The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1)

by Eva García Sáenz

  A strange mix of people were attending the first part. On the one hand, all the MAC staff were there, together with representatives of various Santander authorities and fellow members of the Pedreña golf club. On the other, sorrowful blonds of every size and complexion were soaking their handkerchiefs. It was strange that Elisa should belong to both categories, but she chose to seat herself with the MAC staff. To the astonishment of everyone present, she behaved as if she were the official widow, crying over the closed casket without any sign of holding back or being discreet and thereby giving rise to a new wave of rumors and theories among the museum staff.

  Luckily, Iago came over to me, put his hand on my waist, and pronounced a curt “Let’s go,” so I accompanied him down the marble and glass corridors until we came to a deserted garden trapped in the middle of the building. It was restrained and minimalist, like everything else in that microcosmos, and the grass was being strangled by a circle of cement. A cypress served as a memorial; we were still in Death’s territory.

  “I know you’ve been making an effort so I won’t notice, but you’ve been distant since the Day of the Dead. I believe there’s something we still have to clear up.”

  You bet there’s something, I said to myself.

  “Are you sure you want us to talk about it right now?” I said, cautiously feeling my way.

  “It’s as good a moment as any. Come on, Dana, fire away with your reproaches.”

  As you wish, I thought, sighing.

  “Did you suspect Jairo right from the start?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed, hands in pockets. “The notebook was full of incriminating evidence, which I tore out the night you opened the safe.”

  “Why, Iago? Why did you hide this from me? I even got to the point of suspecting you.”

  “I know, but it was an acceptable risk. If your suspicions had gone any further, and our relationship had been at risk, I would have told you.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “I know you would rather have known from the outset, but my plan was to trap Nagorno as soon as I had a way of putting an end to his longevity, although I had no idea when that moment would arrive. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d work out the telomerase inhibitors so quickly, but there was a lot of scientific literature on the topic, and I just had to adapt what other laboratories had discovered to my objective.”

  “What really hurts is you only told me you were going on with the research behind Lyra’s back because you couldn’t have hidden the hours you spent in the lab from me. Just as you do with the rest of your family, you only tell me what suits you, and you continue to keep secrets and hide your plans from me.” As I turned away from him, I added reproachfully, “The trip to London was to lure him, wasn’t it?”

  “It was the first piece of bait. I had no idea how impatient Nagorno would be to turn up. That’s why I allowed Lyra to see I was carrying on research at Paseo de Pereda. It was high risk, but it would precipitate things. Although I could have spent years tossing him bait.”

  “Years lying to me, in fact,” I said, letting off steam, which mixed with the cold air.

  He exploded. “And why should I have told you and stopped you living? What I found in your mother’s notebook were suspicions, Dana. Suspicions that would have colored your life. And what would you have done then? Searched the whole earth? Looked under rocks? Checked out the Mir space station? You’d have focused your life on an obsession: finding Nagorno and asking him if he killed her. I brought him to you; I gave him to you on a platter at a very high cost to my family.”

  He put his body between me and the ugly concrete wall, and confronted me with that voice that didn’t belong to him. “Tell me, Adriana, what more can you ask of me? That I do things your way? Learn once and for all that that won’t happen. And now decide if you want to stay by my side. This is the moment.”

  “Give me some time.”

  His glacial eyes looked daggers at me. “As much as you want. I have more than enough.”

  He opened the door as if he were going to rip it off its hinges and disappeared.

  Terrific! Our second blazing fight, this one four days after the death of his two siblings. Tact really is my specialty, I thought. There was no question that I had tried to postpone that conversation, but it had been difficult for me to hide my discomfort in Iago’s presence. I lacked the millennia of practice.

  I made my way to the exit of the crematorium, my face reflecting what had happened, and there I came across Salva, who came to my rescue, in keeping with his name.

  “Are you all right, little bird?” he asked, patting me on the back in a brotherly way. “They told me you were part of the attempt to rescue Kyra. It must have been really traumatic.”

  “It was, believe me. Are you going back to the MAC now?”

  “Yes, I’m not going to stay any longer.”

