Controversy and Ultimatum

By Alberto Vital

Controversy and Ultimatum is a thriller with a political background. It takes place in an imaginary country, an island shaped like a crab, located somewhere in the Atlantic or the Pacific, not far from the American coast. There is a crime in high society. Two detectives are dedicated to solving the enigma. They are Gavin William and Chelo Gomez. They are two opposite and yet complementary characters. Gavin William is rational, objective, patient. Chelo Gomez is mysterious, subjective, and even more patient.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636925448

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Controversy and Ultimatum

Alberto Vital

Copyright © 2021 Alberto Vital

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2021

Illustration in the cover: Ofrenda by the Mexican artist Rodrigo Garza.

ISBN 978-1-63692-543-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63692-544-8 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Detective, 1

The Caricaturist, 1

The Biographer, 1

The Detective, 2

The Caricaturist, 2

The Biographer, 2

The Detective, 3

The Caricaturist, 3

The Biographer, 3

The Detective, 4

The Caricaturist, 4

The Biographer, 4

The Detective, 5

The Caricaturist, 5

The Biographer, 5

The Detective, 6

The Caricaturist, 6

To my wife, Sol Vital

The Detective, 1

N ow! Let’s go! I ran up the hill.

There were three others: Steven Stock, Cello G., and P. A.

After two hundred yards, I stopped. Nobody had followed me.

I went back down.

Steven Stock leaned on a rubber plant, breathless. Cello G. had run in the opposite direction and came back slowly, limping for no apparent reason. P. A. stood exactly in the place where I had shouted, Now! Let’s go!

Our man is gone, I muttered, pointing to the top of the hill.

P. A. said, It depends.

I suddenly felt in the mood to ask, "It depends on what? What depends on what?" I said nothing though, and we walked in silence back to the terrace bar.

The terrace is located on the third floor of America Inn. From there, I could admire our local Central Park—its two hills, its gardens, violet clouds, and yellow lightning of the dry summer thunderstorms. Roberta, the barmaid, offered us olives, nuts, and salted peanuts. I saw Roberta, and the taste of her lips like wet and plump olives in my mouth came to mind.

I stood in the first round. I relished in advance my familiar six o’clock drink. I craved it from the moment I asked for it. And just when I felt the cool and vibrant golden bourbon in my chest, I could make the pertinent questions. "Did you really say ‘It depends,’ P. A.? It depends on what? Our man is gone. That’s it!"

In an almost imperceptible way, like sharing a painful secret or perhaps as an effect of an uncontrollable unconscious movement, P. A. gestured Yes with his left forefinger and gestured No with his right forefinger. With his tongue and teeth, he said, I didn’t mean ‘our man.’ I meant the word.

On the pretext of giving him his glass of wine, Roberta approached her breast to P. A.’s face exactly as she had approached it to my face on that unforgettable evening when we put our love into words. She wore a red and blue cowgirl shirt. She is used to rolling up her sleeves. She knew how young and how special she looked with her rolled-up cowgirl shirt. I myself had told her, and she believed it.

But this time, the whole scene was her way of saying, If you don’t promise to marry me or at least to live with me, I’ll break our deal and date that boy one of these nights. But now what could I, Gavin William, do with a woman thirty years younger though, for Christ’s sake? What could Retired County Police Upper Chief Gavin William do with a girl who still had her mother’s milk traces in her lips and yet wanted to have her own nipples full of milk as soon as possible, according to what she had suggested in two or three sly insinuations after our first night?

I urgently needed to humiliate P. A. "What word did you mean, P. A.?" My voice was notoriously steely.

P. A. knows words, William. I told you. Cello G. pronounced William as if William was my first name. I didn’t like it. And why did he say knows words instead of knows his words?

"Do you mean the word man?" Steven Stock asked. After the first half bourbon, Steven had completely recovered his breath.

"I mean the word now," answered P. A.

Three months before, P. A. had been suspected of having committed a murder. Cello G. and I resolved the case: P. A. was innocent. And he was intelligent. He had a very peculiar way of looking at people and things with his side glances. In spite of this, I’d have never included a guy like P. A. in my team if Cello G. hadn’t insisted. Cello G. felt admiration for P. A. since the first day, when we went into his house with a presumptive order of arrest, interrogated him and P. A. wept, and I decided that his tears were an implicit confession, and Cello G. took my arm and said, Not yet, William, and Cello G. was right. P. A. was crying for all of humankind and not exactly for a crime that he couldn’t thoroughly understand, not even in its most elemental terms.

