THE PACKARD CIRCLED Plaza de Neptuno under the deluge, then turned up Carrera de San Jerónimo towards the white, French-style silhouette of the Gran Hotel Palace. They stopped in front of the main entrance, and when the doorman came over to open the passenger door, holding a large umbrella, the two secret-police officers turned their heads and gave Alicia a look that was somewhere between a threat and a plea.
“Can we leave you here without you making a scene, or must we drag you in so you don’t give us the slip again?”
“Don’t worry; I won’t show you up.”
“Do we have your word?”
Alicia nodded. Getting in and out of a car on a bad day was never easy, but she didn’t want that pair to see her looking even more crushed than she actually was: as she stood up, she concealed the piercing pain in her hip with a smile. The doorman walked with her to the entrance, protecting her against the rain with the umbrella; a battalion of concierges and valets seemed to be waiting for her, ready to escort her through the hall to her appointment. When she noticed the two flights of stairs rising from the lobby to the grand dining hall, she knew she should have taken the walking stick. She pulled out a pillbox from her handbag and swallowed a pill. Before beginning the ascent, she breathed in deeply.
A couple of minutes and dozens of steps later, she stopped to catch her breath outside the doors to the dining hall. The concierge who had accompanied her noticed the film of perspiration on her forehead. Alicia smiled reluctantly. “From here on, I think I can manage all by myself, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. As you please, miss.”
The concierge left discreetly, but Alicia didn’t need to look back to know that he was still watching her and would not take his eyes off her until she’d entered the dining hall. She dried her forehead with a handkerchief and studied the scene.
Barely a whisper of voices and the tinkling of a teaspoon slowly turning in a china cup. The Palace dining hall opened up before her, possessed, it seemed, by dancing flashes that dripped down from the large dome beneath the hammering rain. She had always thought the structure resembled a huge glass willow tree that hung like a canopy of rose windows taken from a hundred cathedrals and put together in remembrance of the Belle Époque. Nobody could accuse Leandro of having bad taste.
Under that bubble of multicoloured glass, only one table was taken among a large number of empty ones. Two figures were being watched diligently by half a dozen waiters, who maintained the exact distance from the table that was too far to overhear their conversation but close enough to read their gestures. After all, the Palace, unlike her temporary address, the Hispania, was a first-class establishment. A creature of bourgeois habits, Leandro lived and worked there. Literally. He had occupied suite 814 for years and liked to carry out his business in that dining hall, which, as Alicia suspected, allowed him to believe that he lived in Proust’s Paris and not in Franco’s Spain.
She trained her eyes on the two diners. Leandro Montalvo, sitting, as usual, facing the entrance. He was a man of average height, with the soft and rounded build of a well-to-do accountant. Hiding behind oversize horn-rimmed glasses that helped him conceal his sharp eyes. Affecting the relaxed and affable air of a provincial lawyer, the sort who enjoys operettas, or a successful bank clerk who likes visiting museums after work. Good old Leandro.
Next to him, sporting a British-style suit that didn’t match his rugged looks, sat an individual with smoothed-down hair and moustache, nursing a glass of brandy. His face looked familiar. One of those usual personalities in the newspapers, a veteran of posed photographs that always included the inevitable eaglet on the flag and some predictable painting of an equestrian scene. Gil de something, she told herself. Secretary General of Fried Bread, or whatever.
Leandro looked up and smiled at her from afar. He motioned her to come closer, the way one calls a child or a puppy. Suppressing her limp at the expense of a shooting pain in her side, she crossed the dining hall slowly. As she did so, she noticed two men from the ministry at the far end, in the shadows. Armed. Stock-still, like waiting reptiles.
“Alicia, I’m so glad you were able to find a gap in your schedule to have a coffee with us. Tell me, have you had breakfast?”
Before she could reply, Leandro raised his eyebrows, and two of the waiters standing by the wall proceeded to set a place for her at the table. While they poured her a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, Alicia felt the bigwig’s gaze slowly boring into her. It wasn’t hard to see herself through his eyes. Most men, including professional observers, confused seeing with looking and almost always stopped at obvious details that deterred any reading beyond those irrelevancies. Leandro used to say that to disappear into the eyes of one’s opponent was a skill that could take one a whole lifetime to learn.
