Virgilio shrugged. “Barcelona after the war? What better place to disappear?”
“And would it be possible to find more books of this series?”
Virgilio finished his Fanta while he shook his head slowly. “That would be very difficult. About ten or twelve years ago I heard that two or three copies of The Labyrinth were discovered at the bottom of a box in the Cervantes Bookshop in Seville, and they fetched a lot of money. Right now, I’d say the only possibility of finding anything would be in the bookshop of Costa, the antiquarian in Vic, or else in Barcelona. Gustavo Barceló, perhaps, or maybe, if you’re very lucky, at Sempere’s, but I wouldn’t get too excited.”
“Sempere & Sons?”
Virgilio looked at her in surprise. “You know it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“I’d try Barceló first. He’s the one who deals in special items and is in touch with top collectors. And if Costa has it, Barceló will know.”
“Would Barceló be willing to talk to me?”
“I gather he’s semiretired, but he always finds time for a good-looking young lady. You know what I mean.”
“I’ll doll myself up.”
“Pity I won’t be there to see it. You’re not going to tell me what all this is about, are you?”
“I still don’t know, Virgilio.”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“When this business you’re dealing with is over, if it does indeed end and you’re still in one piece and still have this book, bring it to me. I’d love to spend a few hours with it alone.”
“And why shouldn’t I come out of it in one piece?”
“Who knows? If there’s one thing all Mataix’s Labyrinth books have in common, it’s that anyone who touches them has a bad ending.”
“Another one of your legends?”
“No. This one is true.”
* * *
At the end of the nineteenth century, an island in the shape of a literary café came unstuck from the mainland of reality. From then on it has floated about, frozen in time, at the mercy of history’s currents, through the grand avenues of an imagined Madrid, where it can usually be found beached a few steps away from the National Library and flying the flag of the Café Gijón. There it awaits, a drifting hourglass ready to save any castaway who arrives with a parched spirit or a dry palate, offering them, just for the price of a coffee, the chance to look at themselves in the mirror of memory and for a moment believe they’ll live forever.
Evening was falling when Alicia crossed the avenue toward the doors of the Café Gijón. Vargas was waiting at a table by the window, savoring one of his imported cigarettes and watching the passersby with his policeman’s eye. When he saw her come in, he looked up and signaled to her. Alicia sat down and managed to catch a waiter’s attention as he passed by. She asked for a coffee to shake off the cold that had clung to her in the basement of the library.
“Have you been waiting long?” Alicia asked.
“All my life,” replied Vargas. “Fruitful afternoon?”
“Depends. How about you?”
“I can’t complain. After dropping you off I went by Valls’s publishing house to pay a visit to Pablo Cascos Buendía. You were right. There’s something there that doesn’t quite add up.”
“And?”
“Cascos himself turns out to be little more than an oaf. Full of himself, but still an oaf.”
“The simpler they are, the more dashing they think they are.”
“First of all, our friend Cascos offered me a luxury tour of the offices and then proceeded to rhapsodize about the extraordinary person and exemplary life of Don Mauricio, as if his own life depended on it.”
“You’re probably not far wrong. People like Valls usually drag behind them an endless court of sycophants and enablers.”
“I must say, there was no shortage of either of those. Still, Cascos did seem a bit nervous. He could smell something and didn’t stop asking questions.”
“Did he say why Valls had asked him to come to his home?”
“I had to tighten the screws quite a bit. At first he wouldn’t say a word.”
“And then you criticize me.”
“When it comes to creeps and social climbers, I can work wonders, I must admit.”
“Go on.”
“Let me check my notebook, because there’s a long story there. . . . Here it is. Listen. It turns out that when he was younger, Don Pablito was engaged to a damsel named Beatriz Aguilar. This Beatriz ditched the poor guy when he was doing his military service and ended up marrying, on the way to the maternity ward, as it were, someone called Daniel Sempere, the son of the owner of a secondhand bookshop in Barcelona called Sempere & Sons. This was Sebastián Salgado’s favorite bookshop, which he visited a number of times as soon as he was out of prison, probably to catch up with the literary hits of the past twenty years. If you recall the report that comes with the file, two employees of the said bookshop, one of them Daniel Sempere, followed Salgado to the railway station the day he died.”
Alicia’s eyes flashed electricity. “Go on, please.”
“Getting back to our man, Cascos. The fact is that our resentful hero, Cascos Buendía, the cuckolded second lieutenant, lost contact with his paramour, the lovely Beatriz, who, so Pablito swears, was and is a beauty that in a fair world would have ended up with him and not with a nobody like Daniel Sempere.”
“Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” Alicia suggested.
“Without knowing her, and after spending half an hour with Cascos, I was glad for Doña Beatriz. That’s the background. Now we take a leap forward in time to the middle of 1957, when after parading his CV and letters of recommendation from family members through most companies in Spain, Pablo Cascos receives an unexpected call from Editorial Ariadna, founded in 1947 by Don Mauricio Valls, who is still today its main shareholder and president. Cascos is summoned to an interview, and there he is offered a job in the sales department as representative for Aragon, Catalonia, and the Balearics. At good pay and with the possibility of promotion. Pablo Cascos is delighted to accept and starts working. Some months go by, and one day, out of the blue, Don Mauricio Valls turns up in his office and tells him he wants to take him to Horcher for lunch.”