P. A. took a little white device out of his jacket pocket. We concentrated on this. He seemed parsimonious and careful even in his smallest actions. That attracted our eyes to his hands. He tried to untangle his earphones. I weighed my chances: It was a complete tangle of thin white, purple, and blue cables. He wasn’t in any hurry, though.

We were staring at his large, fine, and apparently very sensitive fingers when Roberta came from the kitchen through the creaky swinging door, grabbed the cables, and untangled them with two or three almost magical movements. It took her all of twenty seconds.

I had my next chance when he put the earphones in his ears.

We could hear his music.

Why are your earphones unplugged, P. A.? Steven Stock asked with exquisite politeness.

Unplugged, you say?

Everybody is hearing your music, P. A., I said.

Everybody, you say? Well, me too. I mean, I finally understand why… Excuse me just thirty seconds.

And you must put the flag out, not in, Cello G. said.

Indeed, the earphones included a tiny British flag on the back. P. A. had tried to insert the tiny British flag in his ear, instead of the right side.

At the third or fourth attempt, he correctly put in the earphones.

Behind me, Roberta had seen the whole scene and had smiled. I felt she wanted to caress his hair. I mean, her smile was a subtle way of caressing and messing with his hair.

I felt he was playing with my olives and my marbles.

I discovered something in me though, something in my attitude, perhaps just understandable for people at my age, something is pushing me to consider P. A. an enemy and simultaneously a possible heir, as if I was not only Roberta’s lover, but also Roberta’s stepfather or uncle or eldest brother or something like that, in the case I decided not to marry that lovely, plump, and terribly unquiet milkmaid. Anyway, since I had retired and had left my position as the boss, I felt I had also lost a part of me. According to some writers (read and once commented on by P. A.), when you have a high position, you get a second body. Around your normal shape, you have an aura, a halo, an image, and people admire, if they do, this second almost untouchable body as a fine armor around the chest and the broad-shouldered back and face, legs, and arms. I had recently lost my armor. My former boss T. L. too. He had recently lost his second body. I had found in Roberta’s body, my shelter, and my second life, outside and inside. I could suspect what T. L. had done to compensate for his loss, certainly much bigger than mine: T. L. had been president of the nation. But I, at least, knew what I had done about it.

Now, Steven Stock, Cello G., and P. A. were my staff. My old friend Steven Stock was an economist, half retired, half active. He took care of carrier pigeons as a hobby in his weekend ride-away, ten miles from the federal capital. We always meet to drink on the terrace our ritual six-o’clock-bourbon. And we talked. But since Roberta had appeared in my life, Steven exaggerated his distant and exquisite politeness as a signal of his disapproving sensibility.

My police colleague Cello G. resolved each and every case, but in a so peculiar way that I never knew if he was crazy or if he was confronting my strictly rational methods of criminal and psychological investigation.

P. A. was a presumed poet and an apparent philosopher who, according to my discreet inquiries, was being spied on by five absolutely different private bureaus of intelligence.

"The word now cannot be defined, P. A. warned. Not any now has limits."

I disagree, I replied.

And who was the man we were chasing a while ago? Steven asked.

Good point, I said. With this question, we reached the unavoidably crucial moment of my decision. I needed to decide if my team was able to follow me in the adventure that had begun two days before.

Two days before, T. L. had invited me to his home. It is, in all ways, a large house. In the intimacy of his favorite study, T. L. confessed, with closed eyes and contrite face pointing to the ceiling, "Gavin, you are one of my best friends. Our friendship has survived for thirty years of political and judicial wars and negotiations. It is the first time in the history of our friendship I’ll ask of you a really personal favor." He opened his ice-blue eyes and stared at me with a pair of sudden pointed sword.

Count on me, T.

I need you to spy on me.

What?

I need you to hide, make yourself invisible, let me carry on, or live, and you record my movements as if you were spying on me.

"Wait just a moment, T. L. By no means am I a spy! I’m a detective! I’m a retired county chief of police!"

Is it not more or less the same thing?

"Are you kidding, T. L.? Why should I spy on you? Why precisely should you be spied on by yourself?"

I want you to spy on me because I’m the only important person who hasn’t been spied on by someone by my order in my lifetime.

Have you spied on me, T. L.? Have you spied on your friends?

"Listen, Gavin. I have a dinner next Saturday. I’ve been suspicious for the last three weeks, and I trust in my intuitions. I believe in the alarms of my suspicious mind."

I’m a detective, T. L. For example, I could follow a suspect even if he spent the night just wandering around.

He put the glass on the table and put his right palm on his wide forehead. The palm of his large pianist’s right hand was surely cold with the coldness of the glass. I supposed he needed cold to freeze his galloping mind.

