The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  Her words made him even more furious, but they also thawed out Roig, who, before Belda could say something even more tactless, stepped in front of him.

  ‘Relax, Carlos. Live and let live.’

  Belda dropped the page onto the desk. His lips were trembling with fury but he didn’t speak again. He settled in his place, lit a cigarette and, clenching it between his lips, started to bang away on the typewriter.

  Half an hour later, a porter came up with the post. Ana never got any. Notifications of social events were addressed to the newspaper; as were the scarce thank-you notes from people mentioned in her pieces, and the fortunately even more scarce complaints. Still, she looked distractedly at the limping, grey-bearded man who went from desk to desk, always placing the envelopes in the left-hand corner, the stub of a Celtas cigarette stuck at the side of his mouth. He would have put them in order twice: first, alphabetically by the recipient’s last name; then by the size of the envelope. Once he had them all prepared, he went up to the first floor of the building and began his delivery, also in alphabetical order. He didn’t care if Francisco José Aparicio was seated next to Ramón Fonseca. Before he gave Fonseca his letters, he would cross the entire office to give Carlos Belda his, as he was second in the alphabetical order. He couldn’t do it any other way; he didn’t know how.

  ‘A bit fuddled from the bombs,’ one of the journalists had said once, after another failed attempt to make him grasp a more efficient way of distributing the post.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said another. ‘Besides, why do you care how he does it? The results are the same.’

  ‘And his obsession with the clear corner, what about that?’ replied the first in a more than half-hearted defence, but he really didn’t care.

  But you had to comply, and always leave the left corner of the desk clear so that the porter could place the envelopes there with the words ‘Today’s post,’ wait for an acknowledgement of receipt and only then go on to the next desk.

  The desk that Ana was sitting at wasn’t prepared; the left corner was buried beneath old copies of Noticiero Universal. The porter stayed standing before her with an envelope in his hand and an incredulous expression on his face. Ana extended her hand to take the envelope, but the porter squeezed it against his chest and his eyes went to the pile of newspapers. The other journalists were looking on. She rushed to remove the newspapers and the porter put the envelope down, aligning it perfectly with the edges of the desk.

  ‘Today’s post,’ he said with relief.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  The porter continued his route. After Martí came Roig. The other writers went back to work.

  She picked up the envelope. Yes, it was addressed to her, and there was no sender’s address. She opened it up.

  Dear Madam:

  You don’t know me, although I’m sure my name will be familiar to you. I am Abel Mendoza. I am the person you and the police think is dead. It is all a terrible misunderstanding and I want to tell you the truth. Can we meet? You will understand that I find myself in a delicate situation, and so I sincerely beg you not to inform the police – let me tell you the truth first. I suggest Friday the 16th, at three in the afternoon at the Estación de Francia.

  Which is to say, today. In a few hours. She kept reading.

  Please sit on one of the two benches beside the main door that leads to the platforms. Carry a copy of La Vanguardia and wear something blue. Please, do not try to trick me. We will be watching you, and remember that I have interesting things to tell you.

  It was signed Abel Mendoza. If the letter was real, and Abel Mendoza was alive, then who was the dead man in the Llobregat River? What was their relationship, if there was one? But there had to be some link, because the dead man was carrying Abel Mendoza’s ID. There was also the possibility that the dead man really was Mendoza, and that the person who wrote the letter was setting a trap for her. Although she couldn’t imagine what motive he would have for doing that.

  ‘What? Getting fan letters already?’

  She hadn’t realised that Carlos Belda had approached her desk and was standing over her, arms crossed over his chest.

  She quickly turned the letter over and then saw that on the back there was a clumsy drawing of a rose. The Knight of the Rose. She covered it with her hand, but she was sure Belda had seen it. He burst out laughing, with loud, forced guffaws that sought to win him an audience. Several of the journalists looked up at him and Ana.

  ‘Our new reporter is getting letters from admirers. Who could it be? A murderer? A conman?’

  Since a few of the others laughed at his joke, Belda returned to his desk satisfied. He had finally got what he wanted, and he set to work. Still, Ana felt as if she was being watched for the rest of the time she was in the office.

  She looked at the letter again. That handwriting; she knew it. It was the same as the original letters she had copied in Castro’s office. Was it the same as the last letter, as well? It must have been, because if the handwriting had been different, she would have noticed it as she was copying them. Or perhaps not. Was she so focused on copying the content that she didn’t compare the handwriting? She hadn’t looked carefully. Why would she have? When she was copying them she was working under the assumption that they were all by the same author. But if the handwriting was the same, how could there have been two authors? And what if the handwriting was a scrivener’s? She couldn’t come up with a reason that might explain why two different authors would have dictated their letters for Mariona to the same person.

  The more she thought about it, the more confused she was about the letters.

  After considering it carefully, she decided that she would keep the rendezvous with the man claiming to be Abel Mendoza, but that she wouldn’t tell anyone, not Sanvisens and not Castro. Should she tell Beatriz? No. Mendoza, dead or alive, was the main suspect in Mariona’s murder. She had to be very careful. She might be meeting up with a killer. But they were meeting in a train station, a crowded public space. There was no way she would go with him anywhere that wasn’t full of witnesses. She grabbed the pointed, dagger-shaped letter opener that lay on the desk and put it in her handbag.

