Tears in Rain (8 page)

A
fter her interview with Chi, Bruna went back home on the sky-tram and, before heading up to her apartment, stopped off at the supermarket on the corner to stock up on provisions and buy a new card for purified water. During those periods when she didn’t have work, the android never found a moment to attend to her daily needs, despite supposedly having all the time in the world. Her pantry emptied, surfaces became covered with layers of dust, and the sheets stayed on her bed so long that they acquired an almost solid smell. Whenever she picked up a job, however, Bruna needed to organize her surroundings in order to feel that her head was in shape. Having a sharp mind was an essential requirement of her profession. The mark of a great detective wasn’t her investigative skills but her ability to think on her toes. So, after putting the shopping away in the kitchen and inserting the water card in the meter, Bruna spent a few hours cleaning and tidying her apartment, washing her dirty clothes, and throwing out the empty bottles that were lined up like tenpins by the door.

Then she served herself a glass of white wine, sat down in front of the main screen, and for a few minutes enjoyed the neat calmness of her apartment. She set herself to thinking about her new case and how to approach it. The first steps in an investigation were important; if you made a mistake, you could sometimes
end up wasting a lot of time and adding confusion to what was already confused. She grabbed her electronic tablet—since taking notes by hand seemed to help her think—and started to jot down the ideas that were buzzing around in her head. Though she wasn’t creating a list of priorities, a rebellious streak made her leave the memorist for later, disregarding the words of the rep leader, who had insisted that she start with him. But she did write on the tablet,
Why is Chi interested in Nopal?
Underneath, she added other phrases using the stylus:
Hologram, Threats against Chi, Lock register, Traffickers, Document four other cases, Victims—chance or choice?
After hesitating for a moment, she added
Pablo Nopal
. She told herself that putting him in eighth place was rebellious enough.

She opened the holograph, took out the chip, put it in her computer and began to examine the image minutely using an analysis program. It was the same program the police used, a powerful tool that immediately deconstructed the original fragment of Myriam and showed the image’s ID properties, which, understandably, corresponded to those of the RRM. As for the additional footage, the program couldn’t find the original sequence on the web, so it performed a hypothetical reconstruction. It was the gutting of a pig and might have originated in a legitimate slaughterhouse, because the animal seemed to have been killed first in the regulation manner, using anesthesia and a stun gun. The image’s ID properties had been carefully erased, together with all its electronic tags, making it almost impossible to track down. Although there were now fewer and fewer slaughterhouses—in part due to a growing sensitivity toward animals, and in part because in order to reduce CO
₂
emissions, the government required meat eaters to acquire an expensive license—hundreds of them were still in operation across the planet. Moreover, the recording could have been made at any stage during the last three years, this being the software’s maximum life span, according to the program. As to the chip itself and the
holograph ball, they were basic, everyday products, the sort any kid could buy in the local corner store to make a hologram to take to school. It would be very difficult to extract useful data from them. Nevertheless, Bruna started an exhaustive analysis of the sequence with the pig and left it running in the background. The analysis program would take hours to complete its task.

She decided to take a break and eat something. She put an individual serving of compressed fish cakes into the Chef Express, and in one minute it was ready. She removed the lid, poured herself another glass of wine, and returned to sit in front of the main screen, eating straight from the container.

“Find Pablo Nopal,” she said out loud.

Various possibilities came up, and Bruna touched one, leaving a faint, greasy food stain on the screen. The man’s image came up instantly, a life-size 3-D head shot on the right-hand side of the screen, with various film clips on the left. Dark hair, slim, with a long, narrow nose, thin lips, big black eyes. An attractive guy. He was thirty-five: TTT age, had he been a rep. But he wasn’t. According to the records, Nopal was a playwright and novelist, as well as a memorist. And he did indeed enjoy a certain celebrity—not just for his books, which were well received, but also for a couple of scandals in his past. Seven years earlier, he had been accused of the murder of his elderly uncle, a patrician millionaire. Nopal just happened to be the sole beneficiary. He even spent a few months in custody, but in the end, there was some murky business about contaminated evidence, and Nopal was cleared due to lack of evidence.

His reputation was tarnished, however, and many people continued to believe that he was guilty; in fact, the government stopped commissioning memories from him because of it all, so he hadn’t gone back to being a practicing memorist.
At least not officially
, Bruna thought to herself, because black market memories also needed memorists to write them. Three years after his acquittal, Nopal was implicated in another violent death—this
time, of his private secretary. He had been the last to see the victim alive, and for a time he was targeted by the police, although in the end he was never even accused. Naturally, both incidents increased the sales of his books. There was nothing like a really bad reputation to make you famous in this world.

Bruna studied Nopal’s face. Yes, it was attractive, but it was also disturbing. An easygoing smile but too sardonic, too tough. An indecipherable expression in his eyes. He had published three novels, the first a few months after his uncle’s death. The title was
The Violent Ones
, and the book’s publication had been celebrated with a small cultural event. Bruna typed in her password and credit account number, paid five gaias for the book, and downloaded the text onto her electronic tablet. She planned to just glance through it, but she began to read and couldn’t stop. It was a short, unsettling novel, the story of a boy who lived in one of the Zero Air Zones. Bruna had been in one of those supercontaminated, marginal sectors during her time in the military, and she had to admit that the author knew how to convey the desperate and poisonous atmosphere of those wretched holes. What happened was that the boy became friends with the recently arrived adolescent daughter of a judge. Magistrates, like doctors, police, and other socially necessary professionals, were posted to the Dirty Air Sectors on double salary, and for no longer than a year, to prevent any health repercussions. Bruna knew that even under those conditions, many refused to go. The novel told the story of the relationship between the two youths during those twelve months. At the end of that time, the night before the judge and her family were to leave, the two adolescents killed her with a hammer. The scene was brutal, but the novel was written in a way that was so convincing, so true to life, and so distressing that Bruna experienced a genuine complicity with the killers and wanted them to escape justice. Which they didn’t, so the end of the story was depressing.

