At Close Quarters (8 page)

Cupido picked it up carefully, as if no one had analysed it yet. On the top left-hand corner he read the printed name,
unaccompanied
by any profession or contact details. On the centre were the two handwritten words.

‘They gave it back to me yesterday, after they officially ruled it was suicide.’

‘Is it his hand?’

‘Yes, his handwriting was unmistakeable, tilted forward slightly, firm, solid and large. Graphologists have confirmed it was he who wrote the note, although they add he must have been under great stress, as the lines are a bit shaky. But of course he was under great stress!’

She stopped for a moment, as if she needed to catch her breath before continuing with the story in the right order, without leaving out any details, as the detective had asked her.

‘I went to the phone at once to call an ambulance, and I stepped on something. On the bloodstained carpet was the gun with which they shot him … or he shot himself … I don’t know what to think anymore. Right now, going over everything, I wonder if I should really be here. Perhaps my father did commit suicide, and it would be best for me and for everyone to accept it and leave well alone. Anyway, the
ambulance
arrived quickly. They saw the body, but didn’t want to touch anything before the police and judge checked the scene.’

‘They did the right thing,’ said Cupido.

‘Yes, I don’t doubt it. They asked me to step out of the study and one of the nurses gave me a bottle of water so I could drink without touching anything in the kitchen either. Until then I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was, my mouth felt dry and acrid, a taste I identified only later and which reminded me of what it used to feel like, as a child, to touch a battery with my tongue.’

‘Yes,’ said Cupido, thinking of the taste of gunpowder.

‘It was later, once everyone accepted the hypothesis of the suicide, that I began thinking about that gun I stepped on.’

‘And that’s what you don’t understand,’ said Cupido.

‘I don’t understand it, no. I don’t understand why my father,
who was so scrupulous about the law, chose that gun, whose sole possession was illegal, to shoot himself, if that was indeed the case. Why not use his regulation gun, which he always had to hand? Because the other pistol had a silencer? I don’t think so. What did he care, if he was about to die, whether someone might hear the noise? I’ve tried to find a satisfactory explanation before I decided to come and talk to you, but nothing seems conclusive, and perhaps there isn’t one. I even told myself that, faced with the other, deeper mystery of why he committed suicide, any other details were irrelevant. If I cannot understand the main thing,
everything
else will remain inexplicable.’

‘How come he had an illegal gun?’

Marina looked at him as if she didn’t understand the question, still engrossed in her thoughts. She took a few seconds to reply:

‘As I said, my father was worried he might be attacked and wanted to feel safe. And, less than a year ago, there was an
unpleasant
incident at the base. One day, during shooting practice, his gun accidentally fired and hit an assistant, a rank and file soldier, in the thigh. The boy didn’t lodge a complaint, as it clearly was one of those mishaps that are inevitable when you handle weapons. But an inquiry was carried out all the same, and the officer in charge of armaments, García Bramante, who didn’t see eye to eye with my father, asked for a formal investigation to determine whether he was guilty of negligence. This upset my father, who was proud of his brilliant, impeccable service record, and scrupulously adhered to very rule. Still, he didn’t worry too much; obviously it had not been deliberate, and he knew they just wanted to introduce a little blemish onto his CV. However, once the inquiry started,
disciplinary
measures took their course, and in those cases they take away the regulation gun as a precautionary measure. It was only for a couple of months. But he didn’t want to go about unarmed, because he felt unsafe, and so he got another gun, which is not difficult if you’re in the army. Once he told me that that had been his only infringement of the law, a small, secret one, in thirty-five years of service. Fortunately, no one ever knew, and he didn’t need
to use it, which would have led to serious disciplinary measures. And then, when the inquiry was closed, and he got back his own gun, he put the other one in a drawer and never touched it again … if it was he who pulled the trigger … until …’

‘Until that day,’ said Cupido.

‘That’s right.’

The detective was quiet for a few seconds, going over the first pieces of information. Then he asked:

‘Do you know what this all means?’

‘No,’ she replied, disconcerted.

‘It means that, if it was homicide, it could only have been someone he knew, someone he asked in, whom he didn’t expect would attack him. Otherwise, since he was a soldier who’d foreseen the possibility of danger, he wouldn’t have just stayed seated in his chair, without attempting to defend himself.’

‘Yes, he would have done that.’

‘The previous evening, when you spoke to him, and he said he was with someone, did you get the impression it was a stranger?’

