The Whispering City (40 page)

‘You mean, he accepted bribes from the thieves? And when they transferred him, he could no longer “protect” the business and they gave it up?’

From the notes one could infer that Garmendia had tried to get in touch with the employee at the military pharmacy through other doctors, but had had no luck. It wasn’t clear, however, what his intentions were.

‘It could just as easily be that he was looking for a direct source of penicillin, without intermediaries, as that he wanted to confirm his theories about the prosecutor’s dealings,’ said Ana.

‘When you think about it, even though he didn’t have conclusive evidence, it looked bad for Grau,’ murmured Beatriz.

‘Yes; it would be enough for someone to continue investigating. In the hands of a political enemy, that information could be very damaging.’

‘But Garmendia wasn’t a political enemy of Grau’s, was he? Why was he saving all this information?’

‘Because it’s highly sensitive information.’

‘But it doesn’t make sense that he blackmailed his patients. If he had done that with the abortions, not only would he have lost all his patients, but he would also have incriminated himself,’ objected Beatriz.

‘But perhaps, thanks to these secrets, he was able to obtain certain favours. To keep him happy and quiet for ever.’

Beatriz nodded.
Manus manum lavat.
Coming from a family of lawyers, she knew the system well. Ever since she was a little girl she had witnessed occasions on which her father acted strangely, arriving home in a fury and shouting in the parlour. Her mother would try to calm him, but he would be beside himself. Later, she understood that those were moments when one of his clients, important manufacturers and bankers, afraid that his professional confidentiality wasn’t enough to keep their dirty dealings secret, offered him favours and benefits, bits of business that weren’t terribly legal in themselves and which, in turn, bound him even more tightly to the network of mutual interests. In a third – and disappointing – stage of these discoveries, she had understood that her father, despite his shouts and pronouncements against the ‘moral decadence of our times’, had on most occasions ended up accepting the favours.

Ana’s voice pulled her from her memories: ‘Perhaps he collected them to exchange when he needed something. For example, if he required the help of a prosecutor, or the economic support of a powerful manufacturer, like Arturo Sanabria, who had beaten a prostitute to death, or the counsel of a cocaine-addicted lawyer…’

‘And after his death,’ added Beatriz, ‘Mariona found the papers and started to use the information. She tried to profit from them. With her husband dead, she no longer had to stand on ceremony. She began to blackmail people.’

‘Conchita Comamala insinuated that recently Mariona had seemed more flush with money. She was wearing a pair of earrings again that she’d had to pawn before.’

‘Which means someone was paying up.’

Blackmail. So that’s what it was. Some of the pieces of the mosaic were fitting into place. Mariona not only had money, but she had found someone to share it with. What had Abel Mendoza told Ana? That they wanted to leave the country and go and live on the Côte d’Azur.

‘I would never have thought that Mariona had the character or the personality to do something like that,’ commented Ana.

‘You see, human beings are surprising creatures.’

Beatriz would have liked to tell her cousin that some of the best authors had been despicable people, that Villon was a criminal and Quevedo surely abhorrent. And to explain to her how much she hated Garcilaso for having let himself be killed so young due to his eagerness for the glories of war. So stupid. But it wasn’t the moment; she’d save it for some other time.

Ana continued putting the pieces together: ‘Abel and Mariona had hit on a real gold mine if they were thinking of running off together.’

‘But it seems that the owner of the gold mine got tired of paying and preferred to put an end to it all with a bloodbath. There are so many names in those papers! And one of them is Mariona’s killer.’

‘And Abel’s.’

There were a lot of names, it was true, but only one person had the means and the power to manipulate even the investigation of his crime.

‘Grau,’ she said.

Ana nodded.

It was all making sense: the way the investigation had been handled, Castro’s interest in presenting it as a common break-in, the way they had used the press, hiding the murder of the real Abel Mendoza.

‘That was the man he told me he was planning on meeting. After Mariona’s death, Abel must have tried to blackmail Grau on his own. He needed money to disappear.’

