The Whispering City (11 page)

Just as he had known from the beginning that at some point he would abandon Mercedes. He looked at her with the gaze of the protagonists of the many romantic novels he had read, for professional reasons. He looked at her the way he had learned to: ‘tenderly, tilting his head a little, parting his lips ever so slightly, letting his eyelids droop with a hint of languor’.

Not even a woman like Mercedes, a professional used to hard dealings with men since she was practically a girl, could resist that gaze that made women feel unique, somewhere between girlfriend and princess. She blushed furiously and, although when she’d had a few she could take on any sailor who showed up at the brothel spoiling for a fight, she took a couple of dainty sips from her glass of vermouth.

Lucky he hadn’t said his last goodbye to her the previous time, thought Abel as he slipped once more into a seat at one of the tavern’s tables. Otherwise where in the city would he go? This time he didn’t drink vermouth; all he had in his pockets was the money Mercedes had given him, as he had spent his own on the train ticket and the suit he was later planning to use to start his new life. He had left it hanging in the wardrobe of Mercedes’s white room. She had lent him a jacket that had been left by a customer after a raid. It was a bit small if he buttoned it up, but since he was forced to walk hunched over by the rain that had begun to fall while he was in the barber’s, he guessed it wasn’t as noticeable.

He asked for bread and cheese and a small glass of wine. An early regular had left a copy of
La Vanguardia
on one of the chairs. He picked it up and began to read absent-mindedly until he reached page eleven. There it was. The news of Mariona’s death. The text said that the police were on the trail of a man who had been seen hastening away from the dead woman’s home.

They were looking for him. Who could have seen him?

He took the page out of the newspaper and folded it carefully so the owner wouldn’t see, but the man was busy polishing glasses and arguing with an unseen woman’s voice that was coming from the kitchen. Abel stuck the article in his pocket, paid and left.

12

‘Tieta Beatriz! Hello!’

His Aunt Beatriz jumped. She had almost passed him on Pelayo Street without noticing him.

‘Pablo! What brings you here?’

His aunt pointed with one finger to her left cheek, so that he would kiss her, something she’d always done.

‘I was doing a few things for the firm, and now I want to have a coffee. Why don’t you join me?’

‘It’s just that…’

It was always the same with Aunt Beatriz. On the one hand, it was obvious that she was very pleased to see him; on the other, she kept her distance. Perhaps she was thinking of some of those authors she was so fond of. ‘Beatriz is married to her books,’ his father would sometimes say.

Pablo imagined it bothered his father that his sister had never married because if she had, she might have added some good connections to the family.

‘Instead, she went off to South America. Who knows what she was doing over there?’

His Aunt Beatriz had lived for several years in Buenos Aires. She had come back a year before Pablo finished his secondary school studies and had taken care of his grandmother until her death. Pablo had got on well with her straight away, and he often visited her at the old family flat on the Rambla de Cataluña. During that last year of school she had organised and corrected several of his pretty disastrous essays, which had enabled him to get a decent grade in Language Arts. As she revised and read his texts, she let out occasional grunts of displeasure and quoted, through gritted teeth, Latin aphorisms on application and discipline, but then she had sorted out the essays for him. He always left her gifts of black market cigarettes and coffee on the sideboard in the parlour.

This chance encounter was a stroke of luck: he needed to talk to someone about what had happened with Calvet and Pla, and who better than her? He couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had taken hold of him after the lunch at Siete Puertas. He couldn’t go to his father with the matter, but his Aunt Beatriz was a good listener and often hit the nail on the head. And he was increasingly convinced that, in this story, there had to be some nail that needed hitting.

