The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  ‘We don’t know that. I was speculating, Beatriz.’

  ‘Perhaps. But still, I think you’ve got me into something that is even uglier than I thought.’

  ‘I got you into? Except for your hangover this morning, I have the feeling you did it willingly.’

  Beatriz let out a weary sigh before answering, ‘You’re right, but I think this is where I bow out.’

  For a few miles all that could be heard was the tapping of raindrops on the car roof. As they were waiting at the gate of a level crossing, Beatriz searched for something in her handbag. She took out her cigarette holder.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  Ana shook her head. ‘Did you learn that in Argentina, too?’

  ‘No. Just the holder.’

  The gate started to rise. Since there were no cars behind, Beatriz lit her cigarette unhurriedly. Then she pulled away.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Ana? Why do you want to be a crime reporter?’

  ‘I don’t want to be a crime reporter, I want to be a reporter of serious news. I’m sick of fashion and society.’

  ‘But isn’t it a huge leap from parties to such gruesome subjects?’

  ‘They are two sides of the same coin,’ she started to say.

  Beatriz gave her a look of admiration that she found so flattering she was almost tempted to conceal her real reasons. But, checking in briefly with her conscience, she was forced to admit, ‘I’m writing about this case because it’s the one they assigned me. I’m not fooling myself. I know that I have my name to thank for being able to work and that, on the other hand, because of my name, there are stories that will remain out of my reach, just as there are others they won’t let me near because I’m a woman. So, when the chance to write about something important came up, I jumped at it.’

  Beatriz nodded in approval as she brought the cigarette holder to her lips.

  Ana kept only one motive hidden: her growing fascination for this kind of thing.

  The rest of the trip passed in silence, and soon they were back in Barcelona.

  ‘Where should I drop you?’ Beatriz asked Ana.

  Beatriz had to be tired. Ana was, too: the lack of sleep, the trip, everything they had discovered was enough for one day. She imagined Beatriz would put the car back in the garage, take the lift up to her flat and find dinner prepared, but Ana still had an unpleasant formality to deal with. Because she wasn’t kidding herself – she knew Castro wouldn’t be pleased with what they had done. Her tiredness had given her the clarity she had lacked in the last few days. Her actions had been a mistake. Suddenly she saw herself and Beatriz like two amateur detectives in a British popular novel. They were amateurs, but instead of the Sussex countryside, they were nosing around Martorell, and the policeman they had to report their findings to wasn’t a rather grumpy but essentially friendly inspector. He was a detective in Barcelona’s Criminal Investigation Brigade; he didn’t wear a tweed suit or smoke a pipe and he certainly wasn’t friendly.

  She asked Beatriz to drop her off at the Plaza Universidad. Her cousin, stricken by her own tiredness, didn’t notice Ana’s sudden low spirits; nor did she insist on taking her along the Ronda to her door. She was in a rush to get to her own house.

  ‘Come on, now go and sleep it off.’

  The awkwardness of Ana’s words of farewell as she climbed out of the car was further evidence of her growing anxiety.

  She walked towards Riera Alta Street, pondering what her opening gambit might be. She’d work the rest out later, but what she needed were a few phrases to get started, and she was struggling to find them. She prayed her only instrument – her tongue – wouldn’t leave her in the lurch.

  She couldn’t make the call from her house. She didn’t want to be spied on by Señora Sauret. She needed a more discreet place to call from. She went into several cafés pretending to be looking for someone until she found a place where the telephone was in a booth. She asked for permission; the waiter set the meter to zero and gave her a line. She dialled Castro’s number. No answer. Maybe he had already gone home, she thought with relief after the sixth ring, but then someone picked up at the other end.

  ‘Hello?’

  She recognised him, but she bought a little time by asking, in a tremulous voice, ‘Inspector Castro?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  ‘Ana Martí.’

  No reaction at the other end. No greeting, no snort of irritation.

  Castro sensed something. Or was she only imagining it, out of a bad conscience?

  ‘Speak.’

