We ended up reaching a point where either we found some topic of conversation that would keep us on the straight and narrow or we were doomed. So there was no way around it. We had to talk about work. After all, that was why I had come to Portugal.
‘The Amber Room! What an incredible story!’ José blurted out, as he raised his glass of vinho verde.
‘Believe me, I still don’t really understand how on earth we ended up going quite this far with it,’ I responded with a sigh.
‘Face it - it’s all your fault,’ he countered playfully. ‘Who found the lining behind the Krylov canvas? Who worked out that Koch used the Atbash Cipher? Who put two and two together, trawled through all those life stories and made sense of the whole thing?’
‘Oh come on! It was Läufer who foraged around on the internet and came up with the real goods.’
‘Yeah, sure. And Donna and Rook and Roi and I all put in our two cents’ worth as well. But the real culprit is you. In any case, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it: you’re the one who’s going to end up suffering for it, down in those damn Weimar sewers.’
‘But I will have you with me.’ My pleasure at the prospect shone through in the way I said it.
José had such dark, dark eyes, dark but streaked with honey, and as they looked me over, they felt like the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Just to wake up next to them one morning, I was ready to do anything, crazy or not. I felt so attracted to this guy that I was only a hair’s breadth away from owning up to being in love with him. Hang on a minute. What did I just say? In love with him? Jesus. It was blindingly obvious. Who the hell was I trying to kid? I almost died of shock as it suddenly dawned on me what I felt for him. A halfwit smile spread across my face and my fingers fit to break the wine glass in my grip. That was it! I was madly in love with the man! I had always been in love with him, I realized, but the distance, Roi’s no fraternization rule, my endless coming and going - everything had conspired to blind me to the truth. Just a few short hours with him in his own surroundings had been enough to blow the cork clean off my bottled-up emotions. Stupid for sure, plain stupid, because what the hell was I going to do about it now? There was no way out.
‘It’s far too dangerous,’ I muttered to myself.
‘No it’s not. Not if we do it right.’
José’s voice was just as jittery as mine. By now neither of us was quite sure what we were talking about - the Weimar job or the next ten minutes. Fear of making a total fool of myself slightly improved my level of self-control, but my pulse was racing and I was badly short of breath.
‘We’ll have to work hard tonight.’
Oh my God! What the hell did I just say? My subconscious was behaving like a drunken Judas Iscariot, betraying my wants and desires without the least disguise. My blushing cheeks lit up the whole damn restaurant and I begged the earth to swallow me up and have done with it. But José just smiled and stretched his arm out to clink his glass against mine.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, and for a long while we just couldn’t keep our eyes off each other.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the meal. I guess the wine went to my head, I was really warm and just didn’t stop making crazy remarks and laughing happily. On the drive back, José had his eyes firmly fixed on the road and I snuggled down into my seat, enjoying the darkness and the gentle bluesy fados sung by Dulce Pontes. José’s face was lit up from time to time by the headlights of the oncoming traffic. God, I loved him! Even if he didn’t feel the same way about me, in that moment he was mine and that moment was mine forever. It was then that José, without even turning his head towards me, took hold of my hand and squeezed it, and I squeezed back. Hand in hand, we drove on home and went up the stairs to his front door, without a word, not daring to break the spell. And once he’d shut the door behind me, he pulled me to him in the dark of his hallway and we began to kiss like there was no tomorrow …
I’m happy to report that the two hundred year-old wrought-iron headboard left not a single scar on my head.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
That Saturday we did plenty. But none of it was work. In the morning, José took me for a walking tour of the city - although walking is hardly an accurate way to describe our increasingly breathless ascents and descents of those endless steep hills and ridges. We walked across the impressive and thankfully more-or-less level Ponte Luis I double-decker wrought-iron bridge across the River Douro (which we Spanish call the Duero) and visited Porto’s São Bento train station, the Torre dos Clérigos and some of the city’s famous Port wine bodegas.
