Bartolomé nodded. Vargas took his finger off the trigger and withdrew the weapon.

Alicia smiled at the guard as if they were old friends. “Go on, go home and get yourself a glass of nice warm brandy. And pick up your money . . .”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bartolomé knelt down and picked up what little cash he carried in his wallet.

“Don’t forget your stick.”

The man picked it up and tied it to his belt. “Can I go now?”

“There’s nobody stopping you.”

Bartolomé hesitated a few moments but then began to retreat toward the exit. Before his silhouette was lost in the shadows, Alicia called him. “Bartolomé?”

The guard’s footsteps stopped.

“Remember, we have your wallet, and we know where you live. Don’t make us have to pay you a visit. My colleague here has a very bad temper. Good night.”

They heard him scampering off as fast as he could.

31

Miquel came up to the apartment carrying a couple of Thermos flasks with hot coffee and a whole tray of pastries fresh from the oven of his friend’s bakery on the corner. The pastries smelled divine. Once they’d divided up the folders, they sat on the floor facing each other. Alicia polished off three pastries in a row and filled a large cup with coffee, which she began to sip while engrossed in the first of the files stolen from Brians’s boxes. After a bit she raised her head and noticed that Vargas was gazing at her, looking rather embarrassed.

“What?”

He pointed to her skirt, which Alicia had pulled up so she could lean against the sofa.

“Don’t be childish. Can’t be anything you haven’t seen before, I hope. Concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Vargas didn’t reply, but he changed position to avoid seeing those fine seams in her stockings, which disturbed his focus on the gripping legalistic prose of the defender of lost causes’ dossiers and summary proceedings.

As they journeyed silently into dawn on the wings of caffeine and sugar, a landscape with figures slowly emerged out of the documentation. On a large sketch pad, Alicia drew what looked like a map, with notes, dates, names, arrows, and circles. Every now and then Vargas would find something relevant and hand it to her. There was no need to say anything; she just glanced at it and nodded. She seemed to have a prodigious skill for establishing links and connections, as if her brain spun a hundred times faster than the brains of other mortals. Vargas began to sense the process governing his colleague’s mind and, far from questioning it or trying to work out its internal logic, he simply acted as a filter, providing the data with which she was constructing her map, piece by piece.

Two and a half hours passed before Vargas paused. “I don’t know about you, but I’m wiped out.” He had gone through all the files allotted to him when they divided up the tasks. The caffeine he’d substituted for his blood was already losing strength, and his eyes could no longer focus.