The doorman tried to protest and very politely requested that Alcázar come back and show him the police credentials he’d flashed too quickly.
“Give me the damn key or I’m going to come down on you like a ton of bricks,” Alcázar replied with affected severity, designed to overcome reservations.
The doorman was clearly daunted and handed over the spare apartment key.
Everything was silent, and the place gave off the impression that it always would be. Things said and done in those rooms, between those four walls, were invisible to strangers’ eyes, inaudible to their ears.
Gonzalo was a methodical man, some might say clinical: everything in its place, nothing superfluous. But the apartment’s orderliness seemed precarious, half done. There were very few personal effects—just a couple of books and photos—and the furniture looked out of place, as though awaiting more cozy environs. This could have been a criminal’s hideout, a safe house, a rarely used office—any one of a number of places used temporarily, for folks just passing through. There was unfinished painting, really just a few brushstrokes…was Gonzalo after a new life? Was he planning on moving in? Alone, or with Tania? It had been almost six months since Laura’s death, long enough for Alcázar to be able to see how similar Gonzalo was to his sister, despite their apparent differences.
It struck him that, in other circumstances, he would have gotten along well with Gonzalo, better than he had with Laura, whose character was so combative and rage fueled. And yet they were both Elías Gil’s kids, there was no doubt about it. Gonzalo might be more even-keeled, more balanced, like his mother, but beneath the surface you could see the Gil in him. The old Cyclops would have been proud of his offspring; he was just as hardheaded. If there was one thing Gonzalo hated, it was people trying to manipulate or trap him, and Alcázar and Agustín González had made the mistake of underestimating him.
Given what the ex-inspector had just discovered by watching the security tape yet again, that miscalculation could turn out to be quite costly. There was no doubt it was Luis who had taken the computer. Why? The answer was there, blinking on Gonzalo’s answering machine: He wanted Siaka. Gonzalo must have discovered Luis on the tape after hearing the message. And if Luis had stolen the tape from his office that very morning, almost right out from under Alcázar’s nose—which infuriated him—that meant he had the safe’s combination. How he’d gotten it seemed obvious: Gonzalo had given it to him, and unless Alcázar was mistaken, it hadn’t been voluntarily. They had an agreement and Alcázar was convinced that Gonzalo wouldn’t break it unless he was forced to: protection and immunity for Javier in exchange for Siaka, the computer, and forgetting about the Matryoshka.
But Luis was a new variable, and that changed the whole equation. His behavior was disconcerting. On the one hand, he’d stolen the laptop and kidnapped Siaka, thereby scotching the Matryoshka investigation; on the other, he seemed to have no qualms about sending the prosecutor files and telling Gonzalo that he had Laura’s witness in his clutches.
Gonzalo had been right: Laura hadn’t killed Zinoviev, and there was now proof of that. Gonzalo was so headstrong that Alcázar worried he might have tried to convince Luis to turn himself in. Picturing it almost made him laugh. The man lived in a world of his own, a complete idealist. He would have made appeals to Luis’s sense of loyalty, to Laura’s memory, tried to find any heartstrings he could tug.
But Luis’s son had been murdered, and no wheedling or smooth talking could counter that. Mr. Elegant was going to blow it all sky-high, but how exactly?
Alcázar could sit and wait. After all, events seemed to be playing out in his favor and there was no doubt that’s what Agustín would have recommended. Let them destroy each other, and all they’d need to do is come by with a dustpan to sweep up the mess. Who cared if Luis killed both Siaka and Gonzalo? In fact, that would serve their own interests as well as those of the Matryoshka. All they’d have to do is wait, and then in a few months send someone to quietly take care of Luis, after things had calmed down—a fatal accident that no one would be able to connect to the deaths of Siaka and Gonzalo.
So why was he picking up the phone and calling Anna Akhmatova to tell her they needed to talk?
“Thirty minutes, at the bookstore,” was her terse reply.
