The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  ‘How?’

  ‘However you want, but without lies.’

  The woman began her story again, this time hesitating; the effort not to repeat literally what she had said, to search for synonyms, add details, was clearly causing her difficulties. She was concentrating hard, with the lost gaze of someone who is recalling images to mind.

  Castro didn’t let her finish, interrupting her with another question. ‘Did Señora Sobrerroca keep valuable objects in her husband’s office?’

  As if coming out of a trance, Carmen replied, ‘Not that I know of.’

  With a wave of his hand, the inspector indicated for her to go on.

  ‘Dr Garmendia’s office was like a museum. No one was allowed to move anything. When I cleaned, she would come in afterwards and make sure that everything was where it should be.’

  ‘How do you know that Señora Sobrerroca wasn’t keeping anything of value in there?’

  ‘I don’t know. But what would there be of value in a doctor’s office?’

  ‘Don’t make conjectures, that’s not your place.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did she have valuable jewellery? Money?’

  ‘She had jewellery, in her dressing room. And that isn’t conjecture.’

  The slap came so quickly that Ana almost leapt out of her chair with fright.

  Castro, who had stood to deliver the blow, sat down again, put his hands on the desk and said, in the same monotone he had maintained throughout the entire conversation, ‘You’re trying my patience. How about you start telling me something I can believe?’

  ‘What?’ asked Carmen, tearful and scared. ‘What do you want?’

  Her left cheek was red.

  ‘For example, you could show me your hands.’

  The woman obeyed. She lifted her hands and showed them with the palms facing up, parallel to the desk. She was trembling. Castro sat up to look at them, indicating to the woman that she should show him the backs. She did. With a quick movement, the inspector seized the woman’s hands with his left. Reflexively she tried to free them, but she was prevented by the right arm of the policeman rising up to hit her again.

  ‘Too small to strangle Señora Sobrerroca. What’s your accomplice’s name?’

  Ana didn’t know what was more menacing: Castro’s hand, which seemed impatient to fall on the woman, his sudden familiarity or his impassive expression.

  ‘What’s your accomplice’s name?’ he repeated.

  And, although the question ‘What accomplice?’ was logical, it earned the woman another slap; a brusque, precise slap on the same cheek as the first, as if Castro were fitting his hand to the pre-drawn contour.

  Carmen Alonso would have fallen from her chair if the inspector hadn’t been holding her by the hands. She hid her face between her outstretched arms. She was crying; her tears stained the thin blue cardboard folder that was on the policeman’s desk, right beneath her face.

  ‘Why are you hitting me?’

  ‘Listen, you don’t know how much it irritates me to be taken for a fool. We weren’t born yesterday, you know.’

  Nothing in the inspector’s expression showed rage, or even anger. Castro spoke and slapped with the coldness of an automaton.

  Ana was trembling. Why didn’t she get up and tell Castro to stop? Out of fear. Two fears, if she was honest, and one of them made her feel ashamed. Being scared to confront a man capable of such sudden violence and who, moreover, had the protection of his authority, was at least understandable. But that she didn’t dare to do it out of fear of losing her job was degrading, it sullied her.

  And even then she remained glued to her seat, as Castro let the maid go, sat back with his hands on the desk and told her, ‘If you, as you confessed, knew that Señora Sobrerroca had valuable jewels and was alone in the house, how do I know you didn’t give in to the temptation of stealing them?’

  Carmen lifted her head. Tears dripped from her chin. She dried them with the back of her hand, took a breath and, with a trembling but resolute voice, answered, ‘I haven’t confessed anything, I only said something.’

  She raised her arms to protect herself from the slap she was expecting. Both she and Ana had their eyes fixed on Castro’s hands, but they didn’t move.

  With the determined fatalism of a martyr in the Roman circus, the woman continued speaking: ‘I’m no fool. The missus treated me well and paid me much better than those of her class usually do. Sometimes she gave me clothing, and she even used to take me with her to the theatre and the cinema. Why would I do anything bad to her?’