We had lunch in a place called A Brasileira, like the famous café in Lisbon, an art-nouveau gem bedecked in mirrors, chandeliers and marble, its waiters dressed in the traditional style with their white aprons and black bow ties. In the afternoon, José took me to the Livraria Lello, an amazing mixture of bookshop, library and museum, open since 1906 and still with its original interior built around an extraordinarily beautiful central staircase. I staggered out of there with a stack of books which I’ll probably never get round to reading, seeing as they were all in Portuguese. But nothing mattered to me that day. I was just so gloriously happy. I felt myself floating from place to place, an enchanted spirit hand-in-hand with the finest-looking, most wonderful man in the world. I had the dumbest ecstatic smile on my face all day long, right up until …
‘We should go home now,’ José announced. ‘Amália is on her own.’
‘Doesn’t your daughter have any buddies?’ I asked him, in a grudging tone of voice that I couldn’t quite disguise.
‘She’s a very unusual girl,’ he answered thoughfully. ‘Solitary, intelligent, introverted … She’s been getting on very badly with her mother and that’s made her very vulnerable right now.’
I think that it was at that precise moment that I finally got it into my head that, just like the eighteenth-century Spanish console with its lion’s paw feet that I bought at auction, José wasn’t the only item in the lot: little Amália came included with her father. Whether I liked it or not, I couldn’t just make her disappear. Either I accepted her, or I’d lose José.
‘Fine,’ I said, serious now. ‘Let’s go back.’
Throughout that whole wonderful day, we hadn’t said a word either about work or about what was happening between us, and both conversations were still outstanding. But, once again, just as we were about to get started, the Amália issue pushed us apart.
‘Listen, Ana, there’s something I really need to own up to before we get home.’
José was opening the car door for me as he spoke. I was dumbstruck with apprehension. He smiled back at me and gently stroked my cheek.
‘I realize that it’s going to make you very angry, but I feel that I owe it to you now to come clean about it.’
Whenever Ezequiela started a sentence like that, it immediately set all my alarm bells ringing. But José’s words fell like a heavy weight on my heart. What on earth was he planning to tell me? I got into the car and waited for him to join me, expecting the very worst. But all he did was just get in the car and drive out of the parking lot. It wasn’t until we ended up stuck in a massive traffic jam on the Avenida dos Aliados that he opened his mouth to speak.
‘Amália knows all about us. About the Chess Group, I mean.’ It was like being hit across the head with a sledgehammer. But worse. I was speechless. I immediately turned to look at him, opened my mouth to speak, but not a single word came out.
‘OK, OK,’ he began to trot out his unconvincing excuses. ‘I know what you’re going to say. Everything you’re thinking right now makes perfect sense, and if you get mad at me, I’ll say nothing in my defense. But even if you decide that you never want to see me again, please, please let me explain myself.’
There was ringing in my ears, my head was spinning, my eyes had gone out of focus and I felt like throwing up. I was completely terrified. If Count Dracula, Mister Hyde and Frankenstein’s monster had all turned up at the s
ame time to disembowel me, it would have been a cakewalk by comparison. But it really wasn’t a laughing matter. This was a major disaster, a catastrophe. And if Roi ever found out … Jesus. If Donna, Läufer and Rook suspected for a split second that their freedom, their lives, their jobs and everything they owned depended on the tender whims of a thirteen-year-old girl!
‘I didn’t tell her a thing,’ Cavalo went on.
‘Yeah, right,’ I finally managed to speak, still scared out of my wits. ‘So now I’m supposed to believe that Amália cracked Läufer’s security programs and found everything out all on her lonesome?’
‘Well, yes. It was something like that.’
‘Something like that?’ I screamed, by now hysterical. ‘How dare you tell me …!’
‘Just calm down now, Ana! I promise you there’s no way my daughter will tell anybody anything!’
‘How the hell do you know? She’s thirteen, for chrissakes! She’s just a child!’
‘She’s my daughter. I know her.’