He waited for her to light a cigarette and take two slow drags on the holder and then, with barely any preamble, he gave her the lie of the land. Their privacy was assured by the surrounding din of customers’ voices, the shouting of the waiters, the banging of cups and glasses and the constant roar of the coffee machine; but all the same he drew close to her when he spoke. He explained it all quickly, without pausing for questions or interruptions, as if he had kept the story bottled up and now couldn’t contain himself. Beatriz looked at him, and every once in a while brought her cigarette holder to her lips. She was a good listener. Or was she? Because at that moment her gaze shifted towards the large window, towards the street; really, noted Pablo, towards nothing in particular, just into the distance. Then he fell silent.

‘What are you thinking about, Tieta Beatriz?’

‘About Cardinal de Retz.’

‘Oh,’ he said, unable to hide his disappointment.

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know who he is. Jean-François Paul de Retz. He lived in the period of Richelieu and Mazarin. He died in 1679.’

Why was she bringing up a French cardinal now?

‘Are you writing about him?’

‘I’m not one of those dispassionate idiots who only reads an author when they’re writing some article about him.’ His aunt paused and changed her tone.

‘No, sweetie. It’s just that your story reminded me of him. There is an interesting passage in his memoirs where the Cardinal de Retz tells how he won over a young courtier, a nobleman from a minor house. First he scared him by accusing him of a crime he hadn’t committed. Then he summoned him to clarify the matter. On that occasion a third person intervened, one of the Cardinal’s trusted men, whose role was supposedly to defend the young man. This “defender” refuted all of the Cardinal’s accusations, but without proving the young man’s innocence entirely, merely questioning his guilt. The young man, of course, became indebted to the Cardinal and, above all, to his trusted man, which in the end was the same thing.’

Beatriz gestured to the waiter and ordered another dry sherry.

‘What happened to the young man?’ asked Pablo.

‘They cut his head off with an axe. The guillotine was invented later.’

Pablo waited for the explanation.

‘They sent him on an espionage mission for the Cardinal, and he was discovered. Retz boasts in his memoirs of managing to plant in the young man’s spirit a mix of fear, indebtedness and gratitude. He bragged about being able to do what he wanted with him.’

Here she paused again and looked at him. Pensive, Pablo took a napkin and wiped off a few drops of sherry that had spilled on the table.

‘You mean that it was all a set-up?’

Beatriz stuck another cigarette into the holder.

‘Maybe.’

Pablo lit it for her. Then he said, ‘The anonymous letter is still at the firm. Pla could take it out of the safe whenever he wanted to, and spread it around.’

Beatriz released a mouthful of smoke. Pablo understood that she was waiting for him to keep talking. Talking and thinking.

‘I’ll have to get that letter.’

‘I think so.’

It would be difficult.

‘How can I do it?’

Beatriz laughed. ‘You’ll think of something.’

13

Isidro Castro kept a complete register of the names of people they were looking for, those they’d already had in custody and those they had released. Isidro was methodical, a quality many members of the CIB boasted about, and which Goyanes said he truly appreciated in him. Methodical, systematic, and rigorous were adjectives that the Commissioner used in his assessment of his subordinate’s work.

On the list were the names of the city’s notorious criminals, and some of its most illustrious families. The two columns were separated only by a fine red line drawn by hand with the help of a ruler. Some of the names were already crossed out. They had good alibis, or were the result of fake leads. The article in
La Vanguardia
had led to a few reports being filed: a woman from the Barrio Chino who accused her lover of the crime, since she hadn’t seen him for a while. The woman’s spite quickly turned to regret and insults directed at God knows whom when they told her that the man’s absence was due to the fact that he’d spent the last two weeks in jail. The doorman of a block of flats neighbouring Mariona Sobrerroca’s also turned up, but all he really told them was what had appeared in the article.

‘The guy’s just a show-off,’ declared Sevilla.

Two more people came in, anxious to ‘cooperate’, but after talking to them the policemen didn’t understand what their story was nor why they were telling it.

‘Slim pickings,’ said Isidro. ‘There are some people who aren’t even good at informing.’

He had also talked with some of the names from the right-hand column of his list, the list of ‘good’ people. He hadn’t got much, except the uncomfortable feeling that he smelled bad, judging by the looks on their faces when they let him in.

