“He’s not that tall, and a little heavier.”
“You know Stalin?”
Díaz puffed on his cigarette, holding it between the fingers of a black-gloved hand. Then he dropped it and crushed it with his heel.
“No one really knows Stalin. Great men are veiled in mist, and Stalin is a great man.” He gave the statue a friendly pat and they walked on.
After a brief silence, Díaz stopped short at a dirt path leading to the respiratory wing of the sanatorium. This was where those with consumption, tuberculosis, and cancer were treated. People with money or influence. No worker could ever afford to come here, and Díaz gazed at the building with infinite sadness, as though the existence of this exclusive facility heralded the failure of what they were attempting to build.
“Have you heard the news from Spain?”
Elías shook his head. “I’ve been busy trying to stay alive.”
Díaz was an uncommon leader, but he was a common man, and not ashamed of it.
“What you’ve been through, I can’t even imagine. I wouldn’t have lasted a week.” He cast a quick glance at the eye patch Elías wore. “I know you were surprised by what Lenin’s widow said. Let’s just say that empathy and social niceties are not comrade Nadezhda’s fortes. But she is right. Velichko’s report must not be made public.”
He waited for Elías to protest or show some sign of disapproval, but the young man simply turned his head to focus on the entrance to the infectious diseases building, where patients and white-coated staff came and went. His empty gaze, lost forever, filled Díaz with sorrow. And yet it was still his job to make the young man see that it was better to bury the whole affair.
“Spain is preparing for war. No one wants to believe it—despite the evidence all being right there—but it’s inevitable. It started the very day the Republic was declared. King Alfonso XIII himself predicted as much before going into exile. ‘I will go to avoid the spilling of Spanish blood,’ he said. The truth is, he went because we kicked him out, but in a way he was right. Sanjurjo’s coup was just a warm-up, a trial run. We responded, but now the government is in their hands, CEDA has the backing of the Church, the landowners, the Falangists, and the Sunday school teachers. The only reason they agreed to give women the vote is that the priests at the pulpits invoke women’s duty as mothers and fuel their long-standing fears. Order, God, and Country…the old die-hard Spain.”
“We’ll throw them out, we did it before.”
“It’s not that easy. Gil-Robles wasn’t named minister of war because they’re planning to democratize the army. It’s so that they can position their pawns—men like Mola and Sanjurjo and Franco—on the front lines. Their generals are making ready.”
“If you know that, why don’t you do something to avoid it before it’s too late?”
Diaz’s expression clouded over, his thoughts at odds. He pointed to a snow-covered bench.
“Every winter in Moscow it snows. Pipes burst, boilers explode, streets are shut down. Winter after winter, the same thing happens, over and over. Hundreds of crews are sent out to toil away, clearing roads, salting sidewalks, repairing pipes, and distributing food. But that doesn’t keep it from snowing.” He held out a hand and made a fist, the leather of his glove squeaking. “Power is in the hands of a reactionary, pro-Fascist government. They are the snow, falling ceaselessly down on us; they control the forces of repression, the press, and the Parliament. Their power is legitimate, but their aim is now to destroy the system that brought them in. Why? Because democracy entails a rotation of power, and they don’t want to share what they see as theirs by right. Do you think enthusiasm is enough to fight an organized, implacable enemy? We have to regroup, form a popular front, be pragmatic in our efforts, or we will surely fail. We are now the selfless workers toiling away, and all we’re doing is damage control. But the Spanish Communist Party has only fifteen thousand in its ranks. Meanwhile, the Socialists are determined to go it alone, as are the other truly Republican forces. None of us, on our own, can defeat this threat. But still we don’t prepare. Still, we gaze up at the sky and hope for a miracle, thinking maybe next year it won’t snow.”
Díaz exhaled deeply. As if the terrible certainty of the panorama he’d just described were right around the corner.
“Your father is a Communist.”
Elías nodded.
“And so are you. That’s why you came here, with our support. To train, to gain the knowledge that would one day allow you to contribute your grain of sand to the construction of a new country, a better country.”
“That was what I thought…”
Díaz gave him a questioning look.
“What you thought? Nothing has changed, Elías. The reason you came to the Soviet Union was that your father set an example for you at the mines. What you saw persuaded you that we have a responsibility to the men of our times, and more than that, to those who come after us. Your father, like mine, like those of thousands of others, simply decided to change the world.”
“The world doesn’t change.”
“You’re wrong, son. The world never stops changing, it moves on and nothing can stop it, and we—you and I—are the tiny invisible cogs in the wheel. And if it means we have to bear what seems unbearable, then we do it. We have no choice. We can’t do anything but move forward.”
Elías looked out past Díaz. He thought of his fights with other boys at the mine, his father, getting up every morning before dawn. He thought of the moment he resolved to show the foreman that he wouldn’t take any more abuse, how good it felt to punch him in the face, and then be beaten by the police and thrown out of the mine. He thought of the black smokestacks, the exhausted soot-covered faces of the miners, the laughter and songs he heard at the wells. Happiness was one weapon the powerful could not take away. The songs that women sang as they brought their husbands lunch after a hard day’s work rang out in the valley louder than shotgun fire. That was what he thought when he was a boy, and he still believed it when he met up with his friend Ramón in a Lavapíes café, in Madrid, where they argued bitterly until dawn. “I’ll take Federico García Lorca over José Antonio Primo de Rivera,” he declared proudly, challenging Ramón’s insistence on the need for order. Words over violence. That was the spirit that had brought him to the Soviet Union a year earlier, the same one that had brought his young friends Michael, Martin, and Claude.