‘Shit, José, you’ve ruined everything! Everything!’
Out of sheer desperation, I burst into tears. I just couldn’t help it. I realize now that I was so emotionally on edge that day that I wasn’t thinking straight and couldn’t see anything positive at all in the whole mess. At that particular moment, I was focused exclusively on Amália as a seriously dangerous threat to my life, and to the lives of all the other members of the Group.
‘I want to return to Madrid tonight,’ I told him, as we walked up the steps to his house, the very same steps we had run up hand-in-hand just last night, swept up in a wave of mutual desire.
‘Don’t be silly, Ana,’ he said, pulling his keys out of his pocket and opening the front door.
The girl was nowhere in sight. The house was in darkness, and utterly quiet.
‘What you’ve just told me is a major problem, José. Too damn big a problem.’
‘I know, but I really had to tell you.’ He looked straight into my eyes. ‘Your aunt Juana knows about it too, doesn’t she? And I’m willing to bet that old Ezequiela has been well aware of it for a good few years already. They don’t worry you?’ he smiled, a touch sarcastically, and carried on. ‘I swear to you, Ana, I swear to you that Amália can be trusted completely, even though you can’t see it right now because you’re shocked and frightened. I want you to understand that she will definitely not say a word to anybody. She understands how important it is. A year ago,’ he began to explain, as he walked around opening doors and turning the lights on, ‘I gave her permission to connect my computer down in the goldsmith’s store to the three she has in her bedroom. All it required was drilling a tiny hole in her floor and running a cable through, she told me, and then she’d be able to go online using my existing internet connection. I didn’t realize that it would be so easy for her to find the subdirectory where I keep all my Group-related files. It just never occurred to me. I thought I had everything safely hidden, but it turned out I was wrong. I used a password, of course,’ he shrugged his shoulders apologetically, ‘but I forgot that Amália knows all my credit card numbers.’
‘You used one of your credit card numbers as a password?’ I’d never heard of anything so amateurish and downright stupid in my whole life.
‘OK, I know,’ he protested, ‘but I made sure that I didn’t have the numbers written down anywhere. I know them all by memory.’
‘Right - and so does your daughter!’
‘That’s true enough. I just didn’t take that into account back then. All she wanted to be able to do was to go online from her room. But she’s my daughter, and like all daughters, I guess, she was curious to see what her father had kept hidden away. Wouldn’t you have done the same?’
In fact, one of my proudest achievements as a girl was having discovered all of my father’s secret hiding places around the house, despite his rather naive belief that he had actually managed to keep certain family mysteries hidden away from me. Even the safe that he had had installed in what was now my study, I cracked with my nimble little fingers as easily as a child’s toy. His cunning combination - as amateurish and stupid as José’s password - was my mother’s date of birth.
‘OK then,’ I muttered as I fell back onto the nearest sofa. ‘Give me some time to take it in. But I honestly don’t think that I’ll ever feel comfortable with it.’
‘You can feel as comfortable about it as you want. It completely depends on you. Amália knew all about the Chess Group this time last month and you were sleeping fine. So what’s new?’
‘What’s new is that now I know that I’m in danger!’
‘But the whole point is that you’re not in danger, godammit!’ he roared and delivered an angry punch to the back of the sofa where I was sitting.
‘Don’t you dare shout at me,’ I yelled back, ‘let alone start smashing up the furniture!’
He looked at me in amazement and stood stock still for a second. But only a second, because before I had a chance to do anything about it, he threw himself on top of me, laughing his head off.
‘Ana, Ana, Ana …’ he kept murmuring as we kissed.
‘Papá …?’
My blood curdled in my veins. The brat was here.
José leapt to his feet at the speed of light and stood to face his daughter, looking awkward and guilty. But he looked a hell of a lot better than I did: I was lying flat on my back on the sofa in a suggestive and highly undignified position and with my hair and clothes seriously mussed up.
‘Papá, I’m hungry. Have you had dinner yet?’
