The Whispering City

by Sara Moliner

  She had read all the pages in the packet. She glanced at the one on top. In the mid-1940s, Dr Garmendia had given a young woman an abortion. Garmendia had neatly recorded the date, time, the anaesthetic used and that the patient had returned to his office three weeks later for a follow-up visit, in which he had discovered symptoms of a syphilitic infection that he had treated with penicillin.

  The patient, Dolores Antich, had been luckier than other women in her situation, who ended up resorting to a backstreet healer who dealt with their problem with knitting needles and infusions of rue. And as for the venereal disease, she had also had it better than most Barcelonians. In the mid-1940s, penicillin could only be acquired on the black market and cost a fortune. Reading up to that point, it could seem as though Garmendia was the saviour of wealthy women who had got into trouble, except for a little handwritten note that was stapled to the medical report: Baby’s father, Josef Kuczynski. Supposedly a Polish nobleman, but Dolores doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Lives at the Ritz. Beneath, a later note in the same handwriting, which Beatriz presumed was Dr Garmendia’s: Not Polish – Argentinian.

  It seemed that Garmendia had done some investigations of his own and had discovered that Dolores Antich, daughter of a good family and the future heiress of several textile factories, fell pregnant by an Argentinian chancer who, to top it all, had given her syphilis. There was a similar story involving Carme Rius, but instead of the fake Polish count it was a friend of her older brother and, to further complicate the situation, a descendant of grandees of Spain. In this case it wasn’t syphilis but some other venereal disease; something that also appeared in the notes about two more patients. All well-known names, to the point that even Beatriz knew who many of them were.

  It appeared that the good doctor had been in charge of discreetly mitigating the unexpected consequences of the sexual activity of the city’s upper class, whether they were infections or unwanted pregnancies. She’d counted eight of the former and five of the latter. All with names, dates, treatment. Several of them with additional information. Much of it came from the patients themselves. People reveal a lot of things to doctors, benefactors par excellence.

  Ana passed her one of the papers. ‘Look, on this page of his visiting log it says to whom and when he prescribed cocaine. Quite a list.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  Ana handed her the sheet of paper. It was definitely a succulent list of names. One in particular caught Beatriz’s eye. Jaime Pla. What a snake in the grass! For a moment she felt the power that possessing shameful information gives one. She let out a giggle.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Ana.

  She told her, without giving his name, what had happened to Pablo, ‘A nephew of mine.’

  ‘I can imagine what I would do in his place, knowing that about my boss,’ replied Ana before returning to the papers.

  Minutes later, she looked up from her reading and showed her two pages darkened by Garmendia’s tiny handwriting. They looked like pages from a private diary.

  ‘Look, this is serious. It’s not just a scandal, it’s a crime.’ She was irate. ‘These are notes by the doctor where he writes that someone named Rodero offered him penicillin. But when he compared it with the other shipments he’d acquired earlier, he saw that the colour wasn’t the same. Since he knew from a colleague that there had been several batches of adulterated penicillin going around on the black market, he didn’t buy it, and instead demanded an explanation from this Rodero character.’

  ‘From the way he freely made use of penicillin in his treatments,’ Beatriz said, pulling out two more fragments with information about gonorrhoea treatments, ‘he needed a reliable source on the black market. He couldn’t run the risk of tainted penicillin.’

  ‘That’s why Garmendia wanted to know where Rodero had got that shipment of adulterated penicillin. Apparently it came from the Vallcarca military hospital; someone there was regularly making large quantities of penicillin disappear from the military pharmacy.’

  Beatriz raised her eyebrows.

  ‘And?’

  Ana slid a page across to her and pointed to a column with her finger.

  ‘Our Dr Garmendia managed to get – who knows how, maybe he knew someone – copies of the pages of the pharmacy’s medication registry where the diverted amounts are recorded.’