"Gavin, there are indeed two suspects wandering around my walls. It wasn’t difficult to detect them. But my point is a third suspect, inside the walls," he whispered. I leaned toward him. After a working life, I knew the situation. It was time for sharing secrets. T. L. had secrets to share. Especially T. L. had secrets to share.

Gavin William, I suspect myself.

What?

Gavin William, I need One Eye looking at me.

I have two eyes, T. L. Should I close one of them?

He stood up straight. His steely eyes became swords again. He really knew how to stare in such situations. "I appreciate, forgive, and immediately forget your irony, Gavin William, because this is not a time for ironies. But listen to me. I know my hands since I was a child. People don’t know their hands. I do. And this is the first time in my long life I don’t completely control the electric impulses of my hands. Next Saturday, we’ll have dinner, and I need you to observe our movements carefully, especially the movements of my hands when I take up a knife to the beef. My neighbor Oberon will sit on my left. His name is not Oberon. Doesn’t matter, we’ll identify him as Oberon. His real last name is Shady. His Titania will sit on my right, I mean Mrs. Titania Shady."

I certainly knew who Oberon and Titania Shady were. I certainly had my file O. Sh. and my file T. Sh. My brain is full of files. According to some notes in my mind, Oberon loved music and loved Titania because music and Titania were exaltation and incitation for him. Earphone’s cables sank into his shirt pocket like a fine stethoscope taking eternal care of his heart. In fact, music and love lightened his blood… Titania embodied just one certainty: she was exaltation and incitation for everyone. At the beginning, he suffered to get from her a definitive answer. In the meantime, he heard music to compensate for her absence. After she refused his first proposal, he duplicated his gym time and his music time. He became an athletic expert in good, regular, and bad everlastingly exciting music. When he fell, he fell upwards.

He was a jealous guy. He was a discreet gentleman, but he didn’t know that everybody had seen him two steps behind his wife while shopping on weekends in company of other wives and friends when he was supposed to have stayed home.

I nodded. Where will I sit? Can I invite my girlfriend? She is s—

He controlled himself to avoid jumping on his comfortable leather armchair. You’ll sit down in the surveillance room, two doors away from the main dining room. And, of course, you may not invite any girlfriend or equivalent!

I have a team, T. L. And I require my team by my side.

T. L. leaned his back on the back of his brown armchair and closed his eyes. It meant a truce. He needed a truce; me too. With our silent and retracting involuntary body movements, we declared it. I took a golden quaff.

After a half-minute pause, he stood up and invited me to inspect the rooms. His transit from calm to determined and well-focused movements was a very impressive effect for the interlocutor, and he knew it. He even hit both arms of his armchair with both palms, and the sound was like the gong in a Buddhist temple. It was the moment of waking up to a very important task for our instincts and our consciousness.

His house was a new one. T. L. always needed the smell of the premiere. His life was guided by his nose. His nose was guided by smells. Like a fine wolf nose, his nose loved fine meals, leather, cotton, wood, wool, metal, glass, and paper. Of course, his cologne was exceptional. During our meetings, I felt we were fighting for air through our respective perfumes and our colognes and, if necessary, our vigorous deodorants. They all were protecting walls, no doubt. They were also the softest invisible irruption into the opposite trenches. I knew and perhaps he knew it too that Egyptians extracted and mixed their perfumes in the temples since they knew that female divinities were stronger than their male counterparts just because of their superior olfactory powers.

His new house was impregnated by virgin aromas, and I, as a simple guest, finally succumbed to the induction. I attentively heard his descriptions and explanations.

The place had been built on three levels. The main entrance was in the second level, so that you could come through the surrounding parkland and stopping at a stately platinum railing and then you had to go between the rubber plants, oaks, pine trees, and eucalypti of the park inside and only then you could get out of the car, ring the bell, and wait a discreet interlude.

