Authors: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
27
If ever I had needed to see a friendly face, it was then. The old building of
The Voice of Industry
peered over the cemetery walls. I set off in that direction, hoping to find my former master Don Basilio, one of those rare souls immune to the world’s stupidity, who always had good advice. When I walked into the newspaper offices I discovered that I still recognised most of the staff. It seemed as if not a minute had passed since I’d left the place so many years ago. Those who, in turn, recognised me gave me suspicious looks and turned their heads to avoid having to greet me. I slipped into the editorial department and went straight to Don Basilio’s office, which was at the far end. It was empty.
‘Who are you looking for?’
I turned round and saw Rosell, one of the journalists who’d already seemed old to me even when I was working there. Rosell had penned the poisonous review of
The Steps of Heaven
describing me as a ‘writer of classified advertisements’.
‘Señor Rosell, I’m Martín. David Martín. Don’t you remember me?’
Rosell spent a few moments inspecting me, pretending to have great difficulty recognising me, but finally he nodded.
‘Where’s Don Basilio?’
‘He left two months ago. You’ll find him at the offices of
La Vanguardia
. If you see him, give him my regards.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘I’m sorry about your book,’ said Rosell with an obliging smile.
I crossed the editorial department, cutting a path between unfriendly looks, twisted smiles and venomous whispers. Time cures all, I thought, except the truth.
Half an hour later, a taxi dropped me off at the door of the main offices of
La Vanguardia
in Calle Pelayo. In contrast to the rather forbidding shabbiness of my old newspaper, everything here spoke of elegance and opulence. I made myself known at the reception and a chirpy young boy who looked like an unpaid trainee, reminding me of myself in my youth, was dispatched to let Don Basilio know he had a visitor. My old friend’s leonine presence remained unscathed by the passage of time. If anything, with his new attire matching the exclusive scenery, Don Basilio struck as formidable a figure as he had in his days at
The Voice of Industry
. His eyes lit up with joy when he saw me, and, breaking his iron protocol, he greeted me with an embrace that could easily have lost me two or three ribs had there not been an audience present - happy or not, Don Basilio had to keep up appearances and a certain reputation.
‘Getting a little respectable, are we, Don Basilio?’
My old boss shrugged his shoulders, making a gesture to indicate that he was playing down the new decor.
‘Don’t let it impress you.’
‘Don’t be modest, Don Basilio; you’ve ended up with the jewel in the crown. Are you taking them in hand?’
Don Basilio pulled out his perennial red pencil and showed it to me, winking as he did so.
‘I get through four a week.’
‘Two fewer than at
The Voice
.’
‘Give me time. I have one or two experts here who punctuate with a pistol and think that an intro is a starter from the province of Logroño.’
Despite his words, it was obvious that Don Basilio felt comfortable in his new home, and he looked healthier than ever.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve come to ask me for work, because I might even give it to you,’ he threatened.
‘That’s very kind of you, Don Basilio, but you know I gave up the cloth and journalism isn’t for me.’
‘Then let me know how this grumpy old man can be of service.’
‘I need some information about an old case for a story I’m working on. The death of a well-known lawyer called Marlasca, Diego Marlasca.’
‘What year are we talking about?’
‘Nineteen hundred and four.’
Don Basilio sighed.
‘That’s going back a long way. A lot of water has flowed by since then.’
‘Not enough to wash the matter away.’
Don Basilio put a hand on my shoulder and asked me to follow him into the editorial department.
‘Don’t worry; you’ve come to the right place. These good people maintain an archive that would be the envy of the Vatican. If there was anything in the press, we’ll find it for you. Besides, the archivist is a good friend of mine. Let me warn you that next to him I’m Snow White. Pay no attention to his unfriendly disposition. Deep down - very deep down - he’s kindness itself.’
I followed Don Basilio through a wide hall with fine wood panelling. On one side was a circular room with a large round table and a series of portraits from which we were observed by an illustrious group of frowning members of the aristocracy.
