Chapter 22 The Cell Tower
The Cell Tower
For a long time, the only thing to break the silence was the roaring of the storm outside and the rattling of the window as it was buffeted by the wind. Roberto looked at Ramón Docampo agog, simply unable to believe his ears.
“What do you mean, took them all out?” he eventually managed to say. “You’re kidding, surely.”
“It was the only way.” Ramón shrugged. “As I said, those were hard times.”
“How did they do it? It was two men against a whole crew, plus whoever else was on board. It wouldn’t have been easy.”
“On the contrary. Later that day, Orlando and my father crossed to the south of the islet, where the submarine was waiting for them. They took the largest cooking pot they’d been able to get their hands on, full of fish stew, freshly made.”
“They brought them a meal . . .”
“Seasoned with a whole packet of strychnine, the stuff used in rat poison.”
“They poisoned them!” Roberto was wide eyed. “But that’s . . . awful!”
“Oh, hardly,” Ramón said, quite blithely.
“Think about it. Most of the passengers on that sub were war criminals; it isn’t as if they didn’t deserve it.
They must have racked up goodness knows how many deaths among them.
As for the crew, well . . . it was war; death was part and parcel.
Just a few more for the grim reaper’s tally. ”
“Even so, it’s abhorrent,” protested Roberto. “How could they just take the law into their own hands, and decide to keep the gold too?”
Ramón’s low, monotone laugh made the hairs stand up on the back of Roberto’s neck.
“You’re still thinking like a mainlander,” he said. “Authorities, processes, rules. I thought you’d have got it by now: Things work differently here.”
Roberto finished his drink in one gulp. His head was buzzing, and the air in the study had become unbreathable.
“My father and Orlando Freire waited an hour and then boarded the sub,” said Ramón, pouring himself another drink. “They stepped in through the hatch and found everybody dead. It smelled like shit, sweat, and engine oil in there. So now they had to find the gold, of course.”
“And then?” Roberto felt as if his own voice were coming from some faraway place. For all his experience reporting on wars around the world, a dispassionate account of a cold-blooded mass murder still turned his stomach.
“That was when things went wrong.” Ramón frowned. “My father and Orlando Freire had agreed to split the gold right down the middle. It was both families’ ticket off the island, the chance to start a new life on the mainland, a future for both men’s children.”
“Let me guess: no gold.”
“Oh, there was gold.” Ramón nodded sadly. “But much less than they’d imagined, just a couple of pounds. There was a chest full of reichsmarks, too, but those were worth about as much as toilet paper by then. Basically, the bastards had been out to cheat them.”
“And your father and Orlando Freire fought over what little there was, I suppose.”
Ramón shook his head, clearly annoyed at such a suggestion.
“My father was a good, trusting man,” he said.
“They agreed that Orlando would take the gold to the mainland for safekeeping while my father sank the sub. So they loaded the gold into Orlando’s boat, and as he sailed away, my father set about looking for the flood faucets. Do you know what those are?”
Roberto shook his head.
“All different kinds of vessels have them—they’re to let seawater in, in case of a fire on board. It took him a while, but eventually he found them. The submarine started to go down so fast that he almost got trapped inside. He at least had time to grab a souvenir . . .”
Ramón pointed to an object on the desk’s polished top.
Roberto had taken it for an old typewriter when he first came in, and only now did he realize what it was.
He whistled. It was an Enigma machine, no less, the cipher device carried by all German submarines for encrypted communications.
As far as he knew, there were hardly any left in the whole world, and here was one right in front of him now.
“Okay. And then what happened?”
“When he got back to the island, it was already dark.” Ramón’s voice was tinged with anger.
“The next morning, Orlando Freire had disappeared. My father waited patiently for a week, until Orlando got back from the mainland. He was wearing an elegant suit, and his boat was loaded with food, clothes, and toys for the children.”
“He’d taken the gold,” said Roberto.
“He’d sold it and deposited the money he got for it in a bank,” hissed Ramón. “And when my father asked for his share, he just laughed in his face.”
“No honor among thieves,” muttered Roberto.
“He hadn’t just robbed him! He’d laughed at him, disrespected him!”
Here he sounded particularly bitter. Roberto now saw that the families’ grudges had far deeper roots than he’d imagined—roots based on insults to honor, guilt, and the spirit of revenge.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “Why didn’t the Freires leave the island if they had all the money?”
