by Mathew Carr
It did not take him long to find Mata’s building, where the concierge let him in. He found Mata standing in the doorway of his apartment in a white shirt and trousers and a pair of rope-soled shoes.
“Good morning Harry!” he said cheerfully. “You have news?”
“Nothing good.”
“Well I’m glad to see you. And I have a visitor. I think you’ll be interested to hear what she has to say.”
Lawton wondered who the visitor was as he followed Mata down the corridor and glanced at the paintings on the high walls, and the study filled with books. At the far end of the apartment, he saw a young woman sitting in front of a large open window. She was sitting in profile, framed by the window and sipping at a glass of water. She was not wearing a hat, and her hair was tied up behind her head to reveal a long neck that made Lawton think of flamingos he had seen in South Africa, as he realized that he had finally met the anarchist Esperanza Claramunt.
20
Lawton’s first thought as she stood up to greet him was that yet another anarchist had failed to bear out Cesare Lombroso’s expectations. Her skull was long and distinctly dolichocephalic and her high cheekbones and rosebud mouth showed no signs of atavism. Her wide brown eyes were earnest and slightly sad, and no closer than they ought to have been, and her glasses made her look studious rather than fanatical. Mata introduced them and Lawton shook her soft hand.
“Mr. Lawton,” she said. “Señor Mata has been telling me about you.”
“The three of us have certain things in common,” Mata said, as Lawton sat down. “And we are probably the only people in Barcelona who have any idea what they are.”
Lawton lit a cigarette and sensed that the Claramunt girl was giving him the same kind of appraisal that he had given her. Through the open window he heard the laughter of children echoing from the interior courtyard, and he could see Mata’s neighbors sitting out on their balconies reading newspapers, hanging clothes on washing lines, or dozing in cane chairs like passengers on an ocean liner.
“Nice view,” he said.
“Light, space, and community,” Mata replied. “As Cerdà intended.”
Mata explained that the Eixample—the Extension—had been designed the previous century by the architect Ildefons Cerdà, following the demolition of the old city walls. The new neighborhood had been built in accordance with its designer’s socialist principles, he said, with wide streets and large courtyards to provide the sunlight and ventilation that was missing from the Raval and the Gothic Quarter.
“A fine socialist idea,” Esperanza said scornfully, “which curiously enough only ended up producing expensive apartments for speculators and the bourgeoisie.”
“Please don’t include me in those categories,” Mata protested. “I don’t speculate and I’m not rich. But it is true that the experiment didn’t live up to expectations, sadly.”
“Sad but not surprising,” Esperanza said. “When capitalism tries to reform itself it rarely does live up to expectations.”
Mata rolled his eyes. “So Harry, what news? You can speak openly in front of Miss Claramunt. She will certainly speak openly in front of you.”
Lawton told them about the botched raid in Sarrià, and Arrow’s reaction to it.
“Well, well,” Mata said “So our Sherlock Holmes thought he’d get his name in the papers. And now he’s sulking, and you have nothing once again.”
“So it seems. Weygrand must have just picked that address at random. Or maybe he thought the house was empty. Either way I have no idea how to find him now.”
“Well we do have another potential line of inquiry. You remember the anarchist Tosets—the one who was kidnapped in Gràcia?”
“Of course.” Lawton looked at Esperanza. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I want justice, not sympathy.”
“Miss Claramunt believes that a member of her affinity group may have colluded with Tosets’s murderers,” explained Mata.
“What’s an affinity group?” Lawton asked.
“Like-minded anarchist comrades,” Mata replied. “They meet and agitate together. They even go hiking in the mountains.”
“Ours is called the Invincibles,” Esperanza said.
“Of course you are,” said Mata.
Esperanza ignored this, and proceeded to explain her reasons for suspecting her comrade Ruben Montero of acting as a police informer. When she had finished, she and Mata looked at Lawton expectantly.
“Well?” Mata asked.
