The Antiquarian (48 page)

“Now was that so difficult? Does Ms. Puigventós know of the existence of the Casadevall manuscript and the Stone of God?”

“Partly.”

“Couples don't usually keep secrets from each other.”

“I told her a part of the mystery so she'd understand why Bety was still in Barcelona.”

“I don't get it. Do you mean she was jealous of Ms. Dale?”

“No. Well … yes. I mean, she knows I'm faithful, but she doesn't approve of our situation.”

“How much of the Stone of God story does she know?”

“She thinks that Bety's trying to translate an old manuscript that could possibly help us with an unsolved mystery. She doesn't know more than that.”

“Why are you hiding it from her?”

“I'm not hiding anything from her. The thing is, by the time we talked about the translation, I wasn't interested in the mystery anymore. That's why I only told her the basics, the part that explained what Bety, Ms. Dale, was still doing in Barcelona.”

“That's hard, very hard, to believe.” He pointed a pen at Enrique. “Convince me I'm wrong.”

“You'll be surprised, but it's partly Fornells's fault.” Enrique delivered a quick summary of Monday morning, when Fornells had revealed the truth about Artur's past, and how it had influenced his state of mind. Rodríguez took careful note of the story in his notebook.

“Okay. Let's go on. You left Ms. Puigventós's house at twelve thirty. What did you do then?”

“I went back to Vallvidrera. I got there around one.” Enrique anticipated Rodríguez's question.

“Interesting. Very interesting. Do you know where our victim Manuel Álvarez lived?”

“No. Bety offered to drive him home Monday night, but I wasn't paying attention.”

“He lived on Muntaner Street, near the highway.”

Enrique comprehended the rock-hard reality that Rodríguez was angling at with that statement. Manolo's apartment was on the way from Mariola's to Artur's. So close that it could be reached with a ten-minute walk, if that. Anyone leaving Mariola's at twelve thirty could have committed the crime and made it to Vallvidrera twenty minutes later.

“You got home around one, and Ms. Dale was there.”

“Yes.”

“Does Ms. Dale have a date set to return to San Sebastián?”

“The initial idea was for her to go back today or tomorrow. But I don't think Bety's going to do it until she's solved the manuscript mystery.”

“Whether or not she was planning on going back, she should postpone it until she's spoken with us. Would you happen to know where we could find her?”

“No. Last night we had … I guess you could call it an argument; and this morning, when I woke up, she was already gone. I suppose you could find her at the archbishopric's archive, or in Casa de l'Ardiaca.”

“Mind telling me what the argument was about?”

Enrique felt like a boxer hammered by his opponent, seeking refuge in the corners of the ring. Of the entire interrogation, this was the part that hurt the worst; he felt like a neighborhood tough, being forced to own up.

“I think she was jealous of Mariola,” he said, sighing.

“Let's see: you said your relationship was purely platonic. Your girlfriend is Mariola, not Bety. Am I wrong?”

“No, you're not wrong. I suppose that Bety still has some of the old passion that she once felt for me.”

“And the feeling isn't mutual?”

“Before I met Mariola it was. It's not anymore.”

“I see. Well, well. That's some story,” he said, as if to himself, as he went over his copious notes. “Some story. All right. I guess that'll do.”

“So am I free to go then?”

Rodríguez deliberately made Enrique squirm by thinking his response through with utter calm.

“Yes. But before you do I want you to know two things. First, your story matches that of Ms. Dale, who we had already questioned in another room of the station and is now waiting for you in the lobby.”

Blindsided, Enrique felt his strength bleeding out. Bety questioned as well! Thank God he had told the whole truth!

“That's good news for you. Second, you can't consider yourselves free from all suspicion—especially not you, for reasons not too hard to imagine—at least until we've spoken with Ms. Puigventós. I recommend you be cautious. Stay reachable, as much as you can, with your cell phones on. The department has several investigations underway that may require your collaboration. Is that all clear? Any questions?”

Enrique shook his head.

“Fornells—” he started.

“Forget it. It would be counterproductive.”

When Enrique opened the office door, Rodríguez stopped him with a new remark.