The hall is as wide and sumptuous as a White House hall. You go downstairs through the east wing stair and reach the east under level and the dark corridor with some black sofas against the wall and the window next to the gym and the indoor swimming pool. And in the direction to the ball court and the place for fixing bicycles was the corridor to the tennis court and to the outdoor swimming pool, the dog kennels, the gun room, and all those things. You go downstairs through the west wing stairs and reach a second complex and a lift. In the west basement, you have the kitchen, the food cellar, the wine cellar, and the corridor to the apartments for the domestic staff. In the street level or first level, you have two dining rooms (the breakfast room and the very elegant dining room), two sitting rooms, each one with generous libraries, and the war room (a vulgar surveillance place with a whole wall covered in screens and with desks, computers, and stuff in the like), where my team and I should spend Saturday evening. In the same first west level or street level, you have a room for meditation: a sort of multimedia and multireligions old and new or new-old chapel with a roof resembling two wings of a dove and a transparent cupola through which you get a direct connection either to heaven or at least to its material equivalence. On the second level, you have four bedrooms, personal bathroom included in each one, with a toilet, boudoir, and bathtub. Coming from the stairs, you turn left, and you run into the main bedroom. It is T. L. and his wife’s bedroom. Also coming from the stairs, you turn right, and you run into two bedrooms: left, T. Jr.’s room (T. Jr. was the firstborn) and right, Jesus Heal Us’s bedroom (Jesus Heal Us was T. L.’s second son). Also coming from the stairs to the right, you come to two rooms. On the left was Susan’s bedroom (Susan was the only daughter and the youngest child in the family), and on the right was a well-stocked cinema with twenty seats.

Two days later, I had to decide who with and how to integrate my team. Steven Stock, Cello, Roberta, and in certain way P. A., all looked at me after Steven had asked who the man we had chased and nearly caught was. The sunset was softly warm. Central Park across the road was a collection of color samples: sweet green, declining green, golden green, sporadic violet, sad red, occasional blue, and temperamental yellow.

P. A. wasn’t technically a cross-eyed person. However, he was a kind of cross-brained poet. He would look at you giving the impression of a cross-eyed person hidden in a cross-brained poet or the other way round.

I have a mission, and I’ll need to run one or two risks chasing potential criminals. I knew that Roberta adored me when I took on the hero’s cape. Before disappearing behind the kitchen door, she made me a half heart with her left forefinger and her left thumb. With her right hand, she was holding the door, and suddenly superstitious, I wondered if that half heart was hers or mine, or even worse, whether she had shaped with her left hand just her half heart, and then I could wonder if the other half already belonged to P. A. or someone else.

In my personal philosophy, I had forbidden myself falling in love with a woman before she fell in love with me. For this simple and universal reason, I had been a successful lover, at least for what the falling in love and conquest was concerned. Now, for the first time in my life, I didn’t know if she or I was more in love than the other.

Is it a sort of preventing pursuit? P. A. asked.

Roberta smiled shortly. Stock took up his bourbon. Cello was about to say something. I stood up imitating T. L.’s sudden stand up effect. I even hit the invisible arms of my chair with my visible palms. I mean, I hit the air as if I wanted to terrify P. A. leading him to the sensation of an imminent virtual slap.

Everybody stood up. I felt the renewed energy of the man who for thirty years had been an important factor in a virtual national bureau of investigations.

As an intimate goodbye without words, Roberta gave me a second heart, this time with her two hands, but with her wet kitchen cloth covering the empty center of the shape. For the second time in less than one minute, I wondered something. I wondered if some wet kitchen cloth always covered my love like a symbol of a working life being on the way to a loving daily life.

We went downstairs, to the street again. The street belonged to me as his large house belonged to T. L.

I didn’t have, in strict sense, a large house.

I had a long street in front though.

I loved books. But I always stopped reading when I felt that my instincts to survive in the streets were in danger because of my obsession to follow letters lines instead of following investigation lines and concrete men like the man we had chased one hour before.

I knew people cannot possess two complementary skills at the same time, and they have to choose at every moment—in this case, either reading or living.

I knew Roberta was missing me, suddenly alone in the terrace with a wet cloth or a dirty glass in her expert lovely hands.

I knew I had to choose as soon as possible—either my love or my freedom.

I knew that a believer believes in God’s incarnation and a nonbeliever doesn’t believe in God’s incarnation.

I had wanted that people saw me and spontaneously said, This man is the incarnation of comfort. This man is the incarnation of the comfortable freedom after a hardworking life.

And now I had to choose. For that moment, I guided my troop downstairs, and we went to the street just like a small army ready to fight. Everybody was waiting for a revelation. Everybody assumed that I’d reveal the secrets of our mission during our last walking around of that day.

I was preparing the best moment.

I felt Roberta follow us, and I expected she was listening to me, although she had stayed alone in the terrace with a wet cloth in her hands.

Nobody knew I doubted. I doubted about P. A. I had read his scare poetry. I admired its way of looking through with the corner of his lyric eye. I guess he could help us with his special way of contemplating the world. At the same time, I feared for his health and for our health in case he joined us. It was a typical apparently irresoluble conjuncture. In my job, I had had to decide under the hard conditions of typical apparently irresoluble conjunctures. In those cases, I would stand up, take a breath, walk around my desk or around our Central Park (with two discreet bodyguards behind me), and wait for an answer. The answer came. For this reason, I had left the comfortable terrace and the especially comfortable Roberta, and I had risked the street, risking through it.

