75

IAGO

Venus Day, thirteenth day of the month of Ngetal

Friday, November 9, 2012

I t would still be a few hours before I had the results of Nagorno’s DNA test, but I had taken every conceivable precaution in case I was confronted with the worst possible outcome.

The previous night, after the museum had closed its doors to the public, Dana and I had gone into Kyra’s laboratory one last time before we sealed its entrance. Part of it had been destroyed by my fight with Nagorno, but the computer and most of the equipment were intact.

“How is it possible that he’s still alive?” Dana kept asking. “I’ve gone over it again and again, and I still can’t explain it.”

“We’ll take it step by step.” I gestured discretely, reminding her that we couldn’t speak in here. If Nagorno was still alive, he’d have access to the microphones.

Dana stopped talking, and we spent the evening deleting all the folders from the computer and then extracting the hard drive, which I kept so that I could destroy it later. I emptied all the organic samples in the fridge. They weren’t secure—maybe they never had been—and if Nagorno had planned at any stage to take them, he would already have done so.

“Why did you get so close to Nagorno in the laboratory?” I asked Dana as soon as we left the parking area. “I don’t understand. It was a futile act, and it put you in danger.”

“He put a flashdrive with all the research files into his jacket pocket,” she answered gravely. “I got close to him so that I could steal it from him.”

“Did you get it?”

“Yes. I destroyed it that night. You weren’t in any state to take charge of anything,” she said without any sign of a smile.

We went back to my place, in no mood to talk, protected by the darkness of a night with a waning moon. I woke up before dawn, fortunate not to have dreamed about anyone or anything. The spirits of the past had had the decency to respect me. Dana was still sleeping beside me, so I left her a note that I’d see her at the museum.

Dawn still hadn’t arrived. I parked some way from the entrance to the cemetery and climbed over the wall. I removed the bottle from inside my leather jacket and placed it on top of Lyra’s headstone. Irish whiskey. The same flavor—of oblivion. If it had worked with Gunnar more or less, why not with Lyra?

It would be simple. Drink the whole bottle and forget. If only to stop that torture for a moment.

But if I was going to fall, I wanted Lyra to see me fall.

I sat on top of a dusty grave and spent hours staring at the bottle, in a silent battle between my weak will and a growing pain that had been choking me since the day she died. I would never fight with her again; I would never see Bryan’s eyes in her cobalt-blue ones again; I would never be worried about her gloomy days again, or laze around with her on a sofa in a city somewhere in the world.

Some time later, when the washed-out colors of dawn announced another dreary November day, I arrived at the rock ledge. The stone felt cold as I climbed down, as if it were trying to persuade me not to return to that spot, but I couldn’t stop thinking that was precisely where the key to everything had to be.

I recalled the image of Little Bastard falling, and of Nagorno’s body emerging from the sea—or rather, if my worst premonitions were fulfilled, someone else’s body. How was he able to swim, return to shore, kill another person who looked like him, dress him in his own wet clothes, and throw him back into the water where it was assumed he ought to have died? How, if no one had lost sight of that cliff face in the hours that followed the accident? He couldn’t have swum out to sea—to where? We would have seen him from up top, from the museum parking lot. He must have hidden among the irregular contours of the rocks, and then what? He couldn’t have climbed up in the way Dana and I always did. The police arrived right away and cordoned off the area. And yet no one saw anything.

I had spent some time sitting on the rock racking my brains when I saw the painted animals of the Lascaux caves passing before my eyes. I thought it was because I had slept so little that night. After I’d rubbed my eyes and verified I was dealing with a real object, I stretched out my arm to grab the cover of a book I recognized from the gold lettering: The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe .

I couldn’t do anything to prevent the damp cover with its photograph from heading out to sea, but it didn’t matter: that paper had come from the small cave behind me. I ran inside, heading into an almost total darkness, but several yards farther in I smelled something. It wasn’t a sea smell. A hint of something metallic, like rusted metal. Some long-forgotten object , I thought.