“It’s not the most conclusive case I’ve ever heard,” Lawton replied.
Esperanza’s face hardened. “And your theory that Pau was murdered by a eugenic religious sect? How conclusive is that?”
Mata was smiling now, but Lawton was beginning to think that Esperanza Claramunt might be a little too outspoken for her own good. “The money this Montero was carrying could have come from something else you don’t know about,” he said. “It’s certainly not something any policeman could arrest him or question him for—not in London, anyway.”
“We’re not in London, Mr. Lawton,” Esperanza said. “And I’m not talking about the police.”
“Surely this man is worth investigating,” Mata said, “in the absence of anything else?”
Lawton stubbed the remains of his cigarette. “Are you a good liar, Señorita?” he asked finally.
“If I need to be,” Esperanza replied.
“When are you seeing this man again?”
“Tomorrow.”
“You said this Ruben wants to know who killed his brother-in-law. So tell him you’ve met me. Tell him I’ve got evidence that Ugarte is involved in these murders and I know the man who’s been helping him. If he’s what you say he is, then Ugarte will have to react—and perhaps Weygrand, too. And if that happens then we’ll know that your suspicions are correct. And I can take further action against this Montero and also against the lieutenant.”
Mata stroked his beard nervously. “Haven’t you made enough enemies already, Harry?”
“One more won’t make much difference. As things stand I have no other way of finding out if Weygrand or this German are even in the city. If they are here, and Montero is the informer you say he is, then they will have to come for me, and I’ll be waiting for them. Are you able to do that, Señorita? Because I don’t want to place you in danger.”
“It’s a little late for that.” Esperanza described her encounter with Ugarte and his veiled threat against her brother. She was visibly angry as she spoke. Beneath the swanlike neck, the neat clothes, the glasses, and the well-coiffed hair, Lawton sensed the same steely quality that he found in the suffragette women. Some of them looked equally delicate, until they bit your hands and kicked your shins, and it was not difficult to imagine Esperanza Claramunt in their company.
“So he’s already trying to intimidate you,” he said. “Be careful.”
“I’m not afraid of Ugarte,” Esperanza replied. “Anyone who threatens my brother is to be despised, not feared. But tomorrow it will be Ugarte’s turn to feel afraid.”
“Why’s that?” Lawton asked.
“Tomorrow Barcelona goes on strike.”
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten,” said Lawton.
“I wish I could,” said Mata with a sigh.
“Señor Mata doesn’t approve of the war, Mr. Lawton,” Esperanza said. “But he also doesn’t like it when the masses protest against it. It’s the bourgeois paradox.”
Mata looked cross. “You know this strike is going to be more than a protest.”
“Do I?”
“You only have to listen to what Lerroux’s barbarians are saying.”
“Sometimes in politics you can’t choose your allies. Don’t you agree, Mr. Lawton?”
“I don’t get involved in politics,” Lawton said.
Esperanza looked at him with an expression of disdain and surprise. “What a thing to say! Suppose your government wanted to send you to di
e in a war to make the rich richer? Wouldn’t you want to oppose that? War is a terrible thing, Mr. Lawton.”
“So I’ve heard. But sometimes they’re unavoidable, don’t you think?”
“All wars are avoidable, Mr Lawton. Poor working men fighting poor working men. It’s only the state that benefits from them. This one is no exception.”
To Lawton’s relief, Esperanza picked up her handbag and stood up to leave. Mata suggested that she and Lawton exchange addresses, and he gave her the name of his hotel while she wrote down her address in Gràcia for him.
“Good day Mr. Lawton,” she said. “I’ll do what you suggest. And I hope you enjoy tomorrow. It’s an opportunity to see our city the way few visitors have ever seen it. And maybe you’ll change your view of ‘politics.’ ”
* * *
Mata escorted her to the door. On his way back Lawton heard him walking into another room, and he returned shortly afterward carrying a revolver and a box of ammunition.
