by Chris Lloyd
A man was seated on a small pile of stones, his back resting against a taller section of wall, his face in the sun.
He looked at Elisenda and spoke.
'I wondered how long I'd have to wait.'
Elisenda looked back at him.
'I really didn't want it to be you.'
Chapter Seventy Nine
The last blackbird sang in an autumn palm.
Apart from that, silence.
There were no city-break tourists, no office workers, no retired travellers nosing among the stones. No schoolchildren following a teacher's earnest games or elderly men sitting out time. The noise of the city and its traffic and commerce didn't permeate beyond the city walls into the world without.
There was just a woman and a man watching each other across a divide.
It was the man who spoke first.
'I take it you put the tile on the Star of David.' He sounded quite pleased with her, quite matter-of-fact. 'And you told the newspapers about it?'
'Yes.'
'You knew I'd know its meaning.'
Elisenda stared at him. 'You have no idea how much I wish I hadn't known.'
He looked around and patted the stones next to him. 'The Torre Gironella. Never rebuilt after being destroyed by the French. But that's not our story of it, is it? Correct me if I get any of my facts wrong, but it was 1391, wasn't it? A hundred and one years before the expulsion of the Jews and over four hundred years before the French turned it into this ruin. A mob ran wild through the city and the Jews were locked up in this old tower for their protection. You knew I'd see the connection between the Jewish museum and this place.'
'Yes, I knew.'
'The Jewish museum. In my day it was called Isaac el Cec. It was a bar and then it was a restaurant. And local people went there. And now they’ve turned it into a museum and no local people go there. Only tourists, who walk around it and come out again and still have no concept of this city. Our culture's no longer ours. It's a plastic image of itself for plastic people.'
'I also knew you'd only see half the history.' She gestured to where he was seated. 'The Jews in the Torre Gironella. They were locked up for their own protection, but many of them weren't allowed out until they rejected their faith and adopted Catholicism. And they were persecuted if they didn't. It wasn't some splendid storybook past to be proud of. It was real, with all its faults and foibles. All our history's like that. Every country's is. Previous generations were taught that Girona was three times immortal. That it held out against the French sieges. Then times change and the history changes and it turns out that French troops occupied the city and we'd all been fed a lie that suited whoever wrote the history that day.'
'That's not true.'
'It is true. You claim we don't know our history and that our culture's disappearing, but that's not true. History doesn't end. It's happening now. Our history evolves. Culture, society, people, we all move on. You can't take an idealised snapshot of a moment of your choosing and insist we all stay there. Culture, our culture, our identity, everything that makes us what we are includes our past, but it also includes our present. And our future. And you can't stop that.'
He cocked his head to one side. 'That doesn't interest me. It's not what I wanted to say. I was speaking out for our identity.'
'No, you weren't. You were speaking out for your own warped view of our identity. An identity that's changing, that's always changed. And that is something you can't accept. You've been inconsistent throughout. You evidently despise all that's new or doesn't fit in with your view of the old order, but you've used new legends to prove your point and old versions of history that have been discredited. You're as pragmatic as the rest of the modern world. You just excuse your own pragmatism in a way you won't excuse anyone else's.'
He looked surprised. 'You've come to confront me?'
'Of course I've come to confront you. With every gram of my being I've come to confront you.'
They stared at each other, both slowing down, both knowing they had to remain calm.
Elisenda broke the silence, her voice quiet again. 'Why have you come?'
'Because I've finished what I had to do.' He paused to consider for a moment. 'I've nearly finished what I had to do.'
'Why did you kill Pau?'
'You said so yourself. It was never about the victims.'
'Of course it's about the victims. It's never about anything other than the victims.'
He regarded her for a moment. 'Because I'd said everything I had to say. It was time to end it. People had stopped listening. They were more intent on petty squabbles than on where we were going wrong. No one could see it, which sickened me, and by the time you finally did see it, you'd all cheapened it and distorted it for your own purposes.'
'And killing Pau changes that?'
