After that, she’d heard the old Renault drive off down the lake road and, hours later, they’d found the empty car by the shore, its doors open. On the dashboard was a brief goodbye note, in his handwriting: I need to escape. Please forgive me. How many times did she repeat this story? A dozen, maybe more. In her memory it went on for hours, her retelling the same events like a constant refrain and the inspector jiggling his shoe, reading the note and shaking his head, repeating, “I don’t believe you.” Until finally she confessed the truth, told him about Anna Akhmatova, the Russian woman who had rented the house next door at the start of summer and had a daughter younger than Gonzalo.
“Actually, it was less than fifteen minutes,” Alcázar said. He still smoked Ducados, as he had in 1967, but this time he offered one to Laura with a tired smile.
Fifteen minutes was how long it had taken her to tell him what really happened. She had wanted to, needed to get it off her chest. It was too much for a young girl to be burdened with. Alcázar hadn’t even needed to scare her or be cruel. All he’d had to do was give her a little nudge and then wait. Once she stopped sobbing, he sent her back out to the hall where her mother and brother were waiting and ordered her not to say a word. Alcázar remembered feeling every fiber of his body tingle, excitement and doubt coursing through him like electricity. He was a young inspector who until that night hadn’t had a single important case of his own, a man who lived in the shadow of his father, commissioner of the BPS—Franco’s secret police, in Barcelona.
The disappearance of Elías Gil was so clearly too big for him that he did the only thing he could. Sensing that this could be the most important case of his entire career, Alcázar had called his father. He needed to be told how to proceed. And that was when his father made the decision that changed their lives forever. The decision involved only Alcázar, Laura, Anna Akhmatova, and Elías Gil himself.
For a few long minutes, ex–Chief Inspector Alcázar stood gazing blankly at the waves lapping gently against the breakwater. Time, in his head, was a jumble of events that—unlike for most people—were not ordered and successive but circular and simultaneous, a constant feedback loop that brought the past into the present and vice versa. Like right now. What was he? A nostalgic old man watching darkness fall by the seashore, standing beside a younger man who thought he knew the truth, as Alcázar himself had once thought.
“I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m not very proud of. But I’ve never killed anyone, I assure you. Your sister Laura knew that.”
When he thought again about Laura, Alcázar remembered a determined woman, full of life. This was in the months leading up to the World’s Fair in Seville and the Barcelona Olympics. Spain was on fire, effervescent, unstoppable; money flowed like a never-ending river; pirates, speculators, and mercenaries the world over disembarked, ready to take a slice of the pie via procurement contracts, construction gigs to build pavilions and offices, transportation services, you name it. Right when the country was about to leap into the world spotlight with no safety net in place, several cases of child prostitution and exploitation came to light, damaging the country’s image; the politicians wanted the news buried—deep—on the double. They tasked Alcázar with creating a special brigade to fight child trafficking and sexual exploitation, but did so with the imbecilic frivolity of those who don’t understand the issues and assume that the whole thing can be shut down with a cavalier wave of the hand, rather than real funding and the provision of material support to the agencies involved.
But Laura had come on board, and she was full of good intentions without being naïve, knew a lot about the world, had traveled widely, and was already in contact with associations fighting the scum involved in child prostitution. And Alcázar noticed something else, something more important. From the start, there was a personal side to her fervor; she had her own demons and was trying to exorcize them. Was that the reason he took her on? Maybe he thought he needed someone with her drive, someone who could convince him that what he was doing—no matter now trivial—was better than nothing and that despite having his hands tied, he had to carry on. But the real reason—which they’d never brought up after their first encounter years earlier—was that Alcázar felt he owed it to her. He had a debt to pay, they both knew this, and he was trying to make good on it.
Ten years later, they’d evolved in opposite directions. There were too many factors at play—all of which, truth be told, came down to the same thing: money. And it hadn’t taken Alcázar long to confirm what he’d suspected from the start—that once he started stepping on toes and preparing to pull the rabbit out of his hat, he’d be left out in the cold. His superiors were looking for dramatic headlines, not actual scandal. That was when he’d first met Agustín González—amazing to think he’d been dealing with the old man that long. Back then Agustín was a lawyer who’d quickly read the situation at hand and adapted to the times, riding the wave, defending anyone with enough money to pay his exorbitant fees. He was smart and saw that Alcázar would never be able to defeat the men under his counsel; he also knew that the shit would keep flowing and all the city wanted to do was hide the stench. And it wasn’t hard for him to convince Alcázar that he, too, could benefit from the scenario by playing his cards right.
So Alcázar became crooked, without intending to but without putting up a fight, simply accepting what seemed inevitable. He arrested those he could arrest, accepted congratulations and decorations when he shut down a brothel or broke up a minor child-trafficking ring, and also accepted—with rather less distaste—the generous handouts Agustín gave him in exchange for privileged information relating to his clients. He openly rubbed elbows with powerful people who kindly saw fit to invite him for a weekend of hunting in Cáceres or sailing in Ibiza—Russians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians who’d begun spreading their tentacles along the Spanish coast, displacing the traditional Italian, French, and British mafias.
