Carcinus' Malediction by Pablo Poveda

Author:Pablo Poveda [Poveda, Pablo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pablo Poveda
Published: 2021-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

9

The next morning dawned a different color. The covers of local newspapers published the face of Heikki Hämäläinen, a 47-year-old Finn nicknamed Tango among his enemies, due to the difficulty of his name. That man from Turku had been the author of the coastal chaos. Which were his intentions? Journalists fired articles left and right, wielding different hypotheses without any foundation. That very same day, officer Rojo resigned from the corps and was relegated from the investigation.

After the raid, an ambulance took Martínez’s body to the morgue. Blanca and I decided to leave the area and stay in the seaside hostel near La Marina, a provincial hamlet that was part of Elche. We needed to vanish, and I knew that place well. We would have time to think, talk, and understand what had happened. Confess to each other. Rojo, on his side, warned me to get over it. The case was closed for him and should be for us too, and that, it all had gone too far. I understood that it was not easy to lose one of your men on a mission for which one is responsible. The tension in the city caused by political scandals had been nothing more than an appetizer for what was to come. Government personnel was taking a toll for the excesses. The Security Forces were getting cutbacks and they could not afford a public scandal. As for me, I highly doubted that Rojo had resigned to avoid a scandal. I was quite disappointed in him, although I did not have the guts to say it to his face at the time. He had hidden information from me. Maybe that would have been my mistake, to trust a cop.

I woke up on the other side of the bed. In front of me, a translucent cloth curtain, a window, the noise of the waves that broke in the morning. I sat on the mattress and looked at Blanca, who slept by my side. The window to the room overlooked the beach. The Hostel where we stayed was an old but beautiful place, built in the second decade of Francoism. It was a house with wooden blinds and white façade, whose paint was cracking because of humidity. It was one of those endearing beach houses that, over time, had become modest hostels with restaurants and ample terraces. The lack of an urbanization law that contemplated the shores allowed many people to build barely a few meters away from the water. There was nothing much to do, but to have a stroll on Santa Pola’s beaches and take the sun along the bathers, a few meters from the owners’ terraces. I decided to take refuge there for a simple reason — no one would find us there. That place, despite its charm, possessed obscure geography, a difficult-to-clean spot on a map, a vestige of the old Spain — that of Franco’s and the Transition. It was a place where umbrellas featuring beer brands flapped in the wind, boats docked on the shore, and elderly ladies played cards.

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