by Sara Moliner
Ana shook her head.
‘Then they would have called me at the newsroom.’
‘And why send two men to deliver a message?’ added Encarni.
Beatriz sighed. Her hypothesis had come up against two irrefutable arguments. She always had a hard time backing down when she was clinging to something that showed itself to be a dead end and she had to start her reasoning again from zero. She wasn’t fooling herself; she had tried to minimise the real danger because she still refused to accept that, contrary to her expectations and her wishes, they were mixed up in all this. Not only that, but they were in deeper than ever. It was Ana who came up with the worst possible explanation of all.
‘They were Castro’s men. Only he knew about my meeting with Abel Mendoza, only he could suspect that I know something more about this business.’
‘But what? You’ve already told him everything you found out, and he didn’t want to hear it. Why would he come looking for you?’
‘Because I have this.’
Ana pulled the envelope out of her bag.
Beatriz immediately guessed what it might be.
‘You didn’t go looking for whatever Mendoza left at the bar?’
‘La Cruz de Malta. Yes.’
‘But, Ana, what were you thinking? Don’t you realise the danger you put yourself in?’
‘Mendoza left it there for me to pick up if anything happened to him.’
‘And what if he ended up telling that to the person who killed him?’
‘He was prepared to keep quiet.’
‘How can you be sure? You didn’t know him. In such an extreme situation, they might have given him the option to save his life.’
Beatriz saw that her objection made an impression on her cousin.
‘He knew all too well that he was dealing with someone very dangerous,’ she argued after a few seconds. ‘He was prepared.’
Beatriz wondered what she would do in a similar situation, with no hope of salvation, when keeping quiet or speaking out led to the same outcome. What would she have done? Kept quiet and died with the hope that later the guilty would be punished? To die with the only consolation being posthumous revenge. Yes. That’s what she would have done. Was that what Mendoza had prepared himself for? Did the envelope contain his revenge? His will? It didn’t matter, since it was not the contents but the mere fact of having it that implicated them irretrievably.
‘We’ve been reckless, Ana.’ The envelope lay sealed on the table. ‘Who did we think we were? Roberto Alcázar and Pedrín?’
‘Surely not those two, they’re fascists.’ Now it was Ana who was trying to make her laugh.
Encarni, on the other hand, standing between them, remained sombre.
‘Ana, please. Imagine Mendoza had talked about La Cruz de Malta. What would have…?’
‘But he didn’t, or the envelope wouldn’t have been there.’
‘And those two men? What were they doing at your house?’
Beatriz was silent. That was the question: what were those two men doing at Ana’s house? Why were they waiting for her there, and not in the bar? She answered the question herself: ‘Because they didn’t know about the bar.’
Ana and Encarni looked at her expectantly. She continued, ‘That’s it. The two policemen weren’t on Mendoza’s trail, they were on yours.’
‘Why did Castro send two men to look for me? What does it have to do with Mendoza’s death? Why have they forbidden us to talk about him?’
‘I’m afraid, Ana, that Castro hasn’t been upfront with you, that he has other interests in this case beyond a promotion. That’s why he didn’t want you to know the truth.’
She couldn’t imagine what Castro’s involvement might be, but nevertheless, Ana may have become a danger to him. Which meant that Ana herself was in danger.
‘Do you think they followed you here?’ she asked.
‘I can’t say for certain, but I am fairly positive that they didn’t see me get on the tram. I don’t think they even knew what direction I was heading in.’
Beatriz had to approach the window and look down at the street below. On one of the benches on the central pavement she saw a plump, well-dressed woman trying to soothe a child who was having a tantrum. The other passers-by were ordinary pedestrians walking to and fro along the Rambla de Cataluña. Even so, she felt an urgent need to draw the curtains and bolt the front door. Then she went through the entire flat to make sure that all the windows were closed.
When she returned to the kitchen, she found Ana and Encarni attentively examining a piece of paper. They had opened the envelope.
‘And what’s that?’ said Encarni.
‘I don’t know what it is, but we can rule out a couple of things. It isn’t a postcode and it isn’t a locker number.’
‘It’s not an address either. At least, not one here, in Barcelona.’
‘You know what it could be? A bank account number. Or a cryptogram.’
Encarni looked at Ana, her eyes wide.
‘What’s that?’
Encarni didn’t get a chance to find out because Beatriz had drawn near. When she saw the combination of numbers and letters written on the piece of paper she said at once, ‘That’s a catalogue number for a book. A book in the Library of Catalonia.’
53
The library smelled as it always did, of dry paper and dust. Yet Beatriz inhaled the air with gusto. The library had always been a refuge for her, her entrance into the Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, the periods she escaped into when the present became unbearable.
She headed straight to the area where the large wooden card catalogues stood. The books’ file cards were ordered into strict, tight rows stuffed into dozens of tiny drawers with handwritten labels. In some drawers you could see that the cards had a little breathing space. That was where the censors had come and removed authors who were banned. Freud’s name was among the missing. As were the names of Marx and Bakunin, and those of Huarte de San Juan and Vives. A simple, effective procedure: cards disappeared; books didn’t exist.
