21

If clothes maketh the man, an office and a good address make, or unmake, the lawyer. In a city well provided with lawyers to be found in sumptuous offices inside the regal, stately buildings of Paseo de Gracia and other elegant streets, Don Fernando Brians had gone for a far more modest address.

From a distance Alicia and Vargas sighted the building, which was roughly a hundred years old and listing vaguely to one side, at the intersection of Calle Mercé and Calle Aviñón. The ground floor was occupied by a tapas bar that looked more like a refuge for forgotten bullfighters and fishermen on payday. The bartender, a tiny man shaped like a spinning top and sporting a plump mustache, had come outdoors armed with a mop and a steaming bucket that stank of bleach. He was whistling a popular tune and performing juggling tricks with a toothpick between his lips while he washed the pavement clean of urine, drunken vomit, and other miscellaneous souvenirs from the early hours, characteristic of the narrow streets leading to the port.

Piles of boxes and dusty bits of furniture flanked the front door of the building. A trio of young men, sweating profusely, had paused to recover their breath and polish off some baguette sandwiches with strips of mortadella peering over the sides.

“Is this the office of Señor Brians, the lawyer?” Vargas asked the bartender, who had interrupted his mopping to have a good look at them.

“Top floor,” the man said, pointing upward with his index finger. “But they’re in the middle of moving.” He smiled as Alicia walked past, revealing his yellowed teeth. “A little coffee and a madeleine, miss? It’s on the house.”

“Some other day. Once you’ve shaved off that bush,” Alicia replied without stopping.

The three young men applauded the jibe, which the bartender took sportingly. Vargas followed her into the building to the stairs, a sort of spiral that looked more like an intestinal tract than an architectural design.

“Is there an elevator?” Vargas asked one of the boys.

“If there is, we haven’t seen it.”

They ascended the building’s five floors until they came to a landing teeming with boxes, filing cabinets, clothes hangers, chairs, and paintings of pastoral scenes that looked like they’d been rescued from a flea market at a few céntimos apiece. Alicia peeked her head around the office door, an apartment in full battle cry where nothing seemed to be in the right place and almost everything was stuffed in overfull boxes or on the move. Vargas tried the doorbell, which didn’t work, then knocked on the door.

“Hello!”

A peroxide blonde with hair amassed into a rigid perm appeared in the corridor. The young lady sporting the prodigious helmet was wearing a flower-print dress and matching rouge.

“Good morning,” said Alicia. “Is this Señor Brians’s office?”

The young lady took a few steps toward them and gazed at them in surprise. “It is. Or was. We’re moving. Can I help you?”