The Angel's Game (54 page)

“It’s here,” he said.

I took a last look at the sky. The moon was hiding behind the clouds again and a veil of darkness advanced toward us from the sea.

I went in.

H
er face was lined with memories and the look in her eyes could have been ten or a hundred years old. She was sitting by a small fire watching the dancing flames with the fascination of a child. Her hair was the color of ash and she wore it tied up in a plait. Her figure was slim, austere, her movements subtle and unhurried. She was dressed in white and wore a silk scarf knotted round her throat. She smiled warmly and offered me a chair next to her. I sat down. We spent a couple of minutes in silence, listening to the crackle of the embers and the murmur of the sea. In her presence time seemed to stop, and the urgency that had brought me to her door had strangely disappeared. Slowly, as I absorbed the heat from the fire, the cold that had gripped my bones melted away. Only then did she turn her eyes from the flames and, holding my hand, open her lips.

“My mother lived in this house for forty-five years,” she said. “It wasn’t even a house then, just a hut made of cane and old rubbish washed up by the sea. Even when she had earned herself a reputation and had the chance to get out of this place, she refused. She always said that the day she left the Somorrostro she would die. She was born here, among the people of the beach, and she would remain here until her last day. Many things were said about her. Many people talked about her, but very few really knew her. Many feared and hated her. Even after her death. I’m telling you all this because I think it’s fair that you should know I’m not
the person you’re looking for or you think you’re looking for. The one many called the Witch of Somorrostro was my mother.”

I looked at her in confusion.

“When
…?”

“My mother died in 1905,” she said. “She was killed a few meters from here, by the sea—stabbed in the neck.”

“I’m sorry. I thought that—”

“A lot of people do. The wish to believe can conquer even death.”

“Who killed her?”

“You know who.”

It took me a few seconds to reply.

“Diego Marlasca …”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“To silence her. To cover his tracks.”

“I don’t understand. Your mother had helped him. He even gave her a large amount of money in exchange.”

“That’s exactly why he wanted to kill her, so that she would take his secret to the grave.”

She watched me, a half smile playing on her lips as if my confusion amused her and made her pity me at the same time.

“My mother was an ordinary woman, Señor Martín. She grew up in poverty and the only power she possessed was her will to survive. She never learned to read or write, but she knew how to see inside people. She felt what they felt, knew their secrets and their longings. She could read it in their eyes, in their gestures, in their voices, in the way they walked or their mannerisms. She knew what they were going to say or do before they did. That’s why a lot of people called her a sorceress, because she was able to see in them what they refused to see themselves. She earned her living selling love potions and enchantments that she prepared with water from the riverbed, herbs, and a few grains of sugar. She helped lost souls believe what they wanted to believe. When she gained a certain popularity, a lot of people from well-to-do families began to pay
her visits and seek her favors. The rich wanted to become even richer. The powerful wanted more power. The mean wanted to feel like saints, and the pious wanted to be punished for sins they regretted not having had the courage to commit. My mother listened to them all and accepted their coin. With this money she sent me and my siblings to the same schools as the sons of her customers. She bought us another name and another life far from this place. My mother was a good person, Señor Martín. Don’t be fooled. She never took advantage of anyone, nor did she make them believe more than they needed to believe. Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.”

“But—”

“If you’ve come here in search of magic, I’m sorry to disappoint you. My mother told me there was no magic; she said there was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.”

“That’s not what she told Diego Marlasca when she accepted his money,” I objected. “Seven thousand pesetas in those days must have bought quite a few years of a good name and good schools.”

“Diego Marlasca needed to believe. My mother helped him to do so. That’s all.”

“Believe in what?”

“In his own salvation. He was convinced that he had betrayed himself and those he loved. He believed that he had placed his life on a path of evil and falsehood. My mother thought this didn’t make him any different from most men who at some point in their lives stop to look at themselves in the mirror. The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world. But Diego Marlasca was a man with a conscience, and he was not satisfied with what he saw. That’s why he went to my mother. Because he had lost all hope, and probably his mind.”

“Did Marlasca say what he had done?”

“He said he’d handed his life over to a shadow.”

“A shadow?”

“Those were his words. A shadow who followed him and possessed the same shape, face, and voice as his own.”

“What did that mean?”

“Guilt and remorse have no meaning. They are feelings, emotions, not ideas.”

It occurred to me that not even the boss could have explained this more clearly.

“And what was your mother able to do for him?” I asked.

“Only comfort him and help him find some peace. Diego Marlasca believed in magic and that’s why my mother thought she should convince him that his road to salvation passed through her. She spoke to him of an ancient spell, a fisherman’s legend she had heard as a child among the hovels by the sea. When a man lost his way in life and felt that death had put a price on his soul, the legend said that if he found a pure soul that would agree to be sacrificed in order to save him, he would be able to disguise his own black heart with it, and death, which cannot see, would pass him by.”

“A pure soul?”

“Free of sin.”

“And how was this to be carried out?”

“With pain, of course.”

“What sort of pain?”

“A blood sacrifice. One soul in exchange for another. Death in exchange for life.”

A long silence amid the whisper of the sea and the wind swirling among the shacks.

“Irene would have pulled out her own eyes and heart for Marlasca. He was her reason for living. She loved him blindly and, like him, believed that his only salvation lay in magic. At first she wanted to take her own life, offering it to him as a sacrifice, but my mother dissuaded her.
She told her what she already knew, that her soul was not free of sin and that her sacrifice would be in vain. She said that to save her. To save them both.”

“From whom?”

“From themselves.”

“But she made a mistake …”

“Even my mother couldn’t see everything.”

“What did Marlasca do?”

