“I thought you’d come to see me at the end of the afternoon,” said Leandro.
Alicia staggered over to the bed and collapsed on it, exhausted. Her mentor turned and sighed, shaking his head. “Shall I prepare it for you?”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Is this some form of atonement for your sins, or do you enjoy suffering unnecessarily?” Leandro stood up and approached the bed. “Let me have a look.”
He leaned over her and felt her hip with a clinical coldness. “When did you have your last jab?”
“At lunchtime. Ten milligrams.”
“That not enough, for starters. You know that.”
“Perhaps it was twenty.”
Leandro muttered to himself. He walked over to the bathroom and went straight to the cabinet. There he found a metal case and returned to Alicia’s side. He sat on the edge of the bed, opened the case, and started to prepare the injection. “I don’t like it when you do that, Alicia. You know it.”
“It’s my life.”
“When you punish yourself this way, it’s also my life. Turn over.”
Alicia closed her eyes and turned on her side. Leandro lifted her dress up to her waist. He unfastened her harness and took it off. Alicia was moaning with pain, squeezing her eyes shut and breathing with difficulty.
“This hurts me more than it hurts you,” said Leandro. He grabbed her thigh and held her down on the bed. Alicia was shaking when he plunged the needle in the wound on her hip. She let out a muffled cry, and her whole body tensed up like a steel cable for a few seconds. Leandro pulled the needle out slowly and left the syringe on the bed. Slowly, he lessened the pressure on her leg and turned her body around until she was lying faceup. He pulled down her dress and gently placed her head on the pillow. Alicia’s forehead was bathed in sweat. He pulled out a handkerchief and dried it for her.
She looked at him, glassy-eyed. “What time is it?” she murmured.
Leandro stroked her cheek.
“It’s early. Rest now.”
16
Alicia woke up in the dark room to discover Leandro outlined against the armchair next to her bed. He held the Víctor Mataix book in his hands and was reading it. While she was asleep, he must have gone through her pockets, her handbag, and probably all the drawers in the room.
“Better?” he asked, without looking up from the book.
“Yes,” said Alicia.
Waking up was always accompanied by a strange lucidity and the feeling of frozen jelly sliding through her veins. Leandro had covered her with a blanket. She felt her body and realized she was still wearing her day clothes. She pulled herself up and leaned against the headboard. The pain was now just a weak, muffled throb buried in the cold. Leandro bent forward and handed her a glass.
She took a couple of sips. It didn’t taste of water. “What’s this?”
“Drink it.”
Alicia drank the liquid. Leandro closed the book and left it on the table.
“I’ve never really understood your literary tastes, Alicia.”
“I found it hidden inside the desk of Valls’s office.”
“And you think it might have some connection with our business?”
“For the moment I’m not ruling anything out.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Gil de Partera. How’s your new partner?”
“Vargas? He seems efficient.”
“Trustworthy?”
Alicia shrugged.
“Coming from someone who doesn’t trust her own shadow, I’m not sure whether to take your uncertainty as a sign that you’re converting to the faith in the regime.”
“Take it as you please.”
“Are we still at war?”
Alicia sighed and shook her head.
“This wasn’t a courtesy call, Alicia. I have things to do, and there are people at the Hotel Palace who’ve been waiting to have dinner with me for quite a while. What can you tell me?”
The young woman gave Leandro a brief summary of the day’s events and let him digest it in silence, as was his habit. He stood and walked over to the window. Alicia watched his still outline against the lights of Gran Vía. His fragile arms and legs, attached to a disproportionate torso, lent him the air of a spider hanging in its web. She didn’t interrupt his meditation. She’d learned that Leandro liked to take his time to scheme and conjecture, savoring every piece of information and working out how to extract the greatest possible damage from it.
“I suppose you didn’t tell Valls’s secretary that you’d found that book and were going to take it with you,” he pointed out at last.
“No. Only Vargas knows that I have it.”
“It would be best if things stopped there. Do you think you can convince him not to tell his superiors?”
“Yes. At least for a few days.”
Leandro sighed, slightly annoyed. He turned away from the window and returned unhurriedly to the armchair. He settled down, crossed his legs, and devoted a few moments to examining Alicia with forensic eyes. “I’d like Dr. Vallejo to see you.”
“We’ve already discussed this.”
“He’s the best specialist in the country.”
“No.”
“Let me make an appointment for you. Just a visit. You don’t need to commit to anything.”
“No.”
“If you’re going to continue speaking in monosyllables, then at least introduce a little variation.”
“OK.”
Leandro took the book from the table again and leafed through it, smiling to himself.
“You find it amusing?”
Leandro shook his head slowly. “No. In fact it makes my hair stand on end. I was just thinking that it seems to be tailor-made for you.” He ran his eyes over the pages, pausing here and there with a skeptical expression. Finally he returned the book to Alicia and gazed at her. He had a Jesuitical look, the sort that sniffs out sins before they are even formed in one’s mind and administers penitence with a mere blink.