Hers was an ageless face, sharp-featured yet malleable, with only a few lines of shadow and colour. Alicia changed her appearance every day according to the role she had to play in whatever fable Leandro had selected to stage his manoeuvres and intrigues. She could be shade or light, landscape or figure, depending on the libretto. In days of truce she would vanish within herself and retreat into what Leandro called the transparency of her darkness. Her hair was black and her complexion pale, made for midwinter suns and indoor lounges. Her greenish eyes shone in the half-light, and she would fix them sharply on onlookers to distract them from her figure, which was fragile but not easy to avoid. When necessary she would conceal it under loose-fitting clothes so as not to draw furtive glances in the street. But close up her presence came into focus and she exuded a sombre mood, which Leandro found vaguely disturbing. Her mentor had instructed her to try to keep it under wraps. “You’re a night creature, Alicia, but here we all hide in daylight.”
“Alicia, allow me to introduce you to the Right Honourable Señor Manuel Gil de Partera, director of the General Police Corps.”
“It’s an honor, Your Excellency,” declared Alicia, offering him her hand. The director didn’t take it, as if he were afraid she might bite him.
Gil de Partera observed her as if he hadn’t yet decided whether she was a schoolgirl with more than a touch of wantonness that was unnerving him, or a species he didn’t even know how to begin to classify. “The director has been good enough to ask for our help in solving a rather delicate matter that requires an extraordinary amount of discretion and diligence.”
“Of course,” said Alicia, in such a meek and angelic voice that it earned her a gentle kick from Leandro under the table. “We’re at your disposal to assist you in all we can.”
Gil de Partera went on observing her with that poisoned mixture of suspicion and desire that her presence usually elicited in gentlemen of a certain age. What Leandro always referred to as the perfume of her presence, or the side effects of her looks, was, in her mentor’s opinion, a double-edged sword she hadn’t yet learned to wield with absolute precision. In this case, and judging by the clear discomfort Gil de Partera seemed to feel in her proximity, Alicia was convinced that the blade would turn against her. Here comes the offensive, she thought.
“Do you know anything about hunting, Señorita Gris?” he asked.
She hesitated for an instant as she searched for her mentor’s eyes.
“Alicia is essentially an urban creature,” Leandro intervened.
“One learns a lot from hunting,” lectured the director. “I’ve had the privilege of sharing a few hunts with the Generalissimo, and it was he who showed me the fundamental rule all hunters must adopt.”
Alicia nodded repeatedly, as if she found it all fascinating. Leandro, meanwhile, had smeared jam over a piece of toast and handed it to her. Alicia accepted it almost without noticing.
The director was still caught up in his lecture. “A hunter has to understand,” he said, “that at a critical moment in the hunt, the role of the prey and that of the hunter become confused. The hunt, the real hunt, is a duel between equals. You don’t know who you really are until you shed blood.”
There was a pause, and after a few seconds of theatrical silence demanding deep reflection on what had just been revealed to her, Alicia put on a respectful expression. “Is that also a maxim of the Generalissimo?”
Leandro gave her a warning stamp on the foot under the table.
“I’ll be frank, young lady,” the director said. “I don’t like you. I don’t like what I’ve heard about you, and neither do I like your tone or the fact that you think you can keep me waiting for half the morning, as if your crappy time were more valuable than mine. I don’t like the way you look at people, and even less the sarcastic tone with which you address your superiors. Because if there’s one thing that pisses me off in this life, it’s people who don’t know their place in the world. And what pisses me off even more is having to remind them.”
Alicia looked down submissively. The temperature in the dining hall seemed to have plunged ten degrees at a stroke.
“I beg you to forgive me, sir, if I—”
“Don’t interrupt me. If I’m here talking to you, it’s because of the trust I have in your superior, who for some reason that escapes me thinks you’re the right person for the job I need to entrust him with. But don’t make any mistakes with me: from this very moment you’re answerable to me. And I don’t have the patience or the generous disposition of Señor Montalvo here.”
Gil de Partera fixed his eyes on her. They were black, and the spider’s web of small red capillaries covering his cornea seemed about to burst. Alicia imagined him all dressed up with a feathered hat and marshal’s boots, kissing the royal buttocks of the head of state during one of those hunts, when the elders of the nation would burst open the prey placed within firing range by a squadron of servants – after which they’d smear their genitals with them, the aroma of gunpowder and chicken blood making them feel like virile conquerors, for the glory of God and the Fatherland.
“I’m sure Alicia didn’t mean to offend you, dear friend,” said Leandro, who was probably relishing the scene.
Alicia corroborated her superior’s words with a serious and contrite nod of her head.
“Needless to say, the content of what I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential, and for all intents and purposes this conversation has never taken place. Any doubt on this point or any other, Gris?”
“Absolutely none, sir.”
“Good. Then for God’s sake, eat your piece of toast, so we can get down to business.”