The Prisoner of Heaven (The Cemetery of Forgotten 3)

The governor bowed lightly and, as he walked away down the corridor, slowly clapped his hands.

23

Fermín could feel the lorry slowing down and negotiating the last obstacles along the dirt track. After a couple of minutes of potholes and groans from the lorry, the engine stopped. The stench wafting in through the canvas was indescribable. The two gravediggers walked round to the rear of the lorry and Fermín heard the click of the metal bar that locked the back panel. Suddenly, a strong pull on the sack flung him into the void.

He hit the ground on his side, a dull pain spreading through his shoulder. Before he could react, the two gravediggers lifted the sack from the stony ground and, holding one end each, carried it uphill until they stopped a few metres further on. They dropped the sack again and then Fermín heard one of them kneel down and start to untie the knot. He could hear the other man’s footsteps as he moved away and picked up a metal object. Fermín tried to take in some air but that miasma burned his throat. He shut his eyes and felt the cold breeze on his face. The gravedigger grabbed the sack by the closed end and tugged hard. Fermín’s body rolled over stones and puddles.

‘Come on, let’s count to three,’ said one of them.

Four hands gripped him by his ankles and wrists. Fermín struggled to hold his breath.

‘Hey, listen, isn’t he sweating?’

‘How the fuck can a stiff be sweating, you jerk? It must be the puddles. Come on, one two and …’

Three. Fermín felt himself swing in the air. A moment later he was flying and had abandoned himself to his fate. He opened his eyes in mid-flight and all he managed to see before the impact was that he was plunging into a ditch dug into the mountainside. In the moonlight he could only glimpse something pale covering the ground. Fermín was convinced that what he was seeing were stones and, calmly, in the half-second he took to fall, decided he didn’t mind dying.

But the landing was gentle. Fermín’s body had fallen on something soft and damp. Five metres further up, one of the gravediggers was holding a spade which he emptied into the air. A whitish powder spread like a shiny mist that caressed his skin and, a second later, began to devour it like acid. The two gravediggers walked away and Fermín stood up to discover he was in an open grave packed with rotting bodies and covered in quicklime. He tried to shake off the fiery dust and scrambled over the bodies until he reached the wall of earth. He climbed up the wall, digging his hands into the earth and ignoring the pain. When he reached the top, he managed to drag himself to a puddle of dirty water and wash off the lime. He stood up and saw the lights of the lorry disappearing into the night. Turning around for a moment to look behind him, Fermín stared at the open grave spreading at his feet like an ocean of tangled corpses. He felt sick and he fell on his knees, vomiting bile and blood over his hands. Panic and the stench of death almost stopped his breathing. Then he heard a rumbling sound in the distance. He looked up and saw the headlights of two cars approaching. He ran to the side of the hill and reached a small esplanade from where he had a view of the sea at the foot of the mountain and the lighthouse of the port at the end of the breakwater.

High above him, Montjuïc Castle rose among black clouds that swept across the sky and masked the moon. The sound of cars was getting closer. Without thinking twice, Fermín threw himself down the slope, falling and rolling through tree trunks, stones and brambles that hit him and tore his skin off in shreds. He no longer felt pain, or fear, or tiredness when he reached the road, from where he set off running towards the warehouses in the port. He ran without stopping or breathing, losing all sense of time, unaware of the injuries that covered his body.

24

Dawn was spilling over the horizon when he reached the boundless labyrinth of shacks blanketing the beach of the Somorrostro. An early mist crept up from the sea, snaking between the rooftops. Fermín wandered through the alleyways and tunnels of the city of the poor until he collapsed between two piles of rubble. He was found by two ragged children, dragging wooden boxes, who stopped to stare at the skeletal figure that seemed to be bleeding from every pore.

Fermín smiled at them and made the victory sign with two fingers. The children looked at one another. One of them said something Fermín couldn’t hear. He then abandoned himself to exhaustion and with his eyes half open was aware of being lifted from the ground by four people and then being laid down on a camp bed near a fire. He felt the warmth on his skin and slowly recovered the feeling in his feet, hands and arms. The pain came later, like a slow but uns

toppable tide. Around him, hushed voices of women murmured blurred words. They removed the few rags that still clung to him. Cloths soaked in warm water and camphor caressed his naked, broken body with infinite gentleness.

He opened his eyes a fraction when he felt the hand of an old woman on his forehead, her weary, wise gaze fixed on him.

‘Where have you come from?’ asked that woman whom Fermín, in his delirium, mistook for his mother.

‘From among the dead, Mother,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve come back from among the dead.’

Part Three

Reborn

1

Barcelona, 1940

The incident at the old Vilardell factory never made the papers. It didn’t suit anyone to let the story come out. What took place there would only be remembered by those present. That very night, when Mauricio Valls returned to the castle to discover that prisoner number 13 had escaped, he informed Inspector Fumero of the political police division about a tip-off from one of the prisoners. Before sunrise, Fumero and his men were already posted in their positions.

The inspector left two of his men guarding the perimeter and concentrated the rest at the main entrance, from which, as Valls had already explained, one could see the guards’ lodge. The body of Jaime Montoya, the prison governor’s heroic chauffeur who had volunteered to enter the premises alone and investigate a prisoner’s claim regarding the existence of subversive elements, was still lying there among the rubble. Shortly before daybreak, Fumero ordered his men to enter the old factory. They surrounded the lodge and when its occupants, two men and a young woman, became aware of their presence, only a minor incident occurred: the woman, who carried a firearm, shot one of the policemen in the arm. It was just a scratch. Apart from that slip, Fumero and his men had overpowered the rebels within thirty seconds.

The inspector then ordered his men to round them all up into the lodge and drag the body of the dead driver inside too. Fumero didn’t ask for names or documents. He had the rebels disrobed and bound hand and foot with wire to some rusty metal chairs lying in a corner. Once the rebels had been tied down, Fumero told his men to leave him alone with them and post themselves by the door of the lodge and by the factory gates to await his instructions. On his own with the prisoners, he closed the door and sat down facing them.

‘I haven’t slept all night and I’m tired. I want to go home. You tell me where the money and the jewels you’re hiding for Salgado are and nothing will happen here, all right?’

The prisoners stared at him with a mixture of bewilderment and terror.

‘We don’t know anything about jewels or about anyone called Salgado,’ said the older man.

Fumero nodded somewhat wearily. His eyes moved unhurriedly over the three prisoners, as if he were able to read their thoughts and was bored by them. After a few moments’ uncertainty, he chose the woman and drew his chair closer until he was barely half a metre away from her. The woman was trembling.

‘Leave her alone, you son-of-a-bitch,’ spat the other, younger man. ‘If you touch her I swear I’ll kill you.’