“I think you should have this,” he said. “My father used it during the last Carlist War. It’s no use to me. I don’t fire guns. But I have a feeling you might have a better idea what to do with it.”
Lawton looked at the revolver. It was a Model 1 Smith & Wesson, a gun that he had not seen since South Africa, and Mata said it had not been fired since 1878. Lawton broke open the chamber and saw that it was already fully loaded. “You might be right,” he said.
“So what do you think of Miss Claramunt?” Mata asked.
“She certainly has some strong opinions. As many women do nowadays.”
“So did her father. He was a liberal and a republican. He was tortured in the Montjuïc fortress in 1896 after the Corpus Christi bombings.”
“Rull?”
Mata shook his head. “Before his time. Someone threw two bombs at the Corpus Christi procession outside the church of Santa Maria del Mar down the harbor. Killed five people and wounded forty-five. My parents were in the procession, standing further back, thank God. Afterward the Brigada and the police rounded up hundreds of people. Anarchists, trade unionists, liberals—anyone the state didn’t like. All of them tortured in the castle. Claramunt was one of them. He died of a heart attack under interrogation. In the end five anarchists were executed the following year, but none of them did it. They never found out who did. Hombre, I’m surprised you never heard about this. Lerroux made his name writing about the Montjuïc trials—he seemed like a proper journalist back then. And there were protests about trials all over Europe. Inquisitorial Spain they called it, and with good reason.”
“I didn’t read the papers much back then.”
“Well, if his daughter seems a little fierce, that’s definitely one of the reasons. And Ugarte was one of the interrogators.”
Lawton felt a little more well disposed toward Esperanza Claramunt now. He had not handled a gun since the war, and he had not expected to hold one again, but the curved wooden handle felt comforting in his hand now, and he tucked the revolver into his trouser belt before emptying the spare ammunition into his pockets.
“Are you going to work tomorrow?” he asked.
Mata shook his head. “I won’t be in the office. The Barcelona newspapers have all agreed not to publish tomorrow. But I’ll be out on the street at least some of the time, so I can write something later.”
“Well, be careful.”
“I think you’re the one who needs to be careful, Harry,” Mata warned.
* * *
Lawton decided not to risk walking down the Ramblas in case he was searched. Instead he took the longer route down the Passeig de Sant Joan toward the Estación de Francia, where he turned back along the port toward the Columbus Monument. As he walked back along the harbor, past the rows of boats, ships, and white sails, he wondered what Maitland would say if he knew that he was walking the streets of Barcelona with a revolver tucked into his belt, looking for the men who had twice tried to kill him. Even in the midafternoon, the city felt airless and muggy, and the sun seemed to burn right through the hat Mata had given him.
In Africa it had been just as hot, but that was before the sickness had ruined him. Now he could not be sure whether it was the heat or his own brain that made the objects around him seem so hazy and insubstantial, from the bobbing ships and the shining sea to the palm trees and tall buildings on his right. Even as he scrunched up his eyes the city seemed to be dissolving in front of him. Only the statue of Columbus seemed solid, pointing toward the sea and beyond it, high on the hill, he could make out the castle where Esperanza Claramunt’s father had died.
Once again, Lawton asked himself what he was doing in this beautiful but incomprehensible city that seethed with threats and dangers unlike anything he had experienced before. The trains still seemed to be running at the Estación de Francia, and he knew they might not be running the next day. It would be easy enough to check out of his hotel and catch the next train northward, and leave Barcelona behind before it killed him. He could tell Maitland and Mrs. Foulkes what he had found out and leave the rest to them. He would not get his full payment, but he could at least save his own skin, and write the whole thing off as a strange adventure that had cost him nothing. Yet even as he considered this option, he had no desire to take it. Whether it was curiosity, stubbornness, or some lingering copper’s instinct to see an investigation through, he was not prepared to walk away until he had found Weygrand and whoever was working with him.