‘And he ended up like her.’

‘He wasn’t wrong when he said he was meeting an extremely dangerous person.’ Ana’s voice had a bitter taint to it.

She got up, went over to one of the room’s towering shelves, returned to the table and, gesturing at the papers with a mixture of disdain and sorrow, said, ‘And this must have been his life insurance!’

‘Why?’

‘He was so naive; he must have thought that, by threatening to make it public, he had an unbeatable advantage. That’s why he sought me out. How could he have been so ingenuous? How could he think any of this would be publishable? It’s one thing for those involved not to want it made public, but for it to appear in the press is quite another. None of this would ever make it onto a newspaper’s pages.’

‘But now we have to think about what we are going to do with these papers and all that they imply.’

Beatriz felt the familiar pressure of the chair’s backrest as she reclined. She had sat there many times reading. Reading and thinking. Literature showed the abysses in human behaviour: the greed, the stupidity, the jealousy, the evil, the eagerness for power. It was all in there. But you could close the covers of the book and go back to being by yourself. She stared at the papers.

Those papers were very much alive. They couldn’t remain stuck between a book’s covers; they couldn’t be kept on a shelf. They had cost two lives. One of the people whose names appeared on those pages had killed twice.

Now the papers were in their hands.

‘What do we do now?’ Ana was both asking her and wondering aloud at the same time.

Beatriz didn’t know. But she was beginning to understand that it wasn’t about what they could do, but about ensuring nothing happened to them. They had material in their hands that was too delicate.

‘I don’t know. If even the police are after this…’

Ana nodded.

‘To start with, I’ll talk to my boss, Mateo Sanvisens.’

‘Is he trustworthy?’

‘I hope so.’

‘You hope so?’

‘Yes, I hope so. Sanvisens is like a tightrope walker who manages to stay a few centimetres above the daily quagmire without muddying himself too much. He gets splattered, but keeps himself up there on the tightrope, watching. The question is whether he’ll come down from his position for me.’

‘But we won’t give him the papers, will we?’

‘No. I mostly want his advice. And I need to get out of here. Get out of here and do something. I can’t stay in this reading room any longer; I’m starting to feel as though I need oxygen.’

Beatriz could understand that. But she would have asked to stay in there for the rest of her life.

‘Be careful, Ana. If the police are looking for you…’

‘And what if I was mistaken, and it wasn’t Burguillos’s voice?’

‘Then perhaps we are wrong about Grau. But whoever it is, someone very dangerous is after these papers.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll stay here a little longer. Then I’ll go home and wait for you there.’

‘Take the papers with you. Hide them.’

‘Of course. The Mendoza brothers gave us a masterful lesson in that. Poe, with his purloined letter, looks like a mere intellectual exercise next to their pragmatism.’

They said goodbye. Ana went out into the street.

55

On Carmen Street she plunged into the flood of people. They even filled the road, and had to squeeze together on the pavements every time the occasional car passed by.

She was trying to keep from looking around to see if she was being followed, but it was hard not to. Men in twos. Tall men. Men who were coming in her direction and looking right at her. Men in dark mackintoshes and hats pulled down low. She held her breath when she passed them. Only two streets. She was almost there. She was pulling it off.

Suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder. She let out a scream.

‘Pardon me, young lady. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

The hand gave way to an entire arm that surrounded her shoulders. From her right side appeared Tomás Roig, who embraced her. She let him do it, as much out of relief that he wasn’t a cop as guessing that if the police were pursuing a single woman, she and he would be more inconspicuous together.

Tomás Roig released her after a few paces. They entered the newspaper together. There she had to solve a second problem. She didn’t want Carlos Belda to see her. She didn’t know how, but she was sure he was mixed up in the whole business.

‘Aren’t you coming up?’ Roig asked her.

‘I have to speak for a moment with the porter who brings up the post.’

