At a signal from Hendaya, the two police officers left the kitchen. They returned shortly afterward, bringing in the chauffeur Fernandito had seen that morning, picking up the banker’s wife. He was handcuffed.
Hendaya nodded, and the two men forced the man to lie down on a wooden table in the middle of the kitchen. Then they tied his hands and feet to the four table legs. Meanwhile, Hendaya removed his jacket and folded it neatly over the chair. He went up to the table, leaned over the driver, and pulled off the mask that covered half his face. Hidden under it was a terrible wound that had disfigured the man’s face from his chin to his forehead; part of the jaw and his cheekbone were missing.
Once the chauffeur had been immobilized, the two officers brought the chair on which the banker’s wife was sitting close to the table. One of them held the woman’s head with his hands, so that she could not look away. Fernandito felt a wave of nausea, and tasted bile in his mouth.
Hendaya knelt down next to the banker’s wife and whispered something in her ear. She didn’t even open her mouth: her face was frozen in anger. The policeman stood up. He stretched an open hand toward one of the officers, who handed him a gun. Then he inserted a bullet in the chamber and placed the gun’s barrel just above the driver’s right knee. For a moment he glanced at the woman, expectantly. Finally he shrugged again.
The roar of the gunshot and the driver’s screams pierced the windowpanes and stone walls. A fine mist of blood and pulverized bone spattered the woman’s face. She began to shout. The driver’s body was convulsing as if an electric current was running through him. Hendaya walked around the table, placed another bullet in the chamber, and pressed the barrel against the driver’s other kneecap. A pool of blood and urine spread over the table, dripping onto the floor. For a second, Hendaya looked at the woman. Fernandito closed his eyes and braced himself for the second shot. When he heard the yells, the nausea got worse, and he doubled over. Vomit rose up his throat and spilled over his chest.
He was trembling when the third shot rang out. The chauffeur no longer screamed. The woman in the chair was stammering, her face covered with tears and blood. Hendaya knelt down next to her once more, listening to her while he stroked her face and nodded. When he seemed to have heard what he wanted, he got up and, with barely one last look at him, shot the driver in the head. He returned the gun to the officer and walked over to a corner, where he washed his hands in a sink. Then he slipped on his jacket and his coat.
Fernandito suppressed his retching and moved away from the window, sliding down toward the bushes. He tried to find the path back along the hill to the tree he’d used to jump over the wall. He was perspiring like never before, a cold sweat that stung his skin. His hands and legs shook as he climbed up the wall. When he jumped over to the other side, he fell flat on his face and threw up again. At last, feeling there was nothing left inside him, he staggered down the road. As he passed the gate through which he’d seen Hendaya enter, he heard voices drawing nearer. He hurried on and ran to the little square.
* * *
A tram waited at the stop, an oasis of light in the darkness. There were no passengers on board, only the conductor and the driver, who were chatting and sharing a Thermos flask of coffee to keep away the cold. Fernandito got in, ignoring the conductor’s look.
“Young man?”
Fernandito fumbled around in his jacket pocket and handed over some coins.
The conductor gave him his ticket. “You’re not going to throw up here, are you?”
The boy shook his head. He sat down in the front, by a window, and closed his eyes, trying to take a deep breath and think about his Vespa waiting for him at the foot of the avenue. He could hear a voice talking to the conductor, and the tram swayed gently as a second passenger got in. Fernandito heard footsteps approaching. He clenched his teeth. Then he felt the touch. A hand resting on his knee. He opened his eyes.
Hendaya was gazing at him with a friendly smile. “Are you feeling all right?”
Fernandito froze. Trying not to look at the red marks dotted over Hendaya’s shirt collar, he nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’ve had too much to drink.”
Hendaya gave him a sympathetic smile. The tram began its descent. “A bit of bicarbonate of soda with the juice of half a lemon. When I was young, that was my secret. And then to sleep.”
“Thanks,” said Fernandito. “I’ll do that as soon as I get home.”
