‘Is that the title of the book he’s working on?’
‘That’s what Bebo believes. From what he’s been able to piece together from what Martín tells him and what he overhears him saying to himself, it sounds like some sort of autobiography or confession … If you want my opinion Martín has realised he’s losing his mind, so he’s trying to write down what he remembers before it’s too late. It’s as if he were writing himself a letter to find out who he is …’
‘And what will happen when Valls discovers that he hasn’t followed his orders?’
Brians gave him a mournful look.
10
Round about midnight it stopped raining. From the lawyer’s attic Barcelona looked lugubrious beneath a sky of low clouds that swept over the rooftops.
‘Do you have anywhere to go, Fermín?’ asked Brians.
‘I have a tempting offer to start a career as a gigolo and bodyguard and move in with a wench who is a bit flighty but has a good heart and spectacular bodywork. But I don’t see myself playing the role of a kept man even at the feet of the Venus of Jerez.’
‘I don’t like the thought of you living on the streets, Fermín. It’s dangerous. You can stay here as long as you like.’
Fermín looked around him.
‘I know this isn’t the Hotel Colón, but I have a camp bed in the back there, I don’t snore and, quite frankly, I could use the company.’
‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’
‘My fiancée was the daughter of the founding partner in the firm from which Valls and company managed to get me fired.’
‘You’re paying dearly for this Martín business. A vow of poverty and chastity.’
Brians smiled.
‘Give me a lost cause and you’ll make me happy.’
‘That makes two of us. All right then, I’ll take you up on your generous offer. But only if you allow me to help and contribute. I can clean, tidy up, type, cook and offer you advice as well as investigative and security services. And if, in a moment of weakness, you find yourself in a tight spot and need to unwind a bit, I’m sure that through my friend Rociíto I can provide you with professional services that will leave you as good as new: when you’re young and tender you have to watch out for a build-up of seminal fluids going to your head, or you could make matters worse.’
Brians shook his hand.
‘That’s a deal. I hereby hire you as assistant articled clerk for Brians & Brians, defenders of the insolvent.’
‘As my name is Fermín, I swear that before the week is over I will have found you a customer of the sort who pays up front and in cash.’
That is how Fermín Romero de Torres moved temporarily into Brians’s minuscule office, where he began by rearranging, cleaning and updating all his files, folders and open cases. Within a couple of days the practice looked as if it had trebled in size thanks to Fermín, who had left the place as clean as a pin. Fermín spent most of the day closeted in the office, but he devoted a couple of hours to sundry expeditions from which he returned with handfuls of flowers he nicked from the lobby of the Tivoli Theatre, a bit of coffee – which he obtained by buttering up a waitress from the bar on the ground floor – and fine foods from the Quílez grocers, which he charged to the account of the legal firm that had fired Brians, having first introduced himself as their new errand boy.
‘Fermín, this ham is fabulous, where did you get it?’
‘Try the Manchego, it’s out of this world.’
He spent the mornings going through all Brians’s cases and copying his notes out neatly. In the afternoons he would pick up the telephone and, working his way through the directory, plunge into a search for solvent clients. When he sniffed a possibility, he would then round off the phone call with a visit to the prospect’s address. Out of a total of fifty cold calls to businesses, professionals and private citizens in the district, ten turned into visits and three into new clients for Brians.
The first of these was a widow who had entered into a dispute with an insurance company because they’d refused to make the payment due on the death of her husband, arguing that the cardiac arrest he had suffered after a huge dish of red-hot spicy prawns at the Siete Puertas restaurant was in fact a case of suicide, not covered by the policy. The second was a taxidermist to whom a retired bullfighter had taken the five-hundred-kilo Miura bull with which he’d ended his career in the rings. Once the bull was stuffed, the bullfighter had refused to pay for it and take it home. He said that the glass eyes the taxidermist had given it made it look as if it were possessed by malevolent forces from the other side, and he’d rushed out of the shop claiming Gypsy sorcery had brought on an irritable colon emergency. And the third client was a tailor from Ronda San Pedro who had had five perfectly healthy molars extracted by a dentist with no qualifications but plenty of gall. They were small cases, but all the clients had paid a deposit and signed a contract.
‘Fermín, I’m going to put you on the payroll.’
‘I won’t hear of it. Consider my services strictly pro bono.’
Fermín refused to accept any emolument for his good offices, except occasional small loans with which on Sunday afternoons he took Rociíto to the cinema, to dance at La Paloma or to the fun-fair at the top of the Tibidabo mountain. Romance was in the air, and Fermín was slowly reclaiming his old self. Once, in the funfair’s hall of mirrors, Rociíto gave him a love bite on the neck that smarted for a whole week. On another occasion, taking advantage of the fact that they were the only passengers on the full-sized aeroplane replica that gyrated, suspended from a crane, between Barcelona and the blue heavens, Fermín recovered full command of his manhood after a long absence from the scenarios of rushed love.
Not long after that, one lazy afternoon when Fermín was savouring Rociíto’s splendid attributes on the top of the big wheel, it occurred to him that those times, against all expectations, were turning out to be good times. Then he felt afraid, because he knew they couldn’t last long and those stolen drops of happiness and peace would evaporate sooner than the youthful bloom of Rociíto’s flesh and eyes.