Victoria felt a knot in her stomach.

“You don’t have to decide now. I know what you’ve been through, and I know you’re confused. I know you don’t trust me, or anyone. It’s perfectly understandable. Nor would I, in your place. But you’ve got nothing to lose by giving us an opportunity. One more day. Or a few hours. At any moment, without having to give your reasons to anyone, you can leave. But I hope you don’t—I beg you not to. Give us this opportunity to help others.”

Victoria looked down and saw that her hands were shaking.

Leandro smiled with infinite gentleness. “Please . . .”

At some point, through her tears, she consented.

4

For an hour and a half Leandro reconstructed what they had been able to uncover.

“I’ve been trying to piece together the facts for some time. What I’m going to do is summarize what we know, or think we know. You’ll see that there are some gaps, and that we’re probably wrong on some points. Or on many. That’s where you come in. If you like, I’ll tell you what I think happened, and you correct me whenever I’m wrong. All right?”

Leandro had a soothing voice that invited one to surrender. Victoria wanted to close her eyes, be cocooned for a time in the warm embrace of that voice, framed by the velvety outline of words that acquired sense, no matter what their meaning was.

“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll try.”

The man smiled with such gratitude and warmth that he made her feel safe and protected against whatever lay in wait beyond the walls of that place. Little by little, unhurriedly, he told her the story she knew only too well. The account began when she was just a small girl and her father, Víctor Mataix, met a man called Miguel Ángel Ubach, a powerful banker whose wife—a regular reader of Mataix’s books—had persuaded him to hire Mataix to ghostwrite his autobiography in exchange for a substantial sum of money.

Victoria’s father, who was going through financial difficulties, accepted the assignment. After the war, the banker and his wife paid the Mataix family an unexpected visit in their home next to Carretera de las Aguas in Vallvidrera. Señora Ubach was a beauty queen straight out of a magazine, and quite a bit younger than her husband. She didn’t want to ruin her perfect figure by bringing a child into the world, but she liked children, or the idea of having them and letting her servants bring them up, almost as much as she liked pet cats and a well-mixed vodka martini. The Ubachs spent the day with the Mataix family. By then her parents had given her a sister, Sonia, who was still a baby. When they left, Señora Ubach kissed the girls good-bye and declared that they were adorable. A few days later a group of armed men returned to the Mataixes’ house in Vallvidrera. They arrested her father and took him to the prison in Montjuïc Castle, and they took Victoria away with her sister, leaving their mother behind, so badly wounded they presumed she was dead.