* * *

They all called him Bernal. That wasn’t his real name, but he hadn’t bothered to correct them. He’d only been in that damned house that made your hair stand on end for a few days, at Hendaya’s orders, but he’d seen enough. Enough to realize that the less that ripper and his team of butchers knew about him, the better. In just under two months he would fade away into retirement with a miserable pension as a reward for his burned-out life in the police force. At this point in the farce, his great dream was to die alone and forgotten in a dark, damp room in some boardinghouse on Calle Joaquín Costa. He’d rather die like an old hooker than as a bogus hero, honoring those pretty kids they were sending from the Ministry of the Interior: the new centurions, all of them cut from the same cloth, ready to clear the streets of Barcelona of poor wretches and third-rate reds who could barely stand up to pee, having spent half their lives hidden or walled up in prisons as crowded as beehives. There are times when it’s more honorable to die forsaken than to live in glory.

The wrongly named Bernal was lost in these thoughts when he opened the door to the kitchen. Hendaya insisted on him making the rounds, and Bernal always followed orders to the letter. That was his specialty.

He only had to take three steps to notice that something was out of place. A gust of fresh air brushed his face, and he looked up toward the far end of the kitchen. A flash of lightning revealed the dented edges of the broken windowpane. He walked over to the corner and knelt down by the pieces of glass that had fallen from the window. A trail of footprints petered out over the dust—a light tread and tiny soles, with matching heel marks. A woman. The false Bernal weighed up the evidence. He stood up and walked over to the pantry room, then pushed the wall at the end and opened the entrance to the tunnel. He took a few steps down, until the reek that came from below advised him to stop. He turned back and was about to close the access when he noticed the torch hanging from the hook. It was swaying gently. The police officer closed the door and returned to the kitchen. He had a quick look around, and after mulling it over for a bit, he rubbed out the footprints with his foot and pushed the bits of glass into a dark corner. He wasn’t going to be the one to tell Hendaya, when he returned, that someone had paid a surprise visit to the house. The last poor soul who gave Hendaya bad news had ended up with a broken jaw. And that was one of his right-hand men. They were not going to get his help. With a bit of luck, he’d be given a little medal in seven weeks’ time, which he was planning to pawn to pay for the services of a classy tart with whom to bid farewell to this rotten world. If he managed to make it through this last assignment, he could still salvage a gray and ill-fated old age in which to forget what he’d witnessed during those last days in El Pinar, and convince himself that everything he’d done in the name of duty belonged to a man named Bernal, someone he’d never been, and never would be.