The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 10
I decided not to argue with him. The most sensible thing would be to ask no questions and not to want to know anything more. The best thing would be not to dump this weird man here but to take him back to town and, once there, go back to being with Karin.
And what if it was true? Even if I eventually decided to leave them, I still had to go back once more. It would seem very strange if I didn’t and left there the few clothes I’d taken with me, along with calcium tablets, stretch-mark creams and all the rest. They’d be worried and would come down to look for me, would ask a lot of questions and the whole thing would go from bad to worse. I wouldn’t be too happy about it either, and wouldn’t even sleep well that night. Then again, to be sincere, I had to confess that my curiosity had been aroused. And if I got out of this situation now, as Julián suggested, if I didn’t go back up to Villa Sol and disappeared, I’d regret it because I’d be left without knowing anything. Life, or destiny, had brought me to this winding road, and it was less complicated to keep going than to turn around and go back.
Just as I feared, when I got to the gym Karin was waiting for me and very testy too.
I apologized, explaining that I’d run out of petrol and, when we got back to Villa Sol, I went to my room and put the newspaper item in the bottom of the bag in which I’d brought my clothes.
Julián
I was very clumsy with Sandra; I scared her, but I had to open her eyes at some point. I’d been going up and down to Villa Sol too often and couldn’t keep waiting till one of Fredrik’s young brutes beat me up on some corner, in which case she’d never know whose hands she’d fallen into. There was no time to waste. On the one hand, Sandra would have been in less danger not knowing, but on the other, she wouldn’t have known what she had to defend herself against. She was still in time to make her escape, to leave the whole thing behind her, to remember it as one of the strangest things that had ever happened in her life. Maybe it would help her to do justice to what she’d left behind her when she came here.
My choice, in contrast, was made. I’d keep going to the end, probably my end, but they weren’t going to get rid of me in any amicable way. Well, yes, I was very worried about the amount of money I was spending and what I had put away, not so much for me to get by in my old age as for my daughter in her old age. My wife wouldn’t approve either. We’d only had one daughter, and Raquel used to say that we couldn’t spare her the upsets and wrongs of life, but at least she shouldn’t have many problems with money. And I was spending it on something necessary or on a caprice, depending on how you looked at it.
Even for changing my rented car I had to fork out more. As soon as they gave me the new one, I embarked on a new round of following Fredrik, now with a certain degree of peace of mind, at least until they discovered me once again.
I tailed him comfortably to the car park of the Nordic Club, which was full of very classy gleaming cars. It was the second time I’d been there. I left my car in a discreet place and, as soon as I saw that Fredrik had gone inside, I went in after him. I’d taken my jacket off and wrapped up the binoculars in it, but had left my hat on, which gave me the appropriate air of a foreigner. I was counting on the doorman letting me in and, almost before he could open his mouth, I announced I’d come with Fredrik.
“I was parking the car,” I offered by way of explanation.
Whether he took me for a chauffeur or a friend, the fact is he let me in as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Fredrik’s head would be sticking up somewhere and I went looking for him, but his long legs that propelled him along as though the soles of his feet were burning, raising his shoulders with every step, had borne him out of my range of vision. I looked into a series of lounges and found him in one of them talking to an individual who would have been very strong once but now was fat. He had light eyes, a sizeable set of jowls and you could still see a sabre scar on his face. He could very well have been Otto Wagner, founder of the ODESSA Organization, engineer, writer and various other things, a restless bastard and apparently in good health, who certainly wouldn’t be content with just playing golf. I leant against the wall trying to calm down. I was churned up and sad, although in my state being churned up was less recommendable than being sad. After about five minutes, and having taken in a few deep breaths, I managed to end up with only the sadness. It distressed me that these monsters were enjoying life in a way that Salva never managed to do, or me, or Raquel, however hard she tried, or even my daughter. I was distressed by their robust health and their zest for life and enjoying themselves.
I watched them getting into a buggy and moving away over the grass. The Nordic Club was incredible: porches with beautiful cool wicker chairs, tennis courts, paddle tennis, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, restaurant, pub-style lounge, billiards room, library, plus all the things I couldn’t see and, in the background, the green undulations of the golf course. I wondered how much water was needed to maintain it. But what did that matter? The important thing was that Fredrik the giant and his buddies could get a bit of exercise.
What hole would they be at? I saw this sport as something that was light years from me. I leant against a tree, as far as possible out of the field of vision from the terraces of the club, and hung my binoculars round my neck. I did a sweep through the middle distance and found a group of octogenarians, Fredrik and Otto among them, who were leaning on their golf clubs and having a chat. There were a couple of young men too. The old ones were carrying on like men of seventy. It was incredible. Perhaps feeling superior to everybody else gave them all that energy. I lowered the binoculars, pondering this, when I spotted some sort of commotion. I raised the binoculars to my eyes again and saw one of them, but not Fredrik or Otto, lying on the grass. One of the young men was talking on his mobile and, a few minutes later, a man with a doctor’s bag appeared in a buggy with others running after him. I wrapped the binoculars in my jacket, despite the fact that no one was paying any attention to me. At the end of the day, you’re as old as your years, I thought. I could hear the ambulance. That one’s had a heart attack, I thought.