That was how he’d met Zinoviev, the arrogant, pumped-up thug and deranged pederast in charge of child prostitution. Until then Alcázar had never heard of the Matryoshka. It was Laura who’d found the name of a complicated tree diagram with multiple offshoots hanging in her office, and one of the branches led to Zinoviev, a known assassin. They weren’t sure if the Matryoshka was a fabrication, a single person who ran the whole network, a consortium, or an abstract idea that Zinoviev and others used as a sort of umbrella.
When Alcázar had asked him directly, Zinoviev simply gave an evil laugh. “You just make sure that bitch on your team doesn’t fuck with us too much.”
Alcázar tried to help her; God and Cecilia were witness to the fact that he’d tried. When she went too far, he’d attempt to convince her to think of her family, weigh the risks, and if that didn’t work, then he was forced to step in personally and make sure her raids were botched and her investigations led to dead ends, or to beg Zinoviev to ask his bosses to throw her a few scraps to keep her satisfied. Although Laura never knew it, Alcázar had more than once saved her life. But then she went too far. She managed to find an informer inside the organization.
Despite Alcázar’s best efforts, she refused to tell him who it was. Her source assured her that there were cops and other authorities on the Matryoshka’s payroll and, naïvely, Laura thought she was protecting Alcázar by not telling him her guy’s name. She gained the support of a young prosecutor and an old-school judge, the kind who hated corruption above all else. Laura started getting search warrants, and then came the arrests and raids, and Alcázar didn’t know how to stop it. He started to see that Laura was after Zinoviev but knew she wouldn’t stop there. One by one she’d cross off the names on the diagram in her office. And at some point…she would come to his.
Laura was in a frenzy, like a hunter who can smell the prey and knows it’s almost in her sights, wounded. Did she suspect him in the end? Probably. Of course, she already knew Agustín González. Not because he was her brother’s fath
er-in-law (a fateful coincidence) but because during Laura’s time on the brigade the man’s performances in court had become epic. Time after time, Agustín González’s firm derailed her investigations, found violations of procedure and inconsistencies in her proof. Laura’s detainees would be set free. She detested him. Agustín knew it, and also knew there was no way he could buy her off, so when the ACASA project took off, he suggested Alcázar feel her out. This was a terrible mistake. From that moment on, Laura avoided him like the plague. She never actually accused him of anything, but she also refused to let him in on anything. And shortly before it all went down, Alcázar found out she’d started investigating him. It was all just a matter of time.
And that was when the tragedy occurred. Zinoviev decided to act on his own, kidnapping Laura’s son, Roberto. Alcázar remembered him—a lively little boy with unusual features, small eyes sharp as slits in his tiny, round face; he was slightly rebellious and totally enamored of his mother. Alcázar didn’t find out about it until it was too late. Laura was the one who told him; she showed him the crass, anonymous handwritten note warning her to stop fucking with them. She was terrified, completely beside herself, as though she’d only just realized the full impact of what she’d done, as though until that moment she’d had no idea whom she was messing with. The boy was supposed to have been returned after two days. Zinoviev swore those were the instructions he’d received from the Matryoshka. And for the first time ever, Alcázar threatened him: If anything happened to that little boy, he was going to wish he’d never been born. Zinoviev calmed him down, assured him there was no reason to get worked up. It was just a warning, and the deputy inspector would see it that way. So why did they kill him? Was it a mistake, a misunderstanding? Firing point-blank can hardly be construed as an error. Maybe the kid saw their faces, maybe Zinoviev felt threatened and decided to take it upon himself to get rid of the evidence.
After that, Laura died inside. She was put on leave and forced to undergo psychological counseling, but by that point she wouldn’t listen to anyone, not even that rich architect husband of hers. Their marriage had been on the rocks even before Roberto died. You can’t be surrounded by horror every day of your life and not have it affect you. Laura had needed sleeping pills for years, and even with those she hardly got any rest. Then she moved on to amphetamines, booze. Alcázar had seen it happen to others, had even gone through it himself. The evil gets into your expression, melts into everything like wax.
A few months later, her husband left home and Laura was swept into a vortex of self-destruction. She started snorting too much coke, taking too many pills, drinking too much. She’d turn up at Alcázar’s place in the middle of the night completely shitfaced, sob on the couch until she was spent, and when he woke up she’d be gone. She started going out with unsavory characters, anyone who would keep her company. She hardly ate, didn’t sleep. And then one night there was a serious altercation at a pub: Laura had been very high and the bouncers refused to let her in. She’d taken out her service weapon and unintentionally fired a shot; it was a miracle that no one was killed.
She fled the scene and was found in her car the following morning, covered in blood. Laura had cut herself, was incoherent, in a state of shock, and had to be admitted to the psych ward at Valle de Hebrón hospital. When she was released, internal affairs was there waiting; they confiscated her gun and informed her that charges were being pressed over the bar incident. After everything she’d been through, she was being fired. Zinoviev’s death was like her death knell. For Laura to commit suicide was simply a melodramatic way out, in a sense unworthy of her.
