I’d laugh at myself too if I could, thought Daniel. Not that long ago he’d been able to make fun of his own shadow, to humor Fermín and his jibes, to embody the eternal naive boy adopted by his quixotic guardian angel. It had been a good part to play, and he’d felt comfortable with it. He would have loved to continue being the Daniel that all the others around him saw, and not the Daniel who, in the early hours, when Bea and Julián were fast asleep, would grope his way down to the bookshop, take shelter in the back room, and push the plaster panel hidden behind a broken old radiator.

There, at the very bottom of a box, covered by a thick pile of dusty old books, was the scrapbook filled with the press clippings about Mauricio Valls he’d been stealing from the newspaper library in the Ateneo. The public life of the minister was recorded in those pages, year after year. He knew every one of those news items and press releases by heart. The last one, the one about his death in a traffic accident, was the most painful.

Valls, the man who had stolen his mother from him, had got away.

* * *

Daniel had learned to hate that face, so eager to be photographed in vainglorious poses. He’d come to the conclusion that you never really know who you are until you learn to hate. And when you really hate, when you abandon yourself to that anger that burns you inside, that slowly consumes what little good you thought you had in your baggage, you do it secretly. Daniel smiled bitterly. Nobody thought him capable of keeping a secret. He’d never been able to, even as a child, when keeping secrets is an art and a way of staving off the world and its emptiness. Not even Fermín or Bea suspected that he kept that folder hidden there, containing the scrapbook in which he so often took refuge, feeding the darkness that had grown inside him since discovering that Mauricio Valls, the great white hope of the regime, had poisoned his mother. It was all conjecture, they told him. Nobody could know the truth of what had happened. Daniel had left the suspicions behind him and lived in a world of certainties.

And the worst of them all, the most difficult to contemplate, was that justice would never be served.

The day he’d dreamed of, poisoning his soul, the day he would find Mauricio Valls, make him look into his eyes and see in them the hatred he had fed—that day would never come. Nor would he pick up the gun he’d bought from a black marketeer who sometimes did business in Can Tunis, which he kept wrapped in rags at the bottom of the box. It was an old gun, dating from the war, but the ammunition was new and the guy had taught him how to use it.

“First you get him in the legs, below the knees. And you wait. You watch him try to pull himself along. Then shoot him in his guts. And you wait. You let him writhe. Then you shoot on the right side of his chest. And you wait. You wait for his lungs to fill with blood, until he chokes in his own shit. Only then, when you think he’s already dead, do you empty the last three bullets into his head. One in the back of the neck, one in his temple, and one under his chin. Then you throw the gun into the Besós River, near the beach, and let the current take it away.”