The Whispering City Read Free Page B

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 pink 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