The inspector stopped in front of the window.
“In half an hour they’ll come for you and I’ll be taken off the case,” he said. “You’ll be handed over to Sergeant Marcos, and I’ll no longer be able to help you. Have you anything else to tell me that might allow me to save your neck?”
“No.”
“Then grab that ridiculous revolver you’ve been hiding for hours in your coat and, taking great care not to shoot yourself in the foot, threaten that if I don’t hand you the key that opens this door, you’ll blow my head off.”
I turned toward the door.
“In exchange I ask only that you tell me where Cristina Sagnier is, if she’s still alive, that is.”
I looked down. I couldn’t find my voice.
“Did you kill her?”
I let a long silence go by.
“I don’t know.”
Grandes came over and handed me the key to the door.
“Get the hell out of here, Martín.”
I hesitated for a second before taking it.
“Don’t use the main staircase. At the end of the corridor, to your left, there’s a blue door that opens only from the inside and will take you to the fire escape. The exit is on the back alley.”
“How can I thank you?”
“You can start by not wasting time. You have around thirty minutes before the whole department will be hot on your heels. Don’t waste them.”
I took the key and walked to the door. Before leaving I turned round briefly. Grandes had sat down at the table and
was looking at me, his expression blank.
“That brooch with the angel,” he said, touching his lapel.
“Yes?”
“I’ve seen you wearing it on your lapel ever since I met you,” he said.
20
The streets of the Raval quarter were tunnels of shadows dotted with flickering streetlamps that barely grazed the darkness. It took me a little over the thirty minutes granted to me by Inspector Grandes to discover that there were two laundries in Calle Cadena. The first, scarcely a cave behind a flight of stairs that glistened with steam, employed only children with violet-stained hands and yellow eyes. The second was an emporium of filth that stank of bleach, and it was hard to believe that anything clean could ever emerge from there. It was run by a large woman who, at the sight of a few coins, wasted no time in admitting that María Antonia Sanahuja worked there six afternoons a week.
“What has she done now?” the matron asked.
“It’s an inheritance. Tell me where I can find her and perhaps some of it will come your way.”
The matron laughed, but her eyes shone with greed.
“As far as I know she lives in Pension Santa Lucía, in Calle Marqués de Barberá. How much has she inherited?”
I dropped the coins on the counter and got out of that grimy hole without bothering to reply.
…
The pension where Irene Sabino lived languished in a somber building that looked as if it had been assembled with disinterred bones and stolen headstones. The metal plates on the letter boxes inside the entrance hall were covered in rust. There were no names on the ones for the first two floors. The third floor housed a dressmaking workshop pompously entitled the Mediterranean Textile Company. The fourth floor was occupied by Pension Santa Lucía. A narrow staircase rose in the gloom, and the dampness from the sewers filtered through the walls, eating away at the paint like acid. After walking up four floors I reached a sloping landing with just one door. I banged on it with my fist. A few moments went by until the door was opened by a tall, thin man, seemingly escaped from an El Greco nightmare.