Roig went up the stairs, grappling with his lighter flint that wouldn’t spark.

Ana looked for the porter.

She found him behind a small counter, leaning over the desk. He was filling in an illustration in a children’s colouring book. When he noticed she was there, he lifted his head, two green pencils in his hand, one light and the other dark.

‘Five is green. But which green?’

‘Let me see. Where does it go?’

The porter pointed to a girl’s jacket. He had already coloured her hair yellow and her wellingtons orange.

‘This one.’ Ana chose the lighter one. ‘Trust me; you know I cover fashion.’

The man smiled in gratitude. Before he began to colour in the jacket, she said, ‘I have an errand for you.’

That was the formula usually used to get his attention.

‘Please go up to the newsroom and see if Señor Carlos Belda is there. But just look. Don’t say anything to him if you see him, is that clear?’

The man got to his feet. A few minutes later he came down the stairs shaking his head.

‘He’s not there.’

‘And Señor Sanvisens?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. I only looked for Señor Belda. Do you want me to go up again?’

‘No. I’ll go up myself.’

She thanked him and praised the precision with which he had filled in the spaces for the first four colours. The porter beamed proudly.

She headed up. She saw Sanvisens in his office and went in, even though he was talking on the telephone. The editor-in-chief understood that it was something important and cut the call short.

On the way there she had thought about what she was going to tell him. Everything. Now, before Sanvisens’s anxious gaze, she realised that the question was how. So she began with a headline.

‘Mateo, I’m in danger.’

She gave him the subhead as he sank into his chair: ‘It’s about the Sobrerroca case. I have some very sensitive documents and they are after me to get at them.’

She then plunged into her story, beginning at the very beginning. First came Isidro Castro and the police investigation, which Sanvisens listened to with modest anticipation; it was already familiar. The appearance of Beatriz and the letters was received with shock and perhaps some rebuke, but that disappeared completely when Abel Mendoza entered the tale in person and exited dead. Sanvisens was astounded.

‘But… but, my dear girl, what have you done?’

The last feature of the story, the discovery of the documents, left him literally struck dumb because a coughing fit prevented him from getting a word out. He rose and took a drink from a little glass that held the dregs of a white coffee that must have been sitting for at least two hours waiting for some errand boy to remove it. Then he turned towards her.

‘How did you get yourself into this mess?’

‘I’ve already told you.’ She intentionally ignored the fact that his ‘how’ was really a ‘why’. ‘What I need is for you to help me think of a way out of it.’

Sanvisens paced back and forth behind his desk. Curiously, Ana noticed, he took three steps to the left, but needed four to go to the right.

‘And Castro?’

‘That’s the worst of it; I’m afraid he’s in on it. I think his task was to carry out a fake investigation in order to close the case without revealing the names of the people behind it. That was why he was so focused on the break-in theory. And the same reason why he refused to pay any attention to me when I insisted that Mariona had a lover.’

‘And the dead guy in the river?’

‘That was an unexpected twist. When they found the body in the river with Abel’s ID, they thought it was him. He wasn’t in their records. I imagine they didn’t try too hard with the autopsy; besides, the blow to the head could have been from the fall into the river. That corpse was a godsend for them. They had killed Mariona, and the person they needed to pin it on went and committed suicide.’

‘But soon after, the real Abel Mendoza turns up and talks to you.’

‘And I, like an imbecile, talked to Castro. I gave him away to the police, Mateo; it’s my fault they killed him.’ Her voice cracked as she spoke.

Sanvisens came out from behind his desk and hugged her.

‘How could you have known, Aneta?’

He was right, but she couldn’t help feeling responsible for his death. He had asked her not to talk to anyone and she had put the police on his trail when they’d given him up for dead. Sanvisens stroked her hair like a father consoling his daughter. But now it wasn’t about that. She wasn’t a girl who had come running for comfort after grazing her knees. She would cry when it was the right time; this wasn’t it. There were still many loose ends.