The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  Some of the nosy parkers were crowded around the nearest end of the bridge and were watching the scene from there, ignoring the trains that passed behind their backs, making the entire structure vibrate. Some lads took advantage of their mothers’ distraction to place coins on the tracks for the passing trains to flatten.

  ‘Have you looked to see if he was carrying any ID?’ Isidro asked the policemen who’d been keeping watch over the body since a fisherman had found it trapped in the reeds and informed the police.

  ‘We haven’t touched anything.’

  ‘Well done.’

  But this meant he had to do it. It really repulsed him to touch dead bodies that had been in the water. He had always avoided them, even in his village when the sea coughed up some drowned sailor’s body. It was their scent, and the feel of their skin.

  He knelt down and for a moment he thought he caught a whiff of saltpetre and putrefaction, but the body hadn’t come out of the sea. It smelled only of decay. He brought his hand to it, opened the jacket and pulled out the wallet with his fingertips.

  ‘Here.’

  He passed it to one of the policemen, who understood that he had to examine the contents. As he dried his fingers on his mackintosh, Castro watched the officer who had taken the wallet without flinching now open it up and list everything he found: ‘A five-peseta bill, a faded bus ticket. Look. He even had his ID on him.’

  Castro grabbed it from his hands. The document was still wet, but the name was perfectly legible: Abel Mendoza.

  He lifted his head and said, ‘Mariona Sobrerroca’s murderer.’

  His colleagues gawped at him. Castro enjoyed the moment immensely.

  33

  It was four in the afternoon when Ana stepped inside Castro’s office, the third time she’d called at the police headquarters. She had spent the day wandering the city.

  The inspector received her in shirtsleeves behind a pile of folders. She recognised them. She knew the ones filling another table and piled up on two chairs; they were the files that she and Beatriz had seen in Mendoza’s house in Martorell.

  Castro had to beckon her in a second time because she was still in the doorway. She obeyed. The long wait and her two prior attempts to speak with him had chipped away at her. She felt fragile, porous, like a sand sculpture that would disintegrate as soon as Castro applied the slightest pressure. Sometimes waiting for a blow is as hard as receiving it, and she had spent so many hours speculating how and in what form it would be delivered that at first she was unable to understand what the inspector said to her.

  ‘I have to congratulate you, Señorita Martí.’

  ‘Well, I… the truth is that…’

  ‘But, don’t just stand there.’

  Castro stood up and extended his hand to her. They shook hands firmly.

  ‘Good job. You saved us many hours of investigation, and there are a few poor wretches who have you to thank for being released from a state-subsidised cell and bread and water rations.’

  She responded to his congratulations with a disconcerted smile. She didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  ‘The case is solved.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We know who killed Mariona Sobrerroca. Thanks to your discovery in Martorell, we know the relationship between the victim and the criminal and we can imagine the motives.’

  ‘So, it was Abel Mendoza?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘The motives?’

  ‘We suppose that, after striking up a friendship with Señora Sobrerroca and establishing an intimate relationship with her, he discovered that the victim had valuable objects in her home and tried to rob her. She surprised him in the act and then Mendoza killed her.’

  The inspector responded easily this time, even though the question that followed his statement harboured some doubt.

  ‘You suppose? What does he say?’

  ‘Nothing. And he won’t. This morning we found him dead in the Llobregat.’

  The next remark came unprompted by a question.

  ‘Suicide, by all indications. We don’t yet have the autopsy results.’

  ‘Then the case is definitively solved?’

  ‘We’re waiting on the autopsy, as I said, but the visual inspection points to suicide.’

  ‘When can I…?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow. We don’t want anything to come out in the press until we are sure. Then we will give you the pertinent information, although your colleague has already been by this morning to tell us that he is back on the job.’

  ‘My colleague?’

  ‘Carlos Belda. But don’t worry, this case is yours. Obviously!’

  Again Castro demonstrated what Ana had come to think of as his telepathic powers, saying, with his gaze distractedly in a file folder, ‘I don’t like Belda either, but I suppose my reasons are very different to yours.’

  She didn’t want to go into her reasons. Erasing Belda from her thoughts was starting to become common practice, and she found it most pleasurable.

  As would be the conversation with Sanvisens, where she explained her role in solving the case, when she showed him that having given her the opportunity hadn’t been a mistake. It had been a good move, and an act of justice. Not some sort of recompense, as Belda presumed, but professional justice.

  34

  Beatriz was aware of her own restlessness. There was something, she couldn’t even call it a thought, more like a hunch, that stirred deep in her mind. Had she really been so deeply affected by what they had discovered in Martorell? Why hadn’t she been able to get all of those women who had trusted Abel Mendoza out of her head, women he’d abandoned when he grew tired of them, or when they didn’t give him enough money? She thought of Jakob.

