29
Calle de la Lleona, better known to locals as the Street of the Three Beds in honour of the notorious brothel it harboured, was an alleyway almost as dark as its reputation. It started in the shadowy arches of Plaza Real and extended into a damp crevice, far from sunlight, between old buildings piled on top of one another and sewn together by a perpetual web of clothes lines. The crumbling, ochre facades were dilapidated, and the slabs of stone covering the ground had been bathed in blood during the years when the city had been ruled by the gun. More than once I’d used the setting as a backdrop to my stories in City of the Damned and even now, deserted and forgotten, it still smelled of crime and gunpowder. The grim surroundings seemed to indicate that Superintendent Salvador’s early retirement package from the police force had not been a generous one.
Number 21 was a modest property squeezed between two buildings that held it together like pincers. The main door was open, revealing a pool of shadows from which a steep, narrow staircase rose in a spiral. The floor was flooded with a dark, slimy liquid oozing from the cracks in the tiles. I climbed the steps as best I could, without letting go of the handrail, but not trusting it either. There was only one door on every landing. Judging by the appearance of the building I didn’t think that any of the apartments could be larger than forty square metres. A small skylight crowned the stairwell and bathed the upper floors in a tenuous light. The door to the top-floor apartment was at the end of a short corridor and I was surprised to find it open. I rapped with my knuckles, but got no reply. The door opened onto a small sitting room containing an armchair, a table and a bookshelf filled with books and brass boxes. A sort of kitchen-cum-washing area occupied the adjoining room. The saving grace in that cell was a terrace that led to the flat roof. The door to the terrace was also open and a fresh breeze blew through it, bringing with it the smell of cooking and laundry from the rooftops of the old town.
‘Is anyone home?’ I called out.
Nobody answered, so I walked over to the terrace door and stepped outside. A jungle of roofs, towers, water tanks, lightning conductors and chimneys spread out in every direction. Before I was able to take another step, I felt the touch of cold metal on the back of my neck and heard the metallic click of a revolver as the hammer was cocked. All I could think to do was raise my hands and not move even an eyebrow.
‘My name is David Martín. I got your address from police headquarters. I wanted to speak to you about a case you handled.’
‘Do you usually go into people’s homes uninvited, Se?or David Martín?’
‘The door was open. I called out but you can’t have heard me. Can I put my hands down?’
‘I didn’t tell you to put them up. Which case?’
‘The death of Diego Marlasca. I rent the house that was his last home. The tower house in Calle Flassaders.’
He said nothing. I could still feel the revolver pressing against my back.
‘Se?or Salvador?’ I asked.
‘I’m wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to blow your head off right now.’
‘Don’t you want to hear my story first?’
The pressure from the revolver seemed to lessen and I heard the hammer being uncocked. I slowly turned round. Ricardo Salvador was an imposing figure, with grey hair and pale blue eyes that penetrated like needles. I guessed that he must have been about fifty but it would have been difficult to find men half his age who would dare get in his way. I gulped. Salvador lowered the revolver and turned his back to me, returning to the apartment.
‘I apologise for the welcome,’ he mumbled.
I followed him to the minute kitchen and stopped in the doorway. Salvador left the pistol on the sink and lit the stove with bits of paper and cardboard. He pulled out a coffee pot and looked at me questioningly.
‘No, thanks.’
‘It’s the only good thing I have, I warn you,’ he said.
‘Then I’ll have one with you.’
Salvador put a couple of generous spoonfuls of coffee into the pot, filled it with water and put it on the flames.
‘Who has spoken to you about me?’
‘A few days ago I visited Se?ora Marlasca, the widow. She’s the one who told me about you. She said you were the only person who had tried to discover the truth and it had cost you your job.’
‘That’s one way of describing it, I suppose,’ he said.
I noticed that at my mention of the widow his expression darkened, and I wondered what might have happened between them during those unfortunate days.
‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘Se?ora 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 go and 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 own 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 fewer 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 Se?or Marlasca, apart from being a lawyer, a scholar and a writer, had, as a young man, won the annual Christmas swim across the port organised by the Barcelona Swimming Club?’
‘How can a champion swimmer drown?’ I asked.
‘The question is where did he drown. Se?or 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’d first encountered Corelli.
‘If you know it, you’ll know that, when it’s full, it’s barely a metre 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 centimetres.’
‘A champion swimmer doesn’t drown in sixty centimetres of water, just like that,’ I observed.
‘That’s what I said to myself.’
‘Were there other points of view?’
Salvador smiled bitterly.
‘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 third-degree burns on the torso, arms and face. According to the pathologist, the body could have been alight 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 which 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 seances, especially since the death of his son. Jaco had a partner, Damián Roures, who was mixed up in that world. A real fraudster. 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 organised 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 reorganise his finances. But I find it hard to believe that a man should reorganise 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 behaviour 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 and 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 with suspicious ideologies.’
‘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 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 neighbours. 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 those 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, who was smiling at the camera, against a velvet backdrop. 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.’