“Wow. How grand.”
“Cascos did find it strange that the president of the publishing house and the most celebrated figure of Spanish culture should invite a mid-level employee, as Doña Mariana would say, whom he’d never met personally, to the flagship restaurant of the glorious Fascists, in whose basement they probably keep the Fuhrer’s ashes in a cookie jar. Between appetizers, Valls gives him an account of all the good things he’s heard about Cascos and his work in the sales department.”
“And Cascos buys that?”
“Not quite. He’s an idiot, but not that stupid. He senses there’s something odd and begins to wonder whether the job he accepted is what he’d imagined. Valls continues with the pantomime until coffee is served. Then, when they’ve both become great friends and the minister has promised him a golden future in the company and told him he’s thinking of him as senior management material for the publishing house, he lets the cat out of the bag.”
“A small favor.”
“Exactly. Valls comes out with his love for old bookshops, mainstay and sanctuary of the miracle of literature, in particular his love for the Sempere bookshop, for which he has a special fondness.”
“Does Valls say where this fondness comes from?”
“He doesn’t specify. He’s a bit more precise when it comes to his interest in the Sempere family, in particular in an old friend of the owner’s deceased wife, Isabella, Daniel’s mother.”
“Had Valls met this Isabella Sempere?”
“From what Cascos figured out, he’d met not only Isabella but also a good friend of hers. Guess who? Someone called David Martín.”
“Bingo.”
“Curious, isn�
��t it? The mysterious name remembered, in extremis, by Doña Mariana during that distant conversation between the minister and his successor as the head of the Montjuïc Castle prison.”
“Go on.”
“Basically, Valls then spelled out his request. The minister would be eternally grateful if Cascos could, deploying his charm, ingenuity, and past devotion for Beatriz, contact her again and, let’s say, repair the burned bridges.”
“Seduce her?”
“To put it one way.”
“What for?”
“To find out whether that man, David Martín, was still alive and had got in touch with the family at any point during all those years.”
“Why didn’t Valls himself ask the Semperes?”
“Again, Cascos asked him the same question.”
“And the minister replied . . .”
“That it was a delicate subject, of a personal nature, and for unrelated reasons he would rather just sound things out and find out whether there was any basis in his suspicion that Martín was somewhere behind the scenes.”
“What happened?”
“Well, Cascos, bold as brass, began to write flowery letters to his old lover.”
“Did he get any answers?”
“Ah, you mischievous pixie, I can see you appreciate a good bedroom intrigue . . .”
“Focus, Vargas.”
“Sorry. As I was saying, not at first. Beatriz, recent mother and wife, ignores the advances of this would-be Don Juan. But Cascos doesn’t give up and begins to realize he’s got a golden opportunity to recover what was taken away from him.”
“Storm clouds in the marriage of Beatriz and Daniel?”
“Who knows? Too young a couple, married in a rush and with a child on the way before tying the knot . . . a perfect picture of fragility. The fact is that weeks go by and Bea doesn’t reply to his letters. And Valls keeps insisting. Cascos begins to fret. Valls implies an ultimatum. Cascos sends a final letter to Beatriz, summoning her to a tryst in a suite at the Ritz.”
“And Beatriz turns up?”
“No. But Daniel does.”
“The husband?”
“Exactly.”
“Had Beatriz told him about the letters?”
“Or he’d found them. . . . It doesn’t matter either way. The thing is that Daniel Sempere turns up at the Ritz, and when Cascos opens the door in Casanova attire—perfumed bathrobe, slippers, and a glass of champagne in hand—good old Daniel beats the crap out of him until Cascos’s face looks like the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“I like the sound of Daniel.”
“Hang on a minute. According to Cascos, whose face is still bruised, Daniel very nearly finished him off, and would have succeeded if the thrashing hadn’t been interrupted by a plainclothes policeman who happened to be passing by.”
“What?”
“This last bit doesn’t seem to add up. My impression is that the policeman was no such thing, but a friend of Daniel’s.”
“And then?”
“Then Cascos returned to Madrid looking like a piece of toast, his tail between his legs and fear in his bones, thinking of what he was going to tell Valls.”
“What did Valls say?”
“He listened to him without saying a word and made him swear he wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened or what he’d asked him to do.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s what it looked like until, a few days before he disappeared, Valls phoned him again and asked him to come around to his home to talk about something. Although he didn’t specify what that was, it might have been related to the Semperes, Isabella, and the mysterious David Martín.”
“A meeting to which Valls never turned up.”
“And that’s as far as the story goes,” Vargas concluded.
“What do we know about this David Martín? Were you able to gather any information about him?”
“Very little. But what I’ve found is promising. A forgotten author and, get this, a prisoner in Montjuïc Castle between 1939 and 1941.”
“Coinciding with Valls and Salgado,” remarked Alicia.
“Classmates, one could say.”
“And once he leaves the prison, what happens to David Martín after 1941?”