“Because Orlando was a half-illiterate peasant and sold the gold for a fraction of its real value,” Ramón muttered.
“But it was still enough for them to build a house with, and over the following years, his family outshone all the others, ours included. And throughout all that time, until the devil took him to his grave, that bastard Orlando never stopped looking down his nose at us. My father died a bitter alcoholic, all because of him.”
“I’ve been to the Freire house.” Roberto recalled the air of the decay there, the old, moth-eaten furniture, the sense of imminent poverty lurking in every corner. “If they had money once, they certainly don’t nowadays.”
“No, nowadays they make a pittance renting out properties to vacationers.” Ramón gave a spiteful laugh. “Houses that aren’t even theirs but belong to islanders who have been gradually emigrating over time. At least we get that satisfaction.”
“And the Docampos?” Roberto patted the elegant armchair he was sitting in. “Your family hasn’t done so badly.”
Ramón sighed. “An opportunity arose in the 1980s. Around the time of the tobacco-smuggling boom, post-Franco. We’d switched out the old sailing and rowboats for motorboats by then—the fast and furious kind. And nobody knew these reaches of the estuary like we did . . .”
“Did the Docampos get into smuggling?”
“Half the contraband tobacco that entered Galicia was carried on one of our boats.” The old man puffed up with pride.
“We didn’t make that much, but a lot more than we did from fishing.
That was when things started looking up for us.
Then the smugglers worked out that you could make a hell of a lot more by moving drugs, and I saw that it was time to take a step back. ”
“You never smuggled drugs?”
“Never,” said Ramón vehemently. “Too dirty, too dangerous. It was a good decision, even if not everyone understood it. But now it’s been too long.”
“Let me guess,” said Roberto. “The money you built up then is also running out.”
“Indeed. But there were years when we were the Freires’ equals. What happened after isn’t our fault.”
Something in his tone made Roberto distinctly uneasy. “After?”
“When we pulled out of the smuggling business, Antía’s father went to the drug smugglers and said the Freires would happily take our place.” A baleful smile flashed across his face. “By then they were pretty broke and desperate.”
“What happened?”
“One moonless night, trying to get away from the Guardia Civil, he crashed his speedboat into a boat moored out in the middle of the estuary,” Docampo spat. “He died on the spot. The Freires blame us; they think we ratted him out.”
Another piece of the complex puzzle of island relationships fell into place. The roots of mutual resentment spread like a weed that could clearly never, ever be pulled up.
“Just to be clear.” He leaned over to Ramón. “Why are you telling me all this? Don’t you realize you’ve just confessed quite a number of crimes to me?”
Docampo rubbed his chin, eyeing Roberto. “Everything I’ve told you is ancient history,” he said. “It all happened a long, long time ago, and the only one still standing from the smuggling days is me. I don’t mean to brag, if that’s what you’re imagining. No, what I want is something else.”
“What?”
“That you understand what’s about to go down,” he said darkly. “And make the right call.”
The ball of ice in Roberto’s stomach grew a little heavier.
“I hope you don’t mean what I think you mean.” He shook his head. “That’s crazy.”
“The other day, when you pulled that bundle out of the water, I saw that all my prayers had been answered.” A coldness had entered Ramón’s tone.
“Fortune had finally smiled on us, and the ticket off this island was being offered on a platter. And not only that, but also the chance for revenge on the Freire family.”
“Revenge? For something that happened eighty years ago?”
“To right an injustice,” he replied. “You’re rich, so maybe you don’t get it, but that money will change lives. Our lives.”
“You want to keep all the money?” The words caught in his mouth. “Go back on your agreement with the Freires?”
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Ramón replied. “Decades ago, the Freires reneged on an agreement. Now we’ve got a chance to collect the debt. If we don’t act, they’ll only do it again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Open your eyes!” Ramón smashed his fist down on the coffee table, causing the glasses to jump. “Right now, my boys are out there retrieving the mangled body of one of my kin! It was the Freires. They’re trying to play us—again! But not this time! Do you hear me? Not this time!”
Roberto looked at him, feeling helpless and overwhelmed. He was sure that Ricardo Docampo’s death had nothing to do with the Freires, nor with the money in the church, nor the deep-seated family feud. It was just too gory, too sadistic. It didn’t fit.