The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,68

awful sound of the body hitting the ground. We rushed into the apartment. The window was wide open. We looked out and saw Luciana’s broken body on the pavement below. She lay face down, in the ghostly light of the street lamps, her neck at a strange angle, as if it were the first thing to have been broken. She was quite motionless and a pool of blood was spreading from her side. I heard the scream, followed by despairing sobs, of Luciana’s sister as she ran downstairs. Kloster and I were alone. I moved away from the window, because I couldn’t look any more, and saw that Luciana had left a note pinned to the door. My hands were shaking violently, as if they didn’t belong to me, but somehow I managed to take it down. At least let her be saved, she’d scrawled. Was it a message addressed to me, or a final plea to Kloster? He was still at the window and when he looked at me at last I could find no horror or sorrow on his face, no hint of compassion for another human being, but something I can only describe as admiration and awe, as if he were witnessing the work of a more powerful artist.

“Do you see?” he whispered. “It’s him again, absolutely. What could be simpler, more basic, more his style? A cosmic principle.” And he parted thumb and forefinger, as if releasing a particle into the void. “Do you see?” he said again. “The law of gravity.”

Epilogue

I saw Kloster once more, at Luciana’s funeral. It was one of those cold, luminous mornings in the city at the end of August when buds on the pollarded trees and lighter, more fragrant air hint at the arrival of spring. I overcame my long-standing aversion to funerals and made myself enter the citadel of terrifying, neat graves and time-worn vaults. If I was there, forcing myself to walk through the sea of stone crosses, it wasn’t because of any debt I felt I owed Luciana, or to assuage my guilt—which the sight of her square of earth would only intensify—but because I wanted one last answer, or rather the painful confirmation of something I still couldn’t quite believe.

Yet I had seen it happening before my eyes. I had seen it in Valentina’s expression as she looked at Kloster in the lift, but I had failed to put two and two together. I’d chosen to believe that it was simply platonic admiration from reading his books, a teenage crush that Kloster wouldn’t dream of reciprocating. But afterwards, in the chaos that followed Luciana’s death, I had seen the speed and energy with which he had acted. I had watched him calm and console Valentina with what looked very much like an embrace, and organise things so that after giving my statement I had found myself heading home in a taxi, still stunned, while he took charge of everything, especially her. And I didn’t protest, didn’t raise any objections, because I could tell from Valentina’s devastated face, behind her anguished tears, that this was what she wanted: to be alone with him.

I was at the cemetery in search of the final proof and I don’t mind admitting that I hoped to find Valentina there alone. As I went over the events of that terrible night in my mind, despite all the evidence I believed there was still a remote hope that she had leaned on Kloster at that tragic moment because she was dazed and grief-stricken and he had seemed like a father figure. I kept telling myself that as soon as she had a chance to think, to reflect, she would push him away in horror.

But when, having made my way round the crematorium, I found the path to the newest graves, they were there together, she with her head bowed as if in prayer, he with a hand on her shoulder. There was no one else at the funeral. A solitary bunch of flowers lay on the patch of earth, still without a gravestone. In the silent cemetery they looked like a father and daughter now alone in the world. As I approached, Valentina looked up and something in her shrank back, as if she would have preferred not to see me. I could only think I reminded her of her sister’s warnings against the person to whom she had entrusted herself. I approached anyway and offered her my condolences, obliging Kloster to remove