The Labyrinth of the Spirits
Page 52
“What do you mean, nothing? After what happened?”
She drew closer to him. There was something different about him, in the way he looked at her and behaved. She decided not to pull at that thread. She’d wait for a more suitable moment.
“You’re going to wait here for Vargas to return, and you’re going to tell him exactly what you’ve told me. Word for word.”
“What about you? Where are you going?”
Alicia pulled the revolver out of the handbag that lay on the table and checked that it was loaded.
Fernandito reverted to his usual shocked expression. “Hey . . .”
22
At some point in his captivity, Mauricio Valls had begun to think of light as the harbinger of pain. In the dark he could imagine that those rusty bars were not confining him, that the walls of the cell did not ooze a film of filthy moisture that slid over the rock like black honey and formed a fetid puddle at his feet. Above all, in the dark he could not see himself.
The half-light in which he lived was only barely broken when, once a day, a strip of brightness opened up at the top of the stairs and a figure was outlined against it carrying the pot of foul water and a piece of bread that he devoured in a matter of seconds. The jailer had changed, but not his manners. His new custodian never stopped to look at him in the face or speak to him at all. He ignored Valls’s questions, pleadings, insults, and curses. All he did was place the food and the drink next to the bars and leave.
The first time the new jailer came down, the stench issuing from the cell and the prisoner had made him throw up. From then on he almost always came down covering his mouth with a handkerchief and stayed as little as possible. Valls no longer noticed the smell, just as he barely felt the pain in his arm, or the dull throb of the purple lines that rose from his stump like a cobweb of black veins. They were letting him rot alive, and he no longer cared.
He had started to think that one day nobody would come down those steps anymore, that the door would never open again, and he’d spend the rest of what little life he had left in darkness, feeling his body decompose bit by bit and devour itself. He had often witnessed that ritual during his years as governor of the Montjuïc prison. With luck, it would take a matter of days. He had started to fantasize about the weakness and delirium that would take hold of him once the initial agonies of hunger had burned all the bridges. The cruelest part was the absence of water. Perhaps, when the grip of despair and torment became overpowering and he began to lick the sewage that seeped down the walls, his heart would stop beating. One of the doctors who had worked for him in the castle twenty years ago always said that God takes pity on motherfuckers first. Even in this respect, life was a bitch. Perhaps, at the last moment, God would also take pity on him, and the infection he could feel advancing through his veins would save him from the worst part of the end.
* * *
When the door opened again at the top of the stairs, he was dreaming that he had already died and was in one of those canvas sacks used to remove the corpses from the cells in Montjuïc Castle. He woke from his drowsiness to discover that his tongue was swollen and aching. He put his fingers in his mouth. His gums were bleeding, and his teeth moved when he touched them, as if they were attached to soft mud.
“I’m thirsty!” he groaned. “Water, please . . .”
The steps coming down the stairs were heavier than usual. A light went on with a roar of white noise. Sound was much more reliable than light in the cell. The world had been reduced to pain, the slow decomposition of his body, and the echoes of footsteps and pipes murmuring between those walls. Valls followed the path of the approaching footsteps with his ears. He became aware of a figure that had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
“Water, please,” he begged.
He crept up to the metal bars and strained his eyes. A beam of blinding light burned his retinas. A torch. Valls moved back and covered his eyes with the only hand he had left. Even like that, he could feel the light moving over his face and over his filthy body, covered in excrements, dried blood, and rags.
“Look at me,” said the voice at last.
Valls removed his hand from his eyes and opened them very slowly. His pupils took a while to adapt to the light. The face on the other side of the bars was different, but it seemed strangely familiar.
“I said look at me.”
Valls obeyed. Once dignity was lost, it was far easier than giving orders. The visitor went up to the bars and examined him carefully, passing the torch’s beam over his limbs and his emaciated body. Only then did Valls realize why the face looking at him from the other side of the bars seemed familiar.
“Hendaya?” he gasped. “Hendaya, is that you?”
Hendaya nodded. Valls felt that his prayers were being answered. For the first time in days or weeks, he could breathe. It must be another dream. Sometimes, anchored among shadows, he held conversations with saviors who came to his rescue. He strained his eyes again and laughed. It was Hendaya. In the flesh.
“Thank God, thank God,” he sobbed. “It’s me, Mauricio Valls. Valls, the minister . . . It’s me . . .”
He stretched out his arms toward the policeman, weeping with gratitude, ignoring the shame of being seen that way, half naked, mutilated, and covered in shit and urine. Hendaya took a step forward.
“How long have I been here?” asked Valls.
Hendaya didn’t reply.
“Is my daughter Mercedes all right?”
Hendaya offered no answer. Valls stood up with difficulty, holding on to the bars until his eyes were level with Hendaya’s. The policeman was looking at him with no expression. Was Valls perhaps dreaming again?
“Hendaya?”