Bruna switched off the tablet. She was numb from having spent several hours in the same position and had the strangest
feeling of grief. There was something in that damn novel that seemed to have spoken directly to her. Something strangely close to home, recognizable. Something bordering on the unbearable.
Four years, three months, and twenty-three days.

She leaped up and paced back and forth feverishly. The apartment had only two rooms: a lounge-kitchen, and a bedroom. Neither of them was very big, so two strides took her to a wall, and she had to turn around. She looked through the picture-window; the city shimmered and hummed in the dark. She approached the large jigsaw puzzle board: she’d been doing the puzzle on it for more than two months, but there was still a central hole of about a hundred pieces to be filled. It was one of the hardest puzzles she’d ever undertaken: an image of the universe, with a great deal of blackness, and few celestial bodies from which to get her bearings. She looked at the jagged edges of the hole for a moment and fiddled with the loose pieces, trying to find one that would fit. Hidden order within chaos. Usually when she was solving jigsaw puzzles, she felt closer to serenity than at any other moment in her edgy life, but right now she couldn’t concentrate, and she ended up abandoning the puzzle without having managed to place a single piece. It was Nopal’s fault, she thought, and the fault of that revolting novel that had hit so close to home. Those damn memorists were all equally perverse, equally repugnant. And then, as on so many other occasions when anxiety was exploding inside her body, Bruna decided to go for a run—physical tiredness was the best tranquilizer. She put on an old pair of track pants and sneakers, and left the apartment. When she hit the street, it was midnight on the dot.

She shot off so fast in the direction of the park that she quickly ran out of breath. She reduced her pace and tried to find a well-balanced rhythm, breathing easily, accommodating her body. Little by little she got into the relaxed and hypnotic rhythm of a good run, her feet almost weightless, hitting the sidewalk in time to her heartbeat. Above her head, the public screens spilled
out the usual stupid messages, juvenile little quips, music clips, personal images from someone’s last holiday, or news items covered by amateur journalists. In one news item, she saw an Instant Terrorist blowing himself up on Gran Vía, fortunately causing only his own death. Just as well that at this stage, Ins were so incompetent and clumsy that they rarely managed to do much damage, thought the android; but once those antisystem crazies learned to organize themselves and make good homemade bombs, the Ins would turn into a nightmare. Every week, someone in Madrid set themselves on fire, for who knew what reason.

Bruna entered the park through the corner gate and crossed it on the diagonal. It was a lung park rather than a park with vegetation. The rep liked running between the rows of artificial trees because it was easier for her to breathe: they absorbed much more carbon dioxide than genuine trees and you could really notice the higher concentration of oxygen. Yiannis had told her that decades earlier artificial trees were built so that they more or less simulated real ones, but those absurdly mimetic creations had long been abandoned in the search for a more efficient design. The android was aware of at least half a dozen tree models, but the ones in this lung park, which belonged to Texaco-Repsol, were like enormous banners made from an almost transparent, and extremely fine, red metallic thread, floating strips three feet wide and about thirty-three feet long that swayed with the wind and produced small, chirruping, cricketlike noises. Crossing the park was like passing through the baleen filter of an enormous whale.

When she came out on the other side of the park, Bruna caught herself turning right rather than taking a left and heading for home along Reina Victoria Avenue, as she had intended. She jogged for a minute without really knowing where she was going, until she realized that she was heading for Nuevos Ministerios, one of the city’s deprived neighborhoods, a prostitution and drug-dealing district. Maybe she could find a memory trafficker
there. It was not the ideal spot to be walking around unarmed at night, but on the other hand, a combat rep out exercising was unlikely to be the most desirable target for criminals.

Despite its name, Nuevos Ministerios was very old. It had been built two centuries earlier as a government hub, and it consisted of a collection of interconnected buildings that formed a gigantic, zigzagging mass. It must have been an ugly and inhospitable cement monstrosity from its inception. During the Robot Wars, Nuevos Ministerios was used to house displaced people, and afterward there was no way of getting them out of there. The original refugees sublet rooms to other tenants illegally, and the area rapidly deteriorated. The windows were broken, the doors burned, and the former gardens had become filthy, empty esplanades. But there were also noisy bars, squalid Dalamina-smoking dens, wretched cabarets. An entire world of illegal pleasures overseen by the local gangs, who paid the clean air fees. Bruna reached the outer perimeter of Nuevos Ministerios and walked past Comet, the area’s bestknown hangout, a dive on the outer boundary frequented by some well-to-do customers keen to dip their toes into the dark side of life. The music was deafening, and there were quite a few people hanging around the door. The majority of them were bodies for hire, figured the detective after giving them a quick glance. Just then, an adolescent-looking boy caught up with her and started to jog along beside her.

“Hi, tough girl. I see you enjoy sport. How about doing some exercise inside with me? I work wonders...”

Bruna looked him over; he had the typical, telltale eyes with the vertical pupils, but he was too young to be an android. True, he could have had plastic surgery, but most likely he was wearing contact lenses that made him look like a rep. Many humans had a morbid sexual curiosity about androids, and the male prostitutes took advantage of it.