Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (5 page)

              Night fell and the living room table was set with his favorite foods: Portuguese Pork with Clams, homemade pickles, and Sericaia (Alentejo Portuguese province Egg Pudding) for desert. He had died and gone to heaven. He spoke excitedly with his parents, something he hadn’t done for years. Lucas felt protected, like when he has a young boy. After supper, he took a cup of hand-dripped coffee with a cube of brown sugar and, while sipping it, looked out the window to see the lights on the street. Out there, the sight of a police car was five cold fingers slapping him in the face. He was still a prisoner.

* * *

He took his leave of his parents, stilling the palpitations and tightness of his heart. Lucas lay down. His spirit turned the last few weeks’ events over and over. How could he escape the steel grip that was dragging him down a bottomless hole? Why had this happened to him? He quit feeling guilty about the beating he’d given Quiroga. It had nothing to do with the rest. No, it had nothing to do with his having acted against the giant without one drop of sportsmanship. That was another story. It was not the expiation of a failure; it was a machination against him.

              Revulsion came over him—he was thinking like his father, imagining traps and cabals executed by occult forces. Who’d waste a second on him? It was merely chance. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time and the judicial machine that has to find the guilty had found him and was not going to let him go. It was like a bulldog’s bite: even if the judiciary wanted to release him, after screwing him over, it couldn’t. His guilt was the other side of the coin of the system’s pacification. They had hunted someone bad to explain the evil. They could move on to another dossier and store his on a shelf. Just he, and perhaps that woman, had seen the small bathroom that didn’t appear in the police photos but out of whose door the murderer had left.
The good judge must have twisted about to swallow that testimony. But, in fact, where had that bathroom gone?
he thought.
At this time, the police must be questioning all of the neighboring houses to see if anyone could have taken it from there. Perhaps they’ll find some clue that will prove they pulled in the wrong fish and leave me alone.
With that thought, he went to sleep.

              But his nightmares wouldn’t let him. A thousand and one terrifying ideas filled his mind. Lucas felt deep nausea and a pain in his shoulders as if Quiroga had resuscitated with two more palms of width and was now squeezing him in a bone breaking embrace. To the left, it was an iron grip. He couldn’t even breathe. Without enough time to get up, he vomited on the bed.
Oh no.
He cleaned his face on the sheet and then sat down.
It’s cold.
He jumped quietly from the bed to not awaken his mother or Luís. He saw things out of focus. Lucas rubbed his eyes but it didn’t help. The window was open.
Again? What is it this time? It’s like ice.
He turned on the lamp and leaped back—on his chair, there was an envelope and on the envelope was a pistol with a silencer. The gun from the crime.

Chapter 5

The Machination

Lucas opened the envelope. Photographs of the dead body of the woman who’d testified on his behalf. A small orifice in the forehead, just like he’d seen on the neck of the giant’s dissected body, which explained how the evil deed had been committed: a bullet in the brow. More photos of the woman in the street and the woman dead. Finally, a picture on heavier paper came on and showed a film in which his witness was murdered by someone unknown. Lucas breathed rapidly; he had cramps in his hands and a pain installed itself in his head over his eyes. He felt hot. He threw up again, as silently as possible. There was a smell of gas in the air and his vision was slowly becoming cloudy. He was lost.

              “You’re lost, Lucas,” agreed the gun, in a metallic voice.

              Was he seeing things? Had he been drugged? Suddenly the photographs erupted in spontaneous combustion. They burned like newspaper. Lucas quickly smothered the fire with a bedspread. The pistol, hoarse, laughed at the young man’s bewilderment. Lucas rubbed his sore eyes once more. This was not happening. The pistol said nothing but raised its eyebrows and rolled its eyes upward and to the left, as if saying, “Puedes no creer en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay,” Spanish for “You may not believe in witches, but they exist, yes, they do.”