But now he was not so sure.
“We are but the first drop, Elías. A sign of the coming storm that will wash away the old.”
A few months earlier, Díaz’s words would have moved Elías to the core. But now he felt nothing but the cold wind penetrating his borrowed clothes. He pictured Irina’s body, trapped at the bottom of the river—perhaps it would stay there, beneath a layer of ice, and one day someone would find it floating in the ocean, a freakish sight. This storm that the general secretary spoke of so fervently would carry off men and women, leave parents without children, husbands without wives. Everything would be swept away, it would all disappear, and in time there would be nothing—no houses, no streets, no bones. They would never have existed; not even their memories would remain.
“Do you have a family?”
The question took Díaz by surprise. “A wife and three children. Why?”
“They must be a good reason for you to keep believing in your words.”
“Indeed. None better.”
“Do you really think there’s going to be a war?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“And what will happen?”
Díaz remained pensive, the pain in his stomach intensifying. “We’ll fight. Perhaps we’ll die.”
“Can we win?”
At this Díaz smiled. “One day, we can. I have no doubt.”
Elías understood. “But not today. And yet still, you’re asking me to accept everything that happened
to me and carry on as though nothing had changed.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly what I’m asking.”
Esperanza was sitting on the curb at the entrance to the industrial complex, trying to draw animals in the snow although none of them was remotely identifiable. She certainly wasn’t going to earn a living as an artist, she thought, wiping away the dirty snow. But that didn’t matter; at sixteen, not many people knew what would become of them, and she had already made up her mind about the only thing that mattered in her future.
“Does that jacket keep you warm?”
Her doelike eyes looked up at Elías. For a second, he thought of the elk that the guards had taken down and felt something inside him break. He was full of holes, like an old bulkhead, and sometimes he thought he’d never be able to stay afloat.
Esperanza nodded, and in her eyes he glimpsed something very different from his darkness—a distant promise that things might turn out all right, the improbable belief that somehow, miraculously, there could be a type of justice that had to do not with laws but with kindness. Kindness, a word he could hardly even say aloud. And yet there it was, in Esperanza’s conviction that those pilots were heroes—with whom he’d soon have to compete—in the eyes of that elk, in the hand Irina had held out to him when he thought he couldn’t carry on and collapsed on the tracks on the way to Siberia. There was kindness in his father, in Claude’s caustic jokes, in the way he died, even in that commander who blew his brains out beside the old man playing harmonica. All of that was there, along with all the evil, engaged in a merciless war. And he couldn’t simply watch it without stepping in.
“Well, I’d say it’s a bit excessive for the Mediterranean climate.”
“What’s the Mediterranean?”
Elías didn’t really know either. He’d never seen it. And he still couldn’t understand how he’d let José Díaz convince him to accept a posting to Barcelona to join the Party’s cell.
The truth was that the general secretary had given him no option. After his moral plea and ideological discourse, Díaz had become the pragmatist once more. With a bitter smile he’d made himself crystal clear: “Either you accept the posting or I leave you to your fate with the OGPU.”
Elías had accepted, on one strange condition: The girl who’d been caring for him all that time could go, too.
16
BARCELONA, SEPTEMBER 2002
Gonzalo leaned on his crutches and looked out the window at the garden below. As far as he could recall, he hadn’t been in this house more than a dozen times in twenty years. In ordinary circumstances, he would have considered it a luxury to be invited by his father-in-law, but he was perfectly aware of the fact that this was no friendly visit. The living room they were in was supposed to look fashionably modern but came off as horrendously cold. The furniture was intended not to be comfortable or inviting, but to arouse guests’ admiration, though in Gonzalo all it aroused was scorn. Each piece was arranged just so. It was like living in a home-furnishings magazine, and Gonzalo himself was the one thing that didn’t match.
He observed the two glasses of whiskey on the desk. His own remained untouched; his father-in-law’s, empty. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but Gonzalo was sure that the man had started far earlier.
“Have you read The History of Rome by Livy, or Shakespeare’s King Lear?”
Gonzalo gave him a bewildered look. Agustín pointed to the volumes in question, on a high shelf.
“You should. Those books make it clear: Anyone who aspires to hold on to power must never show weakness, especially to those closest to them.”
“Where are you going with this?”
His father-in-law gave him an offhand look, as though he were being blasé, but the abrupt way he refilled his glass and brought it to his lips told a different story.