  Beside the amounts, Garmendia had noted that it was striking that the flow stopped when they changed the public prosecutor who had been in charge of the investigation. The doctor had jotted down a question: ‘Did they take him off the case, did they suspect him?’

  ‘Can you guess who that prosecutor was?’ Ana asked her.

  Beatriz shook her head.

  ‘Joaquín Grau.’

  ‘Isn’t he the same one in charge of the investigation into Mariona Sobrerroca’s death?’

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘And the doctor had evidence against him?’

  ‘No. Only conjectures. In the notes, Garmendia speculates on the possibility that it was a pharmacy employee who stole the penicillin, adulterated it and sold it on the black market. The doctor also bought it through an intermediary. His suspicion was that Grau didn’t put much effort into the investigation, if not impeded it as much as possible, because he was getting a cut.’

  ‘You mean, he accepted bribes from the thieves? And when they transferred him, he could no longer “protect” the business and they gave it up?’

  From the notes one could infer that Garmendia had tried to get in touch with the employee at the military pharmacy through other doctors, but had had no luck. It wasn’t clear, however, what his intentions were.

  ‘It could just as easily be that he was looking for a direct source of penicillin, without intermediaries, as that he wanted to confirm his theories about the prosecutor’s dealings,’ said Ana.

  ‘When you think about it, even though he didn’t have conclusive evidence, it looked bad for Grau,’ murmured Beatriz.

  ‘Yes; it would be enough for someone to continue investigating. In the hands of a political enemy, that information could be very damaging.’

  ‘But Garmendia wasn’t a political enemy of Grau’s, was he? Why was he saving all this information?’

  ‘Because it’s highly sensitive information.’

  ‘But it doesn’t make sense that he blackmailed his patients. If he had done that with the abortions, not only would he have lost all his patients, but he would also have incriminated himself,’ objected Beatriz.

  ‘But perhaps, thanks to these secrets, he was able to obtain certain favours. To keep him happy and quiet for ever.’

  Beatriz nodded. Manus manum lavat. Coming from a family of lawyers, she knew the system well. Ever since she was a little girl she had witnessed occasions on which her father acted strangely, arriving home in a fury and shouting in the parlour. Her mother would try to calm him, but he would be beside himself. Later, she understood that those were moments when one of his clients, important manufacturers and bankers, afraid that his professional confidentiality wasn’t enough to keep their dirty dealings secret, offered him favours and benefits, bits of business that weren’t terribly legal in themselves and which, in turn, bound him even more tightly to the network of mutual interests. In a third – and disappointing – stage of these discoveries, she had understood that her father, despite his shouts and pronouncements against the ‘moral decadence of our times’, had on most occasions ended up accepting the favours.

  Ana’s voice pulled her from her memories: ‘Perhaps he collected them to exchange when he needed something. For example, if he required the help of a prosecutor, or the economic support of a powerful manufacturer, like Arturo Sanabria, who had beaten a prostitute to death, or the counsel of a cocaine-addicted lawyer…’

  ‘And after his death,’ added Beatriz, ‘Mariona found the papers and started to use the information. She tried to profit from them. With her husband dead, she no longer had to stand on ceremony. She began to blackmail people.
’

  ‘Conchita Comamala insinuated that recently Mariona had seemed more flush with money. She was wearing a pair of earrings again that she’d had to pawn before.’

  ‘Which means someone was paying up.’

  Blackmail. So that’s what it was. Some of the pieces of the mosaic were fitting into place. Mariona not only had money, but she had found someone to share it with. What had Abel Mendoza told Ana? That they wanted to leave the country and go and live on the Côte d’Azur.

  ‘I would never have thought that Mariona had the character or the personality to do something like that,’ commented Ana.

  ‘You see, human beings are surprising creatures.’

  Beatriz would have liked to tell her cousin that some of the best authors had been despicable people, that Villon was a criminal and Quevedo surely abhorrent. And to explain to her how much she hated Garcilaso for having let himself be killed so young due to his eagerness for the glories of war. So stupid. But it wasn’t the moment; she’d save it for some other time.