The tram was sliding down at a snail’s pace, caressing the hook-shaped curve that crowned the avenue. Hendaya leaned back in his seat opposite Fernandito and smiled at him. “Do you live far?”
The boy shook his head. “No. Twenty minutes on the metro.”
Hendaya felt his coat and pulled out what looked like a small paper envelope from an inside pocket. “A eucalyptus sweet?”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
“Go on, take one,” Hendaya encouraged him. “It will do you good.”
Fernandito accepted a sweet and began to peel off the wrapper with trembling fingers.
“What’s your name?”
“Alberto. Alberto García.” Fernandito popped the sweet in his mouth. His mouth was dry, and it stuck on his tongue. He forced a smile of satisfaction.
“How’s that?” asked Hendaya.
“Very good, thank you so much. It’s true, it really helps.”
“I told you it would. Tell me, Alberto García. Can I see your ID?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your ID card.”
Fernandito gulped the saliva he didn’t have and started searching his pockets. “I don’t know. . . . I think I must have left it at home.”
“You know you can’t go out without ID, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. My father is always reminding me. I’m a bit of a disaster.”
“Don’t worry. I understand, but don’t let that happen again. I’m telling you for your own good.”
“It won’t happen again.”
The tram was now heading down the last stretch toward the final stop. Fernandito glimpsed the dome of the Hotel La Rotonda and a white point caught by the tram’s headlights. The Vespa.
“Tell me, Alberto. What were you doing here at this time of night?”
“I went to see my uncle. The poor man is very ill. The doctors say he won’t live long.”
“I’m very sorry.” Hendaya pulled out one of his cigarettes. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Fernandito shook his head, offering his best smile. Hendaya lit the cigarette. The tobacco embers tinted his pupils the color of copper.
The boy felt those eyes digging into his mind like needles. Say something.
“What about you?” he suddenly asked. “What are you doing around here this time of night?”
Hendaya let the smoke filter through his lips. He had the smile of a jackal.
“Work,” he said.
They both fell silent during the last few meters of the journey. When the tram stopped, Fernandito stood up and, after saying a courteous good-bye to Hendaya, made his way to the back. He got off the tram and walked at a leisurely pace toward the Vespa, then knelt down to open the padlock. Standing on the step of the tram, Hendaya watched him coldly.
“I thought you were going to take the metro home,” he said.
“Well, I meant it was nearby. A few stops away.”
Fernandito put his helmet on, as Alicia had recommended, and fastened the strap. Slowly, he told himself. He lowered the Vespa off the stand with a gentle push, and moved it along a meter or so to the end of the pavement. Hendaya’s shadow loomed in front of him, and Fernandito felt the policeman’s hand on his shoulder. He turned around.
Hendaya was smiling at him paternally. “Come on. Get off and hand me the keys.”
He barely noticed that he was nodding and handing the policeman the motorbike’s keys with a tremulous hand.
“I think you’d better come with me to the station, Alberto.”
9
Grandfather Sempere lived in a small apartment just above the bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. For as far back as the family could remember, the Semperes had always lived in that building. Daniel had been born there, and grew up in the apartment. When he married Bea, he moved only a few floors up, to the attic flat. Perhaps one day Julián would also settle in the same block. The Semperes traveled through books, not maps.
Old Sempere’s apartment was a modest-looking home, haunted by memories. Like so many other homes in the old city, it exuded a vaguely depressing atmosphere, insistent on preserving that nineteenth-century-style furniture to protect the innocents from the dreams of the present.
Gazing at the scene, with Isabella Gispert’s words still fresh in her mind, Alicia couldn’t help feeling her presence in that room. She saw Isabella stepping on the same tiles, sharing the bed with Señor Sempere in the tiny bedroom she’d noticed as she walked down the corridor. Alicia had stopped for a moment as she passed the half-open door, imagined Isabella giving birth to Daniel in that very bed and dying in it, poisoned, barely four years later.
“Please, go in, Alicia, and I’ll introduce you to the rest,” Bea urged her as she closed the bedroom door behind her.
