The Angel's Game (53 page)

“And didn’t your father find it odd that his ex-partner should wish to hand over that sum of money to strangers?”

“Of course he thought it was odd. A lot of things seemed odd to him.”

“Do you remember where those payments were sent?”

“How could I possibly remember? It must have been twenty-five years ago.”

“Make an effort,” I said. “For Señorita Margarita’s sake.”

The secretary gave me a terrified look, to which I responded with a wink.

“Don’t you dare lay a finger on her,” Valera threatened.

“Don’t give me ideas,” I cut in. “How’s your memory? Is it refreshed?”

“I could have a look at my father’s private diaries.”

“Where are they?”

“Here, among his papers. But it will take a few hours …”

I put down the phone and looked at Valera’s secretary, who had burst into tears. I offered her a handkerchief and gave her a pat on the shoulder.

“Come on now, don’t get all worked up. I’m leaving. See? I only wanted to talk to him.”

She nodded tentatively, her eyes fixed on the revolver. I buttoned my coat and smiled.

“One last thing.”

She looked up, fearing the worst.

“Write down the lawyer’s address for me. And don’t try to trick me,
because if you lie I’ll come back and you can be quite sure that I’ll leave all my inherent good nature downstairs in the porter’s lodge.”

Before I left I asked Margarita to show me where the telephone cable was and I cut it, saving her from the temptation of warning Valera that I was on my way or of calling the police to inform them about our small disagreement.

S
eñor Valera lived in a palatial building situated on the corner of Calle Girona and Calle Ausiàs March that seemed to have pretensions to being a Norman castle. I imagined he must have inherited the monstrosity from his father, together with the firm, and that every stone in its structure derived from the blood and sweat of entire generations of Barcelona’s inhabitants who could never have dreamed of even entering such a palace. I told the porter I was delivering some documents from the lawyer’s office on behalf of Señorita Margarita. After a moment’s hesitation, he allowed me to go up. I climbed the wide staircase at a leisurely pace, under the porter’s attentive gaze. The first-floor landing was larger than most of the homes I remembered from my childhood days in the old Ribera quarter, which was only a short distance away. The door knocker was shaped like a bronze fist. I grasped it but the door was already open. I pushed it gently and looked inside. The entrance hall led to a long passageway, about three meters wide, its walls lined with blue velvet and covered with pictures. I closed the door behind me and scanned the warm half-light that was coming from the other end. Faint music floated in the air, a piano lament in a melancholic and elegant style: Granados.

“Señor Valera?” I called out. “It’s Martín.”

As there was no reply, I ventured down the passage, following the trace of that sad music. I passed paintings and recesses containing statuettes
of Madonnas and saints and went through a series of arches, each one veiled by net curtains, until I came to the end of the corridor, where a large dark room spread out before me. The room was rectangular, its walls lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. At the far end I could make out a half-open door and, through it, the flickering orange shadows of an open fire.

“Valera?” I called again, raising my voice.

A silhouette appeared in the light projected through the door by the flames. Two shining eyes examined me suspiciously. A dog that looked like an Alsatian but whose fur was white padded toward me. I stood still, unbuttoning my coat and looking for the revolver. The animal stopped at my feet and peered up at me, then let out a whine. I stroked its head and it licked my fingers. Then it turned, walked back to the doorway, stopped again and looked back at me. I followed it.

On the other side of the door I discovered a reading room dominated by a large fireplace. The only light came from the flames, casting a dance of flickering shadows over the walls and ceiling. In the middle of the room there was a table with a large gramophone from which the music emanated. Opposite the fire, with its back to the door, stood a large leather armchair. The dog went over to the chair and turned to look at me again. I went closer, close enough to see a hand resting on the arm of the chair. The hand held a burning cigar from which rose a plume of blue smoke.