              He now had no witness. He had to flee. But where to?
Where to?
There was nowhere to go.
The police and countries are made one for the other.
Interpol would never let him go, there was neither refuge where he wouldn’t be wanted, nor memory that would be lost, no matter how many years or decades went by. Maybe he could hide on an island in the Pacific or in a village in the Amazon.
No, no.
They would immediately recognize the stranger and immediately surf the Internet using facial recognition software that Interpol made available on its site.
A better alternative would be going to a big city,
he thought. He could pass by unnoticed in a large metropolis in Latin America, in Mexico City, in Buenos Aires or in São Paulo. Suddenly, he was hit by a lightning bolt:
Mother, Father, Luís.
If he successfully escaped Lisbon, he would never see them again. He fell to his knees. His projects and the people he loved were going to disappear.  He was going to terminate them, cut his umbilical cord in order to be free. Lucas bent over until his head touched the ground.
Is this war? Is this the price of victory, if I am able to achieve a victory by fleeing?
He was going to burn everything, incinerate his heart and soul in order to be free, in a law of eternal return in which the flames that killed his parents in his old life returned by his hand, for him to be the incendiary of his own immolation. He bit the mucous membrane in his mouth until it bled. He could be like that other mother, Lara, who was sleeping, who had combed his hair on a soft colored rug, but he wasn’t.
What alternative do I have? None.
That dawn, he had no time to turn the other cheek. Lucas stood up. He was going to abandon everything. He would leave, but the ankle monitor. He sat in the chair.
The ankle monitor.
There had to be a solution. He looked about the room: in a corner, on the window’s parapet, a closed paper box. He opened it. A ringed cutting instrument, with instructions. It was easy. He synchronized it with the apparatus, cut it, and inserted it in the ring while a light at the antenna’s base blinked. He looked at his ankle, free of the monitor. They had put that in the window for him to go out onto the street. But who?

              “It was Quiroga,” the pistol said. “He’s vindictive.”

              His father was right. It was a trap. But why? He was insignificant. A small fry in the order of things. He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote two lines:
Mother, you know I’m innocent. I love you. Dad, you were always right, nothing is what it seems. Take care of Luís. I will survive. Love.
Sweat dropped from his forehead onto the paper. He tried to dry it, but he smeared the ink. He took a second sheet and wrote,
Luís, I have to go far away. Behave yourself and study hard. I love you. Take care of your dinosaur. One of these Christmases, I’ll come back for you.
He turned off the light and locked the door to his room, slipping the two letters under the door and blocking it with an inclined chair, from which he had removed the wheels.

              Lucas thought about taking the pistol but was afraid it would be his undoing by talking out loud and attracting the police’s attention. He tried to clear his mind.
No, the pistol’s not talking.
Nevertheless, it was better not to carry it.
It’s not careful and its voice can easily be heard,
he thought. He slipped a jacket over his pajamas and slipped on his shoes without socks. Lucas took a scarf that he’d never used. He went out the window and carefully closed the shutter from the outside. He knew he was covering the route that he had been pushed upon. He was a piece in someone else’s game. A hamster going down a tunnel he couldn’t see. Livestock. But for now, he had to be livestock with feline slippers.

             
Peace will come later.
He moved away in the supplemental darkness of the roof’s eaves, to the right of the window until he reached the back of the house because the police who were watching the door and the monitor’s signal were to the left. Lucas did not see the gray eyes awaiting him, silently, but another image imposed itself upon him. His father was going to force the door and his mother was going to see the pistol with the silencer. She would never again be at peace. He went back but couldn’t get into his room: the window latch had fallen when he closed the shutters, locking it from inside. He looked again to the left. The police car had an agent inside, immobile. Were there others?

              He got to the left corner. Lucas repeated to himself,
Stupid, you’re stupid.
A policeman was smoking, standing up with his back turned to him, next to his house’s door. The other was sleeping in the car. He took his shoes off and closed in on the smoking policeman’s back. He gave him a quick chop to the back of his neck and he didn’t fall helplessly only because Lucas held him. The feline’s claws, hidden in the slippers, had come out. It had to be about four in the morning. He put his shoes back on. When the policeman woke up, he would knock at his door and force his way into his room, immediately sealing it, according to protocol. His mother wouldn’t be tormented by seeing the gun from the crime and the doubt that he was, in fact, the murderer. But his uneasiness was not pacified by a ninety-nine percent certainty. His minority soul needed, as far as it depended on him, at least one hundred point zero percent probability. And if he had killed the policeman with his blow? And if his mother, in the meantime, went to see if he was resting, like she did when he was sick? And if Luís woke up?

              He looked at the police car. The agent was profoundly asleep at the wheel. Lucas drew closer. The keys were in the ignition but the door was locked. He wrapped the scarf around his right hand, looked intently at the collar of the policeman’s coat and pulled him out through the window, throwing him to the ground. The gray eyes, back there, ground his Cyrillic teeth. Lucas opened the door and the motor started on his first try. The wheels left tracks as he heard, evermore distantly, shouting and gunshots.

              He roared with the laughter of drunken pleasure: whoever had left the pistol in his room and the signal emulator on his parapet had not expected that escape. He laughed again. He did not follow the path prepared for him, he was following his own. Temperance.

              He drove to the river. Lucas stopped the car next to the Tagus and pushed it down the ramp, watching it sink into the water. It seemed like a movie. His sleepiness returned as did his nausea. His shoulder throbbed. His eyes hurt. All curses walk hand in hand. He went to a fountain and washed his face. Nothing doing. His nausea improved, but his fatigue was getting worse. 