Joining two tables together—which filled the dining room from one end to the other and even part of the corridor—Bea had achieved the miracle of seating the eleven guests invited to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday. Daniel was still downstairs, closing the bookshop, while his father, Julián, and Bea had accompanied Alicia up the stairs. Bernarda, Fermín’s wife, was already waiting there. She had set the table and was giving the last touches to a stew that sent out a heavenly aroma.
“Bernarda, come, let me introduce you to Señorita Alicia Gris.”
Bernarda wiped her hands on her apron and folded her arms around her.
“Do you know when Fermín is coming?” Bea asked her.
“Oh, Señora Bea, I’m up to my back teeth with that scoundrel’s tale about the bubbly wine he says is full of pee. Forgive me, Señorita Alicia, but my husband is as pigheaded as a fighting bull and doesn’t stop talking nonsense. You must pay no attention to him.”
“If he takes much longer, I can see us toasting with tap water,” said Bea.
“No, you won’t,” boomed a theatrical voice from the dining-room doorway.
The owner of that resonant instrument turned out to be a family friend called Don Anacleto, who lived in the same block, a secondary school teacher and, according to Bea, a man of verse in his free time. Don Anacleto proceeded to kiss Alicia’s hand with a formality that would have looked outdated at Kaiser Wilhelm’s wedding. “At your service, beautiful stranger.”
“Don Anacleto, don’t bother our visitors,” Bea interrupted him. “Did you say you’d brought something to drink?”
Don Anacleto showed her two bottles wrapped in brown paper. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he said. “Being privy to the controversy arisen between Fermín and that grocer of notorious Fascist sympathies, I decided to come armed with a couple of bottles of sweet moonshine passing for aniseed from the bar across the street, in order to solve any temporary shortage of bubbly spirits.”
“It’s not Christian to toast with aniseed,” said Bernarda. “Much less moonshine.”
Don Anacleto, who couldn’t keep his eyes off Alicia, smiled with a worldly-wise air, to imply that such considerations only worried provincial people.
“So it will be a pagan toast, under Venus’s influence,” the teacher argued, giving Alicia a wink. “And tell me, would you, damsel of such remarkable presence, do me the honor of sitting next to me?”
Bea pushed the teacher to the other end of the room. “Don Anacleto,” she warned him, “move along and don’t overwhelm Alicia with your windy talk. You’re sitting there at the junior end of the table until you prove you can join the adults.”
Don Anacleto shrugged and went over to express his best wishes to the birthday man while two more guests entered the room. One of them was a fine-looking man in a suit, trim and dapper as a model, who introduced himself as Don Federico Flaviá, the neighborhood watchmaker, and displayed exceedingly polished manners.
“I adore your shoes,” he told her. “You must tell me where you got them.”
“Calzados Summun, on Paseo de Gracia,” Alicia replied.
“Of course. They couldn’t come from anywhere else. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wish my friend Sempere a happy birthday.”
With Don Federico came a cheery-looking young girl called Merceditas who was clearly and quite naively smitten with the elegant watchmaker. When she was introduced to Alicia, the girl looked her up and down, assessing her with alarm. After praising Alicia’s good looks, elegance, and style, she ran off to Don Federico’s side, to keep him as far away from her as was humanly possible in that limited space. If the dining room already looked crowded, when Daniel came through the door and had to slip in among the guests, any moving about began to look precarious. The last person to arrive was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty and radiated the shining spirit and easy beauty of the very young.
“This is Sofía, Daniel’s cousin,” Bea explained.
“Piacere, signorina,” Sofía said.
“In Spanish, Sofía,” Bea corrected her, explaining that the girl came from Naples and was living with her uncle while she studied at Barcelona University.
“Sofía is a niece of Daniel’s mother, who died years ago,” murmured Bea, who obviously didn’t wish to mention Isabella’s name.