‘The room for the witches’ sabbaths,’ Don Basilio explained. ‘All the section heads meet here with the deputy editor, yours truly, and the editor, and like good Knights of the Round Table, we find the Holy Grail every evening at seven o’clock.’
‘Impressive.’
‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ said Don Basilio, winking at me. ‘Look at this.’
Don Basilio stood beneath one of the august portraits and pushed the wooden panel covering the wall. The panel yielded with a creak, leading to a hidden corridor.
‘What do you say, Martín? And this is only one of the many secret passages in the building. Not even the Borgias had a set-up like this.’
I followed Don Basilio down the corridor and we reached a large reading room surrounded by glass cabinets, the repository of
La Vanguardia
’s secret library. At one end of the room, under the beam emanating from a lampshade of green glass, a middle-aged man was sitting at a table examining a document with a magnifying glass. When he saw us come in he raised his head and gave us a look that would have made anyone young enough, or sensitive enough, turn to stone.
‘Let me introduce you to José María Brotons, lord of the underworld, chief of the catacombs of this holy house,’ Don Basilio announced.
Without letting go of the magnifying glass, Brotons observed me with eyes that seemed to go rusty on contact. I went up to him and shook his hand.
‘This is my old apprentice, David Martín.’
Brotons reluctantly shook my hand and glanced at Don Basilio.
‘Is this the writer?’
‘The very one.’
Brotons nodded.
‘He’s certainly courageous, stepping out into the street after the thrashing they gave him. What’s he doing here?’
‘He’s come to plead for your help, your blessing and advice on an important matter of documental archaeology,’ Don Basilio explained.
‘And where’s the blood sacrifice?’ Brotons spat out.
I swallowed.
‘Sacrifice?’ I asked.
Brotons looked at me as if I were an idiot.
‘A goat, a lamb, a capon if pressed . . .’
My mind went blank. For an endless moment Brotons kept his eyes fixed on mine without blinking. Then, just as I started to feel the prickle of sweat down my back, the archivist and Don Basilio roared with laughter. I let them laugh as much as they wanted at my expense, until they couldn’t breathe and had to dry their tears. Clearly, Don Basilio had found a soulmate in his new colleague.
‘Come this way, young man,’ Brotons said, doing away with his fierce countenance. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’
28
The newspaper archives were located in one of the basements, under the floor that housed the huge rotary press, a product of post-Victorian technology. It looked like a cross between a monstrous steam engine and a machine for making lightning.
‘Let me introduce you to the rotary press, better known as Leviathan. Mind how you go: they say it has already swallowed more than one unsuspecting person,’ said Don Basilio. ‘It’s like the story of Jonah and the whale, only what comes out again is mincemeat.’
‘Surely you’re exaggerating.’
‘One of these days we could throw in that new trainee, the smart alec who likes to say that print is dead,’ Brotons proposed.
‘Set a time and a date and we’ll celebrate with a stew,’ Don Basilio agreed.
They both laughed like schoolchildren. Birds of a feather, I thought.
The archive was a labyrinth of corridors bordered by three-metre-high shelving. A couple of pale creatures who looked as if they hadn’t left the cellar in fifteen years officiated as Brotons’s assistants. When they saw him, they rushed over, like loyal pets awaiting instructions. Brotons looked at me inquisitively.
‘What is it we’re looking for?’
‘Nineteen hundred and four. The death of a lawyer called Diego Marlasca. A pillar of Barcelona society, founding member of the Valera, Marlasca y Sentís legal firm.’
‘Month?’
‘November.’
At a signal from Brotons, the two assistants ran off in search of copies dating back to November 1904. It was a time when each day was so stained with the presence of death that most newspapers ran large obituaries on their front pages. A character as important as Marlasca would probably have generated more than a simple death notice in the city’s press and his obituary would have been front-cover material. The assistants returned with a few volumes and placed them on a large desk. We divided up the task between all five present and found Diego Marlasca’s obituary on the front page, just as I’d imagined. The edition was dated 23 November 1904. It was Brotons who made the discovery.
