by Andrés Vidal
Three dead bodies lay on the ground. And one of them was Àngel Vila.
Dimas stepped away for a moment from the crowd, which was held back by the police. He couldn’t believe it. … In a matter of a few days, everything around him had been plunged into tragedy and death. He remembered the promise he had just made Neus, Àngel’s wife. Then he thought of Laura: She had treasured Àngel Vila as well.
Dimas stepped back in among the pedestrians and saw a proper journalist with a pad and pen talking with a neighbor.
The man, a fifty-year-old with faded hair, was happy to air publicly all that he knew. Every few moments he would clear his throat and then continue with his bluster.
“Those three men are the ones who perpetrated the attack and assassination of the patriarch of the famous Jufresa jewelers. The always efficient police of our beloved capital have managed to track down those thugs who, when they found themselves cornered, refused to turn themselves in, as more noble souls would have done, and instead looked to shoot their way out, leaving our authorities with no choice but to answer back with the same, though, as can be seen here, with greater accuracy and skill, as all three of them are now dead. A just end to those who take the path of crime instead of the honorable path of hard work.”
Many of those present, including several children, applauded after the orator had spoken. Dimas moved away from them. Before then, he hadn’t dared to look, but now he felt it was his duty. The man’s pompous words had irritated him and stoked his indignation. Àngel was no criminal, not even close. What was he doing here? Maybe the police had thought he was an anarchist like Seguí, a dangerous person? More than once he had heard that people who discomfited those in power had been implicated in murky doings as an excuse to arrest them or even liquidate them. Could that be the case now?
He couldn’t take his eyes off the bodies. Maybe there would be some clue, some important fact he was missing. His gaze wandered over the corpses. The two unknown men had numerous bullet holes and dark spots of blood. The other was Àngel. … When Dimas looked again at his lifeless face, he felt a profound emptiness, just as he’d felt with Francesc. Àngel’s body had bullet holes too, in the chest and in the neck. “Rest in peace” was all it occurred to him to say. Àngel’s cheek was also bruised and he had deep grooves in his wrists.
Along with the cadavers were the pistols. One of the unknown men still held a revolver in his hand. Àngel held an automatic pistol. Dimas found the presence of an automatic unusual; they had only recently gone into production and were usually destined for the military, although with money, you could get anything on the black market. Still, there was something strange about the whole arrangement. Something didn’t add up.
Several vehicles arrived to dispose of the bodies. The police told the public to step back and open a path for them. It was hard for those watching to leave a place that they knew would soon be in the news, and many stayed there until they were forced aside. The police started shoving. Dimas, trapped among them, felt himself being dragged slowly back, as if he had fallen into shifting sands. One of the men close to him shouted at one of the officers.
“Hey! I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life! You don’t have the right to make me go! Who do you think you are?”
The young policeman put a hand on the butt of the pistol in his gun belt.
“You fuck with me and I’ll shoot!”
Other neighbors started shouting and the turmoil grew after the officer’s threat until a superior came and nearly dragged him away, trying to calm down the masses. In the middle of that yelling and screaming, Dimas was thinking, his brow furrowed, as he struggled to make sense of what he saw. He couldn’t find bullet holes anywhere in the buildings. He didn’t see shell casings on the ground, despite the presence of an automatic pistol. There was no odor of gunpowder. The bodies were lain out in a three-meter radius. … There wasn’t any gunfight: this was a setup. They had tortured Àngel first, and then they had lain the three of them out when they were already dead, like setting a stage.
Dimas was at the limit of what he could take. Angry, confused, he left as quickly as he could.
CHAPTER 46
La Vanguardia, Wednesday, March 3, 1915:
Yesterday, in a building situated at Number 3, Calle de la Conrería, a gunfight took place between an agent of the local police and three individuals whose identities have yet to be released. The altercation ended with the deaths of the three perpetrators, who fell in that very street. Inside the building were found various items linked to the robbery of the Jufresa jewelers, one of the most important in the city, and the scene of the murder of its founder, Don Francesc Jufresa i Massip. The majority of the stolen goods have yet to be located by the police investigative teams. It appears that the case has been solved in part by these tragic events, though the case remains open, according to an official comment made to this paper by the chief of police of Barcelona, Esteban Bragado Crespo.
