Then there was a knock at the door. It was almost midday and he wasn’t expecting anybody. Who could be looking for him at this time of day? With a shiver of fear, with resignation, almost with relief, he thought he understood. He’d been mistaken: the Casares weren’t going to kill the old man, they were going to kill him. In a flash of lucidity, he thought that maybe his neighbours had found out that he could have appealed the dismissal letter and secured Enrique Casares’ job for him, but for some reason unknown to them — although no less despicable for that — had refused to do so, ruining their lives and then amateurishly inciting them to murder old man Montero. But if they killed him, they’d not only get revenge on the one responsible for their disgrace, they could also keep his money — money that perhaps legitimately belonged to them — because now he sensed, through the uncertain fog of his derangement, that it was not impossible, during their latest obsessive encounters, that he would have told them that he himself had recently decided to keep all his savings in a wall safe similar to the old man’s.
He looked out through the peephole. His neighbour was indeed waiting on the landing, but his hands were empty. Álvaro opened the door. Enrique Casares stammered, said they were fixing a window and needed a screwdriver; he asked if he’d mind lending them his for a while; that evening, at the latest, they’d bring it back. Álvaro asked him to wait in the living room and a moment later returned with the screwdriver. He didn’t notice that Enrique Casares’ hand was shaking as he took it from him.
His wife returned it that night. They chatted for a few moments in the dining room. When she was about to leave — the apartment door was half open and the woman grasped the doorknob in her left hand — she turned and said, like someone saying farewell, in a tone that struck Álvaro as perhaps too solemn, ‘Thank you for everything.’
He’d never wondered why there were no smells or sounds, and perhaps that’s why he was even more surprised at their presence, although it was not impossible that they’d been there the other times as well; but the strangest thing was the vague certainty that now no one would keep him from reaching his aim. He was walking across a very green meadow with the smell of grass and fruit trees and manure, although he couldn’t see any trees or manure, just the green, green ground and the neighing horses (white and blue and black) against the stony or steely sky. He was climbing the gentle slope of the hill as a dry wind covered his naked skin in goose bumps, and he turned almost nostalgically towards the valley he was gradually leaving behind like a green wake filled with petrified neighing. And at the top of the green, green hill grey birds fluttered, coming and going and emitting little metallic cries that were also frozen needles. And he arrived at the crest panting, knowing that now nothing and no one would keep him from glimpsing what lay in wait on the other side of the door, and he clutched the golden doorknob in his left hand, opened the white door and looked through.
X
The next day he wasn’t surprised when the old man didn’t turn up at the supermarket. They were supposed to play chess that morning, but Álvaro didn’t leave his apartment. He smoked cigarettes and drank cold coffee until, towards noon, someone knocked at his door. It was the concierge: the blood had fled her face. It wasn’t very difficult to deduce from her whimpering and exaggerated gestures that she’d found the old man’s corpse when she’d gone up to do her daily cleaning. He sat her down in an armchair, tried to calm her, and called the police.
Soon an inspector arrived accompanied by three officers. They took them up to old man Montero’s apartment. Álvaro preferred not to look at the corpse. The concierge would not stop talking and whimpering. An older man with a very thin moustache, who arrived not long after the police, took photographs from various angles of the room and of the inert body; then they covered it with a sheet. The neighbours milled around outside the door; some went in as far as the entrance hall. Álvaro was stunned. The concierge had calmed down a little but she kept talking; she thought the old man had been stabbed to death. Álvaro searched for Casares among the group of onlookers, but found only the frightened eyes of the journalist, who was looking at him in a strange way. One individual pushed his way through as far as the entrance, where he was stopped by the officer posted there. The individual — a young man with prescription glasses and a grey raincoat — stated that he was a journalist and demanded to be allowed to enter, but the officer argued that he had strict orders not to let anyone through. Other colleagues of the journalist arrived later and, after he told them what was going on, settled down to wait for the inspector to emerge, sitting on the steps or leaning against the banister on the landing, smoking and chatting in loud voices. The group of neighbours still hadn’t made up their mind to disperse and behaved as if they were at a wake.
After a quarter of an hour, the inspector came out of the apartment; the journalists pounced on him. He said they’d soon be allowed to go in and take photographs, described the type of injuries to the victim and declared that they’d been inflicted with a screwdriver. Judging by the state of the old man’s body, the crime could have been perpetrated any time between yesterday afternoon and last night. The motive? He didn’t want to hazard a guess but a wall safe hidden behind a picture had been opened and emptied of anything it might have contained. This circumstance left little room for doubt: yes, it was possible that the motive had been robbery. Might the fact that the corpse was found in the dining room not indicate that the murderer was known to his victim, given that he’d let him into his house? The inspector repeated that it was not advisable to discount any hypothesis in advance; in his judgement, however, all were premature. For the moment he had nothing more to add.
Álvaro went home. Leaning against the big dining-room window, he stared down at the empty square. He lit a cigarette and rubbed his eyes with his right hand. He had a bit of a headache but he’d calmed down. He foresaw with ease the course the police investigation would take. As the journalist had suggested, it was obvious that only a neighbour or someone the victim knew could have got in as far as the dining room. All the tenants knew old Montero’s taciturn character, but they all knew as well — the concierge, the Casareses, the journalist, perhaps the rest of the tenants — that only he had managed to befriend the old man, that only he spent long mornings playing chess and talking in his apartment. The concierge would realize with horror that he’d been plying her for information by resorting to a ruse she dare not confess; the Casareses would reveal his unhealthy fixation, the perseverance of his obsessive chatter about the old man, their own suspicions about Álvaro’s mental balance; and the journalist (now he understood the strange way she’d looked at him among the crowd of onlookers!) would undoubtedly confirm the couple’s statement. And then there was the screwdriver. No one would believe that Casares had borrowed it in order to implicate him; the idea was too far-fetched. All the evidence would point to him; he would pay for a crime he had not committed. It was ridiculous, yes, grotesque. With benevolent irony he recalled: ‘On veut bien être méchant, mais on ne veut point être ridicule.’ But no: if there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he would not be the one to denounce the Casareses. Perhaps for that very reason, because they knew he wouldn’t give them away, they’d asked to borrow his screwdriver (‘Thank you for everything’): they’d discovered his scheme, the machinations with which he’d managed to ruin their lives, and now they were going to pay him back with interest (and that was also why they hadn’t asked recently about the supposed enquiries he was making about finding Enrique Casares a job). He then understood that should he pay for this murder it would be a secret justice: in reality, the couple were only superficially responsible for it, merely the executioner’s hand. He was the one who was truly guilty of the death of old man Montero. Irene and Enrique Casares had been two puppets in his hands; Irene and Enrique Casares had been his characters.