you had heard. “It will end up seeming quite unreal to her, as if it had all been in her imagination, her auditory imagination.” Not a bad plan really. That’s why I assumed the way was open for me, with you, I mean. And that you’d know nothing about me, as regards that business.’ – He fell silent again. He seemed sunk in thought, so much so that what he said next sounded as if he were talking to himself, not to me: ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like the fact that he doesn’t keep me informed, that he thinks it’s perfectly acceptable not to tell me about something that directly affects me. He shouldn’t have told anyone that story, because it isn’t his alone, it’s more mine, in fact, than his. I’ve run more risks, and I’m more exposed. No one saw him. I don’t like it one bit that he should have changed his mind and told you, especially without telling me. You must have thought me a right fool, now, I mean, with you.’
He looked thoroughly fed up, his gaze abstracted or absorbed. His ardour for me had cooled. I waited a while before saying anything.
‘Yes, well, if you’re going to confess to a murder committed by various people,’ I said, ‘you really should consult the others first. That’s the least you can do.’ – I couldn’t resist getting a little dig in.
He sprang to his feet, outraged.
‘Now you watch what you say. It wasn’t a murder. It was a case of giving a friend a better, less painful death. All right, all right, there’s no such thing as a good death, and the gorrilla did get rather carried away with the stabbing, but that wasn’t something we could have foreseen, we didn’t even know for sure he would use the knife. But what awaited him otherwise was just awful, dreadful. Javier described the whole process to me. At least he died quickly, once and for all, and without having to go through various stages, involving terrible pain and deterioration, with his wife and kids watching him slowly turning into a monster. You can’t call what we did murder, come off it. It was something else entirely. An act of mercy is how Javier put it. A merciful homicide.’
He sounded convinced, he sounded sincere. And so I thought: ‘It could be one of three things: the melodrama is true and not an invention; Javier has lied to this guy about the illness as well; the guy is playing a part under orders from the man paying him. And if the latter is true, then I have to say he’s a very good actor.’ I remembered the photograph of Desvern that had appeared in the press and of which I had seen only a poor reproduction on the Internet: without a jacket or tie or even, almost, a shirt – where could his cufflinks have got to – full of tubes and surrounded by ambulance staff manipulating him, with his wounds on display, lying in the middle of the street in a pool of blood and on view to passers-by and drivers alike, unconscious and dishevelled and dying. He would have been horrified to see himself or to know that he had been so exposed. It’s true that the gorrilla did get carried away, but who could have foreseen that? It was a merciful homicide, and perhaps it was, maybe it was all true, and Ruibérriz and Díaz-Varela had acted in good faith, up to a point and bearing in mind the convoluted nature of their plan. And its recklessness. And as soon as I had admitted those three possibilities and recalled that image, I was overcome by a kind of dismay or perhaps surfeit. When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess – which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels. I made one last attempt, albeit a very reluctant one, because I could already imagine the answer.
‘I see. And what about Luisa, Deverne’s wife? Is it also