For a moment Fernandito didn’t know what to do. Then, seeing the policeman’s weapon on the floor, he picked it up and hurtled down the stairs.
26
A shroud of clouds was quickly spreading up from the sea, blanketing Barcelona. Sitting at the bar, Alicia turned when she heard the first clap of thunder. She gazed at the line of shadows crawling inexorably over the city. An electric spasm lit up the curtain of cloud, and shortly afterward the first drops of rain hit the windowpanes. In a couple of minutes the skies splintered, and the world plunged into dense gray darkness.
The roar of the storm accompanied her as she left the restaurant and made her way back to the stone wall surrounding the property of El Pinar. The curtain of water blurred all outlines a few meters away and provided cover for her movements. When she passed the garden entrance for a second time, she noticed that from there she could barely make out the front of the house. She walked around the property again and climbed up the wall at the point she had selected earlier. From there she jumped over to the other side, landing on a thick layer of dead leaves that softened her fall. Hiding among the trees, she made her way across the garden until she gained the main path, then followed it to the back of the large, sprawling house, where she found the kitchen windows Fernandito had mentioned in his account. Rain lashed furiously, running down the facade. Alicia drew close to one of the windows and peered inside. She recognized the wooden table, covered in dark stains, where Fernandito had seen Valentín Morgado die. There was nobody in view. Claps of thunder shook the building.
Alicia hit the windowpane with the butt of her revolver. The glass shattered. A second later she was inside.
* * *
Fernandito followed the stranger closely. He walked at a leisurely pace, as if he had only gone out for a stroll, not just killed a man in cold blood. The first flash of lightning lit up the streets, and people ran to take shelter from the rain beneath the arches of Plaza Real.
The murderer didn’t quicken his step or give the slightest indication that he was looking for cover. He went on walking slowly toward the Ramblas. When he got there, he stopped on the pavement’s edge. Coming closer, Fernandito could see that his clothes were sodden. For a moment he felt the urge to pull out Vargas’s revolver, which he carried in his pocket, and fire a shot in his back. The murderer remained there, unmoving, as if he could feel Fernandito’s presence and was waiting for him. Then, without any warning, he set off again, crossing the Ramblas into Calle Conde del Asalto, and headed toward the heart of the Raval quarter.
Fernandito hung back a bit until the stranger turned left at the corner of Calle Lancaster. Then he ran after the little man, rounding the corner just in time to see him disappear behind a door halfway along the block. He waited a few seconds and then slowly approached the door, keeping close to the wall. Dirty water poured down from the cornices, splashing his face and trickling under his coat collar. Opposite the spot where he’d seen the murderer enter, he stopped.
From afar the doorway had looked like the entrance to a residential property, but once closer Fernandito realized that it in fact led to the ground floor of some business. A rusty roll-up door sealed the front. A smaller door, cut into the metal, was slightly ajar. Over the lintel, a faded notice announced:
MANNEQUIN FACTORY
CORTÉS BROTHERS
TAILORING ACCESSORIES & WORKSHOP
Established 1909
The workshop looked abandoned, and had clearly been closed for years. Fernandito wavered. Everything seemed to be screaming at him to get away from that place and go in search of help. He’d retreated as far as the corner when the image of Vargas’s crushed body and face stopped him. He turned around and went back to the workshop. Sticking his fingers over the edge of the small door, he opened it a fraction.
* * *
It was pitch-dark inside. He pulled the door right back and let the faint light filtering through the rain sketch a doorway into darkness. He stared at the outline of what appeared to be a shop like the ones he remembered from his childhood days—wooden counters, glass cabinets, and a few tumbled-down chairs. Everything was covered with what at first looked like sheets of transparent silk. Only after a few bewildered seconds did he realize they were cobwebs. A couple of naked dummies stood in a corner, wrapped in an embrace of webs, as if some giant spider had dragged them there to devour them.
A metallic echo was coming from somewhere deep within the premises. Fernandito narrowed his eyes and noticed that behind the dust-covered counter, a curtain led to a back room. It still swayed gently. He walked over and, almost unable to breathe, gently drew the curtain aside. A long corridor stretched before him. Suddenly the brightness behind him dimmed. He turned just in time to see that the wind, or perhaps someone’s hand, had pushed the small entrance door, and it was slowly closing.
* * *
Alicia advanced through the kitchen, her eyes fixed on a door behind which voices echoed, muffled by the hammering of the rain. She heard footsteps on the other side, and the sudden bang of a heavy door closing. She stopped and, while she waited, examined the layout of the kitchen. The stoves, ovens, and grills looked as if they hadn’t been used for a long time. Frying pans, pots, knives, and other utensils still hung from rails on the wall. The metal had turned a darker shade. A large marble sink was full of rubble. The center of the room was taken up by the wooden table, chains and straps tied to its legs and dry blood covering its top. She wondered what they had done with the body of Sanchís’s chauffeur, and whether Victoria was still alive.
