“It doesn’t look like one of your places, Alicia.”
“One comes here not for the sights but for the bombs.”
“And, I suspect, for something else.”
“Well, it’s not far.”
“Far from where?”
Alicia pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and set it on the table. Vargas recognized the tag Alicia had pulled off one of the movers’ boxes outside the lawyer’s office that morning.
“From the warehouse where Brians has temporarily stored all his papers and files,” she said.
Vargas rolled his eyes.
“Don’t play hard to get, Vargas. You’re not expecting to have everything handed to us on a silver platter, are you?”
“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to break the law.”
The rude waiter planted himself in front of them with a questioning look.
“Bring us four bombs and two beers,” Alicia instructed, without taking her eyes off Vargas.
“Estrella or draft beer?”
“Estrella.”
“Bread with oil and tomato?”
“A couple of slices. Toasted.”
The waiter nodded and walked off without more ado.
“I’ve always wondered why you Catalans rub tomato on the bread,” said Vargas.
“And I’ve always wondered why nobody else does.”
“What other surprises do you have in store for me, aside from housebreaking?”
“Technically speaking, it’s a warehouse. I don’t think it’s a home for anything but rats and spiders.”
“How could I refuse, then? What else are you turning over in that devilish head of yours?”
“I was thinking about that cretin you went to see, Cascos—Valls’s employee in Editorial Ariadna.”
“The spurned lover.”
“Pablo Cascos Buendía,” Alicia recited. “Beatriz Aguilar’s ex-fiancé. I can’t get him out of my head. Don’t you find it odd?”
“What isn’t odd in this whole affair?”
“The almighty minister secretly poking around in the family history of some humble Barcelona booksellers . . .”
“We’d decided that he suspected they might know something about David Martín, whom he also suspected of being behind the threats and attacks against him.”
“Yes, but what does David Martín have to do with the Semperes? And what have they got to do with this whole story?” Alicia remained pensive for a while before going on. “There’s something there. In that place. In that family.”
“Is that why you’ve decided to make home visits to Sempere & Sons without warning me?”
“I needed something new to read.”
“You should have bought yourself a comic book. To approach the Semperes too soon could be dangerous.”
“Are you afraid of a family of booksellers?”
“I’m afraid of letting the cat out of the bag before we know what we’re treading on.”
“I think it’s worth the risk.”
“Something you’ve decided unilaterally.”
“Beatriz Aguilar and I got along very well,” said Alicia. “She’s such a delightful girl. You’d fall in love with her at first sight.”
“Alicia . . .”
She smiled mischievously.
The beers and the plate of bombas arrived just in time to interrupt the conversation. Vargas eyed that curious invention, a sort of large ball of breaded potato filled with spicy meat. “So how does one eat this?”
Alicia skewered a bomba with her fork and sank her teeth in it. Outside, the storm pounded the street savagely, and the waiter had gone over to the door to watch the downpour.
Vargas observed Alicia as she devoured the feast. There was something about her that he hadn’t noticed before. “When dusk falls,” he said, “you seem to revive . . .”
She took a sip of beer and looked him in the eyes. “I’m a night creature.”
“No need to convince me.”
30
The storm had left a mist in its wake that swept through the streets of La Barceloneta and glistened in the glow of the streetlamps. Just a few isolated drops were falling when they stepped outside, as the echoes of the tempest disappeared in the distance.
The address Alicia had extracted that morning from Fernando Brians’s storage boxes—a warehouse where the lawyer was to stow his furniture, filing cabinets, and all the surplus junk accumulated over decades—was on the grounds of Vapor Barcino, an old locomotive and boiler factory abandoned during the civil war. After barely two minutes’ walk through deserted, icy-cold alleyways, they came to the entrance of the old factory. An ancient railway track, partly buried under their feet, made its way into the factory grounds. A large stone portal bearing the words vapor barcino presided over the entrance. Beyond it was a wasteland of run-down warehouses and workshops, a graveyard for the wonders of the age of steam.
“Are you sure it’s here?” asked Vargas.
Alicia nodded and went in ahead of him. They walked past a locomotive stranded in a large puddle, among wheelbarrows, water pipes, and the shell of a discarded boiler, where a flock of seagulls had made their nest. The birds stood there stock-still, watching them go by with eyes that flashed in the twilight. A row of posts supported a tangle of electrical cables from which a few dangling lamps cast a faint light. The factory bays had been numbered and marked with wooden signs.
“Ours is number three,” said Alicia.
Vargas looked around him. A couple of starving cats meowed from the shadows. The air smelled of charcoal and sulfur. They walked by a deserted guard’s cabin.
“Shouldn’t there be a guard around here?”
“I think Brians is a lawyer with a preference for low-cost solutions,” Alicia suggested.
“The defender of lost causes,” Vargas recalled. “He stays in character . . .”
She approached the entrance to the bay marked with a 3. Recent tracks from the moving van’s tires were still visible on the mud in front of a large wooden door bolted with metal bars. A smaller door cut into the main panel was locked with a chain and a rusty padlock the size of a fist.
