FOR AN HOUR and a half Leandro reconstructed what they had been able to uncover.
“I’ve been trying to piece together the facts for some time. What I’m going to do is summarize what we know, or think we know. You’ll see that there are some gaps, and that we’re probably wrong on some points. Or on many. That’s where you come in. If you like, I’ll tell you what I think happened, and you correct me whenever I’m wrong. All right?”
Leandro had a soothing voice that invited one to surrender. Victoria wanted to close her eyes, be cocooned for a time in the warm embrace of that voice, framed by the velvety outline of words that acquired sense, no matter what their meaning was.
“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll try.”
The man smiled with such gratitude and warmth that he made her feel safe and protected against whatever lay in wait beyond the walls of that place. Little by little, unhurriedly, he told her the story she knew only too well. The account began when she was just a small girl and her father, Víctor Mataix, met a man called Miguel Ángel Ubach, a powerful banker whose wife – a regular reader of Mataix’s books – had persuaded him to hire Mataix to ghostwrite his autobiography in exchange for a substantial sum of money.
Victoria’s father, who was going through financial difficulties, accepted the assignment. After the war, the banker and his wife paid the Mataix family an unexpected visit in their home next to Carretera de las Aguas in Vallvidrera. Señora Ubach was a beauty queen straight out of a magazine, and quite a bit younger than her husband. She didn’t want to ruin her perfect figure by bringing a child into the world, but she liked children, or the idea of having them and letting her servants bring them up, almost as much as she liked pet cats and a well-mixed vodka martini. The Ubachs spent the day with the Mataix family. By then her parents had given her a sister, Sonia, who was still a baby. When they left, Señora Ubach kissed the girls goodbye and declared that they were adorable. A few days later a group of armed men returned to the Mataixes’ house in Vallvidrera. They arrested her father and took him to the prison in Montjuïc Castle, and they took Victoria away with her sister, leaving their mother behind, so badly wounded they presumed she was dead.
“Am I correct up to now?” asked Leandro.
Victoria nodded, drying her angry tears.
That very night those men separated them, and she never saw Sonia again. They told her that if she didn’t want her little sister to be killed, she must forget her parents, because they were a pair of criminals. And from then on, they said, her name would no longer be Ariadna Mataix but Victoria Ubach. They explained to her that her new parents were Miguel Ángel Ubach and his wife Federica, and that she was very lucky. She would live with them in the most beautiful house in all of Barcelona, a mansion called El Pinar. She would have servants at her disposal, and whatever she wished for would be hers. Ariadna was ten.
“From then on the story becomes confused,” warned Leandro.
They discovered, he explained, that Víctor Mataix had been shot in Montjuïc Castle, like so many others, on the orders of Mauricio Valls, the prison governor, although the official report said he had committed suicide. Leandro believed that Valls had sold Ariadna to the Ubachs in exchange for favours that would help him rise in the regime, together with a bundle of shares in a bank that had been recently set up. These shares had been expropriated from estates of hundreds of people who were imprisoned and in many cases executed shortly after the end of the war.
“Do you know what happened to your mother?”
Victoria nodded, pressing her lips together.
Leandro told her how, as far as they knew, the day after her husband and daughters had been kidnapped, her mother, Susana, managed to gather her strength and made the mistake of going to the police to report what had happened. She was immediately arrested and interned in a psychiatric hospital in Horta, where she was kept in solitary confinement and underwent electric shock treatments for five years, until they decided to abandon her in some deserted area on the outskirts of Barcelona, once they realized she couldn’t even remember her name.
“Or at least that’s what they believed.”
Leandro explained that Susana had survived on the streets of Barcelona by begging, sleeping rough, and eating food she stole from rubbish bins, hoping that one day she would be able to recover her daughters. That hope is what kept her alive. Years later, Susana found a newspaper amid the rubble in an alleyway of the Raval quarter, with a photograph of Mauricio Valls and his family. By then he was a very important man who had left his days as prison governor behind him. In the photograph Valls posed with a little girl, Mercedes.
“Mercedes was none other than your little sister, Sonia. Your mother recognized her because Sonia had been born with a mark she could never forget.”
“A mark in the shape of a star on the base of her neck,” Victoria heard herself saying.