“One more thing,” he said without raising his eyes from his notes, “I said I was reserving my opinion about your guilt until after the interrogation. There's a lot of information that could incriminate or at least relate you to Álvarez's death. But I don't think you're the killer. It's all too obvious, excessively evident. No, if you were guilty, you'd be the most idiotic killer in the history of criminology. Although, that's exactly how I think you've acted throughout this entire thing: like an idiot.”

Leaving the office with his tail between his legs, Enrique went down the dark stairwell to the lobby following Rodríguez's instructions. And there was Bety, sitting in an armchair as old and dilapidated as the rest of the police station, next to a low table covered with the much-handled remnants of what had been gossip magazines. She was gazing absently at the pockmarked ceiling. The rings under her eyes clearly showed that she had been crying a lot. Seeing Enrique, she jumped up and ran to meet him. She hugged him in the middle of the lobby. The two officers standing guard at the door watched them coldly, hardened by years of experience observing human misery. Ill at
ease, Enrique kept walking through the lobby until they had left the building. They went slowly down the stairs, in a silence broken only by Bety's muffled sobs.

They went out onto the street. It was drizzling. They walked toward the Ramblas under a gray sky tinged with a slight pinkish glow from the reflection of Barcelona's lights. A few people looked at them with curiosity, although the majority, residents of a poor and marginalized neighborhood and preoccupied enough with their own problems, didn't pay them the slightest attention. A couple leaving the police station in their state wasn't all that uncommon.

They reached the Ramblas. There would have been more pedestrians had it not been for the light rain. Without realizing it, Enrique ambled toward the sea, but he stopped in front of Santa Mónica church. Bety was too upset to keep walking. There, under the cover of an immense plane tree whose leaves barely afforded them shelter from the rain's quickening intensity, they embraced again until at last she stopped shaking and calmed down.

Bety and Enrique arrived at the Vallvidrera house an hour later. She'd been quiet the entire trip, still rattled by the course of events, so far from what she'd expected. The vision of Manolo seemed to float over the windshield, in time to the wipers, fading out again in the rainwater that momentarily settled on the glass. Enrique drove by inertia, his mind a blank, devoid of all thought.

He would have liked to have said many things, but he didn't know how, nor did he think it would be worthwhile. The trip to Passeig de Gràcia, where he'd parked his car in the morning, proved that any attempt to reason about the situation would be as vain as it was impossible. His feeling of guilt had grown incessantly, flogging his mind, churning inside him; it even affected him physically. His initial unease had ended up as a desire to fall into bed and sleep, to sleep and forget the whole world, to lose himself in dreams for time unending, until he could awake and remember nothing.

Once inside the house, he ran a bath with abundant, near-scalding water. He helped Bety get undressed with complete naturalness. She seemed calm, too calm, her face relaxed but her vacant gaze lingering. He wrapped her in a bathrobe and walked her to the tub. She was so fragile, so vulnerable, with that look typical of children attacked by the world's cruelty. He took her hand in his. Somewhat later, the shine in her eyes subtly changed: her pupils had contracted. Bety was returning to reality, soothed by the gentle rocking movements Enrique made with the sponge he was using to bathe her body.

“What have I done? What have I done?”

“You haven't done anything. In any case, it's both our fault.”

Bety shook in the bathtub.

“That's not true, that's not true,” she whispered gloomily. “I wanted to find the Stone when you'd already given up. I found a translator capable of cracking the enigma. I'm responsible for his death.”

“Don't say that, it's not true. This whole mess began when I hid the manuscript from the police. That's the only truth. Or maybe it began even before that, when Casadevall himself accepted the mysterious assignment from S. and decided to write his damned manuscript. Why did he have to leave clues to the mystery within everyone's reach? Why couldn't he have kept the enigma to himself, silencing it forever with his death?”

“It doesn't matter what you say. Nothing can change what's happened. Nothing can keep me from feeling guilty.”