  Ana continued putting the pieces together: ‘Abel and Mariona had hit on a real gold mine if they were thinking of running off together.’

  ‘But it seems that the owner of the gold mine got tired of paying and preferred to put an end to it all with a bloodbath. There are so many names in those papers! And one of them is Mariona’s killer.’

  ‘And Abel’s.’

  There were a lot of names, it was true, but only one person had the means and the power to manipulate even the investigation of his crime.

  ‘Grau,’ she said.

  Ana nodded.

  It was all making sense: the way the investigation had been handled, Castro’s interest in presenting it as a common break-in, the way they had used the press, hiding the murder of the real Abel Mendoza.

  ‘That was the man he told me he was planning on meeting. After Mariona’s death, Abel must have tried to blackmail Grau on his own. He needed money to disappear.’

  ‘And he ended up like her.’

  ‘He wasn’t wrong when he said he was meeting an extremely dangerous person.’ Ana’s voice had a bitter taint to it.

  She got up, went over to one of the room’s towering shelves, returned to the table and, gesturing at the papers with a mixture of disdain and sorrow, said, ‘And this must have been his life insurance!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was so naive; he must have thought that, by threatening to make it public, he had an unbeatable advantage. That’s why he sought me out. How could he have been so ingenuous? How could he think any of this would be publishable? It’s one thing for those involved not to want it made public, but for it to appear in the press is quite another. None of this would ever make it onto a newspaper’s pages.’

  ‘But now we have to think about what we are going to do with these papers and all that they imply.’

  Beatriz felt the familiar pressure of the chair’s backrest as she reclined. She had sat there many times reading. Reading and thinking. Literature showed the abysses in human behaviour: the greed, the stupidity, the jealousy, the evil, the eagerness for power. It was all in there. But you could close the covers of the book and go back to being by yourself. She stared at the papers.

  Those papers were very much alive. They couldn’t remain stuck between a book’s covers; they couldn’t be kept on a shelf. They had cost two lives. One of the people whose names appeared on those pages had killed twice.

  Now the papers were in their hands.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Ana was both asking her and wondering aloud at the same time.

  Beatriz didn’t know. But she was beginning to understand that it wasn’t about what they could do, but about ensuring nothing happened to them. They had material in their hands that was too delicate.

  ‘I don’t know. If even the police are after this…’

  Ana nodded.

  ‘To start with, I’ll talk to my boss, Mateo Sanvisens.’

  ‘Is he trustworthy?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You hope so?’

  ‘Yes, I hope so. Sanvisens is like a tightrope walker who manages to stay a few centimetres above the daily quagmire without muddying himself too much. He gets splattered, but keeps himself up there on the tightrope, watching. The question is whether he’ll come down from his position for me.’

  ‘But we won’t give him the papers, will we?’

  ‘No. I mostly want his advice. And I need to get out of here. Get out of here and do something. I can’t stay in this reading room any longer; I’m starting to feel as though I need oxygen.’

  Beatriz could understand that. But she would have asked to stay in there for the rest of her life.

  ‘Be careful, Ana. If the police are looking for you…’

  ‘And what if I was mistaken, and it wasn’t Burguillos’s voice?’

  ‘Then perhaps we are wrong about Grau. But whoever it is, someone very dangerous is after these papers.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll stay here a little longer. Then I’ll go home and wait for you there.’

  ‘Take the papers with you. Hide them.’

  ‘Of course. The Mendoza brothers gave us a masterful lesson in that. Poe, with his purloined letter, looks like a mere intellectual exercise next to their pragmatism.’

  They said goodbye. Ana went out into the street.

  55

  On Carmen Street she plunged into the flood of people. They even filled the road, and had to squeeze together on the pavements every time the occasional car passed by.