Dimas folded the newspaper and slipped it under his arm. He carried on walking, a million ideas inspired by the newspaper article bubbling in his mind and disconcerting him. He had looked through it when the vendor was shouting out, “They’ve found the jewelry thieves! The criminals who robbed the Jufresa jewelers are dead!”
He needed to reflect and organize his ideas. Around the Paseo de San Juan, where he was wandering aimlessly, he had seen the news of what he’d witnessed the day before, which the paper boy was announcing so joyously. The chronicle confirmed that those found lying dead were the thieves and that the police were now content. But they still hadn’t found the take. Dimas was expecting that. He imagined they’d found just enough to blame the dead men—the part of the charade that he’d been present for. If he had ever had any doubt as to the innocence of Àngel Vila, it had vanished just then. He found it unsettling, the rush to close a case that even to the most indulgent observer was little more than circumstantial, with many loose ends.
He sat down on a bench. The Paseo de San Juan was like an island of light in the middle of a darkened city under siege. The street was open to the sky as if in honor of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, rather than the Feast of Saint John, which came just afterward. The light beamed down and the buildings, instead of looming over the street, had yards in front of them and ample sidewalks. And yet, the old, dank air of the choking city also reached him there, giving the area a strange aroma. The Arco del Triunfo, which greeted the pedestrian on his way to the Park of the Ciudadella, looked hazy, as if covered by a thin layer of dust or something more diffuse, like fog. Dimas wondered whether it was the air or just the overwhelming gray in his wounded stare from the past few days.
Your disconsolate children, he remembered reading at the end of Francesc Jufresa’s obituary, which had been published on Saturday’s front page. Dimas’s eyes had clouded up at that moment, as they always did when he remembered Laura, and a mute agony, like a searing furnace, burned him inside. Seated on the wood bench, reading the newspaper, he felt distant from everything. The day before, he had seen those cadavers, he had spoken with Àngel’s wife, and he had felt true impotence, the knowledge there was nothing he could do. The knot was tightening and he didn’t know who would be caught inside it. It had already trapped Àngel.
“Your disconsolate children …” he repeated to himself. He couldn’t get Laura out of his mind. She was in the middle of a whirlwind of violence that had murdered her father and now kept her far away from Dimas. Despite all that had happened between them, Dimas didn’t want to give in to cowardice and spite. He didn’t resent Laura for rejecting him. He had made a mistake with the old man Pau. In fact, by following Ferran’s orders, he had made more than one. Now that was in his past: it had been another Dimas, less mature, less reflective, who had caused those misfortunes.
Most important, he told himself, he couldn’t let anything happen to Laura; he had to talk to her, at least to warn her that s
omething smelled wrong about all this. She shouldn’t rest easy, no matter how much the police blathered that they’d caught the thieves; he was sure all that had been staged to cover up something much bigger. How could he explain an incomplete puzzle? He had no proof, only conjectures. He understood that Laura could reject him with a simple question, with the least bit of doubt.
But this wasn’t the moment to hesitate because of a what if. It was the time to act. Dimas smacked his shoes with the newspaper to knock off the dust and walked away, slowly but surely.
At the Sagrada Familia, work was carrying on at its own erratic pace. As he approached it, it occurred to Dimas that it had been months since he had really noticed the progress, though he passed by it almost daily. But one day, without warning, he would look at a new sculpture and see that everything was coming along, that beside the first sculpture was another, and another, and that nothing was exactly as it had been before. When he had looked at it with Laura, he needed only one word from her to reorder everything in his mind and freeze it into a single image that would last for weeks, until another detail was added and he would need another word from her to modify this image in his memory.
