The Whispering City (36 page)

‘I think we could do something,’ he said. ‘Can you send me a photo of the corpse? Without make-up?’

Manzaneque didn’t ask what he needed it for.

‘You’ll have it tomorrow.’

Shortly after, they parted ways.

Carlos got into his car, but didn’t start it. He had to think. He needed the photo of the face without make-up to be completely sure he wasn’t making a mistake, that he had seen that man before. It had been last Friday, when he followed Ana Martí to the Estación de Francia. The dead man was the one he had seen her talking to in Ciudadela Park.

49

He arrived promptly at eleven.

Ana had spent all Thursday morning combing the flat, making sure everything was in place.

She had hidden her personal belongings, and hoped she hadn’t missed anything.

That was the price for being able to live alone in that flat: not being able to make it her own, always being some sort of conservator, more so even than a guest. But since she had seen that her grandfather looked only fleetingly inside the closets and drawers, she had filled them with her things and covered them with some of his clothes. She had also acquired the discipline of not leaving anything of her own, no matter how small, in view.

As on his previous visits, her mother escorted him to the building entrance. Then she left to run errands in the neighbourhood and said that she’d be back to pick him up in an hour.

Grandfather opened the door with his own key, looked at Ana, surprised to see her there, and, after greeting her with a kiss on each cheek, began to go through the rooms. What she hadn’t yet managed was to stop feeling guilty with each visit.
Usurper
. She imagined that was what her grandfather’s disconcerted look was saying as he turned his key, opened the door and saw her there. Teresina Sauret’s bowing and scraping when she saw him only further exacerbated the image of the dethroned king returning from exile for a day to look over his lost land.

In the sitting room, he stopped in front of a pedestal table.

‘There was a vase here! There was a vase here!’ he shouted, pointing to the place, a tabletop with a doily crocheted by his wife where, indeed, there was a vase missing.

‘I broke it, Grandfather,’ responded Ana in a childish tone that she had discovered placated him whenever he flew into a fit of rage.

‘Do you forgive me, Grandpa?’

‘All right, but you have to be more careful. Where is Rayo?’

The dog had died at least fifteen years before, but her grandfather mixed up the past and the present.

Ana would have to buy a vase similar to the one that had got broken because between one visit and the next, he would forget her explanations. That had been her only mistake. The rest of the visit went as always and, as always, left her exhausted and sad for the rest of the day. The entire house was impregnated by the scent of the Heno de Pravia soap that her mother washed her grandfather with before he left the house.

She pulled a text she had to edit for a publisher out of a drawer and began marking it up fiercely in red pencil. A few hours later she wouldn’t remember what it was about, but she left it free of errors, repetitions, superfluous commas, clichés and imprecisions. A couple of innocent adverbs took the brunt of her bad mood, to which Sagrario Ortega, the second-floor neighbour, contributed with her radio. She had it going full blast, and the voices rose amplified and distorted by the interior courtyard. ‘Coplas, coplas, coplas.’ Failed love or, even worse, ‘joy, joy’. She tolerated the metallic timbre of Concha Piquer in ‘Tatuaje’, but when she heard the first chords of a new song and realised that Estrellita Castro was about to start singing, she slammed her window shut and began to sing ‘Suspiros de España’ at the top of her lungs to cover up that high-pitched warble that set her teeth on edge.

She put on her jacket, still singing, grabbed her papers, singing, stuck them in her bag and went down the stairs. When she reached the front door, she rang her neighbour’s bell several times before running off like a mischievous little girl.

She had planned on going to the newspaper after lunch to do more editing and, perhaps, get a new assignment. So she’d just go earlier.

She couldn’t stop thinking about what she could do with what she knew. Her biggest doubt was over how to deal with what Mendoza – because she still believed that he was Abel Mendoza, despite Castro’s mocking comments – had left at La Cruz de Malta. Wait another day, until Friday? She had promised him that. She had already gone against what they’d agreed by talking to Castro. Did that give her carte blanche to break her promise again, or did it require her at least to stick to the rest of it?