The lounges of the Nordic Club were abuzz with the news. At last, something new to jazz up the everyday golf routine. The news ran like wildfire and I watched from the car how they put whoever it was in the ambulance, a corpse, but not totally covered up and with an oxygen mask so as not to alarm the members of the club, although, at bottom, it would have been disappointing for the members of the club if it had all turned out to be a false alarm. The way things were, they’d have something to keep them talking for days. The ruse didn’t fool me. When you’ve seen so many dead people you can recognize a dead man at a glance.
They all left as fast as they could. The soles of Fredrik’s feet seemed to be sizzling more than ever. He was bounding rather than running to his Mercedes, the kind you see in those catalogues that come with your newspaper.
I followed the man I thought was Otto through all the damned curves leading up to El Tosalet. He took the same route as his friend Fredrik but didn’t stop at Villa Sol. He went three hundred metres farther to a mansion that displayed the number 50. Fredrik had led me to Otto and he’d lead me to more of them. The whole bunch of them were bound by a blood pact.
Sandra
Fred paid me more than I expected for keeping Karin company, taking her to the gym and doing a hundred thousand errands for her. Maybe Fred realized that I was feeling too tied down because Karin loved getting out of the house and coming with me under any pretext, and her slowness getting in and out of the car ended up getting on my nerves. But it never pushed me to the limit because Karin was tremendously observant and immediately aware if I was getting impatient. Then she’d ease up, leave me to my own devices and, at the weekend, I could go back to my house down below and breathe. It wasn’t bad being able to save almost everything I was being paid. I was buying my future freedom.
From what Fred had given me I put a bit aside to buy some pearl-cotton skeins and some new needles to start a
second pullover. I’d keep the first one as a memento because it had served its purpose in trial and error, but the one my baby was going to wear would be this other one, into which I was going to put all the tender loving care in the world. When I got to the armhole I’d definitely have to ask Karin for help. The rest I’d manage by myself.
Hence, after lunch, as Fred and Karin were getting dressed to go to the funeral of one of their friends, at the hour when, on other days, Karin got under a blanket and had her siesta on the sofa with the television on, I got out the skein of cotton and knitting needles from the purple velvet bag that Karin had given me to keep them in and set about clacking away with the needles – well, OK, slowly – until, after about a quarter of an hour, thoughts started buzzing like a hornets’ nest in my head. They were zooming by, one after another, appearing and disappearing, but the matter of the uniform and the press cutting Julián had given me was a constant. According to Julián, they were Nazis, which tied in with the SS officer’s uniform I’d seen Fred wearing the night he came back from the party at Otto’s and Alice’s house. The uniform, a uniform gigantic enough to fit Fred, would that have been hired or did it belong to him? If Julián was right, he’d be keeping it somewhere. Although, leaving aside his suspicions, I could also assume that people have the weirdest fantasies and, in this case, they might have nothing to do with what the uniform meant. Compared with people who get off sexually by dressing up as comic-strip characters, Fred’s thing could be permissible. It might be his way of getting it up with Karin. But why should I want to deceive myself? Fred was the perfect Nazi in that uniform. The thing is that, out of uniform, in normal clothes, I didn’t know what a Nazi looked like. How would I spot it? They wouldn’t let anyone spot it.
And what about me, what did I care? Yes, yes, I did care, or maybe I was curious. I don’t know. Anyway, I put the knitting back in the velvet bag and went off to explore the house. Until that point, I’d never had the temptation to snoop. In some ways I was going back to childhood, when it used to be such fun opening up drawers and poking about to see what was inside without anybody knowing that I was looking. But now pleasure was mixed with caution.
The house consisted of two storeys with a basement, a greenhouse, a junk room, a garage and, right at the top, a loft with no stairs leading to it or any other kind of access. That was understandable as there was already too much house for the two of them. Scattered round the bedrooms were some very beautiful old trunks and large chests in which they kept the bulky eiderdowns and rugs in the summer, and then there were cupboards. When I was old and couldn’t be getting out all day I’d also like to have a very big house like this one, so I could go from one room to another without getting bored. It took Karin a lot of effort to get to the top floor, dragging herself up as she clung to the artistically carved mahogany banister. When they came to live here she certainly wouldn’t have had any idea that she’d end up like this. And maybe the worst was yet to come. She therefore tried to stay on the ground floor until bedtime and more and more of her knick-knacks were ending up downstairs when they should have been upstairs. She was leaving them here, so she wouldn’t have to go and get them herself or send me to fetch them. I suggested that to avoid having so much stuff lying around – shoes, dresses, the odd pullover, a jacket – I could stash it all away in a trunk in the library-den, but she told me to get that idea out of my head, because only Fred was allowed to go into that room, and he was very particular about the way his books and papers were ordered. He went mad if anyone touched his things. This is why the door was always locked, so nobody could go in there by accident and problems would therefore be avoided. Yet when his acquaintances like Martín, the Eel or Otto had to wait for him, they were allowed to be in there alone, which, on reflection, was no concern of mine, so I held my tongue. It was evident that the door was closed to me and me alone.
