They heard him scampering off as fast as he could.
31
Miquel came up to the apartment carrying a couple of Thermos flasks with hot coffee and a whole tray of pastries fresh from the oven of his friend’s bakery on the corner. The pastries smelled divine. Once they’d divided up the folders, they sat on the floor facing each other. Alicia polished off three pastries in a row and filled a large cup with coffee, which she began to sip while engrossed in the first of the files stolen from Brians’s boxes. After a bit she raised her head and noticed that Vargas was gazing at her, looking rather embarrassed.
“What?”
He pointed to her skirt, which Alicia had pulled up so she could lean against the sofa.
“Don’t be childish. Can’t be anything you haven’t seen before, I hope. Concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing.”
Vargas didn’t reply, but he changed position to avoid seeing those fine seams in her stockings, which disturbed his focus on the gripping legalistic prose of the defender of lost causes’ dossiers and summary proceedings.
As they journeyed silently into dawn on the wings of caffeine and sugar, a landscape with figures slowly emerged out of the documentation. On a large sketch pad, Alicia drew what looked like a map, with notes, dates, names, arrows, and circles. Every now and then Vargas would find something relevant and hand it to her. There was no need to say anything; she just glanced at it and nodded. She seemed to have a prodigious skill for establishing links and connections, as if her brain spun a hundred times faster than the brains of other mortals. Vargas began to sense the process governing his colleague’s mind and, far from questioning it or trying to work out its internal logic, he simply acted as a filter, providing the data with which she was constructing her map, piece by piece.
Two and a half hours passed before Vargas paused. “I don’t know about you, but I’m wiped out.” He had gone through all the files allotted to him when they divided up the tasks. The caffeine he’d substituted for his blood was already losing strength, and his eyes could no longer focus.
“Go to sleep,” suggested Alicia. “It’s late.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“How is that possible?”
“The night and I, you know.”
“Do you mind if I lie down on your sofa for a while?”
“It’s all yours, although I can’t promise I won’t make any noise.”
“Not even a brass band would wake me.”
* * *
The cathedral bells did wake him. He opened his eyes to see a thick mist floating in the air, smelling of coffee and American tobacco. The sky above the rooftops was the color of young wine. Alicia was still sitting on the floor, a cigarette between her lips. She had taken off her skirt and her blouse, and was wearing only a black negligée that induced anything but calm. Vargas managed to creep over to the bathroom. There, he stuck his head under the tap and looked at himself in the mirror.
He found a blue silk robe hanging on the bathroom door and threw it at Alicia. “Cover up.”
She caught it in mid-flight, stood up, stretched, and put it on.
“I’m going to open the window before the fire brigade comes to get us out of here,” Vargas warned her.
A breath of fresh air penetrated the living room, and the swirl of smoke slipped out like a ghost trapped in a dark spell. Vargas stared at the remains of the two coffee Thermos flasks, the tray of pastries reduced to sugar dust, and the two ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs smoked to the very end. “Tell me all of this has been worth it,” he pleaded.
Apart from the remains of the battle, Alicia had left a tangled pile of about a dozen sheets from the sketching pad. She picked them up and began to stick them on the wall with tape until they formed a circle. Vargas went over to look. She licked her lips like a satisfied cat.
The policeman shook the Thermos flasks to see whether there was anything left in them and managed to fill half a cup. He placed a chair in front of Alicia’s diagram and nodded. “Impress me.”
She tied up her silk dressing gown and pulled her hair back into a knot. “Do you want the long version or the short one?”
“Begin at the beginning, and we’ll see how it goes.”
Alicia stood in front of her mural like a schoolteacher, though she looked more like a Victorian geisha with suspicious night habits.
“Montjuïc Castle, between 1939 and 1944,” she began. “Mauricio Valls is the prison governor, having just married Elena Sarmiento, daughter and heiress of a wealthy industrialist close to the regime who belongs to a sort of cabal of bankers, business owners, and members of the nobility, known as Franco’s Crusaders because, to a large extent, they’re financing the coffers of the Nacionales. Among them are Don Miguel Ángel Ubach, founder and main shareholder of the Banco Hipotecario, from whose head office emerges the investment firm Metrobarna you visited yesterday.”
“All that is there?”
“In Brians’s file notes, yes.”
“Go on.”
“During the years when Valls was governor of Montjuïc Prison, the following individuals coincide at some point as prisoners and as clients represented by Fernando Brians: first, Sebastián Salgado, alleged author of the threats sent by post to Valls for years and resplendent beneficiary of a pardon arranged by the minister, which gets him out of prison. He survives in the outside world for about six weeks. Second, Valentín Morgado, ex-sergeant of the Republican army, included in an amnesty of 1945 thanks to a heroic act he performed in prison: according to Brians’s notes, he saved a captain of the castle’s regiment from dying in an accident during the rebuilding of one of the castle walls. When he leaves the prison, having signed up for a parole and rehabilitation program backed by a group of wealthy patricians with a bad conscience, Morgado is hired as a hand in the Ubach family garages, where in time he is promoted to chauffeur. When Ubach, the banker, dies, Morgado enters the service of his daughter Victoria, who marries your friend Sanchís, director general of Metrobarna.”
