The Whispering City (39 page)

‘That’s fine. Bring her in.’

Pilar was already focused on the card that the other scholar was showing her.

Beatriz thanked her and headed to the reading room with Ana. How she loved that room! It was hard for her to imagine that the nave had been built to hold a hospital and that instead of tables and shelves along the wall, there had been sick and dying patients. On rainy days like this one, the silence of the room was disrupted by the rhythmic drumming of raindrops falling from the leaky roof into metal pails spread about below, but, even so, it had a secluded atmosphere that bordered on the monastic.

Her favourite spot was free. Tonet, the least friendly of the librarians, was the one who enforced silence and order in the room. Seated behind a raised counter, he had the gift of making everyone who entered feel like an intruder.

She sat down with Ana and waited for them to bring the book. The other readers lifted their heads for a moment and then returned to their texts.

The boy arrived a few minutes later, dragging his feet, placed the book on the table and moved off just as slowly. She and Ana stared at the volume, a thick edition of the first part of
Don Quixote
, folio-sized and leather bound. The binding wasn’t original; rather, it was the kind the library used to replace those that had been worn out from use.

Finally Beatriz picked it up.

‘Why would he have written down the catalogue number of
Don Quixote
?’

She was hoping at least for a title that would give them something they could interpret as a message. What was there in that copy of
Don Quixote
that could represent Mendoza’s posthumous revenge?

Ana was thinking the same when she said, ‘Maybe he underlined some passages of the book.’

They began to turn the pages, more and more quickly until the person sitting at the next table looked up furiously to ask could they stop making so much noise. They reached the end of the book without having found a single underlining or annotation.

Beatriz checked the index. She thought that in front of some of the chapters she could make out traces of pencil marks. There were unscrupulous people who wrote in library books; there were others, like her, who erased such marks if they were in pencil. It would be ironic if someone had erased Mendoza’s message in order to clean up the book.

She mentioned it to Ana in a whisper. She peered at the slight remains of what could have been marks to signal certain chapters. She lifted the page, turned on the little lamp and held it up to the light. Beatriz wrote down the chapters where she thought she could make out one of the marks. There were five.

‘Start reading. I’m going to request another copy for me.’

Beatriz went over to Tonet.

‘How can I help you, Doctor?’

‘Are there copies of
Don Quixote
available on the open shelves?’

‘Of course!’ The librarian looked at her derisively. She ignored him.

‘Where can I find them?’

He pointed them out. She headed to the bookshelf and pulled out the book. She returned to the table with it and sat beside Ana, who was already absorbed in the text.

They didn’t know what they were looking for, and the chapters didn’t have any common connection. Nor did the titles give them patterns they could link, and they couldn’t seem to find any clues in the plotlines.

They had been rejecting one hypothesis after another for more than an hour.

‘Should we go to the courtyard for a moment and get some fresh air?’ said Ana.

They went out, both silent and frustrated.

‘Do you know what doesn’t make sense to me?’ said Ana. ‘I can’t imagine Abel Mendoza leaving secret clues inside
Don Quixote
. That wasn’t how he did things, from the little I knew of him. The one who wrote was his brother.’

‘Didn’t Abel tell you that his brother had wanted to be a librarian? I imagine he knows perfectly how this library works, then. It must have been his brother who had the idea.’

‘Yes, but the idea to do what?’

‘I don’t know, but I have the feeling we’re trying too hard. That we’re missing something obvious.’

‘Then let’s start from the beginning.’

They went back to the reading room and examined the book afresh, as if they had just been handed it. Then they saw it. The book seemed to be awkwardly bound. The endpapers were made of normal paper, and they were somewhat off-kilter. In fact, once they checked, they realised they weren’t endpapers at all: they were flyleaves that were strangely springy, sort of puffed up. No bookbinder worth his salt would deliver a book in that condition, and much less to the National Library of Catalonia. The book had been tampered with. They glanced at each other.