'Perhaps it wasn't necessary. I knew if I let him live that he'd eventually come to me. That's why I had to choose him. He had an even more analytical mind than yours. But once I'd killed him, I knew it was the end. That I didn't need to carry on any longer. You have no idea of the relief that brings me.'
'Relief? The relief it brings you?'
'Did you get the significance of the statue.' He looked at Elisenda in the sunlight. 'I see you didn't. It's because the statue is neither one thing nor the other. Neither a woman nor a man. By trying to be both, it becomes neither. And that was Pau. He was neither wholly Catalan, nor was he wholly Spanish. A hybrid of corrupted identity. The way we all are now. He and the statue are a symbol of the modern that is ugly, that doesn't add anything, that has no history, that has no place here.'
She shook her head. 'No. You are wrong. On every human level what you have done is wrong. I can understand about Masó, Chema GM, even Viladrau. But not the others.'
'Can you? And what do you think that says about you? Do you think you're better, then, than someone who sees the immigrant as an understandable victim, but not the priest? Worse than someone who doesn't accept the critic or the comedian as a deserving victim? Better than me because I say they're all as deserving of what happened to them? I heard you say they ceased to be hate figures. No, they didn't. Not for me. They never ceased to be hate figures to me because they were all part of what we're losing. From first to last they stood for everything we are losing. From first to last, I hated them.'
The blackbird stopped its song, the underlying silence more noticeable by its absence.
'So what happens now?' he asked her.
She gestured to his hands. 'You tell me.'
In one hand, he held a syringe, filled with a cloudy fluid. His arms were bare. In the other, he held a Walther P99 pistol. It was pointed at Elisenda. It had been all the time they'd been talking.
'The syringe is full of the stolen drugs, I take it,' she said. 'Who's it for?'
'I haven't entirely decided yet. Me probably.'
'And the gun?'
'That depends on you.'
He gestured with the gun for her to step towards him. Doing so, she caught a movement to her right. Turning to look, she gasped. Hanging by a noose from a tree, his hands tied behind his back, his mouth covered with brown tape, was Àlex. He was barely moving, his right foot clinging to a rock, supporting his weight, his eyes angry and imploring, looking at Elisenda. She made to move towards him, but the man fired the gun at the rock, almost causing Àlex to lose his footing.
'Please don't try to get to him,' the man said.
Elisenda looked down for a moment at the vivid green grass between her feet and then back up at the man seated on a ruined tower.
'Why, Narcís? Why did you do it?'
Pijaume looked back at Elisenda.
'My wife was ill.'
He sat in the breeze and stared bleakly at her.
'Terminal,' he continued after a brief moment. 'I couldn't keep up financially and the bank wouldn't help, so I had to turn to Daniel Masó. But then that got out of hand, too. My wife was dying and I had to worry about money. That is wrong,
Elisenda. On every human level, that is what is wrong.'
'I'm sorry, Narcís. I'm sorry for your wife. I'm sorry for what you've had to cope with, but it excuses nothing.'
He carried on, not registering her words. 'I had to meet him in the building where you found him. He was thinking of buying it. With my money. With all his victims' money. And he was rubbing it in. I refused to pay and he pulled a knife on me. I don't know how it happened but I took it off him and he got stabbed. His nose too. I could see he'd bleed to death so I just let him. He was no loss to anyone. I'd been looking at the En Banyeta face just before I'd got there, and it struck me how fitting it was. Another moneylender dying, his nose rubbed away by someone desperate enough to do that.
'And then I saw those muggers, and I wanted them to know what it felt like to be a victim. I wanted people like them to know the city didn't want them, so I used the legends. And I used the Verge de la Bona Mort to show that I condemned them. That we condemned them. I saw it as our heritage fighting back. I even used Masó's van to take them. I thought it would be appropriate, one blight paying for the punishment of another. After that, it just ran away with me. I kept seeing people who deserved it. The priest, with his hypocrisy. The immigrant who came to this country and then complained about how he was treated. The comedian who sold out his heritage and bastardised his culture.'