“Is there more?”
“I’m only just beginning. Third, David Martín. An ill-fated writer, accused of a series of bizarre crimes committed before the war. Martín had managed to escape from the police in 1930, and eventually ends up in France. For reasons that are unclear he tries to return incognito to Barcelona, but is arrested in Puigcerdá, a town in the Pyrenees, soon after crossing the border into Spain in 1939.”
“What connection does David Martín have with all this, apart from having been in prison during those years?”
“That’s where it starts to get interesting. Martín is the only one of these prisoners who is not directly a client of Brians. The lawyer is hired to represent Martín at the request of Isabella Gispert.”
“Of Sempere & Sons?”
“The mother of Daniel Sempere, yes. Gispert was her maiden name. She allegedly died of cholera, shortly after the end of the war in 1939.”
“Allegedly?”
“According to Brians’s personal notes, there are elements pointing to the possibility that Isabella Sempere was murdered. Poisoned, to be precise.”
“Don’t tell me . . .”
“Exactly, by Mauricio Valls. The result of an unhealthy obsession and an unrequited desire, or so supposes Brians, who obviously can’t prove anything, or doesn’t dare.”
“And Martín?”
“David Martín is the object of another of Valls’s unhealthy obsessions, according to Brians’s notes.”
“Does the minister have any other sort of obsessions?”
“It seems that while Martín was in prison, Valls was trying to force him to write books that the future minister intended to publish later under his own name, to satisfy his vanity and his yearning for literary renown, or whatever. Unfortunately, according to Brians, David Martín is a sick person who has been slowly losing his mind. He hears voices and thinks he’s in touch with a character of his own invention, some
one called Corelli. While in prison, Martín’s ravings, plus the fact that during the last year of his life Valls decides to put him in solitary confinement at the very top of one of the castle towers, earn him the nickname among the inmates of the Prisoner of Heaven.”
“This is starting to have a very Alicia feel about it.”
“In 1941, seeing that his plan for manipulating the writer wasn’t working, Valls apparently orders two of his lackeys to take David Martín to an old mansion next to Güell Park and murder him. Something unexpected happens there, and Martín manages to escape alive.”
“So David Martín is alive?”
“We don’t know. Or Brians doesn’t know.”
“But he suspects it.”
“And probably Valls does too—”
“—who thinks he’s the one who has been sending him the threats and has been trying to murder him. To avenge himself.”
“That’s my hypothesis,” Alicia agreed. “But it’s only a conjecture.”
“There’s more still?”
She smiled. “I’ve left the best for the end.”
“Fire away.”
“Four: Víctor Mataix, author of the series The Labyrinth of the Spirits, of which you and I found a volume hidden in Valls’s desk, and which, according to what his daughter Mercedes remembers about the night he disappeared, was the last document the minister consulted before evaporating from the face of the earth.”
“What’s the connection between Mataix and the other three?”
“Mataix appears to have been a friend and old colleague of David Martín, back in the thirties, when they were both hired to write novels by installments under pseudonyms for a publishing house called Barrido & Escobillas. Brians’s notes hint that Mataix may have been the victim of a similar plan to the one Valls had tried on Martín. Who knows, perhaps Valls was trying to recruit ghost writers so he could build a body of work that would give him a name and a reputation in the literary world. It’s obvious that Valls hated seeing himself relegated to the role of regime jailer, a position obtained through his marriage of convenience, and he aimed much higher.”
“There must be something else. What happened to Mataix?”
“Mataix is sent to Montjuïc in 1941, moved there from La Modelo. A year later, if you want to believe the official report, he committed suicide in his cell. He was probably shot and his body thrown into a common grave, with no record remaining.”
“And the unhealthy obsession in this case is . . .”
Alicia shrugged. “In this case Brians does not jot down any suppositions, but I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that when Mauricio Valls starts his own publishing company in 1947, he christens it Ariadna, the name of the protagonist in the books of The Labyrinth of the Spirits series.”
Vargas sighed and rubbed his eyes, trying to process everything Alicia had just told him. “Too many coincidences,” he said at last.
“I agree,” said Alicia.
“Let’s see if I understand this. If all these connections exist, and we, or rather you, have been able to establish them within three days, how is it possible that the police and the higher echelons of the state, after an investigation that went on for a number of weeks, are still at a loss?”
Alicia bit her lower lip. “That’s what worries me.”
“Do you think they don’t want to find Valls?”
She thought about it. “I don’t think they can afford that option. Valls isn’t somebody who can just disappear and be forgotten.”
“So?”
“Perhaps they just want to know where he is. And perhaps they don’t want the real motives for his disappearance to come out into the open.”
Vargas shook his head and rubbed his eyes again. “Do you really think that Morgado, Salgado, and Martín, three ex-prisoners under Valls’s yoke, could have devised a plan to take their revenge on Valls and at the same time avenge their fallen colleague, Víctor Mataix? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Alicia shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not Morgado, the driver. Perhaps it’s Sanchís, his boss, who is involved.”