Under a scaffold, a group of three workers were raising an enormous carved stone with a system of pulleys. Two of them turned the lever slowly while a third climbed up the inside of the scaffold to ensure the stone didn’t whirl or tip. It was a well-orchestrated job; if it struck anything, Dimas wouldn’t want to imagine the loss of time and money doing it again would represent.
When the men paused, he asked the two at the bottom where he could find Laura. They gave him directions, and it didn’t take long for him to find her in the sculpture workshop. Completely absorbed in her task, she was chiseling away, trying to work the stone into its maximum expression. Just then, it wasn’t a model she was working on, but a kind of tunic, and she seemed concentrated in discovering the nature of the forms shaped by the wind where the folds came away from the flesh on one side and hugged it tight on the other.
Dimas looked around at the disarray in the workshop, which was a labyrinth of torsos, of heads without bodies, of disembodied limbs of variable size, some exaggeratedly large, others tiny, with the tenderness of newborns. They only deepened his feeling of helplessness. Everything around him was imposture, affliction, disunity. Everything was arranged under a strange line of shadow, where the possible appeared like a fourth dimension, profoundly distant and unstable.
After looking over the entire room, his eyes met with Laura’s as she stood there observing him, immobile. Despite the grief that was consuming her, she hadn’t lost even a hint of her beauty. He approached her slowly, feigning a calm that was as far as possible from his inner state.
“What are you doing here?” she asked when he was close.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he answered.
“Say what you have to say and go. I have a lot of work,” she said dryly.
“I think you’re in danger,” Dimas said straightaway. “Have you read the news in the paper? They killed Àngel Vila.”
“The police told us yesterday. Anything else?”
“You knew him well. Doesn’t it strike you as strange?”
“What do you mean?”
“You worked shoulder to shoulder with Àngel, and you know how much he appreciated you. Do you really think he was capable of murder?”
“As you know very well, people disappoint you constantly. I can’t expect everything to suddenly become logical. My father is dead,” Laura pronounced, her voice growing thin. “It still devastates me to say it. Nothing is normal anymore, Dimas.”
“But Laura …”
“Leave it, please. Don’t press.” She turned back to the sculpture, ready to resume her work.
“I think there’s something more to all this. I just wanted to warn you.”
“That’s fine. You’ve done it now. You can go.”
Dimas stood staring at her without knowing what else to say, looking for a way to continue the conversation until he knew she would do something to keep herself out of harm’s way. He no longer hoped for her forgiveness; it would be enough for him if he knew she were safe.
“I just want you to protect yourself, Laura. You can’t trust anyone,” he finished.
“Yes, I’ve had that feeling lately,” she said without looking up.
The blows of the chisel rang out rhythmically again through the room. He began walking out, still without knowing how she had taken his words. When he arrived at the threshold, he gave her one last look, but there was no response.
CHAPTER 47
After walking some distance from the Sagrada Familia, Dimas tried to forget about his heartache and focus on figuring out what had happened. With or without Laura, he couldn’t stand idly by without answering the questions that plagued him. Since he could think of nowhere else to turn, he decided to return to the alleged crime scene. He hopped into a streetcar and after a transfer and a bit of a walk, he found himself next to the Calle Conrería. It was after two, and some of the fishermen were returning with the fruits of their labor. Everything was impregnated with the scent of fish and the salt air of Barceloneta. The alley was on one of the border areas of the city, and when he reached it, he had a direct view of the sea. A few men and women walked by, drawn by the aroma of cooking coming from the windows of a few of the houses.
Dimas tried to envision the alleged shootout with Àngel and the other men the night before; more than a shootout, he thought, it had been a slaughter; treated like animals, the men had no idea their destiny was to end up as dead bodies riddled with bullet holes. He stopped and took a good look at the ground, in search of something, though he didn’t know what, something the police might have overlooked that might lead him to his next step. Crouching down, he ran his hands along the edges and the cracks where the asphalt sank into the ground. One of the fishermen who passed by stopped to watch.
