The Whispering City Read online

  ‘Maybe,’ said the editor-in-chief.

  Mateo Sanvisens wasn’t particularly fond of small talk. He was a man of few words; curt, some said, like his gaunt build, the sinewy body of a veteran mountain climber, with hands covered in ridges as if they’d been carved with a chisel. In his youth he had scaled several high peaks in the Alps and he knew the Pyrenees, where he was from, better than the smugglers did. In his office he had pictures of some of the highest peaks in the world, including Everest.

  ‘The tallest mountain, though not necessarily the most difficult. That’s something you often find out when you’re already on your way up. I’ll get there soon,’ he would say frequently.

  Beside it was the marked page of La Vanguardia that had announced, two years earlier, in 1950, that the French expedition had reached the summit of Annapurna.

  As soon as Ana had settled in front of his desk, Sanvisens immediately started in on the details of the case.

  ‘Mariona Sobrerroca’s maid found her dead at her home yesterday.’

  ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘She was beaten and then strangled.’

  ‘With what?’

  She was embarrassed by the thin little voice that asked the question, but a growing excitement had seized her throat.

  ‘By hand.’ Sanvisens mimed strangulation.

  The how, where and part of the when had been resolved in few words.

  ‘Is this news really going to be covered?’ she asked.

  News of murders wasn’t well received by the censors. In a country where peace and order supposedly reigned, local crimes weren’t supposed to bring that image into question. There were clear orders on the matter, but also, as with everything, exceptions. It seemed this case was going to be one of the latter.

  ‘It can’t be swept under the carpet. Mariona Sobrerroca is too well known, and her family, particularly her brother, is very well connected, both here and in Madrid; so the authorities have decided it is better to report on the investigation and use it to demonstrate the effectiveness of the forces of order.’

  The last few words sounded as if they were in quotation marks. Ana caught the sarcasm.

  ‘What if it turns out she was killed by someone close to her, a top society person?’

  A series of photos of Mariona Sobrerroca in the society pages paraded through Ana’s mind, as if she were turning the pages of an album: in evening wear at the Liceo Opera House beside the wives of the city’s high-ranking politicians; delivering armfuls of Christmas presents to the children of the Welfare Service, along with several leaders of the Women’s Section of the Falange; at a debutante ball; with a group of ladies at a fundraiser for the Red Cross; at dances, concerts, High Mass…

  ‘Well, it would serve as an example of how we are all equal under the law.’ The sarcastic tone was still there. ‘But I don’t think so. It seems to have been a break-in. Whatever it was, we are going to report on it. In an exclusive.’

  He paused as his eyes searched for something on his desk.

  ‘The case is in the hands of a specialist, Inspector Isidro Castro of the Criminal Investigation Brigade.’

  Isidro Castro. She didn’t know him personally, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d written about him, although it would be the first time she did so under her own name. Castro had solved some important cases in recent years.

  She remembered one in particular: the disappearance and murder of a nurse at the San Pablo Hospital, because she had written the copy that had appeared under Carlos Belda’s byline.

  Castro had hunted one killer after another. The first was ratted out by an accomplice, who in turn accused a third man. Not a terribly long chain of betrayals, but even if it had had ten links in it, Castro would have managed to connect them all. The police used brutally effective methods, and Inspector Castro, over the years he’d been working in Barcelona, had earned a reputation as the best. Soon she would meet him. What would he look like? What would the person behind ‘the magnificent investigative work carried out by the Criminal Investigation Brigade’ – as she had written in the article – be like? It was impossible to report on crimes in Spain without using those kinds of formulas. Crimes were to be solved, and order – the country’s natural state – restored. She had done a good job. You had to do things right, even if someone else was going to get the credit for them. Perhaps Sanvisens appreciated her work, even though he had never said it, and this opportunity was her reward.

  The editor-in-chief had given up his attempt to find whatever it was with just a glance and was now rummaging through the mess of documents, newspapers and notebooks that covered his desk. Ana knew that he was searching for something for her.

