The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten 2)

“Sounds like a plan.”

The place was near the library and served good homemade meals at inexpensive prices for the people of the area. I barely touched my food, which smelled infinitely better than anything I’d ever smelled at La Mai-son Dorée, but by the time dessert came round I had already drunk, on my own, a bottle and a half of red wine and my head was spinning.

“Tell me something, Sempere. What have you got against improving the human race? How is it that a young, healthy citizen blessed by the Lord Almighty with as fine a figure as yours has not yet taken advantage of the best offers on the market?”

The bookseller’s son laughed.

“What makes you think that I haven’t?”

I touched my nose with my index finger and winked at him. Sempere’s son nodded.

“You will probably take me for a prude, but I like to think that I’m waiting.”

“Waiting for what? For your equipment to get rusty?”

“You sound just like my father.”

“Wise men think and speak alike.”

“There must be something else, surely?” he asked.

“Something else?”

Sempere nodded.

“What do I know?” I said.

“I think you do know.”

“Fat lot of good it’s doing me.”

I was about to pour myself another glass when Sempere stopped me.

“Moderation,” he murmured.

“See what a prude you are?”

“We all are what we are.”

“That can be cured. What do you say you and I go out on the town?”

Sempere looked sorry for me.

“Martín, I think the best thing you can do is go home and rest. Tomorrow is another day.”

“You won’t tell your father I got plastered, will you?”

…

On my way home I stopped in at least seven bars to sample their most potent stock until, for one reason or another, I was thrown out; each time I walked on down the street in search of my next port of call. I had never been a big drinker and by the end of the afternoon I was so drunk I couldn’t even remember where I lived. I recall that a couple of waiters from the Hostal Ambos Mundos in Plaza Real took me by the arms and dumped me on a bench opposite the fountain, where I fell into a deep, thick stupor.

I dreamed that I was at Vidal’s funeral. A blood-filled sky glowered over the maze of crosses and angels surrounding the large mausoleum of the Vidal family in Montjuïc cemetery. A silent cortège of black-veiled figures encircled the amphitheater of darkened marble that formed the portico. Each carried a long white candle. The light from a hundred flames sculpted the contours of a great, grieving marble angel on a pedestal. At the angel’s feet was the open grave of my mentor and, inside it, a glass sarcophagus. Vidal’s body, dressed in white, lay under the glass, his eyes wide open. Black tears ran down his cheeks. The silhouette of his widow, Cristina, emerged from the cortège; she fell on her knees next to the body, drowning in grief. One by one, the members of the procession walked past the deceased and dropped black roses on his glass coffin, until it was completely covered and all one could see was his face. Two faceless gravediggers lowered the coffin into the grave, the base of which was flooded with a thick dark liquid. The sarcophagus floated on the sheet of blood, which slowly filtered through the cracks in the glass cover until little by little it filled the coffin, covering Vidal’s dead body. Before his face was completely submerged, my mentor moved his eyes and looked at me. A flock of black birds took to the air and I started to run, losing my way among the paths of the endless city of the dead. Only the sound of distant crying enabled me to find the exit and to avoid the laments and pleadings of the dark, shadowy figures who waylaid me, begging me to take them with me, to rescue them from their eternal darkness.

…

Two policemen woke me, tapping my leg with their truncheons. Night had fallen and it took me a while to work out whether these were normal policemen on the beat or agents of the Fates on a special mission.

“Now, sir, go and sleep it off at home, understood?”