The Whispering City (38 page)

‘Abel Mendoza is dead,’ Ana managed to say before her voice cracked.

Encarni crossed herself. Then she picked up a glass, filled it with fresh water and offered it to Ana. She drank it eagerly and was able to continue speaking.

‘What happened?’

‘He was murdered.’

‘How? When?’

‘I don’t know exactly. But I saw a photo of him on the desk of one of my colleagues at the newspaper. It was a police photo, from the morgue.’

‘How do you know he was murdered? Couldn’t he have had an accident?’

‘No. The police don’t send photos of accident victims to the press. In yesterday’s newspaper, Carlos Belda, the one who had the photo, published a brief note about a man found dead, dressed as a woman, in the Somorrostro. It had to be him.’

Beatriz remembered how Ana had described Abel Mendoza as one of the most handsome men she had ever seen, a leading man type, she had said. And a swindler.

‘Then maybe he was killed by the person he said he was going to meet up with.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of. Whatever it was he was trying to do, it played out very badly.’

‘Have you gone to the police?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t dare. Castro threatened me if I even thought about getting involved in this case again.’

‘But now, with what’s happened, you would have evidence that you were telling the truth.’

The sentence sounded wrong. ‘The truth’ was an increasingly slippery word to define. It was always up for manipulation. Every regime distorted the truth to suit them; this Regime used it as if it had been tailor made for their purposes.

‘I’m afraid,’ responded Ana, ‘that the police don’t want to hear anything more about all this. Least of all Castro. I heard that, thanks to his work on the case, they are going to promote him. Do you think he would risk an opportunity like that just to establish a truth that no one seems interested in? Besides, we’ve been forbidden to write about the dead body found in the Somorrostro.’

‘Why?’

‘Because someone must know who he is, and they don’t want it made public, despite the police having the corpse of the man they say is Mariona’s murderer.’

‘And you are convinced that he isn’t the one?’

‘Completely.’

‘That would mean that Abel Mendoza was killed by the same person who killed Mariona.’

‘That’s what I think. But that’s not all. When I got home, there were two men waiting for me.’

‘Who were they?’

‘I don’t know, but I have the feeling that I’d seen one of them before. I don’t know where.’

She had calmed down a little, but she was still frightened. Her story was very disturbing. Beatriz took a deep breath.

‘Maybe they wanted to sell you something, some cold cream or the Espasa encyclopedia.’

She tried to make a joke, recalling Ramón, the door-to-door salesman who turned up every year at her parents’ summer home in Castelldefels to sell them ‘the books that belong in every cultured home’. Her parents had never bought a single volume, but she and her brother Salvador would wait for him in front of the house to buy a few of the little booklets of adventure stories he also carried.

‘Travelling salesmen don’t come in twos, ma’am.’

Encarni set another glass of water in front of Ana. The abruptness of her movements told Beatriz that her awkward attempt to reassure Ana had made Encarni angry. Because it had been Encarni who had let her in, who had brought her into the kitchen when she was completely beside herself. She had also been listening to her attentively, and she was the one who, even though she was unfamiliar with the story, was taking charge of the situation. Beatriz felt a bit of an idiot for her comment. It was no time for levity.

Now it was Encarni who had something to say, but first she very deliberately placed two cups and a sugar bowl on the table. She had put the coffeepot on the stove when Ana arrived, and she served the coffee before adding, ‘Only the police come in twos.’

Ana started spooning sugar into her cup. Her hand was trembling.

‘He had a lisp! I know where I know him from. He lisped when he spoke. I saw him once at the Vía Layetana headquarters – he’s a policeman, some guy named Burguillos.’

Policemen. In desperation, Beatriz suggested an idea that offered a plausible, but above all harmless, explanation. ‘Perhaps they wanted to give you a message from Inspector Castro.’

Ana shook her head.

‘Then they would have called me at the newsroom.’

‘And why send two men to deliver a message?’ added Encarni.

