The Angel's Game (37 page)

“How is she?” he asked. “Señora Marlasca.”

“I think she misses you.”

Salvador nodded, his fierce manner crumbling.

“I haven’t been to see her for a long time.”

“She thinks you blame her for what happened. I think she’d like to see you again, even though so much time has gone by.”

“Perhaps you’re right. Maybe I should pay her a visit …”

“Can you talk to me about what happened?”

Salvador recovered his severe expression.

“What do you want to know?”

“Marlasca’s widow told me that you never accepted the official line that her husband took his life. She said you had suspicions.”

“More than suspicions. Has anyone told you how Marlasca died?”

“All I know is that people said it was an accident.”

“Marlasca died by drowning. At least, that’s what the police report said.”

“How did he drown?”

“There’s only one way of drowning, but I’ll come back to that later. The curious thing is where he drowned.”

“In the sea?”

Salvador smiled. It was a dark, bitter smile, like the coffee that was brewing.

“Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

He handed me a cup and looked me up and down, assessing me.

“I assume you’ve visited that son of a bitch Valera.”

“If you mean Marlasca’s partner, he’s dead. The one I spoke to was his son.”

“Another son of a bitch, except he has less guts. I don’t know what he told you, but I’m sure he didn’t say that between them they managed to get me thrown out of the police force and turned me into a pariah who couldn’t even beg for money in the streets.”

“I’m afraid he forgot to include that in his version of events,” I conceded.

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“You were going to tell me how Marlasca drowned.”

“That’s where it gets interesting,” said Salvador. “Did you know that Señor Marlasca, apart from being a lawyer, a scholar, and a writer, had, as a young man, won the annual Christmas swim across the port organized by the Barcelona Swimming Club?”

“How can a champion swimmer drown?” I asked.

“The question is where did he drown. Señor Marlasca’s body was found in the pond on the roof of the water reservoir building in Ciudadela Park. Do you know the place?”

I swallowed and nodded. It was there that I first encountered Corelli.

“If you know it, you’ll know that when it’s full it’s barely a meter deep. It’s essentially a basin. The day the lawyer was found dead, the reservoir was half empty and the water level was no more than sixty centimeters.”

“A champion swimmer doesn’t drown in sixty centimeters of water, just like that,” I observed.

“That’s what I said to myself.”

“Were there other points of view?”

“For a start, it’s doubtful whether he drowned at all. The pathologist who carried out the autopsy found water in the lungs, but his report said that death had occurred as a result of heart failure.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When Marlasca fell into the pond, or when he was pushed, he was on fire. His body had severe burns on the torso, arms, and face. According to the pathologist, the body could have been on fire for almost a minute before it came into contact with the water. The remains of the lawyer’s clothes showed the presence of some type of solvent on the fabrics. Marlasca was burned alive.”

It took me a few minutes to digest all this.

“Why would anyone want to do something like that?”

“A settling of scores? Pure cruelty? You choose. My opinion is that somebody wanted to delay the identification of Marlasca’s body in order to gain time and confuse the police.”

“Who?”

“Jaco Corbera.”

“Irene Sabino’s agent.”

“Who disappeared the same day Marlasca died, together with the balance from a personal account in the Banco Hispano Colonial that his wife didn’t know about.”

“A hundred thousand French francs,” I said.

Salvador looked at me, intrigued.

“How did you know?”

“It’s not important. What was Marlasca doing on the roof of the reservoir anyway? It’s not exactly on the way to anywhere.”

“That’s another confusing point. We found a diary in Marlasca’s study in which he had written down an appointment there at five in the afternoon. Or that’s what it looked like. In the diary he’d only specified a time, a place, and an initial.
C.
Probably for Corbera.”

“Then what do you think happened?” I asked.

