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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I head to the beach and take off my shoes and socks. The sand is hard, gritty, crushed-shell-like. The Jersey Shore is much better. Sorry, it is. Better waves too. I don’t stay long. I get my shoes back on and walk over to the Discoteca Palmeras. I stare up at the facade. I don’t feel anything because I don’t think I ever saw the place’s exterior in the daytime. I can’t tell whether it’s changed in the past two decades. Have you ever stayed in a nightclub until closing when they turn the houselights on and it’s like a totally different experience? It’s a sobering sight when a nightclub is scrubbed of its makeup and mood lighting, when it is exposed to the harsh morning glare.

I am focused on the case—on finding out the truth about what happened to Victoria Belmond and to a lesser degree me—but I can’t help thinking about the financial windfall that has risen me up like that church song about angels’ wings. I don’t want it to matter. I don’t want to let money change me or any of that. But I feel a lightness in my chest, and I know Molly does too. I’m not sure we consciously understood the burden that debt had placed upon our shoulders—what the heavy weight was doing to us physically, mentally, emotionally. I wanted to be that old Loggins and Messina song about even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you, honey, but the truth is far more complex.

In sum, I had to be careful that the money didn’t cloud my vision.

A young man sees me staring at the club entrance. He walks past me without so much as a nod and starts to unlock the door.

“Buenos días,” I say.

I speak fluent Spanish. Not as well as Osorio speaks English, but pretty close. I took it in high school like a lot of American youth and learned very little. But after my experience here, after Anna, I developed a sudden desire to master Spanish. You’d probably attribute this to some kind of perverse reaction to trauma, offer up some sort of pat psychological explanation for my need to learn the language of the country that had caused me such angst. You’d be right. It’s pretty much that simple, I guess. Or maybe a part of me knew that I would one day return to find the answer.

I’m getting very deep today.

The young man—I would say he’s somewhere between twenty and twenty-five—nods.

“I used to come here,” I say in Spanish. “When I visited here twenty-two years ago.”

He does not look impressed.

“Do you know if anyone is still around from those days?” I ask.

“My grandfather maybe.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“The Santa Maria cemetery in Mijas,” the young man says. He shakes his head. “Twenty-two years ago.” He chuckles. “Didn’t Franco rule this country then?”

Great. I spent years mastering Spanish so I could understand all the nuance of a sarcastic kid.

I try to find the old apartment building where it all went down. It’s gone now, along with all the others, replaced with newer high-rises. Good riddance, I guess, though part of me hoped that it was still there and I could convince Osorio to get his lab guys in there and swab every bit of it in search of… well, now I know it wasn’t blood, so what’s the point?

I head back to the beach and look for some place that doesn’t look too touristy. I order two dishes—the lightly breaded boquerones with tomatoes and the house paella, which is unlike anything we peasant Americans think of as paella. I probably shouldn’t, but it would be almost criminal to enjoy these delicacies without a glass of Rioja Blanco from the Viura grape. So I order one of those too.

I call Molly. She answers in a singsong voice. Again it’s not just that we are staying in a five-star hotel in Spain. It’s the money.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“On the Balinese bed.”

“The same one?”

“We haven’t moved much.”

“How’s Henry?”

“He’s napping. Or should I say, he’s having a siesta.”

“It’s like you’re half Spanish already.”

“I know, right? I’m also drinking something called a Tinto de Verano.”

“What’s that?”

“Heaven.”

A call breaks in. I explain to Molly that it’s Osorio and switch over.

“Come back,” Osorio says.

I pay the check and hurry toward the station. Osorio brings me to a room that they probably use for interrogations. Thick binders are piled on the table. Lots of them. On the cover are the words FOTOS DE DETENIDOS . I don’t need my Spanish mastery to figure out what that means.

“How are they categorized?” I ask.

“By date.”

“How about by crime or physical descriptions?”

“No, sorry.”

“Are foreigners in a separate binder?”

“No. I was wrong about that.”

“So,” I say. “Just by date.”

“Afraid so.”

I let loose a long breath. “Okay.”

