Barcelona Noir

by Adriana V.

  La Licorería on Taulat Street, of course, I thought at once, but I was less struck by the coincidence than by the fact that the clerk had so quickly shared the story about the streetcar while keeping mum about this one. In any event, the story had finally reached me, and I needed to decide now whether I was going to deal with it or not. It was more of a case for a bodyguard than a detective. Still, I didn’t think I could say no to my first case and, to be honest, I thought it would be stupendous to work for so fantastic a woman.

  “So it’s just keeping an eye on her?” I asked to confirm. “I only say this because sometimes I have very complicated cases and every once in a while it’s good to get a simple one.”

  I had to make her think the agency worked at full tilt, and the truth is when I was on the force I did have very complicated cases.

  I think it was when she responded that I noticed something for the first time. “Yes, just watch her,” she said in a very low voice, so much so that I understood it only because of the body language that went with it. Of course, I didn’t give it any importance then.

  Before heading back to the office, I decided to take a walk along the seafront, between the beaches of Bogatell and Mar Bella. A stroll by the ocean always helps me concentrate, going over the facts in my head and coming up with a strategy. I ended up at Chiringuito del Moncho’s and decided to have some chipirones and patatas bravas.

  Diana Gallard had insisted she didn’t want me to do anything about the man, just to keep my eye on the woman. “Don’t lose sight of her,” she’d pressed. And her voice was so quiet this time, I had to ask her to repeat it. And her insistence bothered me. I don’t like to take orders, and when it comes to my cases, I like to figure out the tactics myself. But keeping in mind that I didn’t want to get too tied up, and that I wanted to keep my client happy, I decided to follow her instructions. Although I didn’t simply give in either. I called my friend and former assistant, Dos Emes (Two Ms—a pseudonym I gave her out of discretion, because she was still on the force), and asked her for details about the incident from twenty years ago.

  “I’ll look up the files,” she assured me.

  The next day, I posted myself in front of one of the buildings on Paseo Calvell at eight in the morning—it was the second building just off La Rambla de Poble Nou. At nine-thirty I went up to see the woman I was protecting, armed with a solid excuse.

  “Good morning, ma’am. Acoustic inspection.”

  When you enter a home early in the morning, you usually find the wife in a robe or wearing an apron. But this woman was dressed to leave and was even lightly made up. She was in her late sixties and in good shape, though her expression was a little hostile.

  She was suspicious from the go but I was convincing: “We’re testing the levels of noise pollution in the neighborhood.” I showed her a multiuse ID which I’d made myself. “If the noise in your home is greater than sixty-five decibels, the city has resources to assist with soundproofing. You know … double-glazed windows, cork reinforcement for the walls. May I come in to measure the sound?”

  My purpose was simple: to see the woman up close so I’d recognize her and be able to follow her, and to get any kind of clue about her life. I also wanted to gain her trust, just in case I had to intervene later. A city inspector roaming the neighborhood can pop up anywhere without raising questions.

  I pulled a walkie-talkie out of my bag and went through the whole apartment, focusing it this way and that, making it emit occasional sounds. It was a small apartment, probably no more than fifty square meters, with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, and bathroom; each room was miniscule. The terrace was square and overlooked the sea.

  “You’ve done well since the cleanup, haven’t you?” I said, trying to connect with her. “Have you lived here long?”

  “All my life,” she answered drily.

  I knew those apartments had been built in the ’50s by the city’s housing department. Back then, Mar Bella beach was full of outdoor bars and, when the weather was pleasant, the neighborhood residents would gather there. But little by little, the space between the kiosks and the train tracks was taken over by little shanties that were washed out to sea on more than one occasion. During the next few decades, the beach became a great dump, with equal parts garbage and seashells. It was a black-and-white landscape in which only flames from the burning trash could be distinguished. It was the perfect place for metal scavengers, the homeless, and lonesome souls. The human and urban panorama eventually changed the way it always has in this city: with an extraordinary event. The ’92 Olympic games brought color back to the neighborhood. It was completely transformed. Where factories had idled, parks and luxury apartments were built; some were turned into civic centers, like Can Felipa. They buried the tracks, cleaned the beaches, and built a sea walk; the day they opened La Rambla down to the water, people came down in a mad rush, like a procession, as if the way to illumination had been revealed. What had been a nest of shanties facing a gray ocean and isolated by the train tracks became a high-end neighborhood. And the modest building in which this woman had lived her entire life quintupled in value.

  The interior of the home, however, did not appear to have gone through any modifications and still had the rancid air of the ’60s; there was a deer scene overlooking the dining room, flowered wallpaper, faded tiles, and Formica furniture in the kitchen … as if time had stood still. There were also several ancient photos, but none showed a masculine presence that might be her jailed husband. I wasn’t surprised.

  The inspection completed, I said goodbye to the woman, headed out to the stairwell, and went up the last leg to the roof where I found the perfect watchtower. I pulled out a book, something light, and began to read: The Intersection of Law and Desire by J.M. Redmann.