It was painful for Alicia to see Granddad Sempere’s devotion and sadness as he hugged her. It didn’t take her long to find a framed photograph in the display cabinet, in which she recognized Isabella in her wedding dress, next to a Señor Sempere looking centuries younger. Sofía was the spitting image of Isabella. Out of the corner of her eye, Alicia saw Sempere gazing at her so adoringly and with such sadness that she had to look away.
Bea, who had noticed Alicia making the connection when she saw the wedding photograph, muttered something under her breath, then said to Alicia, “She doesn’t do him any good. She’s a lovely girl, but I can’t wait for her to go back to Naples.”
Alicia just nodded in response.
“Why don’t you start sitting down?” ordered Bernarda from the kitchen. “Sofía, darling, come over and give me a hand. I need a bit of young blood here.”
“Daniel, what about the cake?” asked Bea.
Daniel huffed and rolled his eyes. “I forgot . . . I’ll go down right now.”
Looking sideways at Don Anacleto, Alicia noticed that he was trying hard to creep toward her end of the dining room. She instantly hit on a plan. When Daniel walked past her on his way to the door, she followed him.
“I’ll come with you. The cake’s on me.”
“But—”
“I insist.”
A moment later Bea was left staring at them, frowning, as they disappeared through the door.
“Everything all right?” asked Bernarda next to her.
“Yes, of course . . .”
“I’m sure she’s a saint,” whispered Bernarda, “but I don’t want her sitting next to my Fermín. And if you don’t mind my saying so, neither do I want to see her next to Danielito, bless him.”
“Don’t be silly, Bernarda. We’ve got to seat her somewhere.”
“Better be safe than sorry, is all I’m saying.”
* * *
They walked in silence down the stairs. Daniel led the way. When he reached the ground floor, he stepped ahead and held the front door open for Alicia.
“The cake shop is right here, near the corner,” he said, as if it weren’t obvious; the shop’s neon sign was clearly visible, just a few steps away.
Inside the shop, the woman in charge raised her hands to the heavens with relief. “Thank goodness. I thought you weren’t coming, and we’d have to eat the cake ourselves . . .” Her voice trailed off as she became aware of Alicia. “H
ow can I help you, miss?”
“We’re together, thanks,” said Alicia.
The shop owner’s eyebrows catapulted halfway up her forehead. Her look, brimming with mischief, was mirrored on the faces of her two assistants, who had peeped over the counter for the occasion.
“Look at Danielito,” murmured one of them in a flattering tone. “And there we were, thinking he was born yesterday.”
“Shut your trap, Gloria, and bring out Señor Sempere’s cake,” the boss cut in, letting her underlings know that even the use of slander had to observe proper seniority in her establishment.
The other assistant, a catlike creature with a chubby figure—no doubt the result of eating too many leftover sponge fingers and custard tarts—watched Daniel with delight, enjoying his embarrassment.
“Felisa, have you nothing better to do?” the boss asked her.
“No.”
By then Daniel’s blush had turned the color of a ripe raspberry, and he couldn’t wait to get out of there, with or without the cake. The two confectioners didn’t stop shooting glances at Alicia and Daniel—sizzling glances that could have fried doughnuts in midair. At last Gloria appeared with the cake, a prize-entry exhibit, which the confectionary trinity proceeded to protect with cardboard arches before carefully placing it in a large pink box.
“Cream, strawberry, and lots of chocolate,” said the cake maker. “I’ve put the candles in the box.”
“My father loves chocolate,” Daniel told Alicia, as if it needed an explanation.
“Mind the chocolate, Daniel, it can make you blush,” said Gloria, still poking fun at him.
“And get you all excited,” Felisa finished off.
“How much is that?” Alicia stepped forward and placed a twenty-five-peseta note on the counter.
“And on top of it, she’s paying . . . ,” murmured Gloria.
The manageress dawdled over the counting of the change, giving it to Alicia a coin at a time. Daniel picked up the box and walked over to the door.
“Say hello to Bea,” was Gloria’s parting shot.
The cake-makers’ giggles followed them as they stepped out into the street, their eyes glued to them like soft fruit on an Easter cake.
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 44