Amália was staring at us from the living-room doorway with an expression of pure disgust on her face.
‘Where have you been? We thought you were going out.’
‘In my room. Talking with Joan. I had the door closed.’
‘With Joan?’ I asked, horrified. Jesus! That’s all I needed: someone else eavesdropping on José and me talking. And not talking.
‘On IRC,’ José clarified, reading my thoughts. ‘Joan lives in Washington. Amália practices her English with her.’
‘OK, but have you eaten or haven’t you? I’m starving. I didn’t know whether I was meant to wait for you or not.’
‘Would you like a pizza?’ I suggested, as I discreetly finished making myself semi-presentable. ‘I could really murder a huge pizza with extra pepperoni.’
Amália’s eyes suddenly lit up with hope and expectation.
‘Papá doesn’t let me eat pizza. But maybe today - as a special treat?’
José began to frown, but then faced up to the fact that he wasn’t exactly in a very strong position.
‘OK. We’ll eat pizza.’
Amália yelped with pleasure - and looked at me, and gave me a smile. Hey, maybe she wasn’t so awful after all.
Half an hour later, the three of us were sitting around a major-league family-sized pepperoni pizza, digging in enthusiastically, with drops of grease shining up our chins, and washing it all down with cans of Coca-Cola. It wasn’t exactly the romantic dinner for two to celebrate the glorious start of a love affair that I’d originally had in mind, but given the circumstances, it was nothing to complain about. The next day I was going back home and how it would all end up was a complete mystery. At least in Weimar, the two of us would be alone together, I consoled myself.
José was telling us about a clock which was about to arrive at his workshop for repair. He was really excited about it: apparently the original clockmaker was unknown, but it probably dated back to the end of the sixteenth century and had been made in Antwerp.
‘It’s an absolute beauty, Amália! You’ll love it!’ he enthusiastically explained to his daughter. ‘It’s made in the shape of a lion, and its ruby eyes actually move with the hours. The clockwork mechanism runs for three days, and it chimes on the quarter hour and with the alarm setting. It’s absolutely wonderful! The wheel train that transmits power to the escapement and drives the hour and moon phase display hands on the dials was broken
in the late 1950s, but I should be able to fix it.’
‘Where do the dials go?’ I asked innocently, just to stay in the conversation.
‘In their casings - where else could they go?’ answered José, surprised, with Amália next to him nodding in agreement.
‘I would love to see your workshop, José.’
‘After dinner. Although we should really start thinking about Weimar, Ana.’
I stuffed a huge slice of pizza into my mouth just to hide how hard this was for me to handle. I was going to have to get used to talking about what I had always thought was the world’s best kept secret right in front of this frighteningly small girl.
‘You haven’t really got a lot of time,’ Amália pointed out, gulping down a mouthful of pizza with the help of a sip of Coke. My plane back to Madrid the next day was leaving at five-thirty in the afternoon.
‘The truth is,’ explained José, ‘the expert here is Ana. I just help her out.’
‘It’s not such a big deal,’ I cut in, trying to play it down. ‘Organizing the trip, making lists of stuff we need, working out what we need to buy …’
‘Will you have any outside back-up?’ asked Amália casually, as if it were a matter of little interest to her, while she took another slice of pizza out of the box.
‘Outside back-up?’ José repeated in surprise.
‘Well, someone needs to be outside while you two are underground, surely? In case something happens to you, in case you need something, whatever.’
She took a big bite out of her pizza. José and I looked at each other in amazement and then, in a flash and at the exact same time, we both realized what she was suggesting.
‘No way! Don’t even think about it,’ José countered.
‘Your daughter gets some seriously off-the-wall ideas into her head, José.’
‘If she keeps coming up with this kind of craziness, I’d rather my daughter stopped thinking at all.’
Amália looked at us both with a dangerously innocent expression on her face. She reminded me of Ezequiela putting on her ‘deeply-misunderstood little old lady’ act.
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