The Summer of Dead Toys (3 page)

The third man in the office might intend to earn his living as a lawyer, but if he were to be judged by his eloquence and capacity for expression, the future before him was a little gloomy. In his defense, he wasn’t in a comfortable position, and neither the superintendent nor Héctor Salgado was making it any easier for him.

For the fourth time in ten minutes, Damián Fernández wiped away sweat with the same wrinkled tissue before answering a question.

“I already told you. I saw Dr. Omar the night before last, around nine.”
“And did you communicate the proposal that I made to him?”
Héctor didn’t know what proposal Savall was speaking of, but he could imagine it. He threw an appreciative glance at his boss, although anger shone in the depth of his eyes. Any deal in that bastard’s favor, even in return for saving his neck, left his stomach feeling hollow.
Fernández nodded. He loosened the knot of his tie as if it were strangling him.
“Every word.” He cleared his throat. “I told him . . . I told him he didn’t have to accept it. That you had very little on him anyway.” He must have noticed the rage rising in the superintendent’s face but he justified himself immediately. “It’s the truth. With that girl dead, nothing links him to the trafficking . . . They can’t even accuse you of malpractice when you don’t pretend to be a doctor. If they locked you up for that, they’d have to lock up all the fortune-tellers, quacks and holy men in Barcelona . . . the prison couldn’t hold them all. But,” he hastened to say, “I emphasized that the police could be very insistent and, since he was already recovering from the assault,” and saying that word he directed a rapid and nervous glance toward Inspector Salgado, who didn’t turn a hair, “maybe the best thing would be to forget the whole thing . . .”
The superintendent inhaled deeply.
“And did you convince him?”
“I think so . . . Well,” he corrected himself, “the truth is that he just said he’d think it over. And he’d call me the following day to give me an answer.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. I called his clinic yesterday, various times, but no one answered. That didn’t surprise me. The doctor doesn’t take calls while he’s working.”
“So you decided to go to see him first thing this morning?”
“Yes. I had to have an answer for you, and well . . .” he hesitated, “it’s not as if I have much to do these days.”
Not for the foreseeable future either, Savall and Salgado thought in unison, but they said nothing.
“And you went. About nine.”
Fernández nodded. He swallowed. Pallor was too poetic a word to describe the color of his face.
“Do you have any water?”
The superintendent exhaled.
“Not in here. We’re almost finished. Continue, Señor Fernández, please.”
“It wasn’t even nine. The bus came immediately and—”
“Get to the point, please!”
“Yes. Yes. What I was saying was that, although it was a bit early, I went up anyway and when I went to knock on the door, I saw it was ajar.” He stopped. “Well, I thought I could go in; at the end of the day, maybe something had happened to him.” He swallowed once more; the tissue came apart in his hands when he tried to use it again. “It smelled . . . it smelled strange. Rotten. I called him as I went toward his office, at the end of the corridor . . . That door was ajar as well and . . . I pushed it. Christ!”
The rest he’d already described at the beginning, his face distorted, before Héctor arrived. The pig’s head on the desk. Blood everywhere. And not a trace of the doctor.

“Just what we needed,” muttered the super as soon as the nervous lawyer had left the office. “We’ll go back to having the press biting us like vultures.”

Héctor thought the vultures were hardly biting, but he stopped himself commenting. In any case, he wouldn’t have had time because Savall picked up the receiver and called an extension. Half a minute later, Sergeant Andreu was coming into the office. Martina didn’t know what was happening, but she guessed by her boss’s face it was nothing good, so after winking at Héctor by way of a greeting, she got ready to listen. If the news Savall gave her surprised her as much as it had them, she hid it well. She listened attentively, asked a couple of pertinent questions, and left to carry out her orders. Héctor’s eyes followed her. He almost started on hearing his name.

“Héctor. Listen carefully because I’m only saying this once. I’ve risked my neck for you. I’ve defended you to the press and the brass. I’ve pulled out all the stops to bury this business. And I’m on the verge of convincing that guy to drop the charges. But if you go near that flat, if you intervene in this investigation even for one minute, I won’t be able to do anything. Understood?”
Héctor crossed one leg over the other. His intense concentration showed in his face.

