The Prisoner of Heaven (The Cemetery of Forgotten 3)

‘Another Heredia job …’ he murmured before throwing the documents into the wastepaper basket. ‘These papers are no good. Are you going to tell me your name or do we have to get serious?’

Tenant number 13 tried to utter a few words, but his lips trembled and all he managed to do was stammer something incomprehensible.

‘Don’t be afraid, my good man, nobody’s going to bite you. What have you been told? There are plenty of fucking reds out there who like to spread slanders around, but here, if people collaborate, they get treated well, like Spaniards. Come on, clothes off.’

The new tenant seemed to hesitate for a moment. The governor looked down, as if the whole situation was making him feel uncomfortable and only the prisoner’s stubbornness was keeping him there. A second later, the guard dealt him another blow with the rifle butt, this time in the kidneys, and knocked him down again.

‘You heard the governor. Strip down. We don’t have all night.’

Tenant number 13 managed to get up on his knees and remove his dirty, bloodstained clothes. Once he was completely naked, the guard stuck the rifle barrel under a shoulder and forced him to stand up. The governor looked up from the desk and grimaced with disgust when he saw the burns covering his torso, buttocks and much of his thighs.

‘It looks like our champion is an old acquaintance of Fumero’s,’ the guard remarked.

‘Keep your mouth shut,’ ordered the governor without much conviction.

He looked at the prisoner with impatience and realised he was crying.

‘Come on, stop crying and tell me your name.’

The prisoner whispered his name again.

‘Fermín Romero de Torres …’

The governor sighed wearily.

‘Look, I’m beginning to lose my patience. I want to help you and I don’t really feel like having to call Inspector Fumero and tell him you’re here …’

The prisoner started to whimper like a wounded dog and was shaking so violently that the governor, who clearly found the scene distasteful and wanted to put an end to the matter as soon as possible, exchanged a glance with the guard and, without saying a word, wrote the name the prisoner had given him in the register, swearing under his breath.

‘Bloody war,’ he muttered to himself when they took the prisoner to his cell, dragging him naked through the flooded tunnels.

2

The cell was a dark, damp rectangle. Cold air blew in through a small hole drilled in the rock. The walls were covered with crudely etched marks and messages left by previous tenants. Some had written their names, a date, or left some other proof of their existence. One of them had busied himself scratching crucifixes in the dark, but heaven did not seem to have noticed them. The iron bars securing the cell were rusty and left a film of brown on one’s hands.

Huddled up on the ramshackle bunk, Fermín tried to cover his nakedness with a bit of ragged cloth which, he imagined, served as blanket, mattress and pillow. The half-light was tinged with a coppery hue, like the breath of a dying candle. After a while, his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and his ears sharpened, allowing him to pick up the sound of slight movements through a litany of dripping leaks and echoes carried by the draught that seeped in from outside.

Fermín had been sitting there for half an hour when he noticed a shape in the dark, at the other end of the cell. He stood up and stepped slowly towards it: it was a dirty canvas bag. The cold and the damp had started to get into his bones and, although the smell from that bundle, spattered with dark stains, did not augur well, Fermín thought that perhaps it contained the prisoner’s uniform nobody had bothered to give him and, with a bit of luck, a blanket to protect him from the bitter cold. He knelt down and untied the knot closing one end of the bag.

When he drew the canvas aside, the dim light from the oil lamps flickering in the corridor revealed what at first he took to be the face of a doll, one of those dummies tailors place in their shop windows to show off their suits. The stench and his nausea made him realise it was no dummy. Covering his nose and mouth with one hand, he pulled the rest of the canvas to one side, then stepped backwards until he collided with the wall of the cell.

The corpse seemed to be that of an adult anywhere between forty and seventy-five years of age, who couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos. A tangle of white hair and a beard covered much of his face and skeletal torso. His bony hands, with long, twisted nails, looked like the claws of a bird. His eyes were open, the corneas shrivelled up like overripe fruit. His mouth was open too, with his tongue, black and swollen, wedged between rotten teeth.

‘Take his clothes off before they come and fetch him,’ came a voice from the cell on the other side of the corridor. ‘You won’t get anything else to wear until next month.’

Fermín peered into the shadows and spied two shining eyes observing him from the bunk in the other cell.

‘Don’t be afraid, the poor soul can’t hurt anyone any more,’ the voice assured him.

Fermín nodded and walked over to the sack again, wondering how he was going to carry out the operation.

‘My sincerest apologies,’ he mumbled to the deceased. ‘May God rest your soul.’

‘He was an atheist,’ the voice from the opposite cell informed him.

Fermín gave another nod and decided to skip the formalities. The cold permeating the cell was so intense it cut through one’s bones and any courtesy seemed redundant. Holding his breath, he set to work. The clothes smelled the same as the dead man. Rigor mortis had begun to spread through the body and the task of undressing the corpse turned out to be much harder than he’d anticipated. Once the deceased’s best clothes had been plucked off, Fermín covered him again with the sack and closed it with a reef knot that even the great Houdini would have been unable to tackle. At last, dressed in a ragged and foul-smelling prison uniform, Fermín huddled up again on the bed, wondering how many prisoners had worn it before him.

‘Much appreciated,’ he said finally.