The lights flickered for a moment, and Alicia turned around, startled. And then she saw it. It covered an entire wall, from floor to ceiling. She approached it slowly, and when she realized what she was looking at, she felt her knees weaken and let her arms drop.
The mosaic was made up of dozens, even hundreds, of photographs, newspaper clippings, and notes. It had been put together with extraordinary precision and the diligence of a silversmith. All the pictures, without exception, were of Alicia. She recognized snapshots from her first days in the unit, next to old photographs in which she was barely a child, dating from her years at the orphanage. The collection included dozens of snapshots taken from a distance, showing her walking along streets in Madrid or Barcelona, by the entrance to the Gran Hotel Palace, sitting in a café with a book, walking down the stairs of the National Library, shopping in the capital, even strolling by the Crystal Palace in Retiro Park. One of the photographs showed the door to her room in the Hispania.
She found newspaper clippings giving details of cases in which she’d been involved but which, naturally, never mentioned Alicia or the unit, crediting only the police or the Civil Guard. At the foot of the mosaic was a table arranged like an altar on which she recognized all kinds of objects related to her: menus from restaurants she remembered having visited, paper napkins on which she’d jotted something down, notes signed by her, a wineglass with a lipstick mark on the rim, a cigarette stub, the remains of her train ticket from Madrid to Barcelona . . .
In a glass bowl at one end of the table, exhibited like relics, were a few bits of underwear she’d been missing since the night when someone, or something, had come into her apartment while she was under the effects of her medication. A pair of stockings was neatly spread out on the table and held down with pins. Next to the stockings lay the Víctor Mataix book from the Labyrinth of the Spirits series that had been stolen from her home. Alicia suddenly felt a strong urge to run away from that nightmarish place.
She never saw the figure that had risen slowly from among the pile of dismembered bodies behind her, on the other side of the door, and was advancing toward her.
30
When she realized what had happened, it was already too late. She heard labored breathing behind her and turned around, but had no time to aim her revolver. A brutal impact shook her to the core. The stabbing pain took her breath away, and she fell to her knees. Only then was she able to see him clearly and understand why she hadn’t noticed him on her way in. A white mask covered his face. He was naked and carried an object that looked like some sort of industrial awl.
Alicia tried to shoot Rovira, but he skewered her hand with the metal spike. The revolver tumbled onto the floor. The man grabbed her by her neck and dragged her to the bed. He let her fall there and sat on her legs, holding them tight. He clutched her right hand, which he’d perforated with the awl, and leaned over to tie it to the metal bars of the bed with a piece of wire. As he did so, his mask slipped off and she saw his contorted face, almost touching hers. His eyes were glazed, and the skin on one side was peppered with the burns of a close-range gunshot. One of his ears was bleeding, and he smiled like a boy about to pull the wings off an insect, taking pleasure in its agony.
“Who are you?” asked Alicia.
Rovira observed her, enjoying the moment. “You think you’re so clever, and you still haven’t figured it out? I’m you. Everything you should have been. At first I admired you. But then I realized that you’re weak, that I have nothing left to learn from you. I’m better than you. I’m better than you could have ever been . . .”
Rovira had left the awl on the bed. Alicia reckoned that if she could distract him for a second she might perhaps be able to grab it with her left hand, which was free, and thrust in into his neck or his eyes.
“Don’t hurt me,” she pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you want . . .”
Rovira laughed. “My dear, what I want is precisely to hurt you. To hurt you a lot. I’ve earned it . . .”
Then he held her by her hair against the bed and licked her lips and her face. Alicia closed her eyes, groping around the blanket in search of the awl. Rovira’s hands ran down her torso and stopped at the old wound on her side. She had touched the awl’s handle when Rovira whispered in her ear: “Open your eyes, you whore. I want to see your face properly when you feel it.”