  One shouldn’t be so stupid as to aspire to be happy with someone. Sharing nights talking in a bar in Madrid; drinking wine and discussing literature; plans for the future; trivial things, too. And then, intoxicated by shared affinities and timid touches, walking along the city streets to reach the small flat in Cuatro Caminos where she lived while she wrote her doctoral thesis under the guidance of the old master. One shouldn’t give oneself over to such stories… Only to end up even more alone later. When Jakob’s scholarship ended, he returned to Frankfurt. They wrote to each other often. Once he visited her in Barcelona, shortly before the war. She showed him the city and even introduced him to her parents. Her mother tore her eyes away from the French novel she was reading for a moment and asked her, ‘Are you going to get married?’

  ‘Why?’ she had responded in a tone that made it clear how absurd the idea seemed to her.

  They were kindred spirits who didn’t need papers.

  Jakob went back to Germany, but shortly afterwards, he and his parents had to flee the country. He obtained a post as a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Edinburgh. At that point she no longer found the idea of getting married so absurd. Neither did he, from the looks of it, because he married a rich Scottish woman. He even sent her an invitation to the wedding. Now, every once in a while, he would send her his latest book, or the offprints of his publications. Depending on the mood she was in, she would either throw them out immediately or leave them in some corner where she couldn’t see them.

  No new Jakob would come. There had been the odd fling; a couple of times they had ended up in a discreet love hotel or in a motel room in one of the cities where she had attended conferences. She got up out of the chair in which she had been trying, in vain, to read and headed to her desk. The best thing would be to work a little.

  She sat down and put on her glasses. A fellow student had sent her a doctoral thesis in which the author presented further arguments to pinpoint Gonzalo de Berceo’s origins in La Rioja. Nothing new. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but at that moment she couldn’t care less about the vicissitudes of an eighteenth-century cleric and poet and his Alexandrine verses. She shot a glance at the small pile of Abel Mendoza’s letters.
A melancholy look that turned playful as she wondered, why not try to work out where he was from? It would be funny if he were from La Rioja, too. Mendoza had to be a surname with Basque roots. She checked it in one of her books of heraldry. She was right: from Llodio, in Álava. It pleased her immensely to be right. A last name from Álava, but Abel Mendoza lived in Martorell, in the Baix Llobregat region. She would have to find out if he was Catalan or from somewhere else. Plunging into a fresh rereading of his letters, she found that they had completely lost their ability to make her sad. They were no longer fake love letters, they were first-hand linguistic material for reconstructing a story she was fascinated by. Her work in the field was beginning to bear fruit.

  It was a shame that they were typed copies. Were they medieval manuscripts, she would analyse the way each letter was drawn and the colour and detail of the illumination, to be able to attribute them to a particular monastery or school of scribes. But she only had fourteen letters copied on an old police station typewriter that would soon need a ribbon change. They were all written correctly; there were no spelling mistakes, real or faked, as in the anonymous letter denouncing Pablo.

  The subjects of the letters were all the same: his love and admiration for Mariona, quotes, allusions to their meetings and occasionally words of gratitude for the money she had ‘loaned’ him.

  But something didn’t fit.

  She read the last letter again carefully. That was it. There was something in it that was off; something in the tone was different. But why? Then she hit upon the answer. The key was in the more neutral words, the ones that didn’t transmit content: the adverbs, the conjunctions, the tag words that gave the letter its particular tonality. In the last one, the text was filled with connectors such as ‘really’, ‘truly’, ‘somehow’, ‘in other words’. There was also the imperative ‘look’, three times. The other letters didn’t contain any of those expressions.

  In her head she heard the voice of the old master repeating, ‘Check everything systematically. Science isn’t based on impressions, but on facts.’

  She sketched a chart on a sheet of paper and started to write down which words appeared in which letters. The results were surprising. In all of them except one she found elements of connection such as ‘surely’, ‘finally’, ‘in any case’; in the last one, those elements had been replaced by others such as ‘really’, ‘truly’, ‘somehow’, ‘in other words’, more in keeping with a new eagerness to reinforce his argument than merely to present it. All the letters except the last one displayed complex, sometimes elaborate, syntax and the vocabulary was more sophisticated.

  She took off her glasses.

  The last letter must be by a different author. She had to let Ana know.

  35

  ‘No,’ Ana refused fervently. ‘It can’t be.’

  Beatriz sighed. For more than fifteen minutes Ana had been insisting that the case was solved. That Abel Mendoza had been Mariona’s lover and her killer. That he had met Mariona through an advert, had extracted a lot of money from her and had finally strangled her, perhaps because she had discovered his dirty dealings or because he had tried to burgle her house and she had surprised him in the act. Afterwards, perhaps remorseful over his crime, he had thrown himself into the river. And thanks to her help, the inspector had solved the case.

  Beatriz persisted. ‘I am absolutely sure that the last letter was written by someone else.’

  ‘And what does that matter?’

  Ana frowned and let her head fall in a gesture that showed dismay and impatience in equal measure. Beatriz didn’t allow herself to be deterred. ‘Well, it matters quite a bit. There are two possibilities. The first is that Mendoza is the true killer, as you and your inspector affirm. Which, pardon my frankness, is very convenient, since Mendoza is dead. But the fact that the letters were written by two people shows that at least one other person knew about his relationship with Mariona, and that that person pretended to be him in order to make a date with her. The last few letters of their correspondence all have the same structure; they talk about how wonderful their last meeting was, and set up the next one. The killer copied the model, went to Mariona’s house to rob her and killed her.’

