I reread the entry a few times, trying to scratch some meaning out of it. I knew the alleyway from my days at The Voice of Industry. It was a miserable, narrow street, sunk behind the walls of the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery, with a jumble of workshops where headstones and memorials were produced. It ended by one of the riverbeds that crossed Bogatell beach and the cluster of shacks stretching down to the sea: the Somorrostro. For some reason, Marlasca had given instructions to pay a considerable amount of money to one of those workshops.
On the same page under the same date was another entry relating to Marlasca, showing the start of the payments to Jaco and Irene Sabino:
Bank transfer from D.M. trust to account in Banco Hispano Colonial (Calle Fernando branch) no. 008965-2564-1. Juan Corbera–María Antonia Sanahuja. First monthly payment of 7,000 pesetas. Establish payment plan.
I went on leafing through the notebook. Most annotations concerned expenses and minor operations pertaining to the firm. I had to look over a number of pages full of cryptic reminders before I found another mention of Marlasca. Again, it referred to a cash payment made through a person called Marcel, who was probably one of the articled clerks in the office:
Payment note (379 on 29/12/04), 15,000 pesetas from D.M. trust account. Paid via Marcel. Bogatell beach, next to level crossing. 9 a.m. Contact will give name.
The Witch of Somorrostro, I thought. After his death, Diego Marlasca had been doling out large amounts of money through his partner. This contradicted Salvador’s suspicion that Jaco had fled with the money. Marlasca had ordered the payments to be made in person and had left the money in a trust managed by the law firm. The other two payments suggested that shortly before his death Marlasca had been in touch with a stonemason’s workshop and with some murky character from the Somorrostro neighborhood; the dealings had translated into a large amount of money changing hands. I closed the notebook feeling more confused than ever.
As I turned to leave, I noticed that one of the walls of the reading room was covered with neatly framed portraits set against a wine-colored velvet background. I went closer and recognized the dour and imposing face of Valera the elder, whose portrait still presided over his son’s office. In most of the pic
tures the lawyer appeared in the company of the great and the good of Barcelona, at what seemed to be different social occasions and civic events. It was enough to examine a dozen or so of those pictures and identify the array of celebrities who posed, smiling, next to the old lawyer to understand that the firm of Valera, Marlasca & Sentís was a vital cog in the machinery of the city. Valera’s son, much younger but still recognizable, also appeared in some of the photographs, always in the background, always with his eyes buried in the shadow of the patriarch.
I sensed it before I saw him. In the photograph were both Valeras, father and son. The picture had been taken by the door of the law firm, at 442 Avenida Diagonal. Next to them stood a tall, distinguished-looking man. His face had also been in many of the other photographs in the collection, always close to Valera. Diego Marlasca. I concentrated on those turbulent eyes, that sharp and serene profile staring at me from a picture taken twenty-five years ago. Just like the boss, he had not aged a single day. I smiled bitterly when I understood how easily he’d fooled me. That face was not the one that appeared in the photograph given to me by my friend the ex-policeman.
The man I knew as Ricardo Salvador was none other than Diego Marlasca.
15
The staircase was in darkness when I left the Valera family mansion. I groped my way toward the entrance and, as I opened the door, the street-lamps cast a rectangle of blue light back across the hall, at the end of which I spotted the stern eyes of the porter. I hurried away toward Calle Trafalgar, where the tram set out on its journey down to the gates of Pueblo Nuevo cemetery—the same tram I used to take with my father when I accompanied him on his night shifts at The Voice of Industry.
The tram was almost empty and I sat at the front. As we approached Pueblo Nuevo we entered a network of shadowy streets covered in large puddles. There were hardly any streetlamps and the tram’s headlights revealed the contours of the buildings like a torch shining through a tunnel. At last I sighted the gates of the cemetery, its crosses and sculptures set against an endless horizon of factories and chimneys injecting red and black into the vault of the sky. A group of emaciated dogs prowled around the foot of the two large angels guarding the graveyard. For a moment they stood still, staring into the lights of the tram, their eyes lit up like the eyes of jackals, before they scattered into the shadows.
I jumped from the tram while it was still moving and set off, skirting the walls of the cemetery. The tram sailed away like a ship in the fog and I quickened my pace. I could hear and smell the dogs following behind me in the dark. When I reached the back of the cemetery I stopped on the corner of the alley and blindly threw a stone at them. I heard a sharp yelp and then the sound of paws galloping away into the night. The alley was just a narrow walkway trapped between the wall and the row of stonemasons’ workshops, all jumbled together. The sign SANABRE & SONS swung in the dusty light of a streetlamp that stood a little farther on. I went to the door, just a grille secured with chains and a rusty lock, and blew it open with one shot.
