“Take over from Bea?” asked Señor Sempere. “Take over from what?”

“A number of issues,” Fermín cut in. “Daniel, don’t leave the premises. I’ll go. I have experience in matters of military intelligence, and I can slip out like an eel. Go on, beat it. It mustn’t look as if we’re scheming.”

Daniel walked through the back-room curtain reluctantly, leaving them alone.

“Well?” asked Señor Sempere. “Are you going to tell me once and for all what’s going on here?”

Fermín smiled meekly. “Do you fancy a Sugus?”

8

The day proved endless for Daniel. The hours dragged by as he waited for Bea and let his father tend to the customers. Fermín had left, shortly after palming off one of his byzantine tales on Señor Sempere, consisting of monumental fibs whispered in confidential tones, which he hoped would silence the man’s questions, for a few hours at least, and appease his alarm.

“We must appear more normal than usual, Daniel,” he’d said shortly before sneaking out through the back-room window into the square of the church of Santa Ana, to avoid detection by the officer Hendaya had left watching the bookshop.

“And when have we ever been normal?”

“Don’t get all existential now. As soon as I see that the coast is clear, I’ll slip out and take over from Bea.”

Bea appeared at last around noon, when Daniel’s hair was beginning to gray and he’d bitten his nails up to his elbows.

“Fermín has told me everything,” she said.

“Did he get there all right?”

“Apparently he stopped on the way to buy some sweet biscuits he couldn’t resist because he says they’re called ‘nun’s farts,’ and some white wine.”

“White wine?”

“For Alicia. Which Dr. Soldevila has confiscated.”

“How is she?”

“Stable. The doctor says she’s still weak, but there’s no infection and she doesn’t have a fever.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“What about?”

“Why do I have the feeling that everyone is trying to hide something from me?”

Bea stroked his cheek. “Nobody is hiding anything from you, Daniel. Where’s Julián?”

“At the nursery school. Sofía took him.”

“I’ll go and collect him this afternoon. We have to keep up an appearance of normality. Where’s your father?”

“Back there, fuming.”

Bea lowered her voice. “What did you tell him?”

“Fermín foisted one of his epic poems on him.”

“I see. I’m off to the Boquería market to get a few things. Do you want anything?”

“A normal life.”

* * *

Halfway through the afternoon, Daniel’s father left him alone in the shop. Bea hadn’t returned yet, and Daniel, worried and in a filthy mood because he felt duped, had decided to go up to the apartment with the excuse that he was going to take a nap. For days now he’d harbored the suspicion that Alicia and Fermín were keeping something from him. And now, it seemed, Bea had joined them.

He spent a couple of hours mulling over the matter, winding himself up and gnawing away at his soul. Experience had taught him that in such cases it was better to act dumb and pretend not to have noticed. After all, that was the role he was always given in the show. Nobody expected good old Daniel, the poor motherless boy, the perpetual adolescent with nothing on his conscience, to find things out. That’s what the others were there for, to bring him the answers written down and even the questions to boot. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he hadn’t been wearing short trousers for years. Sometimes even little Julián looked at him out of the corner of his eye and laughed, as if his father had come to the world to play the fool and look like a simpleton while the others revealed life’s mysteries to him.