The Antiquarian (5 page)

Artur worked all day. He analyzed the different transformations of the city's historic center on a map, making impromptu outlines on tracing paper. He managed to find more information on the Casadevall family, and place the figure of the architect in his historical context. Artur also took down the kabbalistic books that graced his library and refreshed his memory. Those tomes, unknown to most, would be essential now. His conclusions confirmed the veracity of most of the enigmas contained in the text. Seeking to validate some of his impressions, he called Samuel, who guided him as best he could, despite the intentional vagueness of Artur's questions. In fact, once the evidence Artur had gathered appeared to fit together, he practically hung up on Samuel in midsentence. Samuel's information was useful for him to corroborate the expectations he had created. It also helped dispel the tension remaining between the two following Friday's conversation.

* * *

He had only to get a few more facts on Casadevall. To do so, he would have to check the books of construction works found in the archives of the Cathedral of Barcelona and the archbishopric. Artur would have to be patient and wait until Monday to outline the personality and behavior of Casadevall, the master builder, which he had determined to be an indispensable part of his investigation. With the information he would get, he was sure he would achieve his objective: he began to imagine what it could be about, and he relished the anticipation of the mystery soon to be unraveled.

The sun had set hours before he came to that conclusion. He placed the camouflaged book on the shelf and prepared to leave the shop. A series of raps on the door glass told him that he was not alone. The darkness of his showroom kept him from seeing who it was, but despite his age, Artur did not frighten easily.

“Who's there?”

“It's me, Artur. I'd like to talk to you a minute.” Artur, anxious because it was so late, recognized the voice right away.

“I never would've thought you'd drop by at this hour. It's late.”

“Look, something's come up and I thought you might be able to help me.”

“Fine, I'll see what I can do. Come up, I'm in the study,” he said as he pressed the button to open the door.

* * *

A shadow cautiously made its way forward, skirting the objects in the shop, and came up the stairs.

“How did you know I was here?” Artur asked dubiously.

“Pure coincidence. I saw a light on and thought you might be in here. It surprised me, being so late, and I thought you could have left it on accidentally. But no, you were working.”

“The passion of this old man, as you well know, is his work. And today I've found something that I think could be worthwhile: a hidden code I plan to break tomorrow.”

“A code? What code?”

“One hidden in a manuscript,” Artur said smiling. “But I'd rather keep it a secret until I verify all the details. That's all I can say for now.” He turned his back on his visitor and placed the pages of notes in a desk drawer.

“How can I help you?”

“You can't,” replied his visitor, laconic.

When Artur turned back to straighten up his table, his caller picked up a heavy marble paperweight, raised it with both hands, and brought it down hard toward the old man's head. Artur had been in the process of getting up, surprised by the odd statement he had just heard. The sudden movement helped him avoid the blow to the head, though it had exposed a different target: his collarbone. The dull snap of broken bone sounded throughout the shop. The antiquarian lost his balance, and would have fallen to the floor if the force of the blow hadn't pushed him back over the desk. He managed to turn around, though his left arm hung lifelessly next to his body. More than pain, the expression on his face was of utter shock.

Artur's assailant methodically raised the paperweight a second time. Artur tried to cover his head with his good arm and partially parried the force of the blow, which impacted the side of his skull. He fell to the floor, his face bloodied. The cold marble had opened a gash that ran from his forehead to his ear, from which blood flowed out
profusely. Next to the stairway he rose, panting, and faced the figure that—he knew as soon as their eyes met—had come to send him to his death.

“Why?” he managed to murmur with a sliver of a voice. “Why?”

His attacker raised the paperweight a third time; it crashed down fully on Artur's face. The force launched him back toward the handrail, which gave way under the old man's weight. His body fell through the air and landed on the marble altar taken from an abandoned church. In Artur's shop, it had been the centerpiece of the antiques on exhibit. The visitor cautiously looked over the ledge. Shrouded in darkness, the body lay on the altar, unmoving. The reinstilled silence was then broken by the assailant's triumphant voice.

“Because what you've found must be mine,” came the reply the asker could no longer hear.

The aggressor gathered the transparencies Artur had worked up over the weekend, and then removed the notes from the drawer where Artur had stowed them. The visitor looked in vain for the book. Impatient, the shadowy figure cast the books occupying the table onto the floor, but still did not find it. A sudden thought: the desk. Writing desks from that period usually had a secret drawer to hide documents, or even a small book. The drawers on the right all opened, but there was one on the left that did not. The visitor rummaged through the drawers and soon found the spring that opened the hidden drawer. One of the moldings that decorated the sides of the desk concealed it, and it now slid outward. Artur's assailant was disgusted to find it empty.

Agitated, the attacker went back through the drawers and books on the floor, to the same result and, becoming impatient, kicked at Artur's chair until it tipped over.

Looking next at the book collection Artur kept in the study, and reviewing the spines of the books twice but finding nothing, the figure murmured, “Damn! He must have it at his house in Vallvidrera. There's nothing I can do, unless …”

A slight groan interrupted this train of thought. The visitor turned out the desk lamp and walked down the stairs. Approaching Artur's body, the assailant was surprised to find him still alive, though barely conscious. Next to the altar, on a small panoply, a collection of silver letter openers with mother of pearl handles awaited a buyer. Now it had found a killer. The visitor took the longest of them all and stabbed Artur in the back, between two ribs, in search of the heart.

“I can't let you live.” The voice was little more than a whisper. “But it's dishonorable for the winner to prolong the agony of the vanquished.”

The murderer paused a few moments to make sure Artur was really dead, and then fished through Artur's pockets until coming upon a set of keys. The visitor then carefully slinked back onto the street. It was drizzling, and as was to be expected, there was no one out walking. Face covered, Artur's killer went outside and headed toward the port.