She walked over to the door and put her ear to it. The voices seemed to come from a nearby room. She was about to open the door a fraction to have a look when once more she heard what at first she’d thought was the sound of rain striking the windowpanes, a metallic drumming that seemed to come from deep down in the house. She held her breath and heard it again. Something or someone was banging a wall or a water pipe. She went over to listen by the well of a dumbwaiter. There she could hear it better, and tell that it came from below. There was something under the kitchen.
Alicia walked slowly around the room, rapping on the walls with her knuckles, but they seemed solid. A metal door was just visible in a corner. She unlocked the lever and opened it. On the other side she found a room, about six meters square, its walls covered in dusty shelving: perhaps an old pantry. The metal drumming could be heard more clearly here. She took a few more steps into the room and felt the vibration beneath her feet. Then she noticed it: a dark line that looked like a vertical crack in the wall at the far end. She drew closer and felt the wall. When she pushed it with both hands, the wall gave way. A strong animal stench of rot and excrement rose from inside. Nauseated, she covered her face with her hand.
A tunnel opened up before her, drilled through the stone, descending at an angle of forty-five degrees. A staircase of irregular steps ran down into the darkness.
Suddenly the drumming stopped. Alicia took one step down and listened. She thought she could hear a faint sound of someone breathing. Pointing her revolver forward, she descended another step.
On one side, hanging from a metal hook on the wall, was a long object. A torch. Alicia took it and, turning the handle, switched it on. A beam of white light penetrated the thick, damp darkness rising from the well.
“Hendaya? Is that you? Don’t leave me here . . .” The voice came from the end of the tunnel, broken, barely human.
Alicia stepped down slowly until she glimpsed the metal bars. Raising the torch, she swept the inside of the cell with its beam. When she realized what she was seeing, her blood froze.
He looked like a wounded animal, covered in filth and rags. Wisps of grimy hair and a thick beard hid a yellow face with scratches all over it. The creature crawled up to the bars and stretched out a pleading hand. Alicia lowered her weapon and looked at the prisoner in astonishment. He placed his other arm between the metal bars, and she noticed that his hand was missing. It had been brutally amputated at the
wrist, and the stump was covered with dry tar. The skin on that arm had a purplish tone.
Struggling to hold back her nausea, Alicia went over to the metal bars. “Valls?” she asked in astonishment. “Are you Mauricio Valls?”
The prisoner opened his mouth as if he were trying to form a word, but the only thing that came out of his lips was a harrowing groan. Alicia examined the cell’s lock. A wrought-iron padlock sealed a chain looped around the bars.
She could hear the sound of footsteps through the walls. She didn’t have much time. On the other side of the bars, Valls looked at her with eyes that were drowning in despair. She knew she couldn’t get him out of there. Even supposing she could blow open the padlock with her gun, she assumed that Hendaya must have left at least two or three men in the house. She was going to have to leave Valls in his cell and go in search of Vargas.
The prisoner seemed to read her thoughts. He put his hand out and tried to grab her, but he barely had any strength left.
“Don’t leave me here,” he said, his tone somewhere between a plea and an order.
“I’ll come back with help,” whispered Alicia.
“No!”
She took his hand, ignoring the revulsion produced by the contact with that bag of bones someone had decided should rot to death in that hole. “I need you not to tell anyone I’ve been here.”
“If you try to leave, I’ll shout, you fucking whore, and they’ll stick you in here with me.”
Alicia looked him in the eye. For a moment she thought she could see the real Valls, or what little was left of him, in that living corpse. “If you do that, you’ll never see your daughter again.”
Valls’s face fell apart, all the fury and despair dissolved in a second.
“I promised Mercedes I would find you,” said Alicia.
“Is she alive?”
She nodded.
Valls leaned his forehead against the bars and wept. “Don’t let them find her and hurt her,” he begged.
“Who? Who would want to hurt Mercedes?”
“Please . . .”
Alicia heard footsteps again above that cavity. She stood up.
Valls gave her one last look, full of resignation and hope.
“Run,” he moaned.
27
Fernandito stared at the door that was slowly closing, pushed by the wind. Darkness solidified around him. The silhouettes of the dummies and the glass cabinets disappeared into the shadows. When the gap in the doorway was just a chink of faint light, he took a deep breath. He’d followed that guy to his hideout with a purpose. Alicia was counting on him. Gripping the revolver firmly, he turned toward the corridor of shadows that plunged into the depths of the workshop.
“I’m not afraid,” he whispered.
A light murmur reached his ears. He could have sworn it was a child’s laughter. Very close. Just a few meters from where he stood. Footsteps dragged quickly toward him in the dark, and he was seized with panic. He raised his weapon and, without knowing quite what he was doing, pulled the trigger. A deafening roar hit his eardrums, and his arms flew up as if someone had hit his wrists with a hammer. A flash of sulfurous light lit up the passageway for a split second, and Fernandito saw him.
The man was advancing toward him, his knife held high and his eyes ablaze. His face was hidden beneath what looked like a leather mask.
