1
THE OLD CATHEDRAL
Sunday, July 24
I
was enjoying the best Spanish tortilla in the world, the egg still runny and the potatoes cooked but firm, when I took the call that changed my life. For the worse, I should add.
It was the eve of El Día de Santiago, and in Vitoria we were celebrating El Día de la Blusa, an homage to the youngsters who enlivened the early-August celebrations by wearing traditional smocks. The bar where I was trying to finish my tasty snack was so crowded and noisy that when I realized my cell phone was vibrating in my shirt pocket, I had to go out into Calle del Prado.
“What’s wrong, Estíbaliz?”
My partner didn’t usually bother me on my days off, and El Día de la Blusa and the evening before were too sacred for anyone to even think about going to work. The entire city was in a state of commotion.
At first, the noise of the brass bands and the flood of people following them prevented my hearing what Estíbaliz was trying to say.
“Unai, you have to come to the Old Cathedral,” she insisted.
Her tone of voice, and the undercurrent of urgency and bewilderment, struck me as odd. Estíbaliz has more guts than me, and that’s saying something.
I understood immediately that something serious must have happened.
Trying to get away from the ever-present racket that was engulfing the city, I walked automatically toward La Florida Park so that our conversation could be at least minimally productive.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to shake off the effects of the last glass of Rioja.
“You won’t believe it. It’s exactly the same as twenty years ago.”
“What are you talking about, Estí? I’m not at my sharpest today.”
“Some archaeologists from the company restoring the cathedral found two naked corpses in the crypt. A boy and a girl, with their hands resting on each other’s cheek. You remember that, don’t you? Come right now, Unai. This is serious, very serious.” She told me where to find her and ended the call.
It can’t be, I thought.
It can’t be.
I didn’t even say good-bye to my friends in the cuadrilla. They were going to stay in Sagartoki’s, in the midst of that flood of humans. It was unlikely any of them would even pay attention to their phone if I called to say that El Día de la Blusa was over for me.
With my colleague’s words echoing in my brain, I headed for the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca. I passed my own doorway and went up Calle de la Correría, one of the oldest streets in the medieval heart of the city.
It was a bad choice. Like everywhere else in the city center that day, it was packed. La Malquerida and the other bars lining the Old City were crammed with locals. It took me more than fifteen minutes to reach La Burullería Square, at the rear of the cathedral, where I’d agreed to meet Estíbaliz.
In the fifteenth century, the square had been the market of the burulleros, or weavers, who made the city one of the main trading arteries in northern Spain, and it had retained their name. As I walked across the cobblestones, the bronze statue of Ken Follett seemed to watch me go by, as if the writer had anticipated the dark web of intrigue being spun around us.
Estíbaliz Ruiz de Gauna, my colleague and fellow inspector in the Criminal Investigation Unit, was waiting in the square, making a thousand phone calls, darting back and forth like a lizard. Her red hair framed her face. At five feet two inches tall, she just met the height requirement to join the force. Had Estí been any shorter, Vitoria would have lost one of its finest, most tenacious detectives.
We were both damned good at solving cases, although we weren’t quite as good at playing by the rules. We had received more than one warning for disobedience, and so we’d learned to cover ourselves. As for following orders, we were working on it.
We were working on it.
I turned a blind eye to some of the addictions that still slipped into Estí’s life. She looked the other way when I disobeyed my superiors and investigated on my own.
My specialty was criminal profiling, so I was usually called in when we had a case involving a serial killer or rapist—any delinquent who reoffended. If there were more than three events with a cooling-off period between them, I was your man.
Estíbaliz specialized in victimology, that great forgotten science. Why that person, and not someone else? She was also better than anyone at using the police databases, like the one that compiled the treads of every imaginable vehicle, or SoleMate, a guide to the footprints left by all the international makes and brands of shoes and sneakers.
As soon as she saw me, she hung up her cell phone and looked at me, distraught.
“What’s inside the cathedral?” I asked.
“You’d better see for yourself,” she whispered, as if the heavens—or perhaps hell—could hear us, who knew? “Superintendent Medina himself called me. They want a profiling expert like you, and they’ve called me in to examine the victims. You’ll soon see why. I want you to tell me your first impression. The crime-scene techs are already here, and so are the pathologist and the judge. Let’s go in via Cuchi.”