She opened her eyes, knowing what was coming and praying that she might lose consciousness before the first blow. Rovira straightened up, raised his arm, and banged his fist down on her wound with all his might. Alicia let out a deafening howl. Rovira, the room, the light, the cold she felt in her body—everything was forgotten. All that existed was the pain flashing through her bones like an electric current, making her forget who she was and where she was.
Rovira laughed to see her body tighten like a cable and her eyes roll back. He lifted her skirt far enough to reveal the scar that covered her hip like a black spiderweb, exploring her skin with the tips of his fingers. He leaned over to kiss her wound and then struck her again and again until he’d damaged his fist against her hip bones. Finally, when no more sound came out of Alicia’s throat, he stopped. Sinking into a well of agony and darkness, she’d gone into convulsions. Rovira recovered the awl and used its point to run over the web of dark capillaries visible under the pale skin of Alicia’s hip.
“Look at me,” he ordered. “I’m your substitute. I’ll be much better than you. From now on, I’ll be the favorite.”
Alicia looked at him defiantly.
Rovira winked at her. “That’s my Alicia,” he said.
He died smiling.
He didn’t get to see that Alicia was reaching for the revolver she’d kept in the left-hand pocket of her jacket. When he started to poke around in her wound with the awl, she had already placed the barrel under his chin.
“Clever girl,” he whispered.
A moment later, Rovira’s face was pulverized into a cloud of bone and blood. The second shot, at point-blank range, knocked him backward. The naked body fell onto its back at the foot of the old bed, a smoking hole in its chest, the hand still gripping the awl.
Alicia dropped the weapon and struggled until she freed her right hand from the bedstead. Adrenaline had spread a veil over the pain, but she knew it would be short-lived. Sooner or later, when it returned, she would pass out. She had to get out of that place as quickly as possible.
She managed to straighten up and sit on the bed. When she tried to stand up, she had to wait a couple of minutes; her legs wouldn’t hold her, and she was seized by a weakness she couldn’t quite comprehend. She felt cold. Very cold. At last she managed to get to her feet, almost shivering. She leaned against the wall. Her body and clothes were covered in Rovira’s blood. She couldn’t feel her right hand except for a dull throb. She examined the wound left by the awl. It didn’t look good.
Just then, the telephone next to the bed rang. Alicia suppressed a scream.
She let it ring for about a minute, staring at it as if it were a bomb about to explode at any moment. Finally she lifted the receiver and put it to her ear. She listened, holding her breath. A long silence followed on the line. Above the light hum of the long-distance connection, she could hear slow breathing.
“Are you there?” said the voice.
Alicia felt the receiver shaking in her hands. It was Leandro.
The phone slipped from her hand, and she staggered toward the door. As she walked past the sanctuary Rovira had created, she stopped. Anger gave her enough strength to go into the workshop, find one of the kerosene cans standing next to the generator, and pour the contents on the floor. A thick liquid oozed through the room, surrounding Rovira’s corpse, spreading a black mirror from which rose swirls of iridescent vapor. When she walked past the generator, she yanked off one of the cables, letting it fall on the floor.
As she made her way through the mannequins that hung from the ceiling toward the corridor that led to the exit, she could hear the crackling so
und behind her. When the blaze caught, a sudden gust of air shook the figures surrounding her. An amber glow followed her through the passageway as she advanced, swaying and lurching from one wall to the other to keep herself on her feet. She had never felt so cold.
She prayed to heaven or hell not to let her die in that tunnel, to let her reach the frame of light just visible in the distance. Her flight seemed endless, as if she were scaling the guts of a beast that had swallowed her, climbing back up to its jaws so as not to be devoured. The heat penetrating through the tunnel from the flames behind her barely thawed the icy embrace wrapping itself around her. She didn’t stop until she’d walked through the hallway and was out in the street. Feeling the rain caressing her skin, she breathed again. A figure was running toward her up the street.
