She stepped out of the carriage wrapped in a veil of white steam, just the way Fermín had learned to expect his beloved Marlene Dietrich to emerge in a station—be it in Berlin, Paris, or any other place that had never existed, in that glorious black-and-white twentieth century of the Capitol Cinema matinees. The woman—for although she couldn’t even be thirty, he would never have thought of describing her as a young girl, a chick, or any other of the terms currently in vogue—walked with a slight limp, lending her a somewhat intriguing and vulnerable air.

Her sharp features and presence exuded light and shade at the same time. If he’d had to describe her to his friend Daniel, he would have said she looked like one of the ghostly midnight angels that sometimes peeped out of the novels by his old cell-block pal in the prison of Montjuïc, David Martín. In particular she reminded him of the ineffable Chloé, the protagonist of many stories of doubtful decorum in the City of the Damned series, which had robbed him of so much sleep in his long sessions of feverish reading. From those novels he’d acquired an encyclopedic knowledge on the art of poisoning, the turbulent passions of criminal minds, and the techniques and variety in the making and wearing of women’s undergarments. Perhaps it was time to return to those wild Gothic romances, he told himself, before his spirit and his gonads dried up inexorably.

Fermín watched the woman as she drew near, and they exchanged glances. It was just a fleeting moment, an accidental gesture from which he quickly fled, lowering his head and allowing her to walk by. Fermín buried his eyes in his coat and faced the other way. The passengers were disappearing toward the exit, the woman with them. He stayed there, glued to his seat, almost trembling, until the station master went up to him.

“Listen, there are no more trains arriving tonight and you can’t sleep here . . .”

Fermín nodded and left, dragging his feet. When he reached the entrance hall, he looked around, but there was no sign of her. He hurried out to the street, where a cold breeze brought him back to the reality of winter.

“Alicia?” he asked the wind. “Is that you?” Sighing, he set off into the shadows of the streets, telling himself that it was not possible, that those eyes he’d met were not the same eyes he’d abandoned that faraway night of fire during the war, and that the girl he’d tried to save, Alicia, must have perished that night along with so many others. Not even his nemesis, destiny, could have such a perverse sense of humor.

Perhaps it was a ghost who had returned from the dead to remind him that someone who lets a child die doesn’t deserve to bring descendants into this world, he speculated. The promptings of the Almighty were unknowable, said the priests. This had to have a scientific explanation, he told himself. Like an early-morning hard-on.