The door opened and Mercedes came in, wearing her wine-colored dress and an enthralled smile that was wiped off her face the moment she saw her father. Vicente watched anxiously from the doorway. Valls gave him a nod and signaled for him to leave them alone.
“Are you all right, Daddy?”
Valls smiled broadly and stood up to embrace her. “Of course I’m all right. And all the better for seeing you.”
Mercedes felt her father’s arms holding her tight as he buried his face in her hair and smelled her, just as he used to do when she was a child, as if he thought that inhaling the aroma of her skin could protect him against all the evils in the world.
When at last he let go of her, Mercedes looked into his eyes and noticed how red they were. “What’s the matter, Daddy?”
“Nothing.”
“You know you can’t fool me. You can fool others, but not me.”
Valls smiled. He looked at the clock on his desk: it was five past nine. “As you can see, I keep my promises,” she said, reading his thoughts.
“I’ve never doubted that.”
Mercedes stood on her toes and glanced at the desk. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing. Just rubbish.”
“Can I read it too?”
“It’s not the sort of thing for a young girl to read.”
“I’m not a young girl anymore,” replied Mercedes, giving him a mischievous smile and twirling around to show off her dress and her demeanor.
“I can see. You’re a grown woman.”
Mercedes put her hand on her father’s cheek. “And is that what makes you sad?”
Valls kissed his daughter’s hand and shook his head. “Of course not.”
“Not even a little?”
“Well, yes, a little.”
Mercedes laughed. Valls imitated her, the taste of gunpowder still in his mouth.
“They were all asking after you at the party . . .”
“My evening got rather complicated. You know how these things are.”
Mercedes nodded cunningly. “Yes. I know . . .”
She wandered around her father’s office, a secret world full of books and closed cupboards, running her fingertips gently over the tomes on the bookshelves. She noticed her father looking at her with misty eyes and stopped. “You’re not going to tell me what’s wrong, are you?”
“Mercedes, you know I love you more than anything in the whole world, and I’m very proud of you, don’t you?”
She looked unsure. Her father’s voice seemed to be hanging from a thread, his self-possession and arrogance torn from him.
“Of course, Daddy . . . and I love you too.”
“That’s all that matters. Come what may.”
Her father was smiling at her, but Mercedes could see he was crying. She’d never seen him cry and felt frightened, as if her world might suddenly fall apart. Her father dried his tears and turned away from her. “Tell Vicente to come in.”
Mercedes walked over to the door, but stopped before opening it. Her father still had his back to her, looking at the garden through the window.
“Daddy, what’s going to happen?”
“Nothing, my love. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Then she opened the door. Vicente was already waiting on the other side, with that impenetrable, harsh expression that always gave her a chill.
“Good night, Daddy,” she murmured.
“Good night, Mercedes.”
Vicente nodded at her respectfully and stepped into the office. Mercedes turned around to look, but the bodyguard gently closed the door in her face. The girl put her ear to the door and listened.
“He’s been here,” she heard her father say.
“That’s not possible,” said Vicente. “All the entrances were secured. Only the house staff had access to the top floors. I have men posted on all the staircases.”
“I’m telling you he’s been here. And he has a list. I don’t know how he got hold of it, but he has a list . . . Oh God.”
Mercedes swallowed hard.
“There must be a mistake, sir.”
“Have a look for yourself . . .”
A long silence followed. Mercedes held her breath.
“The numbers seem correct, sir. I don’t understand . . .”
“The time has come, Vicente. I can’t hide any longer. It’s now or never. Can I count on you?”
“Of course, sir. When?”
“At dawn.”
They fell silent, and shortly afterward Mercedes heard footsteps approaching the door. She ran down the stairs and didn’t stop until she reached her room. Once she got there, she leaned against the door and collapsed onto the floor. A curse was spreading through the air, she thought. That night would be the last of the turbid fairy tale they’d been acting out for too many years.
6
She would always remember that dawn for its cold grayness, as if winter had decided to tumble down without warning and sink Villa Mercedes in a lake of mist that emerged from the edge of the forest. She woke up when just a hint of metallic brightness grazed her bedroom windows. She had fallen asleep on her bed with her dress on, and when she opened the window, the cold, damp morning air licked her face. A carpet of thick fog was sliding over the garden, slithering through the remains of the previous night’s party. The black clouds covering the sky traveled slowly, heavy with an impending storm.
Mercedes stepped out into the passage, barefoot. The house was buried in deep silence. She walked along the shadowy corridor, circling the whole west wing until she reached her father’s bedroom. Neither Vicente nor any of his men were posted by the door, as had been routine for the past few years, since her father had begun to live in hiding, always protected by his trustworthy gunmen. It was as if he feared that something was going to jump out of the walls and plunge a dagger into his back. She had never dared ask him why he had adopted that habit. It was enough for her to catch him sometimes with an absent expression, his eyes poisoned with bitterness.