If the murderer had read the article, he hadn’t felt the need to turn himself in. It’s not that he’d thought Goyanes’s expectations would be met, but he felt somewhat frustrated and he took it out on the author of the article. He couldn’t shake the impression that Ana Martí had muddled him with her arguments and that he had allowed himself be softened up by her eagerness and – he had to admit it – by her appearance. What was it that Gil, the head of the CIB, always told them? ‘Be careful with women in investigations. No one should let themselves be swayed by personal charm.’ He immediately put the rest of Gil’s speech out of his mind because he’d warned that ‘women use other methods to achieve their goals’, and that was unfair to the journalist. But she was a woman and, while she struck him as very honest, the couple of times he found himself repeating Sevilla’s words – ‘magnificent skull’ – as he thought of her made him uneasy. Really, the fact that he was thinking of her at all bothered him. As soon as she arrived he would tell her that, since they had to continue working together, he would prefer, as he had initially suggested, to give her the official texts so she could rework them. And if she didn’t like it, that was her problem.

Now he had something more important to do.

‘Sevilla, bring Boira up to me,’ he ordered his subordinate.

Ten minutes later, the man walked into his office.

Lorenzo Boira was the most veteran of Barcelona’s confidence men. He was sixty years old and, despite having been arrested an infinite number of times as a suspect, he could boast that he remained in the clear: he’d never been prosecuted. The same prodigious imagination that allowed him to concoct elaborate scams with absolute precision, and the same power of conviction he had used for years to deceive his prey, also came in handy for distorting the prosecutors’ accusations, the victims’ testimonies and even the judge’s intentions.

But Boira had a weak point: his family. As in any other family business, he had taught his sons all the tricks of his trade. The three of them had been well schooled, but the eldest, Alfonso, hadn’t inherited his father’s composure and they had caught him after a knife fight with his accomplice in a tavern on Blay Street. That had been on 24 December 1950. Alfonso Boira had been given ten years; he had been saved from capital punishment because Isidro made him confess quickly and they found the other guy in his hideout in Hospitalet. They arrived before he died from his wounds, though it was a close call.

Boira senior tried everything to shorten his son’s sentence, but it was no use. When the old conman threw in the towel, Inspector Isidro Castro – who was the one who’d arrested his son and persuaded him to confess – turned up at his house and offered him, in his words, a deal. ‘Information. In exchange, better treatment for your son in prison.’

They had sent him to the notorious Modelo prison.

Lorenzo Boira didn’t think it over for long before accepting. Part of the deal was to give him a certain degree of immunity.

‘Thank you, Inspector. I have a large family to support. Now I have to take care of my daughter-in-law and the two grandchildren Alfonso gave me.’

Deep down, Isidro disdained the victims of Boira’s scams, who were as hurt by their own greed as they were by the scammers. Besides, it was important that Boira remained active and respected in the city’s underworld. There wasn’t much he could inform on if he stayed at home.

He’d had him arrested on Tuesday, left him to marinate for a night in the cells and now, when Sevilla brought him to his office, he was going to go over the list of usual suspects with him.

‘Come on in, Boira, come on in.’

Sevilla closed the door and left.

Despite his night in the cells, Lorenzo Boira maintained his decorous appearance, which was one of the secrets of his success. His sixty years gave him a gravity that was very useful in his profession.

‘How can I help you, Inspector?’

‘Mariona Sobrerroca, what have you heard?’

‘There’s not much being said, even though there’s a lot of talk.’

The case was gossip all over the city. Boira adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, which was somewhat the worse for wear after a night on a straw mattress, but still looked as if it had been ironed. Isidro saw the gleam in the conman’s eyes; clearly he was already calculating what he could request for his son. I won’t haggle too much this time, thought the inspector.

‘Let’s see then, what are they saying?’

Isidro opened his notebook and picked up a pencil.

‘They say that what they did to the woman was horrific, that they took out her eyes.’