“What I think, and what the evidence suggests, is that Jaco fooled Irene into manipulating Marlasca. As you probably know, the lawyer was obsessed with all that mumbo jumbo about séances, especially after the death of his son. Jaco had a partner, Damián Roures, who was mixed up in that world. A real fraud. Between the two of them, and with the help of Irene Sabino, they conned Marlasca, promising that they could help him make contact with the boy in the spirit world. Marlasca was a desperate man, ready to believe anything. That trio of vermin had organized the perfect sting but then Jaco became too greedy for his own good. Some think that Sabino didn’t act in bad faith, that she genuinely was in love with Marlasca and believed in all that supernatural nonsense, just as he did. It is a possibility but I don’t buy it, and seeing how things turned out, it’s irrelevant. Jaco knew that Marlasca had those funds in the bank and decided to get him out of the way and disappear with the money, leaving a trail of chaos behind him. The appointment in the diary may well have been a red herring left by Sabino or Jaco. There was no way at all of knowing whether Marlasca himself had noted it down.”

“And where did the hundred thousand francs Marlasca had in the Hispano Colonial come from?”

“Marlasca had paid that money into the account himself, in cash, the year before. I haven’t the faintest idea where he could have laid hands on a sum of that size. What I do know is that the remainder was withdrawn, in cash, on the morning of the day Marlasca died. Later, the lawyers said that the money had been transferred to some sort of discretionary fund and had not disappeared; they said Marlasca had simply decided to reorganize his finances. But I find it hard to believe that a man would reorganize his finances, moving almost one hundred thousand francs in the morning, and be discovered, burned alive, in the afternoon, without there being some connection. I don’t believe this money ended
up in some mysterious fund. To this day, there has been nothing to convince me that the money didn’t end up in the hands of Jaco Corbera and Irene Sabino. At least at first, because I doubt that she saw any of it after Jaco disappeared.”

“What happened to Irene?”

“That’s another aspect that makes me think Jaco tricked both of his accomplices. Shortly after Marlasca’s death, Roures left the afterlife industry and opened a shop selling magic tricks on Calle Princesa. As far as I know, he’s still there. Irene Sabino worked for a couple more years in increasingly tawdry clubs and cabarets. The last thing I heard, she was prostituting herself in El Raval and living in poverty. She obviously didn’t get a single franc. Nor did Roures.”

“And Jaco?”

“He probably left the country under a false name and is living comfortably somewhere off the proceeds.”

The whole story, far from clarifying things in my mind, only raised more questions. Salvador must have noticed my unease and gave me a commiserating smile.

“Valera and his friends in the town hall managed to persuade the press to publish the story about an accident. He resolved the matter with a grand funeral: he didn’t want to muddy the reputation of the law firm, whose client list included many members of the town hall and the city council. Nor did he wish to draw attention to Marlasca’s strange behavior during the last twelve months of his life, from the moment he abandoned his family and associates and decided to buy a ruin in a part of town he had never set his well-shod foot in so that he could devote himself to writing—or at least that’s what his partner said.”

“Did Valera say what sort of thing Marlasca wanted to write?”

“A book of poems or something like that.”

“And you believed him?”

“I’ve seen many strange things in my work, my friend, but a wealthy lawyer who leaves everything to go write sonnets is not part of the repertoire.”

“So?”

“So the reasonable thing would have been for me to forget the whole matter and do as I was told.”

“But that’s not what happened.”

“No. And not because I’m a hero or an idiot. I did it because every time I saw the suffering of that poor woman, Marlasca’s widow, it made my stomach turn and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without doing what I was supposedly being paid to do.”

He pointed around the miserable, cold place that was his home.

“Believe me, if I’d known what was coming I would have preferred to be a coward and wouldn’t have stepped out of line. I can’t say I wasn’t warned at police headquarters. With the lawyer dead and buried, it was time to turn the page and put all our efforts into the pursuit of starving anarchists and schoolteachers of suspicious ideology.”

“You say buried … Where is Diego Marlasca buried?”

“In the family vault in San Gervasio cemetery, I think, not far from the house where the widow lives. May I ask you why you are so interested in this matter? And don’t tell me your curiosity was aroused just because you live in the tower house.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“If you want a friendly piece of advice, look at me and learn from my mistakes. Let it go.”

