‘I’ll be dressed in a minute.’
The Vallvidrera funicular station was a few streets down from Marina’s house. Walking briskly we got there within ten minutes and bought our tickets. From the platform, at the foot of the mountain, the district of Vallvidrera looked like a balcony suspended from the sky above the city. The houses seemed to be nestling on the clouds, held aloft by invisible strings. We sat at the end of the carriage and saw Barcelona unfold at our feet as the funicular slowly crept uphill.
‘This must be a good job to have,’ I said. ‘Funicular driver. Like being heaven’s lift attendant.’
Marina looked at me sceptically.
‘What’s wrong with what I said?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. If that’s all you aspire to.’
‘I don’t know what I aspire to. Not everyone sees things as clearly as you. Marina Blau, Nobel Prize in Literature and nightshirt curator for the Doge of Venice collection.’
Marina looked so serious that I instantly regretted making the comment.
‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get anywhere,’ she replied coldly.
I showed her my ticket.
‘I know where I’m going.’
She looked away. We continued our upward journey in silence for a couple of minutes. The outline of my school rose in the distance.
‘Architect,’ I whispered.
‘What?’
‘I want to be an architect. That’s what I aspire to. I’ve never told anyone.’
At last she smiled at me. The funicular, rattling like an old washing machine, was reaching the top of the mountain.
‘I’ve always wanted to have my own cathedral,’ said Marina. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘Let’s make it Gothic. Give me time and I’ll build it for you.’
The sun hit her face and her eyes shone, fixed on mine.
‘Promise?’ she asked, offering an open palm.
I shook her hand tightly.
‘Promise.’
The address Marina had obtained led us to a small villa standing practically on the edge of an abyss. The place was thick with overgrown shrubbery. A rusty and rather ornate letter box stood at the front among the vegetation, like a ruin from the industrial age. We slipped through the garden and made our way to the door. We could see crates containing piles of old newspapers tied together with string. The ochre paint on the façade was peeling off like dry skin, withered by the wind and the damp. Inspector Víctor Florián didn’t go overboard on keeping up appearances.
‘This place really needs an architect . . .’ said Marina.
‘Or a demolition unit.’
I knocked gently on the door. I was afraid that if I knocked any harder, I might send the house tumbling down the mountain.
‘How about using the doorbell?’
The bell button was broken and the electric connections in the box seemed to date back to Edison’s day.
‘I’m not sticking my finger in there,’ I replied, knocking again.
Suddenly the door opened some ten centimetres. A security chain shone in front of two steely eyes that were scrutinising us.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Víctor Florián?’
‘That’s me. What I’m asking is who you are.’
It was an authoritarian voice without a hint of patience. A voice that might give out parking tickets.
‘We have some information regarding Mijail Kolvenik . . .’ said Marina by way of introduction.
The door opened wide. Víctor Florián was thickset and muscular. If someone had told me he was wearing the same suit as on the day he had retired, I would not have doubted it for a second. He had the air of a fiery old colonel with no war to wage and no battalion to command. If retirement requires a certain degree of peace of mind and an easy conscience, Víctor Florián did not appear to have much of either. He held an unlit cigar in his mouth and had more hair in each eyebrow than most people have on their entire head.
‘What do you know about Kolvenik? Who are you? Who gave you this address?’
Florián didn’t ask questions, he machine-gunned them. He showed us in after taking a look outside as if he thought we might have been followed. Indoors, the house was a nest of filth and smelt like a dusty storeroom. There were more papers there than in the archives of Barcelona’s Central Library, but they were all jumbled together as if an electric fan had been used to arrange them.
‘Come through to the back,’ he commanded.
We went past a room where we saw dozens of firearms in a cabinet lining one of the walls. Revolvers, automatic pistols, Mauser rifles, bayonets . . . Revolutions had been started with less artillery than that.
‘Lord almighty . . .’ I whispered.
‘Shut up, you’re not at mass,’ Florián snapped, closing the door on his arsenal.
