The Book of Murder

The Book of Murder - Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto


One

The telephone rang one Sunday morning, tearing me from the sleep of the dead. When I answered, a voice simply said Luciana, in a weak, anxious whisper, as if it were all I’d need to remember her. Disconcerted, I echoed the name, and she added her surname, which roused a distant memory. Then, in an anguished tone, she reminded me who she was: Luciana B, the girl who took dictation. Of course I remembered. Had it really been ten years? Yes, almost ten, she confirmed. She was glad I still lived in the same flat. But she didn’t sound at all glad. She paused. Could she see me? She had to see me, she corrected herself, the desperation in her voice removing any possible delusions on my part.
“Yes, of course,” I said, slightly alarmed. “When?”
“Whenever you can, as soon as possible.” I looked round doubtfully at my untidy flat, testament to the indolent forces of entropy, and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “If it’s a matter of life and death,” I said, “what about this afternoon, here, say at four?”
There was a hoarse sound at the other end of the line and a faltering breath, as if she were trying to hold back a sob. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, embarrassed. “Yes, it is a matter of life and death. You really don’t know, do you? Nobody knows. Nobody realises.” I thought she was about to cry again. There was a silence, during which she struggled to regain her composure. Even more quietly, as if she could hardly bring herself to say the name, she whispered: “It’s about Kloster.” And before I could ask any questions, as if afraid I might change my mind, she said: “I’ll be there at four.”
Ten years earlier, I had broken my right wrist in a stupid accident and had gone about with my hand, to the tips of my fingers, held in the rigid grip of a plaster cast. At the time, I was due to deliver my second novel to the publisher but all I had was a draft in my impossible handwriting—two thick spiral notebooks riddled with deletions, arrows and corrections that no one but me could decipher. After thinking it over for a few moments, my editor, Campari, came up with the solution: he knew that Kloster had for some time now been using a typist—a girl, very young and apparently so perfect in every way that she had become one of his most prized possessions.
“So why would he lend her to me?” I asked, afraid to believe my luck. Kloster’s name, plucked from on high and dropped so casually by Campari, had impressed me a little despite myself. We were in Campari’s office and a framed copy of the dust jacket of Kloster’s first novel that hung on the wall—the editor’s only concession to decoration—created a resonance that was hard to ignore.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t want to. But Kloster’s out of the country till the end of the month. He’s at one of those writers’ retreats where he shuts himself away to polish his novels before publication. He hasn’t taken his wife with him, so by extension,” he said with a wink, “I shouldn’t think his wife has let him take his secretary.”
There and then he called Kloster’s home, offered effusive greetings to someone who was evidently the wife, listened with resignation to what must have been a list of complaints, waited patiently for her to find the name in the address book, and at last jotted down a number on a slip of paper.
“The girl’s called Luciana,” he said. “But be careful. You know Kloster’s the jewel in our crown—you’ve got to return her intact at the end of the month.”
The conversation, though brief, had provided a glimpse into the very private, reclusive existence of the only truly quiet writer in a country whose authors liked above all to talk. As I’d listened to Campari I’d grown more and more surprised and couldn’t help voicing my thoughts: Kloster, the terrible Kloster, had a wife? He even had something as unthinkable, as positively bourgeois, as a secretary?
“And a little girl he adores,” added Campari. “He was almost forty when she was born. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times when he’s been taking her to the park. Yes, he’s a loving family man. Who’d have thought it?”
At any rate, although sales of Kloster’s books hadn’t yet exploded, as they later would, he had for some time, particularly since the publication of his tetralogy, been the writer we all wanted to destroy. Since his first book, he’d been too big, too good. Between novels, he withdrew into bewildering silence, which we found unsettling, threatening: it was the silence of the cat while the mice published their efforts. With each new groundbreaking work, we wondered not how he’d done it but how he’d done it again. And to make matters worse, he wasn’t even as old, as far removed from our generation, as we’d have liked. We comforted ourselves with the thought that Kloster must be from another species, a malevolent freak, rejected by humanity, shut away, resentful and alone, as hideous in appearance as any of his characters. We imagined that before becoming a writer he had been a forensic pathologist, or museum embalmer, or hearse driver. After all, he had chosen as the epigraph for one of his books the contemptuous words of Kafka’s ‘hunger artist’: “I had to fast because I couldn’t find a food I enjoyed. If I had found that I would have eaten to my heart’s content.”