  She owed a lot to Sanvisens and his friendship with her father, despite the political differences that had irrevocably distanced them. He hadn’t spoken to her father since he had been released from jail and dismissed from his post, and Sanvisens never even uttered his former colleague’s name. In fact, he grew angry if Ana even mentioned him. As for Ana, she struggled to banish the suspicion that her job at the newspaper was some sort of compensation because Sanvisens had the position that should have been her father’s. When he offered Ana her first article, she’d asked her father for ‘permission’ to accept it. He gave it to her tacitly, with the phrase, ‘We are a family of journalists.’ The name Mateo Sanvisens was still taboo.

  And now, finally, she was getting to do some serious journalism, writing about a murder case. Her surprise, and the question ‘why me?’, must have been written all over her face, because Sanvisens, as he pulled a small piece of paper out of a pile of letters, looked at her and said, ‘Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? Well, here’s your chance. Make the most of it.’

  At the theatre or the opera, every understudy dreams of the lead losing his voice. That’s their moment, having mastered their role while watching in the wings: to step onto the stage and dazzle the audience.

  And she had got a lot of answers, but she still had one final question. ‘Will it be my own byline…?’

  Sanvisens seemed to have been expecting it.

  ‘Yes. What you write will appear under your byline.’

  He read her the note he held in his hand.

  ‘Now get moving. You have to be at police headquarters at eleven. Don’t forget your ID. Olga is doing an accreditation for you.’

  Suddenly Ana realised exactly where she had to go.

  ‘On Vía Layetana?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said. Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, no. I just wanted to make sure.’

  There was no way she was going to admit to him that she, like so many others, was frightened by the mere mention of that building. Sanvisens looked at her somewhat suspiciously. Ana averted her eyes to avoid giving him any cause to doubt her suitability for the job. She had to step into the spotlight and shine, even if the setting was one of the most threatening in the entire city. This was her chance. ‘Ritorna vincitor,’ ran the aria from Aida that struck up in her head.

  ‘Eleven o’clock, Vía Layetana,’ she repeated, as if making a mental note.

  ‘Inspector Isidro Castro will be expecting you,’ added Sanvisens.

  She tried to thank him, but Sanvisens wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘Do me a favour, Aneta: when you leave, find the errand boy and tell him to go to the pharmacy and get me some of those little sachets of magnesium.’

  Bringing a hand to his stomach by way of explanation, Sanvisens then abruptly turned round and started banging away at his typewriter. So she didn’t get a chance to ask him if Isidro Castro knew that the person covering the story was a woman.

  A woman who, after giving the errand boy the message, was so euphoric that she didn’t realise she was speaking aloud: ‘This time, the dead woman does have a name.’ Unlike the macabre joke Carlos Belda had played on her when she first started working at the paper.

  She remembered the rat. A dead rat lying swollen on the steps, its pi
nk tail hanging almost all the way down to the stair below. No one had bothered to move it aside: not the police, not the undertakers, nor any of the curious bystanders who came to take a look. Someone would eventually end up stepping on it.

  The dead woman she supposedly had to write about was on the first floor of an abandoned building on Arco del Teatro, a street that led into the lower Paralelo and the filthiest part of the Barrio Chino, Barcelona’s red light district. Some children had discovered the body wrapped in an old blanket.

  She didn’t get to see it, but she didn’t need to. She had seen the space where the woman had tried to take shelter from the cold, a wooden box, part of what had once been a wardrobe. It was as if she’d been buried alive.

  ‘Was she elderly?’ Ana had asked one of the officers she’d met in the building.

  ‘About forty, but she’d packed a lot of living into those years.’