“Why would Sanchís do something like that? He is a regime man, married to the heiress of one of the great fortunes of the country . . . a budding Valls. Why would someone like him want to get himself implicated in this kind of mess?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the list of numbers we found in Valls’s car?”
“It could be anything. Or have nothing to do with this. A coincidence. You yourself said that, remember?”
“Another coincidence? In my twenty years in the police force I’ve come across fewer real coincidences than people who told the truth.”
“I don’t know, Vargas. I don’t know what those numbers mean.”
“Do you know what really doesn’t add up for me in all this?”
Alicia nodded again, as if she could read his thoughts. “Valls.”
“Valls,” Vargas agreed. “Without going into the sordid scheming of his years in Montjuïc, and whatever it was he did—poison Isabella Gispert and murder or try to murder David Martín, Mataix, and God knows who else—basically, we’re talking about a low-class butcher, a jailer linked to the middle rungs of the regime. There are thousands like him. You pass them in the street every single day. Connected, with friends and acquaintances in the big jobs, sure, but ass-kissers when all’s said and done. Lackeys and aspiring hopefuls. How does a guy like that manage to climb, in just a few years, from the sewers of the regime to the highest point?”
“A good question, isn’t it?” said Alicia.
“Get that special little head of yours to give it an answer, and you’ll find the piece we’re missing so that all this rigmarole falls into place.”
“You’re not going to help me?”
“I’m beginning to doubt whether I should. Something tells me that discovering the key to this puzzle could be far more dangerous than not finding it, and I was hoping to retire with a full pension in a few years’ time and devote myself to reading Lope de Vega’s plays, from the first to the last.”
Alicia collapsed onto the sofa, her enthusiasm flagging. Vargas finished his cold coffee and sighed. He walked over to the window and took a deep breath. In the distance, the cathedral bells tolled again, and the policeman watched the sun beginning to cast threads of light between dovecotes and bell towers.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “For the moment, not a word about all this to Leandro or to anyone else.”
“I’m not mad,” Alicia cut in.
Vargas closed the window and went over to her. She was beginning to show signs of exhaustion.
“Isn’t it time you started getting into your coffin?” asked Vargas. “Come on.”
He took her hand and led her to the bedroom, then pulled back the blanket and signaled to her to get inside. Alicia let her dressing gown fall to the ground and got in between the sheets. He covered her up to her chin and looked at her with a smile.
“Aren’t you going to read me a bedtime story?”
“Get lost.” Vargas bent down to pick up the dressing gown and walked over to the door.
“Do you think they’re leading us into a trap?” asked Alicia.
He weighed her words. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know.”
“One sets one’s own traps. And all I know is that you need to rest.”
Vargas began to close the door.
“Will you be out there?”
He nodded. “Good morning, Alicia,” he said, closing the bedroom door.
32
Valls has lost all track of time. He doesn’t know whether he’s been in this cell for days or for weeks. He hasn’t seen the sunlight since one faraway afternoon when he was traveling up the road to Vallvidrera in the car, sitting beside Vicente. His hand hurts, and when he tries to scratch it, he can’t find it. He feels spasms in fingers that no longer exist and a stabbing pain in the knuckles, as if someone were nailing iron s
pikes into his bones. For some hours, or days, his side has been hurting. He can’t see the color of the urine that falls into the brass pail, but he thinks it’s darker than usual, tinged with blood. The woman hasn’t returned, and Martín still hasn’t appeared. He can’t understand. Isn’t this what Martín wanted? To see him rotting away in a cell?
The faceless and nameless jailer checks on him once a day, or so Valls believes. He has started to measure the days by the man’s visits. He brings Valls water and food. The food is always the same: bread, rancid milk, and sometimes a sort of dry meat like salted tuna that he finds hard to chew because most of his teeth are getting loose. Two have already fallen out. Sometimes he runs his tongue over his gums and tastes his own blood, feeling his teeth giving way to the pressure.
“I need a doctor,” he says when the jailer arrives with the food.
The jailer hardly ever speaks. He barely looks at him.
“How long have I been here?” Valls asks.
The jailer ignores his questions.
“Tell her I want to speak to her. To tell her the truth.”
On one occasion he wakes up and discovers there’s someone else in the cell. It’s the jailer. He is holding something shiny in his hand. Perhaps it’s a knife. Valls makes no attempt to protect himself. He feels the prick in his buttock and the cold. It’s just another injection.
“How long are you going to keep me alive?”
The jailer straightens up and walks over to the cell door. Valls grabs his leg. A kick in the stomach winds him. He spends hours curled up into a ball, moaning with pain.
That night he dreams about his daughter Mercedes again, when she was just a little girl. They’re in their estate in Somosaguas, in the garden. Valls has been held up speaking to one of his servants, and loses sight of her. When he looks for her, he finds her footprints on the path leading to the dolls’ house. Valls steps into the dark building and calls his daughter. He finds her clothes and a trail of blood.
The dolls are licking their lips with feline glee. They have devoured her.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 35