  An hour later, she rose to go to the rendezvous; Belda had his eyes glued to her. His mocking little smile had disappeared.

  43

  The Estación de Francia was so called because it was where trains heading north departed from; but a couple of years back it had become the destination for immigrants from the south of Spain fleeing a famine that didn’t officially exist. Since the police monitored the passengers, and sent those who had no work contract back whence they had come, many jumped out of the cars as the train was making its final turns, just before the metal structure of the station’s two naves came into view. Those who weren’t literally hunted down by the police discovered that the promised land still offered a few dingy holes for them in the shanty towns that rose up on the slopes of Montjuïc and in the Somorrostro and Can Tunis.

  Arriving at the station, Ana was met by a stream of people loaded down with suitcases, cardboard boxes tied with string and cloth bundles. She went up the stairs and crossed the lobby, dodging near collisions and trampled feet. There were two benches beside the main door to the platforms. Really, the author of the letter should have written flanking, she said to herself, immediately retorting, ‘How pedantic, I’m acting like Beatriz.’ She was nervous.

  Both benches were empty. She chose the one on the right and instantly thought that maybe she should sit on the left-hand one. She switched benches. It seemed more uncomfortable. That wasn’t possible; they were identical. Yes, she admitted, she was nervous.

  She unfolded her copy of La Vanguardia and made sure that her blue jacket was visible. Sky blue, the bluest thing she could find. She had had to buy it at the El Águila department store before heading to the rendezvous at the station. Unquestionably blue: not too close to green, like turquoise, nor imitating purple, like indigo. She had also taken i
nto account that navy blue could look black if the lighting was bad.

  Someone sat on the bench. Ana glanced to the right. The man by her side was strikingly handsome, with a well-proportioned profile: high forehead, straight nose, full lips without looking feminine, with the corners slightly upturned by the beginnings of a smile, a strong chin. The man turned and looked at her with intense blue eyes. He was meticulously shaved and his dark hair was carefully combed back, but the violet shadows under his eyes and his gaze gave a hint of something despicable in that lovely face. A few hours later, in a moment of calm, Ana would think of how the halo of danger he radiated had only added to his attractiveness. She even laughed at herself for imagining she was a saint resisting temptation, first Pablo and then Abel. But that came later. At that moment, on the bench at the Estación de Francia, her wonder at how handsome the supposed Abel Mendoza was, was overlaid by her astonishment when he addressed her.

  ‘Are you Ana Martí?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thank you for coming. I needed to speak with you.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, and immediately regretted it.

  The man looked at her in some confusion.

  ‘Because you are the one who writes about Mariona Sobrerroca.’

  ‘True, true,’ she hastened to say.

  ‘And because, according to your article, I’m dead.’

  ‘According to the police, as well.’

  ‘But as you can see, here I am.’

  ‘And who are you? The body found in the Llobregat had Abel Mendoza’s wallet on it.’

  ‘Yes, I know. What if we take a little walk around the park? We’ll end up drawing attention to ourselves here.’

  Ciudadela Park was a safe place. There were always people strolling, and wardens. They turned right out of the station. As they passed through the park gates, the man began to speak again.

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Perhaps, if you’ll allow me, with the most awkward question: did you kill Mariona Sobrerroca?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then is the man in the river the killer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because that man was my brother Mario, and I killed him.’

  Ana stopped short.

  ‘Please, let’s keep walking,’ he implored.

  This would have been the moment to ask why, but she was struck dumb.

  ‘I suppose I should keep talking,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘Please,’ Ana managed to say in a thin voice.

  ‘My brother and I had a kind of… business.’

  Abel Mendoza explained how he and his brother had started answering lonely hearts adverts from older women. He spoke in a confusing rush, with the urgency of someone who knows he doesn’t have enough time to tell her everything he wants to.

  ‘Mario was in hiding at the Martorell house. He’d escaped from jail. They put him there after the war. They were going to execute him. He was a Red, you know? He wrote a lot of pamphlets. When he escaped, he found me in our town, in Monzón, and since they would eventually have found him there, we went to Martorell to the house of an aunt who had emigrated to Mexico. Mario lived there in a false room behind the wardrobe, in the room where I wrote the letters.’

  Then Ana remembered how Beatriz had pointed out the wardrobe in the house in Martorell, and how she’d seemed uncomfortable. What she had attributed to nervousness at their trespassing was also due to her somehow sensing that the two storeys of the house didn’t match up.

  ‘He was always the clever one in the family; he had studied, he wanted to be a literature professor or a librarian and spend his days reading. He studied here, in Barcelona. And, even though he was a bookworm, he got into politics. He was highly intelligent. The letters were his idea. He wrote them; he was quite good, he always knew what they wanted to hear. And I was the face. At first we did it all very quickly. A couple of meetings, we’d take money from them, or they would give us some, and then, well, that would be that.’