The back to which he referred was a small dining room facing the edge of the hill from which one could view the whole of Barcelona. Old habits never die. Even in his years of retirement the inspector continued to watch from above. He pointed to a sofa, full of holes. I wondered if he’d been chasing the cockroaches away with one of his vintage World War II guns. On the table were a half-empty tin of beans and an Estrella Dorada beer, without a glass. A policeman’s pension buys you less than a prison meal, I thought. Florián sat on a chair facing us and picked up a cheap-looking alarm clock. He placed it on the table in front of us.
‘Fifteen minutes. If in a quarter of an hour you haven’t told me something I don’t know, I’ll kick you out of here,’ he said, clearly meaning it.
It took us longer than fifteen minutes to recount everything that had happened to us. As he listened to our story Víctor Florián’s front seemed to crack little by little. Through the chinks I guessed at the worn and frightened man who hid in that hole with his old newspapers and his gun collection. When we’d finished our account Florián took out his cigar and, after examining it quietly for almost a minute, decided to light it. It must be that sort of day, I observed.
Then, with his gaze lost in the mirage of the misty city, he began to speak.
CHAPTER 16
‘IN 1945 I WAS MADE INSPECTOR OF THE BARCELONA fraud squad,’ Florián began. ‘I’d been considering asking for a transfer to Madrid when I was assigned the Velo-Granell case. Nobody wanted it. For three years the squad had been investigating Mijail Kolvenik, a foreigner with few friends among the new regime, but they hadn’t been able to prove anything. Not that we necessarily had to prove things to make them stick, back then. But this was a hard nut to crack. We didn’t really know what we were looking for. My predecessor in the post had given up. The Velo-Granell company was surrounded by a wall of lawyers and a maze of financial fronts where everything got lost in a cloud. My superiors sold the job to me as a career-making move. That usually means career suicide. But there was a lot of pressure from high up. Cases like that can set you up in a ministerial office with a driver and the timetable of a lord, they told me. I was young and stupid. I believed what I wanted to believe. Ambition is a foolish thing . . .’
Florián paused, savouring his words and smiling sarcastically to himself. He nibbled his cigar as if it were a liquorice twig.
‘When I studied the case file,’ he went on, ‘I realised that what had started as a routine investigation into financial irregularities and even possible fraud had turned into a matter that nobody was quite sure which department should take on. Extortion. Theft. Attempted homicide . . . And there were other things . . . You must understand that until then my experience had been centred on investigating embezzlement, tax evasion, fraud . . . the national pastimes. Not that those irregularities were always punished in those days. It all came down to who you were and your connections to the regime. But even when we did not act, and that was often, we knew everything.’
Florián submerged himself in a blue cloud of his own smoke. I wondered how long it had been since he had last enjoyed one of his cigars. He looked flustered.
‘Then why did you accept the case?’ Marina asked.
‘Out of arrogance. Out of ambition and greed,’ Florián replied as if to himself, in the same tone, I imagined, that he reserved for the most hardened criminals.
‘Perhaps also to discover the truth,’ I ventured. ‘To deliver justice . . .’
Florián smiled sadly at me. One could read thirty years of regrets in that look.