‘
Habemus
cadaver,’ he announced.
There were four obituary notices devoted to Marlasca. One from the family, another from the law firm, one from the Barcelona Bar Association and the last from the cultural association of the Ateneo Barcelonés.
‘That’s what comes from being rich. You die five or six times,’ Don Basilio pointed out.
The announcements were not in themselves very interesting - pleadings for the immortal soul of the deceased, a note explaining that the funeral would be for close friends and family only, grandiose verses lauding a great, erudite citizen, an irreplaceable member of Barcelona society, and so on.
‘The type of thing you’re interested in probably appeared a day or two earlier, or later,’ Brotons said.
We checked through the papers covering the week of Marlasca’s death and found a sequence of news items relating to the lawyer. The first reported that the distinguished lawyer had died in an accident. Don Basilio read the text out loud.
‘This was written by a chimp,’ he pronounced. ‘Three redundant paragraphs that don’t say anything and only at the end does it explain that the death was accidental, but without saying what sort of accident it was.’
‘Here we have something more interesting,’ said Brotons.
An article published the following day explained that the police were investigating the circumstances of the accident. The most revealing piece of information was that, according to the forensic evidence, Marlasca had drowned.
‘Drowned?’ interrupted Don Basilio. ‘How? Where?’
‘It doesn’t say. Perhaps they had to shorten the item to include this urgent and extensive apologia for the
sardana
, a three-column article entitled “To the strains of the
tenora
: spirit and mettle”,’ Brotons remarked.
‘Does it say who was in charge of the investigation?’ I asked.
‘It mentions someone called Salvador. Ricardo Salvador,’ said Brotons.
We went over the rest of the news items related to the death of Marlasca, but there was nothing of any substance. The texts parroted one another, repeating a chorus that sounded too much like the official line supplied by the law firm of Valera & Co.
‘This has the distinct whiff of a cover-up,’ said Brotons.
I sighed, disheartened. I had hoped to find something more than sugary remembrances and hollow news items that threw no new light on the facts.
‘Didn’t you have a good contact in police headquarters?’ Don Basilio asked. ‘What was his name?’
‘Víctor Grandes,’ Brotons said.
‘Perhaps he could put Martín in touch with this person, Salvador.’
I cleared my throat and the two hefty men looked at me with a frown.
‘For reasons that have nothing to do with this matter, or perhaps because they’re too closely related, I’d rather not involve Inspector Grandes,’ I said.
Brotons and Don Basilio exchanged glances.
‘Right. Any other names that should be deleted from the list?’
‘Marcos and Castelo.’
‘I see you haven’t lost your talent for making friends,’ offered Don Basilio.
Brotons rubbed his chin.
‘Let’s not worry too much. I think I might be able to find another way in that will not arouse suspicion.’
‘If you find Salvador for me, I’ll sacrifice whatever you want, even a pig.’
‘With my gout I’ve given up pork, but I wouldn’t say no to a good cigar,’ Brotons said.
‘Make it two,’ added Don Basilio.
While I rushed off to a tobacconist’s on Calle Tallers in search of two specimens of the most exquisite and expensive Havana cigars, Brotons made a few discreet calls to police headquarters and confirmed that Salvador had left the police force, or rather that he had been made to leave, and had gone on to work as a corporate bodyguard as well as doing investigative work for various law firms in the city. When I returned to the newspaper offices to present my benefactors with their two cigars, the archivist handed me a note with an address:
Ricardo Salvador
Calle de la Lleona, 21. Top floor.
‘May the publisher-in-chief of
La Vanguardia
bless you,’ I said.
‘And may you live to see it.’