She collapsed into Fernandito’s arms. The boy hugged her and smiled, but he was staring at her, terrified. She put her hand on her belly, on the place where she had felt that first blow. Warm blood ran through her fingers and dissolved in the rain. She no longer felt pain, only cold, an icy cold telling her softly to let go, to close her eyelids and abandon herself to eternal sleep, which promised peace and truth.
She looked into Fernandito’s eyes and smiled at him.
“Don’t let me die here,” she whispered.
31
The storm had swept the street of passersby and left the bookshop bereft of customers. Fermín decided to devote the day to assorted menial undertakings and a dash of low-level philosophizing. Taking no notice of the lightning flashes and the crashing rain, which seemed determined to knock down the shop window, he turned on the radio. Patiently, as if he were coaxing the lock of a safe, he turned the dial until he came across the sound of a big band that was launching into the first bars of “Siboney.” At the first roll of the timbale drums, Fermín began to sway to the Caribbean rhythm and went back to the repair and restoration work of a six-volume edition of The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue, with Daniel as his kitchen boy and helper.
“I used to kill this tune on the dance floor and sweep the chorus girls off their feet at the Tropicana when I was young and still had a good hip movement. What memories it brings. . . . If instead of good looks I’d had a talent for literature, I would have written The Mysteries of Havana,” he proclaimed.
“Eros won, and Parnassus lost,” Bea remarked.
Fermín walked over to her, keeping step with the music, his arms wide open, swinging his hips to the clave rhythm.
“Señora Bea, come, I’ll show you the basic steps of the son montuno. Your husband dances as if he were wearing cement clogs, and you haven’t been able to properly experience the frenzy of Afro-Cuban tempo. Let’s go . . .”
Bea ran to hide in the back room, where she hoped to finish squaring the accounts and keep her distance from Fermín’s bopping and crooning.
“Your wife can sometimes be as dull as the small print on a land-registry list,” Fermín said.
“You’re telling me,” replied Daniel.
“Sound travels here,” warned Bea’s voice from the back room.
This pleasant atmosphere was broken when they heard a car braking suddenly on the wet street. When they looked up, they saw a taxi stop in the pouring rain outside the Sempere & Sons shop window. There was a sudden flash of lightning, and for a split second the car looked like a carriage made of molten lead smoldering in the rain.
“Leave it to a taxi driver . . . ,” said Fermín.
The rest happened at the speed of disaster. A young boy soaked to the skin, face flattened by terror, came out of the taxi and when he saw the closed notice on the door started banging the glass with his fists. Fermín and Daniel swapped glances.
“And they say nobody wants to buy books anymore,” said Fermín.
Daniel walked over to the door and opened it. The boy, who looked as if he was on the verge of collapse, put his hand on his chest, took a deep breath, and asked, almost shouting, “Which of you is Fermín Romero de Torres?”
Fermín raised a hand. “That’s me, the one with the muscles.”
Fernandito rushed over to grab his arm, pulling at him. “I need you,” he begged.
“Look, kid, don’t take this the wrong way, but the most stunning of females have told me the same many a time, and I’ve known how to resist.”
“It’s Alicia,” Fernandito panted. “I think she’s dying . . .”
Fermín went pale. He looked at Daniel in alarm and, without saying a word, let Fernandito drag him to the street and get into the taxi, which sped away.
Bea, who had just poked her head around the back-room curtain and witnessed the scene, looked at Daniel in bewilderment.
“What was that?”
Her husband sighed despondently. “Bad news,” he murmured.
* * *
As soon as he landed inside the car, Fermín came up against the taxi driver’s eyes.
“Not you again,” said the driver. “Where are we going now?”
Fermín tried to size up the situation. It took him a few moments to realize that the figure with skin as pale as wax and a faraway look lying on the back seat of the taxi was Alicia. Fernandito was cradling her head in his hands, struggling to hold back his tears of panic.
“Just keep going,” Fermín ordered the taxi driver.
“Where to?”
“For now, just straight ahead. Step on it.”
Fermín searched Fernandito’s eyes.