Despite Mata’s article, he doubted that they could get much help from Arrow or Bravo Portillo, and it did not seem right to leave Mata or Esperanza Claramunt to deal with this by themselves. Whatever conspiracy Weygrand and his companions were involved in, it would take more than a poet-journalist and a naïve young anarchist to get to the bottom of it. The three of them might not be the most obvious material for an investigating team, but right now it was the only team there was. He had intended to go back to his hotel to rest, but as he came alongside the entrance to the Plaza Reial he thought of Arenales’s palace and it occurred to him that there was still one more thing he could do that day.
He hurried across the Ramblas, past a small group of Somaten, and threaded his way back into the Raval, until he found the little square that he and Mata had visited two days before. Some children were playing hopscotch in the center of the square, and Lawton saw that one of the shutters in Arenales’s palace was now open, and the French windows behind it were slightly ajar. His lassitude immediately faded. He considered walking up to the building and knocking on the door. Instead he took up a position in a shaded doorway in the narrow street on the far side of the square, and lit a cigarette.
He continued to work his way through the pack, listening to the children chanting and the warble of pigeons from the square. He had been waiting for about an hour when a man appeared in the window. It was not Weygrand or Arenales, but a tall black man wearing eighteenth century livery who appeared to be a servant. The servant looked out across the square, and Lawton pulled away as he grasped the shutters. By the time he looked back the shutters were closed.
Once again Lawton considered knocking on the door. Instead he decided to wait and see what would happen. It was not until the great wooden doors began to open, and the two black horses appeared, pulling a carriage behind them, that he broke away from his hiding place. The children paused in their games and stared at him as the servant locked the doors behind him. Lawton saw immediately that it was the same carriage and the same horses he had seen on the night of Weygrand’s performance, as he came alongside it and shouted “Hola?” at the curtained window.
The curtain opened and he saw the hatchet-faced man he had seen in the photographs of the Explorers Club, with the wispy silver hair combed back over his ears beneath histop hat. Now his gaunt cadaverous features were fixed in a hunted, frightened expression as he looked down at Lawton.
“Count, I want to talk to you!” Lawton said. “About the Explorers Club! About Dr. Randolph Foulkes!”
Arenales continued to stare at him like a mesmerised rabbit as the servant came between them and jumped onto the running board. Arenales banged his stick twice, and the driver flicked his reins and urged the horses forward. Lawton drew the Smith & Wesson from his belt and began to chase after the carriage, and the children backed away from him in alarm. Even before the carriage turned into the street he realized that the revolver was pointless. He had no justification for firing it that anyone would accept, and it would not do him any good to be caught in the Raval waving a gun at an aristocrat who had committed no known crime. He sheepishly tucked the revolver back in his belt.
He arrived back at the hotel to find Señor Martínez sitting behind the receptionist’s desk, looking even more disapproving than usual.
“A woman was asking for you,” he said sourly. “A young woman.”
“Did she say who she was?”
Martínez shook his head. “No. But she left a note.” He handed him an envelope and Lawton read the message: Passeig de Gràcia, 6.1. Ten o’clock tonight. Will tell everything. Please come, Zorka.
For the second time that day, Lawton found himself summoned to a meeting that he had not expected, and whatever was behind this unlikely invitation, he knew that he had no choice but to accept it.
* * *
Ruben Montero sat on the roof and waited for his children to go to bed. During the first year after his return from the Rio de Oro, the roof had provided his only escape from a city that seemed as oppressive as the prison he had left. In the penal colony it had at least been possible to look out at the desert from the window of his cell and feel that the world was somewhere out there waiting for him. In Barcelona there were only the same dark rooms where he had spent most of his life that were too cold in winter and two hot in the summer; the same old man coughing his guts out from the opposite building each morning; the same smell of olive oil and fried cod; the same room that he shared with his two children, Pau, Flor, and her mother.