Elisenda pointed to Àlex, struggling to keep a toehold on survival. 'Why Àlex?'
'Because he sees himself as executioner too. As above the law.'
Pijaume fired the gun at the rock and Àlex lost his footing, his legs swinging out into space, the breath in his throat stuttering. Elisenda moved towards him but Pijaume shot into the ground in front of her feet. 'I am not afraid to kill you, Elisenda.'
She stepped back and watched as Àlex used the pendulum swing of his body to grasp for the rock again and catch onto it. The rope was still tight around his neck but she could see that he could breathe once again.
Elisenda looked back at Pijaume. 'And what makes you different from your victims, Narcís? From Chema GM?'
'I am not like him.'
'No? One or two of your scapegoats might differ slightly, but you're no better. He was responsible for an elderly man dying in fear and despair, you've got even more on your conscience. Daniel Masó thrived on fear, so did you, Viladrau is corrupt and so are you. Ultimately, you are corrupted.'
'Do not liken me to them.'
They stared at each other, separated by a common bond.
'So what did you achieve?' she asked him.
'Achieve?'
'With your victims? What did you achieve? Masó's business has been taken over by his uncle, people still owe him money. You still owe him money, that was where you got the swollen ear and the headaches from, isn't it? He got heavy with you. And the other muggers are out of prison already. The woman Viladrau abused and her son have been abandoned to fend for themselves. There was a better way to bring them to justice for their crimes. You're a policeman, you could have worked within the system and they would have been punished.'
'And Mònica Ferrer? How does the law punish her? It can't. What do we all do? Stop reading her bile? We can't. Everyone in the city loathed what she said, but we all kept her there because we all continued to read what she said. I did what I could. I used what I could.'
'But you achieved nothing. You made Mònica Ferrer suffer far more than any crime she ever committed, and now someone else has taken over from her with even more savagery. More immigrants and local people have suffered because of you. And the stand-up comedian. An entertainer, Narcís, that's all he was, not a threat to our culture. What do you think will change in the world because you brutalised a young man and left him to die in terror in a small city in Catalonia? You did nothing, you said nothing, you achieved nothing.'
She stopped for a moment to calm her voice before carrying on. She glanced over at Àlex. He was still safe. She spoke much more slowly.
'And I will never forgive you for what you've done to Girona. You've turned us against each other, neighbour against neighbour, colleague against colleague. You've brought out the most petty and vindictive in us and invited us all to see the worst in everyone else and demand that they be punished for it.'
'I can't bring out what's not there.'
'That's not a victory, Narcís. But in the end, you'll lose. You're not a legend, you're just a weak and fallible individual. We will forget you and we will get our culture back. Our real culture, not this artificial one of spite that you've created. We are strong enough to outlive you and move on.'
Pijaume looked across the gap between him and Elisenda and pointed the gun first at her and then at Àlex. He seemed to take a decision.
'We appear to have reached an impasse,' he told her. 'So now you have to decide. You have to take the decision who to save. And whether to let me die or not. Whether I deserve to die.'
He fired one more time at the rock, dislodging Àlex, already weakened, who swung heavily over the lush grass, struggling to regain his toehold, kicking with his feet, tightening the noose around his neck. Elisenda moved but Pijaume fired, this time at Àlex, narrowly missing him, making her freeze, caught between the two men.
He then put the syringe to his own arm and pressed. The cloudy fluid slowly drained from the plastic tube and he let out a sigh. Elisenda and Pijaume stared at each other as the gun drooped in his hand. Elisenda began to move, but he lifted the gun again. She waited a moment longer, Àlex's struggles becoming weaker, his legs in spasm.