On the back cover of his first book it said politely that there was something ‘unholy’ about his observations, but as soon as you started reading his work it became clear that Kloster wasn’t unholy, he was merciless. From the opening paragraphs, his novels dazzled, like the headlights of a car on the road, and too late you realised that you’d become the terrified rabbit, frozen, heart beating, and all you could do was continue, hypnotically, to turn the pages. There was something almost physical, and cruel, in the way his stories pierced layers, stirring long-buried fears, as if Kloster had the sinister gift of boring into your brain while holding you down with the subtlest of pincers. Nor were they exactly, reassuringly, detective stories (how we would have liked to dismiss him as the author of mere detective stories). What there was in them was evil, in its purest form. And if the word hadn’t been so overused and devalued by TV soaps it might have provided the best definition of his novels: they were evil. Proof of how he loomed over us like a colossus was the way we spoke of him in hushed tones, as if nobody ‘outside’ would find out about him if we strove to keep him secret. Nor did the critics really know how to deal with him, and all they could do was stammer that Kloster wrote ‘too’ well, so as to seem unimpressed. And they were right: he did write too well. Out of reach. In every scene, every line of dialogue, every finishing touch, the lesson was the same—and discouraging. I’d tried a hundred times to ‘see’ how he did it, but I’d concluded simply that behind the desk there must be an obsessive, magnificently sick mind with the power of life and death, a barely restrained megalomaniac. So it’s hardly surprising that ten years ago I was absolutely fascinated by the prospect of seeing what the ‘perfect’ secretary of this fanatical perfectionist was like.
I phoned her—a calm, cheerful, polite voice—as soon as I got back to my flat, and we arranged to meet. When I went down to let her in I found a tall, slim girl, with a serious yet smiling face, high forehead, brown hair drawn back into a ponytail. Attractive? Very attractive, and terribly young—she looked like a first-year student, just out of the shower. Jeans and a loose blouse, coloured wristbands on one wrist, trainers with a star print. We smiled at each other without speaking in the narrow confines of the lift: very white, even teeth, hair still a little damp at the ends, scent…Inside my apartment, we soon agreed hours and pay. She sat down quite casually at the computer, dropping her small handbag beside her, and making the chair swivel gently with her long legs as we talked. Brown eyes, an intelligent, quick, sometimes cheerful look. A serious yet smiling face.
That first day she took dictation for two straight hours. She was fast, sure and, as an added miracle, made no spelling mistakes. Her hands on the keyboard hardly seemed to move. She adapted straight away to my voice and pace, and never lost the thread. Perfect, then, in every way? At almost thirty, I was starting to look with cruel melancholy into women’s futures and I couldn’t help noticing other things about her. Her hair, starting high on her forehead, was very fine and brittle and if you looked down on her from above (I dictated standing up), her parting was a little too wide. Also her jawline was not as firm as one might have wished, a slight fleshiness at her throat threatening in time to become a double chin. And before she sat down I noticed that from the waist down she suffered from the characteristic Argentinian asymmetry, as yet only incipient, of excessive hips. But all this lay far in the future, and for now her youth overcame any flaws.
As I opened the first notebook to begin dictating, she straightened her back in the chair and I confirmed, with disappointment, what I had suspected: her blouse fell straight over a completely flat chest. But might this not have been a convenient defence for Kloster, perhaps a decisive one? As I had recently found out, Kloster was married, and he would have had trouble introducing an eighteen-year-old nymphet to his wife if the girl had generous curves as well. But above all, if the writer wanted to work undistracted, wasn’t it a perfect arrangement? He had the youthful grace of her profile, which he could calmly admire while he worked, whilst avoiding any sexual tension that might have come from another, more dangerous contour? I wondered if Kloster had made this kind of calculation, this kind of secret deliberation. I wondered—as Pessoa had—if it was only I who was so vile, ‘vile in the literal sense of the word’. In any case, I approved of his choice.