She reached the newspaper office, which was obscured by a cloud of her colleagues’ cigarette smoke. She inhaled a deep lungful of the cleaner air in the staircase and headed towards her usual desk, which meant passing Carlos Belda’s. He wasn’t sitting there, but he was somewhere in the office. His tweed jacket hung on the back of his chair and a cigarette butt was still smoking in the tin ashtray that he’d pinched from the bar next door. CINZANO, it read around the rim. A lamp illuminated the surface of the paper-strewn desk. The light directed her gaze towards a photo. She didn’t mean to stop and look at it – she didn’t want to look as if she were snooping – but she pulled up short when she recognised the face in the image, its eyes closed. She had to lean against the desk. It was Abel Mendoza, and he was dead.

‘An old friend?’

Carlos’s voice at her right shoulder made her jump. Her left arm swept through the air and hit the lamp with the back of her hand as she whirled around to face him. Carlos looked at her quizzically. She didn’t see the sardonic gleam in his eyes, or the scornful sneer he usually had when addressing her. But she hadn’t forgotten them, so she shook her head.

‘So, you don’t know him?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you did.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of your reaction.’

‘It’s an unpleasant image. Or do you like it?’

‘Well, I could swear I saw you with him.’

Asking when would have given her away. She merely widened her eyes and looked at him, incredulous. That made three times she’d denied Abel. She repressed her desire to escape his scrutiny, but she was feeling more and more uncomfortable, her mouth was dry and she needed to sit down because her legs were shaking.

‘Is he your new subject?’ she said in the most neutral tone she could manage.

Now he was the one who didn’t answer. He forced her to move aside.

‘Can I sit down at my desk, or do you want to keep adorning it for a bit longer?’

But as she was about to leave, he grabbed her by the arm, drew close to her ear and said, ‘You’d do well to tell me whatever it is you’ve got up your sleeve. For your own good.’

He relinquished his grip.

Ana didn’t make it to her desk. She left the newsroom and ran into the toilets. Locked in one of the cubicles, she remembered how she’d done that a few times before, at school, to escape punishment from a furious teacher. It never worked. The Sister would always wait; nuns have a lot of time on their hands.

Hiding wouldn’t do her any good.

She came out of the cubicle and splashed some water on her face.

She already knew what she was going to do.

50

‘Carlos, can you come here for a moment?’

Carlos got up from his desk and went into Sanvisens’s office.

The editor-in-chief greeted him with a glass of water in his hand, into which he put a spoonful of Eno fruit salts.

‘Stomach again?’

‘This is pure habit. I’ve bought into that advert we run. Care to try it? It’s very refreshing.’

‘Some other time. What did you want to tell me?’

Sanvisens drank the contents of the glass in one gulp.

‘They called me from the Civil Government.’ He covered his mouth with his hand to hide a burp. ‘About the notice yesterday, about the dead guy.’

‘The queer from the Somorrostro?’

Sanvisens nodded with a hiccup.

‘What about him?’

‘They don’t want any more coverage of the subject.’

‘Why not?’

‘All these questions!’ He hiccuped again. ‘Because they don’t.’

‘But they didn’t say whether it’s because of the nature of the crime, or the victim’s identity?’

Sanvisens shook his head and changed the subject. ‘I shouldn’t have drunk that so quickly, now I’ve got hiccups. But I have something else for you. Yesterday there was an attempted break-in at a jewellery store on the Rambla de Cataluña. Three armed men went in, but the owner confronted them with a pistol. There was a shoot-out. They wounded the owner, but he in turn wounded one of the three robbers, and it seems that he was a member of the resistance.’

Carlos was barely paying attention, not just because Sanvisens’s hiccups were getting on his nerves, but because he was already plotting his next move. He wasn’t just going to forget about the dead guy from the Somorrostro.

‘So, go over to the jewellery shop and prepare something for tomorrow.’

‘Yes, that’s good.’