  The case turned out to be a dirty trick. Belda knew this type of news wasn’t usually published, that a piece about one of the corpses the police removed each week from abandoned buildings and the shelters where the hundreds of indigents swarming the city took refuge for the night wouldn’t pass the censors. It had all been for nothing. The stench of piss and putrefaction on the street, in the building, in the flat. The impoverished faces of some, the bloated features of others, the dogs that ran terrified along the pavements, fleeing grubby, feral children.

  The mere fact that Belda had been the one who’d offered her the chance to go to the scene had put her on her guard. Her humiliation over having fallen so naively into his trap hurt more than her frustration when she realised she wasn’t going to be able to write a word about it.

  Belda was waiting for her in the offices of La Vanguardia like a boy on All Fools’ Day who can barely stifle his laughter when he sees the paper figure stuck to his victim’s back. No one on the staff had opposed her joining the newspaper as vehemently. That was more than a year ago, but he still hadn’t accepted her.

  To get to her desk, Ana had to pass Belda’s. That day, when she returned to the office, he waited until she was close enough, looked up, took the cigarette from between his lips and, with feigned disappointment, said, ‘Oh, so you missed the stiff? Well, maybe you can write a feature on the latest fashions the whores in the Barrio Chino are wearing.’

  He let out a laugh and looked around him, seeking the applause of his colleagues, who were following the scene more or less willingly.

  He raised a few chuckles, which turned into cackles when they heard Ana’s retort.

  ‘I’m sure you’re much better informed on their underwear.’

  She turned on her heel and left him first with his mouth agape and then spewing a torrent of insults that only stopped when Mateo Sanvisens came within earshot.

  So her first case had been a death with no body, the only record of it some court archives filed away along with those of the other nameless souls found dead that week.

  But this time, the corpse waiting for her was a dead woman with a name – a very prominent name.

  3

  ‘Look, I got Ruiz to buy that silver piece from me. You should be glad to be rid of it, it was only gathering dust.’

  Encarni put the shopping basket down on the table. She was pleased. Ruiz, the pawn shop guy, had paid her well for the centrepiece, and she had been able to buy plenty of groceries. The basket was overflowing. She was sure the missus would say she could take something to her mother.

  ‘Good,’ answered her employer, but Encarni could tell she hadn’t been paying attention. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her, and her hand held a holder with the nub of a cigarette in it. The coffee and cigarette must have been her breakfast, and it was already noon.

  She started to pull things out of the basket, making as much noise as possible: she crushed the newsprint so that it would crunch, she clinked together two bottles before placing them heavily on the ground. She liked things to make noise: the tinkling of the silverware when she put it in the drawer, the creaking of the drawers of the many cupboards when she opened them, the lids banging onto the pots.

  The noise was practical, too, when Encarni wanted to attract Señora Beatriz’s attention.

  She turned towards Encarni, pulling her gaze from the distance and focusing it on her. ‘How much did Ruiz pay you for it?’

  ‘He gave me ninety pesetas.’

  ‘Good.’ Then she smiled. ‘That’s a lot.’

  Encarni grinned with satisfaction. She was proud of her negotiating skills, but she thought it more elegant to accept the compliment without comment, to downplay it, so she changed the subject. ‘Do you know what? Up in Tibidabo, they found a dead woman.’

  Was Señora Beatriz still listening to her? There was no way of knowing. If she was thinking about the dusty papers and the yellow cards she had in the desk, there was no point telling her anything. It would be like talking to a wall or a hatstand. But she lifted her head; it seemed she wanted to know more. Encarni continued, ‘A rich widow. Horrible thing. The chicken guy told me that it was real butchery. Everything covered in blood. How awful!’

  She turned to put the half-pound of butter she’d bought into the fridge. Before putting it away, she took it out of its paper, sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t rancid and placed the stick on a porcelain butter dish.

  ‘The maid found her. Poor thing. She had a day off, came back and there was the widow. Stiff as a board. Thank goodness I’m not in her shoes.’

  ‘Yes, what luck! Especially for me.’

