The Hermit (8 page)

– How old is…? Erhard’s mouth is so dry he can hardly speak. – How old is he?

– Three months. Thereabouts.

– Someone must be missing him.

– Unfortunately not. Whenever a case like this arises, it’s always worst with the babies. They don’t know anyone. They don’t have nannies or playmates. They leave behind no colleagues, ex-girlfriends, or empty flats with unpaid rent. If Mum and Dad don’t care, then there’s no one worry to worry over them.

– Someone must’ve reported the child missing. On the islands or in Spain?

Bernal goes on: – If you ask me, Mum went out in the waves and drowned herself like some cowardly dog. No one walks out on her child like that, unless something’s wrong with her.

– What if something happened to the mother and the father? What if they went for a walk out on the beach and fell and…

– What if they shagged in one of the caves? Problem is, we’ve scoured the area. With dogs. With helicopters. There’s nothing. It’s Bill Haji’s bloody ring all over again. Gone.

– Someone must have seen the car arrive. What about that guy on the beach? The surfer?

– We’ve spoken to him twice. He didn’t get to Cotillo until the day after the car turned up. Nobody knows anything. Nada. And the car was registered to an importer outside of Lisbon, but the car never arrived; he thought it was on some lorry in Amsterdam two months ago.

– Maybe a car thief stole it with the boy inside?

– Where? In Amsterdam?

Erhard doesn’t have an answer.

– The most bizarre thing of all is the odometer. It registered thirty-one miles. Thirty-one.

– What about fingerprints?

– No fingerprints on the wheel, the gearstick, or the front seat. Finding prints is not as easy as some people think. And maybe Mum was wearing gloves? Maybe someone removed all traces? We found prints on the cardboard box, but no one we recognize, and who knows who had the box before the boy was shoved inside it? Someone, in any case, secured the box tightly in the seatbelt. It appears as though it’s been shaken around quite a bit, perhaps when they drove the car off the hilltop near the car park. It was on the beach at high tide, but no water gushed in, and no one in Cotillo saw the car when it arrived. If only we’d had some dogs. They’ve got dogs on Tenerife, but it takes a day and a half to get them over here, and by then it would’ve been too late.

– What if the mum and dad left the country?

– We’ve searched all departures. No one has arrived with a child and left without one. The absolute worst part is the autopsy report… Bernal walks over to the photograph of the boy. He points at the region around his eyes, the blackened area. – Lorenzo estimated that the boy was starved to death, two to three days before the car was abandoned on the beach. Before… Before they left him in a cardboard box. The autopsy report also determined that he was around twelve weeks old. When we found him, we all thought he was a newborn, because he was so thin and tiny. We’ve called all the delivery rooms and doctors on the island, and all young mothers with boys ranging from one month old to five months. One hundred and eighty-seven mothers in all. All the babies were accounted for. We’ve spoken with a number of fathers, too. We got a few leads, but nothing that took us anywhere.

Erhard can’t look at the photograph any more. – How can someone abandon a child? he says.

Bernal looks even more tired now. – In the end, we had to bury him. Yesterday morning. East of Morro Jable, Playa del Matorral. A fucking Bobcat dug a hole the size of a microwave oven. We did it quickly to avoid media attention. We were afraid journalists would come out and see the small coffin. Do you know how creepy that is? I thought of my own 3-year-old boy. There’s something all wrong about burying children that small.

– Are you still working on the case?

Bernal gives him a look. – Only because the press has begun writing about it. They’ve found out there was a dead boy in the car. They don’t know anything more than that. The higher-ups don’t wish to have another Madeleine on their hands. That’s the only thing they say. Bad PR won’t help the tourist industry, which is already in the dumps. I shouldn’t get you too involved – we’ve got something. A local angle.

– What does that mean?

Bernal turns his back to Erhard as he speaks. – A local angle. An islander, a suspect.

Erhard doesn’t understand. – If you’ve resolved the case, why am I here? Why are you wasting my time?

– It’s not a waste. We need to examine everything. Now we’re just more certain. We’re barking up the wrong tree with that box. Bernal shakes Erhard’s hand. His is the warm hand of someone who spends the bulk of his time in an office. And then he follows Erhard out, down the hallway, and into the dark hall, which is kept cool by the massive stones in the masonry.

