Authors: Daniel Chavarria
Adios Muchachos (10 page)
Alicia’s performance was finally over. Elizabeth returned to the living room in her role as lady-in-love, wearing her usual sweet smile—although the smile was a lot closer to dumb than to sweet because after eight martinis, the last four of which she had wolfed down like a lush slapping back bourbons, she no longer had much control over her facial muscles.
Rieks Groote and Elizabeth were two completely independent people who lived in worlds far apart. In their relations with Victor, each had their own style and never crossed the dividing line. Their conversations were different, their roles were different, and one world never entered into the other. When Rieks was with Victor, he never mentioned Elizabeth, and Elizabeth acted like Rieks did not exist at all. Victor and Rieks talked or argued about business, never about anything else. Elizabeth and Victor also had their spats, but never about business and only when Elizabeth had a sporadic bout of jealousy. Whenever she felt her confidence waning or got to doubting the sincerity of his affection, she would attack Victor on any pretext.
Victor was fascinated by his talent for keeping up the two personalities so convincingly; they were so coherent and so completely distinct. And yet, in the month of September, when the dispute about the commissions introduced a great divide between Victor and Rieks, relations between Victor and Elizabeth also suffered.
They had gone for almost a month without seeing each other, but twenty days before enjoying Alicia’s contortive machinations with her two fauns, Rieks had called Victor to his office and informed him that van Dongen had run a thorough analysis of the entire operation and that the report had convinced him that Victor’s demands were entirely fair. He wanted him to know that he was leaving that very afternoon for Holland, armed with the iron-clad justifications delineated in the van Dongen report, to have it out with his brother in the presence of the Board.
A few days later, Rieks returned and announced that all his demands had been accepted and that the legal papers to that effect would be ready for signing by the end of January. Victor thanked him sincerely for the intervention in his favor and felt an immediate need to meet with Elizabeth and make her very happy. That same afternoon, he left her a note at her house.
As a rule and as far as rules go, Victor was straight; he did not feel physically attracted to Elizabeth. But when she got herself up in those provocative dresses, with her exotic perfumes and other hidden charms, well, she was able to stimulate him. She would start him slow and then, in the dark, when the moment of truth arrived, Victor responded like a real man, experiencing supreme satisfaction inside of Elizabeth.
When Alicia came on the scene, things got even easier. Their sexual relations became something they both awaited with great anticipation. They would conspire and speculate like young lovers about what that crazy girl would think up next. Because Alicia was priceless. She had brought mystery and expectation to their strained relations. She was imaginative, creative, a genius at improvising; she drove Victor and Elizabeth into erotic frenzies. Sometimes she would make fun of her lovers. Once she threw a bowl full of Sicilian olives on the floor and told her lover that he should try to pick them up with his buttocks; as many as he managed to pick up, that many minutes she would prolong her fellatio on him. Elizabeth laughed like a child and begged Victor to do the same.
From the moment Alicia appeared on the scene, Elizabeth no longer had to start her overtures from zero. As soon as Alicia came on stage and Elizabeth appeared in her attire, Victor was ready, magnificently tumescent. Elizabeth began to feel like a beautiful and sexy woman; her attraction to and confidence in Victor swelled. When she closed her eyes, she could almost return to her adolescence, those years of yearning when she dreamed of being in the arms of someone like Mel Gibson.
From the room that doubled as a theater loge during Alicia’s performances, they could still see the scene of her latest exploits. Alicia and her wonderful dancer had left some time ago. Of that evening’s prodigious sexual ministrations, only the faun remained … smiling.
Elizabeth closed the armoire and ran the curtains, humming something under her breath. She poured herself another martini, prepared a whiskey on the rocks for Victor, and proposed a toast: “To us!”
They stood, touched glasses, and drank.
Victor rolled the couch back to its usual place in the middle of the room and collapsed onto it. He was wearing only shorts and, despite the air conditioning, felt warm.