  Carmen Alonso, despite her fear, was arguing from logic and common sense. Castro was interrogating her from inquisitorial omnipotence. Ana wondered if any victims of the Inquisition had appealed to common sense and saved themselves from persecution that way. She didn’t know, but it seemed that here, somehow, it was working.

  The maid lowered her arms. ‘Hit me, if you want,’ her expression said.

  But Castro was interested in something else now.

  ‘You say that she used to take you to shows and that you used to sleep at the house. What changed? Did you do something wrong?’

  ‘No. It had nothing to do with me. I think that she was no longer afraid of being in the house alone.’

  ‘Oh, no?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  Castro stared at her; his silence forced the maid to continue talking.

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. The missus was very pleased with me.’ She lowered her eyes and added, more to herself than for the other two people in the room, ‘And I with her. What am I going to do now?’

  Castro didn’t bother to answer. After a few seconds he turned in his seat and told her, ‘You can leave. But you should know that we will be watching you.’

  ‘Can I start looking for a new job?’

  ‘No one is stopping you.’

  What would stop her is that she had been Mariona Sobrerroca’s maid, whose murder hadn’t yet been solved. Who was going to want her in their house?

  Carmen Alonso got up and left. First she nodded towards Ana. Perhaps it was a farewell. She couldn’t hold her gaze.

  Castro remained staring at the closed door. Behind his back, Ana didn’t dare to move or speak. As if suddenly remembering her presence, the inspector turned and told her, ‘Well, you heard what the witness said.’

  Her ‘yes’ came out in a croak. Her throat was dry.

  ‘So, prepare your article, a test run.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘You aren’t suggesting taking our reports home to peruse over tea and biscuits?’

  ‘No, no.’

  She was sure they didn’t treat Carlos Belda like this, but she was already learning what she was allowed to think and what she should keep quiet.

  The door opened and Sevilla poked his head in.

  ‘Back already? Did you run my errand?’

  ‘Yes. Should I bring them to you?’

  ‘Later.’

  Castro signalled to Ana with a movement of his head. She understood that whatever Sevilla had gone to get wasn’t meant for her eyes.

  ‘Another thing,’ said the officer. ‘We have a rag-and-bone man that the dead woman’s neighbour saw passing by the house.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Waiting outside the door.’

  ‘Bring him to an interrogation room. I’ll be there shortly.’

  He rose and, before Ana’s questioning gaze, handed her a sheaf of case papers.

  ‘I have things to do. Write your article. You can use my desk.’

  He was already leaving the room when he added, ‘Don’t even think about sitting in my chair.’

  He closed the door.

  It hadn’t even occurred to her, but, like Bluebeard’s wife, the warning was an incentive to go around the desk and sit in the inspector’s chair. She didn’t feel anything special about his seat. ‘Why should I feel something special?’ she thought to herself. It was a wooden chair
with green padded leather arms worn from use. From sweat? As she thought this she involuntarily lifted her arms and rested them on the desk. Her eyes landed on a page from the newspaper Arriba that peeped out from beneath some papers and bore a list of names. She recognised what it was before she had a chance to read it: the names of those put to death the day before. She looked away before any of them could stick in her memory.

  She heard footsteps on the other side of the door. She leapt from the chair and took her place again. She buried the list of the executed beneath the blue folder that still bore the damp stains of Carmen Alonso’s tears.

  She started to write. By hand.

  When Castro returned, she would have to give him her handwritten text, as if it were her homework. That would never do. She got to her feet and left the inspector’s office. She remembered that when he had called to his subordinate, he had shouted towards the right, and she moved in that direction along the hallway. She reached a room that smelled of sweat and aftershave lotion; among the ten or twelve policemen distributed over several desks, she made out Officer Sevilla with a cigarette between his lips. Sevilla saw her too and leapt up. The others stopped what they were doing and turned towards her. Only one, who was furiously hunting and pecking on his typewriter, remained completely unaware of her presence, absorbed as he was in his own tumult.