“I didn’t know what to do,” stammered the boy. “She wouldn’t let me take her to a hospital or a doctor and . . .”
In a brief moment of lucidity, Alicia gazed at Fermín and smiled sweetly at him. “Fermín, always trying to save me.”
When he heard her shaky voice, Fermín’s stomach and all its neighboring entrails shrank. Since he’d eaten a whole bagful of dry almond biscuits for breakfast, it was triply painful. Alicia dangled between consciousness and the abyss, so Fermín decided to shake the young boy for information, since he seemed the most scared of all three by far. “You, what’s your name?”
“Fernandito.”
“Can you tell me what’s happened here?”
Fernandito began to sum up what had happened in the last twenty-four hours with so much rush and confusion of details that Fermín stopped him, deciding to establish practical priorities. He felt Alicia’s belly and examined her bloodstained fingers.
“Helmsman,” he ordered the taxi driver, “head for the Hospital del Mar. Fly!”
“You should have hailed a balloon. Look at the traffic.”
“Either we get there in the next ten minutes, or I’ll burn down this heap. You have my word.”
The taxi driver grunted and pressed the accelerator. He and Fermín exchanged scowling glances through the rearview mirror.
“Don’t quarrel, you two,” Fernandito scolded them. “We’re losing Señorita Alicia.”
“Holy shit,” swore the cabdriver, dodging the traffic on Vía Layetana on his way to the waterfront.
Fermín pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to Fernandito. “Hold the handkerchief out of the window,” he ordered him.
Fernandito nodded and did as he was told. Taking great care, Fermín lifted Alicia’s blouse and found the hole left by the awl in her belly. Blood was gushing out of it.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . .” He pressed the wound with his hand and checked the traffic. Despite his grumbling, the taxi driver was performing juggling tricks with cars, buses, and pedestrians at breakneck speed.
Fermín felt his breakfast swiftly rising up his throat. “If at all possible, the idea would be to get to the hospital alive. One person at death’s door is more than enough.”
“Ask the Three Kings for miracles. And if not, you’re welcome to take the wheel,” replied the driver. “How’s it going back there?”
“We could do better.”
Fermín stroked Alicia’s face and patted it gently, trying to revive her. She opened her eyes. Her corneas w
ere bursting with blood from the blows. “You mustn’t fall asleep now, Alicia. Make an effort to stay awake. Do it for me. If you like, I can crack dirty jokes or sing you some Frank Sinatra hits.”
Alicia gave him a dying smile. At least she could still hear.
“Picture the Generalissimo in his hunting outfit, with his little beret and his boots. That always gives me nightmares and won’t let me sleep.”
“I’m cold,” murmured Alicia weakly.
“We’re almost there . . .”
Fernandito was watching her in dismay. “It’s my fault. She kept asking me not to take her to any hospital, and she scared me,” he said. “She kept assuring me that they’d look for her there—”
“It’s to the hospital or to the graveyard,” Fermín interrupted.
Fernandito looked as if he’d been hit in the face. He was only a kid, Fermín remembered; he was probably more frightened than anyone else in the taxi. “Don’t worry, Fernando. You did what you had to do. In moments like these, anyone can get his underwear in a knot.”
Fernandito sighed, consumed by guilt. “If anything should happen to Señorita Alicia, I’ll die . . .”
She took his hand and pressed it feebly.
“What if that man finds her . . . Hendaya?” Fernandito whispered.
“There’s no fucking way anyone’s going to find her,” said Fermín. “I’ll make sure of that.”
With her eyes half-open, Alicia was trying to follow the conversation. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“To Can Solé. Their prawns with garlic resurrect the dead. Just the job, you’ll see.”
“Don’t take me to a hospital, Fermín . . .”
“Who said anything about hospitals? That’s where people die. Hospitals are statistically the most dangerous places in the world. Rest assured. I wouldn’t take a bunch of lice to a hospital.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 56