Pijaume's eyes closed and Elisenda made the dash over to where he was leaning against the wall in the bright sunlight and knocked the gun out of his hand, kicking it away. She ran straight to Àlex and lifted his legs, trying to take the weight off the noose. Reaching up, she edged her fingers into his waistband, looking for the penknife he carried there, but she dislodged it and it fell down his trouser leg. She had to shake him, trying not to worsen the grip around his throat, until the knife finally fell through and onto the ground. She had to let go of Àlex for a moment to reach down and snatch the knife, hurriedly opening the blade and running to the tree to which the rope was tied and sawing desperately through the dense fibres. It gave way and Àlex fell heavily to the ground. Running to where he lay, she loosened the noose but couldn't feel a pulse, so she began pumping his chest and breathing into his mouth, punching his sternum to revive him. With a choke, he opened his eyes wide in panic and sucked air into his lungs, twisting against the rope around his neck and the pain of his hands tied underneath his body.
Elisenda made sure he was comfortable and then hurried back to Pijaume, kneeling down next to him. His eyes were struggling to stay open. She took out her mobile and called for an ambulance.
'I refuse to be made to decide,' she told him.
'I only meant good.'
She sighed. 'It was the wrong good, Narcís.'
His eyes flickered, the sight going from them, the whites clouding over.
'I didn't kill that young man,' he told her. 'Corominas.'
'I know you didn't, Narcís.'
He nodded and his eyelids began to close. He spoke in short breaths.
'My wife died. Last week.' He fought for breath. 'We might commit evil acts, but we can never be as evil as these illnesses that take innocent people and destroy them from the inside. Burrowing their way through everything that you love. That I loved. Her name was Anna. In the end, the past was all she knew. She was all I knew.'
Elisenda held him and watched the old world die, with all its good and evil, and she shed a tear for the second time in two days.
Chapter Eighty
One side of the church spoke Catalan. The other, Spanish with a southern accent.
Close family to one side at the front, his extended family behind, having made the sorry journey from Andalusia, filling the weeping pews in the parish church in Vista Alegre. The parish to where Pau's family had moved from Andalusia a generation ago and where Pau had worked in th
e Mossos d'Esquadra a lifetime of change later. Colleagues and friends on the other side, in black and dress uniform from the seats at the front to the standing rows at the back. The coffin carried in on the shoulders of six Mossos, Àlex and Josep at the front, the service in both languages, the police station empty of everyone but the reluctant minimum shift.
Outside, Elisenda let out a long pent-up sigh and spoke what words of comfort she could to Pau's parents. His mother told her that Pau had been proud to work for Elisenda. She watched them leave, going home for a private remembrance with the family.
The Mossos were walking in the other direction, returning in mute sorrow to the police station. Her own unit stood on the pavement together, their sorrow greater and more mute than anyone's. She caught Àlex's eye and they looked at each other for a moment.
He had come into her office the day before to ask what she would be doing after Pau's funeral, his throat heavily bandaged, his weakened voice barely audible through the dry-rasping pain. She told him she'd be going and he asked her if she thought that was the right thing to do.
'I have to,' she told him.
He turned to go.
'Àlex.' She paused in what she was about to say. His hand was on the door handle. 'I was going to ask you about the two muggers who were attacked. I've spoken to them, but they claim they didn't see their attacker. I was going to ask you if you had anything to tell me, but I don't think I want to know.'
He started to open the door and she called him back.
'It's just that there are times, Àlex, when you're no better.'
Outside the church in the Vista Alegre parish, Àlex looked at her and nodded once before returning to the station.
'Are you ready, Elisenda?' a voice behind her asked.
She turned around. Inspector Puigventós was waiting for her, holding a car door open.
'I'm ready.'
They both got in and were driven along Carrer Emili Grahit and past the work on the new railway tunnel to the old garden suburb of Sant Narcís and its parish church.
The church was empty. Pijaume's wife's family had refused to come to the service and he only had one brother, who had evidently stayed away too, so his brief service was given in front of just Elisenda and Puigventós and two elderly women seated at the back of the church, who faded away at the end. Elisenda left the church, her shoes echoing on the polished floor. It was the loneliest sound she had ever heard.