  “Nor am I. I’ve had enough. Can you give me a lift? I need to finish off a few things in the Interpretive Center.”

  Iago had the keys to my car, and I wasn’t keen to see him again just then.

  “I don’t know why Héctor and Iago have persisted with the opening date after what they’ve been through,” he commented as we walked to his car.

  I shrugged by way of an answer, and we set off for the MAC. I needed to clear my head of flowers, dead people, caskets, and floating corpses. Once we reached the museum, I said good-bye to Salva and shut myself in the hall, without greeting anyone. If I concentrated hard enough, I could pretend for a while that I was simply an archaeologist working in a regular museum of archaeology and not in a den of immortals who were dying two at a time.

  I set to work with the mannequins they’d delivered at the last minute and focused all my attention on the task. They were supposed to have moveable parts I could adjust to the pose I was after, but I began to doubt this after spending some time trying to bend the elbow of one of the hunters. There was just no way. The elbow was stiff, and it wasn’t going to bend for anything in the world.

  And then the penny dropped.

  Shit.

  The image of Jairo’s body swaying in the water, arms and legs extended, had popped into my mind. It wasn’t possible. It could never have looked like that.

  My hand trembling, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and hit Iago’s number.

  74

  IAGO

  Mother Moon Day, ninth day of the month of Ngetal

  Monday, November 5, 2012

  All of us who were going to attend Nagorno’s cremation had adjourned to a small room with a glass window through which could be seen the closed casket ready to be incinerated.

  “The oven will reach a temperature of one thousand six hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit,” the director of the crematorium had explained. “The wooden casket will volatilize, and if we could look inside it at that moment, we would see that the outline of the dead person has been maintained despite the body already having been converted into ashes. If we were to touch that outline, it would collapse, and a small pile of white ashes would remain.”

  The heartrending cry of Elisa, who was standing behind me, had offended both my hearing and my patience, but I opted not to strike her down with a look. Just then I felt my phone vibrating in my shirt pocket.

  “What do you want, Dana?” I whispered, answering the phone despite my father’s disapproving look. “They’re about to incinerate Jairo.”

  “It’s not Jairo,” she managed to say, her voice shaking nervously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know who it is, but it can’t be Jairo. The body we found had both arms fully extended. With the metal in his elbow, Jairo couldn’t have straightened his left arm, even if he was dead.”

  I hung up and turned to my father. “Have you got your Swiss army knife with you?”

  “Yes, of course. What the
devil’s going on?”

  I moved even closer to him and whispered in his ear, “I don’t think that body is Jairo. We have to stop the cremation.”

  I stealthily took the knife and opened the door to the room with the oven.

  “You have to leave me alone with my brother for a moment,” I told the employee, who looked at me with horror as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “That’s impossible. The oven is programmed to fire within three minutes, and it can’t be stopped.”

  “Then hurry up and leave the room,” I ordered.

  “Sir, I’m conscious of your pain, but you must understand—”

  “Get out,” I shouted while at the same time I shoved him out of the room, disregarding propriety and good manners.

  Fortunately, there was a curtain for the small window that overlooked the room next door, so I drew it, noticing at the same time that my father must have invented some pertinent excuse, because he was already ushering people out of that room. What I was going to do next didn’t call for witnesses.

  I opened the casket and, in the manner of the Scythians, cut off a few inches of the putrid scalp behind one ear. I hid it in the inside pocket of my jacket and closed the lid of the casket just as the conveyor belt began to roll toward the little trapdoor of the oven.

  Farewell, whoever you might be, I said. And at that very moment the employee returned with two security guards.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I assured them, “I’m going. I don’t want to complicate your work any further.”

  I strode down the marble corridors, crossing paths with the people who’d been expelled from the viewing room and who had undoubtedly reached the conclusion I had gone mad. I started Dana’s car and headed for my laboratory in Paseo de Pereda with only one thought—the same thought that dominated all that we’d been through these past few days. I had to confirm, as an absolute priority, whether Nagorno was alive at this very moment or a body burning in flames, with half of Santander there to witness it.

  75

  IAGO

  Venus Day, thirteenth day of the month of Ngetal

  Friday, November 9, 2012

  It 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.