At one point I suggested we have coffee. Displaying the same self-assurance with which she had made herself at home, she stood and, pointing at the plaster cast on my hand, said she’d make it if I told her where everything was. She mentioned that Kloster drank coffee constantly (actually, she didn’t say Kloster, she used his first name, and I wondered how close they had become) and that the first thing he’d done was instruct her how to make it. That first day I didn’t ask anything more about Kloster, because I was sufficiently intrigued by him to be able to wait until she and I had got to know each other better, but I did find out, as she gathered cups and saucers in the kitchen, almost everything I would ever know about Luciana. She was indeed at university, in her first year. She was studying biology but was thinking of changing subject. Mummy, daddy, an older brother in his final year of medicine, a much younger sister, aged seven, mentioned with an ambivalent smile, as if she were an endearing pest. A grandmother who’d been in an old people’s home for some time. A boyfriend discreetly slipped into the conversation, without actually mentioning his name, with whom she’d been going out for a year. Had she slept with the boyfriend? I made a few cynical remarks and she laughed. I decided she had, definitely. She’d studied ballet but given it up when she began at university, although she had retained the upright posture and something of the outward turn of the feet when standing. She’d been to England, on an exchange—with a grant from her bilingual school. In short, I reflected at the time, a proud expensive daughter, a finished example, perfectly educated and polished, of Argentina’s middle class, seeking work much earlier than her friends. I wondered, but didn’t ask, why quite so early, but maybe it was simply a sign of her apparent maturity and independence. She really didn’t look as if she needed the small sum we’d agreed: she was still tanned from a long summer at the house by the sea that her parents owned in Villa Gesell, and her tiny handbag alone must have cost more than my old computer on the desk in front of her.
She took dictation for a couple of hours more and only once did she show any sign of tiredness: during a pause she bent her head to one side, then the other, and her neck, her pretty neck, made a sharp crack. When her time was up, she stood, collected the coffee cups, washed them up and left them to drain by the sink. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and left.
And this was the pattern from then on: a kiss on arrival, her little bag dropped, almost thrown, beside the sofa, two hours of dictation, coffee and a brief, smiling conversation in the narrow kitchen, two more hours’ work, and at a certain point, unfailingly, the bending of her head to one side then the other, half painfully, half seductively, and the sharp crack of her vertebrae. I got to know her clothes, the changes in her face—sometimes more sleepy than others—the variations in hairstyle, the coded signals of her make–up. At one point I did ask about Kloster, but by that time I was much more interested in her than in him. She had indeed started to seem to me perfect in every way, and I was dreaming up improbable scenarios in which I kept her working for me. But Kloster, apparently, was perfect in every way as a boss. He was considerate, giving her time off for exams, and she let me know, tactfully, that he paid her almost double what she’d agreed with me. But what was the man like, the mysterious Mr K, I insisted. What did I want to know? she asked, disconcerted. Everything, of course. Didn’t she know that we writers were professional gossips? No one knew him, I explained; he didn’t give interviews and photos of him hadn’t appeared with his books for a long time now. She looked surprised. It was true, she’d heard him turn down interviews several times, but she’d never imagined there could be anything mysterious about him: he didn’t appear to have any secrets. He must have been a little over forty, was tall and slim; in his youth he’d been a long-distance swimmer, there were cups and medals from that time in his study, and he sometimes still went swimming late at night at a club near his house.
She’d carefully chosen the few words she used to describe him, as if she wanted to make sure she sounded neutral, and I wondered if she was interested in him in any way. So he was tall, slim, with broad swimmer’s shoulders, I summed up. Attractive? I fired the word at her. She laughed, as if she’d already considered and discounted it: “No, at least not to me.” And she added, sounding a little shocked: “He’s old enough to be my father.” And anyway, she said, he was very serious. They too worked for four hours every morning. He had a lovely little girl, four years old, who was always drawing pictures for Luciana and would have liked her for a big sister. The daughter played on her own in a room on the ground floor next to the study while they worked. His wife never appeared—Luciana did find this a little mysterious. She’d only ever seen her a couple of times. Sometimes she heard her shouting something at the little girl, or calling her from upstairs. Maybe she was a depressive, or perhaps she had some other illness—she seemed to spend a large part of the day in bed. It was he who mainly looked after the child and they always finished on time so that he could take her to her nursery school. And how did he work? He dictated to her in the mornings, as I did, every so often sinking into silences that seemed to last for ever. He was always on his feet, pacing like a caged animal; one moment he was at the other end of the room, the next moment he was behind her. And he drank coffee—she’d already told me this. By the end of the day they’d only done about half a page. He rewrote it, changing every word, again and again, making her read the same sentence over and over. What was he writing? A new novel? What was it about? A novel, yes, about a sect of religious assassins. Or so it seemed for now, at least. She had lent him an annotated Bible of her father’s, so he could check a quotation. And what did he think of himself? What did I mean? she asked. Did he consider himself superior? She thought for a moment, as if trying to remember something specific, some remark, something slipped into the conversation. “He’s never talked about his books,” she said doubtfully, “but one day, as we were going over the same sentence for the tenth time, he said that a writer had to be a beetle and God at the same time.”
At the end of the first week, as I paid her, I noticed in the way she looked at the notes—the sudden focused attention, the satisfied care with which she put the money away—an intensity, a wave of interest, that made me see her for a moment in an unexpected light. Recalling her remark about how much Kloster paid her, I realised with surprise and slight alarm that money really did matter to the lovely Luciana.
