Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [217]
‘It’s easy to say now, but you were there,’ said Santos incisively. ‘You visited their house.’
Ren’s snort filled the station chief’s office. He barely concealed the effort he had to make to endure his colleague from Crime. ‘Listen here, Mr Scientist, I knew it wasn’t possible. That woman didn’t fit. Or fitted too well. Blasted eyesight! You only had to see her to understand she was Judith. The way she was there and not there. That vaporous presence of hers. Always so diplomatic. Blasted pluperfect! Now that I think about it, it’s as if she had a star on her forehead: I’m Judith, you fool!’
‘I’d like to know what’s in the reports,’ remarked Paúl Santos. He looked at the station chief. ‘To tell the truth, sir, we still don’t know exactly why Chelo Vidal has to be Judith.’
Ren thumped the table. ‘Because she is!’
‘When there’s a drop of blood, it’s our duty to analyse it,’ said Santos, repeating one of his favourite examples. ‘If we analyse it, it could turn out to be a person’s or a duck’s.’
‘Let me tell you something,’ growled Ren. ‘I’ve no fucking idea what a drop of duck’s blood is supposed to be like.’
Mancorvo spotted the station chief’s gesture and took over in a neutral tone. ‘In view of the current situation, many suspicions can now be considered proof that Chelo Vidal was, in effect, Judith. Reports? We had enough documents to drown in! They’ll be here somewhere.’
‘I looked and didn’t find much. It’s funny. There’s no file on Judith.’
Mancorvo glanced at the station chief and then at Ren.
‘You should know by now . . .’
He adopted a more conciliatory approach.
‘You should know by now some things are in our domain. We’re working for the security of the State. There were enough documents to drown in. They’ll be here somewhere. Best not to worry.’
‘We’re talking about twenty years ago,’ Ren intervened calmly and sarcastically. ‘Things were different back then, Mr Unknown.’
Now he was the one shuffling papers. He opened a folder and pulled out another sheaf of light blue quartos. ‘These are reports from 1937. Some of them you can’t read so well. They’re often carbon copies of reports requested by the military courts in summary trials of those who organised escapes by boat. In Coruña, there was an organisation, a secret network based on the union Maritime Awakening. It had its merit. This was no game. The city was in a state of war. People with a Republican background were . . . neutralised. But this network kept working. In two years, they organised twenty large-scale escapes on fishing boats. Most of them to France. How was this possible?’
Paúl Santos made as if to consult the light blue quartos, but Ren got there first and brandished them in the air. ‘Lots of these reports talk of a strange, mysterious woman. Always dressed in black. Some of those questioned call her Carme, others Lucía, others Dolores, but from the description it appears the woman is always one and the same. Agents of investigation and vigilance even came from Burgos, from the Brigade of Special Services. And seem to have reached a single conclusion: this woman working for Maritime Awakening, rather than being an invention, could be a kind of . . . character in a novel. A myth those arrested and questioned believed in and passed on to each other.’
‘What happened to this woman?’ asked Santos. ‘Did she disappear for ever?’
Ren fell silent. Seemed to be drilling his way through history.
‘In the early 1940s, as Chief Ren already explained, she reappeared,’ continued Mancorvo. ‘The transport of wolfram to Germany was repeatedly sabotaged. A special group of German counterespionage arrived and managed to hunt down a guy who’d been hurting them, a man of a thousand