for everyone. Little by little, Matilde got used to her accent. She noticed that Takumi Kaito was looking at her and wished Eliah would take his hand off her crotch, because she was sure the Japanese man could see the change in her expression.