What happened next? Well, a few things. There was a series of very hot days, an unexpected return of summer in mid-March, and Luciana swapped her blouses for short vests that exposed her shoulders as well as expanses of stomach and back. When she leaned forward to read from the screen I could see the gentle arch of her spine, and below the hollow of her back a spiral of blond downy hair extended to—and I could see it perfectly—the tiny and always troubling triangle of her panties peeping from her jeans. Was it deliberate? Of course not. It was all entirely innocent and we still looked at each other with the same innocent eyes, carefully avoiding touching in my narrow kitchen. It was in any case a new and very pleasant sight.
On one of these identically hot days, as I leaned over to check a sentence on the screen, I rested my hand, again innocently, on the back of the chair. She had shifted forward but now sat back, her shoulder against my hand, gently trapping it. Neither of us moved to break contact—that furtive but lengthy first contact—and, until we took our first break, I continued dictating standing, caught there touching her, feeling through my fingers, like an intense intermittent signal, a secret warm current, the heat of her skin from her neck to her shoulders.
A couple of days later I started dictating the first truly erotic scene of the novel. When I’d finished I asked her to read it back to me. I replaced a few words with cruder alternatives, and asked her to read it again. She complied, as unselfconscious as ever, and I could detect no agitation in her voice as she read the steamy passages. Even so, there was now a slight sexual tension in the air. I hoped, I said for the sake of saying something, that Kloster didn’t subject her to such writing. She looked at me calmly and a little sardonically: she was used to it, she said, Kloster dictated things that were much worse. By a curious inflection of her voice, ‘worse’ seemed to mean better. A half-smile lingered on her lips, as if she were remembering something in particular, and I took it as a challenge. I went on dictating, waiting patiently for her to bend her neck from side to side. When at last I heard the bones crack I slid my hand under her hair and pressed the joint with my fingers. I think this irrevocable move—from avoiding touching her at all costs to touching her decisively—startled her as much as it did me, even as I tried to make it seem casual. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe, her hands away from the keyboard. She was staring straight ahead, and I couldn’t decide whether she was hoping for something more or something less.
“When I get rid of this cast I’ll give you a massage,” I said and moved my hand to the back of the chair.
“When you get rid of the cast you won’t need me any more,” she answered, still not turning, smiling nervously, equivocally, as if she could see an opportunity to escape but hadn’t yet decided if she wanted to take it.
“I could always break something else,” I said, and looked into her eyes. She looked away immediately.
“That would be no good: you know Kloster’s getting back next week,” she said neutrally, as if she wanted, gently, to make me stop. Or was she simply testing me?
“Kloster, Kloster,” I said plaintively. “Why should Kloster have everything?”
“I don’t think he has everything he wants,” she said.
That was all she said, in the same even tone as before, but there was a quiet hint of pride in her voice. I thought I understood what she wanted me to understand. But if she was trying to cheer me up, she’d only added another source of irritation. So Kloster, who was so serious, had after all also had designs on our little Luciana. From what I’d just heard, he might even have already made a first move. And Luciana, far from slamming the door in his face, was about to go back to him. Kloster, now more enviable than ever even if he hadn’t yet got very far with her, would have an opportunity every day. And as well as being proud that she was rejecting him, Luciana would also no doubt feel proud that he kept trying. Wasn’t she at an age, just out of adolescence, when women want to test their powers of attraction on every man?
I imagined all of this from that slight inflexion of her voice, but couldn’t make Luciana reveal anything more. As I started to probe, she said, blushing slightly, that she’d simply meant what she’d said: no one, not even Kloster, could have everything. That she wanted to deny it now simply served as confirmation and though I couldn’t follow all its implications, I felt suddenly discouraged. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then she asked, almost imploringly, if we shouldn’t continue working. Somewhat humiliated, I searched for the point in my manuscript where I’d stopped. I was mortified: I realised that in harping on Kloster so insistently I might have lost my chance. Had I ever had one? I’d thought I had with that first touch, despite her sudden stiffness. But now, as I continued dictating, it had all vanished, as if we’d both resumed our previous places, with a civilised distance between us. Nevertheless, as she picked up her bag before leaving, her eyes sought mine, as if she wanted to make sure of something, or, like me, she wanted to recover some of the contact that had been lost. This glance only disconcerted me all over again: it might mean simply that she didn’t bear me a grudge but would rather forget what had just happened, or that the door, in spite of everything, was still open.