29
Calle de la Lleona, better known to locals as the Street of the Three Beds in honour of the notorious brothel it harboured, was an alleyway almost as dark as its reputation. It started in the shadowy arches of Plaza Real and extended into a damp crevice, far from sunlight, between old buildings piled on top of one another and sewn together by a perpetual web of clothes lines. The crumbling, ochre facades were dilapidated, and the slabs of stone covering the ground had been bathed in blood during the years when the city had been ruled by the gun. More than once I’d used the setting as a backdrop to my stories in
City of the Damned
and even now, deserted and forgotten, it still smelled of crime and gunpowder. The grim surroundings seemed to indicate that Superintendent Salvador’s early retirement package from the police force had not been a generous one.
Number 21 was a modest property squeezed between two buildings that held it together like pincers. The main door was open, revealing a pool of shadows from which a steep, narrow staircase rose in a spiral. The floor was flooded with a dark, slimy liquid oozing from the cracks in the tiles. I climbed the steps as best I could, without letting go of the handrail, but not trusting it either. There was only one door on every landing. Judging by the appearance of the building I didn’t think that any of the apartments could be larger than forty square metres. A small skylight crowned the stairwell and bathed the upper floors in a tenuous light. The door to the top-floor apartment was at the end of a short corridor and I was surprised to find it open. I rapped with my knuckles, but got no reply. The door opened onto a small sitting room containing an armchair, a table and a bookshelf filled with books and brass boxes. A sort of kitchen-cum-washing area occupied the adjoining room. The saving grace in that cell was a terrace that led to the flat roof. The door to the terrace was also open and a fresh breeze blew through it, bringing with it the smell of cooking and laundry from the rooftops of the old town.
‘Is anyone home?’ I called out.
Nobody answered, so I walked over to the terrace door and stepped outside. A jungle of roofs, towers, water tanks, lightning conductors and chimneys spread out in every direction. Before I was able to take another step, I felt the touch of cold metal on the back of my neck and heard the metallic click of a revolver as the hammer was cocked. All I could think to do was raise my hands and not move even an eyebrow.
‘My name is David Martín. I got your address from police headquarters. I wanted to speak to you about a case you handled.’
‘Do you usually go into people’s homes uninvited, Señor David Martín?’
‘The door was open. I called out but you can’t have heard me. Can I put my hands down?’
‘I didn’t tell you to put them up. Which case?’
‘The death of Diego Marlasca. I rent the house that was his last home. The tower house in Calle Flassaders.’
He said nothing. I could still feel the revolver pressing against my back.
‘Señor Salvador?’ I asked.
‘I’m wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to blow your head off right now.’
‘Don’t you want to hear my story first?’
The pressure from the revolver seemed to lessen and I heard the hammer being uncocked. I slowly turned round. Ricardo Salvador was an imposing figure, with grey hair and pale blue eyes that penetrated like needles. I guessed that he must have been about fifty but it would have been difficult to find men half his age who would dare get in his way. I gulped. Salvador lowered the revolver and turned his back to me, returning to the apartment.
‘I apologise for the welcome,’ he mumbled.
I followed him to the minute kitchen and stopped in the doorway. Salvador left the pistol on the sink and lit the stove with bits of paper and cardboard. He pulled out a coffee pot and looked at me questioningly.
‘No, thanks.’
‘It’s the only good thing I have, I warn you,’ he said.
‘Then I’ll have one with you.’
Salvador put a couple of generous spoonfuls of coffee into the pot, filled it with water and put it on the flames.
‘Who has spoken to you about me?’
‘A few days ago I visited Señora Marlasca, the widow. She’s the one who told me about you. She said you were the only person who had tried to discover the truth and it had cost you your job.’
‘That’s one way of describing it, I suppose,’ he said.
I noticed that at my mention of the widow his expression darkened, and I wondered what might have happened between them during those unfortunate days.
‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘Señora Marlasca.’
‘I think she misses you.’
Salvador nodded, his fierce manner crumbling.
‘I haven’t been to see her for a long time.’
‘She thinks you blame her for what happened. I think she’d like to see you again, even though so much time has gone by.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. Maybe I should go and pay her a visit . . .’