Half an hour and two martinis later, Elizabeth’s tongue was heavier than ever, and her mastery of high-heel shoes had gone the way of her tongue. She kept chewing on a strand of hair, making it even harder to understand what she was trying to say.
Victor was feeling no pain, flying low, but he was hardly drunk, and when he saw her gulp down another martini, he gently took it from her and set it on the table. “That’s enough, Elizabeth, even you must realize that you’ve already had too much to—”
“If I were as drunk as you think,” she interrupted, obviously quite drunk and defiantly set on proving otherwise, “do you think I could do this?” She started to whirl like a dervish on a single heel with her arms spread, but suddenly lost her balance and collided against Victor, who held her up by the waist.
“Let’s go to bed, Elizabeth; you’re very drunk.”
“Youuuu are drunk, amigo … now let’s see if you can do this one.” She attempted to make a four—that is, to stand on one leg, arms spread out wide, and cross the opposite ankle over the knee—but she fell over sideways.
Victor let out a mocking laugh and sprang up from the couch to show her how to do a four. Elizabeth pushed him back down and leaped on top of him, pretending to be furious and on the attack, and finally wound up laughing along with him, biting him, kissing him until they collapsed on the floor in a heap of twisted bodies. They stayed that way for a few minutes until their laughter died down.
Sitting on the floor in the lotus position, Elizabeth took an olive from the lower shelf of the liquor cart. “Now, you look at me! I’ll show you who’s the drunk.”
And with the olive between her index finger and thumb she closed one eye, took aim, and attempted a three-pointer into an empty narrow-neck vase standing about five yards away. To her immense surprise, she made the basket. She lunged up from the couch and started a tottering victory dance amid cheers and whistles. Then she took the dish of olives and put them up against Victor’s nose, exclaiming, “Go ahead, my drunky wunky, let’s see what you can do!”
Victor took an olive halfheartedly, shot, and watched the olive role under the nearest table.
Elizabeth’s mocking laughter rang through the room and Victor took another shot, then a third, none of which found their mark.
Elizabeth was enjoying his defeat so much. She whistled; she jeered; she shot him a bird and a Bronx cheer.
For his fourth attempt, Victor went through a grotesque reproduction of the whole routine he had so often seen in professional basketball. He took the olive with both hands, pressed it to his chest, lifted his head to measure his distance. Then he breathed deeply, got his concentration, and propped his elbow on the palm of his left hand. With a neat break of the wrist, he catapulted the olive in a high arching shot that missed the vase by a wide margin.
This time Elizabeth went absolutely wild. She whistled; she jumped; she ran from one end of the room to the other doing everything fans do when the other team misses a free throw.
On the last of her comic dashes, Elizabeth slipped on one of the olives and, unable to regain her balance in the spiked heels, fell backward against the nearest of the planters. One of the lanceolate tips of the ornamental iron work around the border of the planter found its way to the base of her occipital bone, penetrating into the rachis bulb.
Instant death.
Elizabeth lay on her back, her head at almost a right angle with her chest, framed in greenery streaked with sprays of
Alpinia Purpurata
. With her wig slightly askew and the exaggerated make-up, she looked like a forgotten mannequin. But her darkened skin, surrounded with highlights of intense scarlet from the
Alpinia
framing her face, was already beginning to take on the ghastly green hue of a cadaver.
The pit of the olive of destiny had etched a perfectly straight line on the waxed parquet floor.
Alicia was fast asleep. The telephone rang several times before it managed to wake her up. It stopped ringing. She covered her eyes with a pillow to block the harsh ceiling light.
Margarita came through the door and tapped her on the shoulder. Alicia mumbled something and turned over.
“Wake up, child! Victor has been trying to reach you.”
“What time is it? What does he want?”
“It’s 4:30. Go ahead, take the phone. He says it’s urgent.”
Alicia took the phone and plopped it on her ear. “What? … Do you know what time it is? I’m completely asleep, forcrisake!” Alicia propped herself up on her elbows and suddenly looked very awake and interested. “Your wife? … OK, I’ll throw something on and leave immediately.”
