Counterfeit, p.21
Counterfeit, page 21
They both obeyed, and she ran over to him.
“Did they hurt you? Are you OK?”
She nodded.
“Cowards, pieces of shit . . . Jota called to ask me to pick you up. I’m sorry it took me so long. The neighborhood has gone crazy. Get into the car. Don’t worry; these two will get what’s coming to them.”
She sat in the passenger seat while he took his phone out of his jacket. He looked away, and just then the man who’d tried to run her down shot three times. Rodrigo tried to return fire but fell against the door, staring at Laura with the light fading fast from his eyes. She watched in horror.
“L-Laura . . .”
The other man grabbed his companion in terror. “Oh, fuck, fuck! What did you do? That was a fucking cop! You’re crazy! Now we’re truly fucked!”
“Shut up! That’s it. Let’s go, damn it. I’m going to fuck you up, you fucking whore.”
While the other man sniveled in panic, the murderer ran toward Rodrigo’s car. Laura jumped into the driver’s seat just as he got to the door and tried to open it. She locked it, but the window was open. He easily reached in to unlock it.
“I’m going to get you, bitch.”
Still only halfway into the driver’s seat, Laura managed to put the car in reverse as fast as it would go. Her attacker tried to climb onto the chassis but fell and was dragged along a few feet until she saw him roll in front of her headlights, trying to get up. Their eyes met. He knew what was going to happen. She shifted gears and pressed down on the gas, running right over him. Then she took aim at the other man, who stared at her in terror, still standing next to the car. He tried to get in, but she kept going at full speed and caught him when he was only halfway in, smashing his body into a wall. Then she turned around to look at her other assailant and saw that he was trying to get up. She drove back toward him and pushed his body right back into the building across the street, crushing him slowly. The kid tried to push back against the chassis as though there were some chance he might make it, but soon dark liquid began to dribble from his mouth, and he lost control of his limbs before falling limp.
Laura sat in the car in silence. The engine was still running. Then she realized that the radio had been playing the whole time.
The sun was coming up. The local press was covering the disturbances that had turned the neighborhood into a battlefield the night before, but fortunately no one had been seriously hurt beyond bruised bones and several arrests. Some of the violence that had been brewing under the surface had been released, and local residents now felt lighter, as though they’d gotten rid of something that had been festering, even if it was only brief relief from a symptom of the underlying disease: a sick society. That day, counterintuitively, everyone woke up feeling better, healthier even. Finally, people were thinking twice about taking their hatred out on the most vulnerable scapegoats, and that was the real release. Spring had begun.
In the alley by Morgades’s gallery, a crowd of onlookers had gathered around the police cordon. The bodies were covered. Inside an ambulance, a paramedic and a policewoman were tending to Laura, who was hugging her knees with a blanket wrapped around her.
“The psychiatric trauma unit is on its way. We’ve informed your mother. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be OK.”
“You know Jota, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You . . . you’ve found him, haven’t you?”
The policewoman was surprised at her composure. Laura was staring at her unemotionally, with glassy eyes, and the policewoman felt she had to be honest. “No.”
“What?”
“We don’t know where Jota is. We found his car in the countryside with one body inside and another next to it, but he wasn’t there.”
Laura made an ambiguous face. The policewoman didn’t know what to say; she couldn’t tell what Laura was thinking.
Then Laura giggled nervously. “He won’t be back.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. He . . . he had a cat. I’d like to adopt it.”
“Adopt it?”
“Jota’s gone. He’s going to miss him.”
EPILOGUE
A slight groove had been worn into the middle of the imperial marble staircase, but the round banisters stood tall on either side, and in the large antechamber a string quartet was playing—not that many people were listening anymore. Most of the guests had already gone into the hall reserved for the main event.
This was an exclusive dinner for important businessmen: about a dozen tables with six to ten diners at each. Morgades’s client was reading a speech of thanks from a small podium, clearly very gratified.
“Thank you very much, my friends. I really can’t thank you enough for the extraordinary trust you’ve placed in me over the past few years, but I am sure that the challenges our companies are bound to face in the future . . .”
