Turned to Stone Page 4

  Jaime felt a sharp blow to the head and an intense pain, and then he was overcome with the sensation of falling into a deep, dark spiral.

  4

  Madrid

  The ringing of the telephone broke the silence in the room like a train sounding its horn in a desert. On the third ring, a hand reached out from between the sheets and grabbed the wireless handset from its base.

  Still half-asleep, Arcadia editor Laura Rodríguez spoke without rising or even opening her eyes. “Mmm . . . Hello?”

  Given her languid tone, the man on the other end of the line might have reasonably assumed he’d reached some kind of sex line. But instead of cursing and hanging up, he asked, “Dr. Rodríguez?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Vicente Amatriaín.”

  “Who?”

  “Amatriaín, from the EHU. Remember?”

  Laura opened her eyes, sat up, and planted her feet on the floor. As she turned on the lamp and looked at the clock, she brushed away the curly cascade of red hair that fell across the right side of her face. “It’s one thirty in the morning,” she said in an icy voice.

  “I’ve been calling your cell phone all evening.”

  “The battery’s dead. Who gave you my home number?”

  “I took the liberty of finding it myself, since no one at your office would put me through to you.”

  “I was in a meeting with the CHR bosses. I told you I would contact you. I have your number.”

  “Yes, of course, I know. But . . . Look, I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I have to talk to you about your contributor.”

  “Jaime? What is it?”

  “I was with him a few hours ago. And to be honest, his attitude disappointed me.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “To put it nicely, he didn’t show much willingness to help us.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t ask him the right way.”

  Amatriaín waited for Laura to advise him about his next step.

  “Listen, Señor Amatriaín,” she said. “As we discussed the other day, the Center for Historical Research will back your plan and do everything possible to help you recover the lost works of art. To be honest with you, to me, the idea of Arcadia publishing a report on your methods seems opportunistic, exhibitionistic, and inappropriate. But from a purely selfish point of view, I realize this could pull in readers and benefit us, too. I’ll call Jaime in the morning to bring him up to date.”

  “I already did that, but the outcome wasn’t as positive as I’d hoped.”

  “You’re a total stranger and I’m his boss. And by the way, Jaime is within his rights to refuse.”

  “But you told me—”

  “I know what I told you: Jaime is curious by nature and easily enticed by a good mystery. But he doesn’t accept commissions from strangers just for the hell of it. I’ll call him, okay?”

  Laura was about to hang up when Amatriaín’s voice stopped her. “Wait.”

  Laura wavered, holding the phone halfway between its base and her ear. After a moment, she chose the latter. “I’m listening.”

  “Azcárate insisted that he knew nothing about the study you mentioned.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “But you—”

  “I said what I said, but that study was credited to two people, one of them being someone Jaime did not end on good terms with. Leave this to me. I promise I’ll talk to him and we’ll get things sorted out.”

  “But when?”

  Laura moistened her lips with her tongue and, despite how tired she felt, smiled. “Don’t worry. He’ll contact you.”

  After hanging up, Laura jumped out of bed, turned on her cell phone—which was at full charge—and dialed Jaime’s number. It didn’t surprise her when a businesslike voice told her that the person she was calling could not take her call right now. She left him a message, even though she knew she wouldn’t get a response, and then looked up the number for Hotel Virrey Palafox in El Burgo de Osma. Before being reunited with her pillow, there was one thing she wanted to check out. The receptionist who answered her call sounded friendly, but when Laura asked to be put through to Jaime Azcárate’s room, the woman told her nobody by that name was staying at the hotel.

  Laura sat on the bed for a few moments, a blank stare on her face. Then she dialed another number. The phone rang seven times before someone grunted in her ear. “Grmph.”

  “I don’t believe it. Were you asleep?”

  “Are you kidding?” a gruff, powerful voice replied. “I was just fighting off a zombie attack in the east wing. It’s no end of excitement here tonight.”

  If Laura had been in better humor she would have laughed at Roberto Barrero’s banter, but her worry had affected her mood. She pictured the bald, potbellied security guard slumped against the desk in the CHR lobby, his eyes glassy, white drool collected at the corner of his goatee-encircled mouth, the cobwebs of his slumber slowly falling away. “Well, get rid of those zombies quick because I have a question for you: What do you know about Jaime?”

  “That he’s a jackass. That he can’t comb his hair. I don’t know, a lot of things. You’ll need to be more specific.”

  “I mean, has he called you, or have you spoken to him?”

  “Not since he went gallivanting off to El Burgo de Osma, no. Why? Has something happened?”

  “Just that he’s taken his gallivanting a bit too seriously and seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “Gallivanting should never be taken seriously,” said Roberto. “All right, Jaime’s a jackass. But lately his head’s been a mess, and this vacation was well deserved. I could use a break myself, by the way.”

  “Talk to your bosses about it.”

  “If you were my boss, I’d be doing that already.”

  Laura ignored the dig. For years, Roberto had been trying to talk her into hiring him at the journal as a photographer, but Arcadia’s finances kept her from taking on any more staff.