– Let me know if there’s anything else I can do, Erhard says.

– Will do. Bernal pauses at the heavy oak doors that are difficult to nudge open. Through the small glass in the door he gives Erhard one final glance.

Erhard walks to his car, feeling the evening sun irritatingly insistent against his back. He needs water. He has a bad feeling.

It’s one thing to hear about the police’s strange methods, their nepotism, corruption, brutality, rape of detainees, and the alcoholism within its ranks – but it’s another thing entirely to experience it firsthand. He’s met plenty of inebriated policemen, having ferried them home to shrieking girlfriends or sobbing wives, but it’s appalling to see a case being evaluated and solved on a policeman’s desk.

He finds a warm bottle of water in the boot and sits in the car for some time before starting the engine. How random and harsh is life that a child can be born into such complete neglect. First by its parents, then by the system, and finally in death: a deep, black hole that sucks everything into it. He dreads to think of the outcome of the case. He dreads to think what awaits.

‌

‌THE WHORE

‌14 January–21 January

21

When he gets up on Saturday morning, he turns on the radio. He spins the dial from Radio Mucha over to Radio Fuerteventura. He waits for the news as he cautiously removes the finger from the glass in which it spent the night. It appears to have completely stopped decomposing. Holding onto the ends, he wriggles it and tries to free the ring. But it’s still jammed tight. He drops the finger into the bag, then slips the bag into his pocket.

He’s exhausted, or maybe just angry, after yesterday. Not because of the conversation but because he cannot let go of the image of the boy, the tiny box, the unresolved ending, the local angle – whatever that means.

He drives down to Alapaqa and drinks his morning coffee. Aristide, a fisherman who doesn’t usually come to the cafe, is busy with a group of Finnish tourists who’ve ordered breakfast. Erhard showers and sits on a rock beside the harbour, watching the fishermen discuss who’s allowed to fish where as they point across the sea at some buoys lapping on the water. He fills his cup and drives north. He cruises slowly through Corralejo, then onto the country road, and finally out towards Cotillo.

There are very few customers at this time of day. He picks up a young man out near Las Dunas who hails him in an exaggerated way, waving his arms and legs. He has no luggage but needs to go down to Puerto, to the ships, before 8 a.m. So Erhard floors the accelerator in the old Mercedes. The young man goes on and on about a girl he’s just said goodbye to, telling Erhard that she’s not like other girls. Of course it turns out that he doesn’t have any money. His money’s on the ship, he says, which is probably a lie. If Erhard lets him go he’ll never see any money.

– Give me your business card, I’ll give you mine, the young man tells Erhard, handing him a card. – I’ll send you the money.

But Erhard doesn’t have a card. It’s almost eight o’clock now. He doesn’t care and tells the man to get going so he can reach his ferry. The man dashes from the taxi and down the street towards the piers. Halfway, he turns and waves, still running.

This episode just reminds Erhard that he needs to ask people like that about a credit card before the fare begins. A confused young man in love.

Driving westward, he lowers the volume on the radio so he can’t hear dispatch, which, as always, is thick with rubbish. Discussions about who had picked up the most rides last month, or who has the hottest wife. There’s always a lot of complaints from drivers being scolded by the boss because they don’t submit their paperwork in a proper fashion, or because they don’t drive enough per month, or because the substitute drivers don’t tidy up the cars properly following the night shift. Or because someone budged ahead in the airport queue for crying out loud. The girls at dispatch poke fun at them. Lucia teases the drivers who are in the doghouse. In his fourteen years as a cabbie, Erhard hasn’t heard one unsolicited peep from the boss or from the auto workshop, not so much as a single admonishment or comment or criticism. He’s thorough and methodical in his work. He spends fifteen minutes each day balancing his accounts. Every day he pays 30 per cent to TaxiVentura, 25 per cent in taxes, and 25 per cent to Annette, then leaves the last 20 per cent to himself. On a good day it’s enough, on a bad day he barely has enough to eat. But that’s the way he likes it; it’s what’s fair. TaxiVentura receives all of it except for his own cut: they pay the taxes and transfer Annette’s money to her bank account at the People’s Bank of Denmark once a month. And he keeps the car clean. He’s even tried to liven up the atmosphere down at dispatch, suggesting a bookshelf and a break room where people can have a cup of coffee or tea. But it went nowhere. Wait until you’re the boss, Barouki says, washing his hands – first without soap, then with soap, and then finally washing them all the way up to his elbows before drying them with napkins. He does that five or six times during the course of a single meeting. He’s a friendly man who loves air conditioning. He’d only driven a taxi for a few months before he became a haulier, a fleet operator, and ran his own business for almost ten years before becoming the director of TaxiVentura in 2004. He’s good with schedules. Erhard snaps on the radio and waits for the twelve o’clock news to come on, but there’s nothing of interest.