Leandro smiled as he nodded. “Valls’s wife suffered from a chronic illness that prevented her from having children. Valls decided to keep your sister and bring her up as his own child. He called her Mercedes, after his late mother. Stealing what she could, Susana managed to put together enough money to take a train to Madrid. Once she was there, she spent months spying on the playgrounds of all the schools in Madrid, hoping to locate your sister. By then she had built herself a new identity. She lived in a squalid room in the Chueca area and at night worked as a seamstress in a workshop. During the day she searched the Madrid schools. And when she had almost given up hope, she found her. She saw her from a distance, and knew it was her daughter. She began to go there every morning. She would approach the playground railings and try to catch the girl’s attention. She managed to talk to her a couple of times. She didn’t want to frighten her. When she realized that Mercedes . . . that Sonia no longer remembered her, your mother was on the point of taking her own life. But she didn’t give up. She kept going there every morning, hoping to see her, even if it was just for a few seconds, or to speak to her if the child came over to the railings. One day she decided that she should tell her the truth. She was caught by Valls’s bodyguards as she stood by the railings, talking to your sister. They blew her brains out with a single shot in front of the girl. Would you like me to stop for a bit?”
Victoria shook her head.
Leandro continued to narrate what he knew about how Victoria had grown up in the golden prison of El Pinar. In time, Miguel Ángel Ubach was summoned by the Generalissimo to head a group of bankers and dignitaries who had financed his army, and put in charge of designing a new economic structure for the State. Ubach left Barcelona and moved with his family to a large house in Madrid, which Victoria always hated and from which she escaped, disappearing for a few months, until she was found in strange circumstances on a beach in San Feliu de Guíxols, a small town about a hundred kilometres from Barcelona.
“This is one of the big gaps in the story we have put together,” said Leandro. “Nobody knows where you were during those months, or who with. All we know is that one night in 1948, shortly after you returned to Madrid, the Ubach residence went up in flames. It was reduced to ashes, and both the banker and his wife Federica died in the blaze.”
Leandro searched her eyes, but Victoria kept silent.
“I do realize that it’s very difficult and painful to talk about this, but it’s important that we know what happened during those months when you disappeared.”
She pressed her lips together, and Leandro nodded patiently. “It doesn’t have to be today,” he said, and continued with his story.
Orphaned and heiress to a huge fortune, Victoria was left under the guardianship of a young lawyer named Ignacio Sanchís who had been named the executor of the Ubachs’ estate. Sanchís was a brilliant man whom Ubach had taken under his protection from a young age. An orphan, he had studied with a scholarship awarded by the Ubach Foundation. It was rumoured that in fact he was the illegitimate son of the banker, the fruit of an illicit relationship he’d had with a well-known actress of the time.
Little Victoria always had a special bond with Sanchís. They were both surrounded by all the luxuries and privileges the Ubach empire could buy, and yet they were alone in the world. Ignacio Sanchís often came to the family house, where he would conduct business matters with the banker in the garden. Victoria would spy on him from the attic windows. One day, after Sanchís came across her unexpectedly when she was swimming in the pool, he told her he’d never known his parents and had grown up in La Navata orphanage. From then on, whenever Sanchís came to the mansion, Victoria no longer hid and would come down to greet him.
Señora Ubach didn’t like Ignacio, and did not allow her daughter to speak to him. He was a nobody, she said. The matriarch staved off her boredom by meeting her young lovers in luxury hotels in Madrid, or sleeping it off in her bedroom on the third floor. She never became aware that her daughter and the young lawyer had become good friends, that they shared books and a complicity that nobody in the world, not even Señor Ubach, could have imagined.
“One day I told him we were the same,” Victoria confessed.
After the tragic death of the Ubachs in the fire that destroyed their house, Ignacio Sanchís became her legal guardian until she came of age, when he married her. There was a lot of gossip, of course. Some called it the greatest marriage for money of the century.
Victoria smiled bitterly when she heard those words.
“Ignacio Sanchís was never a husband to you, at least not in the way everyone thought he was,” said Leandro. “He was a good man who had discovered the truth and married you to protect you.”
“I loved him.”
“And he loved you. He gave his life for you.”
Victoria sank into a long silence.
“For many years you tried to take justice into your own hands with the help of Ignacio and of Valentín Morgado, who had been in prison with your father and whom your husband hired as a chauffeur for you. Together you forged a plan to lay a trap for Valls, and you managed to capture him. What you didn’t know is that someone was watching you. Someone who couldn’t allow the truth to be disclosed.”
“Is that why they killed Valls?”
Leandro nodded.
“Hendaya?” asked Victoria.
He shook his head. “Hendaya is just a foot soldier. We’re looking for the person pulling the strings behind him.”
“And who is that?”
“I think you know.”
Victoria shook her head slowly, confused.
“Maybe you’re not aware of it right now.”
“If I’d known, I would have ended up in the same cell as Valls.”