‘I don’t know, why?’

‘If it had been someone you both knew, would your father have mentioned he was there with that person?’

‘Yes, I think he would have,’ she replied after thinking it over for a few seconds. ‘Yes, we were very close.’

Those two details didn’t quite fit together, but no doubt there had been some logic to Olmedo’s acts. If he had shot himself, he could have perfectly used the unregistered gun, as if even in death he didn’t want to tarnish that service record he was so proud of. If it hadn’t been him, well, that was the mystery Cupido had to solve. As a civilian, he wasn’t sure he understood what impulses, fears and interests drove a military man. Why would someone keep a gun that’s not legally his when it may occasion problems? An illegal pistol – you either used it at once or threw it into a deep swamp. To keep it was to court risk. And yet, soldiers are familiar with them, and no doubt careful and deft in handling them, aware that they represent danger.

Marina took a photograph out of her bag and passed it to the detective.

‘My father,’ she said.

Either the picture had been taken from a slight overhead angle or Olmedo had tilted his head forwards, but as he stared at the lens his eyebrows appeared slightly curved into a quizzical look, giving the strange impression that he had just asked a question to the photographer and was expecting an answer. His hair – cropped, abundant, and combed back – and a coarse, open-necked shirt of a greenish colour accentuated a look that was so stern it seemed almost scornful. Cupido decided to take the job, but now he would have to
find
the man, get to know him, investigate his world until the human being behind the face became familiar. The mystery was hiding in Olmedo; in Cupido’s experience, the keys to the truth did not turn up when investigating the suspects but the victim. He mistrusted that old adage, ‘Find the motive and you’ll find the culprit’, as he had come across
murderers
who had futile motives to kill and, conversely, innocent people with powerful reasons not to be so.

‘The funeral took place this morning. Forensics had finished their work. Right now he’s being cremated. I’m talking to you as the body of my father burns. The foreign woman at the beach, the one who rents hammocks, knows you well and told me I can trust you, precisely because you’re not from this city, not even this region,’ she said, and Cupido imagined that the Nordic woman must have told Marina that he came from inland, where some people have never seen the sea, ‘and that you solved your
previous
case very efficiently. I’m interested in the fact that you’re a stranger, someone who owes no favours and knows no one here. A local detective might get swayed by the military class, which has so much influence in this city. Will you accept the job? Will you help me? I don’t know how much you charge, I’ve never had to hire a detective before, but I don’t think money will be a problem. Will you take the job?’ she repeated.

‘Yes,’ replied Cupido. ‘I’ll need access to your father’s flat, his
diary, documents, things, and I’ll need to talk to you again. You’ll also have to give me some phone numbers. And it would be nice to arrange a meeting with the top officer at the base.’

‘That won’t be a problem.’

Marina thanked him. They discussed the financial details, and as soon as she left Alkalino reappeared in the living room.

‘I think I’ll accept your invitation and stay for a while. I won’t leave you alone in this city against an entire army,’ he joked. His tone had changed after hearing the conversation with Marina.

‘I didn’t expect anything less from you,’ he answered with a smile, glad that he had aroused his friend’s interest. ‘And I don’t think it’ll be an easy job.’

‘No, it won’t,’ replied Alkalino. ‘But you’ll find out the truth. Sometimes I wonder how you do it.’

Cupido shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘By talking. You ask a suspect about the victim and then, in a bizarre shift, the suspect starts talking about himself, even if he didn’t intend to.’

‘If that’s the case, I’ll be able to help you. You know there are few things I enjoy more than talking. But then with soldiers, those hermetic, proud and corporate people, you might need more than words. A word may sometimes move a mountain, but it’s often useless. The simultaneous shout of all the spectators at a Champions’ League Match at the Bernabú Stadium wouldn’t produce enough energy to warm up a cup of coffee.’

‘All right, but even if we cannot move a mountain, we’ll try and dig a tunnel into it to see what lies beneath.’

‘Beneath you’ll find pain, or the kind of hatred aroused by three or four elementary passions: power, greed, revenge, and sex, of course, sex and that sublimation we’ve invented to justify it. Any of those can be an excuse to kill,’ said Alkalino, and after a few seconds of silence repeated: ‘Of course it won’t be easy. People seem to get smarter the more they hate. Hatred keeps them awake, sharpens their minds, which are tame and drowsy when they’re in love, when they’re enjoying things and feeling good. Hatred wakes you up, love stuns you. That’s why hatred is better at carrying out
its purposes than justice is at preventing them, and most crimes would go unpunished if chance didn’t play a part, if we didn’t use a good share of the national budget to avoid them, and if we didn’t have a few judges and detectives like yourself, who know that appearances can be deceptive.’

