“And you’re a little angel. Let me call Linares to find out whether they’ll let us go and see the car this morning.”

“Who is Linares?”

“One of the real ones. We started out together, and he’s still a good friend. How many people can you say that about after twenty years in the Force?”

They went back into the café, and Miquel let them use the phone. Vargas called police headquarters on Vía Layetana and launched into a conversational two-step of male camaraderie, foul-mouthed jokes, and studied tough-guy bonding with his pal Linares, eventually getting the go-ahead for checking out the car that was allegedly used by Valls and his driver, gunman, and stooge to travel from Madrid to Barcelona. Alicia followed the conversation as if she was listening to a drawing-room play, enjoying Vargas’s knack of flattering his colleagues and coming up with grand statements that said nothing at all.

“All solved,” he concluded as he hung up.

“Are you sure? Haven’t you thought that perhaps this Linares would have liked to know that you’re with me?”

“Of course. That’s why I didn’t mention it.”

“And what will you say when they see me?”

“I’ll say we’re going out together. I don’t know, I’ll think of something.”

They took a taxi opposite the city hall, setting off just as the traffic on Vía Layetana was beginning to thicken in the tortuous early-morning rush hour. Vargas gazed thoughtfully at the parade of monumental buildings emerging like ships in the morning mist. The taxi driver cast occasional furtive glances in the mirror, probably speculating on the odd couple they made. But soon he was distracted by a sports program on the radio, in which it was furiously debated whether the soccer league was already lost or, on the contrary, there were still reasons to go on living.

13

They called it the Museum of Tears.

The huge pavilion stood in a no-man’s-land between the zoo and the beach. A citadel of factories and hangars spread all around it, their backs to the sea, watched over by a great water tower like a circular castle perched at heaven’s door. The museum was a relic, a ruin spared from the demolition that had swept away almost all the structures built for the 1888 Universal Exhibition. After years of abandonment, the city had given the pavilion to Central Police Headquarters, which had transformed it into a depot and modern-day catacombs. Stuff had been piling up there, forming an endless forensic warehouse: decades of legal reports, evidence material, plunder, confiscated goods, weapons, and all manner of contraptions, notebooks, and other treasures resulting from over seventy years of dust, crime, and punishment in the city of Barcelona.

The building had a vaulted ceiling not unlike that of the neighboring Estación de Francia. Blades of light fell from its laminated roof, cutting through the darkness and spreading over a tangle of corridors that were hundreds of meters long and even taller than many of the buildings in the central district. A complex system of staircases and footbridges that seemed to dangle from the heights like ghostly stage machinery led to the upper areas, where a nest of documents and objects told the secret history of Barcelona from the closing years of the nineteenth century. During the seven decades of its existence, all kinds of artifacts had become trapped in that limbo, from ancient carriages and motorcars used in crimes to an encyclopedic arsenal of weapons and poisons. The building held enough works of art linked to an inventory of unsolved cases to open several museums. Particularly famous among experts was a collection of stuffed bodies that had been discovered in the basement of a mansion in the San Gervasio neighborhood. The mansion had belonged to a wealthy colonial baron who, in his years of prosperity and glory in Cuba, had developed a predilection for hunting slaves like game. On his return to Europe, he’d left a trail of disappearances among the underclass who frequented the salons and cafés of the Paralelo district, which had never been resolved.