The echo of the shot was swallowed by the wind as it gusted up the passageway, carrying salt from the breaking waves of the sea only a hundred meters away. I opened the grille and walked into the Sanabre & Sons workshop, drawing back the dark curtain that masked the interior so that the light from the streetlamp could penetrate. Beyond was a deep, narrow corridor populated by marble figures seemingly frozen in the shadows, their faces only half sculpted. I took a few steps past Madonnas cradling infants in their arms, white women holding marble roses and looking heavenward, and blocks of stone on which I could just make out the beginnings of an expression. The scent of dust from the stone filled the air. There was nobody there except for these nameless effigies. I was about to retrace my steps when I saw it. The hand peeped out from behind a tableau of figures covered with a cloth at the back of the workshop. As I walked toward it, the shape gradually revealed itself to me. Finally I stood in front of it and gazed up at that great angel of light, the same angel the boss had worn on his lapel and I had found at the bottom of the trunk in the study. The figure must have been two and a half meters high, and when I looked at its face I recognized the features, especially the smile. At its feet was a gravestone, with an inscription:
DAVID MARTÍN
1900–1930
I smiled. One thing I had to admit about my good friend Diego Marlasca was that he had a sense of humor and a taste for the unexpected. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I told myself, that in his eagerness he’d got ahead of himself and prepared such a heartfelt send-off. I knelt down by the gravestone and stroked my name. Behind me I heard light footsteps. I turned and saw a familiar face. The boy wore the same black suit he had worn when he followed me weeks ago in Paseo del Borne.
“The lady will see you now,” he said.
I nodded and stood up. The boy offered me his hand, and I took it.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said, as he led me toward the exit.
“I’m not,” I whispered.
The boy took me to the end of the alleyway. From there I could make out the line of the beach, hidden behind a row of run-down warehouses and the remains of a cargo train abandoned on a weed-covered siding. Its coaches were eaten away by rust, and all that was left of the engine was a skeleton of boilers and metal struts waiting for the scrapyard.
Up above, the moon peeped through the gaps in a bank of leaden clouds. Out at sea, the blurred shapes of distant freighters appeared between the waves, and on the sands of Bogatell beach lay the skeletons of old fishing boats and coastal vessels, spewed up by storms. On the other side, like a mantle of rubbish stretching out from the great, dark fortress of industry, stood the shacks of the Somorrostro encampment. Waves broke only a few meters from the first row of huts made of cane and wood. Plumes of white smoke slithered among the roofs of the miserable hamlet growing between the city and the sea like an endless human dumping ground. We stepped into the streets of that forgotten city, passages that opened up between structures held together with stolen bricks, mud, and driftwood. The boy led me on, oblivious to the distrustful stares of the locals. Unemployed day laborers, Gypsies ousted from similar camps on the slopes of Montjuïc or opposite the communal graves of the Can Tunis cemetery, homeless old men, women, and children. They all observed me with suspicion. As we walked by, women of indeterminate age stood by fires outside their shacks, heating up water or food in tin canisters. We stopped in front of a whitish structure at the door of which we saw a girl with the face of an old woman, limping on a leg withered by polio. She was dragging a bucket with something gray and slimy moving about inside it. Eels. The boy pointed to the door.
“It’s here,” he said.
I took a last look at the sky. The moon was hiding behind the clouds again and a veil of darkness advanced toward us from the sea.
I went in.
16
Her face was lined with memories and the look in her eyes could have been ten or a hundred years old. She was sitting by a small fire watching the dancing flames with the fascination of a child. Her hair was the color of ash and she wore it tied up in a plait. Her figure was slim, austere, her movements subtle and unhurried. She was dressed in white and wore a silk scarf knotted round her throat. She smiled warmly and offered me a chair next to her. I sat down. We spent a couple of minutes in silence, listening to the crackle of the embers and the murmur of the sea. In her presence time seemed to stop, and the urgency that had brought me to her door had strangely disappeared. Slowly, as I absorbed the heat from the fire, the cold that had gripped my bones melted away. Only then did she turn her eyes from the flames and, holding my hand, open her lips.
“My mother lived in this house for forty-five years,” she said. “It wasn’t even a house then, just a hut made of cane and old rubbish washed up by the sea. Even when she had earned herself a reputation and had the chance to get out of this place, she refused. She always said that the day she left the Somorrostro she would die. She was born here, among the people of the beach, and she would remain here until her last day. Many things were said about her. Many people talked about her, but very few really knew her. Many feared and hated her. Even after her death. I’m telling you all this because I think it’s fair that you should know I’m not the person you’re looking for or you think you’re looking for. The one many called the Witch of Somorrostro was my mother.”