Alcázar stood there for a few seconds, phone in hand, shaking his head. He was thinking about Cecilia, the days he’d spent wiping her after she’d gone to the bathroom because she could no longer do it herself. Sometimes it amazes me, what a softie you are inside, she’d told him. Alcázar recalled his shit-covered hands, the stench of his wife’s guts slowly dissolving, the disgust he had to choke back each time he carried her to the toilet, the love he felt for her as he watched her struggle to move her corroding bowels. So many different men, inside the same one. He was like the dolls Laura liked so much. The thing was, you had to have patience to get to the last one. Alcázar thought of the Florida Keys on the travel brochure he always kept with him and smiled: The truth was, a humid seaside bothered his joints. And he’d never really liked Yanks anyway.
Anna Akhmatova listened to Alcázar’s account without batting an eye, a requiem playing in the background, the volume down low. She’d hung the Closed sign on the door before taking him to the back of the shop.
Alcázar had never been there before. The back was split into a living area and a storage space where boxes of books were piled up. Anna took a seat in a rocking chair with a lace shawl over the back, an embroidered cushion beneath her. The image of the mild-mannered old lady would have been entirely credible had it not been for the Davidoff she’d taken out and lit with a match, like a truck driver. The cigarette had a strong, sweetish smell.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Anna felt a tender sort of fondness for Alcázar. Thirty-four years ago, when it was still possible to believe she’d escaped Igor forever, the inspector had helped her. But over the years, he had called in that favor and then some. He was one of countless men whose excessive ambition ended up destroying their lives, whose high opinion of their own limitations—which they exhibited like battle scars—left them twisted. But beneath his outward cynicism and undisguised avarice, beneath his supposed lack of scruples lay the distant glimmer of the man he could have been. Today, the man before her was engaged in one last showdown between two irreconcilable sides of himself, and for some reason unfathomable to Anna, he’d chosen her as his battlefield.
“I think I know where Siaka is and who has Laura’s computer.”
She lifted her chin and eyed him haughtily. “Then you know what you have to do.”
Alcázar nodded, not really listening, still wrestling with his own thoughts. “It’s not that easy. I have a feeling Elías’s son found out first. The idiot tried to act on his own and I’m pretty sure he’s with the kid.”
“Well, then, you can take care of him at the same time,” Anna replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“What about your daughter? Don’t you care about her feelings for him?”
Anna smoothed the sleeve of her crimson blouse. A near-invisible thread hung from one of the buttons on the cuff. She quickly circled it around her pinkie and snapped it off.
“My daughter’s feelings are none of your business. You should worry about your own position. If that kid ends up testifying in court, you and Agustín González are the two with the most skin to lose in this game, the ones who most benefit by his disappearance.”
Alcázar walked over to a shelf and absently stroked the spine of a book.
“How old is he, Anna? Eighty? Ninety?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s him, isn’t it? Igor still controls your destiny. You’re afraid of him, you loathe him, and yet you’ve turned out just like him. He decides who lives and who dies. He was the one who decided to kidnap Roberto, who ordered his execution and wanted his
body thrown in the same lake where it all went down in 1967. He took revenge on Laura, and now it’s Gonzalo’s turn. I suppose next it will be his wife and kids. In fact, the whole ACASA project is just a form of vengeance when it comes down to it, a way of taking from Elías Gil the only thing he had left—his old house and empty grave—burying it beneath newly laid ground on which Igor Stern will take his last triumphant march and spit on the ghost of Elías, who is actually the one who won. Igor’s still alive, isn’t he? He’s the Matryoshka.”
“Watch what you say, Alcázar.”
But the ex-inspector refused to hold back. He’d spent too long figuring it out.