  Midmorning, the elevator stopped on the top floor and someone knocked on the door of the woman I was protecting. She was approximately the same age, and was dressed very simply in dark slacks and a linen jacket; she had gray-streaked hair that had been styled at a beauty salon. She went in and neither of them reemerged until the first hour of evening. I began to think this was going to be a very dull case.

  At around four-thirty, a little after the end of the afterlunch soap on the Catalan network, they finally left the apartment. They strolled down La Rambla casually, arm in arm, looking like widows of a certain age who keep each other company. I followed them to El Surtidor bakery, well known for its coca de forner bread. During the stroll, they’d greeted several people along the way with a slight nod of the head and a cursory “buenas tardes.” Soon they emerged from the bakery with pieces of coca de forner in their hands and I watched as they retraced their route until they got to the first rotunda, where they said goodbye with kisses on both cheeks. My protected woman did not go out again.

  Yes, yes, a real simple case. And better yet: the next day, case closed. The woman’s husband, the ex-convict who’d done time for the murder of her lover, had fallen to the Ronda del Litoral from one of the pedestrian bridges and thus ended his miserable life. Good thing he threw himself, I thought, because if it had been the woman I was protecting who’d pushed him, who knows what kind of future I would have had.

  When I got the check from Mrs. Gallard, I told myself it wasn’t bad at all for my first case, although I was a little sorry about such a hasty ending, especially because I wouldn’t have any more contact with her.

  “It’s a shame what happened, but now there’s nothing to fear,” I said.

  “No, no, no—it isn’t a shame,” she replied.

  “Excuse me?” Once more her voice was so tenuous I could barely hear her. I remember I got a little worried: maybe my ears were stuffed up.

  “He was a despot,” she said. “He would have gone after her for sure.”

  The patio at the Catamarán was quiet at that hour of the morning. A group of tourists strolled along the beach, and on the path, cyclists and runners crossed each other in opposite directions. It was a sunny day,
windless, the sea as calm as a lake, and there was that woman who provoked a flurry of emotions whenever she was in front of me. She was intense, out of reach, and she wrapped me up in a fog. And she was imperfect: her nose was too big, her mouth too straight. That’s what made her truly beautiful. I thought it was a real tragedy to never see her again.

  “You don’t need me anymore,” I said, with just the slightest tone of disappointment.

  She responded with a firm “No,” and blinked behind her dark glasses while her long hands showed off three rings, one an antique, and a finger touched the edge of the glass in which the ice from a martini was slowly melting.

  The ex-convict’s accidental death seemed straightforward. Apparently, he was blind drunk as he headed to the Ronda, so he probably slipped. It had been eleven o’clock at night, when there’s scarcely a soul around. There were no witnesses. He fell like a sack and was run over by a truck. Still, the idea of suicide, or less likely, that someone had pushed him, hadn’t been entirely ruled out. The police completed the task of investigating without too much fanfare. Obviously, they interrogated the widow: if there was a possible suspect, it was her, but she had an alibi, and a very good one; I actually corroborated it. After a few days, it was confirmed that it had been an accidental death and that was that, case closed.

  But I resisted the idea of having to stop seeing such an extraordinary woman. I guess I could say that my bloodhound instincts made me think something was off, that if it was a puzzle, it had missing pieces; I knew from my time on the force that all cases are like puzzles. But that wasn’t what brought me back on the case. I was crazy to see her again, to reveal the enigma in her sensuous voice, to ask her to dinner, and … well, to shamelessly throw myself at her. Yet I hadn’t found an excuse to see her until Dos Emes pointed out an important detail: the companion of the woman I was protecting, the lady from the afternoon prior to the ex-convict’s death, was the widow of the man killed twenty years earlier in La Licorería.

  “I was going over the file to get information for you when I noticed the coincidence,” explained Dos Emes. “Everything happened so quickly I didn’t have a chance to tell you before. To be honest with you, this death smells fishy.”

  “Fishy! Fishy!” I was furious. “What’s the connection? The two women must have become friends after the tragedy.”

  “But, boss, doesn’t it strike you as weird?” Even though I’m not her supervisor anymore, she’s continued to call me boss. “Would you become friends with the woman who was your husband’s lover, whose husband was killed by your husband?”

  “What a mess!” I said. “But I don’t know. For starters, I don’t have a husband …” At that moment I realized I had the perfect excuse to see Diana Gallard again. “You’re right,” I added very quickly. “I’ll call my client and ask her to clear up a couple of murky points about the case.”

  Late that afternoon, we met at the casino; this time I thought it was important to meet in a quiet place.

  “What’s there to clear up?” she asked, trying to mask her evident irritation.

  “Did you know your aunt and her lover’s widow are friends?”

  Her voice changed again. “What’s so strange about that?”

  “Girl, you don’t become friends with the woman who rolled around with your husband—the husband later killed by her husband!”

  “Perhaps grief brought them together.”

  “What was that?”

  “That maybe grief brought them together,” she repeated, a little forcefully.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  I have to confess, I really didn’t want to work this angle. For me, the case was closed. Dos Emes is finicky, and the more I looked at Diana Gallard, the more I was attracted to her. That’s why I soon changed the conversation and invited her to dinner at the best restaurant in the neighborhood.