‘You mean you believe Olmedo didn’t …?’

‘I believe her, Cupido. I don’t think her father committed suicide, although …’ he hesitated.

‘Say it.’

‘Although the way he died fits the theory.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘How would a soldier kill himself?’ replied Alkalino.

‘By shooting himself,’ said Cupido. ‘No pills, ropes, or jumping out of a window. A soldier would shoot himself in the heart or the head. They’ve got the guns, know how to use them and where to aim to avoid mistakes.’

‘That’s right. The way he died fits in with suicide. But there’s something I don’t get.’

‘What?’

‘The way she described her father, he didn’t sound like the kind of man who would sit quietly at home and then shoot himself in the chest, leaving a card saying “Forgive me”. I’d say someone else shot him, someone he let into his house and his study. But you’re the one that is going to have to find out who. Well, with my help,’ he concluded with a crooked smile.

He went into the flat using the keys Marina had given him, closed the door behind him and walked into the living room. He stood there a few seconds, alert and still, looking at the premises in the dim light that came in through the blinds, which were only half open.

Not knowing quite what he was looking for, he just expected to find material for further speculation. The police had gone through the rubbish, had dusted for fingerprints, searched for DNA, and checked the call register of the day in question. They had checked his computer files, and studied the movements of his bank accounts and credit cards. It was unlikely, though, that they had found anything out of the ordinary, because they accepted the theory of suicide.

He went from room to room without touching anything. There was none of the lonely-male atmosphere he had seen in similar places, a sort of stale stuffiness redolent of raw materials: the smell of animal wool that unwashed clothes acquire, the autumn smell of old furniture, the mineral smell of metallic decorations. He didn’t see a flat unaired as if no oxygen were left in it, or poorly cleaned, or with smudged glasses of every shape and form lying everywhere, or remains of plates, or bits of scrap paper with phone numbers but no names on them, or fast food brochures piled up in the kitchen, or clocks with their hands still because no one had bothered to change the batteries. On the contrary, everything was meticulously tidy, in a way that couldn’t be just the work of
the cleaning lady, Aurora – the name Marina had given him. The doors of the bedroom and cupboards did not creak when they were opened, and the suits on the hangers were protected with plastic covers, the trousers ironed with a crease down the middle, the shirts missing no buttons.

He went back to the living room and searched the flat systematically, checking every corner, opening all drawers, inspecting the diary and the margins of the telephone directory. Fortunately, the decor was not too ornate. There were few things, but all were of good quality, solid, authentic: the carpet made of thick wool, the table and the cupboards of wood, and the coat rack at the entrance of stainless steel. Not a hoarder’s house, but a house made to last.

Seeing a picture of Olmedo with his wife and a teenage Marina, Cupido noticed there weren’t many signs of the woman who had lived in that flat until her death in an operating theatre: barely one or two photographs, ceramic knick-knacks, and some clothes he couldn’t imagine the major had bought himself. Cupido wondered why houses empty little by little when a woman dies or leaves, and why they fill with furniture and paintings and decorations when it is the man who passes on.

He checked the medicines in the bathroom cabinet:
painkillers
, antibiotics, digestion tablets, a cream for haemorrhoids and several kinds of vitamins typical of a man who likes to stay sharp. That was all, no peculiar drug that might indicate depression or insomnia.

Cupido tackled the study last. The parquet was lighter under the desk, from where the bloodstained carpet had been removed. It took a while to check every drawer and every shelf. Two dozen insubstantial novels indicated Olmedo was not too keen on fiction. However, there were numerous books on history, biography,
monographs
on armament, military strategy, and recent armed conflicts. They had been obviously studied with attention, as some passages were underlined in pencil and annotated in the margins.