“You used me that night, but I was too young and big-headed to realize. When I found you at the lake, shirt soaked in Elías’s blood, I didn’t understand that the both of you were caught in the same quandary. You and Elías shared a credo: Rules don’t matter, right and wrong don’t matter, truth and lies don’t matter, morality doesn’t matter—they’re just dogmas to be overcome in the search for some sort of peace. You knew from the start that he was a double agent, that he was collaborating with my father. And that Igor Stern was still alive because my father hadn’t kept his side of the bargain, which meant Elías had betrayed his comrades for nothing. You went to the lake to tell him, Igor Stern used you to confront Elías with the terrible truth. You were there to turn him in, take him down, destroy the myth of the hero once and for all. Stern wanted to watch him crumble. But you had no idea the effect your revelation would have.
“I always suspected that there was something between Gil and my father that I didn’t know about, a friendship I never understood, because despite how risky it was for him to be friends with a Communist, he always maintained their friendship. I never found out why my father protected him. Maybe it’s just that friendship means more than allegiance—but that would be too poetic, and my father was never one for poetry.
“You couldn’t have guessed that thirty-four years later, your words would echo in your daughter’s ears, that the shock waves would affect us all. The shrewdest man never imposes his will; he makes others believe that they’re acting of their own volition. The most loyal slave is the one who feels free. I’ve thought about it a lot and I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner: Igor is behind all of this, controlling us like puppets, making us believe we’re in control of our decisions. It’s been so many years that it’s hard to believe he’s still fighting Elías, and in his war we’re all just pawns, expendable chess pieces.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“There’s not a single person he respects…except you. You’re living proof of his victory. But now you’re afraid of him, too. Not for your sake but for Tania’s. He never loved her, he feels she doesn’t belong. And it’s through her that he controls you, isn’t it? The sword of Damocles hanging over her head—that’s what makes you his puppet. You know it’s true, you know he’d take her away from you without giving it a thought if that could hurt the Gil family.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Anna said once again.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, Anna. And it’s absurd—old rancor, played out by old men and women like you, Esperanza, me, Velichko…and Igor Stern. Our time is over, but we refuse to let go of the hatred, we hold on to it like a life preserver because without it we’d drown, even though staying afloat means drowning those whose only crime was to inherit our venom.”
He sat close to Anna and stroked her cheek.
“It’s time to weigh anchor, Anna. You need to speak to him. This has got to end.”
Anna gazed at Alcázar, an unhinged gleam in her eye.
“You have no idea what you’re asking. Honestly, you don’t have a clue.”
27
BARCELONA, JUNE 1967
A summer storm rolled through the valley like a ship with a black flag, searching for a place to discharge its fury. The first drops came down like buckshot on the jetty by the lake, and although the boy kept looking up in alarm at the darkening sky, his father made no move nor did he divert his attention from the fishing rod.
“Concentrate on those things you can control and forget about the rest,” he said to his son, elbowing the boy lightly to keep him from letting the line go slack.
The boy tried to remember the sentence so that he could decipher it later, but like almost everything, in time he’d forget the words and all that would be left was the vague sense that his father often tried to tell him important things while they were fishing.
By the time Elías Gil decided that it was pointless to keep standing there in the hopes that a fish might bite, father and son were soaked to the bone and the storm was lashing down on the valley with rage, making it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Unfazed, Elías gathered up their tackle and the pair headed home, letting the rain soak them through. Gonzalo looked up from time to time at his father’s dripping face, staring straight ahead, brow slightly furrowed, raindrops falling from the tip of his smashed nose onto the front of his unbuttoned shirt. Now, that’s a real man, Gonzalo had heard a woman in town say after she passed one day, which made him wonder if the others were not. But to Gonzalo, Elías seemed less like a man and more like a one-eyed giant, the Cyclops Ulysses fought in the illustrated books his teacher showed them at school while talking about a place called Ithaca.
Despite the storm and the fact that their fishing expedition had been a failure, the boy was relieved. He could feel, in the way his father held his hand, that Elías was in a good mood today. Strength flowed from his hand protectively, not threateningly. Gonzalo crossed his fingers that it would last.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Elías asked without slowing his pace or looking down.