‘By the end of 1945 Velo-Granell Industries was already technically bankrupt,’ Florián continued. ‘The three main Barcelona banks had cancelled their lines of credit, and trading in the company shares had been suspended. When the capital reserves evaporated, the legal firewall and the network of shell companies collapsed like a pack of cards. The glory days were over. The Gran Teatro Real, which had been closed since the tragedy that disfigured Eva Irinova on her wedding day, had become a ruin. The factory and workshops had closed down. Rumours spread like gangrene. Never one to lose his sangfroid, Kolvenik decided to organise a luxurious cocktail party in La Lonja, the old exchange building, in order to project an air of calm and normality. His partner, Sentís, was on the verge of panic. There were not enough funds in the company’s coffers to cover even the appetisers ordered for the event. Invitations were sent out to all the big shareholders, the four hundred top Barcelona families . . . The night of the party the rain was bucketing down. La Lonja was decked out like a dream palace. After nine o’clock servants from the city’s wealthiest households, many of whose fortunes were in part due to Kolvenik, began to turn up to present their employers’ excuses. By the time I arrived, around midnight, I found Kolvenik alone in the room, in his impeccable tails, smoking a cigarette of the sort he imported from Vienna. He greeted me and offered me a glass of the most expensive champagne. “Eat something, Inspector; it’s a shame to waste all this food,” he said. We had never met face to face. We chatted for an hour. He talked to me about books he’d read as an adolescent, about journeys he’d never managed to make . . . Kolvenik was a charismatic man. His eyes burned with intelligence. However hard I tried not to, I couldn’t help liking him. Indeed, I felt sorry for him, although I was supposed to be the hunter and he the prey. I noticed that he limped and leaned on a carved ivory cane. “I don’t think anyone has ever lost so many friends in one day,” I said. He smiled and calmly rejected the idea. “You’re mistaken, Inspector. One never invites one’s friends to events such as this.” He asked me politely whether I was planning to continue persecuting him. I said I wouldn’t stop until I’d taken him to court. I remember that he asked me, “What could I do to dissuade you, dear Florián?” “Kill me,” I answered. “Everything in due course, Inspector,” he replied with a smile. With those words he walked away, limping. I didn’t see him again after that night. Yet here I am, still alive. Or something like it. For some reason Kolvenik didn’t fulfil his last threat. Odd. He wasn’t a man to leave any business unfinished.’
Florián paused again and took a sip of water, relishing it as if it were the last glassful in the world. He licked his lips and continued with his narrative.
‘From that day on, isolated and abandoned by everyone, Kolvenik lived secluded with his wife in the grotesque fortress he’d had built for himself by Güell Park. Nobody saw him during the following years. Only two people had access to him: his old chauffeur, Lluís Claret, a poor wretch who adored Kolvenik and refused to abandon him even when he couldn’t pay him his salary, and his personal doctor, Dr Shelley, whom we were also investigating. Nobody else saw Kolvenik. And Shelley’s assurance that Kolvenik was secluded in his mansion, suffering from some illness which he couldn’t explain to us, didn’t convince us in the least, especially after we had a look through his files and accounts. For a time we even suspected that Kolvenik had died or fled abroad, and that it was all a sham. Shelley continued to maintain that Kolvenik had caught some rare disease that kept him confined to his house. He wasn’t allowed to receive visitors or leave his refuge under any circumstances; those were the doctor’s orders. Neither we nor the judge believed him. On 31 December 1948 we obtained a warrant to search Kolvenik’s home, as well as an arrest warrant. A large amount of the firm’s confidential documents had disappeared. We suspected that they were hidden somewhere in the mansion. We’d already gathered enough evidence to charge Kolvenik with conspiracy to commit fraud and tax evasion. There was no point in waiting any longer. The last day of 1948 was going to be Kolvenik’s last day of freedom. A special unit was preparing to turn up at his address the following morning. Sometimes, when it comes to major criminals, you have to resign yourself to getting them on some minor technicality . . .’
Florián’s cigar had gone out again. The inspector had a last look at it and then let it fall into an empty flower pot. There were other such remains there, a sort of common grave for cigar butts.
‘But, of course, things didn’t go according to plan. That same night, just hours before we could apprehend him after years of playing cat and mouse, a terrible fire destroyed the house and ended the lives of Kolvenik and his wife Eva. At dawn the two charred bodies were discovered in the attic, locked in an embrace . . . Our hopes of closing the case had burned along with them. I never doubted that the fire had been started deliberately. For a while I thought that Benjamín Sentís and other members of the firm’s board of directors were behind it.’
‘Sentís?’ I interrupted.
‘It was no secret that Sentís loathed Kolvenik for having taken control of his father’s company, but both he and the other directors had further reasons to wish the case would never reach the courts. Dead dogs don’t bite, and without Kolvenik the jigsaw puzzle didn’t fit together. It could be said that a lot of bloodstained hands were cleansed in the fire that night. And yet, once again, just like everything related to that scandal from day one, it was impossible to prove anything. Everything ended in ashes. The investigation into Velo-Granell Industries is still our police department’s greatest mystery. And the greatest failure of my life . . .’
