The Whispering City (16 page)

She felt the irksome sensation at the nape of her neck that she was being watched. She turned. It was the waiter, who was openly following her movements. She understood that he was waiting to see how she managed to drink her coffee without spilling half the cup. In such situations she was always grateful she had grown up with a brother. Eschewing the manners befitting a lady, she leaned over the table, brought her mouth to the full cup and took a good slurp. Then she turned to the waiter, ostentatiously wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled at him. He immediately looked away.

Which was why he missed her surprised expression when she opened the white envelope. It was from her father. A brief little note that read: ‘So you can give yourself a treat’, along with several twenty-five-peseta notes. How had he managed to save up so much money? He hadn’t mentioned it the day before when she had eaten with them.

‘I am going to give myself two treats, Papa.’ She would go back home and walk through the door unhurriedly; she would reach the foot of the stairs without her heart pounding and she would start walking up at a leisurely pace. And when Teresina Sauret’s door opened and she started to say, ‘Señorita Martí, remember that you have to pay the ren —’

She would answer her offhandedly, ‘Of course.’

Then she would open her bag and hand the money to the doorkeeper. And in the same careless tone she would add, ‘May I please have a receipt?’

But first, the other treat.

‘May I have a
palmera
, please?’ she asked, pointing to the heart-shaped pastries. ‘One of the darker ones. And another café au lait.’

Then she pulled out the documents she had copied in Castro’s office. The letters that Mariona had received from her boyfriend had particularly awakened Ana’s curiosity. There were fourteen of them.

The boyfriend was called Octavian. She repeated the name several times under her breath, searching her memory for someone with that name in the circles closest to the victim, but she couldn’t remember anyone, which was strange considering the Catalan bourgeoisie’s fondness for patrician names. Reading the letters, she realised that she shouldn’t actually be looking for an Octavian. Even though the letters were rather cryptic, and without Mariona’s replies it was impossible to understand some of the allusions, soon she could tell that Octavian was a pseudonym, behind which hid a man who called Mariona ‘my Marschallin’. They were adopting roles from the opera
Der Rosenkavalier
! That surely meant that Mariona’s lover was significantly younger than her. She understood now why they had wanted to keep their relationship secret, and she felt sad imagining the fiftysomething widow with a new spring in her step while her friends looked on disparagingly.

Was that how Castro and his people had seen it, as well? Given the indifference with which they had let her copy the material, clearly not. It occurred to her that there wasn’t only gratitude behind Castro’s generosity in letting her see all that material. Perhaps he was hoping that she would happen on something that the police hadn’t been able to find. But most likely, she admitted with a stab to her pride, it was just a way to keep her busy, as if she were a child who had to be distracted so she wouldn’t be too much of a bother.

She took a sip of coffee and kept reading. But nothing in those lines revealed to her who Octavian was, although she knew he had to be hidden in there somewhere.

The next day she took a taxi to the cemetery, but first she walked to Paralelo so it would cost less. She was splurging, but in moderation, she told herself.

She carried the funeral invitation in her bag. She had inherited it from one of her cousins, one of the rich ones, who gave her their old clothes so that she could attend the society parties she wrote about with some respectability. She inherited them in good condition, an advantage of having cousins who followed fashion. She had three coats, and hadn’t worn any of them yet. She also had several handbags, but this was her ‘journalist’ bag. She had managed to cover its few scuffs with shoe polish, and luckily no one besides her looked inside it, because the lining was coming apart.

‘The Montjuïc cemetery, please.’

Along the way she realised that she hadn’t brought her veil. Her mother was going to be furious.

She pulled out her notepad and, even though it made her a bit sick to read in the car, took a look at her notes on the Sobrerroca case. She had the letters with her. She wanted to read them one more time before the funeral; she was sure that at some point she would manage to get some information out of them.

Sitting in the taxi on the way to the cemetery, she felt excitement at finally being involved in her first real case.