The policeman pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Valls got a whiff of tobacco, the first time he’d smelled it in what seemed like years. It was the most exquisite perfume he’d ever sniffed. He thought the cigarette was for him until he saw Hendaya put it between his lips and take a long drag.
“Hendaya, get me out of here,” he begged.
The policeman’s eyes shone through swirls of smoke rising between his fingers.
“Hendaya. It’s an order. Get me out of here.”
The other man smiled and took a couple more drags.
“You have bad friends,” he said at last.
“Where’s my daughter? What have you done to her?”
“Nothing, yet.”
Valls heard a voice rise into a desperate howl, not realizing it was his own. Hendaya threw the cigarette into the cell, at Valls’s feet. The policeman didn’t bat an eyelid when the prisoner, seeing him go back up the stairs, started to shout and bang the metal bars with his last remaining bit of strength.
Valls collapsed, exhausted, on his knees. The door at the top of the stairs sealed itself shut like a coffin. Darkness closed in on him again, colder than ever.
23
Among the many adventures hidden in the heart of Barcelona, there are unassailable sites, and forbidding chasms. But for the truly fearless, there’s the Civil Registry. Vargas faced the ancient structure, covered in soot, and sighed. Its veiled windows and its resemblance to a vast mausoleum seemed to warn the gullible not even to attempt the assault.
Once he’d negotiated the large oak door that kept mere mortals at bay, a heavy-looking counter loomed before him. Behind it, a little man with owlish eyes watched the world go by without even a hint of cordiality.
“Good morning,” was Vargas’s peace offering.
“It would be if these were opening hours. As the notice on the street clearly specifies, we open from eleven a.m. to one p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays. Today is Monday, and it’s eight thirteen in the morning. Can’t you read?”
Vargas, practiced in the art of dealing with this sort of petty tyrant—which many a public servant armed with an official stamp carries inside him—dropped his friendly expression and planted his badge two centimeters from the receptionist’s nose. “But no doubt you can read.”
“I’d like to speak to whoever is in charge here, if possible, not a cretin like you.”
The receptionist quickly picked up the phone and asked for someone called Señora Luisa. “I don’t care,” he murmured into the receiver. “Tell her to come out right now.”
He put down the receiver and straightened his jacket. Once he’d rearranged himself, he looked at Vargas.
“The director’s secretary will be with you right away.”
Vargas sat down on a wooden bench without taking his eyes off the receptionist. Two minutes later a small woman with penetrating eyes appeared. Her hair was tied back and she wore rimless glasses. She raised an eyebrow, clearly realizing what had just happened. “Don’t get angry with Carmona. He does his best. I’m Luisa Alcaine. How can I help you?”
“My name is Vargas, from police headquarters in Madrid. I need to check some certificate numbers. It’s important.”
“Don’t say it’s also urgent. That brings bad luck in this house. Let’s have a look at those numbers.”
The policeman handed her the list. Doña Luisa took a quick look and nodded. “The arrival or the departure numbers?”
“Excuse me?”
“These over here are death certificates, and these other numbers are birth certificates.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m always sure. My short height is just to mislead people.” Luisa gave him a cunning catlike smile.
“Then I’d like to see both, please.”
“Everything is possible in the miraculous world of Spanish bureaucracy. Follow me, if you’ll be so kind, Colonel,” Luisa said, holding a door open behind the counter.
“It’s just Captain, I’m afraid.”
“Shame. After the fright you gave Carmona, I thought you’d have a higher rank, to be honest. Don’t they give you titles according to your height?”
“I’ve been shrinking for a while now. It’s the mileage.”
“I understand. I came here looking like a ballerina, and look at me now.”
Vargas followed her down a seemingly endless corridor. “Is it me, or does this building seem bigger inside than out?”
“You’re not the first person to notice. It grows a little every night. Rumor has it that it feeds on civil servants who are on leave and on legal clerks who come here to look up files and fall asleep in the consultation room. If I were you, I wouldn’t drop your guard.”
When they reached the end of the corridor, Luisa stopped in front of a huge door that looked like the entrance to a crypt. Someone had hung a piece of paper from the lintel with these words:
Abandon all patience
all ye who venture beyond this door . . .
Luisa pushed open the door and winked at him. “Welcome to the magic world of official forms and two-peseta stamps.”
A dizzying beehive of shelves, ladders, and filing cabinets spread out in a vast Florentine tableau under a vault of pointed arches. Something akin to a piece of stage machinery with lamps exuded a dusty light that hung like a ragged curtain.
“God almighty,” murmured Vargas. “How can anyone find anything here?”
“The idea is not to be able to find it. But with a bit of ingenuity, a little persistence, and the expert hand of yours truly, one can find anything here, even the philosopher’s stone. Show me the list.”
Vargas followed Luisa to a wall stuffed with numbered files soaring up to the heavens. The director snapped her fingers, and two diligent-looking staff members appeared. “I’m going to need you to bring down the books from sections 1 to 8B from 1939 to 1943 and 6C to 14 from the same period.”