  “But I’m not your boss. You’ll have to take this to someone who can help you.”

  “I already have. By this time next week, you’ll see neither hide nor hair of me—not that there’s much hair left to see.”

  “I’m thrilled for you. Now listen, I need Jaime back here as soon as possible for a briefing. You know how he is—when he’s on vacation his house could be burning down and he wouldn’t know because he won’t answer the phone.”

  “What do you expect me to do? He didn’t tell me where he was staying, what he was doing—nothing. All he said was that he wouldn’t miss me. You know how that son of a bitch is. I don’t know why I’m bothering to teach him to shoot.”

  “To shoot?” Laura was horrified.

  “Yeah, but don’t worry. He’s a dead loss. If he was hunting King Kong he wouldn’t even hit the Empire State Building.”

  “Please don’t tell me these things.” Just the thought of Jaime with a weapon in his hand would give her nightmares for months. “But see what you can find out, okay? Do you know whether he drove his car?”

  “What car? He sold that old beater he had. He’s so cheap, he probably took the bus.” Roberto exhaled loudly. “Look, I’m not his mother. Isn’t there anyone else you can call?”

  “Not at this hour.”

  “Great. You know the name of his hotel, at least?”

  Laura felt a knot in her stomach. She swallowed and told Roberto the name of the place Jaime had said he’d be staying.

  “I’m not promising anything,” Roberto said.

  “I didn’t ask you to promise. But if he sees it’s you calling, he might actually respond.”

  “I’m sure he will. But he shouldn’t get his hopes up—my heart belongs to someone else.”

  Laura said good night and hung up. Despite their very diff
erent natures, Roberto and Jaime had been friends since their paths first crossed five years earlier, when Jaime was working on a story in the Sepúlveda area. She was certain the two men shared more secrets than they admitted, but Roberto had sounded sincere about trying to reach Jaime. She just hoped he would have more luck than she’d had. As she switched off the bedside light, she felt a twinge of apprehension.

  “Jaime, please tell me you haven’t got yourself into trouble again,” she prayed into the gloom.

  5

  El Burgo de Osma

  The cold air woke him.

  Jaime was lying faceup in the dark, and something under him was digging into his back. When he tried to sit up, he realized that what he’d felt were his own hands, tied at the wrists. The darkness was eased only by a vaporous glow from somewhere above, and the only sound came from the whirring fans that dispersed freezing air throughout the chamber. His head hurt, and he felt as if millions of needles were stabbing him all over his body. Gathering his strength, he straightened his back and sat up on the cold floor. The fact that he was alive told him he hadn’t been there long. Fortunately, his captors had left him in all his clothes, including his leather jacket. It occurred to him to scream for help, but the freezer’s insulation immediately absorbed the sound of his choked voice.

  Shivering almost unbearably, he dragged himself backward, trying to find an edge sharp enough to cut through the rope wrapped around his wrists. Though his limbs were nearly numb, he could feel that his assailants hadn’t tied the cord too tight—in order to avoid leaving marks, no doubt. Yet it was tight enough to prevent him from untying himself.

  As he scooted backward his back hit something hard. Feeling around with his hands, he determined that the object was a wooden crate. He tried to slice the rope by rubbing it against one of the box’s corners, but the edge proved too blunt. As he slid himself along the floor again, something poked his right side, causing a sharp pain. Carefully, he turned and ran his stiff hands over the object, discovering an irregular surface full of razor-sharp projecting parts. The feel was familiar. He’d experienced something similar in his hands and between his teeth on more than one occasion. He gave silent thanks for that bony discovery; the hard vertebrae of a dead animal would be the perfect tool for cutting through rope.

  “I don’t know what you were in life,” he said to the unhappy row of bones, “but if I get through this, I promise I’ll go vegetarian.”

  Making conversation with a cow’s skeleton wasn’t exactly a sign of sanity, but Jaime knew from experience that talking to whatever was in front of him could help him fight against panic. In the past he had chatted to lamps, spoons, shoes, and even rain—and on all those occasions he’d managed to keep his situation under control.

  Once free of his bonds, he started flexing his hands to restore their circulation and soon began to feel a pain that, despite his discomfort, he gladly received. “Welcome back,” he said to them, eager to talk to anything now.

  Still using the cow’s ribcage as a saw, he freed his legs from the rope and then tried to stand, but weakness and poor circulation caused his first attempt to fail. Lying on his back, he pumped his legs in the air as if riding a bicycle before trying again, and on his next attempt managed to stand and dodder toward the freezer door. He felt the surface of the door from top to bottom, looking for a way to open it, but he was out of luck. His kidnappers had tampered with the handle and it now hung uselessly from the door.

  He felt around in his jacket pocket and scowled when he found that they’d taken his cell phone. “Hey!” he cried out. “Can anyone hear me?”

  But he knew no one would hear him calling out. The walls of the freezer were lined with thick sheets of aluminum, rendering useless any attempt he might make to get help from inside.

  That was when it hit him that he was completely alone.

  No friends or family knew what hotel he was staying at. Even if they did, they’d still have no idea he was in danger. He’d been left to his fate in an icy, hermetically sealed death trap.