A young man in his midthirties sat before a computer, typing with an utter calm that bordered on idleness. Suddenly, as if activated by an irresistible impulse, his keystrokes came faster. The letters appeared on the screen in a whir. He seemed caught up in a sudden attack of inspiration that he had to make the most of, knowing that it could vanish at any second. He was an expert writer, and he knew the workings of his mind all too well; he worked consistently, but flurries like that made for his best work. He could not afford to waste them.

Under his tangled brown hair, his eyes, of the same color, twitched to follow on the screen the words his fingers tapped out on the keyboard, in a vain attempt to type at the unattainable speed of thought. His tongue caressed his thin lips with relish, as if savoring the sweet taste of a recently created, well-conceived work.

He kept the frantic pace for several minutes, perhaps twenty. It made for two pages of what he immodestly considered excellent work. For a week now, he had been on the verge of completing what would be his sixth book, two months ahead of the deadline set by his editor, but he had been stumped on the ending. The action of the novel had taken a course well outside his original plan, to the point that the book's end was different from what he had initially conceived. This had happened before. He tried as best he could to write out the events according to his plan, but despite his numerous alternatives, he had to give in to the obvious: there was no logical possibility to cap off the book other than what the action itself was leading up to. He had just realized this when inspiration snuck up on him. Minutes later, the revelation had achieved what he had been unable to do in the seven days prior.

He saved the document on a memory stick and made a backup copy of the file before turning off the computer. He got up to look out the window. Dressed in navy blue pajamas, Enrique rested his broad forehead on the glass of the window pane. He had an olive complexion, and he was tall, about six feet one, and rather burly. His body still respected the proportions of his height, but he was slightly on the heavy side, with a few pounds to spare. He pressed his aquiline nose against the glass to comic effect, held his head there a few seconds and let out a long sigh. It was an uncomfortable position, but judging from the stain his oily skin left when he pulled back from the glass, repeated in several other places on the pane, it was one he took often. He could see his reflection in the window—distant and unclear, but it was how he saw himself. He looked lost, and it was how he wished to imagine himself, as if returning from the dream world where he spent much of his life. A world so different from reality, but with an intense quality of perfection that made it seem a viable alternative to this one. His tousled hair, vacant gaze, dark circles under his eyes, the dishevelment that came from working under total concentration in his own home, alone, did not keep him from recognizing himself in that grisly figure: yes, it was him. The broad, noble forehead, the distant stare of his own big brown eyes, his thick, well-defined eyebrows, the nose he had always considered elegant, the jaw, not so broad as it was thin. Yes, it was him, and he had returned once again from the world of writers, that magical place where he had been wandering lost for the past several months, until finally managing to isolate himself from the real world.

He could not avoid taking in the view of the bay. The sky was perfectly clear. The sun warmed it with zeal. On days like this, looking out on La Concha Bay from his home was a true privilege. Pondering the slopes of Mount Igueldo, one of the two hills that sheltered the bay with its tricky Cantabrian waters, in the most beautiful landscape
of the entire coast, Enrique let his memories soar back to that day, not long ago, when he came to this place. He remembered how, after setting up house, he was unable to write a single line for two months, so captivated had he been by the enigmatic and disquieting perfection of the bay. He had arranged his desk under a round window that afforded him a view of the entire seafront of the city of San Sebastián. All he had to do was glance up from the computer to be mesmerized by the vista. The phenomenon became so significant that more than once he had considered relocating to a place where he would not be distracted by so much natural beauty, as it was clear that the view of La Concha altered his creative capacity. At last, in his third month, and after great effort, he managed to sit before his computer and defeat the scenery's attraction. But nothing comes for free, and the price Enrique had to pay was high, though pleasant: he managed to concentrate on his work, but once he was finished he could not keep from spending hours sitting at his window watching the ebb and flow of the tides, to such an extent that he was well on his way to becoming a modern-day hermit.

He opened the door to his balcony and went outside. A gust of cool, northern wind caressed his face, and brought him back to reality at once. A scrutinizing gaze into the distance confirmed his suspicion: the wind was strong and constant, and it was nicking the foam off the waves. In a sudden frenzy he put on the first thing he found in his bedroom closet: jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and a blue sweater decorated with nautical flags. He opened the drawer of a small chest in the entry hall, took out a set of keys, and ran down the stairs, where he found the mailman leaving letters in the residents' mailboxes. In the box marked “Enrique Alonso,” there were two large envelopes and a number of letters waiting to be collected. He hesitated, and decided it was better to pick them up on when he got back. He got into his car, an old hatchback half eaten away as much by the salty air and rain as by the neglect of its owner, and drove to the city
center. He arrived in just a few minutes, and parked his beat-up car in the parking garage off Zumardia Boulevard next to the city hall. He left his car without bothering to lock it, and did not stop until he had descended a stairway off the jetty, where, after crossing over the decks of several boats, he reached that of his own sailboat, christened
Hispaniola
in tribute to the famous schooner created in the fertile imagination of Stevenson. He opened the companionway with one of the keys and checked the control panel and radio: everything was in working order. He went back above deck ready to cast off, when a rasping voice caught his attention.

“Well, well, look who we have here! If it isn't our famous writer!”

A completely hairless head craned out of the boat moored alongside Enrique's. It belonged to an older man, well into his seventies, with a face decimated by cold, heat, sun, and rain, wearing a weather-faded T-shirt.

“Hey, Mikel, you old sea dog!
Zer moduz?
How are you?”

“
Oso ondo
, my friend,
oso ondo
. Fine, fine. I thought I heard someone running around up here, but I didn't think it would be you. Might I ask where you're off to in such a hurry?”