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 colourful note was a reference to one of the alleged witnesses of the alleged plot in connection 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 towards 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 afterwards 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.
“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. Goodnight.”
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.”