Well, when we went out of the America Inn, we walked together to the west corner. Around the corner we near ran into a man. He was a man with three secondhand books in his hands. He was a solitary culture seller. P. A. stopped and shouted as if he shouted for help, I am this man!

We all jumped.

What? I managed to react.

I am this man. He nodded.

The secondhand bookseller looked at us with shy and almost terrified lamb eyes. P. A. stood and stared at him. The three books seemed to behave as modest as their provisional owner. Even they seemed to bend over and looked at us with shy and almost terrified lamb eyes.

Why are you this man? I asked.

I am this man because he is me.

Their shirts are white, Cello said.

We all looked at their shirts.

Good point, Steven Stock admitted. Besides, their shoes are covered in mud.

We all looked at their shoes. Even P. A. and the bookseller looked at their respective shoes and at the counterpart shoes.

We all confirmed the two facts: white shirts and muddy black shoes.

Indeed, I agreed, and their white collars are rounded, and the rest of their shirts are square.

And their hair is curly, and the curls in the top are like a cupola, Steven Stock said.

In that very moment, a feminine voice said, Time to call me! Who had pronounced that sweet but inexcusable order? Was it a voice from beyond? Was it an underground signal? And then, as a sort of answer, P. A. took his cellphone out from his trousers’ left front pocket, and with some clumsiness, he tried to type on the touch screen. In spite of his efforts, the sweet order sounded again, It’s Natalie, P., and it’s time to call me.

As I had expected, I finally found the answer. I decided to exclude P. A. from our mission.

On Saturday evening, nobody but Roberta was able to join me. Steven had to write an academic paper, and Cello G. had to absolve another mission. I hate Cello G. using my own words. In the terrace or in stairs or streets, I had used the word mission, and he used it now. I’d like to patent words. I’d really like to get a form to avoid that some people used some words.

Whatever, this bad feeling was the perfect mood to understand some corporal movements and some words during the Saturday dinner.

Roberta revealed herself as the perfect assistant. Plates with aromatic and hot or cold food had been discretely placed on a table in our war room. She served me with exquisiteness the same hors d’oeuvres, soups, and viands that T. L. and his guests were tasting two doors away.

As a violet and yellow lightning in the terrace, I discovered that we, men and women, have more than one body, although we don’t carry a high political or simply public position upon our shoulders. In fact, I had read somewhere this philosophical aphorism. And yet, just in that moment, the assertion penetrated in my first body, after living in my second and deepest one. With her tenderness and with her disposition, Roberta was building my second body as an armor to protect our love from my masculine tendency to spread my enthusiastic ardor in more than one destination. I began to need her. I really began to. I then discovered that our second body is in part spread among other first bodies. I knew that some corporal points of my own pleasure were deposited not in my first or second body, but in her body. I don’t remember if men have G points and things like that. Anyway, my second body was convinced that some points of my own most intimate pleasure were placed in her thighs and her naked shoulders and in the back of her knees and hands.

Besides, we shared a secret. That secret spread through the forty screens in front of us. We talked with such secrecy, which is so useful to connect human destinies. I knew it since thirty years ago. She knew it too since the origin of the species. She and I knew that those hours of shared secrecy were a way of continuing with the construction of our respective complementary bodies.

The odors from the plates helped us to round off the scene. In a certain sense, the odors came from the four central screens discretely emplaced to cover the dining room. The upper left screen showed the best angle of the occupier of the main chair, obviously the host. It showed, behind the host, a door. The upper right screen showed his wife, sitting in front of her husband. It showed, behind her, the door to the room connected to the kitchen. The under left screen showed Titania. She deserved her name.

I turned and whispered to Roberta, This woman deserves her name.

What’s her name?

Titania.

Roberta took my empty glass, stood up, and poured me more wine. I loved it and yet understood how dangerous for my freedom it was—such disposition, such easiness, such speed to read my mind. She served me because she was waiting for something definitive between us. Besides, I knew she served me as a way to avoid asking me some naïve questions, at this case, Who’s Titania? What does ‘Titania’ mean at all?

"I imagine Shakespeare’s Titania like this half-brown, half-blonde, and half-curly-haired woman, and I’m sure that this tall and well-formed woman has been dressed by fairies and by more than one Puck. Anyway, her dress is like a colorful pajama that insinuates her shapes and promises