  Señora Beatriz sounded amused. She was still wearing her dressing gown. Her blonde hair was wrapped in a turban, a damp lock escaping on one side. Another night that she had stayed up into the wee hours with her books.

  Encarni smiled.

  ‘Forgive me, Professor, ma’am. But imagine, Fermín the fishmonger said the poor girl almost died of a heart attack.’ Encarni paused for dramatic effect. ‘But the worst thing is the eye…’

  The missus leaned forward and shook some ash from her sleeve. Encarni sighed. She was going to make another hole in her dressing gown. She didn’t seem to care much, though it must have cost a bob or two. She had to have bought it before the war; you couldn’t find those designs these days. If she wanted to, the missus could be very elegant, but no; in the end she just put on whatever she pulled out of her huge wardrobes. There was even a cassock in one of them.

  ‘It was my Uncle Lázaro’s,’ Señora Beatriz had told her when she’d asked about it.

  ‘And what’s it doing here?’

  ‘I don’t even remember.’

  ‘The priest in my town would have sold his soul for a cassock of such quality.’

  ‘Encarni!’ Señora Beatriz pretended to be scandalised. ‘Well, if you’d like, we’ll send it to him.’

  ‘That’s expensive. Forget about it.’

  She’d responded evasively, instead of telling her that she still remembered with shame how the priest of her town – El Padul, in Granada – had called her a ‘bitch in heat’, pointing at her during a sermon in church, because he had seen her kissing her boyfriend the previous afternoon. If it weren’t a cassock and made of such good fabric, she would have used it to make dust rags. Encarni knew about clothes. She and her sister used to study the display windows on the Paseo de Gracia on Sunday afternoons.

  ‘They ripped out one of her eyes and it was rolling around on the floor.’

  Encarni bent and picked up an orange that had fallen and rolled along the kitchen tiles. She placed it in the fruit bowl.

  ‘Her eye was rolling on the floor?’

  ‘That’s what she told me in the greengrocer’s and while she did, nothing to it, she slipped me an overripe apple.’

  She produced the apple and put it on the table in front of the missus. It seemed that the apple was about to begin rolling too, but Encarni stopped it with her hand and placed it firmly beside the coffee cup.

  ‘Look, all four of the
m are perfect,’ she said. ‘“Let me see,” I said to the produce lady, “because last time there was one that was overripe.” “Please, for the love of God,” she told me, “don’t be like that. It’s just that this murder’s got me all a-frit.”’ Encarni imitated the fruit seller’s accent and way of speaking. ‘What nonsense! She only tells her stories so her customers are distracted and she can sell them rotten apples and disgusting oranges.’

  ‘Can you say that again?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The disgusting part.’

  ‘Ay, ma’am! Don’t start again with my zeds,’ lamented Encarni, but with little conviction.

  She hadn’t forgotten that her zeds were what had got her the job in the first place.

  She had been working at Señora Beatriz’s house for almost two years, ever since one afternoon when she’d sat down, exhausted, on one of the circular benches along the Paseo de Gracia. She had been going from house to house looking for work since the early morning. She was so tired that she didn’t notice the woman sitting to her left until she pulled out a box of matches from her handbag and lit a cigarette fitted into a long black holder. A woman smoking in the street. But she wasn’t a whore: she was elegant, even if her clothing was a bit dated; Encarni had guessed she was over forty, but forty in rich women’s years, which take less of a toll than a poor woman’s forty. She had a book on her lap. After lighting the cigarette, she held the holder with her free hand and continued reading. A woman smoking and reading; Encarni couldn’t contain her curiosity.

  ‘Is it good?’

  The woman turned towards her in surprise.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘No, nothing, just wondering if the book you’re reading is good.’

  ‘Very. It’s Dauzat’s Introduction to French Dialects.’

  ‘Gosh… Well, it sounds good,’ she said, intimidated by the obscurity of the title.

  She was expecting the woman to turn back to her reading, but she didn’t, instead asking, ‘You’re from Andalusia, aren’t you?’