ACCORDING TO THE BOOKS

Jean-Loup Lamarc was no moron: he knew very well who were his bosses. He was the manager of a small hotel in the lakes; as he used to joke to himself, the manager of the only hotel owned by the mafia that was not used for money laundering. Everything was clear as a summer day in his business; no tricks, no cheating, no nothing. He slept well and loved the flavor of a good cigar in the evening.

But one night someone knocked at his door. Lamarc was still wiping the sleep from his eyes while he let his visitor in; Elijah Blumenthal, the accountant, a bug-eyed, lizard-thin guy from Boston, was pale as if he just had seen a ghost.

"We're screwed, Frenchie. Yes, man, we're screwed.", said in a trembling voice.

Lamarc didn't like to be called 'Frenchie', but that time he let it go. "Sit down. What's the matter?"

"The numbers, Frenchie. The numbers. They are false. And they will know."

"What are you saying? The numbers are fine. Nobody takes a buck. Everything is clean as my mother's kitchen."

"No, no, no, Frenchie, they will know. They have people, you know, they will check the accounts and they will know."

"Stop that 'Frenchie' thing, Eli. And I swear that the fucking numbers are right. There is no dollar out. Everything is fine. What the fuck is wrong with you?" Lamarc draw a fist and the accountant acknowledged the threat by opening his hands.

"The numbers are tweaked, Jean. They do not obey Benford's law."

"WHAT? What do you mean? Who the fuck is Benford?" He shoved Blumenthal onto his chair; the accountant shouted, covered his head with his hands and said: "I... I don't know who he is. A mathematician, I guess. He wrote... a method. A method to check if a set of numbers are fabricated."

"WHAT?" Lamarc felt as if his head would explode. "Are you fucking kidding me?" he took a lamp from a nearby table with both hands and crashed it into the floor.

"Ah!", shouted Blumenthal, "Please! Please! Don't hurt me!"

"I'm gonna kill you fucking weasel if you don't stop all this bullshit."

"No! No! Frenchie, listen to me. Please. The numbers look fake. I checked them. They look fabricated. Believe me. Have you...?"

"WHAT?"

"No! No! I see. I see. They are for real, no trick. I believe it. I do. But they won't. They will apply the formulas and they will suspect we are cheating on them. And they will come after us. They will come, Frenchie. They just WON'T believe these numbers!"

Lamarc, who was no moron, calmed down and thought.

"So you say", he spoke to the accountant while scratching his head, "that these numbers, being real, look fake, am I right? AM I RIGHT?"

"Yes! Yes! You are right. The number 1 must appear as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time and..."

"STOP! I don't want to hear it, motherfucker. We will just... we will just make them look right."

"What?"

"Are you deaf, dumb or both? We'll make them look right."

So they took a deep breath and sat down to rewrite the numbers so that they obey Benford's law. It was a very long night. Elijah Blumenthal looked like he was the survivor of a flood when he walked down the street in the morning lights.

"Putain..." said Lamarc, closing the safe box. "So we have this bag full of money, real money, clean money, that we must take from their real owners because some fucker wrote a formula... This is fucking crazy."

Days passed and everything went back to normal. One evening, while Jean-Loup Lamarc was delightfully tasting a glass of whiskey and remembering the stupid thing about the briefcase full of bills in his safe, somebody knocked at his door. It was an old man, iron-grey hair, in an old-fashioned suit.

"Who the fuck are you?" said Jean-Loup.

"Hi. My name is Benford. I'm here to take my money."

#ShortFiction

Though I write my novels in Spanish (my native language), I also write short pieces in English. Some of them are published here, tagged as #ShortFiction.

A GOOD DILEMMA HAS NO GOOD OPTIONS

Ambrose Bierce used to say that the hardest decision for a honorable man was choosing between raisins and radishes. Ambrose Bierce said many more things; for example, that a cradle is a trough in which a human infant is agitated to keep it sweet, or that an opportunity is a favourable occasion for grasping a disappointment. We cannot guess what was the fact about the raisins or the radishes that kept him in displease, he probably found them terrible or somewhat (I don't personally find raisins terrible, but this story is not about me).