“There is no after. The police records have him as ‘disappeared and deceased during an attempted escape.’”
“And translated, that would mean . . . ?”
“In all likelihood a summary execution and burial in a ditch or a common grave.”
“On Valls’s orders?”
“Most probably. At that time Valls would have been the only person with the authority and power to do it.”
Alicia weighed all that up for a few moments. “Why would Valls look for a dead man he himself had ordered executed?”
“Sometimes dead men aren’t completely dead. Take El Cid, for example.”
“Then let’s suppose that Valls thinks Martín is still alive . . .”
“That would make sense.”
“Alive and seeking vengeance. Perhaps pulling Salgado’s strings in the shadows, waiting for the moment when he can get his revenge.”
“Old friends made in prison are not easily forgotten,” Vargas agreed.
“What isn’t clear is what relationship there can be between Martín and the Semperes.”
“There must be something, all the more so if Valls himself stopped the police from following that thread and preferred to use Cascos to investigate.”
“Perhaps that something is the key to all this.”
“Do we or don’t we make a good team?”
Alicia noticed a feline smile lifting the corners of Vargas’s mouth. “What else?”
“Wasn’t that enough?”
“Out with it.”
Vargas lit a cigarette and took a deep puff, studying the spirals of smoke creeping through his fingers. “Later, as you were still visiting your friend, after I’d practically solved the case single-handedly, only for you to get the medals for it, I went by headquarters to pick up the letters from Sebastián Salgado, the prisoner, and took the liberty of consulting my friend Ciges, the police graphologist. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him what it was about, nor did he ask. I showed him four sheets of paper at random, and after having a good look at them, he told me there were quite a number of signs on the accents and in at least fourteen different letters and ligatures that ruled out a right-handed person. The angle of the ink strokes on the paper and the pressure—or something like that.”
“And where does that take us?”
“To the fact that the person who wrote those threatening letters to Valls is left-handed.”
“So?”
“So if you took some time to read the Barcelona Police report of Sebastián Salgado’s surveillance after his surprising release in January 1958, it specifies that the comrade lost his left hand during his prison years and wore a prosthetic porcelain hand. It seems that during one of the interrogations someone overplayed his hand, if you’ll excuse the pun.”
Alicia seemed about to say something, but she suddenly fell silent, her gaze miles away. In less than a minute she’d started to grow pale, and Vargas noticed a film of perspiration on her forehead.
“Anyway,” he said, “our quick-witted one-handed Salgado could not have written those letters. Alicia, are you listening? Are you all right?”
The young woman suddenly stood up and put on her coat.
“Alicia?”
Alicia picked up the folder that lay on the table with Salgado’s supposed letters and glanced absently at Vargas.
“Alicia?”
She made her way to the door, with Vargas’s baffled eyes fixed on her back.
15
The pain worsened the moment she stepped out. She didn’t want Vargas to see her like that. She didn’t want anyone to see her like that. The looming episode was going to be a bad one. That damned Madrid cold. The midday dose had only bought her a bit of time. She tried to manage t
he first stabs in the hip by breathing slowly and went on walking, taking each step carefully. She hadn’t even reached Plaza de Cibeles when she had to stop and hold on to a lamppost while a spasm clenched her, like an electric current eating away at her bones. She could feel people walking by, staring surreptitiously.
“Are you all right, miss?”
She nodded without even looking up. When she recovered her breath, she stopped a taxi and asked to be taken to the Hispania. The driver looked at her rather nervously, but didn’t say anything. It was getting dark, and the lights on Gran Vía were already sweeping up all and sundry in the gray tide of those who were leaving their cavernous offices to go home and those who had nowhere to go. Alicia pressed her face against the window and closed her eyes.
When she reached the Hispania, she asked the taxi driver to help her out. She gave him a good tip and made her way to the entrance hall, holding on to the walls. As soon as he saw her come in, Maura, the receptionist, jumped up and ran to her side, looking worried. He put his arm around her waist and helped her reach the elevators.
“Again?” he asked.
“It will soon pass. It’s this weather . . .”
“You don’t look at all well. Shall I call the doctor?”
“There’s no need. Upstairs I’ve got the medicine I need.”
Maura nodded rather hesitantly.
Alicia patted his arm. “You’re a good friend, Maura. I’ll miss you.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
Alicia smiled and stepped into the elevator as she waved goodnight.
“By the way, I think you have company,” Maura said as the doors were closing.
She limped down the long dark corridor to her room, clinging to the wall, passing dozens of closed doors that sealed off empty rooms. On nights like this, Alicia suspected she must be the only living occupant left on that floor, although she always felt that somebody was watching her. Sometimes, if she stopped in the dark, she could almost feel the breath of the permanent residents on the back of her neck, or the touch of fingers on her face. When she reached her room at the end of the passage, she paused for a moment, panting.
She opened the door, not bothering to turn on the light. The neon billboards of Gran Vía’s theaters projected a flickering beam that spread a dim Technicolor radiance over the room. The figure in the armchair had its back to the door, and a lighted cigarette in one hand, from which a spiral of smoke wove arabesques in the air.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 17