They went their separate ways. Sanvisens held his breath and counted to thirty; Carlos mentally paged through his little black book of useful phone numbers.

The first call Carlos made was to Inspector Manzaneque.

‘Thanks for the photo,’ he said.

‘What did you want it for?’

He gathered two things from the policeman’s curt tone as he put to him the question he had forgotten to ask the day before: that he wasn’t going to be able to count on his collaboration, and that Manzaneque too had received orders.

‘To get into the case. You know how I usually work,’ he said as if he were oblivious.

‘Well, since the case isn’t going to be published, you’d better send it back to me.’

Carlos continued to feign ignorance.

‘What do you mean, it’s not going to be published? Why not?’

‘Orders.’

‘Who from?’

Perhaps Manzaneque’s resentment at having been stripped of the opportunity to see his name in print would make him more talkative.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?’

‘The end result is the same, isn’t it?’

‘Does it have to do with the victim’s identity? Or with the murderer?’

Manzaneque sighed at the other end of the line.

‘Since we’ve known each other for years, I’ll tell you: we’ll never know. The public prosecutor’s office has ordered the case closed at the request of the Civil Government.’

‘But… what about the stiff?’

‘Going into a mass grave. He’ll be buried tomorrow.’

‘I get it.’

‘Good.’

‘Cheers, Manzaneque. I owe you one.’

‘At the dry cleaner’s, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘And give me back the photo. Don’t forget.’

As they said goodbye, Carlos was already looking up another phone number in his little black notebook. He had other contacts in the force. Before dialling the number, he shot a fleeting glance at the desk Ana Martí usually used. It was empty.

51

The La Cruz de Malta bar on Conde del Asalto Street was squeezed between a narrow doorway with a broken metal grille and a shop whose window displayed a small stack of bars of Lagarto soap beside a few feather dusters that seemed to have attracted every speck of dust in the neighbourhood. The place was a long tunnel traversed by a bar festooned with stools. At the back, there were some tables – the general murkiness meant that she couldn’t see how many. Behind the bar, the wall was obscured by casks of wine with taps and a pitted mirror that, instead of making it wider, only reflected the narrowness of the room.

There were barely any customers: two women sitting at a back table and an old guy leaning on the bar. All three stared at her openly when she came in; she supposed and hoped that it was because she was new to the place. Her simple clothes shouldn’t attract attention in that neighbourhood.

For the length of the walk there she had avoided looking back to check whether someone was following her, but she kept feeling the ghostly pressure of a hand falling abruptly on her shoulder before an authoritarian voice said, ‘One moment, señorita.’ In her head she heard another voice, the voice of common sense asking her to turn around, warning her that she didn’t know what she was getting into and, above all, that she might not be able to get out. But Mendoza’s dead face was dragging her towards that foolish undertaking. She had promised him. She was going to make good on the promise. Finally she reached the bar and stepped inside.

The landlord had his back to her, but he turned when he saw his three regulars looking towards the door. He was a fat man in his forties. At first she thought he was giving her a fierce glare, but when he came over to her end of the bar, she realised that the smoke from the cigarette stuck between his lips was irritating his left eye. When she got her first glimpse of him face to face, she immediately knew that he was Amancio, otherwise known as ‘Ears’, because he had none; in their place were two scraps of shrivelled flesh. She brought her hand to her mouth. The man understood why and explained in the routine tone of a museum tour guide: ‘In Seville, when Queipo de Llano came in, instead of giving me his famous coffee.’

‘Give him coffee’ was the coded phrase with which General Queipo de Llano sent someone off to be shot by firing squad. The old man at the other end of the bar let out a sly, high-pitched cackle and, looking into his glass of wine, said, ‘Fucking Moors, fucking Moors.’

The barman ignored him.

‘What do you want to drink?’

‘Nothing,’ stammered Ana. ‘I’ve come to pick something up.’

The man didn’t react.

‘Can you hear me?’ She pointed obliquely with her index finger towards where his ears should have been.