Confessions (61 page)

‘You’re welcome.’

H
e opened the door himself. Older, just as thin, with the same penetrating gaze. Adrià got an intense whiff of the air inside, and wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. For a few seconds, Mr Berenguer stood with the door open, as if he were having trouble placing the visitor. He wiped a few drops of sweat from his brow with a carefully folded white handkerchief. Finally he said, ‘Goodness gracious. Ardèvol.’

‘May I come in?’ asked Ardèvol.

A few seconds of hesitation. In the end, he let him in. Inside it was hotter than outside. By the entrance was a relatively large, neat, polished room with a splendid Pedrell coat-rack from eighteen seventy that must have cost a fortune, with an umbrella stand, mirror and a lot of mouldings. And a definitive Chippendale console table with a bouquet of dried flowers on it. He led him into a room where a Utrillo and a Rusiñol hung on the same stretch of wall. The sofa, by Torrijos Hermanos, was a unique piece, surely the only one that had survived the historic workshop fire. And on another stretch of wall was a double manuscript page, very carefully framed. He didn’t dare go over to see what it was. There, from a distance, it looked like a text from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Adrià couldn’t say why, but it seemed that all of that impeccable, undisputable order lacked a woman’s touch. Everything was too emphatic, too professional to live in. He couldn’t help looking around the entire room, with a lovely Chippendale confident sofa in one corner. Mr Berenguer let him look, surely with a hint of pride. They sat down. The fan, which uselessly tried to lessen the mugginess, seemed like an anachronism in poor taste.

‘Goodness gracious,’ repeated Mr Berenguer.

Adrià looked into his eyes. Now he understood what the
intense scent mixed with the heat was: it was the smell of the shop, the same smell of every time he had visited there, under the watchful eye of Father, Cecília or Mr Berenguer himself. A home with the scent and atmosphere of a business. At seventy-five, Mr Berenguer obviously hadn’t retired.

‘What is all this about the violin?’ I said, too abruptly.

‘These things happen.’ And he looked at me, not trying to conceal his satisfaction.

What things happen? spat out Sheriff Carson.

‘What things happen?’

‘Well, the owner has shown up.’

‘He’s right in front of you: me.’

‘No. He is a gentleman from Antwerp who is quite elderly. The Nazis took the violin from him when he got to Auschwitz. He had acquired it in nineteen thirty-eight. If you want more details, you’ll have to ask the gentleman.’

‘And how can he prove that?’

Mr Berenguer smiled and said nothing.

‘You must be getting a good commission.’

Mr Berenguer ran his handkerchief over his forehead, still smiling and saying nothing.

‘My father acquired it legally.’

‘Your father stole it in exchange for a fistful of dollars.’

‘And how do you know that?’

‘Because I was there. Your father was a bandit who took advantage of whomever he could: first the Jews fleeing any which way they could and then the Nazis, fleeing in an orderly, organised fashion. And always, anyone who was skint and needed money desperately.’

‘That surely is part of the business. And surely you took part in it.’

‘Your father was a man without scruples. He made an ownership title that was inside the violin disappear.’

‘You know what? I don’t believe you and I don’t trust you. I know what you are capable of. I would like to know where you got that Torrijos and the Pedrell in the entryway.’

‘Everything is in order, don’t worry. I have the ownership papers for each and every one of my things. I’m not a
blabbermouth like your father. In the end he chose the end he met with.’

‘What?’ Silence. Mr Berenguer looked at me with a poorly concealed cunning smile. Surely to gain a bit of time to think, Carson had me say did I understand you correctly, Mr Berenguer?

Signor Falegnami had pulled out a feminine little parlour gun and aimed it at him nervously. Fèlix Ardèvol didn’t even flinch. He pretending to be stifling a smile and shook his head as if he were very displeased, ‘You are alone. How will you get rid of my corpse?’

‘It will be a pleasure to face that challenge.’

‘You’ll still be left with an even bigger one: if I don’t walk out of here on my own two feet, the people waiting for me on the street already have their instructions.’ He pointed to the gun, sternly. ‘And now I’ll take it for two thousand. Don’t you know that you are one of the Allies’ ten most wanted?’ He improvised that part in the tone of someone scolding an unruly child.