‘There’s something inside here,’ said Beatriz. ‘How do we open it?’

‘Wait. I’m going to look for something.’

Ana got up and went to the cloakroom where they had left their jackets and bags. She came scurrying back, panting from exertion. She showed Beatriz a sharp nail file. She stuck the tip beneath the endpaper and lifted a corner.

‘Not yet, they can see us. We should cover ourselves a little better.’

She hastened to the shelf that held the reference books and grabbed a few: the Real Academia dictionary, another Latin one and two thick volumes of an etymological dictionary. And just then Tonet, the gruff, rather unhelpful librarian, had a fit of gentlemanly behaviour, got up from his throne and came over to help Beatriz carry the books to the table.

‘Allow me to assist you, Doctor.’

Ana turned her back to them. Thank heavens she hadn’t gone on separating the endpaper and had hidden the nail file. If Tonet caught her, not only would he throw them out of the library and perhaps ban her for ever, but also, and at that moment this seemed much worse, they wouldn’t find out what was hidden in the cover of that copy of
Don Quixote
.

Luckily, Ana had seen them and, pretending to look up from her reading, greeted them with a smile. They placed the books on the table, forming a wall that hid them from indiscreet looks and obscured their movements. Then Ana began to separate the paper from the cover with the utmost care. Beatriz sneaked glances around them. The readers were still absorbed in their books and Tonet, recovered from his fleeting bout of friendliness, was complaining about how poorly a visitor had filled out the request form, forcing him to rewrite it. With the file Ana made a slight scratching noise and, even though it was almost inaudible, it seemed to her that the vaulted room amplified it. The person seated in front of them might have heard because he shifted in his seat. Beatriz put her hand on top of the file to stop Ana. When the man turned a page of the book he was reading, they resumed. False alarm.

Finally Ana managed to separate the endpaper enough to venture a look inside. There were some very thin sheets of paper between it and the cover.

They had found what they were looking for.

They pulled out the paper delicately. They were octavos of India paper, fragile as butterfly wings.

‘There might be more beneath the other cover.’

They repeated the process, and again extracted several pages.

Beatriz was impressed by the cleverness of the hiding place. Without having met either of the brothers, it was clear to her that it was Mario Mendoza’s idea. She wanted to understand the scheme well before reading the papers. She got up and went to the card files. She searched in Authors. The card for that edition of Cervantes’ work wasn’t there. There was no card with that number in the Titles catalogue either. Brilliant. They had made the cards disappear. Without a catalogue number, the book couldn’t be requested, so no one had touched it since they’d hidden the papers there. The book existed only for someone who had the key.

She went back to Ana, who was making a pile of the little papers.

‘Don’t you want to read them?’ Beatriz asked her.

‘Here?’

‘You don’t think this is a good place to read?’

‘What I don’t think it is, is safe.’

54

Beatriz organised the papers carefully on the polished table of the small room. Pilar had opened up one of the reserved rooms, the Cervantine room, so that they could work in peace; that afternoon, no one had requested any of the volumes from the special collection. Ana rested her head on her hands while she read various pages written in tiny script on cramped lines.

Beatriz leaned back in the chair and contemplated the little pile of papers. Fragments of medical records from the military hospital at Vallcarca, and numerous handwritten notes. They were from Mariona’s husband.

She had read all the pages in the packet. She glanced at the one on top. In the mid-1940s, Dr Garmendia had given a young woman an abortion. Garmendia had neatly recorded the date, time, the anaesthetic used and that the patient had returned to his office three weeks later for a follow-up visit, in which he had discovered symptoms of a syphilitic infection that he had treated with penicillin.