  ‘And you? You, with the women…?’

  ‘You want to know if we were intimate? Less than you’d imagine. Most of them were real romantics. Mario was the one who did most of the work, writing the letters, finding the poems and telling me how I had to talk to them. He wrote the words and I, well, shall we say, added the music.’

  She tried to laugh, but failed.

  ‘Why did you kill your brother?’

  Mendoza tried to button up his jacket but it was too small for him. ‘It was an accident. We were fighting; I pushed him, he fell, hit the edge of a table and died.’

  ‘Why were you fighting?’

  ‘Over a disagreement.’

  They turned right and took one of the paths that led to the lake. Suddenly, Mendoza stopped short. A park warden was striding towards them. Ana froze, too. The guard, dressed in a uniform and with a nasty face, stopped in front of a bench and violently shook a woman who had lain down there to sleep.

  ‘Hey! You! This isn’t a bedroom! Sit up!’

  The woman was about forty years old. She was wrapped in a dirty blanket. With sleepy eyes she looked at the guard while she struggled to sit up.

  ‘Yes, sir. Forgive me, sir.’

  ‘If I see you lying down again, I’ll call the police.’

  ‘No, no! I’ll sit up.’

  Meanwhile, Abel Mendoza and Ana recovered from their shock and walked on. They didn’t speak again until they reached the lake.

  ‘Why did you fight with your brother?’

  ‘Mario didn’t agree with the way my relationship with Mariona was progressing.’

  ‘Why? Did you fall in love?’

  ‘Please! Not another romantic! Well, I think Mariona did, but what really bothered my brother was that we had a plan to go away together, just me and her. We wanted to go and live on the Côte d’Azur. As soon as we had enough money.’

  He shot a sad look at the Ciudadela Park’s pathetic lake.

  ‘We had it all planned.’

  ‘What did you have planned?’

  But Abel Mendoza was lost in another moment, with his gaze on the water. ‘When I told Mario about it, he was furious. I told him that there would be money for him too, plenty, but he criticised me for abandoning him.’

  Abel covered his face with his hands. ‘Then the accident happened. Since the house overlooks the river, I threw him into the water at night.’

  ‘And you put your wallet on him to hide his identity?’

  ‘No, I put his jacket on him because, even though I’m sure it seems absurd, I couldn’t just throw him into that cold water with so few clothes on. I didn’t think he had his wallet in the pocket, with a copy of my ID.’

  ‘Why was he carrying a copy of your ID?’

  ‘It was a fake he carried when he went out for a walk sometimes at night. He went along the river where no one would see him, but if he ever had the bad luck to run into a Civil Guard patrol, he carried those papers in my name. And now look, I’m officially dead. That’s why I’m going to finish what Mariona and I started.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what it’s all about?’ asked Ana, testing the waters.

  Mendoza smiled at her.

  ‘No. Not that. You’ll find out later.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  Mendoza looked straight ahead as he spoke to her. ‘Because it’s not the right moment. Don’t ask me any more about it, please.’

  ‘Why did you tell me all the rest?’

  ‘Because I thought it would interest you. It does interest you, doesn’t it?’

  Her ‘yes’ came out weakly. She didn’t like the situation, the veiled words after his confession. She was afraid, but not of the man she was speaking with. Despite not having proof, she believed him when he said that he wasn’t Mariona’s killer. What she didn’t understand was why he had sought her out – what did he expect from her? What Mendoza said next made her even more uneasy.

  ‘I’m convinced that t
he person who killed Mariona is after me, too. If she gave him my name before she died, now he thinks I’m dead. My only option is to disappear for real, but first I have something I must do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to the police? The thing with your brother was an accident, and —’

  Mendoza’s expression couldn’t have been more eloquent. ‘Do you honestly think that makes any sense?’

  He was right.

  ‘That’s why I’m asking you not to go to them either. Give me a little time, Señorita Martí. Don’t talk to anyone about me. Least of all the police.’

  ‘What makes you think I’ll accept?’

  ‘Because in the end you will have a good story, I promise you that.’

  ‘A good story with two dead bodies. My duty is to inform the police. Just talking to you incriminates me, because, even though your brother’s death was an accident, you have committed a homicide, and —’

  ‘Maybe because you are a good person.’

  Ana looked at him, astounded. Mendoza kept talking. ‘I’d heard about you. From Mariona. She said that you were an honourable person, who came from a line of journalists.’

  He didn’t fool her with those words.

  ‘I can see you’ve learned a lot from your brother about knowing what women want to hear.’

  No, he hadn’t fooled her. Nevertheless, he almost had her trapped.

  Mendoza ignored her sarcasm.

  ‘Look, Señorita Martí, the only thing I want is to get away from here. But first I have to do a couple of things. I have to meet someone.’

  ‘The person who killed Mariona?’

  ‘That’s just speculation.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you. It is someone extremely dangerous, which is why the meeting will be, like this meeting with you, in a public place where it will be easy to get away. But in case something goes wrong…’

  Mendoza noticed Ana’s frightened expression.

  ‘Don’t worry, no one knows that we have seen each other.’