Death Going Down Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  1. Death Going Down

  2. The Moon in the Window

  3. A Home and a Victim

  4. One Building and Many Worlds

  5. The Web

  6. The Horsefly

  7. Where is Emilio Villalba?

  8. Who Killed Frida Eidinger?

  Available and Coming Soon from Pushkin Vertigo

  Copyright

  1

  Death Going Down

  The car pulled up in front of an apartment building on one of the first blocks of Calle Santa Fe, where the street opens out to a view across the wide Plaza San Martín. At two in the morning on that cold, misty August night, only the occasional vehicle was gliding over the damp shiny asphalt.

  The few people walking the streets were silhouetted against a desolate background. They hurried along, harassed by the temperature and the late hour, but moved with the uncertain gait of sleepwalkers. They were spurred on by the desire to get home, wherever that was, because when night and winter reign in the streets and there is a sense of others sleeping behind closed windows, whether peacefully or fitfully, even a room that is lonely or filled with painful memories counts as home.

  Pancho Soler let his body fall against the car door to open it. Framed by the windscreen, the double row of buildings seemed to go on without end. A wave of nausea forced him to close his eyes and steady himself. When he opened them again a yellow streetlamp swam into focus, looking like a badly painted moon.

  A pair of legs, floppy as if made of cloth, emerged from the car door and Soler thrust his face into the frozen night air like a carp bursting out of water. The pavement stretched from the car to the building door like an abyss of dull slabs, filling him with fear. He resolved to cross the space, trying in vain to give some direction to his disconnected footsteps, furious that the simplest of tasks demanded such concentration.

  Still, he’d had a good time. He always had a good time with Luisita. She was a great girl who knew how to appreciate a drink, a useful tool to curb her eventual complaints. Women always complain that they are left alone.

  The light in the lobby was on. If he hurried he would reach the lift before the regulation three minutes were up. The illuminated panel showed number six, the caretaker’s apartment. What a nuisance! He would end up in the dark before the lift reached the ground floor.

  Leaning on the frosted glass door, Soler waited while the red buttons lit up and went out successively. A fuzzy tiredness crept along his limbs and up into his head. All of a sudden he noticed that the lift shaft had filled with light and at the same moment, as if choreographed, the lobby plunged into darkness.

  Someone had come down in the lift. He could make out a blurry shape on the other side of the door. Still leaning on the wall, Pancho moved to one side to make way for the person in the lift but the door remained stubbornly closed. All he could see was the shadow puppet outline of a shape curled up in the corner.

  “It must be a woman,” grumbled Soler. “Women always expect a chap to do everything.”

  Nonetheless, he pulled the door open with a smile in reserve in case it was indeed a woman. She might be young and pretty. The mirror doubled the unseemly position of the stranger, who was bundled up in a dark fur coat. He had already been softened by alcohol, and the female shape, half collapsed against the back panel, somehow moved him. She showed not the slightest intention of moving from that spot. Poor thing, she must have been feeling even worse than he did.

  There was an air of unreality as Soler, in his impulse for solidarity, approached the woman and saw she was young and blonde. She looked awfully pale. His annoyance faded as he noticed successive details. His selfishness was not, after all, the product of an adult’s resentful attitude, but rather of a child’s innocent self-interest.

  All that bothered him now was the constant shifting of the walls and the ghostly light reflected by the mirror illuminating the fallen woman, with her face half hidden in the collar of her fur coat. A strand of blond hair hung limply across her cheek in a suggestion of intimacy. Soler stretched out his hand to sweep her hair back and in doing so, his fingers brushed against her skin. A spasm of horror froze him. Unaware of what he was doing, Soler reached out to touch the stranger’s hands. He was surprised by his involuntary invocation:

  “My God!”

  He became aware of the ground becoming firmer under his feet. His face in the mirror looked strange and distorted, and the unlit lobby was like a shadowy pit where one wakes at the edge of nightmare. He felt a desperate need to shout in protest. Why did this have to happen to him, him of all people? If only Luisita had insisted he stay with her! That would have been less trouble, all things considered.

  He then felt his legs bump against a smooth edge. He had stepped back as if the surprise had pushed him in the chest, and was now crashing against the chestnut-coloured velvet divan along the length of the lobby wall. Soler let himself fall onto it, his eyes fixed on the scene in the lift, which with distance was now brought into clearer focus.

  Adolfo Luchter crossed Calle Santa Fe almost at a run, the cold biting his cheeks, bearing the unwelcome memory of desolate nights, and the next day looming as an arduous string of bitter hours to fight through in that unfamiliar city.