Calle Cuchillería was one of the ancient streets where the guilds had been established in the Middle Ages. Vitoria could boast an indelible record of our ancestors’ trades: La Herrería for blacksmiths, La Zapatería for shoemakers, La Correría for ropemakers, La Pintorería for the dyers’ guild. Despite the passage of centuries, the city’s medieval core was still intact.
Oddly enough, from Calle Cuchillería you could enter the cathedral through what looked like the doorway to an ordinary dwelling.
There were already two uniforms guarding the heavy wooden door at Number 85. They saluted and let us in.
“I’ve questioned the two archaeologists who found them,” my colleague said. “They came today to try to make some headway with their work: the Santa María Cathedral Foundation is pressuring them to finish the crypt and the vault this year. They left us the keys. As you can see, the lock is intact. It hasn’t been forced.”
“They came to work on the eve of El Día de Santiago? Isn’t that slightly . . . unusual for people from Vitoria?”
“I didn’t notice anything strange about their reactions, Unai.” Estí shook her head. “They were shocked, or rather horrified. Horror like that isn’t faked.”
All right, I thought. I trusted Estíbaliz’s judgment the way the back wheel of a bicycle trusts the front wheel. That’s how we functioned; that’s how we pedaled along.
We went in through the restored porch. My colleague closed the door behind us, and the noise of the festivities finally faded.
Until that moment, the news that two dead bodies had been found hadn’t really hit me; it had been too much at odds with the joyful, carefree atmosphere all around. But in that cloistered silence, with the archaeologists’ lamps dimly lighting the wooden staircase down to the crypt, it all seemed more plausible. And not exactly welcome.
“Here, put on a helmet.” Estíbaliz handed me one of the white helmets bearing the foundation’s logo that every tourist visiting the cathedral was obliged to wear. “With your height, you’re bound to bump your head.”
“I’ll be fine without it,” I said, busy peering around the room.
“It’s mandatory,” she insisted, holding out the white monstrosity to me again and brushing the edge of my hand with her fingertips.
This game we played had one very clear rule: So far and no further. In fact, there was a complementary one: Don’t ask; that’s far enough. I figured that two years without going any further constituted a status quo, an established code of conduct, and Estíbaliz and I got along very well. It was also true that she was busy with her wedding preparations, and I had been widowed for several— Well, that doesn’t matter.
“You’re going soft,” I muttered, but took the plastic helmet.
We climbed the curving staircase, leaving behind the models of the village of Gasteiz, the first settlement that had become the foundation of the city. Estíbaliz had to stop once more to find the right key to the door that would take us to the inner area of the Old Cathedral, one of our city’s symbols. It had been restored and patched up more often than my childhood bike. A sign reading open greeted us on the right.
I knew all my region’s emblems. They had been stored in my memory ever since the double crime of the dolmen had thrown the people of Vitoria into a panic twenty years and four months earlier.
The dolmen, known as the Witch’s Lair; the Celtic village at La Hoya; the Roman salt pans at Añana; the medieval wall—those were the sites a serial killer had chosen that put Vitoria and the province of Álava on the world news map. And the morbid fascination created by his macabre staging of the murders had led to the establishment of tourist trails throughout the region.
I was almost twenty when it happened; my obsession with the killings became the main reason I joined the police. I followed the investigation day after day, with an anxiety that only a single-minded young person could understand. I analyzed what little appeared in El Diario Alavés and thought: I can do better. They’re being stupid. They’re forgetting the most important thing: the why. Although I wasn’t even twenty, I thought I was smarter than the police. How naive that seems now.
Soon afterward, the truth hit me in the face harder than a boxer’s fist. I was stunned, just like all of Spain. No one expected Tasio Ortiz de Zárate to be guilty. I wouldn’t have cared if it had been anyone else: my neighbor, a Poor Clare nun, the baker, the mayor. I wouldn’t have cared.
But not Tasio, our local hero who was more than an idol: he was a role model, a TV archaeologist who starred in a show that won record ratings each season, the author of books of history and mythology that sold out in weeks. Tasio was the most charismatic, entrancing character that Vitoria had produced in decades. Intelligent and, in the unanimous view of Vitoria’s women, very attractive. And duplicated.
Yes, duplicated.
We had two to choose from. Tasio had a monozygotic twin, and they were identical down to the way they cut their fingernails. Indistinguishable. An optimist like him, from a good family, cheerful, full of fun, cultured, well-mannered. At the age of twenty-four, the brothers had Vitoria at their feet and a future that was generally expected to be beyond stellar, stratospheric.
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