“Valera? It’s Martín. The door was open …”

The dog lay down at the foot of the armchair, never taking its eyes off me. Slowly, I walked round in front of the chair. Señor Valera was sitting there, facing the fire, his eyes open and a faint smile on his lips. He was wearing a three-piece suit and his other hand rested on a leather-bound notebook. I drew closer and searched his face. He didn’t blink. Then I noticed a red tear, a tear of blood, gliding down his cheek. I knelt down and removed the notebook from his hand. The dog gave me a distraught look. I stroked its head.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

The book seemed to be some sort of diary, with its entries, each handwritten and dated, separated by a short line. Valera had it open at the middle. The first entry on the page was dated 23 November 1904:

I reread the entry a few times, trying to scratch some meaning out of it. I knew the alleyway from my days at
The Voice of Industry.
It was a miserable, narrow street, sunk behind the walls of the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery, with a jumble of workshops where headstones and memorials were produced. It ended by one of the riverbeds that crossed Bogatell beach and the cluster of shacks stretching down to the sea: the Somorrostro. For some reason, Marlasca had given instructions to pay a considerable amount of money to one of those workshops.

On the same page under the same date was another entry relating to Marlasca, showing the start of the payments to Jaco and Irene Sabino:

I went on leafing through the notebook. Most annotations concerned expenses and minor operations pertaining to the firm. I had to look over a number of pages full of cryptic reminders before I found another mention of Marlasca. Again, it referred to a cash payment made through a person called Marcel, who was probably one of the articled clerks in the office:

The Witch of Somorrostro, I thought. After his death, Diego Marlasca had been doling out large amounts of money through his partner. This contradicted Salvador’s suspicion that Jaco had fled with the money. Marlasca had ordered the payments to be made in person and had left the money in a trust managed by the law firm. The other two payments suggested that shortly before his death Marlasca had been in touch with a stonemason’s workshop and with some murky character from the Somorrostro neighborhood; the dealings had translated into a large amount of money changing hands. I closed the notebook feeling more confused than ever.

As I turned to leave, I noticed that one of the walls of the reading room was covered with neatly framed portraits set against a wine-colored velvet background. I went closer and recognized the dour and imposing face of Valera the elder, whose portrait still presided over his son’s office. In most of the pictures the lawyer appeared in the company of the great and the good of Barcelona, at what seemed to be different social occasions and civic events. It was enough to examine a dozen or so of those pictures and identify the array of celebrities who posed, smiling, next to the old lawyer to understand that the firm of Valera, Marlasca & Sentís was a vital cog in the machinery of the city. Valera’s son, much younger but still recognizable, also appeared in some of the photographs, always in the background, always with his eyes buried in the shadow of the patriarch.

I sensed it before I saw him. In the photograph were both Valeras, father and son. The picture had been taken by the door of the law firm, at 442 Avenida Diagonal. Next to them stood a tall, distinguished-looking man. His face had also been in many of the other photographs in the collection, always close to Valera. Diego Marlasca. I concentrated on those turbulent eyes, that sharp and serene profile staring at me from a picture taken twenty-five years ago. Just like the boss, he had not aged a single day. I smiled bitterly when I understood how easily he’d fooled me. That face was not the one that appeared in the photograph given to me by my friend the ex-policeman.

The man I knew as Ricardo Salvador was none other than Diego Marlasca.

T
he staircase was in darkness when I left the Valera family mansion. I groped my way toward the entrance and, as I opened the door, the street-lamps cast a rectangle of blue light back across the hall, at the end of which I spotted the stern eyes of the porter. I hurried away toward Calle Trafalgar, where the tram set out on its journey down to the gates of Pueblo Nuevo cemetery—the same tram I used to take with my father when I accompanied him on his night shifts at
The Voice of Industry.

The tram was almost empty and I sat at the front. As we approached Pueblo Nuevo we entered a network of shadowy streets covered in large puddles. There were hardly any streetlamps and the tram’s headlights revealed the contours of the buildings like a torch shining through a tunnel. At last I sighted the gates of the cemetery, its crosses and sculptures set against an endless horizon of factories and chimneys injecting red and black into the vault of the sky. A group of emaciated dogs prowled around the foot of the two large angels guarding the graveyard. For a moment they stood still, staring into the lights of the tram, their eyes lit up like the eyes of jackals, before they scattered into the shadows.

