because an argument got out of control, or even for profit.
‘Are you Dr. Davids?’ Barnes asked impatiently, in English obviously.
‘Yes, I am,’ the other answered in the same language, continuing his routine.
‘Lieutenant Balkenende gave us permission to come in,’ Barnes continued. ‘We want to see three bodies.’
‘ Ik wil ook veel dingen,’ the other said in his own language. I also want many things. ‘Wait a minute, please.’
‘ Wij willen deze dode drie zien, nu,’ Barnes demanded irritably, shaking a paper in his hand. We want to see these three bodies, now. He was not truly multilingual, but an understanding of basic phrases in the most important European languages like Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian was required for his appointment to a position in Europe. ‘And don’t make me grab you by the neck and shove you into one of these compartments,’ he concluded in English.
‘ Amerikaanen,’ the doctor let slip between his teeth, grabbing the paper out of Geoffrey Barnes’s hand. Always arrogant.
He read the names written on the paper, turned to a computer installed on a small square table, and pressed the keys that made the first name appear. Solomon Silvander Keys, the victim’s complete name. After he pressed the Enter key, detailed information appeared on the monitor with the certificate of autopsy attached, and many other facts of little relevance to Barnes and his agents. What Davids wanted from this procedure was to know the location of the victim, which appeared immediately in the lower right screen, number 13. Since the count was made starting from the top and left to right, we know that the thirteenth door Davids is heading toward, or Dr. Davids, we should say, is in the bottom row on the left side.
The doctor opened the square steel door and slid out the rack he found inside, where the corpse was lying stretched out, inert. A container that held Solomon Keys’s life of eighty-seven years. The tone of the skin, noticeably ashy, was a result of the temperature to which the body was subjected, interrupting completely the decomposition, but giving him a cadaverous, supernatural, vampiric look. If three of the men hadn’t been used to dealing with the most revolting scenes, they might have doubled over with fear or vomited their guts out, as we see Jerome Staughton doing at this moment into a blue plastic bucket.
‘Go outside, Staughton,’ Barnes ordered. He had no time for his subordinate’s weakness.
Staughton went gladly, with no desire to be heroic. Barnes knew perfectly the strengths and weaknesses of those who served him and what they could tolerate. Otherwise he would’ve made him stay there for the entire observation. Staughton was good at other things, as he’d already proved in the bathroom at Amsterdam Centraal. To observe and deduce, summarize and process facts. Yes, no one could compete with Jerome Staughton in analysis.
A serious Barnes looked at the body. Totally naked of clothes and prejudices, sanctified by death. There were two entrance wounds corresponding to the police report, one in the chest and the other exactly in the center of his head, brown, lifeless, since even the blood loses vitality.
‘Do you have the ballistics report?’ Barnes asked without taking his eyes off the body of the old member of the agency.
‘Yes, wait a minute,’ the doctor answered, reluctantly returning to the small table, where he looked at the monitor. ‘Nine millimeter.’
‘Nine millimeter,’ Barnes repeated. ‘Of course. It had to be.’ He continued looking at the corpse. ‘Were all of them killed with the same gun?’
He couldn’t take his eyes from the body. He knew that one day it could be him stretched out on another gurney in some other morgue, with a bullet in the head and wrinkles cut with age, if he made it to Solomon Keys’s age. Solomon’s world didn’t exist anymore — the time when people trusted strangers who came out of nowhere suddenly, manipulating them at their will, paying generously for information, eliminating those who had to be, and avoiding risks to those who took care of that. Today things were more dangerous, the criminals much more intelligent, cautious, always two steps ahead of the intelligence services, and never thinking twice. Besides, double or triple or totally invented lives, as in his time, didn’t make sense now. Everything was done at a distance on the Internet or other wireless technology. The demand was much greater. Communications were encoded, and millions of dollars required to validate or decode a message, with no certainty it was trustworthy. That was one of the reasons the company opted for surveillance on everyone, not just those who might be considered suspicious, since in reality they have no idea who is or isn’t. After an information scan in which the supercomputer uses key words such as ‘president,’ ‘attack,’ ‘bomb,’ ‘United States of America,’ ‘menace,’ ‘gas,’ among others on a long list, via Internet, audio, and video, from time to time they manage to catch someone. No, Barnes wouldn’t make it to Solomon Keys’s eighty-seven years, nowhere close. The shot to the temple was practically guaranteed. Hence the compassionate look he gave the deceased old man.
‘Yes. All with the same gun,’ the doctor concluded.
‘I want to see the other two,’ Barnes demanded.
More fast finger movement on the keyboard, and the information appeared on the computer screen. Doors 15 and 16 held the bodies of the English couple. Davids went to 15 first and slid out the rack to reveal… no body.
‘This is unexpected,’ Davids uttered, paralyzed with surprise.
‘Are you sure this is the right one?’ Barnes asked.
‘It’s what the computer says,’ the doctor informed him.
He opened 16. Nothing.
‘Fuck,’ Barnes swore. ‘Do you see this?’ He whirled around to ask Thompson.
Irritated, impatient, Barnes started opening all the refrigerated compartments and sliding out the racks.
‘Hey,’ the doctor protested.
‘Keep quiet,’ Thompson warned, also opening the compartments and reading the tag attached to each corpse’s toe.
Thirteen corpses later, some compartments empty, they still hadn’t found a sign of the English couple. They reviewed the list, and everything seemed to be in order with the rest.
‘Who could have taken them away?’ Barnes asked the doctor.
‘No one. The bodies aren’t even prepared for transfer yet.’
‘And when will that be? Who takes them?’
‘In this case, since they’re foreigners, the family or a representative of their country of origin, but always accompanied by a family member.’
‘Could there be an error? Could they already have been handed over and the information not yet entered in the computer?’ Thompson wanted to know.
‘It seems strange to me, but I’m going to find out,’ Davids informed him, much friendlier now than in the beginning. It was the morbidity of the situation. Irony. Irony.
He picked up a telephone attached to the wall next to the entrance door and punched three numbers, an internal extension. Three seconds later he started a conversation in his nasal Dutch that ended with violently slamming down the receiver, leaving it dancing on the end of the cord.
‘He’s coming,’ he explained.
‘Who?’ Barnes and Thompson asked.
‘The boss. Dr. Vanderbilt,’ he explained. ‘ Zoon van een wijfje ’ — son of a bitch.
The reasons for his blasphemies were his own, of no interest to us, nor to Barnes, Thompson, or Staughton, who came in white as a cauliflower, cleaning his mouth with a cloth handkerchief and covering his nose with it.
‘Everything is sterilized. It doesn’t smell of anything,’ Davids pointed out, fed up with all the interruptions. They were going to set his work back. Staughton paid no attention to the remark. He looked at the open doors of the gigantic refrigerated bay and the thirteen corpses slid out from the compartments. He looked at Thompson curiously. The latter, seeing him, turned his eyes away.
‘Don’t ask,’ he advised.
Meanwhile, the doctor, who must have been the previously mentioned Vanderbilt, Dr. Davids’s boss, came in. He was wearing a blue suit with an indigo tie underneath his open white gown. His posture radiated confidence and arrogance. He cut short the ‘ Goede nacht, heren ’ — Good evening, gentlemen — upon seeing the macabre spectacle. It looked like someone wanted to buy bodies, or parts of them.
