I touched my chest and found the hole left by the inspector’s shot. I opened my coat and pulled out the copy of The Steps of Heaven. The bullet had pierced the front cover and the four hundred pages of the book, so that it peeped out, like the tip of a silver finger, through the back cover. Next to me, Grandes was writhing on the ground, grabbing at his neck with despair. His face was purple and the veins on his forehead and temples stood out like tensed cables. He looked at me, pleading. A cobweb of broken blood vessels spread across his eyes and I realized I had squashed his windpipe and that he was suffocating. I watched him as he lay shaking on the floor in agony. I pulled the white envelope from his pocket, opened it, and counted fifteen thousand pesetas. The price of my life. I put the envelope in my pocket. Grandes was dragging himself across the floor toward the gun. I stood up and kicked it out of reach. He grabbed my ankle, begging for mercy.
“Where’s Marlasca?” I asked.
His throat emitted a dull moan. I fixed my eyes on his and saw that he was laughing. The cable car had already entered the tower of San Sebastián when I pushed him through the doorway and saw his body plunge eighty meters through a maze of rails, cables, cogwheels, and steel bars that tore him to pieces as he fell.
24
The tower house was buried in darkness. I groped my way up the stone staircase until I reached the landing and found the front door ajar. I pushed it open and waited on the threshold, scanning the shadows that filled the long corridor. I took a few steps, then stopped, not moving a muscle. I felt the wall until I found the light switch. I tried it four times but without success. The first door to the right, three meters away, led into the kitchen. I remembered that I kept an oil lamp in the larder and there I found it, among unopened coffee tins from the Can Gispert emporium. I put the lamp on the kitchen table and lit it. A faint amber light suffused the kitchen walls. I picked it up and stepped out into the corridor.
As I advanced, the flickering light held high, I expected to see something or someone emerge at any moment from one of the doors on either side. I knew I was not alone; I could smell it. A sour stench, of anger and hatred, floated in the air. I reached the end of the corridor and stopped in front of the last room. The lamp cast its soft glow over the wardrobe that had been pulled away from the wall and the clothes thrown on the floor—exactly as I had left them when Grandes had come to arrest me two nights before. I continued toward the foot of the spiral staircase and warily mounted the stairs, peering behind my shoulder every two or three steps, until I reached the study. The ruby aura of twilight flooded in through the windows. I hurried across the room to the wall where the trunk stood and opened it. The folder with the boss’s manuscript had disappeared.
I crossed the room again, heading back to the stairs. As I walked past my desk I noticed that the keyboard of my old typewriter had been destroyed—as if someone had been punching it. Gingerly, I went down the steps, entered the corridor, and put my head round the entrance to the gallery. Even in the half-light I could see that all my books had bee
n hurled onto the floor and the leather of the armchairs was in tatters. I turned round to examine the twenty meters of corridor that separated me from the front door. The light from the lamp reached only half that distance, beyond which the shadows rolled on like black water.
I remembered I’d left the door to the apartment open when I came in. Now it was closed. I walked on a couple of meters, but something stopped me as I passed the last room in the corridor. When I’d walked past it the first time I hadn’t noticed, because the door to that room opened to the left and I hadn’t looked in far enough to see. But now, as I drew closer, I saw it clearly. A white dove, its wings spread out like a cross, was nailed to the door. Drops of blood dripped down the wood. Fresh blood.
I entered the room. I looked behind the door, but there wasn’t anyone there. The wardrobe was still pulled to one side. The cold, damp air that emanated from the hole in the wall permeated the room. I left the lamp on the floor and placed my hands on the softened filler around the hole. I started to scratch with my nails and felt it crumble beneath my fingers. I looked around and found an old paper knife in a drawer of one of the small tables piled up in a corner. I dug the knife edge into the filler. The plaster came away easily; it was only about three centimeters thick. On the other side I discovered wood.
A door.
I searched for the edges using the knife, and the shape of the door began to emerge. By then I’d already forgotten the close presence that was poisoning the house, lurking in the shadows. The door had no handle, just a lock that had rusted away from being covered by damp plaster for years. I plunged the paper knife into it and struggled in vain, then began to kick the lock until the filler that held it in place was slowly dislodged. I finished freeing it with the paper knife and, once it was loose, the door opened with a simple push.
A gust of putrid air burst from within, impregnating my clothes and my skin. I picked up the lamp and entered. The room was a rectangle about five or six meters deep. The walls were covered with pictures and inscriptions that looked as if they had been made with someone’s fingers. The lines were brownish and dark. Dried blood. The floor was covered with what at first I thought was dust but, when I lowered the lamp, turned out to be the remains of small bones. Animal bones broken up into a layer of ash. Numerous objects hung from a piece of black string suspended from the ceiling. I recognized religious figures, images of saints, Madonnas with their faces burned and their eyes pulled out, crucifixes knotted with barbed wire, and the remains of tin toys and dolls with glass eyes. The silhouette was at the far end, almost invisible.
A chair facing the corner. On the chair I saw a figure. It was dressed in black. A man. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Thick wire bound his arms and legs to the frame. An icy coldness took hold of me.
“Salvador?”