“Do you know why I’ve been in the legal profession for forty years and no one has ever caught me out?” He spread his hands toward the bookshelves, the library. “It’s not because I know the law better than anyone else, or because I’m a better speaker, or even smarter or cleverer than anyone else. Of course, I know how to pull the strings of power and move them to my advantage, but that’s not how I made my name. It’s because I can predict the hand. I know when I’m going to win and when I might lose, because I’ve got the cards before anyone else. You’ll never trip me up, not you or anyone. Having all the information, calling in favors, turning weaknesses into strengths—that’s power. And I know how to conduct it. As I said, you should read Livy and Shakespeare and forget about those romantic tortured Russians.”
Was he drunk? Probably, but in that affable way that those of his class deemed acceptable.
“A good friend down at the public prosecutor’s office told me that a few days ago you filed to have your sister’s case reopened, to look into Zinoviev’s death. According to the report, you claim to have overwhelming proof of her innocence. I’d like to know what that proof is.”
“That’s classified information. Nothing in the file is to be made known until the judge makes his pronouncement.”
“Oh, come off it, Gonzalo. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?” Agustín snapped. “This isn’t some crappy little divorce case. This is the big league. The firms you’ve asked to have investigated are majority shareholders that I represent. Respectable, foreign investors who are very interested in getting this case dropped. Otherwise, both investors will back out of the ACASA project and I’ll lose a fortune.”
Gonzalo considered the documents he’d given the prosecutor, the way the man had reacted. The vast quantities of information made perfectly clear what the Matryoshka was involved in.
This was much more than a matter of his father-in-law losing a big-money investment. The consortium was a network of aboveboard companies engaged in laundering money earned from child prostitution, drugs, and all manner of illegal activity. Banks, property developers, construction companies with headquarters in London, Lichtenstein, Monaco, Mauritius. Millions in currencies that would have to be offloaded quickly, since Spain was now adopting the euro, so as not to lose value against the dollar.
“This isn’t just about an investment you stand to lose, you don’t even need those millions. This goes much deeper, doesn’t it?”
“I see you understand.”
Gonzalo was vehement. “What exactly is it that I should understand? That you handle the legalities that enable a bunch of criminals to launder dirty money?”
Agustín continued to take sip after sip of his drink, and through a crack in his façade, Gonzalo saw the truth: The man was terrified. The great white shark had taken too big a bite. This was no longer about Gonzalo’s refusal to sell the family property holding up the construction project. This was far more serious. His father-in-law was trapped in the Matryoshka’s net. God only knew how long he had been doing business for them, either without realizing it or—worse—without admitting it. Hadn’t he said that knowledge was power? He knew what they were like, knew what they were capable of. Gonzalo could sense all of this in the imploring look concealed beneath Agustín’s bogus rage and bluster. Now he saw the full extent of it: The poor man was quaking in his boots, afraid of what they could do to him. They could take down not only his reputation and the empire he’d spent forty years building but also, and more important—and this awakened fear and compassion in Gonzalo, too—his daughter and grandchildren.
“You have to withdraw the lawsuit and forget about those people. You have no option, Gonzalo. I’m not negotiating.”
“I’m not withdrawing the petition, Agustín.”
“You’ve already put my daughter and grandchildren in danger once. There is absolutely no way I’m letting you do it again—do you understand me? I’ll do whatever it takes to ensure their safety. Whatever it takes.”
His eyes told Gonzalo that he meant what he said.
Old Luka
s dozed in a patch of sunlight on the tile floor. Dogs were like people, or vice versa—always trying to warm their bones when it was too late to do any good. Alcázar went to the pantry and opened a can of dog food, mixed it with weight-control kibble, and held the bowl close to Lukas’s snout. The animal had been born blind, his eyes pools of milky white; he would have been put down at the pound had Alcázar not taken a shine to him. After twelve years together, neither of them needed to be able to see in order to recognize each other in the dark. Not even all couples could say that.
The dog—part husky, part mutt—lifted his snout, sniffed his master’s hand, and chewed, his old teeth all yellow. He didn’t growl when Alcázar scratched and petted his big grizzled head. Alcázar had a way with dogs; his father had been a hunter and they always kept hounds at home. He knew how to treat them and in general found dogs far easier to get along with than people. A person might be faithful, but a dog was loyal, and not everyone understood the difference. Cecilia had.
Maybe that was the reason it was just the two of them, old Lukas and old Alcázar, in a five-hundred-square-foot apartment, scenically overlooking a brick wall covered in filthy graffiti where every drunk in the neighborhood came to piss and shit. Every man forges his own future, his father used to say. Alcázar had forged his, so he wasn’t complaining. He was simply taking stock of the undeniable fact that for some time now, he’d been finding the bed too big for just him, and the ghost of Cecilia—who for so many years had slept on the right-hand side—was visiting a little too often.
He needed a change. It was time to live out the last few years of his life in peace, slowly sinking into nostalgia, a beer in one hand as he sat in the Florida Keys like a real golden oldie, watching the sun shining down on the ocean and turning it purple.
Alcázar made some coffee and spread a little soft cheese on a piece of toast. He was trying to make sure he had breakfast before his first cigarette. He’d been fooling himself, thinking he would actually quit one day. Nobody gives up the bad habits of a lifetime; it’s the bad habits that put an end to your life. The TV in the kitchen was on. The commissioner was reading a press release. Alcázar turned up the volume.
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