I went upstairs to the bedrooms making the minimum amount of noise possible, even though nobody else was there. You could only hear the tick-tock of an old porcelain clock, which must have been very valuable. Normally, you’d be hearing Karin’s snores too. She tended to sleep for three quarters of an hour, snoring her head off. The doors hadn’t been greased for a thousand years and all of them creaked. According to Karin, they functioned as alarms that would warn of the presence of any intruder. The wardrobe doors squeaked too. I opened them and was awed by Karin’s beautiful evening dresses. Not just the white one she’d worn to Otto’s and Alice’s party. There must have been at least a hundred of them, all tucked away inside cloth covers. Each one must have cost a fortune. I could only see a few by lifting up the covers, but not the whole dress. Embedded in the wardrobe wall was a safe where they certainly must have kept her jewels, because with dresses like these she’d have to wear equally valuable jewels. Then I opened up Fred’s part of the wardrobe. It was even tidier than Karin’s. The covers here were transparent and there was no uniform in any of them. I stood there for a moment, fascinated by the perfect arrangement of ties, handkerchiefs and socks. I closed the door and peeked in the trunk at the foot of the bed and, as I imagined, it contained an eiderdown. I went out and closed the door with the sensation that my fingerprints would be all over the place, an absurd notion arising from groundless fear.
I also went into the guest room and checked out the chest of drawers and the wardrobe in there. I looked into the three remaining bedrooms. At the end of the passageway there was a door that was also locked. There were lots of places where the Nazi uniform could be kept, but it could also have been hired and returned. I wasn’t keeping track of the time it was taking me to go from one room to another, opening and closing wardrobes. Then I heard the front door opening and Fred’s long strides coming up the stairs.
I asked him about the funeral and he asked me if anything had happened in the house in their absence. I said no but could see that he still wanted to know what I was doing upstairs, so I told him I’d gone to lie down on my bed and now I felt dopey so I was going out for a ride on the motorbike to clear my head.
I went down to the town and headed for Julián’s hotel. I recalled that he’d said something about never going there, but I don’t take these things too seriously and thought it slightly excessive, so I parked for a moment, wrote a note telling him that I’d be waiting for him at the lighthouse the next day at four, walked into the lobby, pretended to be looking at a newspaper, slipped over to the lifts, got to his room and slid the note under the door. I slipped out as I’d come in, trying to make sure nobody noticed me, but I didn’t know whether I’d managed that.
Julián
The day after the ruckus at the Nordic Club we had a funeral. It was none other than Anton Wolf, commander of a Waffen-SS battalion notorious for its part in the massacre of four hundred civilians in an Italian village, most of them women and children. Salva would certainly have located him, but I hadn’t been capable of spotting him and, once again, one of them had escaped right under my nose, even if it was to the next world. I’d had him there in my binoculars and hadn’t recognized him. It seemed that I was forgetting more than I thought. I’d been so caught up with what Fredrik and Otto were up to that I hadn’t noticed Anton Wolf. Now he’d got out of my clutches. He was buried in a grave overlooking the sea.
Despite the horror he created in his life, his burial was surrounded by beauty, but at least he wasn’t there to enjoy it. His wife, Elfe, was there crying quietly and restrainedly, standing between Karin and Alice, both of whom looked as if they wanted to get the whole thing over and done with. Now why should Elfe be crying, I wonder. Yes, Elfe, you people die too, and all that cruelty has been in vain. You did all that and your life has still slipped by like a sigh. You don’t even remember very well the atrocities you lot committed. Do you remember how we had to dig our own graves? You didn’t know anything? Yes, you knew, and you aren’t sorry because you believed you had the right to do what you did. You’re going to die too, Elfe, and nothing and nobody will be able to prevent it.
There was nothing more for me to do there, so I chose the best bunch of flowers from Wolf’s grave and put it on the tomb of the little eight-year-old boy and left. Remaining behind me was the angel with its big wings and ahead of me was a grey sea that had adopted the form of the arch of the cemetery. Further down the road, Heim was lumbering towards the town. I certainly didn’t expect this. I dug my nails into my hand to stop my heart from pounding excessively. I was following a probable Heim. And why not? What did anyone know of his whereabouts? No one was sure whether he was dead or alive. People speculated that he was living in Chile protected by Waltraut, the daughter he’d had with an Austrian lover, or by her daughter, his granddaughter Natasha Diharce, in Viña del Mar. However, neither this daughter nor the two other offspring who lived in Germany had claimed the life-insurance policy worth a million dollars and deposited in a German bank, which was the best proof that he was alive and laughing at all of us. It was also said that he could have died in Cairo and, then again, that there were signs that he was hiding in some residential estate in Alicante.