In the year 1913, the day after Christmas, Ambrose Bierce was heading SW when he met Nathaniel Ebenezer Hickox. He is long forgotten now, but he was a hard-boiled bandit and also a very bad tempered motherfucker.

"Stop there", said Hickox, drawing his gun. It was an impressive object.

Bierce obeyed silently. His horse, a somewhat old but still good-looking male, found Bierce's lack of words disquieting. Silence was not common in his presence.

"What are you doing this far, old man?", said the bandit, almost without opening his mouth.

"I'm going beyond the border to join Pancho Villa's army", said Bierce.

Hickox hummed. "And why would you do such a stupid thing?".

Bierce took a look at the bandit's animal: it was a strong stallion with a very singular white mark on its forehead.

"It's what I have to do", replied Bierce, arms crossed.

"Mmmmm. Do. Mmmmm. Do.", said Hickox, and then: "What do you have on that bag?".

The wind blew for a second and nothing was to be heard.

"Tell me, my friend", said Bierce, "If you had to pick one, what would you prefer, raisins or radishes?".

Hickox scratched his filthy beard with his free hand. Suddenly, he realized that he didn't want to answer stupid questions from a bizarre man, nor breathing dust from the plains, nor bearing the annoying pain in the back that was there for days, nor thinking about raisins nor radishes: he remembered a warm place in El Paso, a site full of music and señoritas and whiskey and with a delicious smell of recently made beef steak.

Then, without a word, he left, leaving Ambrose Bierce alone. The beloved writer and notable bigmouth observed the bandit's figure as he disappeared towards the horizon.

#ShortFiction #SundayReadings

LE MASQUE VIDE (THE EMPTY MASK)

When we lived as kids by the sea, my sister and I found a body washed ashore. She thought that we had found a mermaid and immediately felt sad and horrified about it; I, older and wiser, realized that what we had found was a dead fisherman. His beard looked like seaweed, he had no eyes and lacked some limbs.

First, we agreed to leave him there; we were no one to decide on what the sea had decreed. But soon we understood that rotting under the sun and becoming food for the seagulls was not a fair ending to what probably had been a life of bravery and courage, so we moved him among the rocks and covered his head with a shelter made of planks and ropes.

My sister thought that he needed some eyes and she filled the scary holes that led to his long gone brain with branches of lilies, small blots of blue and violet.

Our life went on and we forgot about the seaman. There were long days of light, rain and storm. My sister grew up and became a woman; me, I don't know very well what I ended up being.

One day I returned to that beach and found it very different. I visited the rocks where he rested: he didn't look like a fisherman anymore. A sense of apathy and ennui filled by heart. Upon my head, a flock of birds flew in circles chasing each other.

#ShortFiction

IF I COULD BLOW AWAY THE TEARS RUNNING DOWN

The traveler wipes the sweat from his forehead. He carries a heavy, battered case full of forgotten samples, useless memorabilia and fistfuls of sorrow. His mind wonders endlessly because he lost his grip with life so long ago. The panels in the station are starting to be meaningless to him. But he tries, and tries, and despairs.

The traveler no longer knows where he goes nor where he comes from. He has brief glimpses, yes he does, but they are more and more blurry every time; all is like a mesh of milky lines, pale lights, paths to destinations that have no meaning to him. Sometimes a kid asks him what does he do: "I travel", he says, faking a smile while his eyes try to fix a point and fail.

His life is a hollow pit of departures; here, there, anywhere. He tries to recall his past but a curtain of headache lies in front of it: he barely remembers a loving mother, a cozy blanket, a puppy gone too early.

But soon the traveler is back again in endless corridors, all similar, all white, all convergent to a hub that links to another. He only hopes for one trip more, the one that finally erases him from existence, because he is starting to feel like he's slowly disappearing, mirrors not bothering to reflect his wasted image anymore. "Only one trip more", says to himself while trying to breathe an air thick as mud, blinded by light, almost defeated.

#ShortFiction