The Angel's Game (59 page)

One of the staff was getting ready to close the doors to the building when he saw me hurrying up the road. He held the door open and pointed inside.

“Last trip of the evening,” he warned. “You’d better hurry.”

The ticket office was about to close but I scurried in, bought the last ticket on sale, and rushed over to join a group of four people waiting by the cabin. I didn’t notice their clothes until the employee opened the door. Priests.

“The cable railway was built for the International Exhibition and is equipped with the latest technology. Its safety is guaranteed at all times. From the start of the journey this security door, which can be opened only from the outside, will remain locked to avoid accidents or, heaven forbid, a suicide attempt. Of course, with Your Eminences on board, there is no danger of—”

“Young man,” I interrupted. “Can you speed up the ceremony? It’s getting late.”

The employee threw me a hostile glance. One of the priests noticed my bloodstained hands and crossed himself. The young man continued with his long-winded speech.

“You’ll be traveling through the Barcelona sky at a height of some seventy meters above the waters of the port, enjoying spectacular views of the city until now available only to swallows, seagulls, and other creatures endowed with feathers by the Almighty. The trip lasts ten minutes and makes two stops, the first at the central tower in the port, or, as I like to call it, Barcelona’s Eiffel Tower, the tower of San Jaime, and the second and last at the tower of San Sebastián. Without further delay, I wish Your Eminences a happy journey, and on behalf of the company I hope we will see you again on board the Port of Barcelona Cable Railway in the not-too-distant future.”

I was the first person to enter the cable car. The employee held out his hand as the four priests went by, hoping for a tip that never graced
his fingertips. Visibly disappointed, he slammed the door shut and turned round, ready to operate the lever. Inspector Víctor Grandes was waiting there for him, in a sorry state but smiling and holding out his badge. The employee opened the door and Grandes strode into the cable car, greeting the priests with a nod and winking at me. Seconds later we were floating out into the void.

…

The cabin lifted off from the terminal toward the mountain edge. The priests had all clustered on one side, ready to enjoy the evening views over Barcelona and ignore whatever murky business had brought Grandes and me together in that place. The inspector sidled over and showed me the gun he had in his hand. Large reddish clouds hung over the water of the port. The cable car sank into one of them and for a moment it felt as if we had plunged into a lake of fire.

“Have you ever been on this before?” Grandes asked.

I nodded.

“My daughter loves it. Once a month she asks me to take her on a return trip. A bit expensive, but it’s worth it.”

“With the amount of money old Señor Vidal is paying you for my head, I’m sure you’ll be able to bring your daughter here every day, if you feel like it. Simple curiosity: what price did he put on me?”

Grandes smiled. The cable car emerged from the crimson cloud and we found ourselves suspended over the port, with the lights of the city spilling over its dark waters.

“Fifteen thousand pesetas,” he replied, patting a white envelope that peeped out of his coat pocket.

“I suppose I should feel flattered. Some people would kill for two duros. Does that include the price of betraying your two men?”

“Let me remind you that the only person who has killed anyone here is you.”

By now the four priests were watching us with expressions of shock and concern, oblivious to the delights of the vertiginous flight over the city. Grandes gave them a cursory glance.

“When we reach the first stop, if it’s not too much to ask, I’d be grateful if Your Eminences would get off and allow us to discuss a few mundane matters.”

The tower on the docks of Barcelona port rose before us like a cupola of steel with great metal threads wrenched from a mechanical cathedral. The cable car entered the dome and stopped at the platform. When the door opened, the four priests hastened out. Grandes, gun in hand, told me to go to the far end of the cabin. One of the priests looked at me anxiously as he got off.

“Don’t worry, young man, we’ll call the police,” he said, just before the door closed.

“Yes, please do!” replied Grandes.

Once the door was locked, the cable car resumed its course. We emerged from the tower and started on the last stage of the crossing. Grandes went over to the window and gazed at the view of the city, a fantasy of lights and mist, cathedrals and palaces, alleyways and wide avenues woven into a labyrinth of shadows.

“The city of the damned,” said Grandes. “The farther away you are, the prettier it looks.”