Fernandito fired again and again, until the revolver slipped from his hand and he fell on his back. For a moment he thought the demonic silhouette he’d seen looming over him was by his side, and that the cold steel would touch his skin before he could recover his breath. He pushed himself backward and struggled to his feet. When he’d regained his balance, he hurled himself against the small door. It opened wide, and he fell headlong on the waterlogged street. He scrambled up again and, without looking behind him, ran off as if death were breathing down his neck.
* * *
They all called him Bernal. That wasn’t his real name, but he hadn’t bothered to correct them. He’d only been in that damned house that made your hair stand on end for a few days, at Hendaya’s orders, but he’d seen enough. Enough to realize that the less that ripper and his team of butchers knew about him, the better. In just under two months he would fade away into retirement with a miserable pension as a reward for his burned-out life in the police force. At this point in the farce, his great dream was to die alone and forgotten in a dark, damp room in some boardinghouse on Calle Joaquín Costa. He’d rather die like an old hooker than as a bogus hero, honoring those pretty kids they were sending from the Ministry of the Interior: the new centurions, all of them cut from the same cloth, ready to clear the streets of Barcelona of poor wretches and third-rate reds who could barely stand up to pee, having spent half their lives hidden or walled up in prisons as crowded as beehives. There are times when it’s more honorable to die forsaken than to live in glory.
The wrongly named Bernal was lost in these thoughts when he opened the door to the kitchen. Hendaya insisted on him making the rounds, and Bernal always followed orders to the letter. That was his specialty.
He only had to take three steps to notice that something was out of place. A gust of fresh air brushed his face, and he looked up toward the far end of the kitchen. A flash of lightning revealed the dented edges of the broken windowpane. He walked over to the corner and knelt down by the pieces of glass that had fallen from the window. A trail of footprints petered out over the dust—a light tread and tiny soles, with matching heel marks. A woman. The false Bernal weighed up the evidence. He stood up and walked over to the pantry room, then pushed the wall at the end and opened the entrance to the tunnel. He took a few steps down, until the reek that came from below advised him to stop. He turned back and was about to close the access when he noticed the torch hanging from the hook. It was swaying gently. The police officer closed the door and returned to the kitchen. He had a quick look around, and after mulling it over for a bit, he rubbed out the footprints with his foot and pushed the bits of glass into a dark corner. He wasn’t going to be the one to tell Hendaya, when he returned, that someone had paid a surprise visit to the house. The last poor soul who gave Hendaya bad news had ended up with a broken jaw. And that was one of his right-hand men. They were not going to get his help. With a bit of luck, he’d be given a little medal in seven weeks’ time, which he was planning to pawn to pay for the services of a classy tart with whom to bid farewell to this rotten world. If he managed to make it through this last assignment, he could still salvage a gray and ill-fated old age in which to forget what he’d witnessed during those last days in El Pinar, and convince himself that everything he’d done in the name of duty belonged to a man named Bernal, someone he’d never been, and never would be.
* * *
Hiding in the garden on the other side of the window, Alicia watched the policeman roam around the kitchen area, check the entrance to the tunnel, and then, inexplicably, rub out the footprints she’d left behind her. The policeman took one last look and then went back to the door. Making the most of the fact that the rain was still bucketing down, and not knowing for certain whether the officer would tell his superiors what he had discovered, Alicia decided to risk crossing the garden very quickly, going down the hillside and climbing over the wall. For the sixty seconds this took, she kept expecting a shot between her shoulder blades that never came.
After jumping down into the street, she ran back to the square, where the blue tram was starting its descent in the storm, and hopped onto the moving carriage. Ignoring the conductor’s disapproving look, she collapsed onto a seat, soaking wet and trembling either from cold or relief—she wasn’t sure which.
* * *
She found him sitting in the rain, huddled on the doorstep. Alicia walked through the puddles flooding Calle Aviñón and stopped in front of Fernandito. He raised his head and looked at her with tears in his eyes.
She knew even before he spoke. “Where’s Vargas?” she asked.
Fernand
ito lowered his head. “Don’t go up,” he whispered.
Alicia went up, two steps at a time, ignoring the pain that drilled through her hip and fired up her side. When she reached the fourth-floor landing, she stopped in front of the half-open door to Vargas’s rooms. A sickly-sweet smell floated in the air. She pushed the door inward and saw the body, lying over a shiny, dark sheet. A sudden chill took her breath away, and she held on to the doorframe. Her legs shook as she drew closer to the corpse.
Vargas’s eyes were open. His face was a wax mask, so brutally beaten up she hardly recognized him. She knelt down beside him and stroked his cheek. He was cold. Angry tears clouded her eyes, and she stifled a moan.
Next to the body was a fallen chair. Alicia picked it up and sat down to gaze in silence at the corpse. The searing pain in her hip was raging through her bones. She struck her old wound hard, fist clenched. For a few seconds the pain blinded her, and she almost fell on the floor. She kept on hitting herself until Fernandito, who had been witnessing the scene from the doorway, held her arms and stopped her. He embraced her until he’d steadied her, then let her howl with pain until she could hardly breathe.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, over and over again.
When Alicia had stopped shaking, Fernandito covered the body with a blanket he found on an armchair.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 54