As he spoke, three men came in through a side door, but their way was blocked by a waiter. One of them flashed a badge, and the waiter stood aside. They asked him a question, and he pointed at the podium. Once they’d found him, they stood at the back, waiting discreetly. Nobody seemed to have noticed them. The client’s tone changed.
“I’m afraid that I must bring this speech to a close, but I don’t want to leave without saying something that you may never have heard me say before, and it’s very important that I do before I give up this role. My dear friends: maybe the aspect of my career in the business world that I am most proud of is that I never lost track of my moral compass, as hard as that might have been sometimes . . . when you know that you must fight for something, you know that you must get to the end regardless of the consequences. Even if it means losing everything you ever had. Any damage done will be compensated for by the knowledge that you did what you had to do. Many thanks.”
The guests sat in silence for a moment, surprised by these unexpected sentiments, until somebody started to clap and was immediately followed by all the others until the applause grew quite fevered. He came down amid the noise while the policemen approached him quietly.
Adolfo was sitting in his shop, staring into space. The front door opened, and Laura came in, half her face covered in bandages and various parts of her body in plaster. He didn’t seem surprised. He waited until she’d sat down opposite him, across the desk. They looked at each other without a word. In the end, he spoke first.
“I thought the cops would be coming with you . . . well, it doesn’t matter. They’ll turn up eventually.”
She didn’t say anything. There was no hatred in her eyes. She seemed numb.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? My wife has left me. She’s taken the girls. You’re too young to understand what that means, but waiting for the police is all I can do now.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I told them where you were.”
“No, not that. Did you go get Jota? I don’t understand. You’re the only one it could have been, but I don’t understand . . .”
“Yes, it was me. He was there, with them. I waited for them to go, and then I went back. I thought maybe I could still save him, even though I knew it was too late. But he’s a very stubborn man—he’d killed them. I still can’t believe it.”
“Where did you take him?”
“He was badly hurt. I don’t think he would have made it if I hadn’t gone back. But I took him away. I can’t tell you where. Fortunately, he had somewhere to go.”
“Is he OK?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
“Is he coming back?”
“No. He planned it all out in the past few days. He got rid of everything, even his name. Maybe you’ll see him again one day. I don’t know where or when, but a long time from now, when you’ve forgotten all about him.”
“Why? Where’s he gone?”
“Sometimes a new generation has to come onto the scene before an old story can come to an end. You’re the new blood he needed to do that.”
“But I didn’t bring anything to an end. This had nothing to do with what happened to you.”
“I think you taught him something. That the past isn’t set in stone; you can get over things. I don’t know. And now he’s gone—I don’t know where, but somewhere overseas, I imagine. He’s going to bring a story that’s been running for twenty years to a close. Come to terms with a death that has been on his conscience all this time. And earn back his name.”
Laura stared at him urgently.
“I imagine that’s why you’re here. It’s all I can give you.” Jota’s partner sighed. “Well, the story starts a long time ago, more than twenty years, much more, with four guys who were very close. They thought they were going to take the world by storm. They thought that things would turn out very different from how they did. But that’s how all stories go: when you start out, you always think that life is going to turn out differently.”
While Jota’s partner told an old, painful story, light began to shine on old wounds, clearing away the rotting, stagnant air that had festered during twenty years of silence. A cat with no collar leaped gracefully into a hidden alley from a window it would never find open again, heading for places unknown, on his way to nowhere in particular.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Laura Pacheco Castro
Guillermo Valcárcel was born in Madrid. He worked in the construction industry by day and studied filmmaking by night until 2008, when he moved to Costa Rica, where he currently lives and works as a filmmaker. He also dedicates his time to writing and illustrating. He is the author of the thrillers Counterfeit and Shadows Across America as well as The Wave That Hit Spain, an influential essay that launched his writing career.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2018 Ar De Bonis Orquera
Kit Maude is a Spanish-to-English translator and editor based in Buenos Aires. His translations of stories by Latin American authors have been featured in Granta, the Literary Review, and the Short Story Project, among other publications. He has translated several great Argentinian and Uruguayan writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Armonía Somers, Julio Cortázar, Antonio Di Benedetto, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. He was born in Hong Kong and received a bachelor’s degree in comparative American studies from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
Guillermo Valcárcel, Counterfeit
