The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,57

but fell asleep halfway through.

I was woken just before midnight by the insistent, painful stab of the telephone ringing. It was Luciana. She was screaming and it took me a moment to understand her. “What have you got to say now?” she sobbed. “This is what he was planning.” Eventually I grasped that she wanted me to switch on the television. Still holding the phone, I groped for the remote control. All the channels were showing the same news: a horrific fire had spread through an old people’s home on the top floor of a building. The fire had started in an antique shop on the ground floor. “The antique shop,” Luciana screamed. “He set fire to the shop below the home.” The shop window had shattered and flames had engulfed a huge tree in the street outside. The trunk had acted as a wick, the fire running up and spreading to the upper floors of the building. Some of the branches were still in flames, touching the balconies. Firemen had managed to get inside but so far they’d brought out only dead bodies: many of the residents were bedridden and had been suffocated by the smoke.

“They called from the hospital—my grandmother’s dead. I’ve got to go and identify the body because Valentina’s still a minor. But I can’t do it. I can’t!” she screamed desperately. “I can’t cope with another morgue, the corpses, the undertakers. I don’t want to see any more corpses. I can’t go through it all again.” She started crying again, a devastated sobbing that seemed for a moment as if it might turn into a howl.

“I’ll come with you,” I said. “Look, this is what we’re going to do.” I tried to sound practical and authoritative, like a parent talking to a frightened child. “There’s no hurry to identify the body, the main thing is for you to calm down. Take a pill now. Have you got some there?”

“Yes,” she said, between sobs. “I already took one, before calling you.”

“Good. Now take another one, but only one, and wait for me to arrive. Don’t do anything else. Turn off the TV and stay in bed. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I asked if her sister was with her and her voice fell to a whisper.

“I told her. The day I saw you, after she came out of his house. I told her everything but she didn’t believe me. I said Bruno hadn’t believed me and now he was dead. She’s just seen the fire on TV. She was with me when they called from the hospital, we watched them bringing out the bodies, but even now she doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t realise,” her voice faltered, terrified, “she doesn’t realise she’s next.”

“Don’t think about that now. Promise me you won’t think about any of it until I get there. Just try to get some sleep.”

I hung up and sat for a few seconds, eyes riveted on the screen. They’d already brought out fourteen bodies and the count was still rising. I couldn’t believe it either. It was, simply, too monstrous. On the other hand, weren’t all these bodies the perfect screen? The name of Luciana’s grandmother amongst a growing list of dead. No one would look into it as a separate case; her death would remain for ever invisible, merged with the general tragedy. This fire wouldn’t even be considered arson, but an accident, a tragic side effect of the attacks on furniture stores. Maybe the Chinese man would be made to pay, that is if he really existed and they caught him. Was Kloster capable of planning and carrying out such an atrocity? Yes, at least in his novels he was. I could almost hear his contemptuous retort: “So you want to send me to prison because of my books?”

Then I had the fatal, misguided impulse, which I have regretted every single day since—the urge to act, to intervene. I dialled Kloster’s number. He didn’t answer and there was no answering machine. I dressed quickly and hailed a taxi outside my building. We drove through the night, its silence interrupted only by the distant wail of fire engines. Over the radio in the taxi I heard news of more fires, multiplying like a virus across the city, and now and again the morbid repetition of the list of dead at the care home. The taxi dropped me outside Kloster’s house. The windows were shuttered and I could see no light through the