The patient, Dolores Antich, had been luckier than other women in her situation, who ended up resorting to a backstreet healer who dealt with their problem with knitting needles and infusions of rue. And as for the venereal disease, she had also had it better than most Barcelonians. In the mid-1940s, penicillin could only be acquired on the black market and cost a fortune. Reading up to that point, it could seem as though Garmendia was the saviour of wealthy women who had got into trouble, except for a little handwritten note that was stapled to the medical report:
Baby’s father, Josef Kuczynski. Supposedly a Polish nobleman, but Dolores doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Lives at the Ritz
. Beneath, a later note in the same handwriting, which Beatriz presumed was Dr Garmendia’s:
Not Polish
– Argentinian.

It seemed that Garmendia had done some investigations of his own and had discovered that Dolores Antich, daughter of a good family and the future heiress of several textile factories, fell pregnant by an Argentinian chancer who, to top it all, had given her syphilis. There was a similar story involving Carme Rius, but instead of the fake Polish count it was a friend of her older brother and, to further complicate the situation, a descendant of grandees of Spain. In this case it wasn’t syphilis but some other venereal disease; something that also appeared in the notes about two more patients. All well-known names, to the point that even Beatriz knew who many of them were.

It appeared that the good doctor had been in charge of discreetly mitigating the unexpected consequences of the sexual activity of the city’s upper class, whether they were infections or unwanted pregnancies. She’d counted eight of the former and five of the latter. All with names, dates, treatment. Several of them with additional information. Much of it came from the patients themselves. People reveal a lot of things to doctors, benefactors par excellence.

Ana passed her one of the papers. ‘Look, on this page of his visiting log it says to whom and when he prescribed cocaine. Quite a list.’

‘Let me see.’

Ana handed her the sheet of paper. It was definitely a succulent list of names. One in particular caught Beatriz’s eye. Jaime Pla. What a snake in the grass! For a moment she felt the power that possessing shameful information gives one. She let out a giggle.

‘What is it?’ asked Ana.

She told her, without giving his name, what had happened to Pablo, ‘A nephew of mine.’

‘I can imagine what I would do in his place, knowing that about my boss,’ replied Ana before returning to the papers.

Minutes later, she looked up from her reading and showed her two pages darkened by Garmendia’s tiny handwriting. They looked like pages from a private diary.

‘Look, this is serious. It’s not just a scandal, it’s a crime.’ She was irate. ‘These are notes by the doctor where he writes that someone named Rodero offered him penicillin. But when he compared it with the other shipments he’d acquired earlier, he saw that the colour wasn’t the same. Since he knew from a colleague that there had been several batches of adulterated penicillin going around on the black market, he didn’t buy it, and instead demanded an explanation from this Rodero character.’

‘From the way he freely made use of penicillin in his treatments,’ Beatriz said, pulling out two more fragments with information about gonorrhoea treatments, ‘he needed a reliable source on the black market. He couldn’t run the risk of tainted penicillin.’

‘That’s why Garmendia wanted to know where Rodero had got that shipment of adulterated penicillin. Apparently it came from the Vallcarca military hospital; someone there was regularly making large quantities of penicillin disappear from the military pharmacy.’

Beatriz raised her eyebrows.

‘And?’

Ana slid a page across to her and pointed to a column with her finger.

‘Our Dr Garmendia managed to get – who knows how, maybe he knew someone – copies of the pages of the pharmacy’s medication registry where the diverted amounts are recorded.’

Beside the amounts, Garmendia had noted that it was striking that the flow stopped when they changed the public prosecutor who had been in charge of the investigation. The doctor had jotted down a question: ‘Did they take him off the case, did they suspect him?’

‘Can you guess who that prosecutor was?’ Ana asked her.

Beatriz shook her head.

‘Joaquín Grau.’

‘Isn’t he the same one in charge of the investigation into Mariona Sobrerroca’s death?’

‘The very same.’

‘And the doctor had evidence against him?’

‘No. Only conjectures. In the notes, Garmendia speculates on the possibility that it was a pharmacy employee who stole the penicillin, adulterated it and sold it on the black market. The doctor also bought it through an intermediary. His suspicion was that Grau didn’t put much effort into the investigation, if not impeded it as much as possible, because he was getting a cut.’