  Yes, he had sensed something. In his case, ‘speak’ wasn’t an invitation; it assumed that she would tell him what she had to tell him. So it was best to get on with it.

  ‘I’m calling because I wanted to give you some information that might be useful in the Sobrerroca case.’

  ‘Very well. What is the information and where did you get it from?’

  ‘I discovered that Mariona Sobrerroca was corresponding with, and was almost definitely in a romantic relationship with, a man named Abel Mendoza, of Martorell. They met through an advertisement in the magazine Mujer Actual. In my opinion, this man could be a suspect in her murder.’

  ‘How did you find this out?’

  She told him that she had had the clue from the letters she’d copied in his office, explaining how she had found out where the advert came from and how she had obtained the address in Martorell.

  She wasn’t expecting applause, but the silence that followed her explanation was ominous.

  ‘Did you touch anything in this Mendoza’s house?’

  ‘I read some of the letters. That’s how I know how his scam worked.’

  Silence again. She knew that Castro could tell she was hiding something, but she didn’t want to implicate Beatriz. She had been careful not to let a single ‘we’ slip out during their exchange; she had to resist that distrusting silence at the other end of the telephone.

  ‘You aren’t keeping anything from me?’ enquired Castro.

  ‘No.’

  She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t fall into the trap of trying to underpin her denial with more words, like every typical liar.

  ‘We’ll see. Tomorrow I’ll see you at the station at ten. Then you’ll tell me the whole thing again.’

  He hung up.

  Castro hadn’t raised his voice once in the entire conversation. Ana would have preferred it if he had. She was exhausted. Her feet dragged heavily, the walk home seemed never-ending. She opened the door and walked right past the postboxes. She still had four flights to climb.

  31

  That night Ana didn’t have nightmares because she could barely sleep. Tomorrow I’ll see you at the station at ten. Then you’ll tell me the whole thing again.

  She woke up with those words echoing in her mind and, as she made coffee, she repeated them out loud, trying to imitate Castro’s tone.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll see you at the station at ten. Then you’ll tell me the whole thing again.’

  She finally got Castro’s tone, and all of a sudden felt intimidated. She would tell it all to him again and then she’d see what happened. At the very least he would get angry. That she thought she could take. But he could also throw her off the case, and she wouldn’t be able to object and say she had given him information, the generous exchange that Beatriz had mentioned at Pastís. What nonsense! She imagined the inspector’s dry laugh if she dared to raise the notion, and she was ashamed at the ridiculousness of the thought that she, Ana Martí, a novice journalist, could negotiate with that volatile man.

  She drank another cup of coffee, trying to think of the person she wished she had sitting across the kitchen table from her right then. Gabriel, no: he had his own worries. She couldn’t go to her father either. Only bring successes home, that was her motto. She’d rather not make Beatriz nervous. She was hoping she hadn’t got her into any trouble. Besides, she didn’t need any poems that morning, just moral support. Sanvisens,
she would talk to Sanvisens. She finished off her coffee.

  It was eight in the morning. Sanvisens would already be at the office. She had time to talk to him before she went to the station.

  The day was going to be sunny; the morning fog beat a retreat, not without leaving a souvenir of its visit in the humidity that impregnated the air. She wrapped a jacket around herself. She noticed she was the only person taking her time amid the flow of people that passed her on the pavement. Heavy legs, sombre faces, occasional voices. A porter pushing a metal cart loaded with boxes of vegetables said as he passed her, ‘Reciting the rosary at this hour? I’ll slip you something you can worship.’

  Ana hadn’t realised that she’d been repeating the policeman’s words in a low voice. She sent the porter to hell, but he didn’t mind much; he was already several metres past her, swerving obstacles. When she stepped into the newspaper office she heard a familiar but unexpected, voice, ‘A rookie! A girl!’

  Her heart skipped a beat. Belda was there. She suddenly remembered that Sanvisens had told her last week, but at the time she’d been so excited about her plan that her boss’s words reached her now like a lost letter finally arriving at its destination.

