MargenIn the port everyone has two names: the one their parents gave them and the one that pays their debts. Anglada knew it because she had grown up between those two names, the daughter of a docker who was called Jordi for the union and something else for the men who lent him money.
It took the ghost without hands four days to have a name, and it was a false one: Emili Sans, according to a passport that turned up in a locker rented with stolen papers. Sans did not exist. Or existed only as one of those identities that in the port are bought cheap, used once and thrown into the water like a sandwich wrapper.
"Crossed papers," her colleague explained, Subinspector Bru, a patient man who liked order the way other men like drink. "People who come in through the port without coming in. Ships that bring containers with declared goods and undeclared people. And someone who makes them a name so they can disappear altogether."
"Or so they can stay alive," said Anglada.
She went to see old Restany because in that port not a mooring moved without his knowing. She found him in his glass-walled office above the dock, watching his cranes like a god already bored with his own creation. He was eighty years old and had the smile of an old shark, the kind that no longer needs to bite because the water parts on its own.
"Little Anglada," he said. "Jordi’s girl. It has been a long time since you came round here. Since that business with your brother, I reckon."
"I have not come to talk about my brother."
"Nobody ever comes to talk about what they have come to talk about." He poured her a coffee she did not touch. "A man with no hands, they say. And a photo of you in his pocket." He laughed quietly, without wanting to. "Nuria, some dead men come back to steal. And some come back so that you will recognise them. This one has made a very long journey just to show you a face. If I were you I would ask myself whose face it is. Not the dead man’s. The one in the photograph."
Anglada left the office with the coffee untouched and an idea lodged in her stomach. She looked again at the copy of the photograph they had given her. And for the first time she did not look at herself. She looked at the background. Behind her, blurred, half turned away, there was a second man who on the night of the fourteenth of August she would have sworn was a thousand kilometres from that quay.
It was her brother.