The Antiquarian (23 page)

“Finally! I thought you'd never get here, and I didn't know where to reach you. You've had your phone off all afternoon.”

“What's going on?”

“They caught him.”

The news shocked Enrique.

“How? When?”

“Fornells called you around ten thirty. They were following someone, and they caught him early yesterday afternoon in Sitges.”

“Who? Which of the two did it?”

Bety smiled, amused at Enrique's question.

“Neither,” she responded bluntly. “You were wrong.”

“You've got to be kidding!”

“I'm not. They haven't arrested Guillem, Enric, or Samuel. It was another man I don't know anything about.”

Enrique abruptly left Bety in midconversation. He dialed the Raval Precinct number, but Fornells couldn't come to the phone. They put him through to Rodríguez, his assistant.

“Hello?”

“This is Enrique Alonso.”

“Right. I can't tell you much right now. We've brought a suspect in, your father's alleged killer. Fornells is interrogating him right now, but it looks like we're in for a long night. He's a tough guy, one of those who won't talk much.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“A guy we've suspected from the beginning: Phillipe Brésard, better known by his alias, the Frenchman. He's an international art smuggler, wanted everywhere.”

“Unbelievable!” Enrique shouted, stunned at the sudden turn of events. His suspect had disappeared, vanished like a dream on waking. All of the intricate imaginings he had construed over the previous days were now meaningless. He felt like a bona fide idiot, receiver in hand without the slightest idea what to say.

“Excuse me? What'd you say?” Rodríguez asked, equally perplexed.

“Sorry, it's just, the news has really hit me hard,” Enrique lied, reacting only to Rodríguez's surprise. “When do you think I can talk to Fornells?”

“Did you know him?”

“Excuse me?”

“I asked you if you knew the Frenchman.”

“No, I have no idea who he could be.”

“All right,” Rodríguez answered after a pause. “I think you can talk to Fornells tomorrow morning, but I can't give you a time. Stay reachable. He'll call your cell as soon as he can.”

After hanging up, Enrique felt disoriented, and didn't know what to do. Standing next to the table where the telephone sat, with his mind elsewhere and his eyes casting a faraway gaze, it must have been Bety who took him by the hand and led him to the sofa. The two of them sat there, and she patiently waited for him to talk.

“It can't be,” Enrique finally said. “It can't be.”

“Well, it is.” Bety wore the soft smile so characteristic of her, conveying a message of calm.

“Everything … everything fit perfectly. It couldn't have been any other way!”

“It was.”

Their eyes met and Enrique felt his conviction waver.

“Yes, it was,” he responded.

“You shouldn't worry. Maybe you were a little affected and obsessed by it all—enough to come up with a coherent story that you could tell me, and that I participated in. Either way, we'll know more tomorrow.”

“You're right.”

“Go to bed. It'll do you good.”

“Okay.”

Enrique obeyed Bety. But once in bed, he managed only to drowse throughout the night, needled by a tiny voice from the depths of his conscience that seemingly wanted to warn him of something, a warning he couldn't quite make out.

Early the next morning, the telephone rang. Enrique, who hadn't slept well at all, was already up, waiting in the living room for Fornells's call. And that's just who was calling.

“Enrique,” he stated, more than asked.

“I'm here.”

“We need to talk.”

“Whenever you want.”

“Come down to the station, but don't come in. Wait for me outside. We'll go for breakfast. Can you be here within forty-five minutes?”

“I'll be there.”

“Good, see you then.”

Bety craned her head through the doorway as soon as he hung up.

“Was that Fornells?”

“Yes. He wants to talk to me.”

“Why are you so touchy? You haven't been yourself since last night.”

“I don't know. I have the feeling that something isn't quite right.”

“Don't you think it could be the explosive cocktail of big-time-writer ego plus failed theory?”

“Let's hope that's all it is,” he muttered.