On the desk were the bank documents needed to change the name of the account holder on an investment fund, which Marina
had mentioned in their interview. They were signed by her, but not by the major, the other account holder. In a small cupboard Cupido found a wooden box with medals and decorations, the oldest ones dating from as far back as Olmedo’s time in the Academia de Zaragoza. Next to the box were several folders with old bank statements, income tax returns, and the title deeds to the house and a small farm in the countryside. The last folder he checked contained the dossier of a trial. Cupido sat on the floor – he didn’t dare sit down in the chair where Olmedo had died – and carefully perused the report: the judge found an anaesthetist called Lesmes Beltrán Villa guilty of criminal negligence at work during an operation which had resulted in the death of a patient called Pilar Rodríguez Pando. The lawsuit had been initiated by the victim’s husband, Camilo Olmedo, and the anaesthetist had been barred from practising for four years and sentenced to pay a hundred and fifty thousand euros in compensation to the family of the woman.

Cupido wrote it all down in his notebook for discussion later with Marina.

Over three hours had gone by when he went down to the garage. Even here, everything was impeccably tidy, with the tools in order and two old tyres placed on the back wall as buffers. A racing bicycle in perfect condition hung from a hook and made the detective want to take it down and go for a ride for a couple of hours, pedalling until he was exhausted. The car was open and he went through the glove compartment and looked under the floor mats without finding anything important.

He left the building with the feeling that the man who had lived there had no secrets. The surface of his life looked like a hilly landscape, with the inevitable accidents created by time, but it didn’t hide pits inhabited by unknown monsters, or caves full of bones and bats, or frozen, inaccessible mountains whose very existence was a mystery. Olmedo seemed to have led a sensible life, and on that evidence the theory of his suicide seemed strange and incongruous. Cupido now better understood Marina’s refusal to accept
it and her need to find another explanation. She could only rest if she came to understand Olmedo’s death just as she’d been able to understand his life.

At his request, Marina had arranged for him to meet with the colonel in charge at San Marcial. The appointment was for five p.m. but ten minutes earlier Cupido was already at the entrance to the base, showing his ID to the corporal on guard duty, well aware that military men appreciate punctuality, which they consider another daughter of discipline. At five o’clock, the
colonel’s
orderly, a soldier with South American features and accent, opened the door of the office and led him in.

Cupido had not set foot in an army base since the day he
finished
his compulsory military service, and for a moment he was taken aback by the air of authority emanating from the elderly colonel, who was looking at him from across his desk at the back of the enormous room, flanked by a Spanish flag and a picture of the king. Cupido was surprised to realise he hesitated between using the form of address employed in the army – ‘Colonel’ – which was more rooted in his memory than he’d suspected, and a more neutral kind of expression.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said eventually, standing still at the start of the long, emphatic and solemn carpet that led to the desk.

‘Come closer,’ ordered the colonel, pointing to one of the two upholstered chairs in front of the desk.

Barely rising, he offered a hand which was small and lively, like a mouse. It was accompanied by a faint smell of ripe apples, as if someone had just eaten fruit in the office. The colonel fixed his gaze on Cupido, his blue eyes slightly veiled with that milky white that hints at the onset of cataracts. Around them, on his nose and cheeks, fine thread veins gave the impression that minute red-
legged
spiders were running under his skin. Yet the colonel appeared to have left behind that age when sudden death is a risk, and to have settled into a state of enduring good health.

‘I must say I don’t understand why you’d like to speak with me,’
he said before Cupido had a chance to ask him even one question. ‘I think everything is clear enough. But Marina Olmedo rang me and I don’t have the heart to refuse anything to the daughter of a dead colleague, considering the circumstances.’

‘Do you believe it was suicide?’

‘I do better than believe. One believes when there’s no evidence, but everything indicates that Olmedo died by his own hand.’

‘And yet, he gave no warnings. No one ever heard him mention that possibility. And his character was the opposite of a suicide’s.’

‘Warnings? Character? Do you know how many people commit suicide in the army without giving any warnings? And tell me, what’s a suicide’s character like?’

Cupido was surprised by the hard, terse, almost hostile tone. He searched for an answer that wasn’t too vague, but when he hit on an adjective to define someone who would take his own life he also found the exception; when he tried to circumscribe an age group or a cluster of reasons, he remembered a case that
contradicted
them.

‘In all my years in the army,’ continued the colonel, ‘I’ve signed several suicide dossiers, and I can assure you they all have the word “unexpected” in them. Olmedo was a well-balanced man, indeed, but he was under a lot of pressure because of his last mission and the responsibility it carried. Marina must have mentioned the report he had written about the base.’

‘Yes, and I’ve read everything the newspapers published. I guess that commission earned him the hatred of a few colleagues.’

