CHAPTER 40

December 15 was a cold, cloudy Friday, the kind of day you wish was a Saturday so you could spend all morning in bed. Asunción arrived at the office at nine o’clock sharp, carrying a flask of hot chocolate and two paper cones of churros. She hung her coat on the hook behind the door and sat down to wait for Gaby to arrive and join her in getting drunk on sugar and grease, her drugs of choice at such an early hour, on such a grim day, and with such a painful, empty stomach.

She thought Gaby would probably be a while yet. She and Livingstone had made up the day before and, according to what Gaby had said over the phone, they were going to take things easy from now on. She no longer had the same urgency to become a mother, thanks to Franklin’s cuddles and his confession that he had never really wanted to go back to Argentina, he only said so because they were having such trouble conceiving a baby. He had sobbed as he admitted this, and Gaby thought she had never seen a more helpless child than her husband. Now nothing could upset her. Not even the problems at Librarte or the unremitting arrival of her period every twenty-eight days. She said she felt as calm as can be and couldn’t stop grinning like a Cheshire cat.

A couple of hours earlier, when it was still dark, the phone had rung on Asunción’s bedside table, waking her up and giving her the fright of her life, followed by terrible news, which caused her to burst into a flood of tears. Berta had brought her up to speed with the tale of César Barbosa’s serial abuses, in which María had turned out to be the unwilling accomplice and the rest of them the innocent victims. The inevitable result was the demise of the magazine. Now, while she waited for Gaby to say goodbye to Franklin at the door, Asunción tried to find the words to break the bad news to her in the nicest way possible.

She didn’t have time to rehearse her speech. Gaby arrived at nine thirty, humming, bounding up the stairs two by two; she unbuttoned her red coat before starting to search the labyrinthine depths of her bag for her office keys, took off her orange scarf, her blue hat, her green gloves. She shed her colorful woolen skin. She opened the door and was shocked to find Asunción waiting for her with breakfast laid out on the photocopier, calculated that there were more than a dozen churros each, and understood that something bad was up.

“Come on, Gaby, have some of these, come into the warmth, have a seat here,” said Asunción, pointing to the rocking chair that she had dragged in from Berta’s office, which now took up most of the free space between the desks and the bookshelf.

“This can’t be to celebrate me and Franklin making up. Something’s happened, right?”

“Yes, love, it has. Something awful.” Asunción couldn’t stop the tears welling up in her eyes again. She downed her hot chocolate and left the empty cup on her mouse pad.

Gaby did as she was told. She sat down and clung for dear life to the arms of the rocking chair, as if it were a raft in the middle of the ocean.

“Do you remember César Barbosa?”

“The Pirate.”

“The very same. Well, it turns out that he and María have been seeing each other for about a year now.”

“Bloody hell, so María’s lover is Barbosa!”

“Look, Gaby, I couldn’t name a bigger son of a bitch than Barbosa if you paid me. It turns out that last January, by mistake, he got paid twice for an invoice and María called him to ask for the money back. So he, the crafty thing, realized that María was the only one who’d noticed the double payment. He invited her out to dinner a couple of times, seduced her—you know, with that stubble, the tattoo, the motorbike, and the bad-guy look—and bit by bit he got her to tell him how the Librarte accounts worked. María explained that Berta signed the invoices and gave them to her, she made a copy for our records and sent the original to England, so they could pay out from the central office. I don’t know if you knew that that’s the way it’s always been: Librarte only has a tiny amount in the bank and everything else, our wages and all that, is paid for from London.”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“So the Pirate, by the looks of it, had an idea: He told María to forge Berta’s signature and send off an invoice for a nonexistent piece of work, to see if they’d pay it. The next month, like clockwork, the money arrived from England. María had sent the invoice direct to London and, of course, she hadn’t kept a copy or left any trace of it in Madrid.”

“Because it was fake.”

“Right. Then, when they saw the trick had worked, they did the same again, this time with a larger amount. And so, all year, María and Barbosa have been splitting the money, which has gone into different accounts in different banks.”

“I don’t believe it! That’s why the magazine was hemorrhaging money! And poor Berta slaving away, unable to understand why we were going under when she’d been so careful with all the expenses!”

“Berta’s a wreck. She hasn’t stopped crying. Put yourself in her shoes. Everything she’s done for María, how much she’s cared for and protected her, and now she discovers this.”

“Poor Berta.”