“Is that my epitaph?”

“I’m not going to kill you, Martín. I don’t kill people. You’re going to do that for me. As a favor. For me and for yourself. You know I’m right.”

Saying no more, the inspector fired three shots at the locking mechanism of the door and kicked it open. The door was left hanging in the air and a blast of damp wind filled the cabin.

“You won’t feel anything, Martín. Believe me. The impact will take only a tenth of a second. It’s instant. And then, peace.”

I gazed at the door. A fall of over seventy meters into the void opened up before me. I looked at the tower of San Sebastián and reckoned there were still a few minutes to go before we would arrive. Grandes read my thoughts.

“Soon it will all be over, Martín. You should be grateful to me.”

“Do you really think I killed all those people, Inspector?”

Grandes raised his revolver and pointed it at my heart.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

“I thought we were friends.”

He muttered in disagreement.

“You don’t have any friends, Martín.”

I heard the roar of the shot and felt a blow to my chest, as if I’d been hit in the ribs with a jackhammer. I fell on my back, unable to breathe, a spasm of pain spreading through my body like petrol on fire. Grandes had grabbed my feet and was pulling me toward the door. The top of the tower of San Sebastián appeared between veils of cloud. Grandes stepped over my body and knelt behind me, then started pushing me by my shoulders. I felt the cold air on my legs. Grandes gave another push and my legs slid over the edge. The pull of gravity was instant. I was beginning to fall.

I stretched out my arms toward the policeman and dug my fingers into his neck. Anchored by the weight of my body, the inspector was trapped and couldn’t move from the doorway. I pressed with all my might, pushing on his windpipe, squeezing the arteries in his neck. He struggled to free himself from my grip with one hand while the other groped about for his gun. Finally his fingers found the trigger. The shot grazed my temple and hit the doorframe, but the bullet bounced back into the cabin and went clean through his hand. I sunk my nails deeper into his neck, feeling his skin yield. Grandes groaned. Using all the strength I had left, I managed to get more than half my body back inside the car. Once I was able to grab hold of the metal walls, I let go of Grandes and threw myself away from him.

I touched my chest and found the hole left by the inspector’s shot. I opened my coat and pulled out the copy of
The Steps of Heaven.
The bullet had pierced the front cover and the four hundred pages of the book, so that it peeped out, like the tip of a silver finger, through the back cover. Next to me, Grandes was writhing on the ground, grabbing at his neck with despair. His face was purple and the veins on his forehead and temples stood out like tensed cables. He looked at me, pleading. A cobweb of broken blood vessels spread across his eyes and I realized I had
squashed his windpipe and that he was suffocating. I watched him as he lay shaking on the floor in agony. I pulled the white envelope from his pocket, opened it, and counted fifteen thousand pesetas. The price of my life. I put the envelope in my pocket. Grandes was dragging himself across the floor toward the gun. I stood up and kicked it out of reach. He grabbed my ankle, begging for mercy.

“Where’s Marlasca?” I asked.

His throat emitted a dull moan. I fixed my eyes on his and saw that he was laughing. The cable car had already entered the tower of San Sebastián when I pushed him through the doorway and saw his body plunge eighty meters through a maze of rails, cables, cogwheels, and steel bars that tore him to pieces as he fell.

T
he tower house was buried in darkness. I groped my way up the stone staircase until I reached the landing and found the front door ajar. I pushed it open and waited on the threshold, scanning the shadows that filled the long corridor. I took a few steps, then stopped, not moving a muscle. I felt the wall until I found the light switch. I tried it four times but without success. The first door to the right, three meters away, led into the kitchen. I remembered that I kept an oil lamp in the larder and there I found it, among unopened coffee tins from the Can Gispert emporium. I put the lamp on the kitchen table and lit it. A faint amber light suffused the kitchen walls. I picked it up and stepped out into the corridor.