  She stepped back, out of view of the two men. They hadn’t noticed her presence. Even though the scene seemed absurd, like something out of a bad spy movie, she stayed glued to the doorframe to eavesdrop on their argument. She sensed that what would come next was going to hurt her and yet she didn’t want to miss a single word.

  Carlos Belda was beside himself.

  ‘This is unheard of! It’s as if, instead of being off sick for a week, one day I’ve woken up a hundred years later, like Sleeping Beauty. A rookie! A girl!’

  ‘I know, and you don’t have to shout,’ replied Mateo Sanvisens.

  ‘It’s the case of the year. You could at least have given it to Roig.’

  Tomás Roig would have passed it straight to Belda as soon as he asked. Not only because he was on the staff, but because on more than one occasion they had saved each other’s arses. Carlos had written Tomás’s articles when his wife had died and he had spent several days out of the loop. Everyone knew that Tomás – who was more fond of the Regime – was his first censor; his red marks had spared Belda more than a few problems. ‘YRY’ Tomás would write when Belda didn’t manage to hide his pro-Catalan ideas, an abbreviation for ‘You’re revealing yourself’.

  ‘Why didn’t you give it to Roig?’

  ‘Can you imagine Roig moving in those circles?’

  Since he had become a widower, Roig’s natural slovenliness knew no bounds. Sanvisens had asked him at least to come to work in a suit, and he did. A suit that gradually became covered in stains, until Carlos would have pity on him and take him by the arm after work and say, ‘Today, Tomás, time for a touch-up.’

  This little alliteration meant that they were going to a small dry cleaner’s in the Barrio Chino, on Unión Street, which shared its back courtyard with a brothel. While the dry cleaner took care of his suit, they would spend several hours in the adjoining establishment. Tomás Roig left with a clean, ironed suit and a soiled conscience.

  ‘All right,’ conceded Belda, ‘Roig isn’t the best choice, but that novice? Who does she think she is?’

  Sanvisens gave him an answer: ‘She’s doing a good job. And the police have accepted her readily.’

  ‘Who’s in charge of the case?’

  ‘Castro.’

  ‘Castro? Castro is mine!’

  ‘Calm down, Carlos.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mateo. I’m out for a week, and you replace me with the first person you bump into.’

  ‘Don’t be so unreasonable.’

  But Carlos was too furious, and the Sobrerroca case was too alluring, so he kept at it. ‘If she wasn’t his daughter, would you have given it to her? Ever since she showed up one fine day, you started giving her little jobs. She writes well, I’ll give her that, but there are a lot of people who write well and they don’t all get to work at La Vanguardia. She’s freelance, OK, but if we’re not careful, soon she’ll be asking for her own desk and then a contract. Will you give it to her?’

  Sanvisens turned his back as he said, ‘Carlitos, don’t push me. We’ll talk later.’

  ‘Yes, we will. This subject’s not closed.’

  Ana hadn’t been wrong: eavesdropping on that conversation did hurt. Carlos Belda’s words stung. Those belittling adjectives held such power over her! And the accusation of favouritism hurt her even more. Even though Sanvisens had dismissed it.

  She still had more than an hour before her meeting with Castro. That must be how the defeated feel on their way to sign the surrender agreement. What do you do with the hours, the days, between being declared a loser and when the document is signed and sealed? How do you kill that time? Now she knew: reviewing all your mistakes, one after the other, time and time again.

  She entered the station on the dot of ten and asked for Castro.

  ‘He’s not here. He had to go out on urgent business. He’ll be back later.’

  32

  Isidro Castro loathed ambiguity, especially when it affected his judgement. Ana Martí’s call had disconcerted him. On the one hand, it made him angry, no, furious that she had dared to investigate on her own; on the other, he had to concede that, if what she had told him was true, it radically shifted the course of the investigation. It wasn’t, as they had supposed, a break-in, at least not in the first place, but rather a scam artist specialising in wealthy widows. Not a negligible discovery in the least. And he owed it to her. So instead of calling her in immediately, he chose to see her the next morning. Besides, he was exhausted; as on every day recently, he had spent more than twelve hours working and he wanted to have dinner at home. Even so, before leaving he had sent two officers to keep watch on Mendoza’s residence in Martorell.

