Vlad

Chapter 7

The hunchback opened the door and brought his face much too close to mine, staring at me insolently. His breath reeked of yogurt. When he finally recognized me, he gave a fawning bow.

“Come in, Licenciado Navarro. My master is expecting you.”

I entered and searched in vain for the Count in the large living room.

“Waiting where?”

“Go on upstairs to the bedroom.”

I climbed a semicircular staircase that had no banister. The servant remained at the foot of the stairs. I don’t know whether he was overdoing a show of courtesy or of subservience, or whether he was just observing me with suspicion. On the upper floor, all the doors to what I reckoned were bedrooms were shut, except for one. I approached that one and entered a room with a wide bed. By that time it was already nine o’clock at night, but I noticed that the bed was still covered with black satin, and had not been turned down for the master to retire for the evening.

There were no mirrors in the room, but below where a mirror might have hung stood a vanity with all sorts of cosmetics, and a row of wig stands. While he combed his wig and applied his makeup, it seemed, the Count would have to imagine himself.

A light steam billowed from an open bathroom door. I hesitated for a moment; I felt as though I must be invading my client’s privacy. . But he said from within, “Come in, Mr. Navarro, come on in. Don’t be shy. .”

In the bathroom, the steam emanating from the shower filled the air. Count Vlad was washing himself behind a dripping lacquer door. I looked away. Still, curiosity got the better of me. Through the fog, I noticed that the bathroom too lacked mirrors. The bathroom also lacked the usual tools of hygiene: shaving brush, comb, razor, toothbrush, toothpaste. . As in the rest of the house, there were drains in every corner.

Vlad opened the door and emerged from the shower, showing himself naked before my discomfited gaze.

He had shed his wig and his mustache.

His body was as white as plaster.

He did not have a single hair anywhere — not on his head, not on his chin, not on his chest, not in his armpits, not around his genitals, and not on his legs.

He was totally smooth, like an egg.

Or a skeleton.

He looked as though he’d been flayed.

But his face was still wrinkled like a pale lemon, and his gaze remained hidden by those dark glasses that were almost like a mask, stuck on his olive-colored sockets and fitted on his tiny ears sown with scars.

“Ah, Mr. Navarro,” he said with a wide, red smile. “At last we see each other as we really are. .”

Standing next to a naked Central European count who liked to discuss the philosophy of life and death, I tried to lighten things up a little.

“Sorry, Sir, Count,” I said. “But I’m fully dressed.”

“How can you be so sure?” he asked. “Doesn’t fashion enslave and undress us all?”

At the edges of his affable smile, now without the fake-mustache disguise, two sharp canines glinted, yellow like the lemon color suggested by the pallor of his face when observed from up close.

“Excuse my indiscretion. Please, hand me my robe. It’s hanging over there,” the Count said as he pointed into the distance. “Let’s go downstairs,” he said hastily, “for dinner.”

“Pardon me. I have dinner plans with my family.”

“Your wife?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Your daughter?”

I nodded. He let out a cartoonish laugh.

“It’s 9 P.M.,” he deadpanned. “Do you know where your children are?”

I thought of Didier, who was dead, and of Magdalena who had gone to Chepina’s birthday party and who should be back home by now while I remained here like an idiot in the bedroom of a naked, hairless, grotesque old man who was asking me at 9 P.M. if I knew where my children were.

I ignored his creepiness, confused.

“May I call home?” I asked.

Zurinaga had warned me. I had taken the precaution of bringing my cell phone. I took it out of my pants pocket and speed-dialed my house. I brought my hand up to my head. There was no answer. I heard my own voice tell me to “Leave a message.” Something kept me from speaking, a feeling of uselessness, of a lack of freedom, of being dragged against my will down a slope like the one that plunged behind this house into the domain of pure uncertainty, a realm without free will. .

“They must still be at the Alcayagas’,” I muttered to reassure myself.

“The Alcayagas? You mean the kind engineer who designed and built the tunnel behind this house?”

“Yes,” I said in a fog, and not just the one produced by the steam still billowing from the bathroom, “that’s him — that’s his family and him.”

I selected their number and pushed talk.

“Hello, María de Lourdes?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Yves, Yves Navarro. . Magdalena’s father. .”

“Oh, yes, how are you, Yves?”

“My daughter. . No one’s answering the phone at our house.”

“Don’t worry. Magdalena’s sleeping over here. Chepina’s having a sleepover.”

“May I speak with her?”

“Yves, don’t be cruel. They were exhausted. They went down an hour ago. .”

“But my wife, Asunción. .”

“She didn’t show. She never came for Magdalena, but she called. She said she was running late at the office and would go straight to meet you at your mutual client’s house — what’s his name?”

“Count Vlad.”

“That’s it, Count What’s-his-name. Foreign names are so hard for me to pronounce! And she said you should wait for her there.”

“But, how’d she know I’d be coming here?”

María de Lourdes hung up. Vlad gave me a sarcastic look. He feigned a shiver.

“Yves. . is it alright if I call you by your first name?”

I nodded without thinking.

“And remember, all my friends call me Vlad. Yves, my robe please. Do you want me to catch pneumonia? There, in the armoire, the one on the left.”

I approached the closet like a sleepwalker. I opened the door to find there was only a single garment in the closet, an old heavy brocade robe, a bit threadbare, its collar made of wolf fur. It was a long robe that reached down to the ankles, worthy of a czar from a Russian opera, and embroidered in antique golds.

I took the garment and tossed it over Count Vlad’s shoulders.

“Yves,” the Count said, “don’t forget to close the armoire door.”

I looked back at the closet (a word obviously unknown to Vlad Radu) and only then did I see, stuck with thumb-tacks to the inside of the door, a photograph of my wife, Asunción, with our daughter, Magdalena, sitting on her mother’s lap.

“Vlad. Call me Vlad. All my friends call me Vlad.”