“But that’s not the worst of it. Do you remember María’s black eyes and bruises? And we thought that the disgusting chauvinist pig was abusing her? Well no, love, it wasn’t just domestic violence, he was threatening her, trying to get her to keep her mouth shut. Because when Míster Crasman showed up in Madrid, María wanted to tell Berta what they’d done. She wanted to confess everything, beg forgiveness, pay the money back. She was ready to sell the little house and piece of land that her father left her in a village near Valencia to repay the losses, but she realized that the amount was huge, it’d got out of hand and something of that scale counted as a serious crime. She was afraid she’d end up in prison and, what’s more, would end up separated from Bernabé without custody of the kids, her life in ruins.”

“And she was scared.”

“She told Barbosa that Míster Crasman had taken the account books home to study them in detail. The whole thing was going to come out as soon as he looked at the books and saw the fake invoices, the payments to Barbosa, the accounts in different names, the fake businesses they used to receive payments, et cetera.”

“So the Pirate broke into the flat!”

“So it seems. He found out which police officer was in charge of tracking down Mr. Craftsman—who, as you know, is still in Granada, under Soleá’s watchful eye—because he was scared that once the police got involved, the case would be solved immediately. He figured there was no time to lose, so he won Inspector Manchego over, told him he was a locksmith and that he could help him get into the flat on Calle del Alamillo; that way he managed to kill two birds with one stone.”

“Get into the house, steal the account books, and slip out through the door without fear of Manchego arresting him.”

“Because at that moment they were accomplices. If the inspector arrested him, he’d look like a corrupt officer and, what’s more, a real idiot.”

“Right.”

“He said his name was Lucas and then covered all the tracks that might connect him to the Craftsman case. Manchego thought that the so-called Lucas, surely a drug addict, had gone to burgle the Alamillo flat and, of course, he’d had the wool pulled right over his eyes. He suspected it wasn’t the first time Barbosa had done something like that, probably other officers had fallen into the same trap and kept quiet so as not to look like idiots. But he never imagined that the locksmith was really after the accounts.”

“So César Barbosa managed to steal the books and threatened María and beat her up so she wouldn’t talk.”

“Things were getting ugly. María’s life was at risk. Sooner or later, César Barbosa would’ve made a fatal decision so as not to end up in prison.”

“He almost killed her yesterday.”

“Exactly. He wasn’t far off. María hid out at Berta’s house, fell asleep on the sofa and, while she was sleeping, got a message from Barbosa saying she’d better keep her mouth shut or he’d kill them both.”

“Oh my God! What did Berta do?”

“She called Inspector Manchego. Then, apparently, he came with four friends and they spent the night on guard, waiting for Barbosa to show up.”

“And did he?”

“Did he show up? At three in the morning, ready to kill them both, for sure, but when he saw that the police were there, he ran off.”

“And he’s still on the loose—” They were interrupted by someone banging on the office door. It made Asunción and Gaby jump out of their skins. They hugged each other like two terrified schoolgirls, thinking it was César Barbosa, crazed and out of control, come to take them hostage, threaten to kill them, gag them, and hold them at gunpoint, until the police promised immunity and a plane ticket to some secluded Caribbean island.

Whoever it was banged on the door again.

“Who is it?” Asunción managed to stammer.

“Open the door!” someone in the hallway said in perfect English. “This is Marlow Craftsman.”

“Míster Crasman?”

Asunción and Gaby looked at each other in astonishment. They pulled themselves together as best they could and hurried to open the door to the man who owned not only that office but Librarte magazine itself and the entire Craftsman publishing house. Mr. Marlow Craftsman, whom they had only ever seen in photos, had arrived, unannounced, at the worst moment in the history of the magazine.

Asunción was trembling as she opened the door.

On the photocopier was a crocheted blanket, and on the blanket sat a flask of hot chocolate, sugary churros, and two cups. The computers were all switched off, the phones were unplugged, only two of the five staff had turned up to work, Gaby’s chair was still rocking, it was almost ten o’clock on a Friday, and that man was not only very important, he was also English.

“Welcome to Librarte” was all Asunción could think to say when she saw the disbelief on the boss’s face.

Just then, they heard voices on the stairs. The voices of three small children. And coughs.

From behind Craftsman appeared the flushed faces of María’s three children, who all had fevers—Bernabé had left them at the door, they could find their way from there—and, without a word, they came into the office and launched themselves at the churros and chocolate.

“Want you breakfast, Míster Crasman?” asked Asunción in her rusty English.