She hung up the telephone and only then realized that Margarita had been standing by the bed all that time, wringing her hands and waiting for some explanation of what could possibly be so urgent. Alicia just looked at her, pensive and in a terrible mood.
“Is anything wrong, Ali?”
“It looks like Victor’s wife has had an accident …”
“What happened to her?”
“He didn’t say.”
“So what do you have to …”
“What do I know, Mother? If he’s asking for my help …” she trailed off, shrugging her shoulders and considering the question-and-answer period over.
Alicia leaped from the bed. Margarita watched her nude daughter walk toward the bathroom in her short, smooth finishing-school stride.
An ashtray full of half-smoked butts; Groote’s body covered with a silk sheet; a gilt mantle clock telling the world the time was 05:15.
Victor heard the sound of the automatic gate, crossed the living room, peeked through the blinds, and identified Alicia’s white convertible coming up the driveway through the garden and toward the garage. Victor triggered the garage door from the inside; he had already moved his own car into the backyard to make room for Alicia’s. As he accompanied her through the kitchen into the living room, he tried to prepare her for the shock.
“Something terrible has happened,” Victor began in a low, unsteady voice.
“Elizabeth?”
“Well, more or less,” Victor hedged.
“More or less? What kind of an answer is that?”
Alicia had never been in this house. They passed right through to a living room almost as large as the one in the adjoining house. The first thing Alicia looked for in the room was the silvered side of the great screen. The wall where it was supposed to be was completely covered by plush red curtains. She had not noticed the body lying against the planter behind the sofa on the opposite end of the room.
Alicia turned to confront Victor. “So? Out with it! What’s going on?”
Victor took her by the hand, led her around one end of the sofa, and pointed to the lump on the floor under the sheet.
Alicia stopped in her tracks and muted a tiny scream with her hands cupped over her mouth.
Victor walked right up to the lump and pulled back the sheet so that Alicia could see the body. Her head pinned on the lance tip, the woman’s hair was splayed out in a fan shape.
“A mulatto woman? Is she dead?”
Victor nodded.
Alicia could feel the skin on her temples tightening. Victor pointed between the open legs of the body to the trail of the slip that had taken her life; two meters away, in a straight line from the body, was the crushed olive, and strewn around the room were several more uncrushed olives.
“She slipped on an olive?”
Victor nodded.
Alicia looked again at the body and twisted her face into a grimace. “Elizabeth was a mulatto?”
Victor lit two cigarettes and handed one to Alicia. Alicia hesitated a moment, but when she finally took it, she inhaled deeply. Victor moved away toward the windows to give her time to get her bearings. Then, elbows propped up on the backrest of a large easy chair as if covering himself from a possible attack, he blurted out the hardest piece of news—“She’s a man”—without looking up.
“She’s a
WHAT?”
“Sometimes, I … just let myself be loved …”
Elizabeth was dead. Elizabeth was a mulatto woman. The mulatto woman was a man. The man was Victor’s lover! Alicia was thoroughly at a loss before this array of unexpected revelations. She raised her eyebrows, sketched a melancholy smile, looked back at Victor. Suddenly she opened her mouth and raised her finger, about to say something, but there was nothing to say. She pressed her fingertips against her temples trying to push her thoughts into some sort of order. Then, finally, turning again toward the body: “So the … your wife … Elizabeth?”
“Elizabeth never existed!”
Alicia faced Victor again, her eyes running through expressions of shock, fear, suspicion.
But Victor had been saving the biggest surprise for last: “It’s Hendryck Groote.”
Alicia gasped and leaned over, as if moving a little closer to Victor might help her understand what she had just heard. “Your b … boss?”
Victor did not even nod. He began to wander aimlessly around the room again, running his fingers through his hair.
“For the love of God!” Alicia began to examine Victor like a stranger for the first time.