“How are we for brute force?” asked Alicia.
“You’re not expecting me to bite it open, are you?”
“I don’t know. Do something manly.”
The policeman pulled out his revolver and inserted the barrel point-blank into the padlock’s hole. “Move away,” he ordered.
Alicia put her hands over her ears. The echo of the shot rippled through the enclosure. Vargas pulled the gun out of the padlock, which fell to his feet, dragging the chain with it. Then he kicked the door open.
A web of shadows spread through the bay, out of which peered the ruins of a thousand and one palaces. From the vaulted ceiling hung a network of cables dotted with bare bulbs. Vargas followed the circuit along the walls until he found an electrical box sticking out of the wall and pressed the main switch. The bulbs lit up in slow succession, just strands of yellowish, flickering lights, as in a ghostly funfair. The current produced a low humming sound, like a cloud of insects fluttering in the dark.
They walked down the corridor that ran through the bay, with enclosures on either side protected by wire fencing. A notice hung at the entrance to each enclosure, bearing the number of the lot, the month and year of the storage expiration, and the owner’s surname or company name. Each of those subdivisions housed a world in itself. In the first enclosure they saw hundreds of old typewriters, adding machines, and cash registers, stacked up like a fortress. The next one contained a huge selection of crucifixes, figures of saints, confessionals, and pulpits.
“One could start a convent with all that,” said Alicia.
“Maybe you’re still in time . . .”
Farther on they came across a dismantled merry-go-round behind which, barely visible, lay the broken remains of a traveling fair. On the other side of the corridor was a collection of coffins and funeral paraphernalia—all in the ornate
nineteenth-century style—including a glass baldachin, containing a silk bed on which one could still see the imprint left by some worthy deceased soul.
“Jesus Christ . . . ,” murmured Vargas. “Where does all this come from?”
“Mostly from fortunes that went downhill, families that had already fallen into disgrace before the war, and companies that have vanished into the black hole of time.”
“Are you sure someone still remembers that all this is here?”
“Someone is still paying the rent.”
“Makes your hair stand on end.”
“Barcelona is a haunted house, Vargas. What happens is that you tourists never think of looking behind the curtain. Look, here it is.”
Alicia stopped in front of one of the compartments and pointed to the notice:
BRIANS-LLORAC
family
No: 28887-BC-56. 9-62
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I didn’t think you’d be so squeamish, Vargas. I’ll take the blame.”
“Whatever you say. What exactly are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. Something that connects Valls, Salgado, David Martín, the Semperes, Brians, your list with the undecipherable numbers, the Mataix books, and now Sanchís and his faceless driver. If we find that piece, we’ll find Valls.”
“And you think it’s here?”
“We won’t know until we find it.”
The enclosure was sealed with a simple padlock, the sort you can buy at any hardware store. It yielded at the fifth blow of the revolver’s butt. Not wasting a second, Alicia slipped inside.
“It smells as if a corpse was dumped here,” Vargas griped.
“It’s the sea breeze. All those years in Madrid have made you lose your sense of smell.”
Vargas cursed and followed her in. A pile of wooden boxes covered with tarpaulins formed a passageway leading to a sort of yard, where the relics of various generations of the Brians dynasty seemed to have been scattered by the force of a tornado.
“The lawyer must be the black sheep of the family,” Vargas said. “I’m not an antiquarian, but there’s at least a fortune or two here.”
“Then I hope your sense of legal rectitude will stop you filching one of Grandma Brians’s silver ashtrays.”
Vargas pointed to the hodgepodge of dinner sets, mirrors, chairs, books, sculptures, chests, wardrobes, console tables, chests of drawers, bicycles, toys, skis, shoes, suitcases, paintings, vases, and thousands of other belongings piled up to form a haphazard mosaic that looked more like catacombs than anything else. “What century would you like to start with?”
“Brians’s files. We’re looking for medium-sized cardboard boxes. It shouldn’t be too difficult. The moving men must have chosen the closest free space to the entrance to drop off the lawyer’s stuff. Anything that isn’t covered with a thick coat of dust is a possible candidate. Would you rather start left or right? Or is that a stupid question?”
After a few minutes’ wandering around through a jungle of junk that had probably been there since before either of them had been born, they discovered a pyramid of boxes still sporting a tag identical to the one Alicia had pulled off. Vargas stepped forward and began to place them in a row, while she opened them and went through their contents.
“Is this what you were looking for?” asked Vargas.
“I don’t know yet.”
“A perfect plan,” muttered the policeman.
It took them over half an hour to separate the boxes containing documents from the ones full of books and office supplies. They were unable to examine the documents properly in the anemic glow of the bulbs hanging high above them, so Vargas went off in search of something that would provide a better light. He came back after a while with an old copper candlestick and a handful of thick candles that looked as if they had never been used.
“Are you sure those aren’t dynamite cartridges?” asked Alicia.
Vargas flicked on the lighter, holding the flame a centimeter from the first candle, which he handed to her. “Will you do the honors?”