After getting out of the car she entered the city of the dead and, for the first time, the sight of the rows of funereal niches that completely covered the hillside didn’t weigh on her heart.

19

‘Imagine, they had to open the poor woman up three times.’

‘For the love of God! Couldn’t they just have emptied her out the first time?’

The first of the two women in black nodded; the feather in the small veiled hat she wore bobbed in time. A third woman brought her hands together over her handbag and added, ‘Those the Lord calls to his bosom…’

One of the three women was married to one of Beatriz’s many cousins; the other two she had never seen before. She quickly turned her back on the small group. She didn’t want to be drawn into any conversation, especially not one like that. As she turned, the funeral invitation rustled in her jacket pocket.

The doorman’s son had brought it to her the previous night. That time it had been Encarni who had opened the door and tipped him.

‘Cheeky little Manolito told me that you’re more generous, ma’am,’ she’d said as she delivered the black-bordered envelope.

Encarni held it with two fingers, somewhat apprehensive, and sighed in relief when she put it down on the table. But then she had stood over Beatriz, waiting for her to open it.

‘Family?’ she had asked after Beatriz had taken out the funeral notice.

‘An aunt.’

‘My condolences. Should I prepare funeral clothes?’

She nodded, and Encarni left the room.

From the study she heard the muffled sounds of the young woman’s laborious search through the wardrobes for the appropriate attire.

A funeral notice. More bad news. First she had thought about stuffing it in a pile of papers as she had done with the letter from Oxford, but then she’d decided to leave it out so that she wouldn’t forget the exact time and place of the burial.

She joined the funeral procession that was slowly beginning to move. She heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, the swish of mourning dresses and the occasional discreet murmur. The retinue wound its way up Montjuïc mountain along a path flanked by cypress trees. About a hundred people followed the coffin that swayed on the shoulders of the bearers as they took one of the many curves. The May sun fell on the oak wood that shone as brightly as the silver-plated, solid iron fittings. Blanca must have chosen it herself. It had been a long time since Beatriz had last seen her aunt, but unless she had changed a lot in her final years, the coffin perfectly reflected her discreet elegance.

The cemetery, with its profusion of angel sculptures, irritated her. On a tomb to the right of the path one angel lay drooping over the headstone. It seemed overcome by immense grief, its long hair covering its face and its bare arms lifted in a final gesture of entreaty. Beatriz turned away. But soon her eyes came across another angel with fallen wings and its gaze lifted up to heaven. Frankly, I prefer the dogs of hell in the medieval representations of purgatory, thought Beatriz. Doomed souls fighting against emaciated demons; sinning bodies devoured by snakes; nameless winged monsters – that is how grief and pain should look. Grief when her mother died. Grief when Jakob disappeared from her life. Furious beasts, not gloomy angels with languid robes dragging their wings along the ground.

Beatriz called herself to order. If she kept carrying on like this, she’d turn into a bitter old lady hauling around her permanent inventory of losses. Her mother, Jakob, lost friends, missed opportunities. A bitter, old, resentful woman. In a word, unbearable. Not even she would be able to put up with herself. She knew of only one antidote. Getting on with work, and not thinking about things too much.

She decided to listen to the conversations going on in whispers around her.

‘Poor woman, in the end she was a shadow of her former self.’

‘And so alone, in that enormous house. And no relative to take care of her.’

Beatriz went over to her brother Salvador, whose wife had begged off with a migraine. On the other side of Salvador was their cousin Bernardo.

Bernardo was trying to extract information from Salvador about the division of their aunt’s assets. He was particularly interested in some properties on the Costa Brava.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, in a couple of years half of Europe will be coming to sunbathe on our beaches. They’ll come in hordes; they’ll rent rooms en masse to be able to tan their pale skins.’

Felipe, the husband of another cousin, turned round to join the conversation.

‘And don’t forget the Americans. They’re going to need land for their military bases.’

Salvador sketched a smile.

‘Not only that. They will need food, alcohol and women,’ added Bernardo.

