The Book of Murder

Four

Once I was back out in the piercing cold night air, I saw the problem, or set of problems, I’d got myself into. So had I believed Luciana? Strange as I find it now, as I walked home through the last traces of that Sunday, to some extent I had believed her, just as you believe in the revolution while you’re reading The Communist Manifesto or Ten Days that Shook the World. At any rate I’d believed her enough to make that stupid promise. The more I thought about it, the harder it seemed to keep. I didn’t know Kloster personally; I’d never even seen him. Ten years earlier, when I wrote for various literary supplements, at a time when I went from literary gatherings to book launches, from round tables to newspaper offices, it would have been impossible not to meet him had he deigned to show his face at such events. But during those years Kloster’s persistent non-appearance had become legendary, and was, I assumed, another expression of his lofty contempt for us. Some of us had even toyed with the idea that Kloster didn’t in fact exist, that he was the joint invention of several writers, like mathematicians’ Nicolas Bourbaki, or of a pair of writers, secret lovers who couldn’t sign their names together. The couple of rather hazy photographs reproduced for years on the flaps of his books could easily have been faked. We joked and speculated and compared, but Kloster was too different, light years from the galaxy of Argentinian writers, like a cold star in the distance. And in the years that followed, when Kloster underwent his spectacular transformation and was frenetically everywhere, I’d made my own journey to the end of the night. On my return—if, that is, I had returned—I’d preferred to keep away from everything and everyone, shutting myself up like a phobic within the four walls of my apartment. I’d never returned to the literary scene and now only went out for walks or to give a class.
If Kloster and I had utterly failed to coincide, something separated us even more. When Kloster had done something unforgivable—have his first big success—the machinery of petty resentments in the literary world had cranked into action against him. What had once been a well-guarded secret, passed quietly with bewildered admiration amongst connoisseurs of the obscure, was now in full view, at the same democratic price as the work of any other Argentinian author, and, in the great wave of recognition, Kloster’s earlier novels reappeared. Ordinary readers in their thousands suddenly purchased those early books, which had once circulated like passwords among the cognoscenti. It could mean only one thing: Kloster couldn’t be as good as we’d thought and we had, quickly, to backtrack and shoot him down. To my shame, I was part of the firing squad, with an article full of irony about the writer I most admired. It had been just after Luciana stopped working for me and I was still feeling hurt at the thought—the conviction—that she’d gone back to him. And though almost ten years had passed and the article had appeared in an obscure journal that now no longer even existed, I was only too familiar with the tangled web of literary intrigue: someone had no doubt placed it in front of him at some stage, and if he’d read it, and was even half as vindictive as Luciana believed, he would not have forgiven me.
I couldn’t even contemplate phoning him and saying my name. He’d hang up before I could get a sentence out. I thought of increasingly crazy possibilities: turn up at his door, engineer a meeting in the street, give a false name and pretend to be a journalist. But even if I cleared the first hurdle, even if I managed to enter Kloster’s fortress of fame and we exchanged a few words, how on earth could I talk to him about Luciana, broach the real subject, without the conversation’s ending before it began? I fell asleep, annoyed with myself for having got into a mess that wasn’t mine and that I was desperate to get out of. Why did I say yes when everything inside me was saying no, I wondered again. We always treat women too well, as Queneau might have said. Even their ghosts, I thought in the oppressive darkness of my bedroom, unable to picture the face of the real Luciana from ten years ago.
I awoke the next day feeling as if I’d had a drunken night out but that, despite the hangover, my senses and my equanimity had been returned to me. In the warm, familiar sunlight coming through the window, I felt myself swing towards scepticism, and the suspicion that I’d been ensnared in a series of careful lies told by an apparition from the past. Desperate for caffeine, I went out to have breakfast in a bar, and as I reviewed Luciana’s story in search of contradictions and errors I realised, with that same lucid calm, that if I had now decided to doubt what I’d heard, it was mainly to get out of this ludicrous mission.
I didn’t have classes that Monday, but I had to go to El Bajo to collect the tickets for my flight on Wednesday to Salinas, where I was to give a postgraduate course at the Universidad del Oeste. The offices of one of the newspapers for which I’d once written reviews were also in El Bajo. I decided that before doing anything it would be worth consulting the archives to confirm the most salient facts, at least.