“Then perhaps we can find out together, with your help and our resources. You have already suffered enough and put yourself in enough danger. It’s our turn now. You and your sister were not the only ones. You know that. There are many, many more. Many don’t even suspect that their life is a lie, that everything was stolen from them . . .”
She nodded.
“How did you find out? How did you come to the conclusion that you and your sister hadn’t been the only ones?”
“We managed to get a list with document numbers. Numbers of birth and death certificates that had been forged by Valls.”
“Who did they belong to?” asked Leandro.
“To children of the prisoners who’d been locked up in Montjuïc Castle after the war, when he was the prison governor. All disappeared. Valls would first jail and murder the parents. Then he kept the children. He made out a death certificate at the same time as he forged a birth certificate with a new identity for the children, and then sold them to well-positioned families in the regime in exchange for favours, money and power. It was a perfect plan, because once the new parents had accepted the stolen children, they became accomplices, and had to keep their mouths shut forever.”
“Do you know how many of these cases there were?”
“No. Ignacio suspected there may have been hundreds.”
“We’re talking about a very complex operation. Valls couldn’t have done all that on his own.”
“Ignacio thought he must have had an accomplice, or various.”
“I agree. In fact, I daresay that Valls was possibly only a cog in the machine. He had the access, the opportunity and the greed. But I find it hard to believe that he could devise such a complex plot.”
“That’s what Ignacio said.”
“Somebody else, someone we still haven’t uncovered, is the brain of this whole operation.”
“The black hand,” said Victoria.
“Excuse me?”
She smiled weakly. “It’s from a story my father used to tell me when I was a child. The black hand. The evil that always stays in the shadows and pulls the strings . . .”
“You must help us find him, Ariadna.”
“So do you think that Hendaya is receiving orders from Valls’s partner?”
“That’s the most likely thing, yes.”
“That means it must be someone inside the government. Someone powerful.”
Leandro nodded. “That’s why it’s so important not to rush into anything and act very cautiously. If we want to capture him, we must first know the whole truth, with names, dates and details, and discover who knew about this matter and who is implicated. Only if we find out who was in the know will we be able to get to the bottom of all this.”
“What can I do?”
“As I said, help me reconstruct your story. I’m sure that if we join up all the pieces of the jigsaw, we’ll find the mastermind behind the plot. Until then, you won’t be safe. That’s why you must stay here and let us protect you. Will you?”
Victoria looked uncertain at first, but then she nodded.
Leandro leaned forward and took her hands in his. “I need you to know that I’m grateful for your bravery, for your courage. Without you, without your fight and your suffering, none of what we are trying to do would be possible.”
“I just want justice to be done. Nothing else. Never in my whole life have I thought that what I wanted was revenge. Revenge doesn’t exist. All that matters is the truth.”
Leandro kissed her on the forehead: a paternal kiss, protective and noble, which made her feel less alone, even if only for an instant.
“I think we’ve done enough for one day,” he said. “You need to rest. We have a difficult task ahead.”
“Are you leaving?” asked Victoria.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be close by. And I want you to know that you’re guarded and protected. I’m going to ask your permission to let us shut this door. It’s not to keep you locked in, but to stop anyone who is not allowed to enter from trying to get in. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yes.”
“If you need anything, all you have to do is press this bell, and someone will be with you in a matter of seconds. Whatever you may need.”
“I’d like to have something to read. Would it be possible to get hold of some of my father’s books?”
“Of course. I’ll have them sent up to you. Now you must try to rest.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep.”
“If you like, we can help you . . .”
“Sedate me again?”
“It’s just a help. It will make you feel better. But only if you want.”
“All right.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning. We’ll start to piece together everything that has happened, bit by bit.”
“How long will I have to stay here?”
“Not long. A few days. A week at most. Until we know who is behind all this. Until the culprit has been arrested, you won’t be safe anywhere else. Hendaya and his men are looking for you. We managed to rescue you from El Pinar, but that man isn’t going to give up. He never gives up.”
“How did it happen? I don’t remember.”
“You were dazed. Two of our men lost their lives to get you out of there.”
“And Valls?”
“It was too late. Don’t think about that now. Rest, Ariadna.”
“Ariadna,” she repeated. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” said Leandro on his way to the door.
As soon as she was left alone, she was gripped by a sense of unease and an emptiness she couldn’t quite understand. There wasn’t a single clock in the entire room. When she drew back the curtains, she saw that the windows were locked and covered on the outside with a translucent paper that let in the light but completely blocked the view.
She began to wander aimlessly around the room, struggling to stop herself from pressing that bell Leandro had left on the table in the lounge. At last, after exploring every corner of the suite, she returned to her bedroom, worn out. She smiled at herself.
“The truth,” she heard herself whisper.