Beatriz sighed. Her hypothesis had come up against two irrefutable arguments. She always had a hard time backing down when she was clinging to something that showed itself to be a dead end and she had to start her reasoning again from zero. She wasn’t fooling herself; she had tried to minimise the real danger because she still refused to accept that, contrary to her expectations and her wishes, they were mixed up in all this. Not only that, but they were in deeper than ever. It was Ana who came up with the worst possible explanation of all.

‘They were Castro’s men. Only he knew about my meeting with Abel Mendoza, only he could suspect that I know something more about this business.’

‘But what? You’ve already told him everything you found out, and he didn’t want to hear it. Why would he come looking for you?’

‘Because I have this.’

Ana pulled the envelope out of her bag.

Beatriz immediately guessed what it might be.

‘You didn’t go looking for whatever Mendoza left at the bar?’

‘La Cruz de Malta. Yes.’

‘But, Ana, what were you thinking? Don’t you realise the danger you put yourself in?’

‘Mendoza left it there for me to pick up if anything happened to him.’

‘And what if he ended up telling that to the person who killed him?’

‘He was prepared to keep quiet.’

‘How can you be sure? You didn’t know him. In such an extreme situation, they might have given him the option to save his life.’

Beatriz saw that her objection made an impression on her cousin.

‘He knew all too well that he was dealing with someone very dangerous,’ she argued after a few seconds. ‘He was prepared.’

Beatriz wondered what she would do in a similar situation, with no hope of salvation, when keeping quiet or speaking out led to the same outcome. What would she have done? Kept quiet and died with the hope that later the guilty would be punished? To die with the only consolation being posthumous revenge. Yes. That’s what she would have done. Was that what Mendoza had prepared himself for? Did the envelope contain his revenge? His will? It didn’t matter, since it was not the contents but the mere fact of having it that implicated them irretrievably.

‘We’ve been reckless, Ana.’ The envelope lay sealed on the table. ‘Who did we think we were? Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín?’

‘Surely not those two, they’re fascists.’ Now it was Ana who was trying to make her laugh.

Encarni, on the other hand, standing between them, remained sombre.

‘Ana, please. Imagine Mendoza had talked about La Cruz de Malta. What would have…?’

‘But he didn’t, or the envelope wouldn’t have been there.’

‘And those two men? What were they doing at your house?’

Beatriz was silent. That was the question: what were those two men doing at Ana’s house? Why were they waiting for her there, and not in the bar? She answered the question herself: ‘Because they didn’t know about the bar.’

Ana and Encarni looked at her expectantly. She continued, ‘That’s it. The two policemen weren’t on Mendoza’s trail, they were on yours.’

‘Why did Castro send two men to look for me? What does it have to do with Mendoza’s death? Why have they forbidden us to talk about him?’

‘I’m afraid, Ana, that Castro hasn’t been upfront with you, that he has other interests in this case beyond a promotion. That’s why he didn’t want you to know the truth.’

She couldn’t imagine what Castro’s involvement might be, but nevertheless, Ana may have become a danger to him. Which meant that Ana herself was in danger.

‘Do you think they followed you here?’ she asked.

‘I can’t say for certain, but I am fairly positive that they didn’t see me get on the tram. I don’t think they even knew what direction I was heading in.’

Beatriz had to approach the window and look down at the street below. On one of the benches on the central pavement she saw a plump, well-dressed woman trying to soothe a child who was having a tantrum. The other passers-by were ordinary pedestrians walking to and fro along the Rambla de Cataluña. Even so, she felt an urgent need to draw the curtains and bolt the front door. Then she went through the entire flat to make sure that all the windows were closed.

When she returned to the kitchen, she found Ana and Encarni attentively examining a piece of paper. They had opened the envelope.

‘And what’s that?’ said Encarni.

‘I don’t know what it is, but we can rule out a couple of things. It isn’t a postcode and it isn’t a locker number.’

‘It’s not an address either. At least, not one here, in Barcelona.’