‘But the fire wasn’t your fault,’ I said.
‘Little did that matter. My career in the department was ruined, and I knew it. I was assigned to the anti-subversion unit. Do you know what that is? The ghost hunters. That is how they were known in the department. I would have left my post, but those were hard times and I was supporting my brother and his family on my salary. Besides, nobody was going to give a job to an ex-policeman. People were tired of spies and informers. I had nowhere to go. So I stayed there. The work consisted of midnight raids on shabby boarding houses packed with old pensioners and disabled war veterans, where we searched for copies of Das Kapital and socialist leaflets hidden in plastic bags in the lavatory cistern, that sort of thing . . . At the beginning of 1949 I thought everything had ended for me. Everything that could have gone wrong had turned out even worse. At least, that’s what I thought. At daybreak on 13 December 1949, almost a year after the fire in which Kolvenik and his wife died, the dismembered bodies of two inspectors from my old unit were discovered at the door of the old Velo-Granell warehouse, in the Borne district. It appears that they’d gone there to follow up an anonymous tip-off they’d received on the case. Turned out to be a trap. I wouldn’t wish the death they encountered on my worst enemy. Even the wheels of a train can’t do what was done to the bodies I saw in the morgue . . . They were experienced policemen. Tough men. Armed. They knew what they were doing. The report said that some of the neighbours heard shots. Fourteen nine-millimetre shell cases were found at the crime scene. They were all from the inspectors’ standard-issue weapons. Yet not a single bullet mark or bullet was found on the walls.’
‘How do you explain that?’ asked Marina.
‘There is no explanation. It’s quite simply impossible. But it happened . . . I saw the empty cartridges myself and inspected the scene along with a forensic team.’
Marina and I looked at each other.
‘Could it be that the shots were aimed at a moving object, a car or a carri
age for example, which absorbed the bullets and then vanished without a trace?’ Marina suggested.
‘Your friend here would make a good detective. That’s the hypothesis we formulated at the time, but there was still no evidence to support it. Bullets of that calibre usually bounce off metallic surfaces and leave a trail of impacts, or at least traces of shrapnel. Nothing was found.
‘Some days later, at my colleagues’ funeral, I bumped into Sentís,’ Florián continued. ‘He seemed worried, and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. His clothes were dirty and he reeked of booze. He confessed to me that he didn’t dare go back home, that he’d been wandering around for days, sleeping in public spaces . . . “My life isn’t worth a damn, Florián,” he said to me. “I’m a dead man walking.” I offered him police protection. He laughed. I even proposed that he took shelter in my home. He refused. “I don’t want to have your death on my conscience, Florián,” he said before disappearing into the crowd. During the next few months all the former members of the Velo-Granell executive board met their deaths, theoretically of natural causes. Heart attack was the doctor’s diagnosis in most of the cases. One of them drowned in his own swimming pool. The body was still holding a gun when they fished him out. For the rest the circumstances were similar. They’d been alone in their beds; it was always at midnight; and they were all found in the process of dragging themselves across the floor . . . trying to flee from a death that left no trace. All except Benjamín Sentís. I didn’t speak to him again in thirty years, until a few weeks ago.’
‘Just before he died . . .’ I remarked.
Florián nodded.
‘He called the police station and asked to speak to me. He said he had information on the crimes in the factory and on the Velo-Granell case. I called him and spoke to him. I thought he was delirious. But I agreed to see him. Out of pity. We arranged to meet in a bar close to his place on Calle Princesa the following day. He didn’t turn up. Two days later an old friend of mine from the police station called to tell me they’d found his body in an abandoned sewer in the old quarter. The artificial hands Kolvenik had created for him had been amputated. But that was in the papers. What the press didn’t say was that the police found a word written in blood on the wall of the tunnel: Teufel.’
Marina Page 11