              “You brought your pajamas but you’re not going to sleep out on the lawn now, are you, you idiot?” the fountain asked him in an affected voice.

             
Now everything talks,
Lucas thought. He looked around. He was going to sleep. The question was where. In the background, he saw a dirty black ship with an almost bleached out Canadian flag. He jumped the port fence with effort and approached the ship unsteadily, but it was impossible to get in there. His drowsiness was befuddling him. That was not normal. It was poison. He tried climbing in an open bulk container hooked to a crane, but it was difficult. He looked like a crippled old man or a hypnotized baby. He finally succeeded—it was full of coal. He rolled the scarf and covered himself in coal. Lucas went to sleep.

              When he woke up, the container was in the air. Lucas crawled out of the coal and peeked over the edge, squatting, realizing that he was flying en route to the ship’s hold. He felt better. The coal floor opened up and he fell more than five meters into a ravine in a mountain of lignite, accompanied by a ton of soot. He rolled to that enormous pyramid’s base without a scratch. He was as black as a crow, but hale and hearty. The feeling of being old had left his body. The crane returned several times with coal it dumped on the mountain’s flanks. The ship’s motors awakened and Lucas realized that the boat was going to leave—he didn’t know where to, and he was a stowaway. If the doors to the hold closed, would the air be breathable? He didn’t know.

              Lucas knew nothing. Neither where he was going, nor the length of the voyage, nor how he would eat or drink. He looked around and saw a hatch a third of the way from the top of the hold. A ladder built into the deposit’s wall gave access to the hatch. The hold cover began to close, making it nighttime. Never, since he was young, had he been afraid of the dark. Perhaps because he could see equally well on a night of the new moon as in the light of a summer day. In his childhood, the other kids would exclude him from blind man’s bluff in a dark room—after all, he wasn’t blind in the dark. He stumbled toward the ladder but could no longer see when the hold’s cover was sealed. Even an owl’s eyes need a grain of light to see at night. He groped the walls until he found the first step. He climbed blindly searching from time to time for the hatch. His left shoulder wasn’t helping. Luckily, he found the handle and opened it on his first try. The small door squeaked loudly and he remained immobile. From the other side, a tenuous light without the shadow of a living soul appeared.
They must all be getting the ship ready for departure,
he thought.

              He opened the door again, and again it squeaked. Lucas waited one or two minutes of three hundred seconds each. Nothing. He opened it again enough to slip through. He entered a narrow, poorly lit corridor with battered paint and rusty rivets. A stairway let him either go up or down. He descended, stepping as if his feet were cotton. He had gone down two decks when he heard laughter and human voices.  The laughter was coming down the steps to meet him and the voices coming up. He was the ham in a sandwich. On the first landing, he escaped down the corridor, seeking shelter. At the end, he saw a women’s bathroom. He went in. It wasn’t occupied. It was reasonably spacious inside and had a small porthole looking out, from which he could see that the ship was moving away from the port of Lisbon. With his tension, he had barely heard the growing rumble of the engines that now seemed deafening. He opened the porthole and tossed all of his documents and credit cards into the river, as well as his cell phone. He only kept his money, in bills, and his grandfather’s pocket watch. In his hands, he strangely felt his ex-girlfriend’s warm skin and in his sight the expectant look with which Luís observed everything that he did still remained. He’d once gone with his parents to Badajoz, in Spain, but this was different. He’d passed the point of no return. Goodbye Lisbon. Behind, in the city’s hills, he had left a past without future and in front of him, en route to the lake-filled plains of Canada, he went in search of a future without a past. He would only have to dissolve himself in the vastness of humanity and pass by unseen. If he had no problems with the law, he would never be deported.

              He was hungry and thirsty. Lucas locked the restroom from the inside. He drank water and washed his clothes, black from coal. He established a routine. At two-thirty in the morning, he would leave the restroom, camouflaged with soot, seal it from the outside, and explore the ship in the most barefooted of silence. He was the dark shadow of a black cat in a collier’s unilluminated darkness. Invisible to the human eye. He always took note of nooks to hide in along the way in case of danger.

              He would let his hair grow and would begin wearing a short ponytail. It was easier to comb like that, even if it meant he were less of a clean cut warrior.

              From its smell, he found the galley and left it provisioned with bread, crackers, chocolate, oranges, sausages, various types of knives, forks, plates, glasses, candles and matches, towels, soap, paper and fishing line. But why would they have fishing line in the kitchen? In one or another key site, he would set up set up nocturnal traps with transparent line that he would take down on his return. He realized there were no women on board, which explained the sailors’ behavior when they guffawed loudly watching sex films. It took him a few days to arrange for some clothes in the laundry that fit him, but he managed to come up with a minimal wardrobe.