The candles spread a bubble of brightness, and Alicia began to check, one by one, the spines of the folders that could be seen when they opened the boxes.
Vargas watched her anxiously. “What shall I do?”
“It’s arranged by dates. Beginning in January 1934. I’ll search by date, and you search by name. Start with the most recent files, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“Search for what?”
“Sanchís, Metrobarna . . . Anything that might allow us to link Brians with—”
“Fine,” Vargas interjected.
For almost twenty minutes they checked through the boxes without saying a word, exchanging occasional glances or a shake of the head.
“There’s nothing here about Sanchís or Metrobarna,” said the policeman. “I’ve already looked through five years, and there’s nothing.”
“Keep looking. Maybe it’s under Banco Hipotecario.”
“There’s nothing about banks. All these clients are nobodies, to use the technical legal term—”
“Keep looking.”
Vargas nodded and submerged himself again in the ocean of papers and dossiers as the candles dripped, leaving a cluster of wax tears running down the candlestick. After a while he noticed that Alicia was silent and had stopped her search. He looked up at her. She was immobile, her eyes riveted on a pile of folders she had pulled out of one of the boxes.
“What?” asked Vargas.
Alicia showed him a thick folder. “Isabella Gispert . . .”
“Of the Sempere & . . .”
She nodded. She showed him another folder labeled montjuïc 39-45. Drawing closer, Vargas knelt down by the box and began to go through the folders.
He pulled out a few. “Valentín Morgado . . .”
“Sanchís’s chauffeur.”
“Sempere/Martín . . .”
“Let me see.” Alicia opened the folder. “Is this our David Martín?”
“That’s what it looks like . . .” Vargas stopped. “Alicia?”
She looked up from David Martín’s dossier.
“Look at this,” said Vargas.
The folder he handed her was at least three centimeters thick. When she read the name of the file, she felt a shiver.
“Víctor Mataix . . . ,” she said, unable to suppress a smile.
“I’d say we have enough with this.”
Alicia was about to close the box when she noticed a yellowed envelope at the bottom. She picked it up and inspected it in the candlelight. It was a foolscap envelope, sealed with wax. She blew on the layer of dust covering it and read a word written in ink, the only word on the envelope.
Isabella
“We’re going to take all of this,” she said. “Close the boxes and try to leave them more or less as we found them. It might be days, if not weeks, before Brians has a new office and notices some of the dossiers are missing.”
Vargas nodded, but before he’d lifted the first box off the floor, he stopped dead and turned around.
Alicia had also heard it. Footsteps. The sound of footsteps on the layer of dust covering the enclosure. She blew out the candles, while Vargas pulled out his revolver.
A silhouette was outlined in the doorway: a man wearing a ragged uniform, watching them. He carried a lantern and a cudgel that shook so much it gave the poor man away: he was obviously more frightened than a warehouse mouse.
“What are you doing here?” the guard stammered. “You’re not allowed in after seven.”
Alicia straightened up slowly and smiled at him. Something in her expression must have made his blood freeze, because he took a step back and brandished his cudgel with a threatening gesture.
Vargas placed the barrel of the revolver against his temple. “Unless you’d like to use it as a suppository, please drop the stick.”
The guard dropped it and stood there, petrified. “Who are you?”
&n
bsp; “Friends of the family,” said Alicia. “We’d forgotten some things. Is there anyone else here with you?”
“I cover all the bays. You’re not going to kill me, are you? I have a wife and children. Look, I’ve got a picture of them in my wallet . . .”
Vargas pulled the wallet out of the guard’s pocket. He removed the money, which he dropped on the floor, and put the wallet in his coat.
“What’s your name?” asked Alicia.
“Bartolomé.”
“I like your name. It’s very masculine.”
The guard was trembling.
“Look, Bartolomé, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going home, and you’re going to do the same thing. Tomorrow morning, before coming here, you’re going to buy a couple of new padlocks and substitute the one at the entrance and the one on this enclosure. And you’re going to forget that you saw us. What do you think of the deal?”
Vargas cocked the revolver.
Bartolomé gulped. “I think it’s good.”
“And just in case you suddenly feel bad about it, or someone questions you about it, remember—the salary they pay you wouldn’t be worth it, and your family needs you.”
Bartolomé nodded. Vargas took his finger off the trigger and withdrew the weapon.
Alicia smiled at the guard as if they were old friends. “Go on, go home and get yourself a glass of nice warm brandy. And pick up your money . . .”
“Yes, ma’am.” Bartolomé knelt down and picked up what little cash he carried in his wallet.
“Don’t forget your stick.”
The man picked it up and tied it to his belt. “Can I go now?”
“There’s nobody stopping you.”
Bartolomé hesitated a few moments but then began to retreat toward the exit. Before his silhouette was lost in the shadows, Alicia called him. “Bartolomé?”
The guard’s footsteps stopped.
“Remember, we have your wallet, and we know where you live. Don’t make us have to pay you a visit. My colleague here has a very bad temper. Good night.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 34