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.”