“Your important dinner at the Palace must be getting cold,” said Alicia.
Leandro gave her his ecumenical assent. “Don’t get up. Rest. I’ve left ten one-hundred phials for you in the bathroom cabinet.”
Alicia pressed her lips angrily but kept silent. Leandro nodded and made his way to the door. Before leaving the room, he stopped and pointed his finger at her. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Alicia joined her hands as if in prayer and smiled.
17
Once free from Leandro’s presence, Alicia bolted the door, got under the shower, and abandoned herself to the steam and the needles of hot water for almost forty minutes. She didn’t bother to turn on the light, but stood in the faint glow that filtered through the bathroom window, letting the water rub the day off her. The Hispania boilers were probably buried in some part of hell, and the metallic rattle of water pipes behind the walls created a hypnotic music. When she thought her skin was about to peel off in shreds, she turned off the taps and stayed there a couple more minutes, listening to the drip of the shower and the murmur of the traffic on Gran Vía.
Later, wrapped in a towel and with a full glass of white wine for company, she lay on the bed with the dossier Gil de Partera had given them that morning and the folder of letters allegedly penned by Sebastián Salgado, or by the possibly deceased David Martín, addressed to Minister Valls.
She began with the dossier, comparing her findings so far with the official version from police headquarters. Like so many police reports, what mattered wasn’t what it included: the interesting part was what was left out. The report on the supposed attack against the minister in the Círculo de Bellas Artes formed a masterpiece in the genre of inconsistent and overblown conjecture. All it contained was an unverified refutation of Valls’s words, who argued that he’d seen somebody among the audience who intended to make an attempt on his life. The only colorful note was a reference to one of the alleged witnesses of the alleged plot in co
nnection with a presumed individual who had allegedly been seen behind the scenes wearing a sort of mask, or something that covered part of his face.
Alicia let out a sigh of boredom. “All we needed now was El Zorro,” she muttered to herself.
After a while, tired of flicking through documents that seemed whipped up to provide the dossier with a swift coat of varnish, she abandoned it and began to look through the letters.
She counted about a dozen messages, all written on sheets of yellowing paper peppered with erratic handwriting, the longest barely two short paragraphs. They had been written with a worn nib that made the ink flow irregularly, so that some lines were saturated and others hardly seemed to have scratched the page. The author’s writing rarely seemed to link one character with the next, giving the impression that the text was written out letter by letter. The subject matter was repetitive, insisting on the same points in every message: the phrases “the truth,” “the children of death,” and “the entrance to the labyrinth” appeared again and again.
Valls had been receiving the messages for years, but only in the end had something pushed him into taking action. “What?” whispered Alicia.
The answer was almost always in the past. That had been one of Leandro’s first lessons. Once, when they were leaving the funeral of one of the senior officers of the secret police in Barcelona, which Leandro had obliged Alicia to attend (as part of her education, he had stated), her mentor had pronounced those words. Leandro’s thesis was that after a particular point in a man’s life, his future is invariably in his past.
“Isn’t that obvious?” Alicia had said.
“You’d be surprised at how often one looks in the present or in the future for answers that are always in the past.”
Leandro had a penchant for didactic aphorisms. On that occasion Alicia thought he was talking about the deceased, or perhaps even about himself and the wave of darkness that seemed to have pulled him like a tide toward power, like so many celebrated individuals who had climbed up the gloomy architecture of the regime. The chosen, she’d ended up calling them. Those who always stayed afloat in the murky waters, like scum. A distinguished group of champions reborn in a cloak of decay, creeping through the streets of that barren land like a river of blood surging up from the sewers. Alicia realized she had borrowed that image from the book she’d found in Valls’s office: blood that surged up through the drains and was slowly flooding the streets. The labyrinth.
She dropped the letters on the floor and closed her eyes. The cold in her veins from that poison always opened a door to the dark back room of her mind. It was the price she paid for muting the pain. Leandro knew that. He knew that beneath the frozen mantle, where there was no pain or consciousness, her eyes were able to see through the dark, hear and feel what others couldn’t even imagine, hunt down the secrets others thought they’d buried in their wake. Leandro knew that every time Alicia sank into those black waters and returned with a trophy in her hands, she left behind part of her being and of her soul. And that she hated him for it. She hated him with the anger that can only be felt by one who knows her maker all too well.
She suddenly sat up and went to the bathroom. She opened the small cabinet behind the mirror and found the phials Leandro had left for her, perfectly lined up. Her prize. She grabbed them with both hands and threw them forcefully into the sink. The clear liquid drained through the broken glass and disappeared.
“Fucking bastard,” she murmured.
Shortly afterward the phone rang in the bedroom. For a few seconds, Alicia stared at her reflection in the mirror and let the phone ring. She was expecting the call. She went back to the room and picked up the receiver. She listened without saying anything.
“They’ve found Valls’s car,” said Leandro at the other end.