‘You know what it could be? A bank account number. Or a cryptogram.’

Encarni looked at Ana, her eyes wide.

‘What’s that?’

Encarni didn’t get a chance to find out because Beatriz had drawn near. When she saw the combination of numbers and letters written on the piece of paper she said at once, ‘That’s a catalogue number for a book. A book in the Library of Catalonia.’

53

The library smelled as it always did, of dry paper and dust. Yet Beatriz inhaled the air with gusto. The library had always been a refuge for her, her entrance into the Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, the periods she escaped into when the present became unbearable.

She headed straight to the area where the large wooden card catalogues stood. The books’ file cards were ordered into strict, tight rows stuffed into dozens of tiny drawers with handwritten labels. In some drawers you could see that the cards had a little breathing space. That was where the censors had come and removed authors who were banned. Freud’s name was among the missing. As were the names of Marx and Bakunin, and those of Huarte de San Juan and Vives. A simple, effective procedure: cards disappeared; books didn’t exist.

Beatriz grabbed one of the request slips and wrote the catalogue number that they had found in Abel Mendoza’s envelope on it. The problem was that they didn’t have the name or the title of the book to go with the number. But she knew how to solve that problem. She had already seen that Pilar was at the service desk, and she was one of the librarians she knew best there. She approached the counter and waited for her to finish speaking with a visitor who was complaining about not being able to take a book home.

‘It can only be read in the reading room.’

‘It’s just that the damp isn’t good for my rheumatism.’

Beatriz grinned. She had grown used to wearing an additional light jacket when she went to the library and, in the winter, fingerless gloves to be able to write while keeping the rest of her hands warm.

‘Well, I’m sorry. But those are the rules.’

The man left, grumbling under his breath.

Pilar greeted her. ‘Dr Noguer, I haven’t seen you all week.’

‘I’ve been working at home.’

‘I’m not surprised. With the damp here… And spring seems to be dragging its heels.’

‘It’ll be one of those years without a spring. One day we’ll go out on to the street and all of a sudden it’ll be summer. I have a little problem, Pilar. It seems that the last time I was here I jotted down a book reference so quickly that all I have is the catalogue number. I don’t know what it is, but I underlined it, so I think it must be something interesting. Do you think you can pull it out for me so I can give it a quick look? Ever since I saw the number, I’ve been wondering what book it is and why I wrote it down.’

‘Of course. That kind of thing can drive you up the wall, can’t it? It happens to me when I can’t remember a title or an author; I can’t rest until I find it out.’

Pilar glanced at the catalogue number.

‘It’s in storage.’

‘Can you get it for me now?’

‘Of course.’

The librarian beckoned one of the employees, a young lad who was pushing a little cart from which he slowly distributed the books that the readers had requested. On one of the final tables he left a pile of books for an older man who was frenetically scribbling away on small sheets of paper.

‘Old Montoliu,’ said the librarian.

‘He’s still at it?’

‘It’s what keeps him alive. The day he finishes it, he’ll die.’

The boy came over and the librarian gave him the slip of paper.

‘Miguel, can you bring this? Quickly?’ she said in a firm tone.

He took the paper and hurried off.

‘The boy confuses fetching things silently for fetching them slowly.’

‘How is your daughter?’

The last time Beatriz had been in the library, Pilar had told her that her young daughter was sick again.

‘A little better,’ she said resignedly.

Beatriz nodded. The librarian’s daughter was ten years old, a delicate child whom all the bacteria that Barcelona was swarming with seemed to have ganged up on.

Another reader had approached the counter and was demanding the librarian’s attention.

‘Forgive me, Doctor, we forgot to write on the slip where you are sitting. Where should I send Miguel?’

‘To the reading room.’

She wrote down the number of her favourite table, trusting that no one was already using it. Then she remembered Ana.

‘Pilar, I forgot, I brought a student who wants to see the library.’

She pointed to Ana, who had been waiting the whole time near the entrance.