Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [59]
‘Who was he with?’ Jueves was asking as she moved back to the bed.
‘Someone called Marc Rhein. You know him?’
‘Only by reputation. A French journalist, anti-communist. He’s written some stuff about the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. He’s vanished too?’
‘Seems so. His room still has his belongings, yet he’s not been seen or heard of since the weekend.’
Anji mentally made a note to look for references to Rhein as well, or articles by him. This whole business would be a lot easier if the Doctor had allowed her to use post-it notes. Or if all the post-its weren’t in the sealed desk drawers of the TARDIS library. As it was, she had to mark places of interest with bits of paper and they kept falling out. She realised that the room’s phone was ringing, a clattering bell. Without thinking, she picked it up.
‘Hola.’
She listened for a moment to the crack and hiss of an open line. ‘Hola? Qui est?’
Glancing up, both the Doctor and Jueves were watching her, waiting to see who it was. ‘There’s no one there, must be a wrong –’ There was a clicking on the receiver, forcing Anji to return her attention to it. ‘Hola? Hello?’
A further click, then silence followed by the burr of a dialtone. She rattled the cradle a couple of times, then smirked at herself for doing so. Yeah, that always worked in the movies.
‘Wrong number. Or a bad connection.’
She dialled the desk in the basement, where the switchboard operator was. ‘Rosita? Si, si. Listen, you just put a call through. Who was it? Uh-huh. Oh. Are you sure? OK, thanks.’
Anji put the phone back into its cradle slowly and carefully, frowning at it.
‘She didn’t put the call through,’ she told the Doctor, ‘she says we’ve not had a call all day.’
The Doctor looked at her with a calm certainty. ‘Somebody is watching us.’
* * *
He was living with his sisters now, in an apartment in Casa des Punxes. They had a corner flat, the wide windows looking down on to La Diagonal. When Durruti’s funeral procession had marched past, just about the same time as Juan was killed, they had closed all the shutters and blinds and sat with the lights on at midday waiting for the crowds to be gone.
Sugrañes lived in fear, every day and every night. He had stopped going to the Sagrada Família now. Without Juan he couldn’t raise the bravery to go back there at first and now he couldn’t risk his sisters coming under suspicion as well. He was sure the apartment block was watched. The turret apartment above them had been requisitioned a few weeks previously and a machine gun hauled up to it, the sharp metal stand gouging holes in the plaster of the stairwell. He daren’t speak out. If, when, there was trouble the gun would be able to fire at anything trying to cross the wide junction next to them.
At night, he would carefully pull up a boxload of recovered works from their hiding place beneath the floorboards of his room and spend hours cataloguing them, trying to recall what they were. Some of his colleagues, some of his sisters’ friends, were talking quietly of when the Nationalists would restore order. Perhaps even the monarchy. They seemed to expect liberation within weeks, but Doménec Sugrañes was used to thinking in longer terms than they. He had spent twenty years on a single project and he could see it would be another hundred, even more, before that was complete. Franco was working fast, but it would be another year, maybe even two, before Barcelona was restored.
By day, he took a walk around the Eixample. Every day the same locations, although often from different routes as he had to run errands for his sisters. They were both too afraid to leave the apartment. He would visit all the Master’s works, except the gardens in Parc Güell, and note any damage to them. The details that would need restoring, once this was over. There was no law against checking the architecture, he was sure. It also gave him ideas, chances to meditate how Antoni had envisaged the Sagrada Família in its final form.
It was dusk as he approached the last site before heading home. His