But as I moved forward blindly, feeling my way along the rock wall with my hands, I touched a metal surface that was smooth, if irregular, because it was corroded by time and seawater. Something implausible—a door. An ancient door.

I pushed against it with my shoulder and it yielded at the first attempt. It had recently been opened, because the edges of the rust were broken off. I kept exploring, guided by my hands, and found a hole. I felt along the walls of the hole and grabbed hold of a metal bar. When I stepped through the narrow space left open by the rusty door, I sensed I was standing on something softer in among the ankle-high lumps of broken concrete. I bent down in the dark and picked up a square object. It was the book Dana had lost months earlier. So I steeled myself and climbed blindly up the vertical bars.

I reached the top of the tunnel and crawled into a small wooden room. I could see a crack of light between the two doors of the oak cupboard. I glued my ear to it and heard the voices of Dana and Javier, the designer.

“So Iago hasn’t arrived yet?” he was asking impatiently. “As soon as you locate him, please tell him to call me on my cell phone. It’s urgent.”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be here any minute,” Dana replied.

“Well, you come with me then. I’ve got the driver of the truck with the display cases outside, and I’m not entirely sure they brought the sizes we ordered.”

“Fine. Let’s go,” she said, and they left her office.

I opened the cupboard and collapsed onto the carpet, only to be blinded again, this time by the daylight. Then I heard the voices of Dana and Javier again, so I hid under the heavy walnut desk. It wasn’t that my presence in Dana’s office wouldn’t have been justifiable if they’d found me there, but being covered with dirt would have been harder to explain.

“I think I’ve got the original order in here. I hope the error is the supplier’s, Javier, because we’re running out of time.”

“I know. Have you found it?” he asked from the door.

Then something wonderful happened. Dana didn’t spot me, but she smelled my presence. While I could see her from my position under the table, she couldn’t see me, but she went rigid for a moment and looked stealthily around her. I stretched my arm out a little and waved at her. She turned around and left the room with Javier.

“I’ve got it. Let’s check them out,” she said as she closed the door behind them.

As I continued to crouch under the desk, I glanced at the light-colored carpet under me. I noticed some muddy footprints that weren’t mine. I ran my hands over the surface of the carpet. The footprints were almost dry, but they were recent. They belonged to a flat pair of shoes and were much wider than Dana’s.

Ten minutes later, she came back to her office and locked the door behind her.

“You are going to explain this, aren’t you?” she said, taken aback.

“Do you remember the tunnel that led from the cupboard? It didn’t end a few yards down, level with the laboratory, as you and I thought. If you break a false cement floor, it continues down to the cave at the back of our rock ledge.”

She sat down in the armchair to absorb what I was telling her.

“I don’t think you need to wait for the DNA, Iago. The marquis of Mouro escaped through my office, didn’t he?”

“Yet again,” I agreed. “We’ve solved a couple of mysteries in one hit. I think I now know the identity of the body. Did you pick up any notable absence at Jairo’s funeral?”

“No, I think all the blonds of Cantabria and its surrounds were there.”

“Patricio was missing. In fact, I’ve been trying to locate him since the night of the accident, but he’s not answering his phone. The last time we saw him was before Nagorno’s exile, and there’s nothing to prove he came back with him that weekend, despite the fact that, as I said to you at the time, I thought I saw him at the Esperanza Market.”

Dana’s hand flew up to her mouth as she remembered something. “Yes, you did see him,” she said with conviction. “Yes, he did come back to Santander. When Kyra and I were at the cemetery, Jairo invited us to dinner at his villa, and he said they had more than enough food to cover those festive days. He said ‘we,’ plural. Kyra and I assumed he was talking about himself and Patricio.” She looked at me questioningly. “So now what, Iago?”

Good question.

“Now I have to confirm the DNA results, and then I’m going to have the most difficult conversation in my life.”