“It’s my head on the chopping-block,” he finally said. “Don’t you think I’ve a right to know why they are cutting it off?”
“You lost it, Héctor. The same day you came to blows with that swine you gave up your rights. Now you’re facing the consequences.”
The thing was, Héctor knew all this but at that moment he didn’t care. He couldn’t even manage to repent: the blows he’d showered on Omar seemed to him just and deserved. It was as if the serious Inspector Salgado had regressed to his youth in a Buenos Aires
barrio
, when disagreements were resolved by punching each other to shit at the school gates. When you’d go home with a split lip but say you’d been hit in the face playing football. A burst of rebellion was still pricking him in the chest: an absurd, break-my-balls thing, decidedly immature for a cop just turned forty-three.
“And no one remembers the girl?” asked Héctor bitterly. A poor defense, but it was the only one he had.
“Let’s see if you get this into your head, Salgado.” To his regret, Savall had raised his voice. “As far as we know, there wasn’t the least contact between Dr. Omar and the girl in question after the flat where the girls were kept was taken apart. We couldn’t even show there was any beforehand without the girl’s word. She was in the centre for minors. Somehow they managed to do . . . that . . . to them.”
Héctor nodded.
“I know the facts, chief.”
But the facts didn’t manage to convey the horror. The intensely panicked face of a little girl, even in death. Kira wasn’t fifteen, didn’t speak a word of Spanish or of any language other than her own and yet she’d managed to make herself heard. She was slight, very slim and in her smooth, doll-like face her eyes shone, a color somewhere between amber and chestnut that he’d never seen before. Like the others, Kira had taken part in a ceremony before leaving her country in search of a better future. They called them ju-ju rites, in which, after drinking water used to wash a corpse, the young girls offered pubic hair or menstrual blood, which was collected before an altar. They then promised never to report their traffickers, to pay the supposed debts incurred by their journey and generally to obey without question. The punishment for whoever did not comply with these promises was a horrible death, for her or for the relatives she’d left behind. Kira suffered it herself: nobody would have said so fragile a body could contain so much blood. Héctor tried to block the image from his mind, that same vision that at the time had made him lose his head and go in search of Dr. Omar to extract every bone from his body. That individual’s name had come up during the investigation: in theory his only function had been to attend to the girls’ health. But the fear betrayed by the girls on hearing his name indicated that the doctor’s duties went further than purely medical attention. Not one had dared speak of him. He took precautions and the girls were brought to his clinic individually or in pairs. The most he could be accused of was of not asking questions, and that was a very weak accusation for a witch doctor who ran a squalid clinic and tended to illegal immigrants. But that wasn’t enough for Héctor; he’d chosen to lean on the youngest, the most frightened, with the help of an interpreter. All it had achieved was that Kira said, in a very quiet voice, that the doctor had examined her to check whether she was still a virgin and in passing he’d reminded her that she must do what those men said. Nothing else. The following day, her child’s hand took up a pair of scissors and made her body a fountain of blood. In Héctor’s eighteen years in the police force he’d never seen anything like it, and he’d seen a lot: from junkies without a healthy piece of skin to inject into, to victims of every type of violence. But nothing like this. A macabre, perverse sensation emanated from Kira’s mutilated body, something unreal which he couldn’t put into words. Something belonging to the realm of nightmares.
“Another thing,” Savall continued, as if the previous point had already been agreed without argument. “Before being reinstated, you have to attend some sessions with a force psychologist. It’s mandatory. Your first appointment is tomorrow at eleven. So do what you can to appear sane. Starting with a shave.”
Héctor didn’t protest; in fact, he already knew. Suddenly, and in spite of all the good resolutions he’d made on the long flight back, he didn’t give a shit about any of it. Any of it except the bloody pig’s head.
“Can I go?”
“One moment. I don’t want statements to the press, not even a hint of one. As far as you’re concerned, all of this is ongoing and you have no comment. Have I made myself clear?”
Seeing Héctor nod, Savall exhaled and smiled. Salgado got up, ready to leave, but the superintendent didn’t seem disposed to let him go yet.
“How was Buenos Aires?”
