Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (29 page)

Marchán was direct. Almost brutally so. It wasn’t an action designed to upset the lawyer, although he didn’t like her. It was his way of doing things. Saving effort. He put a photograph of the corpse of Pedro Recasens on the table. The only one in which his destroyed face was at all identifiable.

“He showed up dead yesterday on the piers of the Zona Franca dock. They cut him to bits before killing him. I am going to ask you two questions, and I hope you have two, equally concise, answers. First: why did Recasens have your name jotted on a piece of paper that said, ‘Publio matter’?”

María felt dizzy. It wasn’t her usual dizziness and pain at the nape of the neck that she now felt almost daily. It was that photograph, the abrupt way that Marchán had just given her the news. She leaned back and breathed deeply. The inspector kept looking at her. He was relentless, trying to catch her by surprise so she wouldn’t have time to come up with any excuses. He was a good inspector. Brusque but good at his job. Without time to improvise a response, María told a half-truth. What the circumstances allowed her to say. Yes, she knew Pedro Recasens. Her ex-husband, Lorenzo, had introduced them. Yes, she knew that he was a CESID agent; so was Lorenzo. They had both asked her to visit César in prison. She couldn’t say why. If Marchán wanted to know the details, he’d have to talk to Lorenzo. She couldn’t compromise herself any further.

“And what can you tell me about the
Publio matter
? What is it?”

María clenched her jaw. For a moment she weighed talking openly with that policeman. Perhaps it was her chance to get off her chest the fear and tension that had been accumulating ever since she knew that Ramoneda was lurking around. But Lorenzo had been clear: no talking to the police. If Marchán intervened in that case, she could kiss good-bye the chance to trap that psychopath who had threatened her and her family. If Ramoneda had already escaped the police once, nothing was stopping him from doing it again. As hard as it was for her, she could only trust that Lorenzo would keep his promise of catching him. Besides, César didn’t want the police to get involved either. If he found out, maybe he wouldn’t want to keep talking to her. And then all would be lost.

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Marchán scrutinized her intensely. He could tell when someone was lying to him. And that woman was lying. The question was, why?

“You said you had two questions. That was the last one. I’m in a hurry, Inspector.”

“I’ll tell you what I think, María: I think you’re lying. And that leaves you in a difficult situation. Lying about a homicide is a crime.”

María didn’t let herself be intimidated by that old trick. Putting someone between a rock and a hard place was what she had been doing all her life in criminal courts. She knew how to slip out of that trap like a cat.

“Well then accuse me formally or arrest me. But I have the feeling you don’t want to or can’t do either. Frankly, I don’t think you see me as a suspect. You want information, and I can’t give it to you. I told you that the person to see is my ex-husband, Lorenzo.”

Marchán rubbed his cheek. That was almost funny to him.

“If I get in touch with your husband, before we leave this café he’ll show up here with two of his men and take me off the case.” He stood up, taking the photograph of the dead man. “At least tell me one thing: was Recasens thinking of helping César find his daughter?” María nodded. Marchán was silent for a moment, as if searching for the way to say what he was going to say. “And did he seem sincere to you? Was he really planning to do it, to try to at least?”

María said yes. Recasens seemed sincere. Then she formulated a question that was hard to answer.

“Do you think they killed him because he found out something about Marta’s kidnapping?”

“It’s a possibility,” responded the inspector, buttoning his overcoat. He was about to say good-bye when he timidly asked, “How is Alcalá?”

María realized that the policeman was blushing, perhaps eaten away by shame. She remembered each one of the witnesses who testified in favor of Alcalá during the trial. None of them could help him, but at least some of his colleagues stood up for him. And Marchán wasn’t among them. Maybe the inspector felt the bitterness of not having been able or not wanting to stand up for César.

“He’s okay, considering the circumstances.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Marchán with a slight nod.

“Before, you said that César
was
your partner and friend for ten years. Does that mean he no longer is?”

Marchán smiled bitterly. He was going to say something, but finally he repressed his desire to speak.

“Eat your breakfast; I’ll pay. And don’t go far. I might have to call you. For the moment, to me, you are as much a suspect as anyone else in the murder of Pedro Recasens.”

María realized the inspector was serious.

“And what reason could I have for doing something like this?”

Marchán looked at her as if he didn’t understand the question.

“There doesn’t have to be a motive, but in your case it seems clear: guilt.”

María couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Guilt?”

Marchán wondered, somewhat confused, if the lawyer was acting, or if she really didn’t know what he was talking about.

“If there is anyone who has plenty of reasons to hate Pedro Recasens, it’s César Alcalá. And you feel indebted to him, that’s obvious. You would do anything to redeem yourself in his eyes.” Then he headed off, leaving María perplexed.

Through the window of the café Lola watched the lawyer from the street. The sheets of water slipping down the glass diffused her face. It was as if the old woman were looking at a ghost.

18

Barcelona, two hours later

It was just a hunch. After all, maybe I’m wasting my time, María said to herself, discouraged in the face of the thousands of files in the hallways of the archive of the Bar Association.

The air, laden with ancient dust, entered her lungs, catching her by surprise. She smiled with a hint of nostalgia. It had been years since she’d been there. And that smell brought back memories of her student days, the hours and hours spent among those legal briefs. A ladder on a track ran from one end to the other of the bookshelf, which was several yards long as well as wide. There were hundreds, thousands of brown files closed with thick cloth bows, organized by date. Someday all of that would just be fuel for a fire. In the lower level she had seen the new computers. Dozens of civil servants applied themselves to transcribing all that information into digital format. But it would take them years. And they might never finish it all. Times change, she said to herself. But what didn’t change was the apparent calm of that nineteenth-century building.

