* * *

The echo of footsteps in the dark roused him from his dreams. He looked carefully and noticed a silhouette forming among the folds of the mist. It was advancing toward him. Braulio took a step back and bumped into the entrance door. The visitor didn’t seem much taller than he was, but he transmitted a strange calm and determination that made the few hairs remaining beneath Braulio’s blondish hairpiece stand on end.

The individual stopped in front of Braulio and offered him an open packet of cigarettes. “You must be Señor Don Braulio.”

Nobody had ever called Braulio Señor or Don in his entire life, and he discovered that he didn’t like the sound of that address coming from the stranger’s lips. “And who are you? Has Hendaya sent you?”

The visitor simply smiled and raised the packet of cigarettes up to Braulio, who accepted one. He then pulled out a gas lighter and held out the flame.

“Thanks,” Braulio murmured.

“You’re welcome. Tell me, Don Braulio, who’s in there?”

“A pile of stiffs—what do you expect?”

“I’m referring to the living.”

Braulio hesitated. “So Hendaya sent you, right?”

The stranger just fixed his eyes on him without losing his smile.

Braulio gulped. “The pathologist, and a policeman from Madrid.”

“Vargas?”

Braulio nodded.

“How is it?”

“Excuse me?”

“The cigarette. How is it?”

“Very good. Imported?”

“Like all good things. You have keys, don’t you, Don Braulio?”

“Keys?”

“To the morgue. I’m afraid I might need them.”

“Hendaya didn’t say anything about giving any keys to anyone.”

The stranger shrugged. “Change of plans,” he said, as he calmly slipped on a pair of gloves.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

The flash of the steel only lasted a second. Braulio noticed the blade of the knife, the sharpest cold he’d ever known in his miserable existence, sinking into his guts. At first he felt no pain, only that awareness of extreme clarity and weakness as the blade sliced his guts. Then, when the stranger sank the knife again into the lower abdomen, this time right up to the handle, and pulled it strongly upward, Braulio felt that cold turning to fire. A claw of red hot iron made its way toward his heart. His throat flooded with blood and drowned his screams, as the stranger dragged him into the alley and pulled out the bunch of keys fastened to his belt.

20

He walked through the corridors in the half-light until he reached the passage leading to the autopsy room. A greenish halo filtered through the cracks in the door. He could hear the voices of the two men. They spoke like old friends, leaving silences that didn’t require explaining and making jokes to ease the job at hand. Standing on his toes to look through the tinted glass circle crowning the door, he studied Vargas’s profile as he sat on one of the marble slabs, and that of the pathologist, leaning over the corpse. He heard the doctor describe in all detail the fruit of his labors. He couldn’t help smiling at the skill with which the pathologist unraveled the details of Lomana’s last moments, without being disgusted by the smoothness of the cut or the precision with which he’d sliced the arteries and the windpipe of that lout, just to see him die on his knees and enjoy the panic in his eyes as the blood gushed through his hands. Among experts, it was only gentlemanly to recognize a job well done.