Departure

By Ines Galiano

A suspense filled tale of action, adventure, pursuit… and a manuscript.

Alba is a translator who thinks she has a boring job in Madrid, until she receives a translation assignment that will change everything…

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jul 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507114919

Book preview

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I am finding it difficult to believe everything that has happened to me in so few days. I have to write it down, in as much detail as possible, and as quickly as possible, because I don’t have much time. I need to get away from this place, but first I must put it in writing so that someone may know my story. Perhaps it might help. Perhaps, some day, I will be able to go back. Perhaps, some day, justice will be served.

I work in a publishing house translating novels. It isn’t the best job in the world, spending the entire day in amongst piles of papers, but I like it. I have always enjoyed reading, and now I get paid for it. I normally translate from English, although I have also translated a few French novels. They are only novels, entertainment; the sort of things in which you don’t expect to find what I found.

Normally, I work from home, but we do have an office where we can meet up. That Monday, we were scheduled for a meeting in the afternoon. We had an urgent order for a children’s book: some companies offer the rights to several publishing houses, and so that sets up a race against the clock. Management wanted us to leave all other projects to one side and dedicate ourselves fully to this book, and we had until the Friday to present the draft. As such, I went home, left my laptop ready to go on my desk, and then went to bed.

On the Tuesday morning I turned on the computer and, before doing anything else, I checked my email. They had actually sent the book via email, though that was not normal- the publishing houses usually give us a hard copy of the novel, so as to avoid any leaks, but I just attributed it to a lack of time. I began reading it, but my surprise grew with each passing page: this was a story about a soldier in a war, dealing with feelings of guilt, so I sent a message to the publisher, and received an answer explaining that they had made a mistake with the genre, but that the manuscript itself was correct. On Wednesday, I was able to begin the translation, and by dawn on Friday I had finished it. I sent it by email and went to bed, finally relaxed, not knowing that the book that I should have translated was still in my post box, and that I had now involved myself in something that was out of my reach.

When I got up on Sunday, I had no intention of going out anywhere, but as I ate breakfast, the phone rang. The number was withheld, and they hung up when I answered, but I gave it no importance: not that time, nor the next three times that they rang that morning. It was at noon when there came a knock on the door. As I was not expecting anybody, I approached it very slowly, and silently, until I could look through the spy-hole, but there was nobody there. I thought about my neighbours; about the two little boys in the building, who were always playing in the hallway, and did not worry about it.

I checked my email often, hoping for a reply from the office, but the message that I received was not from there, it was from Jake Fisherman. I checked it several times, incredulous, but it could not be anybody else.

I had known Jake years earlier in New York, where I took my Masters in International Relations. Back in those days, my dream was to work as an interpreter in some important organisation, like almost every other person on that course. On the one hand, there were those who had studied law or political sciences, who wanted to become big personalities; on the other, there were the students coming from the economic branch who wanted to be their advisers; and, finally, there was us, the ones who had studied languages, and who would carry out the job of making everybody able to understand each other, but we all aspired towards finding work with the UN in one form or another.

Jake was in my class that year. He came from the political branch, and had grand and revolutionary ideas about changing the world and society. He was a young man from California, who lived in a small flat shared with four other students in Manhattan, and worked in a restaurant at night in order to pay the bills. But despite working many hours, it was never enough to cover all of his costs. Even though he was an intelligent guy, he did not perform well in his studies, and his main problem was his incapacity to contain himself whenever a tutor was talking about something in class that he considered unjust, which subsequently led him to prolonged discussions that did nothing to endear him to them. The tutors saw him as an alarmist, and considered those interruptions as intentional and lacking in respect. But Jake could not contain himself, and dreamed of the idea of convincing the whole of society with his arguments. Besides, he was not a very good student; not only did he not have much free time, he was also incapable of sitting for hours memorising things. If something did not grab his attention, he could not study it. When there was a topic that interested him, however, he could spend days gathering information, searching for related news, reading books and magazines about it. He would get to the point where he spent every available minute talking about it, repeating everything he had learned, until, in every single class, we would all invariably end up discussing the topic.

The truth is that he had a gift for public speaking; he was capable of arguing anything, and you did not have the option of contradicting him. It was on more than one occasion that this great knack of his came to his rescue. He was accustomed to getting away with things, and capable of manipulating each and every one of us on a whim. He would convince us to go to parties when we had no intention of going; he would make us give more money than we would have to charitable collections; and he would make us feel bad if we did not attend the rallies and demonstrations that he organised in favour of a cause that seemed opportune to him at that time. I always thought he would have made a good politician.

However, money was his weak point. Basically, he did not have any, and whatever he did have he spent immediately or lost playing poker. His flatmates got more and more involved in the game, and the debt. He worked flat out, but it all counted for nothing. On several occasions, they threatened him, to get him to repay the money he owed, and he was saved by his verbal hot air. But the last time that I saw him, his gift of the gab did not work.

It was at the end of the course, during a rally that he had organised in front of the magistrate’s court, over a case of legislative injustice. There we were all gathered, classmates from the Masters, his work colleagues, his flatmates, people from the neighbourhood, and even the odd tutor. To sum up; everyone he had managed to convince by means of repeating to us, more times than were necessary, the need for us to attend the rally, and the reasons were by no means few.

We grouped around the door, whilst he went from one side to the other handing out informative leaflets, and the moment any worker left or entered the building, he grabbed the megaphone and encouraged everyone to sing the slogan he had created for the occasion.

We had been there for a good half an hour when a black van with tinted windows stopped just to the side of