Who is this guy? What am I doing here with him? Why am I not leaving? Birds of a feather and all that shit …
The ominous proverb began to reverberate in her mind like the litany of a chiding tutor. Alicia closed her eyes and let herself drop into a wing chair. “Have you called for help?”
“I called you.”
“Why me?” And for the second time that night she cursed herself for getting mixed up with this man.
“When they start investigating, they’re certain to find the screen between the two houses and there’s going to be a real stink; I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep you out of this. When they start questioning me …”
What does he mean by keeping me out of it?
Alicia was beginning to panic.
Could he be trying to shift the blame for all this on me? Or to blackmail me? Wait; take it easy; let’s see what he’s up to.
Alicia just stood there, biting her lips and not letting on that she was preparing a counterattack. She ran all the possibilities through her mind. Even if nothing came of it, her way of life was in danger of being seriously compromised. Her heart was racing, but her instinct told her to crush her fear. She took a long breath and stooped to get a closer look at the body, trying to give the impression that “it’s not such a big deal.”
“You think they might try to blame you?” she asked, her voice in complete control.
“Not a chance! Forensics will have no trouble verifying that what I tell them is true. The guy was drunk and he just slipped … and that’s all; I had nothing to do with it.”
“Have you had sex with many men?”
“A few. Imagine, I spent five years in a Mexican prison.”
A Mexican prison,
Alicia mused.
Is this going to go on all night?
Every time Victor opened his mouth he upped the ante.
So my favorite boss is a bugger and an ex-con. Can you believe it? Every time I throw him a pitch, he whacks it out of the ballpark.
In spite of herself, Alicia’s mouth was hanging open again. She watched Victor make himself comfortable in an easy chair and cross his feet on the center table.
Damn if he doesn’t look in control
.
“Alicia, I called you because this mess involves both of us. No matter what happens, you’re peddling your ass on a bike and I’m out on my own ass, flat broke—a condition I have come to loathe.”
“Well, I can see how I get tossed right back onto my bike, but why should you get shafted? You’ve got a big deal going and it looks like everybody likes it,” Alicia replied.
Victor squared his shoulders and worked himself up to telling her the whole truth, or at least as much truth as he was capable of telling anyone. “It’s easy, really, when you know the story. Rieks and I have been lovers for close to three years, but it was the strictest of secrets. We never mixed business with our affair and no one ever suspected anything. Rieks has a wife and children, a mother and three brothers—all of them wealthy beyond anything you can imagine. Up until now, I’ve been working for a salary, but in a couple of month’s time, the company was going to sign a contract giving me one-and-a-half million dollars a year for ten years. However, with Rieks dead, it’s a cinch the sunken galleon project gets it in the neck and me along with it.”
“You still haven’t explained why,” Alicia interrupted.
“It’s a long and sad story, but suffice it to say that the older brother, Vincent, hates me and hates the project, and now gets to be in control of everything. The rest of the family doesn’t give a damn about the Caribbean Division that Rieks put together, and as a percentage of the family fortune, it’s really nothing. And nothing is what I’ll be left with.”
Alicia put on her best poker face and listened.
So it’s not about me, but about you … Go on, lover boy. I know you haven’t run out of surprises; so whatever it is, spit it out. What the fuck, I’ll deal with it!
And out loud to Victor: “So what are you going to do?”
Victor rose to his feet again and walked slowly around the room, taking his sweet time.
Alicia was determined to be patient and let him set the pace. After all, he was the one who knew what had happened, and only he really had any idea of what he had to do now. Judging from his calm and collected attitude, she was convinced that the best was yet to come.
After a seemingly endless pause, Victor leaned over to cover the corpse again and said something that sent chills through Alicia’s body: “Yeah, that olive has certainly screwed us both, but if we play our cards right, we can parlay this corpse into an easy four million.”