  Once he got home, he regretted not having spoken with her earlier, because he couldn’t get what she had told him out of his head. His dilemma could be summed up in two alternating phrases: ‘Who does she think she is?’ and ‘Boy, is she clever!’ He only thought them though. He never spoke to Araceli about work. Really, he didn’t talk about much at all with her; she, on the other hand, talked a lot. That was fine; it distracted and relaxed him. His wife’s life was tinged with a sedating grey, her daily triumphs and defeats were so innocuous that he thought of her life as ideal, the closest to a state of peace that he could possibly imagine. Araceli’s words and the children’s stories over dinner distracted him from his dilemma over Ana Martí. Daniel barely coughed.

  Before going to bed, they listened to the comedy programme on the radio. Araceli enjoyed Mary Santpere’s humour. Isidro closed his eyes and listened to the comedienne’s voice and his wife’s laughter as if they were both coming out of the device that presided over the parlour from the sideboard. He forgot about the case during that time, but when he put his head down on the pillow his thoughts returned to his conversation with the journalist. Who did she think she was? His body tensed up and he clenched his fists.

  ‘Is something wrong, Isidro?’ his wife asked him.

  ‘Nothing, just a cramp. Sleep, sleep.’

  He heard a giggle from the children’s room.

  ‘Boys! If I have to get up, you’ll be sorry. Come on, put down the comics!’ he shouted at them.

  Reading past their bedtime again. Those boys were clever. Like Ana Martí.

  The next morning, while he shaved, he thought of the call once again. At that point in the day, he was more grumpy than anything else, and that gave him the solution to his dilemma: he would thank Ana Martí for her help and then he would put her in her place. Who did she think she was? First of all, and therein lay the root of this whole mess, she thought she was a journalist. A lady journalist. Absurd. Crime reporter. They should have left her in her society pages, talking about outfits and cocktails. As soon as she arrived, he was going to come down heavy on her. She was lucky he hadn’t com
plained to the newspaper…

  Shortly afterwards, he left the house and headed into the city. He lived in Collblanc, a neighbourhood in Hospitalet de Llobregat.

  He jumped off the tram at the Plaza Universidad. He would walk the rest of the way. He took Pelayo Street. First he passed by a lingerie shop where it was rumoured there were trapdoors in some of the changing rooms, and they kidnapped the good-looking girls to sell them to harems; then he passed by the offices of La Vanguardia. Was Ana Martí already working? As soon as she showed up at his office he was going to give her a dressing-down she’d never forget. Then he would send her back to her newspaper. Definitively.

  But as it turned out, the dressing-down would have to wait. When he reached the police headquarters, a colleague in the CIB came out to meet him.

  ‘Isidro. Where have you been? They’ve found a dead body in the Llobregat.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s yours.’

  ‘Mine? I’ve got another case.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that. Verdejo is in Saragossa, Prim is in court, Manzaneque I don’t know about, and that’s all Goyanes told me. So it’s yours.’

  ‘Where did they find the stiff?’

  ‘On the edges of Prat del Llobregat. Near the railway bridge.’

  A well-aimed stare saved Isidro from having to ask any more questions.

  ‘A man, about thirty years old, fully dressed. The car’s been waiting for you outside for half an hour.’

  The car reeked of the driver’s sweat and the aftershave lotion of the man who was already seated in the back. They crossed the city in silence, three men in an unmarked car. Even so, when they drove close to the pavement on the Paseo de Colón, past the main post office, he had noticed a few fearful looks of recognition. Maybe it was their faces, maybe it was the vehicle, maybe both. It didn’t matter; the only thing that mattered was that their mere presence was intimidating.

  ‘They’re shitting themselves,’ said Olivares, the driver, as if he had read his thoughts.

  They reached the Prat. Curious onlookers were following the police progress around the corpse that lay on a piece of fabric spread out on the bank of the Llobregat River.