She opened the door to her father’s bedroom without knocking. The bed hadn’t been slept in. The cup of chamomile tea that the maid left on Don Mauricio’s bedside table every night hadn’t been touched. Mercedes sometimes wondered whether her father ever slept, or whether he spent most nights awake in his office at the top of the tower. The flutter of a flock of birds flying off from the garden alerted her. She went over to the window and saw two figures walking toward the garage. Mercedes pressed her face against the glass. One of the figures stopped and turned to look up in her direction, as if he’d felt her gaze on him. Mercedes smiled at her father, who stared back at her blankly, his face pale, looking older than she could ever remember.
At last Mauricio Valls looked down and stepped into the garage with Vicente, who carried a small suitcase. Mercedes panicked. She had dreamed about this moment a thousand times without understanding what it meant. She rushed down the stairs, stumbling over bits of furniture and carpets in the steely gloom of daybreak. When she reached the garden, the cold, cutting breeze spat in her face. She hurried down the marble staircase and ran toward the garage through a wasteland of discarded masks, fallen chairs, and garlands of lanterns still blinking and swaying in the mist. She heard the car’s engine start and the wheels steal across the gravel drive. By the time Mercedes reached the drive, which led to the front gates of the estate, the car was already speeding away. She ran after it, ignoring the sharp gravel cutting her feet. Just before the mist swallowed the car forever, her father turned his head one last time, throwing her a despairing look through the rear window. She went on running until the sound of the engine was lost in the distance, and the spiked gates at the entrance to the estate rose before her.
An hour later Rosaura, the maid who came every morning to wake her up and dress her, found her sitting at the edge of the swimming pool. Her feet were dangling in the water, which was tinted with threads of her blood. Dozens of masks drifted over its surface like paper boats.
&n
bsp; “Señorita Mercedes, for heaven’s sake . . .”
The girl was trembling when Rosaura wrapped her in a blanket and took her back to the house. By the time they reached the marble staircase, it was starting to sleet. A hostile wind stirred through the trees, knocking down garlands, tables, and chairs. Mercedes, who had also dreamed about this moment, knew that the house had begun to die.
Kyrie
Madrid
December 1959
1
Soon after ten in the morning, a black Packard drove up Gran Vía under the downpour and stopped opposite the entrance to the old Hotel Hispania. Her bedroom window was shrouded by the rain trickling down the pane, but Alicia could see the two emissaries, as gray and cold as the day, getting out of the car in their regulation raincoats and hats. Alicia looked at her watch. Good old Leandro hadn’t even waited fifteen minutes before setting the dogs on her. Thirty seconds later the phone rang. She picked it up at the first loud ring. She knew perfectly well who would be at the other end.
“Señorita Gris, good morning and all that,” Maura’s hoarse voice intoned from reception. “A couple of lizards who reek of political police have just asked for you very rudely and stepped into the elevator. I’ve sent them up to the fourteenth floor to give you a couple of minutes in case you might want to evaporate.”
“That’s very kind of you, Joaquín. What are you into today? Anything good?”
Shortly after the fall of Madrid, Joaquin Maura had ended up in Carabanchel Prison. When he came out, sixteen years later, he discovered that he was an old man, his lungs were ruined and his wife, six months pregnant when he was arrested, had managed to get an annulment and was now married to a bemedaled lieutenant-colonel who had furnished her with three children and a modest house on the outskirts of town. From that first short-lived marriage there remained a daughter, Raquel, who grew up convinced that he had died before her mother gave birth to her. The day Maura went to see her surreptitiously on her way out of a shop on Calle Goya, where she worked selling fabrics, Raquel thought he was a beggar and gave him a few coins. Since then Maura had scraped by, living in a dingy room next to the boilers in the basement of the Hispania, doing the night shift and all the shifts he was allowed to do, rereading cheap detective novels, and chain-smoking short Celtas in his lodge while he waited for death to put things in their place and take him back to 1939, from where he should never have emerged.
“I’m in the middle of a romance that makes no sense at all. It’s called The Crimson Tunic, by someone called Martín. It’s part of an old series, The City of the Damned. It was lent to me by that little fat guy Tudela in room 426, who always finds odd things in the Rastro flea market. The story is about your part of the world, Barcelona. You might feel like reading it.”
“I won’t say no.”
“Very good. And keep your eye on that pair. I know you can fend for yourself, but those two don’t leave a pretty shadow.”
Alicia hung up and calmly sat down to wait for Leandro’s jackals to sniff her out. At most, two or three minutes before they stuck their noses around, she reckoned. She lit a cigarette and waited in the armchair facing the door, which she’d left open. The long dark corridor leading to the elevators opened up before her. An odor of dust, old wood, and the threadbare carpet covering the floor of the passageway flooded the room.
The Hispania was an exquisite ruin in a perpetual state of decadence. Built in the early 1920s, the hotel had seen its years of glory among Madrid’s large luxury buildings but fell into disuse after the civil war. After two decades of decline, it had become a graveyard where the dispossessed, the doomed, lost souls with nothing and no one in their lives, languished in drab rooms that they rented by the week. The hotel had hundreds of rooms, but half of them were empty and had been for years. A number of floors were closed off, and eerie tales spread among the guests, recounting what sometimes took place in those long bleak passages: an elevator would stop and open its doors when nobody had pressed the button, and for a few seconds a yellowish beam of light would shine out from the car, revealing what looked like the innards of a sunken liner. Maura had told her that the switchboard often rang in the early hours with calls from rooms nobody had occupied since the war. When he answered, there was never anyone on the line, except the time he heard a woman weeping; when he asked what he could do for her, another voice, dark and deep, said to him: “Come with us.”