She kept silent. “In Barcelona,” she said at last.
“Yes,” Leandro confirmed.
“And not a sign of Valls.”
“Or of his bodyguard.”
Alicia sat on the bed, her eyes lost in the lights that bled on the window.
“Alicia? Are you there?”
“I’ll take the first train tomorrow morning. I believe it leaves Atocha at seven.”
She heard Leandro sigh and imagined him lying on his bed in the suite of the Gran Hotel Palace.
“I don’t know whether that’s a good idea, Alicia.”
“Would you rather leave it in the hands of the police?”
“You know that I worry about you being alone in Barcelona. It’s not good for you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Where will you stay?”
“Where do you think?”
“The apartment on Calle Aviñón . . .” Leandro sighed. “Why not in a good hotel?”
“Because that’s my home.”
“Your home is here.”
Alicia looked around the room, her prison for the last few years. Only Leandro could think this coffin could be a home. “Does Vargas know?”
“The news came from headquarters. If he doesn’t know, he’ll know early tomorrow morning.”
“Anything else?”
She heard Leandro breathing deeply.
“I want you to call me every day without fail.”
“All right.”
“Without fail.”
“I said I would. Good night.”
She was about to put the phone down when Leandro’s voice reached her through the receiver. She put it back to her ear.
“Alicia?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful.”
18
She had always known that one day she would return to Barcelona. The fact that she was going to do this during her last job for Leandro added a layer of irony that could not have escaped her mentor. She imagined him pacing around his suite, pensive, his eyes on the telephone, tempted to pick up the receiver and call her again, order her to stay in Madrid. Leandro didn’t like it when his puppets tried to cut their strings. More than one of them had attempted it, only to discover that this was not a profession for lovers of happy endings. But Alicia had been different. She was his favorite. She was his masterpiece.
She poured herself another glass of white wine and lay down to wait for the call. The temptation to disconnect the phone crossed her mind. The last time she’d done that, two of his stooges had turned up at her doorstep to escort her as far as the hallway, where Leandro was waiting for her—a Leandro she had never seen before, devoid of his calm expression, consumed by anxiety. On that occasion he had looked at her with a mixture of suspicion and eagerness, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether to hug her or order his men to beat her to a pulp with their rifle butts then and there. “Don’t ever do anything like that to me again,” he’d said. It was two years since that night.
She waited for Leandro’s call until late that evening, but it never came. His need to find Valls and please the upper echelons of the regime must be great, she thought, if he was letting her out of her cage. Convinced that neither of them would get any sleep that night, Alicia decided to take refuge in the only place where she knew Leandro had never been able to reach her—the pages of a book. She picked up the black volume she’d found hidden in Valls’s office and opened it, ready to enter the mind of Víctor Mataix.
Before she reached the end of the first paragraph, she’d already forgotten that what she was holding in her hands was a piece of evidence in the investigation. She let herself be lulled by the perfume of the words and was soon lost among them, succumbing to the torrent of images and rhythms that oozed from the story of Ariadna’s adventures and her descent into the depths of that enchanted Barcelona. Every paragraph, every sentence, seemed written in a musical key. The narrative drew her eyes through a cadence of timbres and colors that sketched a theater of shadows in her mind. She read without pause for two hours, relishing every sentence and dreading the moment she would reach the end. When, upon turning the last page, she came across the illustra
tion of a curtain crashing down on a stage and making the text evaporate into shadowy dust, Alicia closed the book over her chest and lay down in the dark, her gaze still lost in the adventures of Ariadna in her labyrinth.
Bewitched by the magic of that story, she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. She imagined Valls in his office, hiding the book behind a drawer and turning the key in its lock. Of all the things he could have hidden, he’d chosen that book before disappearing. Slowly, exhaustion began to drip over her body. Throwing off the towel, she slipped naked under the sheets. She lay on one side, curled up into a ball, her hands linked between her thighs. It occurred to her that this was probably the last night she would ever sleep in that room, the room that had been her cell for years. She lay there, waiting, listening to the murmurings and groans of the building that was already sensing her absence.
She got up shortly before dawn, with barely enough time to pack a few essentials and leave the rest behind as a donation for the invisible hotel guests. She stared at her little city of books piled up against the walls and smiled sadly. Maura would know what to do with her friends.
Day was just breaking when she walked across the lobby, with no intention of bidding farewell to the lost souls of the Hispania. She had almost reached the door when she heard Maura’s voice behind her.
“So it was true,” said the concierge. “You’re leaving.”
Alicia stopped and turned around. Maura was observing her, leaning on a mop that sported as much mileage as he did. He smiled so as not to cry, his eyes betraying immense sadness.
“I’m going home, Maura.”
The concierge nodded repeatedly. “You’re doing the right thing.”
“I’ve left my books upstairs. They’re for you.”
“I’ll look after them.”
“And the clothes. Do what you think best. Someone in the building might want them.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 18