He stops at a petrol station and washes his car. Afterward he rinses off the yellow foam, then dries the car with an old rag, polishing it with wax he’s gotten from one of the other drivers. He rarely does this. On an island where it’s always windy and dusty, it almost seems idiotic to wash and polish your car.

While the wax settles, he reads the last chapter in the new book by Almuz Ameida, the great hope among Spanish crime novelists. He sits in the shade on a bench next to the station. From there he can see the rocks and cliffs on the beach. He can see the sand as it swirls up each time the wind sweeps eastward, like a broom, towards the island. There is always a bunch of cars parked on the flat section of the rocks. Surfers and nudists. Tourists who don’t get out of their cars, because of the drifting sand. At this moment he sees a family sitting in a most-likely-rented Seat and staring across the beach. There are no kitesurfers. They are all down at Playa Cualpa. But if one looks hard enough between the rocks one sees several brown, mosslike lumps reclining in inflatable chairs. Usually with a beer close by or small bottles of white wine. It’s the island of intoxication. Not like Ibiza or Mallorca or Crete – youthful boozing that’s mostly an excuse to have sex. The drinking here is discreet. Outside the few noisy discotheques and roaring cocktail bars with their improvised menus, hundreds of people are quietly crawling from one buzz to the next. Alcohol is cheap, the weather is good, and the calendar empty.

Why not?

He’d sat between those rocks himself once, horny as a bull, during his first seven months on the island. His skin becoming brown and hard. From morning to night he lay with an erection behind a rock, his rest interrupted only by short hikes down to the water. At night he slept under a ledge farther north up the coast. He’d light a fire and eat jellyfish or fish he caught himself. Mostly, he ate the leftovers from family picnics, heels of bread or hunks of sausage. If it got really bad, he walked to the supermarket and bought tins of food. He had money from home. Not much. A backgammon case stuffed with a few thousand euros. But he didn’t want to spend the money. For a long time he didn’t feel he deserved to spend the money. For a long time he just wanted to be left alone. Without smiling. Without any kind of pleasure. Not even the sunshine or the starlight. He lay quietly, dispassionately observing the sky. But in the end this proved difficult. In the end the small pleasures found him.

The sound of the water trickling through the rocks when the sea was at low tide. Warm bread from the fire. One morning, a large bird sat with a fish in its beak a metre away, dripping water and blinking its huge buttonlike eyes. Sometimes he had company. But only later, after a few months. People who wanted to see him for themselves
el ermitaño
, the man who lived among the rocks. Most of them just gawked at him, standing as far away as possible to watch him clamber about. Others came all the way up to his campfire and offered him food or asked him questions. But he never responded. In those seven months he said nothing. Not even when the two men attacked him with bats and beat him senseless, leaving him lying in the sun like a shelled turtle.

What doesn’t kill you makes you angrier, as the saying goes.

He parks his car and crosses the road to the flat section down the slope, steep and covered with chunks of rock. He notices that his left boot is in tatters. He notices his sock through a slit between the sole and the leather. It’s been a long time since he’s spent money on that sort of thing. He doesn’t like to. Just the thought of trying on shoes makes him delay buying them. Maybe he can mend it with a little glue or some duct tape.

The car was parked here, right here.

He walks up and down the slope. It looks like soft sand, but there are actually rocks right beneath the thin layer. It’s hard to walk on. Suddenly he’s standing in the water, the beach disappearing into it. Tidewater is distinctive across the entire island, but because the sandy bottom is so flat, it seems stronger here. Here, napping girls or some family on a picnic are suddenly surprised by a wave that crashes all the way up the beach and against the first row of rocks.