The large window let in gobs of light that illuminated the monastic silence. It was strange to see the keenness with which men had tried to order, constrain, and systematize human passions, jealousy, rage, violent death, accusations. That was the justice system, thought María, as she ran her fingers over those shelves: the absurd pretension that human nature could be dominated by the power of the law. Reducing it all to a summary of a few pages, organizing the facts, judging it, archiving it, and forgetting it. That simple. And yet in the silence of that place you could hear the murmur of the written words, of the key players, the screams of the victims, the hatred never forgotten by either party, the pain that never went away. All that order was nothing more than appearances.

María had contempt for that type of thoughts, which only turned into senseless digression. She focused on her search. She went back with the archive ladder to the year 1942. Judging by the number of summaries, it was a year of intense work. That’s without counting the cases that never got filed, got lost, or were simply never brought to trial. She idly wondered how many of those sentenced in that period she could have defended with the current system. How much evidence had been obtained falsely? How many fake testimonies? How many trial errors? How many innocent people tried, sentenced, executed? It was better not to think about it.

“Here you are: Trial 2341/1942. The murder of Isabel Mola.”

She didn’t know what she was looking for, and she wasn’t expecting to find anything in particular. She had familiarized herself with the case in the last few weeks. Isabel, the wife of Guillermo Mola, was killed by Marcelo Alcalá, the teacher of their younger son. César didn’t talk much about it; nobody talked about it. Alcalá also hadn’t been able to tell her why Recasens had insinuated that she and the inspector had this woman’s death as a common link. María had asked her father, but Gabriel didn’t remember anything, beyond that for a while, when they lived in Mérida before she was born, he had done some artisanal casting work for Guillermo Mola and his sons, who were very fond of weapons.

Yet after talking to Marchán, María had had the feeling that it was a puzzle with all the pieces visible but which didn’t fit together. Perhaps there, in that summary, she would find a clue, something that would allow her to organize her ideas.

She brought the folder down from the shelf and carried it over to one of the small metal tables that were at either end. She was alone. Apart from students preparing their theses, who were researching case law or simply curious, nobody usually went up to the archive. So nobody would bother her.

She opened the folder with a fear bordering on the religious. It was like opening a door through which all the ghosts that had played a role in that story could escape on the back of the specks of dust.

The first thing she found was a police file with edges yellowing from the dampness. The file of Marcelo Alcalá. She was surprised to see in the annotation that the teacher was the leader of a group of communists who had made an attempt on Guillermo Mola’s life, before killing his wife. He didn’t seem like that type of man. The photograph in the police description showed a withered being, ridiculous in a suit jacket with shoulder pads that were too wide and made his shoulders fall forward, lacking any consistency. He held the sign with his arrest number, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his fingers trembling, the fear in his eyes. He clenched his mouth in an expression of abandonment, despair. That must have been shortly before they hanged him. Maybe his sentence had already been handed down, and the prisoner was only waiting for the completion of some bureaucratic steps without being aware of them, like a bundle of merchandise that was moved from here to there in order to give him an execution that was legal, coherent. Everything had to be done following the macabre protocol, of which that poor wretch was merely a spectator.

She placed the file to one side and opened the declaration. It was typewritten, copied with carbon paper. It was succinct, just a few short sentences.

I, Marcelo Alcalá, native of Guadalajara, thirty-three years old and a primary school teacher by profession, declare that I am the perpetrator of the murder of Isabel Mola. I declare that I killed her with shots to the head in an abandoned quarry that the army uses for target practice, near the Badajoz highway.

I also declare that I was the instigator and perpetrator of the assassination attempt on Guillermo Mola on the 12th of October of 1941 in front of the Santa Clara church. I declare that others helped me in that task. Their names are Mateo Sijuán, Albano Rodríguez, Granada Aurelia, Josefa Torres, Buendía Pastor, and Amancio Ojera.

To whom it may concern.

January 28, 1942

Beneath there was a signature in a strange, forced hand. Perhaps they made him sign; maybe that wasn’t even really his signature. Too succinct, too cold. There were no details, no motive. There was no guilt or hatred … And that list of names. Maybe he didn’t even know those people. Just a formality. María checked the dates. Between Marcelo’s confession and his execution barely two days passed.

“No normal procedure would have allowed such haste,” she said in a soft voice, shaking her head.

Then she discovered the corner of a photograph in a small compartment. She pulled on it carefully so as not to break it. It was folded in half; the paper was yellowed, and it stuck together as if it had spent so much time stored there that it didn’t want to show itself. María opened it beneath the light of the desk lamp.

It was a war portrait, of an old war, in black and white. It showed a German light tank stationed in front of a snowy village; beside the tank posed a tank officer, his face burned from the snow and haggard from hardship, and two operators and artillerymen.

One of them was Recasens himself. Younger—María barely recognized him beneath a copious layer of grime—but it was definitely him. They all wore tattered dirty German uniforms with the Spanish coat of arms sewn onto the sleeve. Recasens also held in his fingers a flag with the Falangist yoke and arrows. María turned the photograph over:
Front of Leningrad, Christmas 1943.

It didn’t make sense that the photograph, taken two years after the summary, was there. Obviously someone had left it in the folder … Someone who knew that sooner or later she would go there and find it.

“That’s absurd,” she reproached herself. No one could have foreseen that she was going to have the hunch to go to the archive in search of the summary of the Isabel Mola case that morning. Not even she herself.

So there must be some other reason: Marchán had said that Pedro Recasens had more than enough reasons to be the object of César Alcalá’s hatred. She had chalked that statement up to the fact that both Recasens and Lorenzo, like Publio himself, had manipulated César in one sense or another, by using the inspector’s daughter’s disappearance. Besides, it was absurd: César didn’t know Recasens personally. The only thing he knew about him was what she had told him.