  ‘Need something?’ Sevilla asked, without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

  ‘A typewriter,’ she said, pointing to his preoccupied colleague.

  Sevilla looked in the opposite direction. Along one of the nicotine-stained walls he spotted a typewriter on a little table with wheels.

  ‘I’ll bring it to you.’

  She returned to Castro’s office followed by the squeak of little wheels. Sevilla heaved the typewriter onto his boss’s desk. He didn’t leave, standing in the doorway as if he needed to keep a zealous eye on what she was going to do with the equipment. Ana turned her back to him, stuck paper in the carriage and started writing. An admiring little whistle behind her back indicated that the policeman was impressed by her speed.

  Once again, the hours she’d invested in learning to type were paying off. She had taught herself with a little dog-eared book that her father had bought at the second-hand book market in the San Antonio district. Her mother had complained many times about the noise of the typewriter as she was practising her A-S-D-F-G-F, her Ñ-L-K-J-H-J and then the more advanced speed exercises. But she let her keep at it; Ana was ten years old and it was a game. They still lived in the enormous flat on Paseo de San Juan, and her mother could avoid the percussive clatter of the keys by going to the other end of the apartment. A few months after, a real clatter would come, that of the Italian air force bombardment in March 1938. Ana, wedged beside her mother against the wall of the Triunfo-Norte metro station, would try to trick her fear by doing exercises on a book cover as if it were an invisible keyboard.

  Now she was writing the article for Castro to read and approve. When he returned, she was only a few lines away from finishing. She didn’t let Sevilla’s chatter distract her.

  ‘You should see how she types. She must have steel metacarpals!’

  She wrote the last two sentences and turned.

  ‘Done.’

  She pulled the sheet of quarto from the typewriter’s carriage and handed it to him. Castro sat at his desk and began reading the text. Sevilla hadn’t moved from the doorway. She knew that it was only her imagination, but she could feel when the policeman’s eyes were fixed on the inspector and then turned on her, at the nape of her neck. Both of them were waiting for Castro to finish reading, and she imagined that the officer was maliciously anticipating the opposite response to what she was hoping for.

  ‘Fine,’ the inspector said at last. ‘This can be published. You just have to take out this part here.’

  Castro pointed to the sentence that described the position of the dead woman’s body.

  ‘Take out the part about the dress. This isn’t for the society pages.’

  She accepted the deletion with the private satisfaction of knowing that he was forcing her to erase a petty detail because he hadn’t found anything he could reproach her for.

  ‘What are you still doing here, Sevilla?’

  ‘Waiting to take the typewriter back.’

  ‘Well, go on, take it.’

  Sevilla put the typewriter on the little trolley and dragged it out of the room. Castro looked at Ana and said, ‘Don’t even think about changing a single line of the text you showed me. Even though you forgot to make me a carbon copy, I will notice any differences.’

  She was sure about that.

  Ten minutes later, she left the headquarters with a smile on her face, which was such an unusual sight that two women walking down the Vía Layetana stared at her in surprise.

  7

  Pablo Noguer liked his new office. He liked it even though the furniture had been scavenged from other parts of the firm and the various styles didn’t match. But it was his, and it was on Bruch Street at the corner of Consejo de Ciento, far enough from his father’s law practice, which was further north in the Ensanche district on Londres Street. Also, he had a huge picture window that opened on to the block’s large central courtyard. You could look out and let your gaze wander over the changing choreography of blinds and curtains.

  The office was a bit remote from the firm’s reception area. His clients, or more accurately the clients Calvet, the second in command, assigned him were less important and less well off than those of the other attorneys, and he received them in the firm’s conference room. And he had many cases where he was acting as a public defender. ‘To break you in,’ Jaime Pla, the head partner of the firm, had said. ‘There is no better school for a good lawyer than daily contact with the dregs of society. Take good note of everything you see, Noguer. Get an unvarnished look at what humans are capable of.’