“I’d like to. The problem is that I don’t think the matter will let
me
go.”

Salvador watched me for a long time. Then he took a piece of paper and wrote down a number.

“This is the telephone number of the downstairs neighbors. They’re good people and the only ones who have a telephone in the whole building. You can get hold of me there or leave me a message. Ask for Emilio. If you need any help, don’t hesitate to call. And watch out. Jaco disappeared from the scene many years ago, but there are still people who don’t want this business stirred up again. A hundred thousand francs is a lot of money.”

I took the note and put it away.

“Thank you.”

“Not at all. Anyhow, what more can they do to me now?”

“Would you have a photograph of Diego Marlasca? I haven’t found one anywhere in the tower house.”

“I don’t know … I think I must have one somewhere. Let me have a look.”

Salvador walked over to a desk in a corner of the sitting room and pulled out a brass box full of bits of paper.

“I still have things from the case. As you see, even after all these years I haven’t learned my lesson. Here. Look. This photograph was given to me by the widow.”

He handed me an old studio portrait of a tall, good-looking man in his forties posed against a velvet backdrop and smiling for the camera. I tried to read those clear eyes, wondering how they could possibly conceal the dark world I had found in the pages of
Lux Aeterna.

“May I keep it?”

Salvador hesitated.

“I suppose so. But don’t lose it.”

“I promise I’ll return it.”

“Promise me you’ll be careful and I’d be much happier. And that if you’re not, and you get into a mess, you’ll call me.”

We shook on it.

“I promise.”

T
he sun was setting as I left Ricardo Salvador on his cold roof terrace and returned to Plaza Real. The square was bathed in a dusty light that tinted the figures of passersby with a reddish hue. From there I set off walking and ended up at the only place in town where I always felt welcome and protected. When I reached Calle Santa Ana, the Sempere & Sons bookshop was about to close. Twilight was advancing over the city and the sky was breached by a line of blue and purple. I stopped in front of the shop window and saw that Sempere’s son was saying good-bye to a customer at the front door. When he saw me he smiled and greeted me with a shyness that spoke of his innate decency.

“I was just thinking about you, Martín. Everything all right?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“It shows in your face. Here, come in, I’ll make you some coffee.”

He held the shop door open and showed me in. I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling. Sempere’s son took me to the back room, where he set about preparing a pot of coffee.

“How is your father? He looked fragile the other day.”

Sempere’s son nodded, as if appreciative of my concern. I realized that he probably didn’t have anyone to talk to about him.

“He’s seen better times, that’s for sure. The doctor says he has to be careful with his angina, but he insists on working more than ever. Sometimes
I have to get angry with him, but he seems to think that if he leaves me to look after the shop the business will fail. This morning when I got up I asked him to stay in bed and not come down to work today. Well, would you believe it, three minutes later I found him in the dining room putting on his shoes.”

“He’s a man with fixed ideas,” I agreed.

“He’s as stubborn as a mule,” replied Sempere’s son. “Thank goodness we now have a bit of help, otherwise …”

I adopted my best expression of surprise and innocence, which always came in handy and needed little practice.

“The girl,” Sempere’s son explained. “Isabella, your apprentice. That’s why I was thinking about you. I hope you don’t mind if she spends a few hours here each day. The truth is, with the way things are I’m very grateful for the help, but if you have any objections …”

I suppressed a smile when I noticed how he savored Isabella’s double
l
.

“Well, as long as it’s only temporary. The truth is, Isabella is a good girl. Intelligent and hardworking,” I said. “And trustworthy. We get on very well.”

“She says you’re a tyrant.”

“Is that what she says?”

“In fact, she has a nickname for you. Mr. Hyde.”

“How charming. Pay no attention to her. You know what women are like.”

“Yes, I do,” said Sempere’s son in a tone that made it clear that he might know a lot of things but certainly hadn’t the faintest clue about women.