  As he was about to open the front door he noticed Soler draped pitifully over the divan in the lobby. It was always the same! Whenever he arrived home late at night he ran into one of that man’s displays of extravagant boredom. Soler would either be at home making merry with others just as convinced as he that to sleep at certain times of night denotes an utter lack of personality, or else one had to collect him at the door, help him up to his apartment and even put him into bed when the aforementioned displays had been excessive. Luchter was generally a helpful soul but his goodwill faltered when it came to people like Soler who took life for nothing more than a bothersome, illicit game.

  Soler launched himself at the doctor when he saw him come in. Luchter was forced to grab him to prevent his fall, and noticed his glassy eyes. A slight shift of his blond eyebrows was the only sign of annoyance.

  Luchter went to turn on the light. Soler clung to his arm, almost letting himself be dragged along. He muttered a few garbled words as though his tongue had to contort itself in his mouth in order to articulate them. His outstretched hand motioned towards the lift. From the gesture, more than from his speech, Luchter guessed what he was trying to say:

  “Look,” he mumbled, “there… there’s a dead woman…”

  The light came on and its brightness swept away the absurdity of those words, making them seem ridiculous.

  “Stop all this silli—” Luchter started.

  But a brief glance at the lift made him pause. He held ba
ck an exclamation of surprise and started towards the motionless woman. Soler stumbled behind him, following his steps and trying in vain to imitate his confident movements. Luchter would have liked to shoo him away but another more serious problem demanded his attention. Dr Luchter promptly bent forward to examine the stranger in the lift. He acted with an impersonal and professional efficiency. When he stood up, his clear green gaze was clouded with unease. He turned to see Soler’s face, full of idiotic expectation.

  “Was she with you?” he asked.

  “No, no… I found her there… I’ve no idea who she is.”

  Again the light went off and the square of the lift stood out once more. Luchter’s voice was clipped with anxiety.

  “Did you see which floor the lift was stopped at when you called it?”

  “The sixth… yes, the sixth.”

  “The caretaker’s apartment. It makes no sense,” the doctor muttered. Staring at the pathetic figure, he noticed the handbag beside her. He bent to pick it up.

  “Don’t touch it,” whimpered Soler.

  “Why not?”

  “The police… what’ll they say? We have to report it.”

  Fear, a wretched fear, weakened Soler’s voice. That was the end of his game of cops and robbers. Now the thought of police uniforms seemed dreadful. Luchter shrugged.

  “We’ve nothing to lose by trying to find out who she is. She might have lived in this building.”

  “Lived?”

  Luchter, who had opened the handbag, let the anxious suspense of that question hang in the air. Soler then moved towards him. Well, if they must do something. He tried to peek over the doctor’s shoulder.

  “Leave me be,” Luchter pushed him away harshly, making Soler lose his balance. To stop himself from falling, Soler snatched at the doctor’s sleeve. Luchter stumbled and there was a metallic tinkling, like a muffled, mocking laugh. The bag’s contents had spilt across the floor.

  Wide-eyed, Soler contemplated the sudden appearance of those tiny objects: a powder compact, a handkerchief, a change purse, a wallet, an address book. Something rolled towards the gap beneath the door—a little golden tube, clearly a lipstick. It was going to disappear! Dear God, that was the same as admitting to having opened the bag! They heard no accusatory click as it fell, but it had disappeared all the same, silently and definitively.

  “Did you see?” groaned Soler. “What now?”

  Luchter was much calmer.

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll get it out later. Come with me, Soler.”

  Soler muttered a protest against going anywhere.

  “So… she’s dead, then? She’s really dead?”

  He pointed to the woman with an incredulous gesture. A person didn’t just die like that, in a lift, at that time of night. How long would the formalities take? He needed to sleep. He heard Luchter answering the question he’d almost forgotten he’d asked.

  “Yes, she’s dead.”

  “How?”

  “It looks like poisoning. There’s a smell of bitter almonds. It must have been potassium cyanide.”

  Luchter took Soler’s arm.

  “We’ll go up in the service lift,” he said, dragging Soler along. “We have to tell the caretaker and the police. Come on.”

  The bell rang in the caretaker’s apartment. Andrés Torres, half asleep, stretched out his hand towards the light as if the intermittent, high-pitched sound tugged at his arm. With the glare, his wife’s dishevelled head emerged from under the blankets. Aurora had the same interrogatory appearance as the light that now filled the room.

  Torres’s next action put him in possession of his trousers, which had been waiting at the foot of the bed for him get up. He hurriedly pulled them on in order to recover the sense of individuality lost in sleep, obeying that simple, pathetic relationship between the clock and consciousness. He heard but did not understand what Dr Luchter was explaining through the door. Something about a body in the lift and the police, none of which fitted with his job as caretaker, who at six in the morning must set methodically to work and begin the daily battle with suppliers and residents. He turned to his wife and shot her an authoritative look with which he hoped to resolve his inner confusion.

