“Why are you telling me this?”
She gave him a beautifully bewitching smile, surprisingly melancholy for a girl of her tender age. “There’s not many decent johns around here, and your guy was one. You deserve to know.”
Manuel nodded gratefully.
“I gotta go back. They’re probably already asking where I am. I don’t smoke, so I don’t have that excuse.” She opened her eyes wide in consternation. “I don’t take drugs or any of that stuff either. I try to live a healthy life . . . and save my pay . . .” She stood there fixing him with her gaze but saying nothing more.
“Oh!” His aching muscles protested as he twisted in his seat to fish his wallet out from the back pocket of his jeans.
He took out fifty euros, thought about it, then added another fifty. She nipped them through the window with the deft assurance of a Las Vegas croupier.
“All the best, buddy,” she said. “That’s a good-looking dog you got!” She crouched, made her way along the parked cars, and disappeared from sight.
Manuel raised the window and looked at the mutt. “Hear that, Café? For a hundred euros anybody can be good-looking!”
The dog’s tail wagged, but as usual the pooch wouldn’t look directly at him. It was the same attitude Manuel had, pretending that none of this was of any importance.
The pain of unknowing cripples you.
That agony had pierced him like an incessant drill ever since the beautiful sergeant informed him of álvaro’s death. The evidence of betrayal and a scarcely hidden derision in the voices of Nogueira and Santiago had poured salt on his wounds. Acid shame had burned its way through his guts in a cruel, unrelenting advance of unbearable humiliation that annihilated his very essence. He’d been determined to ignore it, to flee from this corrosive situation, and to walk away with his head held high. He’d shouted in his defense that all of this was foreign to him; it had nothing to do with his life. Manuel, so offended by álvaro’s deliberate deceptions, had also demanded others not reveal the truth. He also had lied.
He’d invented those pretexts to persuade himself he could flee from untruths, but what he was really trying to escape was reality. He’d refused to accept the warning signs that the inexorable corrosive process was consuming his guts and would eventually overwhelm him. And later he’d set himself this impossible investigation as a refuge from which to continue the struggle. He’d embraced the fiction that some supernatural force was driving him, that some irresistible inertia was impelling him to take on this task.
By fooling himself he’d committed the greatest sin one can commit against oneself. He’d violated moral principles instilled in childhood, ideals of honor and dignity he’d held sacrosanct. He’d lied to the only being in this world entitled to know the truth: himself.
Uncertainty is caustic.
Like an idiot he’d thought he could live with the weight of the unresolved dilemma. He’d assumed it wouldn’t affect him. He’d thought he could get on with his life uncrippled by despair and unhurt by the fear of not having been loved. And suddenly a beaten dog, a steep slope of vineyard, and a baby-faced prostitute had offered antidotes for his affliction, had become the balm to counteract the pain. He was still faced with the specter of the unknown álvaro: the man who bought Café from a tormentor before the brutal old man could beat it to death or starve it, the man who worked the vineyard side by side with his rural employees, the man who paid the prostitute so he wouldn’t have to go to bed with her. Those álvaros were as alien to him as the Marquis of Santo Tomé, the man with a second cell phone and no wedding ring. A vast number of questions called for answers, and perhaps now, for the first time, he wanted those explanations. Manuel had the impression that Café, the vineyards along the river, and the prostitute were discordant notes, exhibits for the defense that described another reality, one he hadn’t wanted to contemplate, blinded as he was by the shame and humiliation of betrayal. He had just begun to acknowledge that reality with the admission the girl hadn’t even heard: He was my husband.
He reached out to Café and held his hand still until the dog sidled close enough for him to brush his fingertips over its coat. He caressed the dog and saw the distrust gradually subside. The animal responded to Manuel’s affection and closed those funny little eyes for the first time.
“If only I could,” he whispered. Café opened his eyes. “Close my eyes, I mean, Café. If only I could shut my eyes.”
He saw Nogueira coming across the lot and checked his watch: not more than twenty minutes had passed. Hardly time enough for a drink. Manuel had returned the dog to the backseat by the time the policeman opened the door and admitted the night chill along with the sickly sweet stink of the roadhouse.
“Okay, that’s taken care of. I talked with the girl.” He settled himself into the driver’s seat, gripped the wheel as if about to depart, but didn’t turn on the engine. His wedding ring remained plainly in sight on his finger. “She confirms what our little Nieves told us yesterday. Santiago visits a couple of times a month and usually takes her upstairs. What I found particularly interesting is what she told me about the man’s routine. It’s a bit out of the ordinary.”
Manuel’s eyebrows rose. “So there’s a standard operating procedure?”
“It’s like this,” Nogueira explained patiently. “A guy comes here with one thing in mind. That’s obvious, but most of them enjoy the routine of coming in, taking a seat at the bar, ordering something, checking out the girls and offering one a drink, imitating the usual pickup routine. Except that here you know you can pick up any of them you want.”
“A hundred euros makes anyone good-looking,” Manuel commented, with a backward look at Café.
“Doesn’t have to cost nearly that much. The thing is, Santiago goes about it in exactly the reverse order. He gets here, he grabs her by the arm, they go upstairs; it’s only afterward he treats himself to a quiet drink.”
“So he’s in a hurry when he gets here.”
“Right. Which makes me think that maybe he’s trying to beat the clock.”
“You think he takes a little blue pill to make sure he can perform?”
“The girl says that he even phones in advance to make sure she’ll be available. But I think that if it was just a matter of the little blue pill, the guy would be more at ease.”
Manuel’s expression betrayed his puzzlement.
“Viagra kicks in after thirty minutes to an hour and lasts between three and six hours. That doesn’t mean the guy is going to have a hard-on for six hours, but when sexually stimulated he’ll have no problem getting it up.”
“You sound like an expert.”
Nogueira shrugged and jutted out his chin. “So what are you insinuating? You think I need that shit? I don’t. My equipment’s in great shape.”
“I didn’t say that,” Manuel replied in his defense, although with a mocking little half smile like that he’d seen earlier on the officer’s face. “I recognize the fact that you know a lot about the subject.”
“What the hell! I know a lot about a lot of things, but that’s because I do my work. I read, I study, I’m an investigator. You got that?”
Manuel nodded but the smile remained on his face. “Loud and clear, good buddy.”
“What I’m saying is that it’s strange our little marquis is always in such a hurry. And by the way, the girl says he wasn’t able to finish up a couple of times. That really pissed him off. He blamed her, and she says it got pretty brutal.”
Manuel recalled what he’d seen in Santiago’s face during their heated discussion: the cruel rictus of the mouth, the eyes narrowed in contempt, the angry stride, and the way he’d stopped for an instant by his wife to say something that reduced her to tears.