I advanced slowly toward him. The figure did not move. I paused a step away and stretched out my hand. My fingers skimmed over the man’s hair and rested on his shoulder. I wanted to turn his body round but felt something give way under my fingers. A second later I thought I heard a whisper and the corpse crumbled into dust that spilled through his clothes and the wire bonds, then rose in a dark cloud that remained suspended between the walls of the prison where for years this man’s body had remained hidden. I looked at the film of ash on my hands and brought them to my face, spreading the remains of Ricardo Salvador’s soul on my skin. When I opened my eyes I saw that Diego Marlasca, his jailer, was waiting in the doorway, with the boss’s manuscript in his hand and fire in his eyes.
“I’ve been reading it while I waited for you, Martín,” said Marlasca. “A masterpiece. The boss will know how to reward me when I give it to him on your behalf. I admit that I was never able to solve the puzzle. I fell by the wayside. I’m glad to see the boss found a more talented successor.”
He put the manuscript on the floor.
“Get out of my way.”
“I’m sorry, Martín. Believe me. I’m sorry. I was starting to like you,” he said, pulling out what looked like an ivory handle from his pocket. “But I can’t let you out of this room. It’s time for you to take the place of poor Salvador.”
He pressed a button on the handle and a double-edged blade shone in the gloom.
He threw himself at me, shouting angrily. The blade sliced my cheek open and would have gouged out my left eye if I hadn’t jumped to one side. I fell backwards onto the bones and dust covering the floor. Marlasca grabbed the knife with both hands and crashed down on top of me, putting all his weight on the blade. The knifepoint stopped only centimeters from my chest, while my right hand held Marlasca’s throat.
He twisted to bite me on the wrist and I punched him hard in the face with my free hand. He seemed barely to flinch, driven by an anger that went beyond reason and pain, and I knew he wouldn’t let me out of that cell alive. He charged at me with incredible strength. I felt the tip of the knife cut through my skin. I hit him again as hard as I could. My fist collided with his face and I heard the bones of his nose crack. Marlasca gave another shout, ignoring the pain, and plunged the knife into my flesh. A sharp pain seared through my chest. I hit him once more, searching out his eye sockets with my fingertips, but Marlasca raised his chin and I could only dig my nails into his cheek. This time I felt his teeth on my fingers.
I shoved my fist into his mouth, splitting his lips and knocking out a few teeth. I heard him howl and then he hesitated for a second before coming at me again. I pushed him to one side and he fell to the floor, dropping the knife, his face a mask of blood. I stepped away from him, praying that he wouldn’t get up again. A moment later he had crawled over to the knife and was getting to his feet.
He grasped the blade and threw himself on me again with a deafening shriek, but this time he didn’t catch me by surprise. I reached for the handle of the lamp and swung it at him with all my might. The lamp smashed against his face, spreading oil over his eyes, his lips, his throat, and his chest. It caught fire immediately. In just a few seconds a blanket of flames covered his entire body. His hair shriveled. I saw a look of hatred through the tongues of fire that were devouring his eyelids. I picked up the manuscript and fled.
Marlasca still held the knife in his hands as he tried to follow me out of that accursed room and fell facedown on the pile of old clothes, which burst into flames. The fire leaped at the wood of the wardrobe and the furniture that was piled up against the wall. I rushed toward the corridor but still he pursued me, arms outstretched, trying to catch me. As I reached the door I twisted round and saw Diego Marlasca being consumed by the blaze, furiously punching the walls, which caught alight at his touch. The fire spread to the books scattered in the gallery and then the curtains. It writhed across the ceiling like bright orange snakes, licking the frames of doors and windows, creeping up the steps to the study. The last image I recall is of a doomed man falling to his knees at the end of the corridor, the vain hopes of his madness lost and his body reduced to a human torch by a storm of flames that spread relentlessly through the tower house. I opened the front door and ran down the stairs.
Some of the neighbors had assembled in the street when they saw the first flames in the windows of the tower. Nobody noticed me as I slipped away. Shortly afterwards, I heard the windowpanes in the study shatter. I turned to see the fire embracing the dragon-shaped weather vane. Soon I was making my way toward Paseo del Borne, walking against a tide of local residents who were all staring upwards, their eyes captivated by the brightness of the pyre that rose into the black sky.
25
That night I returned, for the last time, to the Sempere & Sons bookshop. The CLOSED sign was hanging on the door, but as I drew closer I noticed that there was still a light on inside and that Isabella was standing behind the counter, alone, engrossed in a thick accounts ledger. Judging from the expression on her face, it predicted the end of the old bookshop’s days. But as I watched her nibbling the end of her pencil and scratching the tip of her nose with her forefinger, I was certain that as long as she was there the place would never disappear. Her presence would save it, as it had saved me. I didn’t dare disturb that moment so I stayed where I was, smiling to myself, watching her unawares. Suddenly, as if she’d sensed my presence, she looked up and saw me. I waved at her and saw that despite herself her eyes were filled with tears. She closed the book and came running out from behind the counter to open the door. She was staring at me as if she couldn’t quite believe I was there.
“That man said you’d run away. He said we’d never see you again.”