“Where is she now?” I asked.
“At a friend’s house. They run the school magazine together. They have to design the cover. She said she’d be back late, and might even stay the night there.”
She said this without looking at me, as she picked up a cup that had been left on the sideboard and lit a lamp on a glass side table. She switched off the central light and the room was plunged into shadow. I remained standing, reluctant to sit in the armchair she’d cleared of papers, with the growing feeling of having fallen into a trap. Luciana looked at me, as if suddenly noticing that I hadn’t moved.
“I could make us something to eat, if you like.”
“No,” I said, and looked at my watch. “Thanks. I’ll just have a coffee. I can only stay half an hour. I’ve got to prepare my class for tomorrow.”
She fixed me now with her eyes, and I held her gaze as best I could. She seemed offended, even humiliated, as if she’d read my mind: at one time I’d have given anything for such an offer.
“You said it wouldn’t take long,” I said, growing more and more uncomfortable. “That’s why I came back with you. But I’ve got to give a class first thing tomorrow.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll get you some coffee. You can sit down, at least.”
She went to the kitchen and I sat in one of the solemn squashy armchairs arranged about the coffee table. I looked around: a chandelier, dark heavy furniture, a metal crucifix on one wall, a small bookcase full of knick-knacks. It felt like a place frozen in time, the severe old-fashioned decor no doubt chosen by the mother many years ago, the furniture perhaps inherited, and the daughters, now alone, lacking the strength to change it. A photograph in a silver frame stood beside the lamp.
There they all were, on a beach, probably in Villa Gesell, looking happy and suntanned: the father standing, holding a sunshade, the mother with a basket, and the three children sitting in the sand, as if they didn’t want to leave. I could see Luciana, slim again and terribly young, behind her sister. Luciana as I had once known her. I almost had to close my eyes to dispel the image. I could hear her coming back from the kitchen so I hurriedly put the frame down, but didn’t manage to unfold the stand in time. Luciana placed the tray on the table, then took the photograph and looked at it for a moment.
“It’s the last photo of us all together,” she said. “It was the summer before I met you. My brother Bruno hadn’t graduated yet. And I was the same age Valentina is now. Only I think I was a little more mature than she is,” she added and put the photograph down. She took a sip of coffee and then stood up again, as if she’d forgotten the most important thing. “I’ll bring the Bible,” she said.
She disappeared down the hallway that led to the bedrooms and was away for two or three minutes. When she came back, once again I felt the alarm verging on fear that the madness of others inspires. She wore a pair of latex gloves and held the large book out in front of her, as if she were the high priestess in some private ritual bearing a fragile relic. Under her arm she gripped an oblong cardboard box. She put the book on the table and held out the box to me.
“I used this sort of gloves at university for experiments in the lab,” she said. “Kloster’s fingerprints are on the page and it’s the only evidence I have against him. I don’t want them to get smudged with other fingerprints.”
I put on a pair of the gloves, with difficulty because they were too small, and swore to myself that it was the last favour she would get out of me. Once I had donned the gloves she slid the book towards me. It was an impressive volume, rather beautiful, with a tooled leather cover, gilded edges to the pages and a red ribbon as a marker.
“The night my parents died, when Bruno phoned, I remembered the Bible Kloster had returned to me at the conciliation meeting. After I’d hung up, before leaving for the hospital, I opened it at the page where the bookmark was. Kloster handed it to me as it is now, with the marker at this page.”
I opened the Bible at the marked page, near the beginning. It was the part in the Old Testament about the first murder-Abel’s death at the hands of his brother Cain-and Cain’s final plea, when God condemns him to exile. I read aloud, doubtfully, as I wasn’t sure it was the paragraph she meant:
Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.
“A little further on: God’s promise to Cain.”
And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.
“Vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. Do you see? That was the line Kloster wanted me to read. The line intended for me. When I was working for him he dictated a novel that was never published, about a Cainite sect that took this notion of proportion literally in avenging their own. Divine law, as laid down for them by God, wasn’t an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It was seven for one.”
She had again fixed her gaze on me anxiously, watching my face for the slightest hint of scepticism. I handed back the Bible and removed the gloves.
“Seven for one. But it hasn’t been carried out exactly, has it?” I said. I realised I was beginning to feel truly afraid of her.
“My God, can’t you see? It’s taking place step by step. And if no one realises what’s happening, if no one stops him, he’ll just keep going.”
“But I still don’t understand,” I said, “how it could have been him in the first two cases you’ve told me about.”
“Yes, that was what was driving me most crazy. From the moment I opened the Bible and read that sentence I no longer had any doubt that it was him, but I still couldn’t see how he’d done it on either occasion. It was all I could think about. I even stopped eating during that time. I was in a kind of fever that prevented me from doing anything else. Actually I had an idea how he’d done it in my parents’ case. All he had to have done was follow me to the house that first summer and he’d have seen the little wood where we picked mushrooms. It was the only piece of information he didn’t have. I think he went back to Villa Gesell a couple of days before my parents’ wedding anniversary and scattered the poisonous fungi amongst the edible ones, but with the base missing, so there was no way of distinguishing between them. He removed the bases. And before leaving he made sure he left a few buried in leaf litter, in case there was a forensic examination afterwards.”
I tried to picture Kloster-the Kloster who appeared in the papers-engaged in such horticultural skulduggery.
“I suppose it’s possible, though it sounds a little complicated. It seems more like the kind of murder he’d devise for one of his novels,” I said. But at the same time, and perhaps precisely because of that, I had to admit to myself that it didn’t seem all that unreasonable. “But how could he have managed it with your boyfriend?”
Luciana looked at me, eyes shining, as if she were about to confide a magical formula that she alone in the world had discovered.
“‘The cup of coffee with milk. That was the key. I woke up with a start early one morning and it came to me: I remembered the row with Ramiro over the waitress and how my coffee-the one with milk-was always cold. I’d thought it was petty spitefulness on her part when in fact, with hindsight, I realised it was just something all waiters do: to save herself a trip she sometimes waited for another order to be put on her tray, together with ours. As she was the only one waiting on the tables outside, it also quite often happened that orders were left at the bar for a minute, until she went back inside. Kloster was sitting right there, where the owner of the bar placed the trays with the cups. And he knew very well that I always had milk in my coffee, which meant he knew that the black coffee had to be Ramiro’s. He simply waited for the first rough day, so that it would look like an accident.”