“Go to sleep,” suggested Alicia. “It’s late.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“How is that possible?”

“The night and I, you know.”

“Do you mind if I lie down on your sofa for a while?”

“It’s all yours, although I can’t promise I won’t make any noise.”

“Not even a brass band would wake me.”

* * *

The cathedral bells did wake him. He opened his eyes to see a thick mist floating in the air, smelling of coffee and American tobacco. The sky above the rooftops was the color of young wine. Alicia was still sitting on the floor, a cigarette between her lips. She had taken off her skirt and her blouse, and was wearing only a black negligée that induced anything but calm. Vargas managed to creep over to the bathroom. There, he stuck his head under the tap and looked at himself in the mirror.

He found a blue silk robe hanging on the bathroom door and threw it at Alicia. “Cover up.”

She caught it in mid-flight, stood up, stretched, and put it on.

“I’m going to open the window before the fire brigade comes to get us out of here,” Vargas warned her.

A breath of fresh air penetrated the living room, and the swirl of smoke slipped out like a ghost trapped in a dark spell. Vargas stared at the remains of the two coffee Thermos flasks, the tray of pastries reduced to sugar dust, and the two ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs smoked to the very end. “Tell me all of this has been worth it,” he pleaded.

Apart from the remains of the battle, Alicia had left a tangled pile of about a dozen sheets from the sketching pad. She picked them up and began to stick them on the wall with tape until they formed a circle. Vargas went over to look. She licked her lips like a satisfied cat.

The policeman shook the Thermos flasks to see whether there was anything left in them and managed to fill half a cup. He placed a chair in front of Alicia’s diagram and nodded. “Impress me.”

She tied up her silk dressing gown and pulled her hair back into a knot. “Do you want the long version or the short one?”

“Begin at the beginning, and we’ll see how it goes.”

Alicia stood in front of her mural like a schoolteacher, though she looked more like a Victorian geisha with suspicious night habits.

“Montjuïc Castle, between 1939 and 1944,” she began. “Mauricio Valls is the prison governor, having just married Elena Sarmiento, daughter and heiress of a wealthy industrialist close to the regime who belongs to a sort of cabal of bankers, business owners, and members of the nobility, known as Franco’s Crusaders because, to a large extent, they’re financing the coffers of the Nacionales. Among them are Don Miguel Ángel Ubach, founder and main shareholder of the Banco Hipotecario, from whose head office emerges the investment firm Metrobarna you visited yesterday.”