When I got to the old building by the river, I too felt like a ghost haunting a place that no longer existed. Like a cathedral under restoration, the fa?ade was unrecognisable, hidden behind scaffolding. I searched for the entrance amongst temporary signs and boardwalks. Someone who had come outside to smoke greeted me from a distance without much surprise or enthusiasm; I returned the greeting automatically, not entirely sure who it was. Inside the receptionists were new, but the basement where the archives were kept was unchanged, as if it was too difficult to shift the past. I went down the stairs and again breathed in the smell of damp exuded by the peeling walls, and felt the sagging floorboards creak beneath my feet, betraying my presence. I was alone down there and assumed the librarian had gone for lunch. I searched the shelves myself. The first three deaths had taken place before newspapers were digitised but I soon found the box files containing the copies for each year. I almost missed the first item as it occupied only a tiny space at the bottom of a page. Headed ‘Lifeguard Drowns’, the article didn’t mention Luciana. It simply stated that the rescue operation had been unsuccessful, and that cold and exhaustion had caused the young lifeguard to suffer massive cramps, despite his being very fit. That was all, with no further details the following day. I supposed that no one in the resort wanted to publicise a drowning at the start of the season.
The item about her parents’ poisoning, on the other hand, near the end of the next box file, took up over half a page. There was a rather blurry photograph of a tree with some fungi beneath it, and a comparative diagram of Amanita phalloides and an edible mushroom. An arrow indicated where the volva had become detached, as Luciana had explained. The article mentioned that the couple had three children, but that none of them was with them at the house at the time. It didn’t give their names, and Luciana’s surname was so common that I wouldn’t have registered the item even if I’d read it back then. There was a slightly shorter article the following day, explaining that a search of the little wood had confirmed the presence of the poisonous species. It mentioned how spores could be carried considerable distances on the wind and warned of the dangers of amateur mushroom gathering.
I took the articles to the photocopier, and as I inserted coins and watched the beam of light pass over the pages I had the feeling that an idea, as yet unformed, was trying to emerge, like an elusive animal lurking—about to brush past, about to flee—in that silent basement. On impulse I returned to the rows of files and searched for reports of the fourth death. The progression here was in reverse: the story began with a tiny item lost in the Police Reports page, but then, as the political implications became apparent, it had taken up more and more space until it featured on the front page. I read the first day’s article, as yet without photographs. The killer had apparently been waiting for the doctor late at night, at the entrance to his building, and had held him up at gunpoint. Luciana’s brother hadn’t put up a fight, perhaps believing it was just a mugging. They’d gone up in the lift to his apartment. Neighbours had heard a terrible commotion and the doctor shouting. Someone had called the police. The door to the apartment was open and the man’s revolver was in plain view on a shelf, as if he’d put it down there as soon as he entered. The doctor’s body lay in the middle of the sitting room, his eyes gouged out and a huge wound on his neck, possibly caused by a bite. The police had found the killer on the roof of the building, his mouth smeared with blood. When they managed to unclench his fist they found he was gripping the doctor’s eyeballs, crushed to a pulp. In his statement he said he had wanted to throw them in his wife’s face before killing her.
I looked for the next day’s paper. The story now occupied over half a page. It turned out that the arrested man had already been sentenced to life in a high security prison, but nobody could explain how he’d got out. There was a photograph of him looking straight at the camera, eyes empty of all expression, probably his police mug shot: a wide forehead, bald with narrow strips of hair above his ears, a sharp nose, plain ordinary features that gave no hint of murder or butchery. The post-mortem had revealed a few more details. The murderer had used only his hands and teeth; the victim had barely resisted, failing to land a single blow. The killer was famous in prison for letting his nails grow long, and had already blinded another inmate in a fight. It hadn’t been established whether the doctor had still been conscious when he’d had his eyes gouged out. In any case the cause of death was severing of the jugular vein. The report also stated that the doctor had been having an affair with the convict’s wife, whom he’d met when she was visiting her husband in prison, but there was no mention of the anonymous letters Luciana had told me about.