The two minions set off in search of ladders, and Luisa invited Vargas to sit down at one of the consultation desks in the middle of the hall.
“Nineteen thirty-nine?” asked the policeman.
“All these documents still have the old numbering. The system changed in 1944, with the introduction of the national identity document. You’re in luck, because a lot of the prewar files were lost, but the period between 1939 and 1944 is all here in a separate section that we finished putting in order a couple of years ago.”
“Do you mean to say that all these certificates are from shortly after the war?”
Luisa nodded. “Stirring up the past, eh?” the civil servant hinted. “I applaud your bravery, though I’m not so sure about your prudence. There aren’t many people who have the interest or the desire to rummage around there.”
While they waited for the return of the two assistants with the requested books, Luisa studied Vargas with clinical curiosity. “How long since you last slept?”
He checked his watch.
“Just over twenty-four hours.”
“Shall I ask for a coffee? This could take a while.”
Two and a half hours later, Luisa and her two assistants had navigated through oceans of paper and finished the voyage by placing a small islet of volumes in front of Vargas, who could hardly keep awake.
He considered the task ahead and sighed. “Would you do the honors, Señora Luisa?”
“But of course.”
While Vargas drank his third cup of coffee, Luisa sent her assistants away and proceeded to organize the registry books into two slowly increasing piles.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what all this is about?” Vargas inquired.
“Should I?”
He smiled.
After a while, Luisa let out a sigh of relief. “Well, it should all be there. We’ll go through the list again. Let’s see.”
Checking the numbers, she selected one volume after another. As she examined them, Vargas noticed that she was frowning.
“What?” he asked.
“Are you sure these numbers are correct?”
“They’re the ones I have . . . Why?”
Luisa looked up from the pages and gazed at him in surprise. “No, nothing. They’re all infants.”
“Infants?”
“Children. Look.”
Luisa placed the books in front of Vargas and compared the numbers, one at a time.
“Do you see the dates?”
Vargas tried to decipher that numerical mishmash. Luisa guided him with the tip of a pencil.
“They go in couples. For every death certificate there is one birth certificate. Issued on the same day, by the same civil servant, in the same division, and at the same time.”
“How do you know?”
“Because of the control code. See?”
“And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it normal for the same civil servant to issue two documents simultaneously?”
“No. And even less normal when they’re from two different departments.”
“What could have caused such a thing?”
“It’s not standard procedure. At the time, certificates were noted down by districts. These were all processed in the central registry.”
“And is that an irregularity?”
“Very much so. Moreover, these documents, if what is written down here is true, were all issued in a single day.”
“And that’s odd.”
“Odder than two left feet. But that’s just the start.”
Vargas looked at her.
“All the deaths are certified in the Hospital Militar. How many children die in a military hospital?”
“And the births?”
“In the Hospital del Sagrado Corazón. All, with no exception.”
“Could it be a coincidence?”
“If you’re a man of faith. . . . And look at the ages of the children. They’re also in pairs, as you can see.”
Vargas took a closer look, but exhaustion was beginning to cloud his understanding.
“For every death certificate, there is one birth certificate,” Luisa once again
explained.
“I don’t understand.”
“The children. Every one of them was born on the same day as one of the deceased.”
“Could I borrow all this?”
“The originals cannot leave the premises. You’d have to ask for copies and that would take at least a month, and only by pulling strings.”
“Couldn’t there be a faster way—”
“And more discreet?” Luisa completed.
“Also.”
“Move to one side.”
For the next half an hour, Luisa took paper and pen and wrote down an extract with the names, dates, certificate numbers, and codes of each document. Vargas followed her neat, elegant handwriting, trying to find the clue that would tell him what all of it meant. Only then, when his eyes were already drifting through the endless list of words and numbers, did he notice the names Luisa had just written down. “Just a minute,” he interrupted.
Luisa moved to one side. Vargas looked back among the certificates and found what he was looking for.
“Mataix,” he murmured.
Luisa leaned over the documents the policeman was examining. “Two girls. They died on the same day . . . Does that mean anything to you?”
Vargas’s eyes slid down to the bottom of the certificates. “What’s this?”
“The signature of the civil servant who issued the document.”
The strokes were clean and elegant, the handwriting of someone who knew about appearances and protocol. Vargas formed the name silently with his lips and felt his blood turn to ice.
24
The apartment smelled of Alicia. It smelled of her perfume, her presence, and the aroma left by the touch of her skin. Fernandito had been sitting on the sofa for an eternity and a half, accompanied only by this fragrance and an anxiety that was starting to eat him alive. Alicia and her gun had left a quarter of an hour ago, but the wait was becoming interminable. Unable to stay still for another moment, he got up and went over to the large double windows that looked out on Calle Aviñón, to open them and get some fresh air. With a bit of luck, that disturbing aroma would escape in search of a new victim.