‘I don’t know if “hatred” is the right word,’ qualified the colonel.

‘Why not? In his report he recommended the closure of San Marcial. Which would affect the interests of many people. Some people would be made redundant.’

‘Reduce us to unemployment? No … detective,’ he said after a pause, as if he’d tried in vain to remember his name, ‘make no mistake about it. There will never be unemployment in the army. Reforms, changes, recycling, yes. But before the army disappears, man himself will have to disappear, along with his desire to take
over his neighbouring country. The army will always exist,’ he repeated without looking at Cupido.

Although stiff and short, he stood up without any apparent effort, neither sighing nor emitting one of those faint whimpers which usually accompany the movements of people his age, and walked to the large window commanding a panoramic view of the base.

‘No,’ he explained from there, his back turned to Cupido, ‘it wasn’t the disappearance of the army that Olmedo wanted. I think no one will say that he wasn’t a true soldier. And a soldier endeavours to make the army more efficient, not weaker. However, his methods were so daring that some people found them upsetting. I won’t deny it: I myself thought he was acting too precipitously. He wanted to replace things that, at least for now, cannot be replaced.’

‘Such as?’

Castroviejo turned to look at him as if he were a dim pupil, perhaps wondering if an explanation was worth the effort.

‘Armies are designed to kill, even if Olmedo had helped in Bosnia and Afghanistan to keep people from killing each other. Olmedo, and others like him, following the directives from the civilian government in Madrid, hope to create an army that’s mainly a peace corps, which is a contradiction in terms,’ he explained, raising his eyebrows in bewilderment, as if he couldn’t believe that something so simple was so hard to understand. However, the next moment he tempered his words. ‘In any case, they want a small, versatile army, trained to fight outside Europe, as if war could never again break out in this continent. I frequently heard him say that, in an armed conflict, victory no longer depends on having a greater number of soldiers and how well they adapt to the climate and the scene, but on better technology, more digital screens and men who are half soldier and half computer.’

‘And isn’t that the case?’

‘No, not really. Technology wins wars, but it doesn’t maintain peace,’ he explained with slight irritation. ‘The faster and bigger the capacity of an army to obliterate an enemy’s war structures,
the more difficult the post-war period will be, because the teams of enemy experts will not have been touched.’

‘As in Iraq,’ said Cupido.

‘As in Iraq,’ he echoed. ‘To control a defeated enemy you always need additional troops. And not fewer of them! That’s what Olmedo refused to accept.’

‘And do you think those arguments may have triggered a crisis that led him to kill himself.’

‘Trigger? I don’t think so. But perhaps it added to his confusion. I don’t know, and nobody can know, what went through his mind after he left the base once the meeting was over. But he surely was aware that he’d affected some officers’ lives. And then, Olmedo had lived alone since the absurd death of his wife, and lonely people sometimes react in strange, extreme ways, which others may find puzzling.’

The detective passed over this last comment – he himself lived alone and didn’t feel he fitted that category – and said:

‘You mentioned officers whose lives might be affected.’

The old colonel’s eyes turned to look at him with a brief glint of suspicion, and then he raised one eyebrow. Cupido remembered something he’d heard in the military service. They said that that little expression, which occurred in tense or upsetting conversations, gave away a real soldier, one who was so used to taking aim that the grimace became second nature.

‘I never cease to be amazed by the false ideas civilians have of the army. In moments of conflict, a soldier might become a hero, but the rest of the time we’re only civil servants. Perhaps a bit special because of the nature of our job, but civil servants nonetheless, who are used to the monotonous succession of three-year posts, the slow climb up the hierarchy, the fear of being posted far away or somewhere unpleasant. How could there not be affected colleagues?’

‘Bramante, Ucha?’ said Cupido, repeating the surnames Marina had mentioned, and whose first names and rank he did not know. The colonel raised his right eyebrow slightly once again, as if he was surprised that the detective was in possession of that information.

‘There wasn’t a unanimous consensus,’ said the colonel dodging the question, and he turned around to look out of the window. But then, like the athlete who thinks he’s left his rival far behind but a few minutes later hears someone’s breathing at his back, he turned to reply with annoyance at the detective’s stubborn remark. ‘That’s why, when Olmedo left, the idea emerged of calling a meeting for everyone concerned, in order to adopt a common stance in the face of what we thought was the inevitable closure of the base.’