The streets of the Raval quarter were tunnels of shadows dotted with flickering street lamps that barely grazed the darkness. It took me a little over the thirty minutes granted to me by Inspector Grandes to discover that there were two laundries in Calle Cadena. The first, scarcely a cave behind a flight of stairs that glistened with steam, employed only children with violet-stained hands and yellow eyes. The second was an emporium of filth that stank of bleach, and it was hard to believe that anything clean could ever emerge from there. It was run by a large woman who, at the sight of a few coins, wasted no time in admitting that María Antonia Sanahuja worked there six afternoons a week.
‘What has she done now?’ the matron asked.
‘It’s an inheritance. Tell me where I can find her and perhaps some of it will come your way.’
The matron laughed, but her eyes shone with greed.
‘As far as I know she lives in Pensión Santa Lucía, in Calle Marqués de Barberá. How much has she inherited?’
I dropped the coins on the counter and got out of that grimy hole without bothering to reply.
The pensión where Irene Sabino lived languished in a sombre building that looked as if it had been assembled with disinterred bones and stolen headstones. The metal plates on the letter boxes inside the entrance hall were covered in rust. There were no names on the ones for the first two floors. The third floor housed a dressmaking workshop pompously entitled the Mediterranean Textile Company. The fourth floor was occupied by Pensión Santa Lucía. A narrow staircase rose in the gloom, and the dampness from the sewers filtered through the walls, eating away at the paint like acid. After walking up four floors I reached a sloping landing with just one door. I banged on it with my fist. A few minutes later the door was opened by a tall, thin man, seemingly escaped from an El Greco nightmare.
‘I’m looking for María Antonia Sanahuja,’ I said.
‘Are you the doctor?’ he asked.
I pushed him to one side and went in. The apartment was a jumble of dark, narrow rooms clustered either side of a corridor that ended in a large window overlooking the inner courtyard. The air was rank with the stench rising from the drains. The man who had opened the door was still standing on the threshold, looking at me in confusion. I assumed he must be one of the residents.
‘Which is her room?’ I asked.
He gave me an impenetrable look. I pulled out the revolver and showed it to him. Without losing his calm, the man pointed to the last door in the passage. When I got there I realised that it was locked and began to struggle with the handle. The other residents had stepped out into the corridor, a chorus of forgotten souls who looked as if they hadn’t seen the sun for years. I recalled my miserable days in Doña Carmen’s pensión and it occurred to me that my old home looked like the new Ritz Hotel compared to this purgatory, which was only one of many in the maze of the Raval quarter.
‘Go back to your rooms,’ I said.
No one seemed to have heard me. I raised my hand, showing my weapon. They all darted back into their rooms like frightened rodents, except for the tall Knight of the Doleful Countenance. I concentrated on the door once again.
‘She’s locked the door from the inside,’ the resident explained. ‘She’s been there all afternoon.’
A smell that reminded me of bitter almonds seeped under the door. I knocked a few times, but got no reply.
‘The landlady has a master key,’ suggested the resident. ‘If you can wait… I don’t think she’ll be long.’
My only reply was to take a step back and hurl myself with all my might against the door. The lock gave way after the second charge. As soon as I found myself in the room, I was overwhelmed by that bitter, nauseating smell.
‘My God,’ mumbled the resident behind my back.
The ex-star of the Paralelo lay on a ramshackle bed, pale and covered in sweat. Her lips were black and when she saw me she smiled. Her hands clutched the bottle of poison; she had swallowed it down to the last drop. The stench from her breath filled the room. The resident covered his nose and mouth with his hand and went outside. I gazed at Irene Sabino writhing in pain while the poison ate away at her insides. Death was taking its time.
‘Where’s Marlasca?’
She looked at me through tears of agony.
‘He no longer needed me,’ she said. ‘He’s never loved me.’
Her voice was harsh and broken. A dry cough seized her, a piercing sound ripping from her chest, and a second later a dark liquid trickled through her teeth. Irene Sabino observed me as she clung to the last breath of life. She took my hand and pressed it hard.
‘You’re damned, like him.’
‘What can I do?’
She shook her head. A new coughing fit seized her. The capillaries in her eyes were breaking and a web of bleeding lines spread towards her pupils.
‘Where is Ricardo Salvador? Is he in Marlasca’s grave, in the mausoleum?’
Irene Sabino shook her head. Her lips formed a soundless word: Jaco.
‘Where is Salvador, then?’
‘He knows where you are. He can see you. He’ll come for you.’
I thought she was becoming delirious. Her grip weakened.
‘I loved him,’ she said. ‘He was a good man. A good man. He changed him. He was a good man…’
The terrible sound of disintegrating flesh emerged from her lips, and her body was racked by spasms. Irene Sabino died with her eyes fixed on mine, taking the secret of Diego Marlasca with her.
I covered her face with a sheet. In the doorway, the resident made the sign of the cross. I looked around me, trying to find something that might help, some clue to indicate what my next step should be. Irene Sabino had spent her last days in a cell four metres deep by two wide. There were no windows. The metal bed on which her corpse lay, a wardrobe on the other side and a small table against the wall were the only furniture. A suitcase sat under the bed, next to a chamber pot and a hatbox. On the table lay a plate with a few breadcrumbs, a jug of water and a pile of what looked like postcards but turned out to be images of saints and memorial cards given out at funerals. Folded in a white cloth was something shaped like a book. I unwrapped it and found the copy of The Steps of Heaven that I had dedicated to Señor Sempere. The compassion awoken in me by the woman’s suffering evaporated in an instant. This wretched woman had killed my good friend, and all because she wanted to take this lousy book from him. Then I remembered what Sempere told me the very first time I went into his bookshop: that every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and dream about it. Sempere had died believing in those words and I could see that, in her own way, Irene Sabino had also believed in them.
I turned the pages and reread the dedication. I found the first mark on the seventh page. A brownish line, in the shape of a six-pointed star, identical to the one she had engraved on my chest with the razor edge some weeks earlier. I realised that the line had been drawn with blood. I went on turning the pages and finding new motifs. Lips. A hand. Eyes. Sempere had given his life for some paltry fortune-teller’s mumbo-jumbo.
I put the book in the inside pocket of my coat and knelt down by the bed. I pulled out the suitcase and emptied its contents on the floor: nothing but old clothes and shoes. In the hatbox I found a leather case containing the razor with which Irene Sabino had made the marks on my chest. Suddenly I noticed a shadow crossing the floor and I spun round, aiming the revolver. The tall thin resident looked at me in surprise.
‘I think you have company,’ he said.
I went out of the room and headed for the front door. As I stepped onto the landing I heard heavy footsteps climbing the stairs. A face appeared in the stairwell, squinting up, and I found myself looking straight into the eyes of Sergeant Marcos two floors down. He moved out of sight and his steps quickened. He was not alone. I closed the door and leaned against it, trying to think. My accomplice observed me expectantly.