Doctor Voigt watched as Ardèvol pulled out a wad of notes and put them on the table. He lowered the gun, with his eyes wide, incredulous: ‘That’s not even fifteen hundred!’

‘Don’t make me lose my patience, Sturmbannführer Voigt.’

That was Fèlix Ardèvol’s doctorate in buying and selling. A half an hour later he was out on the street with the violin, striding quickly with his heart beating fast and the satisfaction of a job well done. No one was waiting for him downstairs to do what they had to do if he didn’t emerge, and he was proud of his shrewdness. But he had underestimated Falegnami’s little notebook. And he hadn’t even noticed his hate-filled gaze. And that afternoon, without telling anyone, without entrusting himself to God, or the devil, or Mr Berenguer, or Father Morlin, Fèlix Ardèvol turned in that Doctor Aribert Voigt, officer of the Waffen-SS, who was hiding at the Ufficio della Giustizia e della Pace disguised as a harmless, fat, bald consierge with a lost stare and a puffy nose. Fèlix was unaware of his medical activities. Just as there had been no way to tie Doctor Budden to Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was no way
to tie Doctor Voigt to the camp either. Someone must have burned the specific papers and all the inquisitorial gazes were focused on the vanished Doctor Mengele and those around him while the enterprising investigators assigned to other Lager had time to destroy compromising evidence. And if we add to that the general confusion, the numerous lists of the accused, the incompetence of Sergeant-Major O’Rourke, who opened the file and who, it must be said, was overwhelmed by the task, all of it colluded to obscure the true personality and activities of Doctor Voigt, who was sentenced to five years of prison as an officer of the Waffen-SS, and about whom there was no record of participation in any act of war or annihilation in the cruel style of most of the SS units.

A few years later, on the street of the Sun, which was filled with people wearing jellabah coming out of the majestic Umayyad Mosque and commenting on some of the reflections of that Friday’s sura, or perhaps only mentioning, shocked, the rise in the prices of shoes, tea or vegetables. But there were also many people who didn’t look as if they’d ever set foot in a mosque and were smoking their hookahs on the narrow rows of outdoor tables at the Concord Café or the Café of the Scissors, trying not to think about whether there would be another coup d’état that year.

Two minutes from there, lost in the labyrinth of backstreets, sitting on a rock of the Deer Fountain, two silent men looked at the ground, lost in thought, as if they were keeping an eye on the sun as it headed west, along Bab al-Jabiyah, towards the Mediterranean. More than one distracted observer must have thought that those individuals were fervent men waiting for the sun to set and the shadows to begin their reign, for the magical moment when it was impossible to distinguish a white thread from a black thread and Mawlid began and the name of the Prophet was forever remembered and venerated. And the moment came when the human eye couldn’t distinguish a white thread from a black thread and, despite the soldiers paying little attention, the entire city of Damascus entered into Mawlid. The two men didn’t move from the rock until they heard some rather hesitant footsteps. A Western
person, from the gait, the excessive noise, the panting. They looked at each other in silence and stood up. From the corner of the street of the mosques came a fat man, with a big nose, who was wiping his brow with a handkerchief, as if that Mawlid was a hot night. He went straight over to the two men.

‘I am Doctor Zimmermann,’ said the Western man.

The two men, without saying a word, began to walk swiftly through the backstreets around the bazaar and the fat man had quite a time keeping them in his sight around each corner or when they mingled among the increasingly fewer people circulating on those backstreets. Until they went through a half-open door to a shop stuffed with copper utensils, and he went in after them. They went along the only aisle left by the piles of utensils, a narrow path that led to the back of the shop, where there was a curtain that opened onto a courtyard lit by a dozen candles where a short bald man in a jellabah was pacing, visibly impatient. When they arrived, he extended his hand to the Westerner, ignoring the two guides, and said I was worried. The two guides disappeared as silently as they had come.

‘I had problems at the customs control in the airport.’

‘Everything taken care of?’

The man removed his hat, as if he wanted to show off his baldness, and he used it to fan himself. He made a gesture that said, yes, everything taken care of.

‘Father Morlin,’ he said.

‘Here I am always David Duhamel. Always.’

‘Monsieur Duhamel. What were you able to find out?’

‘Many things. But I want to dot the i’s.’