I looked at the next day’s paper. The story had now reached the front page. Apparently the inmate hadn’t escaped, he had been let out by guards to commit a burglary. The Ministry of the Interior had intervened and the head of the prison service was expected to resign imminently. The investigation had changed hands and was now being conducted by the same Superintendent Ramoneda that Luciana had mentioned. Even so, as I read this article—by far the longest—I felt that the trail was fading; that, as in the children’s game, I was getting cold. No, this definitely wasn’t what I thought I’d glimpsed. There was something earlier which I had missed again as I read. I took the first day’s article to the photocopier and then I went to one of the desks and set out all three copied stories. I read them again, one after the other. Almost nothing seemed to connect them, other than Luciana’s account. The dates were unevenly spaced: the first two incidents had taken place within a year, but the third had occurred three years later, and now four years had elapsed since anything had happened. There seemed, at any rate, to be a slowing of the pace of killing. Nor was there any obvious pattern linking them, discernible ‘from the outside’. There was even an aesthetic inconsistency: if the first two cases were to a certain extent reminiscent of the kind of subtle murder Kloster devised in his novels, the third—brutal, bloody—was quite unlike his style, his literary style at least. Though it might, of course, be part of the plan, and an obvious precaution for some of the deaths to be very different from those in his books. I recalled Luciana’s anxious voice the first time she called me: nobody knows, nobody realises. No, nobody knew, nobody realised, though all three cases had been in the papers, though the deaths were there, in plain sight, and one of them had caused quite a scandal. But was there really nothing to link them? A moment earlier, I thought I’d seen something, something that now eluded me but was nevertheless still there. Suddenly I thought I had the answer, though it didn’t seem to be of much use. It was something Luciana had said when describing her brother’s death. With his bare hands. The article on the first day also mentioned it: the killer had put down his gun and used only his hands and teeth. I sensed that this was it but, as if the scarcely glimpsed figure had once again melted away, I still couldn’t fully see the connection. And what significance, if any, did it have? Even if I accepted that Kloster was behind the deaths, even if I accepted that he had written the anonymous letters, of which there was no mention in the articles, there didn’t seem to be any way that he or anyone else could have foreseen that the killer would put down his gun and use only his hands. Or was there some prison code I was unaware of by which killing face to face, with bare hands, was the payback for infidelity? I resolved to find out. Anyway, simply by following Luciana’s brother, Kloster could have found out that he was having an affair with the convict’s wife, but it was much more unlikely that he would also have known that the prisoner, serving a life sentence, was allowed out to commit burglaries.
Every time I went over it, the case against Kloster seemed convoluted and unbelievable. But then, as I knew, the plots of Kloster’s novels also seemed convoluted and unbelievable, until you reached the last page. It was precisely because the case against Kloster had something excessive, something disproportionate, about it that I couldn’t discount it entirely.
I folded the pages and left the building, without dropping in to the editorial office to say hello to my erstwhile colleagues. Actually I was afraid there would be no one left that I knew. I walked home, hoping that during the walk I’d come up with a reasonable—or convincing—excuse for calling Kloster.
In the lift on the way up to my apartment, I heard the phone ring one last time before stopping. Nobody phoned nowadays and when I opened the door, in the silence amplified by that last ring, the apartment felt emptier than ever. I was under no illusions: I knew exactly who was calling and what she wanted to know. I reflected that she was right, at least, about the grey rug: I’d have to find the energy at some stage to get a new one. I went to the kitchen to make coffee, but just as I was rinsing out a cup the phone rang again. I wondered how early she’d started ringing like that, at five-minute intervals. It was, indeed, Luciana.
“Have you spoken to him?”
Her voice was anxious, but there was also something slightly imperious in her tone, as if the favour she’d wrung from me in tears the night before had, by morning, become a duty I had to report on.
“No, not yet. Actually I don’t even have his number. I was thinking of calling my editor now…”
“I’ve got it,” she said. “I’ll give it to you.”
“Is it the number at the house you used to go to?”
“No. He had to move out of there after his divorce.” I wondered how she’d managed to get hold of the new number. But I realised, then, that Luciana had to know his new address. How else could she have sent him the letter? If indeed Kloster was secretly watching her every step, the watching, it seemed, was mutual. She spoke again, her impatience barely contained, as if she felt she’d left me no excuse. “So will you call him now?”
“The thing is, I still can’t think how to go about it. I don’t even know him. So, calling out of the blue, to talk to him about something like this…Anyway,” I said, “I once wrote a rather unpleasant article about him. If by any chance he read it I don’t think he’ll let me get out a single word.”
As I listed excuse after excuse, I felt more and more contemptible. But she stopped me.
“There is one way,” she said darkly. “Something you could say if all else fails. After all, he must think I’ve completely lost my mind over these years. You could say you’ve had a conversation with me that’s worried you. You have to talk to him, because you get the impression that I’m desperate. I feel cornered and even made you believe that I might try something against him. I mean, I’ve thought of it a thousand times: pre-empt his next move. It would be self-defence. I would have done it already if I only dared, or could think of a way, like him, of not getting caught. When he hears his life’s in danger, he’ll want to know more.”
I listened with a shiver of revulsion at her obsession, but had to admit that it was a better idea than any I’d come up with so far.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind as a last resort.”
“So will you call him now? Please,” she said, her voice faltering. “I don’t know how much time we have left. I’m sure he’s about to try something.”
“Of course I will. I promised, didn’t I?” I said. “I’ll call now. I’ll speak to him and we’ll sort this out.”
I hung up and sat staring with annoyance at the phone number I’d just jotted down, as if it were a note left by a stranger that was now throbbing and ticking insistently. I hadn’t had any scrap paper to hand, so I’d written it down on the lined pad where I made notes for my novels, beneath a list of provisional titles. I suddenly knew what I had to do, and it seemed so obvious it almost made me smile. Of course. Of course. What could be more natural? It was the only thing that Kloster would believe: I’d tell him I was about to start a novel.