Beatriz grabbed one of the request slips and wrote the catalogue number that they had found in Abel Mendoza’s envelope on it. The problem was that they didn’t have the name or the title of the book to go with the number. But she knew how to solve that problem. She had already seen that Pilar was at the service desk, and she was one of the librarians she knew best there. She approached the counter and waited for her to finish speaking with a visitor who was complaining about not being able to take a book home.
‘It can only be read in the reading room.’
‘It’s just that the damp isn’t good for my rheumatism.’
Beatriz grinned. She had grown used to wearing an additional light jacket when she went to the library and, in the winter, fingerless gloves to be able to write while keeping the rest of her hands warm.
‘Well, I’m sorry. But those are the rules.’
The man left, grumbling under his breath.
Pilar greeted her. ‘Dr Noguer, I haven’t seen you all week.’
‘I’ve been working at home.’
‘I’m not surprised. With the damp here… And spring seems to be dragging its heels.’
‘It’ll be one of those years without a spring. One day we’ll go out on to the street and all of a sudden it’ll be summer. I have a little problem, Pilar. It seems that the last time I was here I jotted down a book reference so quickly that all I have is the catalogue number. I don’t know what it is, but I underlined it, so I think it must be something interesting. Do you think you can pull it out for me so I can give it a quick look? Ever since I saw the number, I’ve been wondering what book it is and why I wrote it down.’
‘Of course. That kind of thing can drive you up the wall, can’t it? It happens to me when I can’t remember a title or an author; I can’t rest until I find it out.’
Pilar glanced at the catalogue number.
‘It’s in storage.’
‘Can you
get it for me now?’
‘Of course.’
The librarian beckoned one of the employees, a young lad who was pushing a little cart from which he slowly distributed the books that the readers had requested. On one of the final tables he left a pile of books for an older man who was frenetically scribbling away on small sheets of paper.
‘Old Montoliu,’ said the librarian.
‘He’s still at it?’
‘It’s what keeps him alive. The day he finishes it, he’ll die.’
The boy came over and the librarian gave him the slip of paper.
‘Miguel, can you bring this? Quickly?’ she said in a firm tone.
He took the paper and hurried off.
‘The boy confuses fetching things silently for fetching them slowly.’
‘How is your daughter?’
The last time Beatriz had been in the library, Pilar had told her that her young daughter was sick again.
‘A little better,’ she said resignedly.
Beatriz nodded. The librarian’s daughter was ten years old, a delicate child whom all the bacteria that Barcelona was swarming with seemed to have ganged up on.
Another reader had approached the counter and was demanding the librarian’s attention.
‘Forgive me, Doctor, we forgot to write on the slip where you are sitting. Where should I send Miguel?’
‘To the reading room.’
She wrote down the number of her favourite table, trusting that no one was already using it. Then she remembered Ana.
‘Pilar, I forgot, I brought a student who wants to see the library.’
She pointed to Ana, who had been waiting the whole time near the entrance.
‘That’s fine. Bring her in.’
Pilar was already focused on the card that the other scholar was showing her.
Beatriz thanked her and headed to the reading room with Ana. How she loved that room! It was hard for her to imagine that the nave had been built to hold a hospital and that instead of tables and shelves along the wall, there had been sick and dying patients. On rainy days like this one, the silence of the room was disrupted by the rhythmic drumming of raindrops falling from the leaky roof into metal pails spread about below, but, even so, it had a secluded atmosphere that bordered on the monastic.
Her favourite spot was free. Tonet, the least friendly of the librarians, was the one who enforced silence and order in the room. Seated behind a raised counter, he had the gift of making everyone who entered feel like an intruder.
She sat down with Ana and waited for them to bring the book. The other readers lifted their heads for a moment and then returned to their texts.
The boy arrived a few minutes later, dragging his feet, placed the book on the table and moved off just as slowly. She and Ana stared at the volume, a thick edition of the first part of Don Quixote, folio-sized and leather bound. The binding wasn’t original; rather, it was the kind the library used to replace those that had been worn out from use.
Finally Beatriz picked it up.
‘Why would he have written down the catalogue number of Don Quixote?’
She was hoping at least for a title that would give them something they could interpret as a message. What was there in that copy of Don Quixote that could represent Mendoza’s posthumous revenge?
Ana was thinking the same when she said, ‘Maybe he underlined some passages of the book.’
They began to turn the pages, more and more quickly until the person sitting at the next table looked up furiously to ask could they stop making so much noise. They reached the end of the book without having found a single underlining or annotation.
Beatriz checked the index. She thought that in front of some of the chapters she could make out traces of pencil marks. There were unscrupulous people who wrote in library books; there were others, like her, who erased such marks if they were in pencil. It would be ironic if someone had erased Mendoza’s message in order to clean up the book.
She mentioned it to Ana in a whisper. She peered at the slight remains of what could have been marks to signal certain chapters. She lifted the page, turned on the little lamp and held it up to the light. Beatriz wrote down the chapters where she thought she could make out one of the marks. There were five.