  Sandra had told him his body would appear three hours later near the castle on the hill. He held his watch closer to the weak light overhead and saw that it was now ten past two. He guessed that they would come to collect his frozen body around four o’clock. As an art history major, Jaime didn’t consider himself a natural scientist, but even he knew he couldn’t survive the cold for two more hours.

  As he shivered, he tried to locate a switch to turn off the fans, but either the switch did not exist or it was beyond his reach. He had to find a way to turn off the refrigeration, and he had to do it quickly, before the cold began to paralyze him.

  Tracing the current of cold air back to its source, he found an opening that concealed one of the fans. The cavity was located in a corner of the ceiling, three meters up. Drawing upon the little bit of warmth left in his body, he made his way back to the corner where he’d found the wooden crate and discovered an entire tower of them. He stretched to reach the top one, hobbled back to the other side of the freezer with it, and set it down on the floor. By standing on the crate he was able to reach the metal grille that protected the fan. Jaime stuck all his fingers into the holes and pulled with all his strength, but the grille was screwed into the ceiling and wouldn’t budge. He cursed the freezer’s manufacturers and their security measures. What had they feared would happen? That a group of frozen cows would attempt to reenact The Great Escape?

  He then noticed the dark cables running across the ceiling. These came out of the fan nearest to him and crossed to the other fan, located in the opposite corner of the freezer. If he could destroy the cables, perhaps he could shut down the fans’ motors. Using the cow’s backbone as a lever, he managed to pop out a refrigeration tube and tear out one of the cables at the point where it attached. Then he grabbed the box and put it under the other fan, repeating the process. Once the cables were hanging from the ceiling and the tubes had been split in half, Jaime was relieved to see that the fans had stopped. Exhausted, he threw himself to the floor. Unbelievably, he was sweating. However, the satisfaction of destroying the refrigeration system was fleeting, because it felt to Jaime as though he’d done nothing more than raise the temperature from absolute zero to freezing. The huge quantity of frozen food and the freezer’s effective insulation would soon turn his sweat to frost.

  Thinking it might help to have a shelter, he improvised one using the wooden crates. But within five minutes he’d crawled back out from his refuge, knowing that he had to do something to warm up or there’d soon be two stiff carcasses in the freezer. He had to find some way to keep warm until his would-be murderers came to collect his body. When they opened the door he would attempt his escape, but he had to survive another hour and a half of cold first.

  Desperate, he looked around again for something he could use to force the door open, but found nothing. The sweat on his chest had become a breastplate of ice. He unbuttoned his shirt and beat himself until the frozen perspiration fell from his body.

  Then he remembered a warning that his mother used to give him as a boy: If you sweat and then get cold, you’ll get sick.

  Of course! He had found the solution. He looked at the wooden crates, knowing what he was about to do would be tough but that it was his only chance. But he figured he’d been meaning to join a gym, anyway.

  At four o’clock in the morning, a white van bearing an egg company’s logo stopped in front of the entrance to Casa Genaro. A man dressed in black climbed out and crossed the pavement as nimbly as a grasshopper. The light from a nearby streetlamp fell on his face, revealing blue eyes over a long nose and a large mustache. As he reached the guesthouse door, he heard one of the van’s windows being lowered and turned back toward it. “Be quick about it,” said the dark-haired woman inside the vehicle. “The sun’s about to come up.”

  The man spread his arms and smiled. “Don’t worry! When has your cousin Clark ever
failed you?”

  The woman snorted. The man strode into the guesthouse humming a tarantella and then headed down the stairs to the kitchen, where just a few hours before he’d whacked that poor unfortunate on the head. His hands turned the wheel on the freezer door and then pulled it toward him. The cloud of freezing air that came from the gap was much smaller than it had been earlier, but he didn’t notice this detail and quickly slipped inside, taking care to prop the door open with a stool.

  A strange feeling came over him when he saw that the body was not where they’d left it. In its place there was a strange structure built of broken wooden crates. As he approached he could hear a sobbing sound, accompanied by the chattering of teeth.

  It seemed that the wretch was alive, albeit at death’s door.

  He peered behind the pile of crates, expecting to find a dying lump of frozen meat, but all he saw was more boxes. The body had to be buried under them. “May I ask what you’re doing? I hope you haven’t injured yourself or broken any bones; the boss will be furious.”

  As he began to remove one of the crates, he realized that only the ones forming the outer structure were made of wood. The crates covering the moaning, shivering body were made of polyurethane and were much lighter. “Hey you,” the man with the mustache called out. “Stop playing games and come out of there or I’ll—”

  Just then a long object shot out from between the boxes and whistled past his face. Cartons and plastic flew everywhere as his intended victim clambered to his feet, retrieved the object, and tried for a second time to strike him with what looked, unbelievably, like a cow’s backbone.

  To Jaime’s dismay, the man with the mustache moved with agility and evaded his second lunge as easily as he had the first. Before he could attack once more, he felt the vertebrae cut into his hand as the improvised weapon was violently snatched from him.