  ‘And Mendoza?’

  ‘He committed suicide when he found himself without a source of income and the suspect in a murder investigation. Or the other guy killed him.’

  ‘And how did your mysterious author gain access to the previous letters?’

  Beatriz soon found herself replying.

  ‘Perhaps it was someone close to the victim who found the letters. Her maid, for example.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Don’t forget that I was there when Castro interrogated her, that I was watching her face. She wasn’t lying.’

  ‘Some people are very cunning. She left, supposedly to visit family outside of Barcelona, so that she would have an alibi and the accomplice did the rest.’

  ‘Not that woman. Besides, in that case there was no need for a letter. She could have told her accomplice when Mariona would be out. Actually, if the letter really is by someone else, it exonerates her even more.’

  There was a tense silence. Beatriz looked out of the café window. It was getting busier out on the street. From here they could see the building that housed the offices of La Vanguardia, where she had gone to inform Ana of her discovery. She had found her in a large room where fifteen other people were banging on typewriters, talking on the telephone or yelling from desk to desk.

  She turned to her cousin, who seemed to be examining her coffee cup very carefully. She ventured a joke.

  ‘Are you expecting to read the right answer in the coffee grounds?’

  Ana glared at her furiously.

  ‘Beatriz, the matter is completely resolved. The only thing that doesn’t fit is your theory about the two authors.’

  ‘That’s true. And since that theory is correct, the whole solution to the case collapses like a house of cards.’

  ‘Not at all. It only shows that perhaps, perhaps, there was a third person who was aware of the situation. And not even that seems to be proven by your absurd little chart.’

  Ana pointed to the paper that was still on the table, the chart where Beatriz had written down in detail all the stylistic deviations of the last letter, which had reminded her so much of the controversy over the possible double authorship of the medieval classic La Celestina.

  ‘Maybe he was just having a bad day, and that’s why he used other words.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or he was in a hurry and wasn’t as careful in his composition.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re so stubborn!’

  ‘Yes, because I’m right.’ She paused briefly. She almost didn’t dare to say what was going through her head, but she said it. ‘Ana, I’ll remind you that, without any sort of evidence, you were the one who was already thinking, on the way back from Martorell, that Mendoza had to be the killer. I’m afraid that your presumption influenced you. That type of procedure is not scientific.’

  ‘We aren’t dealing with science; this is a police investigation.’

  ‘Shouldn’t they go together, without prejudice or interest? That’s how I’ve worked. I don’t think anything has clouded my judgement.’

  Ana scowled angrily.

  ‘And you’re saying mine is clouded?’

  ‘Yes. If you write the article as you are planning to, your boss at the paper will be thrilled, Castro will want to work only with you and your career will take off. Don’t you think that could cloud your vision?’

  She had struggled to say it as gently as possible. Ana made as if to grab her jacket while gesturing to the waiter that she wanted to pay. Beatriz continued, ‘I’m not saying that my theory explains what happened, I’m merely asking you to accept that there is reasonable doubt, there are loose ends, which means that…’

  ‘That the case isn’t solved, you don
’t have to repeat it. God! I’m not surprised no one can put up with you.’

  Beatriz felt the violence of the jab, but she didn’t want the rage that had dictated Ana’s words to overcome her too. She resorted to one final argument.

  ‘I’m talking about doubt, Ana. The mere suspicion that Mendoza wasn’t the killer should be enough. Remember that you yourself told me, to convince me to help you, that we couldn’t let Mariona Sobrerroca’s killer go free and not receive the punishment he deserves.’

  ‘The afternoon shift is about to start. I should be at my desk.’

  Beatriz put her hand on Ana’s arm and said, without raising her voice, ‘I think you know that I’m right. Knowing something and not being able to say it is the norm in this country. But not wanting to know something, intentionally shutting your eyes because it doesn’t suit you to say what you know, that’s opportunism.’

  Ana got up and put on her jacket. ‘You don’t know when to stop, do you?’ She turned on her heel and left.

  ‘See you soon.’

  Beatriz wasn’t sure that Ana had heard her; she went out of the café without looking back. From the window she saw her cross the street, but she wasn’t heading towards La Vanguardia’s offices, rather to the Plaza Cataluña.

  Beatriz bit her lip. Arrogance. Wanting always to be right was a form of arrogance. Her particular mortal sin. Ana had left furious, and didn’t want to listen to her any more. Being right doesn’t get you very far if no one will listen to you.

  36

  Ana crossed the Plaza Cataluña briskly. Even though she had to write the article, she also needed to walk a little to clear her head.

  She was confused, and increasingly irate with Beatriz for having plunged her into this confusion. ‘The seeds of doubt,’ she formulated to herself. More than a seed, she corrected herself: her cousin’s words had grown like the legendary magical beans. ‘Very witty. And now what?’