‘Start reading. I’m going to request another copy for me.’
Beatriz went over to Tonet.
‘How can I help you, Doctor?’
‘Are there copies of Don Quixote available on the open shelves?’
‘Of course!’ The librarian looked at her derisively. She ignored him.
‘Where can I find them?’
He pointed them out. She headed to the bookshelf and pulled out the book. She returned to the table with it and sat beside Ana, who was already absorbed in the text.
They didn’t know what they were looking for, and the chapters didn’t have any common connection. Nor did the titles give them patterns they could link, and they couldn’t seem to find any clues in the plotlines.
They had been rejecting one hypothesis after another for more than an hour.
‘Should we go to the courtyard for a moment and get some fresh air?’ said Ana.
They went out, both silent and frustrated.
‘Do you know what doesn’t make sense to me?’ said Ana. ‘I can’t imagine Abel Mendoza leaving secret clues inside Don Quixote. That wasn’t how he did things, from the little I knew of him. The one who wrote was his brother.’
‘Didn’t Abel tell you that his brother had wanted to be a librarian? I imagine he knows perfectly how this library works, then. It must have been his brother who had the idea.’
‘Yes, but the idea to do what?’
‘I don’t know, but I have the feeling we’re trying too hard. That we’re missing something obvious.’
‘Then let’s start from the beginning.’
They went back to the reading room and examined the book afresh, as if they had just been handed it. Then they saw it. The book seemed to be awkwardly bound. The endpapers were made of normal paper, and they were somewhat off-kilter. In fact, once they checked, they realised they weren’t endpapers at all: they were flyleaves that were strangely springy, sort of puffed up. No bookbinder worth his salt would deliver a book in that condition, and much less to the National Library of Catalonia. The book had been tampered with. They glanced at each other.
‘There’s something inside here,’ said Beatriz. ‘How do we open it?’
‘Wait. I’m going to look for something.’
Ana got up and went to the cloakroom where they had left their jackets and bags. She came scurrying back, panting from exertion. She showed Beatriz a sharp nail file. She stuck the tip beneath the endpaper and lifted a corner.
‘Not yet, they can see us. We should cover ourselves a little better.’
She hastened to the shelf that held the reference books and grabbed a few: the Real Academia dictionary, another Latin one and two thick volumes of an etymological dictionary. And just then Tonet, the gruff, rather unhelpful librarian, had a fit of gentlemanly behaviour, got up from his throne and came over to help Beatriz carry the books to the table.
‘Allow me to assist you, Doctor.’
Ana turned her back to them. Thank heavens she hadn’t gone on separating the endpaper and had hidden the nail file. If Tonet caught her, not only would he throw them out of the library and perhaps ban her for ever, but also, and at that moment this seemed much worse, they wouldn’t find out what was hidden in the cover of that copy of Don Quixote.
Luckily, Ana had seen them and, pretending to look up from her reading, greeted them with a smile. They placed the books on the table, forming a wall that hid them from indiscreet looks and obscured their movements. Then Ana began to separate the paper from the cover with the utmost care. Beatriz sneaked glances around them. The readers were still absorbed in their books and Tonet, recovered from his fleeting bout of friendliness, was complaining about how poorly a visitor had filled out the req
uest form, forcing him to rewrite it. With the file Ana made a slight scratching noise and, even though it was almost inaudible, it seemed to her that the vaulted room amplified it. The person seated in front of them might have heard because he shifted in his seat. Beatriz put her hand on top of the file to stop Ana. When the man turned a page of the book he was reading, they resumed. False alarm.
Finally Ana managed to separate the endpaper enough to venture a look inside. There were some very thin sheets of paper between it and the cover.
They had found what they were looking for.
They pulled out the paper delicately. They were octavos of India paper, fragile as butterfly wings.
‘There might be more beneath the other cover.’
They repeated the process, and again extracted several pages.
Beatriz was impressed by the cleverness of the hiding place. Without having met either of the brothers, it was clear to her that it was Mario Mendoza’s idea. She wanted to understand the scheme well before reading the papers. She got up and went to the card files. She searched in Authors. The card for that edition of Cervantes’ work wasn’t there. There was no card with that number in the Titles catalogue either. Brilliant. They had made the cards disappear. Without a catalogue number, the book couldn’t be requested, so no one had touched it since they’d hidden the papers there. The book existed only for someone who had the key.
She went back to Ana, who was making a pile of the little papers.
‘Don’t you want to read them?’ Beatriz asked her.
‘Here?’
‘You don’t think this is a good place to read?’
‘What I don’t think it is, is safe.’
54
Beatriz organised the papers carefully on the polished table of the small room. Pilar had opened up one of the reserved rooms, the Cervantine room, so that they could work in peace; that afternoon, no one had requested any of the volumes from the special collection. Ana rested her head on her hands while she read various pages written in tiny script on cramped lines.
Beatriz leaned back in the chair and contemplated the little pile of papers. Fragments of medical records from the military hospital at Vallcarca, and numerous handwritten notes. They were from Mariona’s husband.
