Saras has been in Spain for 26 years and returns to Ukraine on Monday. She travels to see her mother, as she does from time to time. She is worried about the closure of the Polish border, in case it prevents her from arriving by bus. “If not, I’ll walk across.” She does not remember ever seeing Maxim Kuzminov, the murdered Russian deserter who lived just a couple of blocks from her restaurant, ‘Wind Rose’, which she has run since 2006; He specializes in paella and is presided over by a large blue and yellow flag.
He has learned about the crime from the news. He heard, like everyone else, that it was a settling of scores, and he was surprised, “because this is very quiet, nothing ever happens here.” This is confirmed by the agent on duty at the Local Police station; his colleagues were the first to go when a neighbor called the Emergency Department on the 13th to report that a man had been run over in a garage.
He also explains that this almost paradisiacal place – too urbanized to be completely urbanized – is the limit of La Vila, six kilometers away from the picturesque colored houses of the fishing village. “The beach belongs to Finestrat, the promenade and the urbanizations belong to La Vila, and everyone believes it is in Benidorm,” he summarizes. It is not strange, since the imposing skyscrapers of Poniente beach, the Gran Bali, the InTempo, dominate the immediate landscape.
In one of the four real estate agencies in the area, all of them with claims in Russian along with ads in English and Spanish. J. attends and says that the Residencial La Cala, where the crime was committed, “is not the most expensive in the area, and not because it is of poor quality, but because it is not on the first line, which is what here you pay more.”
It was built shortly before the 2008 crisis, to the point that two of the five towers were left half-finished and were not completed until later. There were always Russians and Ukrainians there. He knows this well, because he is married to a Ukrainian woman, whose brother cannot leave his country because he is of military age. However, he assures that coexistence between them and the Russians does not seem to have changed after the invasion: “until now, there have been no problems.”
On the nearby walk, among the dog walkers, you can hear talking in Russian. “We do not know anything”. It’s a bright morning, the strollers on the shore are Englishmen who didn’t even know the news. A graffiti on his tongue accuses Putin of being a murderer. It is recent, because he adds “Navalny in memoriam”.
A postman who gets off his motorcycle confirms that his area ends right there, on the edge of La Vila, so he distributes it in the crime area. “No, packages and letters from your country do not usually arrive; Almost all of them are documents from SUMA (tax management entity of the Provincial Council) or the city council.”
It costs nothing to enter the place where those in charge of the execution entered; some say there were two of them. Because although an intercom with a code limits access, in the traffic of neighbors coming and going, no one objects.
And, according to the janitor, fear has taken over the neighborhood. He joined the position in December, just in time to occasionally cross paths with the victim, who asked him where he should throw the rubble from the renovation he was doing. And whose body was the second person to be found, a neighbor arrived before. They thought it was an accident, a fall, a run over… “but he was dead.”
They had shot him up to six times, but no one heard anything, although the janitor was on the second floor of the garage where he was killed and heard the car of the aggressor or aggressors accelerate. He was found burned 25 kilometers from here, in El Campello.
With professional kindness, the concierge gives way to a woman who enters and had recently left the complex. She has gone to the car looking for more papers from the surveillance company she represents. “There are neighbors who are scared and want to install security systems.” In a window of the block next to the one where Kuzminov lived under a false identity, a rainbow flag stands out.
