ANDROMEDA SKYSCRAPER
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 07.25 A.M.
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The envelope slipped under the door as the dawn light began to filter through the windows.
Malin, who was in the kitchen making breakfast, heard something scratchy sliding between the front door and the floor, touching the entrance mat. Someone had thrown a little package.
Hoping to catch any other noise, she stopped, keeping her hand still just before dumping the coffee grounds into the pot. Nothing. Nor did she hear footsteps outside in the corridor. Whoever had just dropped whatever that was had been so stealthy as not to have made a sound when leaving. Finally, she dumped the coffee in the machine and went to the living room.
‘Please, dust off your feet before entering,’ read the entrance mat. A few days ago, Adam had made a peculiar observation, “Even the rugs are boring in this apartment.” Part of the envelope got stuck under it.
Malin’s first thought was, Be careful; it could be a letter bomb. That kind of trick is something from a century ago, but there will always be some nostalgic nutcase eager to use them in this day and age. Then she shook her head. Why don’t you leave paranoia in your own country, dear? Things are different here.
The envelope was small and too thin to contain anything other than paper.
It was odd. As far as she knew, the superintendent didn’t use to go door to door, handing out envelopes; let alone at that hour. Maybe it was some urgent message from the building consortium. Or it could be the CAM expenses bill; she had heard Adam talking about it with this Trevor Homam guy—Who in their right mind was still using paper receipts these days, though?
She watched through the peephole. The hallway was empty. She opened the door and poked her face. Nobody. As she expected, whoever had dropped it had taken off pretty quickly—Or maybe was watching her hiding behind the door of one of the many apartments which they shared the floor with? She closed the door, and although something told her there was nothing to fear, she found it convenient not to spare caution. She looked for some rubber gloves from the laundry room and put them on before lifting the envelope.
She shook it. Judging by its weight, there was nothing but a piece of paper inside. She looked at it against the light and confirmed her thoughts. She opened it, and the content fell to the ground, drawing a swing in the air and landing on the mat, covering part of the boring phrase.
It was a clipping from a printed newspaper—something that could already be considered a curiosity by itself—belonging to the obituary section, where there was a photo of an old man with a wrinkled face and a serious expression. The data in the clipping’s header: ‘Proxima City. August 30, 2110’, according to the calendar used in the Rodinian continent—or, rather, in the rest of the world except in her country—indicated it belonged to an edition of the previous month.
Someone had highlighted with a red marker a particular small paragraph, the one next to the old man’s photo.
> Rodolfo Gutierrez. May he rest in peace. He died on August 29, 2110, at the age of 88. Surviving him is his wife, Aida Mendoza Gutierrez. Funeral services will be held at 9 a.m., Friday at the Elysian Fields cemetery. Burial will be made in the same place.
A cold text for a person with a cold face, Malin thought.
Who was the deceased, and who might be interested in Adam, or both of them, seeing that article? Of course, that man could also have been someone close to the apartment’s previous tenant. Well, there was an easy and quick way to find it out. She took the phone that rested on the table, the one that Adam used for his work duties, and activating it with a slight touch, she entered every known search engine, after any data on the deceased.
She spent the next half hour walking in circles around the living room with the phone in one hand and the cup of coffee in the other, drinking it from time to time, analyzing each article that mentioned the name: Rodolfo Gutierrez.
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“You’re still here?”
The question brought her back to reality. Adam had woken up.
“I slept well, thank you,” she replied.
Adam heaved a resigned sigh. “For a moment, I hoped to get up and not find you here.”
“Yesterday, I made my position clear.”
“So am I,” Adam said, and opened a couple of doors in the kitchen cabinet, searching unsuccessfully for an empty cup. How hard it was for him to remember where everything was kept in that apartment!
Malin opened the right door, the last on the right, took one, and handed it to him. He grabbed it with a long face.
“Do you know this man?” she asked, showing him the newspaper clipping.
Pouring himself some coffee, Adam stretched his neck out to look at the picture. “Rodolfo Gutierrez,” he said. “That’s written there, isn’t it?”
“I know. But do you know him?”