Ten minutes later he was ready to descend from his private haven. Bety walked him to the gate and said good-bye after a kiss on both cheeks.

“Good luck.”

Enrique was standing on a corner near the station at the prearranged time. Leaning against a battered wall that he imagined had been deformed under the backs of thousands of unknown snitches on countless nights of uncertain endings, he saw
Fornells emerge from the station. Not yet spotting him, the veteran detective looked down both directions of the deserted street. Enrique made his presence known with a wave. Fornells, walking with a tired gait, approached him. Standing before him, he blinked several times; his tired eyes, shot through with red thread veins, told the story of a very long night.

“I need a drink.”

“From the looks of you, I don't doubt it.”

“London Bar will be opening now. Let's go there.” They walked in silence. Fornells seemed to have aged several years in very little time. He walked slowly, with small steps that exasperated Enrique. At the café, the morning shift was preparing to open. Fornells lifted the half-open blind and hailed one of the waiters.

“Hey, Andreu. Do you mind?”

“No problem, my friend. Come on in. That corner table's quiet. What can I bring you?”

“Enrique?” Fornells offered.

“Warm milk and some toast with butter.”

“An espresso with a healthy shot of Soberano cognac for me.” He sighed. “Enrique, we have to talk.”

“That's why I've come.”

“It's not going to be pretty.”

“I imagine it's not.”

“Okay, okay.” Fornells rubbed his temples, tousling his sparse hair. “Where to begin? Let's see … What I'm going to tell you is not what you're expecting to hear. But before I tell you what you really want to know, I have to tell you a few things that I don't think you know yet. And to do that, I'm going to go back many years, not just
before you were born, but before your parents even knew each other. I'll go back to a distant, and rather dark, time, even though young people today don't really know the meaning of those words.

“The story begins in the mid-1950s. The fifties were not the best of years, though they couldn't compare to the forties. Now those were horrible times! Don't look at me like that, son. You're not sitting with some rambling old fart. Be patient and listen. Back then, this country's economy was on what you could call an upswing, an upswing that meant that we could get rid of the ration cards. Society, economically polarized between the elite, who had won the Civil War, and everyone else, expanded and normalized its activities, so that general welfare increased enough to get over the most dire shortcomings.

“You can well imagine that a private little world sprang up around that elite I just mentioned, one that had nothing to do with most people's problems. In Barcelona, that little world was made up of the new de facto powers who came from outside Catalonia—a handful of them anyway—and a large part of the Catalan bourgeoisie, who had no trouble warming up to the new bosses for the sake of preserving their status and privileges, in most cases. So here—well, I don't want to generalize, they would have done the same thing anywhere—those who were well-off welcomed with open arms the conquerors with whom, by strange coincidence, they shared a great deal.

“They lived in an odd environment. While everyone else faced shortages of everything, showing off either more or less depending on how discreet the family was, they had everything: plenty of food, financial means …

“Your father—I mean your real one, Lluís, not Artur—because of his social standing, belonged to that world, and he must have grown up in it, but he was caught between two opposing forces. Much of his family had made heavy political
commitments to the Republic, and had to go into exile after the war. There were very few who stayed on the sidelines, among them your father, Lluís.

What happened to the Aiguaders was worse. All of them had strongly supported the Republic, which meant serious reprisals for the family. Most of the Aiguaders' wealth was used, first off, to help those in exile. They may have had a different ideology, but they were still cousins, uncles, and brothers. Then, the new regime expropriated much of the family's property and left your relatives, who had once had it all, on the brink of abject poverty.

“They had some tough times. Pere, Artur's father, did some time in a work camp, and when he was released, he was pretty sick. The family depended on other people's charity to get by. A couple of years later, the stigma of being ‘reds' started to wear off, and the family's situation improved quite a bit.

“You may wonder why I'm telling you all this, but I think it's necessary to get an idea for who Artur was. The environment we grow up in marks us deeply for the rest of our lives, and Artur was no exception to that rule.”