  “My goodness!” cried Aurora, jumping out of bed and grabbing her clothes, her face puffy from interrupted sleep,

  “What are you doing, woman?” asked her husband.

  “Getting dressed. I’m going down with you.”

  “No one called for you.”

  “I’m not staying here alone, not even on Saint James’s orders. Didn’t they say someone’s been killed? The murderer’s probably on the loose.”

  Torres paused with his hand still in the air, pulling at the elastic of his braces while trying to button them.

  “Rubbish! Who said anything about a crime?”

  “Well, I mean, if there’s a body…”

  Torres scratched his head. Feeling defeated, he turned to prophecy.

  “That’s what happens to people who go out at night. Just look how they end up. That’s what my mother always said.”

  This was his worst complaint against his wife. Once a week, Aurora asked him to take her to an evening cinema screening. Pleased that the circumstances finally backed him up, he added:

  “No good comes from roaming the streets at the sort of time when decent people are at home.”

  Aurora listened with her head bowed. The main thing was for her husband not to leave her alone. She even felt able to accept him turning her mother-in-law into a prophet of doom.

  “Come on, Andrés, take me with you. I’m scared half to death.”

  She was lying. Something stronger than fear had taken hold of her. She mentally ran through the faces of the people who lived in the building, pausing with morbid pleasure on the ones she most disliked. Who could the victim be?

  The police had arrived by the time they got down to the lobby. Two officers were guarding the main door. A corpulent middle-aged man and another younger man were taking a statement from Soler. Luchter was standing to one side, waiting his turn.

  “Officer Vera,” said the older man to the other, “notify Public Assistance to come for the body once the police surgeon has examined it. Call Inspector Ericourt, too. I’ll carry on taking statements.”

  The officer saluted.

  “You can use my telephone, Superintendent,” offered Luchter.

  “Thank you. Is someone there to open the door?”

  “The cook.”

  “Go ahead, Officer Vera. Fifth floor, isn’t it? And you, I need you now. What’s your name?”

  “Adolfo Luchter. Doctor.”

  “Argentinian?”

  “Naturalized Argentinian. I’ve lived in this country for nine years.”

  “Please tell me what happened.”

  “I was coming home after leaving my car in the garage.”

  “Do you recall the time?”

  “Approximately two fifteen. At two a.m. I left the house of a colleague with whom I was working on a report for the Neuropsychiatric Society.”

  “His name?”

  “Dr Martín Honores. He lives at twenty-seven Calle Arenales.”

  “Good, carry on.”

  “I came across señor Soler in the lobby. My first impression was that he was unwell. He told me what had happened.”

  “How did you find the victim?”

  “In the same position as she is now.”

  “You didn’t move her?”

  “I simply examined her. I don’t believe I moved her.”

  “Do you know her?”

  Luchter’s face, which normally had the healthy glow of a man who practises plenty of outdoor sport, was pale. Without even casting a glance towards where she lay, he declared he did not know the person in the lift.

  “Was it you who called the police?”

  “Yes, I called from my apartment. Señor Soler was with me. We went up together to notify the caretaker.”

  “So you’re
telling me everything is as you found it.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But señor Soler has said you opened the deceased’s handbag.”

  “That’s true. I wanted to see if there was anything that might indicate who she was and whether she lived in this building. To save time, I mean.”

  “Poor move.”

  Luchter silently agreed. Authority is like the word of God, difficult to dispute if one feels its presence.

  “So it’s true that the young woman’s lipstick fell into the lift shaft?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The Superintendent turned to Vera, who had just entered the lobby.

  “As soon as the body has been removed, have one of the officers go down with the caretaker. We need to retrieve a lipstick that fell down there.”

  He pointed to the lift shaft. His gaze then travelled restlessly over everyone present.

  “Which of you is the caretaker?”

  Andrés and Aurora Torres stepped forward together like the inseparable stars of a constellation. At last, the identification! Aurora was sniffing at clues in her memory. Andrés shook his head. He did not recognize the elegant figure. Aurora saw a topaz-coloured jersey dress under the fur coat and beautiful, dark suede stilettos. The woman’s long blond hair fell languidly, framing sharp features that when still alive must have given her an air of impertinence, and which death made sharper still.

  “I’ve never seen her,” declared Torres.

  A joyful yelp from Aurora undermined his resounding conviction.

  “Well, I do think I’ve seen her. I met her in the lift when I was going down to clean the first floor.”

  Torres’s withering look reached Aurora at the same time as the Superintendent’s question.

  “Had you seen her before that?”

  “No, sir, no.” Aurora now took refuge in the single sighting as a mitigation of possible complications. “Just once! It was last week and she was dressed just as she is now. That’s how I remembered her, nothing else.”

  “Where was she going? To which floor?”