Gonzalo looked away, embarrassed. He didn’t know what way he was looking at his father and wondered if it was the wrong one. He knew that sometimes his heart felt warm, like it was going to explode, and other times it felt cold and shrank in fear. On this morning, as the storm hammered the birch trees and the trail turned into a muddy river, his heart felt warm. It didn’t happen often, but when it did it was the most extraordinary feeling ever.
“Are you scared about what happened last night?”
Ears sticking out, hair plastered to his brow, Gonzalo shook his head. He didn’t know if he was still afraid or not, but he hoped Laura wouldn’t hide him in the well again while there was so much shouting and the sound of things being broken in the shed. And he hoped he wouldn’t wet the bed again, too. Suddenly, Elías stopped and sighed deeply. Rain bounced off his dark eye patch and Gonzalo pictured water penetrating the cloth, filling his father’s eye socket and running out. Then it would be like his father was crying, even though he was really only overflowing.
“You didn’t see what you saw; you didn’t hear what you heard. You have to forget some things quickly so there’s room to remember others. Do you understand?”
Gonzalo said yes, although of course he had no idea what his father was talking about. He’d add this to the other sentence and think about them both later, before he forgot.
Elías glanced skeptically at his son and then let out a quick flash of laughter, like lightning.
“I can’t fill your little head with these things yet. I’m a fool.”
The only thing Gonzalo remembered from the previous night was that he’d sobbed, in the darkness of the well, and felt terribly alone and panicked, thinking his sister might forget to come for him, that he’d never see her appear at the top of the shaft, never feel her arms pull him up as she had on other occasions.
But Laura always came in the end. His loved his big sister more than anything, more than his favorite toys, more than his father, and much more than his mother. More than swimming naked in the lake every morning, and more than making snow angels in the winter. Maybe the only thing that came close to his love for Laura was the joy that flow
ed through him some mornings when he opened his eyes in fear, felt the sheets, and realized that he had not wet the bed.
She was protecting him, although Gonzalo didn’t exactly understand from what. But when the shouting began, and his father began moving quickly and jerkily, or started feverishly pounding on his typewriter in the shed, she would come and carry him to the well, kiss him on the lips, and whisper soothing words, promising that she’d come back for him.
That morning, Laura hadn’t come downstairs. She stayed in her room until lunchtime, and when Gonzalo’s mother told him to go up and get her, he found her on the floor in the narrow gap between the bed and the window, curled into a ball. The noonday sun flooded one side of her face; the other, hidden by her tangled hair, was in darkness.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she ordered, and he wondered anxiously why everyone criticized his way of looking and what was wrong with trying to see.
“You have a bump on your cheek. And scratches on your neck.”
Laura instinctively hid her face. She was thirteen years old but sometimes seemed much older, as old as their mother—at least that’s what Gonzalo thought. Especially when she touched her hair nervously or avoided his eyes.
“I went hunting for blackberries and I fell.”
On days like this, Gonzalo felt as though his sister was a completely different person, someone he didn’t know, and everyone behaved differently. His mother was especially nice to Laura, but nice in the way she was when one of their father’s friends came to visit and she offered coffee and cakes, and Laura was almost rude in response. Under normal circumstances that would have gotten her in trouble with their father, but he didn’t even look at her, and in fact seemed to be trying to avoid her.
And something told him that these were scenes he should erase from his memory.
The good thing about storms was the calm that followed. That’s what Vasili Velichko was thinking as he got out of the car and observed the green mountains and the lake in the distance, reflecting the cloudless sky. The earth’s gentle, quiet dripping was like the slow thaw that always came to Siberia, simply arriving one morning as the icicles hanging from the ceiling of the barracks began to melt, wetting their wooden cots. The unrivaled feeling of having survived one more winter in the gulag.
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