I waited impatiently for the day to end. The month had passed too quickly and I realised that there were only a couple of days left before Luciana disappeared from my life. When I let her in the next morning I looked to see if anything in her face or general appearance had changed since the day before—whether she’d tried a little more make–up, or a bit less clothing—but if anything she seemed to have succeeded in looking the same as always. And yet, nothing was the same. We sat down and I began dictating the last chapter of my novel. I wondered whether the imminent end wouldn’t stir something in her as well, but as if we were applying ourselves with the utmost concentration to playing our parts, Luciana’s hands, her head, her entire attention, seemed fully focused on my voice.
As the morning progressed, I realised I was waiting for a single movement. Strange dissociation. Though I still noticed the same things as usual—the gap between her T–shirt and the line of her panties, the seductively furrowed brow, the tips of her teeth biting her lip now and then, the movement of her shoulders as she leaned forward—it was strangely distant and all that I could really see before me, with extraordinary clarity, was the nape of her neck. I was waiting, with the pathetic expectancy of Pavlov’s dog, for the moment when she would bend her neck from side to side. But the signal never came, as if she too had become conscious of the power, the danger, of that cracking sound. I waited incredulously, and then almost feeling as if I’d been cheated, till the very last moment, but her neck, her lovely capricious neck, remained stubbornly still, and I had to let that day go.
The next morning was our last. When Luciana arrived and dropped her tiny bag down beside her, it seemed simply inconceivable that I might no longer have her with me and that all these little routines would disappear. The first two hours passed, exasperatingly. During a break Luciana went to the kitchen to make coffee. This too was happening for the last time. I followed her and remarked, half humorous, half dejected, that next week she would be back to taking dictation of good novels. I told her of Campari’s injunction when giving me her number, that I had to return her intact, and I added that to my regret I was complying. All this managed to draw from her was an uncomfortable smile. We went back to work. I only had a few pages of the epilogue left to dictate. I thought bitterly that we might even finish a little early that day. On one of the final pages there was a German street name and Luciana wanted me to check she’d spelled it correctly. I leaned over her shoulder to look at the screen, as I had done so many times in the past month, and once again I was enveloped in the scent of her hair. Then, just as I was about to move my hand from the back of the chair, like a belated call that I’d ceased to expect, she tilted her head to one side, almost touching me, then the other. I heard the crack and, as if it were a continuation of that first time, slid my hand beneath her hair until I found the gap between the vertebrae. She gave a small faltering sigh and leaned her head back, yielding to my touch. She turned her face towards me, expectantly. I kissed her once. She closed her eyes, and half opened them again. I kissed her more deeply and slid my left hand under her T–shirt. But the cast on my other hand hampered me and she was able to push the chair back slightly and free herself easily.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, taken aback. I held out my hand, but something in her seemed to shrink from me and I froze.
“What’s the matter?” She smiled nervously as she rearranged her hair. “I’ve got a boyfriend, that’s what’s the matter.”
“But you had him ten seconds ago too,” I said, bewildered.
“Ten seconds ago…I forgot myself for a moment.”
“And now?”
“I remembered.”
“So what was it? A bout of amnesia?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she looked up, as if trying to make the whole thing seem trivial. “You seemed to want it so much.”
“Ah,” I said, offended. “Only I wanted it.”
“No,” she said, looking confused. “I felt…curious. And you seemed so jealous of Kloster.”
“What’s Kloster got to do with it?” I asked, exasperated. Competing against two other men seemed a bit much.
She seemed sorry she’d said it. She looked at me alarmed, I suppose because it was the first time she’d heard me raise my voice. “No, no, nothing,” she said, as if she could take it back. “I think I just wanted something to happen so you’d remember me.”
So she’d already learned that sort of trick, I thought bitterly. She was staring at me sadly, eyes open very wide, and she seemed to be both lying and telling the truth.
“Don’t worry, I’ll remember you,” I said, humiliated, but hoping to salvage some of my wounded pride. “That’s the first time anyone’s kissed me out of pity.”
“Could we finish, please?” she said and cautiously edged the chair back in, as if fearing some kind of reprisal.
“Yes, of course, let’s finish,” I said.
I dictated the last two pages. As she picked up her bag before leaving I handed her that week’s pay without a word. For the first time she put it away without looking at it, as if she wanted to get away as quickly as possible.
That was the last time I saw Luciana, ten years ago, when she was just another very pretty girl, confident, carefree, trying her first games of seduction, far from matters of life and death.
The entry phone rang—it was five to four. As I went down in the lift, I stared at my now gaunt face in the mirror and couldn’t help wondering what I would see when I opened the door.