“Uh-uh,” Adam shook his head.
“Someone threw it under the door.”
Adam took the clipping—he still had the splint covering his index finger. “Some kind of door-to-door advertising?”
“Don’t be silly.” Malin took the clipping out of his hand. “I did some research on him; didn’t find much, though. How many Rodolfo Gutierrez do you think there are in this city?”
“Thousands?”
“Millions!” she exclaimed, pissed. “Why don’t your country’s regents do a better job regulating the names of their citizens? Finding information about someone is almost impossible with so many repeated names. In Markabia and other Imperial Citadels, new names are getting released officially every now and then to avoid situations like these. It’s one of the few good ideas the Army had. I’m telling you, if I hadn’t…”
Adam listened to her rant while drinking coffee.
“Well,” he interrupted her, “did you find out anything about this particular Rodolfo Gutierrez?”
Malin took a sip from her cup. “Little to nothing. He was a real estate agent. Though he may not have been a very good one, I only found just a few transactions made under his name.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Adam said. “I doubt you know much about the real estate topic.”
“The other thing I found out was that the guy spent the last years of his life in a residential care home,” she told him. “I entered into that place’s database, and I identified him thanks to the patient photo registry.” She raised her hand and made a caveat. “I gotta tell you—if all computer security in this country is as easy to hack as this one, any technician from mine who wants to have some fun causing cyberterrorism would have a feast in here. Hell! Even I did it with a trifle like this phone.”
“Thank you for the tip,” he said. “I’ll tell the guys in Homam Enterprises to improve the firewall against info petty thieves like you, just in case.”
“Anyway,” she went on; “this man, Rodolfo, was lost in a mental ocean thanks to severe senile dementia.”
“Just like seventy percent of the elders in any of the three big Ps,” Adam pointed out, and upon seeing Malin’s face, clarified, “Rodinia’s three big metropolises: Proxima, Principia, and Plutonia. What makes this old man stand out among the remaining sixty-nine-point-nine percent so that his death goes under this door?”
Malin shrugged. “I don’t know, you tell me. Why would anyone throw this under the door?”
“Good grief, Malin; less than a month ago, an old married couple was renting this apartment. Your old man must have been a relative or an acquaintance of theirs. What else? Whoever sent the obituary certainly didn’t know a new tenant was living here.” Adam smirked. “You heard? I said tenant, in the singular.”
Malin chose to ignore the comment. “Do you know how many times I’ve received clues like this in my life?” she said. “Thousands! And how many of them didn’t lead to anything? Many! But at one time I was Lieutenant Malin Alioth of the Markabian Army Raid Squad, an intelligence officer, and the first thing an intelligence officer learns is not to rule anything out until you run out of resources.”
“Alioth?” Adam repeated. Of all that Malin had said, that was what had caught his attention the most. “I thought your last name was Viveka.”
“It is,” she agreed. “Alioth was when I was in the Army. When the Markabian officer reaches a certain rank of prominence within the Empire, he is assigned a new last name, y’know, as a symbol that he no longer has any family other than the military.”
Adam made a gesture as if to say, ‘How interesting is that!’ and took the last sip of his coffee. “Well, ex-Lieutenant Alioth,” he said; “I see that this silly newspaper clipping brings you quite excited.”
“Adam, I may not be the freaking intelligence officer Alioth anymore, but habits are hard to break. Now I’m very bored and with a lot of free time. What the hell do you want me to do?”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong,” he said while washing his cup. “I’m okay with you playing the private eye; that way you won’t be all over me all the time. I also have a lot of very important things to do, like listen to some music, go to the gym, and turn some seawater into vapor.”
Then, after seeing her so excited, he said, “In the contact list of that phone—which you have confiscated, by the way—you’ll find Rita Okinawa. She’s my secretary, the most efficient woman I’ve ever met. Text her passing yourself off as me and ask her for information about this Gutierrez guy. See what she can find. She’ll surely answer you, detailing even the zodiac sign of the nurse who changed his diapers in the residential care home.”
Without hesitation, Malin stuck her eyes on the phone.