“Well, you know . . . it’s like the Perito Moreno glacier: from time to time it looks like it’s going to fall to pieces but the block stays firm.”
“It’s a fantastic city. And you’ve put on weight!”
“Too many barbecues. Each Sunday I had one in a different friend’s house. It’s difficult to resist.” The phone on Savall’s desk rang again and Héctor wanted to take advantage of the moment to get out of that office once and for all.
“Wait, don’t go. Yes? Fuck! Tell her I’ll call her back. Then tell her again!”
“Problems?” asked Héctor when his boss had hung up.
“What would life be without them?” Savall fell silent for a few seconds. This usually happened when an idea suddenly seized him and he needed time to translate it into words. “Listen,” he said very slowly. “I think there’s something you can do for me. Unofficially.”
“Do you want me to beat someone up? Fine with me.”
“What?” Savall was still absorbed in his deliberations, which exploded like bubbles in an instant. “Sit down.” He inhaled, nodding and smiling with satisfaction, as if he were convincing himself of his brilliant idea. “The person who called was Joana Vidal.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you were away when it all happened. It was the night of San Juan.” Savall opened one or two files on the desk until he found what he was looking for. “Marc Castells Vidal, nineteen. He was celebrating the festival in his house, just him and two friends. At some point during the night, the boy fell through the window in his room. He died instantly.”
“A Superman complex after a couple of lines?”
“There were no drugs in his blood. Alcohol yes, but not in great quantities. It seems he had the habit of smoking a cigarette sitting on the windowsill. Maybe he lost his balance and fell, maybe he jumped . . . He was a strange boy.”
“Everyone’s strange at nineteen.”
“But they don’t fall from windows,” replied Savall. “The thing is that Marc Castells was the son of Enric Castells. That name ring a bell?”
Héctor meditated for a few seconds before answering. “Vaguely . . . Business? Politics?”
“Both. He used to run his own company with over a hundred employees. Then he invested in the property market, and he was one of the few who knew to get out before the bubble burst. And recently his name has cropped up repeatedly as the possible number two of a party. There’s quite a lot of movement in the lists for the next local elections and they say new faces are needed. At the moment nothing’s confirmed, but it’s clear that a couple of right-wing parties would like to have him in their ranks.”
“Successful businessmen always sell.”
“Even more at times of crisis. Well, the case is that the boy fell, or jumped from the window. Full stop. We have nothing else.”
“But?”
“His mother won’t accept it. It was she who called just now.” Savall looked at Héctor with the friendly attitude he did so well from time to time. “She’s Castells’ ex-wife . . . Bit of a murky story. Joana abandoned her husband and son when the boy was one or two years old. She only saw him again at the funeral.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yes. I knew her. Joana, I mean. Before she left. We were friends.”
“Oh yeah. The Barcelona old guard. Polo companions? I always forget how much you stand by each other.”
Savall made a disparaging gesture with his hand.
“Same everywhere. Look, like I said, officially we have nothing. I can’t put anyone on it to investigate, and I’m not so flush with inspectors that I can keep them busy with something that definitely won’t go anywhere. But . . .”
“But I’m free.”
“Exactly. Just take a look at the case: speak to the parents, the kids who were at the party. Give her a definitive answer.” Savall lowered his head. “You have a son too. Joana is only asking that someone dedicate more time to the boy’s death. Please.”
Héctor didn’t know if his boss was asking a favor of him, or if he’d guessed what he intended to do and was preventing it before it happened.
Savall passed him the file with a pained smile.
“We’ll sit down with Andreu tomorrow. She opened the case with the new girl.”
“We have a new girl?”
“Yeah, I put her with Andreu. A little bit green, but on paper she’s very clever. First in all the tests, a meteoric rise. You know how the young push.”
Héctor took the file and got up.
“I’m delighted to have you back with us.” Here was the solemn moment. Savall had numerous registers. At these times, his face reminded Héctor of Robert Duvall’s. Paternal, hard, condescending, a little bit slick. “I want you to keep me posted on how it goes with that shrink.” All that was missing was a “Behave yourself,” an “I hope I don’t regret this.”
They shook hands.
“And remember.” Savall squeezed his subordinate’s hand lightly. “The Castells case is unofficial.”
Héctor let go, but the echo of the phrase stuck in his mind, like one of those bluebottles that insist on bumping their heads against the glass.