Art of Murder by José Carlos Somoza Page B

clock. A record, which must mean she had done something right and that, yes, however incredible it might seem, she was being watched. Yet she had still not done everything required of her. She decided to try something new: she phoned once more and, while she was standing at the window, raised a hand and tousled her hair. Almost before she had time to finish the gesture, they hung up.
    She smiled her agreement in silence, staring down at the street. 'Aha, now I've caught you: you want me not to talk, to stand at the window, to remain motionless, and .. . what else?' Bassan sometimes told her that her face could look kind and heartless at the same time, 'like an angel who has nostalgic memories of being a devil'. Right now, her expression was more devilish than angelic. 'What more, eh? What more do you want?'
    It was always the same when she took the first steps in the strange temple that was art, at the beginning of a new work: she felt aroused. It was the greatest feeling in the world. How could anyone want to work in anything else? How could there be people like Jorge, who were not works of art or artists?
    She amused herself by imagining what might come next; her imagination always raced in situations like this. The silence on the phone would last ten minutes if she leaned over her balcony, fifteen if she put one leg down on the ledge, twenty-five if she put the other one there, thirty if she stood up on the ledge, thirty-five if she took a step forward into the void ... perhaps then someone would respond . . . But that would be ruining the canvas, not stretching it.
    She chose another, more modest option. She looked over at the clock again, and then, still standing at the window, dropped the towel to the floor. She dialled the number. Heard the same reply as always. Waited.
    The silence went on and on.
    When she calculated that a good five minutes had passed, she wondered what else she would need to do if they hung up again.
     
    She did not want to have to think about it. She stood at the window without moving. The silence in her earpiece persisted.

    The black cat was to blame.
     
    She saw it for the first time in Ibiza, beneath a blazing sun. The cat was staring at her in that strange way all cats do, opening its quartz-crystal eyes wide and challenging her to discover its secret. But she was fourteen years old, was lying on her stomach on a towel with the top half of her bikini undone, and at that moment secrets did not mean much to her. She won the animal's confidence by calling gently to it. Or perhaps the cat was won over by her beauty. Uncle Pablo, who had invited her to spend the summer in Ibiza, used to ask her jokingly who her image consultant was. Someone as beautiful as you must have one, he said. With her long blonde hair, eyes like two tiny marine planets with no shoreline in view, her taut adolescent silhouette perfectly set off by her blooming skin, Clara was well accustomed to admiring glances.
    As a child, the father of a school friend called Borja had given her father a business card, saying he was a TV producer and wanted to offer Clara a screen test. He had never seen anyone like her, he said. Her father got very angry and didn't want to hear any more about it. That night there was a violent argument at home, and Clara's TV career was cut short before it began. This happened when she was seven. At nine, when her father died, it was already too late to disobey him. From then on, life was hard, because his death had left the family unprotected. The draper's store her mother ran, where Clara helped as soon as she was old enough, enabled them to get by, and provided the funds for her brother Jose Manuel to finish school and enrol to study Law. They could also count on Uncle Pablo's help. He was a businessman married to a young German woman and lived in Barcelona. It was his idea to rescue Clara every summer and take her to his apartment in Cortixera on Ibiza, with her cousins. They were girls, too, but