‘Can you talk to me about what happened?’
Salvador recovered his severe expression.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Marlasca’s widow told me that you never accepted the official line that her husband took his own life. She said you had suspicions.’
‘More than suspicions. Has anyone told you how Marlasca died?’
‘All I know is that people said it was an accident.’
‘Marlasca died by drowning. At least, that’s what the police report said.’
‘How did he drown?’
‘There’s only one way of drowning, but I’ll come back to that later. The curious thing is where he drowned.’
‘In the sea?’
Salvador smiled. It was a dark, bitter smile, like the coffee that was brewing.
‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’
‘I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.’
He handed me a cup and looked me up and down, assessing me.
‘I assume you’ve visited that son-of-a-bitch Valera.’
‘If you mean Marlasca’s partner, he’s dead. The one I spoke to was his son.’
‘Another son-of-a-bitch, except he has fewer guts. I don’t know what he told you, but I’m sure he didn’t say that between them they managed to get me thrown out of the police force and turned me into a pariah who couldn’t even beg for money in the streets.’
‘I’m afraid he forgot to include that in his version of events,’ I conceded.
‘It doesn’t surprise me.’
‘You were going to tell me how Marlasca drowned.’
‘That’s where it gets interesting,’ said Salvador. ‘Did you know that Señor Marlasca, apart from being a lawyer, a scholar and a writer, had, as a young man, won the annual Christmas swim across the port organised by the Barcelona Swimming Club?’
‘How can a champion swimmer drown?’ I asked.
‘The question is where did he drown. Señor Marlasca’s body was found in the pond on the roof of the Water Reservoir building in Ciudadela Park. Do you know the place?’
I swallowed and nodded. It was there that I’d first encountered Corelli.
‘If you know it, you’ll know that, when it’s full, it’s barely a metre deep. It’s essentially a basin. The day the lawyer was found dead, the reservoir was half-empty and the water level was no more than sixty centimetres.’
‘A champion swimmer doesn’t drown in sixty centimetres of water, just like that,’ I observed.
‘That’s what I said to myself.’
‘Were there other points of view?’
Salvador smiled bitterly.
‘For a start, it’s doubtful whether he drowned at all. The pathologist who carried out the autopsy found water in the lungs, but his report said that death had occurred as a result of heart failure.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘When Marlasca fell into the pond, or when he was pushed, he was on fire. His body had third-degree burns on the torso, arms and face. According to the pathologist, the body could have been alight for almost a minute before it came into contact with the water. The remains of the lawyer’s clothes showed the presence of some type of solvent on the fabrics. Marlasca was burned alive.’
It took me a few minutes to digest all this.
‘Why would anyone want to do something like that?’
‘A settling of scores? Pure cruelty? You choose. My opinion is that somebody wanted to delay the identification of Marlasca’s body in order to gain time and confuse the police.’
‘Who?’
‘Jaco Corbera.’
‘Irene Sabino’s agent.’
‘Who disappeared the same day Marlasca died, together with the balance from a personal account in the Banco Hispano Colonial which his wife didn’t know about.’
‘A hundred thousand French francs,’ I said.
Salvador looked at me, intrigued.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s not important. What was Marlasca doing on the roof of the reservoir anyway? It’s not exactly on the way to anywhere.’
‘That’s another confusing point. We found a diary in Marlasca’s study in which he had written down an appointment there at five in the afternoon. Or that’s what it looked like. In the diary he’d only specified a time, a place and an initial. C. Probably for Corbera.’
‘Then what do you think happened?’ I asked.
