“He said he and Ramoneda talked about crime fiction and that at one point the superintendent showed him the anonymous letters and asked him what kind of person he thought could have written them. Apparently the superintendent thought it was more likely it was you.”
She sat in silence for a moment, her hands trembling helplessly.
“Don’t you see?” she murmured. “Don’t you see how he twists everything and turns everyone against me? I suppose he tried to make you believe it was me?”
“Actually, no, he didn’t. That’s what I found most surprising. He seems to think there’s another possibility. I suppose it’s what he’s writing about in his novel. He said I’d never believe it.”
“There is no other explanation: it’s him. I don’t understand how you can still doubt it. He’ll go on and on, until I’m all alone. Until I’m the last one left. That’s the revenge he’s after. The one he marked in the Bible: seven for one. And now Valentina is in there at this moment. In there with him. I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to her. I don’t think I can wait any longer,” she said, making as if to stand. I stopped her.
“When I mentioned that section in the Bible he said it was wrong to interpret it that way. That the number seven is actually a symbol of completeness, of the perfectly finished. The vengeance that God reserves for himself. Even if it is Kloster behind the deaths, maybe the punishment is complete.”
“In the novel about that sect that he was dictating to me, the number seven wasn’t symbolic. They killed seven members of a family one by one. That’s what he’s been planning for me from the beginning and that’s why he never had that novel published, so as not to give himself away. Did you ask why he was standing outside my grandmother’s nursing home?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t very well subject him to an interrogation,” I said, a little irritably. “I just tried to get him to talk. And I think I did pretty well.”
Something in my voice made her back down, as if she realised for the first time that she’d asked too much of me.
“I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said. “How did you get him to see you?”
“I said I was writing a novel about the strange series of deaths around you, and I wanted to hear his version of events. I thought it was also a way of letting him know that somebody else is aware of what’s happening to you.”
I realised Luciana was no longer listening to me. She was watching Kloster’s front door.
“Thank God,” she murmured. “I can see her. She’s just come out of the house.”
I looked round out of the window, but I’d missed Valentina for the second time. She must have been walking away in the opposite direction, because from her seat Luciana could still see her.
“I think she’s heading for the subway,” she said.
“Safe and sound, I hope,” I said. “We can leave now too.” I signalled to the waiter for the bill.
“I’m going to tell her everything tonight. She has to know what he’s like, before it’s too late. Can I call over the next few days if I notice she’s behaving strangely? I feel she’s slipping away from me, and I can’t watch over her any more.”
“I’m going to Salinas tomorrow,” I said. “To give a seminar. I’ll be away for a fortnight.”
She was silent for a moment, as if I’d said something unexpected and brutal. She looked at me, all her defences down, and I saw the dismay in her eyes, and the abyss of madness dangerously close. Convulsively, almost involuntarily, she grasped my hands across the table. She didn’t seem to realise how hard she was gripping, or that she was digging her nails into my palms.
“Please, don’t leave me alone with this,” she said hoarsely. “I’ve had nightmares every night since I saw him outside the nursing home. I know something very bad is about to happen to us.”
Gently I freed myself from her hands and stood up. I wanted to get away from there as soon as I could.
“Nothing else is going to happen,” I said. “Now he knows that somebody else knows.”
Nine
As I left the café, I thought I was escaping, but outside, far from feeling free, I could still hear Luciana’s voice in my mind, begging me not to leave her alone, and feel her hands gripping my wrists. It was a cold night, at the start of a dark, dismal August, but I decided to go for a walk before heading home. Above all I wanted to think. Over and over I told myself I’d already done enough for Luciana and shouldn’t let myself be swept along by her madness. I wandered through emptying streets, the shops closed and rubbish strewn over the pavements. Now and then I passed cartoneros, silent, eyes lowered, hauling their handcarts to the railway station. The tide had ebbed from the city. All that remained was the rotten smell from torn rubbish bags and the sudden, occasional light from an empty bus as it rumbled by.
Did I really believe, as Luciana had accused, that Kloster was innocent? Episode by episode, I had believed that what he’d told me was true. But he had also appeared to be a player who was entirely in control, who could lie with the truth. What he’d told me might have been the truth, but it probably wasn’t the entire truth. And also, coldly considering the facts, all explanations (as Luciana had almost screamed at me) seemed to point to Kloster. Because if it wasn’t him, what else was there? A series of fantastic coincidences? Kloster had mentioned runs of bad luck. He’d made me feel small-I could still hear his contempt as he mocked me for having written a novel about chance without knowing that such things occurred. I came to a wide avenue and saw a bar frequented by taxi drivers that was still open. I went in and ordered coffee and toast. What exactly had Kloster said? That I should think of tossing a coin. A sequence of three heads or three tails in a row was not unusual. Chance too had tendencies. I found a quarter in my pocket, searched for my pen and spread a paper napkin on the table. I tossed the coin in the air ten times and wrote down the series of heads and tails using dashes and crosses. I tossed the coin another ten times and wrote out a second sequence beneath the first. I went on tossing the coin, with an increasingly deft movement of the thumb, and noted a few more series on the same napkin, one under the other, until the waiter brought my coffee and toast.
As I ate, I looked over the series, marked on the napkin like some strange code. What Kloster had said was true-amazingly true: there were sequences of three or more heads or tails in almost every line. I spread another napkin on the table and, seized by an impulse, I flipped the coin again, aiming to toss it a hundred times, noting the results tightly so that the entire sequence fitted on the one napkin. The coin slipped from my fingers a couple of times and the clatter made the waiter look round. The bar was empty now and I knew I ought to leave but the repetitive action seemed to have possessed my hand and I couldn’t stop. I wrote down the final symbol and looked over the sequence from the beginning, underlining any runs of the same sign. There were series of five, six, even seven of the same sign in a row. So was there, as Kloster had said mockingly, a bias to chance? Even the blind coin yearned for repetition, form, figure. As I tossed the coin more and more times the runs of repetitions grew longer. Perhaps there was even a statistical law that governed their length. And in that case were there other hidden forms, other kernels of causality, within chance? Other figures, other patterns invisible to me, in the sequence I’d just written down? Something that could even explain Luciana’s bad luck? I looked at the sequence again but it was still closed to me like some indecipherable handwriting. You should uphold the thesis of chance, Kloster had said. I felt something inside me falter, as if an essential, personal foundation, of which I hadn’t even been aware, was crumbling. I had withstood the criticism, in a review, that my novel The Random Men was calculating in its careful simulation of chance. But simply tossing a coin in the air had proved more devastating than any of these objections. A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, Mallarme might have said. And yet the napkin spread on the table had demolished for ever what I believed about chance. If you really believe in chance, you should believe in these runs, they should seem natural, you should accept them. This was what Kloster had meant, and it was only now that I fully understood. But at the same time-and this was perhaps the most disconcerting thing, the maddening detail-he, Kloster, didn’t seem to believe that Luciana’s getting tails several times in a row was just a run of bad luck. It was the theory that most favoured and suited him, yet he was sufficiently sure of his innocence, or impunity, to lean towards another possibility. But which one? Of this he had said nothing, merely hinting that it would be set out in his novel. But he had made that strange comparison of the sea to a god’s bath. Kloster, the fervent atheist whom I had admired, had spoken in almost religious terms more than once during our conversation. Could his daughter’s death have affected him that much? He who stops believing in chance starts to believe in God, I recalled. Was this how it was? Kloster now believed in God? Or had it all been carefully staged to convince a single spectator?