I jumped from the tram while it was still moving and set off, skirting the walls of the cemetery. The tram sailed away like a ship in the fog and I quickened my pace. I could hear and smell the dogs following behind me in the dark. When I reached the back of the cemetery I stopped
on the corner of the alley and blindly threw a stone at them. I heard a sharp yelp and then the sound of paws galloping away into the night. The alley was just a narrow walkway trapped between the wall and the row of stonemasons’ workshops, all jumbled together. The sign
SANABRE & SONS
swung in the dusty light of a streetlamp that stood a little farther on. I went to the door, just a grille secured with chains and a rusty lock, and blew it open with one shot.

The echo of the shot was swallowed by the wind as it gusted up the passageway, carrying salt from the breaking waves of the sea only a hundred meters away. I opened the grille and walked into the Sanabre & Sons workshop, drawing back the dark curtain that masked the interior so that the light from the streetlamp could penetrate. Beyond was a deep, narrow corridor populated by marble figures seemingly frozen in the shadows, their faces only half sculpted. I took a few steps past Madonnas cradling infants in their arms, white women holding marble roses and looking heavenward, and blocks of stone on which I could just make out the beginnings of an expression. The scent of dust from the stone filled the air. There was nobody there except for these nameless effigies. I was about to retrace my steps when I saw it. The hand peeped out from behind a tableau of figures covered with a cloth at the back of the workshop. As I walked toward it, the shape gradually revealed itself to me. Finally I stood in front of it and gazed up at that great angel of light, the same angel the boss had worn on his lapel and I had found at the bottom of the trunk in the study. The figure must have been two and a half meters high, and when I looked at its face I recognized the features, especially the smile. At its feet was a gravestone, with an inscription:

I smiled. One thing I had to admit about my good friend Diego Marlasca was that he had a sense of humor and a taste for the unexpected. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I told myself, that in his eagerness he’d
got ahead of himself and prepared such a heartfelt send-off. I knelt down by the gravestone and stroked my name. Behind me I heard light footsteps. I turned and saw a familiar face. The boy wore the same black suit he had worn when he followed me weeks ago in Paseo del Borne.

“The lady will see you now,” he said.

I nodded and stood up. The boy offered me his hand, and I took it.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said, as he led me toward the exit.

“I’m not,” I whispered.

The boy took me to the end of the alleyway. From there I could make out the line of the beach, hidden behind a row of run-down warehouses and the remains of a cargo train abandoned on a weed-covered siding. Its coaches were eaten away by rust, and all that was left of the engine was a skeleton of boilers and metal struts waiting for the scrapyard.

Up above, the moon peeped through the gaps in a bank of leaden clouds. Out at sea, the blurred shapes of distant freighters appeared between the waves, and on the sands of Bogatell beach lay the skeletons of old fishing boats and coastal vessels, spewed up by storms. On the other side, like a mantle of rubbish stretching out from the great, dark fortress of industry, stood the shacks of the Somorrostro encampment. Waves broke only a few meters from the first row of huts made of cane and wood. Plumes of white smoke slithered among the roofs of the miserable hamlet growing between the city and the sea like an endless human dumping ground. We stepped into the streets of that forgotten city, passages that opened up between structures held together with stolen bricks, mud, and driftwood. The boy led me on, oblivious to the distrustful stares of the locals. Unemployed day laborers, Gypsies ousted from similar camps on the slopes of Montjuïc or opposite the communal graves of the Can Tunis cemetery, homeless old men, women, and children. They all observed me with suspicion. As we walked by, women of indeterminate age stood by fires outside their shacks, heating up water or food in tin canisters. We stopped in front of a whitish structure at the door of which we saw a girl with the face of an old woman, limping on a
leg withered by polio. She was dragging a bucket with something gray and slimy moving about inside it. Eels. The boy pointed to the door.