‘What I think, and what the evidence suggests, is that Jaco fooled Irene into manipulating Marlasca. As you probably know, the lawyer was obsessed with all that mumbo-jumbo about seances, especially since the death of his son. Jaco had a partner, Damián Roures, who was mixed up in that world. A real fraudster. Between the two of them, and with the help of Irene Sabino, they conned Marlasca, promising that they could help him make contact with the boy in the spirit world. Marlasca was a desperate man, ready to believe anything. That trio of vermin had organised the perfect sting but then Jaco became too greedy for his own good. Some think that Sabino didn’t act in bad faith, that she genuinely was in love with Marlasca and believed in all that supernatural nonsense, just as he did. It is a possibility but I don’t buy it, and seeing how things turned out, it’s irrelevant. Jaco knew that Marlasca had those funds in the bank and decided to get him out of the way and disappear with the money, leaving a trail of chaos behind him. The appointment in the diary may well have been a red herring left by Sabino or Jaco. There was no way at all of knowing whether Marlasca himself had noted it down.’
‘And where did the hundred thousand francs Marlasca had in the Hispano Colonial come from?’
‘Marlasca had paid that money into the account himself, in cash, the year before. I haven’t the faintest idea where he could have laid hands on a sum of that size. What I do know is that the remainder was withdrawn, in cash, on the morning of the day Marlasca died. Later, the lawyers said that the money had been transferred to some sort of discretionary fund and had not disappeared; they said Marlasca had simply decided to reorganise his finances. But I find it hard to believe that a man should reorganise his finances, moving almost one hundred thousand francs in the morning, and be discovered, burned alive, in the afternoon, without there being some connection. I don’t believe this money ended up in some mysterious fund. To this day, there has been nothing to convince me that the money didn’t end up in the hands of Jaco Corbera and Irene Sabino. At least at first, because I doubt that she saw any of it after Jaco disappeared.’
‘What happened to Irene?’
‘That’s another aspect that makes me think Jaco tricked both of his accomplices. Shortly after Marlasca’s death, Roures left the afterlife industry and opened a shop selling magic tricks on Calle Princesa. As far as I know, he’s still there. Irene Sabino worked for a couple more years in increasingly tawdry clubs and cabarets. The last thing I heard, she was prostituting herself in El Raval and living in poverty. She obviously didn’t get a single franc. Nor did Roures.’
‘And Jaco?’
‘He probably left the country under a false name and is living comfortably somewhere off the proceeds.’
The whole story, far from clarifying things in my mind, only raised more questions. Salvador must have noticed my unease and gave me a commiserating smile.
‘Valera and his friends in the town hall managed to persuade the press to publish the story about an accident. He resolved the matter with a grand funeral: he didn’t want to muddy the reputation of the law firm, whose client list included many members of the town hall and the city council. Nor did he wish to draw attention to Marlasca’s strange behaviour during the last twelve months of his life, from the moment he abandoned his family and associates and decided to buy a ruin in a part of town he had never set his well-shod foot in so that he could devote himself to writing, or at least that’s what his partner said.’
‘Did Valera say what sort of thing Marlasca wanted to write?’
‘A book of poems, or something like that.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘I’ve seen many strange things in my work, my friend, but a wealthy lawyer who leaves everything to go and write sonnets is not part of the repertoire.’
‘So?’
‘So the reasonable thing would have been for me to forget the whole matter and do as I was told.’
‘But that’s not what happened.’
‘No. And not because I’m a hero or an idiot. I did it because every time I saw the suffering of that poor woman, Marlasca’s widow, it made my stomach turn, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without doing what I was supposedly being paid to do.’
He pointed around the miserable, cold place that was his home.
‘Believe me: if I’d known what was coming I would have preferred to be a coward and wouldn’t have stepped out of line. I can’t say I wasn’t warned at police headquarters. With the lawyer dead and buried, it was time to turn the page and put all our efforts into the pursuit of starving anarchists and schoolteachers with suspicious ideologies.’
‘You say buried . . . Where is Diego Marlasca buried?’
‘In the family vault in San Gervasio Cemetery, I think, not far from the house where the widow lives. May I ask why you are so interested in this matter? And don’t tell me your curiosity was aroused just because you live in the tower house.’
‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘If you want a friendly piece of advice, look at me and learn from my mistakes. Let it go.’