He dreams he is traveling in a train where he is the only passenger. The locomotive is galloping furiously over clouds of black steam toward a maze of factories shaped like cathedrals, pointed towers and a mass of bridges and roofs conjured up into a tangle of incomprehensible angles beneath a bloodstained sky. Shortly before entering a tunnel that seems to have no end, Valls looks out of the window and sees that the entrance is guarded by two large statues of angels with open wings, sharp teeth visible between their lips. A battered sign hanging from the lintel reads:

Barcelona

The train hurtles into the tunnel with a hellish roar. When it emerges at the other end, the silhouette of Montjuïc rises before him, with the castle outlined on the hilltop, enveloped in an aura of crimson light. Valls feels his guts tighten. A ticket inspector, bent over like an old, storm-battered tree, is approaching along the corridor and stops in front of Valls’s compartment. He wears a badge on his uniform that reads salgado.

“Your stop, Governor . . .”

The train climbs up the winding road he remembers so well and enters the prison premises. It stops in a dark corridor, and he alights. The train sets off again and disappears into darkness. Valls turns around and realizes that he’s become trapped in one of the prison cells. A dark figure is watching him from the other side of the bars. When Valls tries to explain to him that there’s been a mistake, that he’s on the wrong side, that he’s the prison governor, his voice won’t reach his lips.

The pain comes later, pulling him out of his dream like an electric current.

* * *

The smell of carrion, the darkness, and the cold are still there, but now he barely notices them. The only thing he can think of is the pain. A pain as he’s never known before. As he’s never been able to imagine. His right hand is burning. It feels as if he’s plunged it into a bonfire and can’t pull it out. He grabs his right arm with his left hand. Even in the shadows he can see that the two dark stains where his fingers should be are suppurating, oozing what looks like a thick and bloody liquid. He screams in silence.

The pain helps him remember.

The images of what has happened begin to form in his mind. He revisits the moment when Barcelona emerges in the distance, silhouetted against the early-evening sky. Through the windshield, he watches the town rise like the great backdrop for a funfair performance and remembers how much he hates that place. His loyal bodyguard, Vicente, drives silently, concentrating on the traffic. If he’s scared, he doesn’t show it. They drive along avenues and streets where he sees people wrapped up, hurrying through a curtain of snow that drifts in the air like glass mist. They head straight up a boulevard to the higher part of town, and soon they’re on a road that zigzags up toward the ridge of Vallvidrera. Valls recognizes that strange citadel of facades suspended from heaven. The city’s lower zones are left behind, a carpet of darkness below, melting into the sea. The funicular climbs the hillside like a serpent of golden light, outlining the grand modernist villas that shore up the mountain. There, sunk among the trees, he glimpses the outline of the old rambling house. Valls swallows hard. Vicente glances at him, and Valls gives him a nod. It will all be over very soon. Valls pulls back the hammer of the revolver in his hand. It is already dark when they reach the entrance to the villa. The gates are open. The car drives into the weed-infested garden, around the fountain—dry and covered in ivy. Vicente stops the car opposite the stairs that lead to the front door. He turns off the engine and pulls out his revolver. Vicente never uses a gun, only a revolver. A revolver, he says, never gets jammed.