Unworthy? Alcázar shook his head, observing Gonzalo. The man was holding his head as if it might fall off his shoulders. He had purple bags under his eyes and a nervous twitch in his lip. More than anything, Alcázar felt sorry for him. It was patently obvious that this was all pushing him to the limit, the man was about to collapse. And yet, by committing suicide, Laura had dropped him in the middle of it, forcing him to finish what she hadn’t been able to. And judging by the headaches the man was causing Alcázar, she’d known what she was doing. If anyone knew Gonzalo Gil, it was his sister, that much was clear.
It was never going to end, Alcázar thought. Elías, Laura, and now Gonzalo. As long as one of the Gils was alive, the past would keep haunting him at night, coming back to bite him.
“It’s time to forget about all this, Gonzalo. Now.”
“The old man sent you to scare me, is that it?”
Alcázar scratched his mustache, pensive, and continued as though he hadn’t heard him.
“The old man is right. You’ll never be able to take them down, and you’ll just end up destroying yourself and your family, like Laura. This isn’t your war, it never was. You’re a good family man, an unassuming but honest lawyer. Be happy with that, hold on to it, it’s worth more than you think. If it makes you feel better, cling to the idea that your father was a martyr and assholes like me killed him. Bring your mother flowers, write a book…but forget all this. The old man will pay you handsomely for the land. Sell it. Join his firm, watch your kids grow up, and grow old with your wife without having to look over your shoulder every day. Carry on with your life, there’s no reason to feel indebted to your sister’s memory. I mean, you barely even knew her anymore. It wasn’t your fault and you have no business finishing a story that’s not yours to write.”
“What if I say no? What if I never wanted to be a father or an unassuming but honest lawyer to begin with? What if I decide to be loyal to my sister and get to the bottom of this?”
“I already told you—they’ll tear your life apart.”
“I don’t care,” he fired back too rashly.
Alcázar patted Gonzalo’s knee and stood. It was almost dark. The fishermen on the breakwater had lit their lanterns and the water was completely dark. His back hurt. He’d been hunched over too long. Alcázar pulled a photo from his pocket and placed it in Gonzalo’s hand. He would have preferred not to do this and hoped it would be enough to convince him.
It was a picture of Patricia, Gonzalo’s daughter.
“What does this mean?”
“Only the beginning, Gonzalo. Only the beginning.”
17
BARCELONA, 1936–1937
On January 16, 1936, Elías Gil and Caterina Esperanza Orlovska were married in a civil ceremony at a Barcelona City Hall annex. He was twenty-four years old and she had yet to turn eighteen. It was a somber occasion, overshadowed by those who were absent. Elías’s father had been killed after the October ’34 miners’ strike, summarily executed near Mieres along with several other labor leaders. Elías had returned to Spain just in time to attend the funeral and experience firsthand the fierce repression people were living under at the hands of African auxiliary troops outside Oviedo. His mother died a few months later, in the Zaragoza women’s prison.
Now, back in the country, the truth of José Díaz’s words was hitting him full force. He hardly even had time to mourn his parents’ deaths. Terms like war effort, revolution, committee order, and Party reorganization were replacing terms like mourning, sorrow, emotion, and love. Elías was convinced, after seeing the havoc that Asturias had been plunged into, that Gil-Robles and his crony government had to be stopped by any means necessary and the CEDA sent back to the catacombs. So he threw everything he had into work, meetings, and plotting, burying his feelings, shoveling more and more dirt on to cover the now-enormous hole inside him—although anyone who got close enough could see the loss in his stony, lifeless expression. In late 1935 and early 1936, encounters with Party figures like Dolores Ibárruri and the promising young Santiago Carrillo became more heated: There were an increasing number of rallies, strikes, and boycotts but also increasing street violence.
He saw his old childhood friend Ramón once, in Madrid, shortly before the 1936 elections. They embraced affectionately and had dinner at a secluded re
staurant in Aranjuez, far from prying eyes. Together they made a realistic—and thus quite negative—assessment of the current climate. Things could only get worse. Ramón had risen through the ranks of the CEDA, and Elías had become more entrenched in Communist agitation after the Asturias uprising, so they exchanged harsh words. For a moment it seemed as if the distance between them had become insurmountable. This was happening all over the country—neighbors, friends, and brothers hating one another—but somehow they managed to bring the situation under control.
“I’m really sorry about what happened to your parents.”
He was being sincere, and Elías knew it.
“But you’re on their side, Ramón.”
Would the two of them start ascribing personal responsibility to each other for everything that happened? Elías recalled what Lenin’s wife had said: It’s not the ideas that betray us but the individuals who carry them out. Were they being swept up in a current impossible to escape, like the one on Nazino?
Despite the precautions they’d taken, two days later Elías got a visit from Santiago Carrillo. He had a resolved, intellectual air and gave Elías a clear warning: No consorting with the enemy.
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