“Tell me, Alberto. What were you doing here at this time of night?”

“I went to see my uncle. The poor man is very ill. The doctors say he won’t live long.”

“I’m very sorry.” Hendaya pulled out one of his cigarettes. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Fernandito shook his head, offering his best smile. Hendaya lit the cigarette. The tobacco embers tinted his pupils the color of copper.

The boy felt those eyes digging into his mind like needles. Say something.

“What about you?” he suddenly asked. “What are you doing around here this time of night?”

Hendaya let the smoke filter through his lips. He had the smile of a jackal.

“Work,” he said.

They both fell silent during the last few meters of the journey. When the tram stopped, Fernandito stood up and, after saying a courteous good-bye to Hendaya, made his way to the back. He got off the tram and walked at a leisurely pace toward the Vespa, then knelt down to open the padlock. Standing on the step of the tram, Hendaya watched him coldly.

“I thought you were going to take the metro home,” he said.

“Well, I meant it was nearby. A few stops away.”

Fernandito put his helmet on, as Alicia had recommended, and fastened the strap. Slowly, he told himself. He lowered the Vespa off the stand with a gentle push, and moved it along a meter or so to the end of the pavement. Hendaya’s shadow loomed in front of him, and Fernandito felt the policeman’s hand on his shoulder. He turned around.

Hendaya was smiling at him paternally. “Come on. Get off and hand me the keys.”

He barely noticed that he was nodding and handing the policeman the motorbike’s keys with a tremulous hand.

“I think you’d better come with me to the station, Alberto.”

9

Grandfather Sempere lived in a small apartment just above the bookshop on Calle Santa Ana. For as far back as the family could remember, the Semperes had always lived in that building. Daniel had been born there, and grew up in the apartment. When he married Bea, he moved only a few floors up, to the attic flat. Perhaps one day Julián would also settle in the same block. The Semperes traveled through books, not maps.

Old Sempere’s apartment was a modest-looking home, haunted by memories. Like so many other homes in the old city, it exuded a vaguely depressing atmosphere, insistent on preserving that nineteenth-century-style furniture to protect the innocents from the dreams of the present.

Gazing at the scene, with Isabella Gispert’s words still fresh in her mind, Alicia couldn’t help feeling her presence in that room. She saw Isabella stepping on the same tiles, sharing the bed with Señor Sempere in the tiny bedroom she’d noticed as she walked down the corridor. Alicia had stopped for a moment as she passed the half-open door, imagined Isabella giving birth to Daniel in that very bed and dying in it, poisoned, barely four years later.