Alicia stared at him in disbelief, but the sound of four million stuck in her ears, vibrating, tinkling like a crystal bell. With the sudden turn of the conversation toward something she could readily relate to, Alicia felt the thrill of her fear fading away to be reborn in the form of keen interest in this as-yet-undisclosed proposition. She smiled, but it was the kind of smile that said she was in no mood to have her chain pulled. Then she walked up to Victor, aggressively, her forehead at the height of his lips, smelling the alcohol and nicotine on his breath. “Let me see if I got this straight. You’re talking about four million dollars … USD … greenbacks, not lira, not francs, not any of that shit?”
“His family’ll pay whatever we ask … if you cooperate, of course.”
“Four million for a corpse?”
“No one knows he’s dead. Listen,” Victor went on, almost smiling, “the plan is easy and totally safe, at least as safe as it is to go out into the streets every day when you go to work. I’ll be on the inside, so I’ll know exactly what’s going on at every turn, but I need a partner operating on the outside, and that can only be you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only other person who knows what went on here, and besides, I don’t have anyone else.”
Alicia stood there trying to digest Victor’s reasoning, nodding her head in subconscious approval of the concept. Of course, it was a long way from a concept to a plan that would actually work. But for the time being, it sounded good.
“What’s in it for me?”
“Equal pay for equal risk. Fifty-fifty; partners all the way. Two million for you and two million for me. If we invest it wisely, it can buy us our freedom for the rest of our lives.”
Alicia continued staring into the distance, thinking, her eyes darting back and forth.
“Otherwise, it’s back to the bicycle and wiggling your ass all over the streets of Havana. Say goodbye to the convertible and bid farewell to the three thousand a month; without an order from Rieks, those drafts will never be authorized, and I have no way of justifying them.”
Underneath her steely exterior, Alicia was on the verge of dry heaves. Oh, yes, the scope of the disaster was becoming clearer and something deep inside was counseling her to take action, counterattack, take measures, do something.
Oh, yeah, sure, but what about this guy, Victor? Can he be trusted? Only if it’s in his own interest. Well then, that’s how it’s gotta be.
Everything about his behavior, combined with her common sense and the logic of recent events, told Alicia that Victor was not a murderer. He was too smart to have killed the goose that was going to give him the golden eggs. No, Groote was his ticket to his pet project and a life of ease. He couldn’t have killed him. It was simply not logical to kill Groote to make a few bucks on the dead body.
If it’s ransom you have in mind, you keep him alive … at least until you have the money
. And if he had done that he would not have called her in after the fact. A lover’s spat? Nothing in the room pointed to that. No, no! Victor was a liar, a cheat, a cynic, and completely amoral, but he was not a murderous psychopath capable of such a stupid crime.
“What if I want out?”
“If you want out, you’re out. But without your help I’m screwed. I can’t collect the ransom.”
“Then what would you do?”
“I’d call the police in a few minutes and then put up with their suspicions and questioning for a few days until the specialists verify my story. His death was clearly an accident, and besides, everyone knows that Rieks was my ticket to the big leagues … I had nothing to gain by killing him and the world to gain by keeping him alive. No, it’s not the body I’m worried about. What
is
a problem is the investigation they’re going carry out in this house and the hue and cry that’s going to erupt when they find out what was going on here.”
“What was going on
where?”
Alicia asked, looking around the room again and stopping at the red curtains that covered the entire dividing wall from one end to the other and from floor to ceiling.
Understanding the object of her concern, Victor drew the heavy curtains and taking a key from one of the top drawers of the armoire, opened the lock and pushed back the louvered doors, revealing a panoramic view of the room with the pond.
“This is what I’m worried about,” Victor explained with a sweeping gesture, “the screen, the two houses, everything.”
Alicia studied the broad room as if she were seeing it for the first time. And there was the faun, as flat on his face as he could be, but ever smiling.
“And when they interrogate me, there’s no way I can keep you out of it. I mean, they may think all this was real sicko, but it’s not a crime. If I begin lying to them, they’ll start to see crimes where there were none, you see?”
“Right! So, what’s the third alternative? There’s always a third alternative.”