Felipe chuckled silently and whispered over his shoulder, ‘You want to invest in a brothel in the Barrio Chino? And in English classes for the girls?’

‘I don’t think they’ll need to talk much.’

Both men laughed quietly.

Bernardo wouldn’t let the matter drop. He pulled on Salvador’s sleeve and murmured, ‘So you don’t know who’s going to inherit Blanca’s properties?’

Salvador shrugged and whispered, ‘No idea. Maybe Joan.’

‘Not Joan, I already asked him.’

Salvador nodded pensively.

‘Well, I can’t think of anyone else. Maybe the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross.’

Beatriz smiled. Blanca had never been a religious person. Going to church had been a social duty for her that she had fulfilled when it seemed necessary. At family parties she had taken her revenge for those dutiful church visits by making fun of the intellectual poverty of the sermons. In her youth, Blanca had read Freud avidly and made good use of her reading when expounding her observations and hypotheses about the hidden passions of the local clergy. The representatives of God on earth were a band of neurotics and criminals, according to Blanca. Which was why Beatriz thought it highly unlikely that she had left anything to a religious brotherhood. Bernardo sounded offended: ‘But Aunt Blanca couldn’t stand priests!’

Beatriz assumed that her brother knew full well who the happy heir was. He was probably already pondering how he himself could close some advantageous deal with him.

By the looks of it, Bernardo had come to the burial to do business, and he was not going to be deterred. Since Salvador wasn’t giving him any information about Blanca’s estate, he moved on to the other recently deceased woman of note.

‘Weren’t you in charge of Sobrerroca’s affairs?’

He didn’t wait for a reply, just continued with his offensive: ‘Who’s getting the house on Tibidabo? That’s worth a fortune. Must be going to her brother. But what’s he going to do with it, when he lives in Madrid? With that location, it’s a gold mine.’

Salvador reacted to these questions with the same show of ignorance as before; Bernardo slowed his pace and was left behind, a cyclist returning to the peloton after an attempt to take the lead. Maybe he was searching for a new source of information towards the rear of the funeral procession.

Just behind them walked an older woman whom Beatriz only vaguely remembered. A cousin of Blanca’s. She had been reproaching her daughter in a low voice for some time: ‘Where have you come from? You’re late again! Why aren’t you wearing a veil?’ The young woman seemed to take the scolding calmly, but then she launched into her counter-offensive: ‘Mama, we are at a funeral. Be quiet, people are starting to stare.’

It was true that Beatriz had turned to glance at the mother and daughter. She had greeted them with a friendly nod. The young woman was in her twenties, very pretty, with a slightly square chin and a lively gaze. When her mother tried to start on again with her reproaches, Beatriz listened to what she said.

‘Please, Mama, let’s accompany Aunt Blanca with dignity on her final walk.’

That somewhat pitiful tone was effective and the conversation behind Beatriz ceased.

A minute later, Pablo appeared by her side. It seemed he had been making his way from the rear of the procession towards the front.

‘Good morning, Aunt Beatriz. Good morning, Papa.’

Pablo kissed her first and then his father.

‘It’s nice to see you again after so long, Tieta, even though it’s at a funeral.’

Beatriz understood. His father shouldn’t find out about the problems he was having.

So she asked him, ‘How are things going?’

‘Well, I’m learning a lot at the new firm.’

He sounded perfect: the obedient son and promising lawyer. The boy was a chameleon. Beatriz saw that her brother was eyeing his son suspiciously.

‘Something new every day,’ said Pablo without batting an eyelid.

That was another sign for her; she understood that there was new information. Then Salvador intervened, ‘Glad to hear it. What are you working on at the moment?’

‘A very interesting case. Listen, Papa.’

Beatriz smiled. Even as a child his father had forced Pablo to give spontaneous speeches on every possible subject. Pulling a case from up his sleeve was the easiest of exercises for him.

But then he was interrupted from behind by one of Blanca’s cousins, the woman who had been scolding her daughter earlier.