Chapter 6 - The Visitor in Soto del Real
The visiting room of the Soto del Real penitentiary smelled of damp wool, industrial bleach, and institutional despair.
High above the concrete floor, narrow slit windows let in the cold, gray light of a January afternoon. Two long rows of metal tables were divided down the center by heavy, scratched sheets of reinforced plexiglass, each station equipped with a black plastic telephone receiver wired into the bulkhead.
I sat on the visitors' side of Booth 8, wearing my dark overcoat, my gloves resting neatly beside my leather handbag.
The heavy steel door on the prisoners' side clicked open with a concussive metallic thud.
Carolina Delgado was escorted into the room by two female guards in navy blue uniforms.
She looked entirely unhinged. The salon blowout she had worn on Christmas Eve had collapsed into a greasy, unwashed tangle pinned back with plastic barrettes. Her face was gaunt, hollowed out by three weeks of prison food and sleepless nights in a collective cell, her eyes surrounded by dark, bruised circles of exhaustion and terror. She wore a drab, oversized gray sweatshirt with frayed cuffs, her manicured acrylic nails having broken off down to the quick.
She sank onto the metal stool opposite me, her hands trembling so violently that she dropped the black telephone receiver twice before managing to lift it to her ear.
I picked up my receiver, holding it against my cheek in silence.
"Sara..." Carolina’s voice came through the crackling intercom, thin, reedy, and stripped of every shred of high-society venom. "You came. Thank God... thank God you came."
I said nothing. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, looking directly into her hollow eyes with the unyielding stillness of a stone monument.
"Sara, you have to talk to your lawyers," she pleaded, pressing her forehead against the scratched plexiglass, tears streaking through the dirt on her pale cheeks. "Judge Carrasco denied our bail application yesterday! He said we represent a flight risk because of the offshore accounts in Switzerland! They want to keep me here until the trial in September! I can't survive eight months in this place, Sara! The other women... they know what the charges are. They know about Lucía! They took my winter shoes! They threw cold water on my mattress last night!"
"You should have worn the crimson velvet dress, Carolina," I said, my voice dead level, cutting through the static of the line like a scalpel. "I hear it keeps you warm."
Carolina flinched as if I had driven a nail through the glass into her eye. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out for three long seconds.
"It wasn't my idea!" she sobbed, the old, pathetic reflex spilling out of her mouth like bile. "It was Javier! Javier was the one who set up the shell companies! He told me David was never going to notice forty thousand euros here and there! He said the company was printing cash, that we deserved a piece of the pie! I was just trying to protect Martina's future!"
"Martina is in Segovia, Carolina," I informed her quietly. "Living in a three-bedroom apartment with your parents, attending the local public school. Her pony was sold at auction last week to pay the delinquent livery fees at Las Encinas."
"My daughter's horse?!" Carolina shrieked, slamming her palm against the glass. The guard behind her stepped forward instantly, resting a heavy hand on her shoulder until she shrank back into her seat. "You sold Martina's pony?! You vindictive, heartless monster!"
"I didn't sell it, Carolina," I replied. "The judicial administrator sold it to satisfy the civil damages judgment entered against your estate. You spent four years stealing diesel fuel from two hundred working-class families to pretend you were aristocrats in Pozuelo. Did you think the bill would never come due?"
"David would never have allowed this!" she wept, her voice cracking into hoarse, broken whispers. "David loved me! I was his little sister! He promised our mother on her deathbed that he would always take care of me!"
"David took care of you until the day his heart stopped beating, Carolina," I said, leaning forward until my breath fogged the cold surface of the plexiglass. "And you repaid him by ripping his final gift off his seven-year-old daughter's bleeding skin."
Carolina looked down at her cuffed wrists, her shoulders shaking with silent, ragged sobs.
"Why did you come here, Sara?" she whispered, unable to meet my gaze. "If you hate me this much... why did you come to see me?"
"I came to deliver a message," I said softly, pulling a certified document from my coat pocket and pressing it flat against the glass for her to read.
It was an official notice from the Mercantile Registry of Madrid.
"Delgado Logistics Group has filed a formal commercial bankruptcy petition against your private holding corporation," I told her. "Every bank account in your name has been seized. Your apartment in Madrid has been placed on the public auction block. Your jewelry, your designer bags, and your luxury cars will be sold by the court on the fifteenth of next month."
I paused, letting the words settle into her soul like iron weights.
"When you walk out of this prison in eight or ten years, Carolina, you will have no house. You will have no money. You will have no corporate title. And you will never, ever set foot inside the province of Madrid without violating a permanent judicial restraining order."
I hung up the black telephone receiver, letting it clatter against the metal cradle with a sharp, final click.
May you like
I stood up, smoothed the lapels of my dark coat, and walked toward the heavy security airlock without looking back once.
Behind me, through the reinforced glass, Carolina’s high-pitched, hysterical screams were drowned out by the metallic roar of the automated sliding gates sealing her inside the dark.