“From then on, I’m damned if I take calls from any room after midnight,” Maura admitted to her once. “Sometimes I think this place is like a metaphor, you know? Of the whole country, I mean. I feel it’s cursed because of all the blood that was spilled and is still on our hands, however much we insist on pointing the finger at others.”
“You’re a poet, Maura. Not even all those detective novels manage to dampen your lyric vein. What Spain needs is thinkers like you to bring back the great national art of conversation.”
“Laugh at me all you want. It’s easy when you’re on the regime’s payroll, Señorita Gris. Although I’m sure that with what you must make, an important person like you could afford to move somewhere better and not rot in this dungeon. This is no place for a refined, classy mademoiselle like you. People don’t come here to live, they come here to die.”
“As I said. A poet.”
“Get lost.”
Maura wasn’t all that mistaken in his philosophical remarks, and as time went by the Hispania began to be known, among select circles, as Suicide Central. Decades later, when the hotel had already been closed for some time and finally the demolition engineers went through the building, floor by floor, placing the explosive charges that would tear it down forever, rumor had it that in a number of rooms they’d found corpses that had lain mummified on beds or in bathtubs for years, its old night manager among them.
2
She saw them emerge from the shadows of the corridor for what they were, two puppets made up to frighten people who still took life at face value. She’d seen them before, but she’d never bothered to remember their names. All those dummies from the secret police looked the same to her. They stopped in the doorway and gave the room a studied look of contempt before resting their eyes on Alicia and showing her the wolfish smile Leandro must have taught them on their first day at school.
“I don’t see how you can live here.”
Alicia shrugged and finished her cigarette, waving a hand toward the window. “I like the views.”
One of Leandro’s men laughed halfheartedly, and the other muttered disapprovingly under his breath. They came into the room, had a peek at the bathroom, and examined the place from top to bottom as if they hoped to find something. The younger one, who still oozed inexperience and tried to make up for it with attitude, pretended to take an interest in the collection of books piled up against the wall, practically filling half the room. He slid his forefinger along the spines. “You’re going to have to lend me one of your lovely romantic novels,” he sneered.
“I didn’t know you could read.”
The novice turned around, scowled, and took a step forward, but his colleague, and presumably his boss, stopped him, sighing wearily. “Go on,” he said to Alicia, “powder your nose. They’re expecting you at ten.”
Alicia showed no signs of leaving her chair. “I’m on mandatory sick leave. Leandro’s orders.”
The novice, who apparently had felt his manliness tarnished, plonked his ninety-plus kilos of muscle and bile close to Alicia and offered her a smile that was clearly well practiced in prison cells and midnight raids. “Don’t fuck with me—I’m not in the mood today, sunshine. Don’t make me have to drag you out of that chair.”
Alicia turned her eyes on him. “It’s not about whether you’re in the mood, it’s about whether you’ve got the balls.”
Leandro’s thug glared at her for a few seconds, but when his partner grabbed his arm and pulled him away, he decided to break into a more gentle smile and put his hands up as a sign of truce. To be contin
ued, thought Alicia.
The leader of the twosome checked his watch and shook his head. “Come on, Señorita Gris, it’s not our fault. You know how these things work.”
I know, Alicia thought. I know only too well. She pressed both hands against the sides of the armchair and stood up. The two henchmen watched her stagger over to a chair. On it lay what looked like a harness made up of fine lengths of string and a set of leather straps.
“May I help you?” asked the novice, his voice malicious.
Alicia ignored them both. She picked up the contraption and went into the bathroom with it, leaving the door ajar. The older man looked away, but the novice couldn’t help finding an angle from which to dwell on Alicia’s reflection in the mirror. He saw her remove her skirt and, grabbing the harness, place it over her hips and her right leg as if she were putting on some exotic sort of corset. When she adjusted the fasteners, the harness hugged her figure like a second skin, giving her the appearance of a mechanical doll. It was then that Alicia looked up and the thug met her eyes in the mirror: cold eyes, devoid of all expression. He smiled with delight and, after a long pause, turned back into the room, not without catching a fleeting glimpse of that black stain on Alicia’s side, a tangle of scars that seemed to sink into her flesh as if a red-hot drill had rebuilt her hip. The officer noticed his superior looking at him severely.
“You cretin,” he heard him mutter.
Moments later Alicia emerged from the bathroom.
“Don’t you have another dress?” asked the older policeman.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“I don’t know. Something a little more discreet, maybe?”
“Why? Who else is at this meeting?”
His only response was to hand her a walking stick that was leaning against the wall and point to the door.
“I haven’t put my makeup on.”
“You look fine. But if you like, you can do that in the car. We’re already late.”
The Labyrinth of the Spirits Page 8