Bety wasn't willing to let any reason disrupt the nefarious role that she'd chosen for herself. Worried, Enrique watched her: there she was before him, nude, sitting in a full bathtub, her legs drawn up to her body, her torso hunched over them, embracing them with her arms. Her chin rested on her knees, keeping her head up. Her eyes, skittish, darting, were lost in the infinity that lay beyond the bathroom wall. She needed to face the problem without dodging her part of the responsibility—which could not be denied—but without irrationally adding to it, either. He needed her near him. He needed her insightful intelligence, her pragmatic rationalism. He had to break up her state however he could; he needed her help. And the easiest way to get her to react would be to make her angry.

“Insisting on your blame won't get us anywhere,” he reflected, suddenly inspired. “Destiny plays its hand as it pleases. Its dice are loaded, and they tumble according to its will. Do you think Manolo's death was your fault? Don't be stupid! He was as
blinded by the light of knowledge, or rather, ambition, as you might have been. Or did he not spend years researching everything he could on the Stone of God? It could be that at first, taken in by a mystery from the past, he was guided by curiosity, the desire to know, as he himself told us in the study. But he couldn't fool me.” Bety abandoned her lax posture, readying to speak her mind, but Enrique continued his tirade. “And he couldn't fool me, because I myself could see, perfectly, in his face, as I saw in yours, and as I had seen in mine, the symptoms of a mad thirst for knowledge. All three of us were possessed by the demon of ambition: the ambition to discover, to possess, to reveal. Or did you not dream about the prestige you would get from the Stone? Did you not dream about the fame, the interviews, the glory? The Stone itself, aside from all these fantasies that Shackermann told Manolo, was a priceless object! Answer me! Did you not dream about that?”

“Yes! Of course I dreamed about it!” she answered, choking the beginning of a sob. “Why are you blaming me for that? You did too!”

“That's true,” he answered as coldly as possible, “and now I curse myself for it. I wanted to go beyond what was reasonable, and the consequences were completely unpredictable. My recklessness led us to this.”

“Nothing will bring Manolo back,” Bety said remorsefully.

“You're getting so bogged down in that that you're overlooking the details.”

“Then tell me about them, please.” Anger began to take the place of sadness.

“I will, but the truth isn't pretty.”

Bety impatiently awaited the great revelation, ready to refute it tooth and nail, already prey to Enrique's trap.

“Have you ever stopped to think about yourself instead of others? Because that's the first thing you should do when your life could be in danger. Or do you think that the
murderer, who has successively eliminated all of his competitors, systematically and in cold blood, isn't aware of our relationship with Manolo? They could only have known what he was doing by watching us. I'm sure the police have come to the same conclusion.”

Bety felt defenseless. There was no other explanation. Immersed in her grief, she'd been unable to think about the causes of Manolo's murder.

“According to Rodríguez, in the police's eyes, we're not suspects. We can believe that or not. He may have said it to make us overconfident and then see how we react. It may well be true, but as I was leaving he told me something I'll never forget: without even bothering to look up from the file he was reading, he told me that throughout this whole affair, I'd acted like an idiot. And he was absolutely right. But what about the killer? Have you stopped to think about him?”

“No.”

“Well the time has come,” Enrique said. “And not to solve the mystery, but for many other things. First of all, to prove our innocence. It infuriates me to think of them linking me to Artur's death! Second, for our own safety: two people tied to the manuscript have died, and I don't want either you or me to be added to the list. And third, to unmask the son of a bitch who's out on the streets killing anyone he likes. Are you going to just sit there in the bathtub all day or are you going to help me?” She got up, and Enrique handed her the bathrobe.

“I'll help you.”

An hour later, sitting in the kitchen, surrounded by the remnants of dinner of which Bety had scarcely eaten a bite, Enrique went back over everything that had happened in the past three weeks. He drew up an outline on a sheet of paper detailing the main events, in much the same way he prepared his novels. On this sheet, a jumble of lines
and circles of different sizes crisscrossed in every direction, a faithful portrayal of the wild search for a nonexistent murderer who had proven to be real, and a fabled stone with the name of God written on it. Bety, nestled in her robe, slowly sipped a cup of coffee as she listened attentively to Enrique's explanations.