“Can I help you, young man?” The speaker was a small man, well past seventy, with thick white eyebrows and mustache and a cap covering his head. He looked at Dimas with a wrinkled forehead.
Dimas stood up quickly and cleaned his hands on his pants.
“Do you live around here?”
“Right there,” the old man answered, pointing to the Calle Alegría. “Why?”
“Did you see any of what happened yesterday?” he asked with interest.
“Well, I know they found those thieves dead. It was early in the morning and my son was at work. I don’t go out to fish anymore, you know? My age … Suddenly I heard some shooting, like a cracking sound, but no shouts, no running, nothing, actually.” The man drummed his fingers in the air. “Just a few shots and then silence. But I will tell you too I haven’t got the best hearing …”
Dimas nodded, thinking that his description jibed, more or less, with his own impression that the crime scene had been nothing more than a frame job. There were no shouts from the police, no steps running down those narrow streets, no warning shots before the coup de grâce. He was already thanking the old fisherman and getting ready to carry on with his investigation when the old man interrupted him.
“Anyway, those young men had a pretty dark future before them …” he added before going on his way. The bones on his squat torso showed through his jacket like the framing of a house.
Dimas turned around, surprised, and went over to him again.
“Did you know those men?” he asked from up close, to make sure the man heard him. The man looked up slowly until he met eyes with Dimas, who was a good deal taller than him.
“Not really, just that they lived in those shanties over in Somorrostro. Their families never had a chance, obviously. They’d lived their lives stealing, mainly to bring something to their families, never anything big. But they finally got their feet into something big, and look how it turned out.”
Despite the dense
odor of salt and fish, Dimas felt as if a gust of fresh air had just filled his lungs. He handed the old man a bit of money and moved on. When he arrived at the other end of Calle de Conrería, he turned and saw the old man standing where he’d been before. The bill was still in his hand, and his eyes were wide open; he was stunned by what had just happened. Dimas didn’t see, however, that after he turned the corner, another person followed in the fisherman’s uncertain footsteps and asked him gruffly, without formalities, about the conversation he had just had.
After talking to the old man, Daniel Montero began to gloat: he couldn’t believe the luck, the same luck he’d lost a year back when he became what he was now. Of all the jobs he’d had to do since he left his job as foreman, the least illegal of them had been security. He dedicated his time to following around people who bothered others in power. Today would compensate for all the sitting around, the fruitless waiting, the insults. He wouldn’t have any problem in explaining to his boss—maybe even stretching the truth a bit—that some stranger was snooping around asking more than he should. He had been ordered to make sure that no wise guys were snooping around asking questions about a recent altercation in the area. Now all he needed to know was what his boss wanted him to do about it, and whatever his boss decided, it would be a pleasure.
He ran with long strides to the streetcar stop. Given the layout of the Park of the Ciudadella, very few routes led out of Barceloneta into the city. According to what the old man said, going to the beach at Somorrostro and back would take his friend a good while. If Montero rushed, he still might have time to come back with instructions and reinforcements without losing track of Dimas Navarro.
As soon as Dimas had made it to the beach of Somorrostro, the faces of the children turned to look at him. The neighborhood of shacks and low houses between Barceloneta and the Lebón gasworks was packed with children and barefoot gypsies with nothing more to do than look for change that had fallen under the rocks on the shore or play in the seawater that washed over their ankles. One of the boys came over to him, trembling with cold. He couldn’t have been more than seven, and he gave off an acrid odor barely covered by the sea spray floating through the air. His skin and his white clothes were covered in mud and filth. A straw hat covered his head. The boy looked distrustfully at Dimas’s suit while he protected his eyes from the sun with one hand. It hadn’t occurred to Dimas to don more ordinary clothes for a search like this. Thinking that the families of the two murdered men would be in mourning now, he took a coin from his pocket, put it into the boy’s hand, and asked, “Do you know if anyone is getting ready for a funeral around here?”