  “Do you know Els Pescadors?” It’s an old-style bar with a kitchen, which has done very well thanks to a group of famous theater people, and has been turned into a fancy eatery on a charming plaza untouched by time, with three beautiful bella ombres trees for shade. “It’s got the freshest fish in town, artfully cooked … By now you must know the quality of Catalonian cuisine.”

  I don’t know why she accepted. The easiest thing would have been to disappear; I’ve always wondered if that was part of her strategy. After all, what could Diana Gallard see in me but a nobody who thinks of herself as a Miss Marple. You have your complexes, and at a certain age you know your possibilities and your limits—which doesn’t mean that every now and then I don’t get carried away by naïve dreams. In any case, the truth is that I very much enjoyed the dinner. We talked about her life and mine, what we liked, and though she was somewhat restrained, I got the feeling she had a good time. I think if that hadn’t been for the case, she probably wouldn’t have let slip a confession.

  “I’ve lived in Florence since I was very little and the woman you protected isn’t my aunt but my mother.”

  “Good god! Then the deceased … I’m so sorry.”

  “My mother sent me to Italy to live with her sister so that I’d be free of him.”

  “And when they jailed him, why didn’t you come back?”

  “I was an adolescent and it’s not good for a kid to have her father in jail for murder.”

  I understood that, just as I understood why she wouldn’t feel any special affection for her real father.

  “My parents are in Italy,” she said. “I’ve always stayed in contact with my biological mother. She’s been honest with me; she’s never lied to me.”

  “That’s why you wanted to protect her now.”

  “She deserved it.”

  Given the serious turn the evening had taken, I didn’t think it appropriate to suggest spending the night together. I’ve always been a little dumb about these things. And anyway, she was leaving for Italy the next day and I wouldn’t see her again. In the end, the feeling you get for somebody you meet one day and instantly traps you, that desire to please them, to protect them, to care for them—it has no future. So … I contemplated her imperfect beauty one last time: the too-straight mouth, the too-large nose, and I thought: she hired me, I’ve done my duty, she paid me well, and that’s the end of the story, with a wonderful meal and a kiss on the lips—the way you always say goodbye to impossible loves.

  The next day, Dos Emes came to see me in my office. She was wearing her Mossos d’Esquadra police uniform and had that Colombo face she gets when she’s onto something important.

  “It’s just that, it’s what I said, boss, it smelled bad to me. I’ve been investigating and what I’ve found out is quite surprising.”

  “Whatever it is, Dos Emes, it’s nonsense. And you watch too much CSI.”

  “No, boss, really! There’s stuff here that will make your head spin. The two women are getting married!”

  “What two women?”

  “The widows … the widow of the murdered lover and the widow of the guy who died on the Ronda. Their names are in the registry, the wedding’s next week. I found out by accident. I had to go to court to check all the files on a forgery case and there it was, their marriage document. Apparently, grief really did bring them together.”

  Now it really stunk. This was definitely a puzzle now and the missing pieces were starting to turn up. Dos Emes has a special talent for that.

  “Boss, I have a feeling they didn’t become friends after the tragedy but that they were friends before … and much more than friends. In the file there are copies of love letters that the murderer’s widow received. They’re signed with the initials R.M. The assassin’s widow and the friend of the woman you were protecting is named Rosa María. Everything fits. Imagine what it would mean to them if that guy were free. And the dead guy’s cell had a call from an unknown number, from a phone card. My theory is that someone called and asked to meet him and—”

  “He had a lot of alcohol in him,” I interrupted. “The
most likely scenario is that he slipped and fell.”

  “Precisely—with so much alcohol in him, it wouldn’t be at all difficult to give him a little push and help him into the abyss. We’ll also never know if he was hit in the head because the truck that ran him over fractured his skull. What can I tell you? The whole thing bothers me.”

  As usual, Dos Emes was right. Everything fit. In fact, the husband had suspected that his wife was cheating on him, and he was correct, but what he couldn’t imagine was that his wife’s lover was not a man but a woman. It must not have been difficult to find the rendezvous place, the little house where the couple used to live. For him, the rest held no mystery: if she was seeing someone, it had to be him, the other man, regardless of the initials on the letters; after all, clandestine lovers need to protect themselves. He went looking for the guy at the bar and blasted two shots straight into his belly. After that, the two women were set free. One dead husband, the other in jail, and a daughter in Florence; there was no obstacle to their relationship except the neighborhood itself: the people and what they’d say. They continued their love affair in secret. But the killer was going to be set free soon. Would he realize his mistake? The best plan was to eliminate him.

  “But it wasn’t either of them. They both have alibis and then there’s my testimony.”

  “I know,” lamented Dos Emes, and with a hint of cynicism she quickly added: “And, of course, there’s no other suspect.”

  I wondered, did Diana Gallard have an alibi? Why did she hire a detective instead of letting the police know about the possible danger to her mother? Had they spoken? Had they planned it together?

  “Not that I know of, and anyway, what can I tell you? Nobody’s going to ask questions. Let’s let those two enjoy the last years of their relationship in peace, don’t you think?”