Father Félix Morlin, standing, dotted the i’s in the light of the twelve candles, and spoke in a murmur that the other man listened to attentively, as if it were a confession without a confessional. He told him that Fèlix Ardèvol had betrayed his confidence by taking advantage of Mr Zimmermann’s situation, robbing him, practically, of that valuable violin. And violating the sacred rule of hospitality, he had also turned Mr Zimmermann in, revealing his hidey hole to the Allies.

‘Because of his unjust actions, I have enjoyed five years of forced labour for having served my country in times of war.’

‘A war against the expansion of communism.’

‘Against the expansion of communism, yes.’

‘And now what do you want to do?’

‘Find him.’

‘Enough blood,’ declaimed Father Morlin. ‘You do know that, even though Ardèvol is unpredictable and has harmed you, he is still my friend.’

‘I just want to get my violin back.’

‘Enough blood, I said. Or I personally will make you pay.’

‘I haven’t the slightest interest in harming a hair on his head. Gentleman’s promise.’

As if those words were a definitive assurance of good conduct, Father Morlin nodded and pulled a folded piece of paper out of his trousers pocket and passed it to Herr Zimmermann. He opened it up, drew near one of the candles, read it quickly, folded it again and made it disappear into his pocket.

‘At least the trip wasn’t in vain.’ He pulled out a handkerchief and ran it over his face as he said ffucking heat, I don’t know how people can live in these countries.

‘How have you earned a living, since you were released?’

‘As a psychiatrist, of course.’

‘Ah.’

‘And what do you do, in Damascus?’

‘Internal things for the order. At the end of the month I will go back to my monastery, Santa Sabina.’

He didn’t say that he was trying to revive the noble espionage institution that Monsignor Benigni had founded many years earlier and had had to shut down because of the blindness of the Vatican authorities, who didn’t realise that the only real danger was communism spreading throughout Europe. Nor did he say that the next day it would be forty-seven years since he had joined the Dominican order with the firm, holy intention of serving the church, offering up his life if necessary. Forty-seven years already, since he had asked to be admitted to the order’s monastery in Liège. Félix Morlin had been born during the winter of 1320 in the same city of Girona where he was raised in an atmosphere of fervour and piety in a family
who gathered each day to pray after finishing their work. And no one was surprised by the young man’s decision to become a member of the fledgling Dominican order. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and, at twenty-one years of age, joined the Austrian National Socialist Party with the name Alí Bahr. He was preparing to begin the studies that would make him a good Qadi or a good mufti, since he had already modelled himself on the gifts of wisdom, deliberation and justice of his teachers and shortly afterward he joined the SS as member number 367,744. After serving on the battlefield of Buchenwald under the orders of Doctor Eisel, on 8 October, 1941, he was named chief medic on the dangerous battle front of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he worked selflessly for the good of humanity. Misunderstood, Doctor Voigt had to flee disguised with various names such as Zimmermann and Falegnami and he was willing to wait, among the chosen, for the moment to regain the Earth when it became flat again, when the sharia had spread all over the world and only the faithful would have the right to live there in the name of the Most Merciful. Then the end of the world would be a mysterious fog and we will be able to go back to managing this mystery and all the mysteries that derive from it. So be it.

Doctor Aribert Voigt instinctively patted his pockets. Father Morlin told him that it would be better if he took a train to Aleppo. And from there another train to Turkey. The Taurus Express.

‘Why?’

‘To avoid ports and airports. And if the train line is down, which can happen, rent a car with a chauffeur: dollars make miracles.’

‘I already know how to get around.’

‘I doubt that. You arrived in an aeroplane.’

‘But it was totally secure.’

‘It’s never totally secure. They held you there for a little while.’

‘You don’t think I was followed.’

‘My men made sure you weren’t. And you’ve never seen me in your life.’

‘Obviously I would never put you in any danger, Monsieur Duhamel. I am infinitely grateful to you.’

Up until then he hadn’t unbuttoned his trousers, as if it hadn’t occurred to him. On some sort of fabric belt he wore various small hidden objects. He pulled out a tiny black bag and gave it to Morlin, who loosened the string that closed it. Three large tears of a thousand faces were reflected, multiplied, in the light of the twelve candles. Morlin made the bag disappear among the mysteries of his jellabah while Doctor Voigt buttoned his trousers.