As I advanced, the flickering light held high, I expected to see something or someone emerge at any moment from one of the doors on either side. I knew I was not alone; I could smell it. A sour stench, of anger and hatred, floated in the air. I reached the end of the corridor and stopped in front of the last room. The lamp cast its soft glow over the wardrobe that had been pulled away from the wall and the clothes thrown on the floor—exactly as I had left them when Grandes had come to arrest me two nights before. I continued toward the foot of the spiral staircase and warily mounted the stairs, peering behind my shoulder every two or three steps, until I reached the study. The ruby aura of twilight flooded in through the windows. I hurried across the room to the
wall where the trunk stood and opened it. The folder with the boss’s manuscript had disappeared.

I crossed the room again, heading back to the stairs. As I walked past my desk I noticed that the keyboard of my old typewriter had been destroyed—as if someone had been punching it. Gingerly, I went down the steps, entered the corridor, and put my head round the entrance to the gallery. Even in the half-light I could see that all my books had been hurled onto the floor and the leather of the armchairs was in tatters. I turned round to examine the twenty meters of corridor that separated me from the front door. The light from the lamp reached only half that distance, beyond which the shadows rolled on like black water.

I remembered I’d left the door to the apartment open when I came in. Now it was closed. I walked on a couple of meters, but something stopped me as I passed the last room in the corridor. When I’d walked past it the first time I hadn’t noticed, because the door to that room opened to the left and I hadn’t looked in far enough to see. But now, as I drew closer, I saw it clearly. A white dove, its wings spread out like a cross, was nailed to the door. Drops of blood dripped down the wood. Fresh blood.

I entered the room. I looked behind the door, but there wasn’t anyone there. The wardrobe was still pulled to one side. The cold, damp air that emanated from the hole in the wall permeated the room. I left the lamp on the floor and placed my hands on the softened filler around the hole. I started to scratch with my nails and felt it crumble beneath my fingers. I looked around and found an old paper knife in a drawer of one of the small tables piled up in a corner. I dug the knife edge into the filler. The plaster came away easily; it was only about three centimeters thick. On the other side I discovered wood.

A door.

I searched for the edges using the knife, and the shape of the door began to emerge. By then I’d already forgotten the close presence that was poisoning the house, lurking in the shadows. The door had no handle, just a lock that had rusted away from being covered by damp plaster for years. I plunged the paper knife into it and struggled in vain, then
began to kick the lock until the filler that held it in place was slowly dislodged. I finished freeing it with the paper knife and, once it was loose, the door opened with a simple push.

A gust of putrid air burst from within, impregnating my clothes and my skin. I picked up the lamp and entered. The room was a rectangle about five or six meters deep. The walls were covered with pictures and inscriptions that looked as if they had been made with someone’s fingers. The lines were brownish and dark. Dried blood. The floor was covered with what at first I thought was dust but, when I lowered the lamp, turned out to be the remains of small bones. Animal bones broken up into a layer of ash. Numerous objects hung from a piece of black string suspended from the ceiling. I recognized religious figures, images of saints, Madonnas with their faces burned and their eyes pulled out, crucifixes knotted with barbed wire, and the remains of tin toys and dolls with glass eyes. The silhouette was at the far end, almost invisible.

A chair facing the corner. On the chair I saw a figure. It was dressed in black. A man. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Thick wire bound his arms and legs to the frame. An icy coldness took hold of me.

“Salvador?”

I advanced slowly toward him. The figure did not move. I paused a step away and stretched out my hand. My fingers skimmed over the man’s hair and rested on his shoulder. I wanted to turn his body round but felt something give way under my fingers. A second later I thought I heard a whisper and the corpse crumbled into dust that spilled through his clothes and the wire bonds, then rose in a dark cloud that remained suspended between the walls of the prison where for years this man’s body had remained hidden. I looked at the film of ash on my hands and brought them to my face, spreading the remains of Ricardo Salvador’s soul on my skin. When I opened my eyes I saw that Diego Marlasca, his jailer, was waiting in the doorway, with the boss’s manuscript in his hand and fire in his eyes.

“I’ve been reading it while I waited for you, Martín,” said Marlasca. “A masterpiece. The boss will know how to reward me when I give it to him on your behalf. I admit that I was never able to solve the puzzle. I
fell by the wayside. I’m glad to see the boss found a more talented successor.”