“My mother never wanted to tell me—she didn’t want me and my siblings to be a part of it. She separated us and sent each of us far away to different boarding schools so that we would forget where we came from and who we were. She said that now we were the ones who were cursed. She died shortly afterwards, alone. We didn’t find out until much later. When they discovered her body nobody dared touch it: they let the sea take it away. Nobody dared speak about her death either. But I knew who had killed her and why. Even today I believe my mother knew she was going to die soon and by whose hand. She knew and she did nothing about it because in the end she, too, believed. She believed because she was unable to accept what she’d done. She believed that by handing over her soul she would save ours, the soul of this place. That’s why she didn’t want to flee, because, as the legend says, the soul that sacrifices itself should always remain in the place where the treasonable act was committed, like a bandage over the eyes of death.”

“And where is the soul that saved Diego Marlasca?”

The woman smiled.

“There are no souls or salvations, Señor Martín. That’s just an old wives’ tale, gossip. Only ashes and memories remain, but if there are any they will be in the place where Marlasca committed his crime, the secret he has hidden all these years to mock his own destiny.”

“The tower house. I’ve lived there for almost ten years and there’s nothing …”

She smiled again and, with her eyes fixed on mine, leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were frozen, like the lips of a corpse, and her breath smelled of dead flowers.

“Perhaps you haven’t been looking in the right place,” she whispered in my ear. “Perhaps the trapped soul is your own.”

Then she untied the scarf she wore round her neck and revealed a large scar across her throat. This time her smile was malicious and her eyes shone with a cruel, defiant light.

“Soon the sun will rise. Leave while you can,” said the Witch of Somorrostro, turning her back to me and looking into the flames once more.

The boy in the black suit appeared in the doorway and offered me his hand, an indication that my time was up. I stood and followed him. When I turned I caught her reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall. In it I could see the profile of an old hag, dressed in rags, hunched over the fire. Her dark, cold laughter stayed with me until I was out of the door.

D
awn was breaking when I arrived at the tower house. The lock on the front door was broken. I pushed the door open and stepped into the courtyard. The locking mechanism on the back of the door was smoking and gave off an acrid smell. Acid. I climbed the stairs slowly, convinced that I would find Marlasca waiting for me in the shadows of the landing or that if I turned around he would be there, behind me, smiling. As I walked up the last flight of stairs I noticed that the keyhole on the apartment door also showed signs of acid. I put in the key and had to struggle with it for a couple of minutes; the lock was damaged but had apparently not yielded. Finally I succeeded and pulled out the key, which was slightly gnawed by the substance, and pushed open the door. I left it open behind me and headed down the corridor without taking off my coat. I pulled the revolver out of my pocket and unlocked the barrel, emptying it of the cartridges of the bullets I had fired and replacing them with new ones, just as I’d seen my father do so many times when he returned home at dawn.

“Salvador?” I called.

The echo of my voice spread through the house. I cocked the hammer and continued to advance until I reached the room at the end. The door was ajar.

“Salvador?” I asked.

I pointed my gun at the door and kicked it open. There was no
trace of Marlasca inside, just the mountain of boxes and old objects piled up in a corner. Again I noticed the odd smell that seemed to filter through the walls. I went over to the wardrobe that covered the back wall and opened its doors wide, removing all the old clothes from the hangers. The cold, damp draft that came from the hole behind it caressed my face. Whatever it was that Marlasca had hidden in the house, it was on the other side of that wall.

I put the weapon in my coat pocket and removed my coat. Standing by a rear corner of the wardrobe, I put my arm into the space between the frame and the wall. I managed to grab the back of the wardrobe with my hand and I pulled it forward hard. The first pull allowed me to gain a few centimeters and secure my hold. I pulled it forward again. The wardrobe now moved almost a hand’s width. I kept on pulling the end of the wardrobe until the wall behind it became visible and there was enough room for me to slip in. Once I was behind the wardrobe I pushed it with my shoulder, moving it against the adjacent wall. I stopped to recover my breath and examine my work. The wall was painted an ocher color, different from the rest of the room. Beneath the paint I could feel some sort of claylike mass. I rapped on it with my knuckles. The echo left no room for doubt. This was not a supporting wall. There was something on the other side. I leaned my head against the wall and listened carefully. Then I heard a noise. Steps along the corridor, approaching. I moved away and stretched out my hand toward the coat I had left on a chair, in order to grab the gun. A shadow filled the doorway. I held my breath. It peered into the room.

“Inspector,” I whispered.

Víctor Grandes smiled at me coldly. I imagined he must have spent hours waiting for me, hiding in some doorway in the street.

“Are you refurbishing the house, Martín?”

“Just tidying up.”

The inspector looked at the pile of clothes and boxes thrown on the floor and the displaced wardrobe.

“I’ve asked Marcos and Castelo to wait downstairs. I was going to knock, but the door was open so I took the liberty of coming straight in.
I said to myself, This must mean that my friend Martín is expecting me.”

“What can I do for you, Inspector?”

“Come along with me to the police station, if you’d be so kind.”

“Am I being arrested?”

“I’m afraid so. Are you going to make it easy for me or are we going to have to do this the hard way?”

“No, I’ll come,” I assured him.

“I appreciate that.”

“May I get my coat?”

Grandes stared straight at me for a moment. Then I picked up the coat and he helped me put it on. I felt the weight of the revolver against my thigh. Before leaving the room, the inspector cast a last glance at the wall that had been revealed. Then he told me to go on out into the corridor. Marcos and Castelo had come up to the landing and were waiting for me with triumphant smiles. Just as we were about to leave I stopped for a second to look back inside the house, which seemed to withdraw into a well of shadows. I wondered if I would ever see it again. Castelo pulled out handcuffs, but Grandes stopped him.