“You want something to drink?”

I’m tempted to ask for a Rioja Blanco. “I’m good.”

“Let me know if you need anything.”

I expect this to take hours. It doesn’t. I find him in fifteen minutes.

I started with July 11, 2003, the day I ran from Spain, figuring Buzz and “Anna” remained active after me. The mug shots are much like the ones in the USA—two photos of the face, one a frontal view, the second a profile.

I was just settling in, getting a little rhythm going, when I hit pay dirt.

Buzz still had the purple spiked hair and nose ring. The date on the photo is four months after he’d scammed me. There is no name listed under the mug shot. There is no crime. There is just a number—9039384.

I lift the large binder, keeping it open to the correct page, and bring it to Osorio’s office.

“Found him,” I say.

Osorio looks at me over his reading glasses. “Let me see.”

I hand him the book. He studies the mug shot for a moment.

“Do you recognize him?”

“He is not completely unfamiliar,” Osorio says. “But there were a lot of guys who looked like this turd back in the day.”

“Do we know what he was arrested for?”

“We can’t put the name or crimes on here for privacy reasons. Article 18.4 of the Spanish Constitution protects personal data, including mug shots and police records.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning this can’t be accessed by the general public.”

“But you’re not the general public.”

“True, but you are. So step back and don’t look over my shoulder.”

Osorio types the number into his computer and starts to read. I wait.

“Well?”

“His name is Harm Bergkamp.”

“Harm?”

“Apropos name, no? He is a citizen of the Netherlands. He was thirty-six years old at the time of his arrest. This was a year after you left. He has a fairly extensive record, all minor things. Petty robberies. It’s what I told you before. Even if we caught him back then, what crime had he really committed—stealing under a thousand dollars from you and, what, pretending someone was dead?”

“And this arrest?”

“Assault.” Osorio squints and reads. “Seems our friend Harm got into a fight in a room at the El Puerto Hotel.”

“Did he stand trial?”

He shakes his head. “All charges dropped.” He keeps reading. “Oh, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“According to the record, the man he attacked was an American named Frank Ache. Bergkamp claimed self-defense, saying that Ache first attacked his girlfriend, a woman named—” He looks up at me. “Anna Marigold.”

Boom.

He continues to read. I am not patient.

“What?” I ask.

“Give me a second.”

I take out my phone and google Anna Marigold. Nothing significant. I hit the image search. A bunch of textile patterns of marigold flowers designed by a woman named Anna Spiro pop up. I try putting the name in quotes—“Anna Marigold”—but still get nothing. Then again had I really expected to get anything worthwhile? No. I try “Harm Bergkamp,” but the results are all in Dutch. I click through a few, but they all seem to be about someone with the name who died in 1876.

Finally, Osorio lets loose a deep breath, sits back, and rubs his face. “Okay, so here’s the deal.”

I put my phone down and lean toward him.

“It’s like what happened to you. Anna met Ache at the Discoteca Palmeras. She faked a drug overdose. Not death. But like, really out of it. The problem was, from what I can gather here, Bergkamp got held up and didn’t get there in time. So Ache kept shaking her and shaking her. Anna tried to keep her eyes closed and pretended to be out of it. But how long can you pull that off? So he figures out she’s faking it and she’d already stolen his money and hidden it. So Ache loses it and starts beating her.”

The broken nose, I think. The shattered cheekbone. Could this be how she got them?

“Harm Bergkamp arrives, sees her in trouble. He jumps on Frank Ache to stop him. That’s the assault. It turns super ugly. Hotel security intercedes. Bergkamp and Ache both get arrested. Anna Marigold has to go to the hospital.”

He stops and reads some more.

“And?” I say.

“And that’s it. Charges dropped. My guess is, neither side wanted to pursue it.”

“How badly was Anna hurt?”

“Doesn’t say. It just says that she was hospitalized in Málaga.”

“Can we get records?”

“From that long ago? Doubt it. And what are you going to learn? There won’t be pictures.”

“So,” I say, “how do we get Harm Bergkamp’s current whereabouts?”