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

“And where’s the blood sacrifice?” Brotons spat out.

“Sacrifice?” I asked.

Brotons looked at me as if I were an idiot.

“A goat, a lamb, a capon, if pressed …”

My mind went blank. For an endless moment, Brotons kept his eyes fixed on mine. Then, just as I started to feel the prickle of sweat down my back, the archivist and Don Basilio roared with laughter. I let them laugh as much as they wanted at my expense, until they couldn’t breathe and had to dry their tears. Clearly, Don Basilio had found a soul mate in his new colleague.

“Come this way, young man,” Brotons said, doing away with his fierce countenance. “Let’s see what we can find.”

28

The newspaper archives were located in one of the basements, under the floor that housed the huge rotary press, the product of post-Victorian technology. It looked like a cross between a monstrous steam engine and a machine for making lightning.

“Let me introduce you to the rotary press, better known as Leviathan. Mind how you go: they say it has already swallowed more than one unsuspecting person,” said Don Basilio. “It’s like the story of Jonah and the whale, only what comes out again is minced meat.”

“Surely you’re exaggerating.”

“One of these days we could throw in that new trainee, the smart aleck who likes to say that print is dead,” Brotons proposed.

“Set a time and a date and we’ll celebrate with a stew,” Don Basilio agreed.

They laughed like schoolchildren. Two of a kind.

The archive was a labyrinth of corridors bordered by three-meter-high shelves. A couple of pale creatures who looked as if they hadn’t left the cellar in fifteen years officiated as Brotons’s assistants. When they saw him, they rushed over, awaiting instructions. Brotons looked at me inquisitively.

“What is it we’re looking for?”

“Nineteen hundred and four. The death of a lawyer called Diego Marlasca. A pillar of Barcelona society, founder-member of the Valera, Marlasca & Sentís legal firm.”

“Month?”

“November.”

At a signal from Brotons, the two assistants ran off in search of copies dating back to November 1904. It was a time when each day was so stained with the presence of death that most newspapers ran large obituaries on their front pages. A character as important as Marlasca would probably have generated more than a simple death notice in the city’s press and his obituary would have been first-page material. The assistants returned with a few volumes and placed them on a large desk. We divided up the task among all five present and found Diego Marlasca’s obituary on the front page, just as I’d imagined. The edition was dated 23 November 1904. It was Brotons who made the discovery.

“Habemus cadaver,” he announced.

There were four obituary notices devoted to Marlasca. One from the family, another from the law firm, one from the Barcelona Bar Association, and the last from the cultural association of the Ateneo Barcelonés.

“That’s what comes from being rich. You die five or six times,” Don Basilio remarked.

The announcements were not in themselves very interesting—pleadings for the immortal soul of the deceased, a note explaining that the funeral would be for close friends and family only, grandiose verses lauding a great, erudite citizen, an irreplaceable member of Barcelona society, and so on.

“The type of thing you’re interested in probably appeared a day or two earlier, or later,” Brotons said.

We checked through the papers covering the week of Marlasca’s death and found a sequence of news items relating to the lawyer. The first reported that the distinguished lawyer had died in an accident. Don Basilio read the text out loud.

“This was written by a chimp,” he pronounced. “Three redundant paragraphs that don’t say anything and only at the end does it explain that the death was accidental, but without saying what sort of accident it was.”

“Here we have something more interesting,” said Brotons.

An article published the following day explained that the police were investigating the circumstances of the accident. The most revealing piece of information was that, according to the forensic evidence, Marlasca had drowned.

“Drowned?” interrupted Don Basilio. “How? Where?”

“It doesn’t say. Perhaps they had to shorten the item to include this urgent and extensive defense of the sardana, a three-column article entitled ‘To the Strains of the Tenora: Spirit and Mettle,’” Brotons remarked.