  So Pablo learned from all sorts of conmen, pickpockets, pimps, prostitutes and murderers. If that was the idea, Pla was a good teacher.

  He hung his coat in an old art deco tallboy that no one had wanted. It was time to go and see Maribel.

  He found her, as always, sitting at her desk in the anteroom to Pla’s office. When she saw him, she gestured for him to come over. In her white blouse and navy jacket, she looked just like any secretary in a well-established firm: tidy and competent. She was pretty and pleasant too. Pablo smiled at her and she smiled back. He presumed that Maribel had taken a certain liking to him because she was much more friendly and gracious with him than with the other lawyers in the firm. But that morning, there wasn’t time for the usual small talk.

  ‘Pla wanted to talk to you as soon as you got in. I’ll let him know you’re here.’

  Pablo was surprised. What did Pla want? He normally worked with Calvet.

  Maribel hung up and looked at him. ‘You can go on in.’

  She stood and opened the door for him as she did for the head partner’s clients. She waited until he had taken a couple of steps inside and closed the door discreetly behind him.

  Pla pointed to a chair in front of his desk and continued writing with his solid, robust body leaning over the table like a novice schoolboy, an impression that Pablo knew very well was deceptive. No one was less clumsy and innocent than Jaime Pla. For a while, the room was silent except for the scratch of pen on paper, the dull blows of the blotting paper he applied with vigorous movements and the rustle of the signed documents as he put them away in their folder. Finally his leather desk pad was clear. Pla lifted his head and stared at Pablo as he twirled the fountain pen between his fingers.

  ‘I’m pleased you came quickly, Noguer!’

  He held up a hand to keep Pablo from replying.

  ‘It’s an unpleasant matter. Extremely unpleasant. And serious.’

  Pablo took the precaution of saying nothing. He looked at Pla squarely, trying to maintain a neutral expression.

  ‘The day before yesterday you were in an�
�’ Pla paused briefly, ‘establishment.’

  Pablo nodded.

  Two days before, he had gone out with some of his young colleagues from the firm. Calvet had invited them. Pablo had understood it as some sort of initiation rite: going out for drinks together, going to a brothel and the next day toasting the occasion with Alka-Seltzer dissolved in water.

  ‘There, there were some…’ Pla hesitated again, ‘some excesses. Various excesses.’

  That was also true. He would have preferred to forget about them, and he felt embarrassed by some of the images that came into his head.

  Pla’s gaze became kindly. Pablo was familiar with the strategies his boss used in the courtroom. This expression worked to reassure reluctant witnesses so that he could then deliver a well-timed blow and destroy their credibility entirely. He prepared himself.

  ‘All of us, when we are young, have to let off steam. Well, later too, because a man is a man and has his needs. But’ – the kindness vanished – ‘there are limits.’

  Pla opened the main drawer of his desk and pulled out an envelope.

  ‘Someone filed a complaint with the police. It seems that on the night in question you consumed illegal drugs, namely cocaine. It seems you also sold the drug.’

  This was only partly true. That night there was plenty of everything: food, alcohol, women. Cocaine too. But he hadn’t brought it. He didn’t know where it had come from or who started spreading it around. No one sold cocaine there, only consumed it and, from what he could remember, the other three young colleagues, Miranda, Ripoll and Gómez, did too. Perhaps Pla knew as much, perhaps not. Pablo reacted as he had learned to. ‘Never admit to anything. It’s always better to counter-attack,’ his father would hammer into him.

  ‘That’s slander. Who filed the complaint against me?’

  Pla stared at him. ‘It was anonymous.’

  Before Pablo could reply, he continued, ‘Well, the complaint, due to fortunate circumstances that I don’t want to go into now, came from Vía Layetana straight into my hands. Luckily. So, give thanks to the goddess of Fortune or,’ Pla smiled, ‘light a candle to Saint Martin, the patron saint of drinkers, who must have been looking out for you.’