Fornells took a little break in his stream of recollections to sip down the last of his
carajillo
, though the coffee-with-brandy was now cold. Enrique, who had finished his breakfast some time before, made use of the lapse to interrupt Fornells's monologue.

“You're right. Sorry, but I don't quite understand.”

“Don't worry about it, just listen,” Fornells cut him off softly, without paying him the slightest attention. “Did you ever find out why, after your parents' death, Artur adopted you? Or let me put it another way: do you know the fundamental reason why they forged such a great friendship?”

“Well, I …” Enrique strived to remember any conversation he had had with Artur in which this was explained to him, to no avail. “I know they had been friends since
they were young. See, on winter nights, when it was cold, we would sit by the fireplace, and I would ask him to tell me things about my parents. I would have him do it time and again, so many times that I think I can repeat all the stories as he did, word for word. He never said no: he thought it was necessary for me to have a clear memory of them, and not forget them as the years went by and his figure took their place. He told stories about things all three of them had done, or stories about my father when he was young, but I don't remember him saying anything about what brought them together.”

“That makes sense. But I can tell you the reason, I can tell you why. And once I have, you'll understand what I'll tell you next. Remember that Artur and I went to the same high school at the same time.

“Look, I've told you that Artur spent his early years in an upper-class setting. In that world he met the children of many other respectable, well-established people in society, among them your mother, Núria Pujolrás, and your father, Lluís Alonso. For years, they played their children's games, oblivious to what was going on around them for one fundamental reason: they spent the war isolated in their private world, defended by an environment that filtered everything that happened on the outside before it reached them.

“Once the war was over, the losers—as it always has been and always will be—got screwed by the winners. That meant that Artur's family had to move to a lower-class neighborhood, where they lived surrounded by poor people whose only goal, just like the Aiguaders' from that time on, was to not go hungry. That's how we met: in poverty. But, what for my family had been a way of life we were more or less accustomed to, for him and his family was a terrible blow that took them a long time to get over.

“We met at school, where Artur had lots of trouble. He was out of his element and it showed. He had this well-defined class arrogance, not of his own, personally, but
acquired by the upbringing he was given and the environment he grew up in. He lost that haughtiness soon enough, and in the hardest way: they beat it out of him. We neighborhood kids were never great believers in class.” Fornells smiled. “After a while, he was accepted into the group: he was clever, intelligent, and he helped others whenever they asked him to. That trait alone let him make many friends who would later prove to be very useful.

“He was a bit older than me, but we got to be friends. We weren't like inseparable bosom buddies, but we both knew we could trust the other completely. There's a thin line between trusting and confiding in someone, and it wasn't long before I knew his most secret, cherished dream: to no longer be poor. He remembered his childhood, so far from the poorness of our neighborhood. His one desire was to return to those lost origins.

“We grew up and went our separate ways. I managed to join the force, which at that time was a substitute for the priesthood, and to put food on the table, while Artur temporarily left the academic world. He began to move around in some shady areas, and a few years later, he had put some money together. His mother, Ana, died, and then his father, Pere. Free from family ties, he stepped up his activities. The black market was risky and dangerous, but also profitable.

“It was in those years that he reunited with Núria and Lluís. The recipients of the contraband could only be those well-off, old-money families. Artur, whose name meant something in that world, became a key contact for the hypocrites who in public rejected what he represented, along with Artur himself, and in private welcomed him in—though not without reservations—to their high-walled mansions.

“I don't know the details of how he rekindled his friendship with Núria. I do know that Artur cut a fine figure and had that roguish air that came from his illegal
undertakings. They saw each other several times in public, and finally, alone. As a result of that meeting, something changed radically in Artur's behavior: he quit the black market, wanting to redeem himself in the proper society that Núria belonged to, that he had been so distanced from. Love and hate are the only feelings that can really transform a person, and Artur was in love.