  She was trying to keep from looking around to see if she was being followed, but it was hard not to. Men in twos. Tall men. Men who were coming in her direction and looking right at her. Men in dark mackintoshes and hats pulled down low. She held her breath when she passed them. Only two streets. She was almost there. She was pulling it off.

  Suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder. She let out a scream.

  ‘Pardon me, young lady. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  The hand gave way to an entire arm that surrounded her shoulders. From her right side appeared Tomás Roig, who embraced her. She let him do it, as much out of relief that he wasn’t a cop as guessing that if the police were pursuing a single woman, she and he would be more inconspicuous together.

  Tomás Roig released her after a few paces. They entered the newspaper together. There she had to solve a second problem. She didn’t want Carlos Belda to see her. She didn’t know how, but she was sure he was mixed up in the whole business.

  ‘Aren’t you coming up?’ Roig asked her.

  ‘I have to speak for a moment with the porter who brings up the post.’

  Roig went up the stairs, grappling with his lighter flint that wouldn’t spark.

  Ana looked for the porter.

  She found him behind a small counter, leaning over the desk. He was filling in an illustration in a children’s colouring book. When he noticed she was there, he lifted his head, two green pencils in his hand, one light and the other dark.

  ‘Five is green. But which green?’

  ‘Let me see. Where does it go?’

  The porter pointed to a girl’s jacket. He had already coloured her hair yellow and her wellingtons orange.

  ‘This one.’ Ana chose the lighter one. ‘Trust me; you know I cover fashion.’

  The man smiled in gratitude. Before he began to colour in the jacket, she said, ‘I have an errand for you.’

  That was the formula usually used to get his attention.

  ‘Please go up to the newsroom and see if Señor Carlos Belda is there. But just look. Don’t say anything to him if you see him, is that clear?’

  The man got to his feet. A few minutes later he came down the stairs shaking his head.

  ‘He’s not there.’

  ‘And Señor Sanvisens?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. I only looked for Señor Belda. Do you want me to go up again?’

  ‘No.
I’ll go up myself.’

  She thanked him and praised the precision with which he had filled in the spaces for the first four colours. The porter beamed proudly.

  She headed up. She saw Sanvisens in his office and went in, even though he was talking on the telephone. The editor-in-chief understood that it was something important and cut the call short.

  On the way there she had thought about what she was going to tell him. Everything. Now, before Sanvisens’s anxious gaze, she realised that the question was how. So she began with a headline.

  ‘Mateo, I’m in danger.’

  She gave him the subhead as he sank into his chair: ‘It’s about the Sobrerroca case. I have some very sensitive documents and they are after me to get at them.’

  She then plunged into her story, beginning at the very beginning. First came Isidro Castro and the police investigation, which Sanvisens listened to with modest anticipation; it was already familiar. The appearance of Beatriz and the letters was received with shock and perhaps some rebuke, but that disappeared completely when Abel Mendoza entered the tale in person and exited dead. Sanvisens was astounded.

  ‘But… but, my dear girl, what have you done?’

  The last feature of the story, the discovery of the documents, left him literally struck dumb because a coughing fit prevented him from getting a word out. He rose and took a drink from a little glass that held the dregs of a white coffee that must have been sitting for at least two hours waiting for some errand boy to remove it. Then he turned towards her.

  ‘How did you get yourself into this mess?’

  ‘I’ve already told you.’ She intentionally ignored the fact that his ‘how’ was really a ‘why’. ‘What I need is for you to help me think of a way out of it.’

  Sanvisens paced back and forth behind his desk. Curiously, Ana noticed, he took three steps to the left, but needed four to go to the right.

  ‘And Castro?’

  ‘That’s the worst of it; I’m afraid he’s in on it. I think his task was to carry out a fake investigation in order to close the case without revealing the names of the people behind it. That was why he was so focused on the break-in theory. And the same reason why he refused to pay any attention to me when I insisted that Mariona had a lover.’