“I won’t say no.”

Vargas had always heard it said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, at least until lunchtime. To finish it off with a good Havana cigar could only bring good luck. Leaving a halo of Caribbean smoke, he set off again, with a full stomach and mounting optimism. The sky was tinged with amber, and the misty light sliding down the facades made him think that this would be one of those rare days when he’d discover the truth, or something that looked sufficiently like it.

* * *

About fifty meters behind him, under a patch of shadow cast by the cornices of a decaying building, the eyes of the observer followed him relentlessly. With that cigar between his lips, full belly, and the air of someone steeped in false hopes, Vargas seemed to him closer to the end than ever. What little respect he’d managed to feel for the policeman was evaporating like the film of mist that still crept along the cobbled pavement beneath his feet.

He would never be like that, he told himself. He would never allow alcohol and complacency to cloud his judgment or let his body become a useless bundle of bones. He’d always found old people disgusting. If people didn’t have the dignity to jump out of a window or under a train once decrepitude set in, somebody should shoot them, deal them a death blow, or remove them from circulation like mangy dogs as a matter of public health.

The observer smiled, never remiss in celebrating his own witty remarks. He was always going to be young, because he was smarter than the rest. He wasn’t going to make the mistakes that allowed someone with Vargas’s potential to become a sad reflection of his former self. Like that yokel Lomana, who had been kicked in the ass all his life and then died on his knees, holding on to his gullet with both hands while he, the observer, watched his eyes: the capillaries bursting, the pupils dilating into a black mirror. Another piece of shit who hadn’t known how to get out of the way in time.

He wasn’t afraid of Vargas. He wasn’t afraid of what the cop could, or believed he could, discover. He bit his tongue so as not to laugh. Time was nearly up. And when there was no more need to follow Vargas, and all that business had concluded, he would be able to enjoy his reward: Alicia. The two of them alone, in no hurry. Just as the master had promised him. With enough time and skills to teach that velvet slut that there was nothing left to learn from her, and that, before dispatching her into the oblivion from which she should never have emerged, he was going to work her good and deep and show her what pain really was.

* * *

When Alicia opened her eyes, the light of dawn was blazing in the windows. She turned her head to one side and buried her face in the sofa cushion. She was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and the poisonous taste of bitter almonds lingered in her mouth, left by the pills soaked in alcohol. Something hammered in her ears. She half opened her eyes again and saw the bottle of pills on the table next to the remains of a glass of warm white wine, which she swallowed in one gulp. When she tried to fill it again, she discovered that the bottle was empty. Only when she groped her way to the kitchen to look for another one did she realize that the hammering she heard in her temples wasn’t her pulse or the shadow of a migraine brought about by the pills, but the sound of someone knocking on her door. She held on to a chair in the dining room and rubbed her eyes. A voice on the other side of the door kept repeating her name insistently. She dragged herself to the entrance and opened the door. Fernandito, who looked as if he’d been to the end of the world and back, gazed at her more in alarm than relief.