“A taxi, gorgeous?”

18

An entire life devoted to medicine had taught Dr. Soldevila that the hardest illness to cure is habit. That afternoon, just like every afternoon since he’d taken that damned decision to close his office and succumb to the second deadliest plague known to man—retirement—the good doctor opened the balcony of his flat on Calle Puertaferrisa and stuck his nose out. The day, he thought, like almost everything in the world, was already going downhill.

Lamps adorned the streets, and the sky had acquired the pink hue of those wonderful cocktails served at the Boadas Bar with which the doctor rewarded his liver from time to time for a life of practicing what he preached. That was the signal. Armed with coat, scarf, and his doctor’s bag, and under cover of his Barcelona-gentleman’s hat, Soldevila stepped out into the street to his daily meeting with that strange spirit called Alicia Gris, placed in his path thanks to the intrigues of Fermín and the Semperes. A spirit for whom he felt infinite curiosity and a weakness that made him forget, in his long, sleepless nights, that he’d spent thirty years without touching a woman in good health.

Sauntering down the Ramblas, ignoring the city’s bustle, he was mulling over the certainty that, luckily for her and unluckily for him, Señorita Gris had recovered from her wounds with a speed he attributed not to his medical abilities but to the concentrated malice running through the veins of that shadowy creature. Soon, he lamented, he would have to discharge her.

He could always try to convince her that she should come by his office every now and then for what professionals call a follow-up, but he knew that such an attempt would be as futile as asking a Bengal tiger that had just been let out of its cage to return every Sunday morning before church to drink its little saucer of milk. Probably the best thing for everyone, except for Alicia herself, was that she should disappear from their lives, the sooner the better. All he had to do was look into her eyes to make that diagnosis and know that it was the most accurate one he’d made in his long career.

Such was the melancholy that overcame the old doctor at the thought of having to say good-bye to someone who would surely be his last patient that he was unaware, as he walked into the dark tunnel of Calle Arco del Teatro, that among the shadows hovering around him there was one that let off a peculiar perfume of strong eau de cologne and imported Virginia tobacco.

During the past week he’d learned to locate the large door of that place whose existence he’d had to swear he would not reveal even to the Holy Ghost, unless he wanted Fermín to come around to his house for an afternoon snack every day and tell him dirty jokes. “It’s best if you come alone,” they’d told him. Security reasons, alleged the Semperes, whom he would never have suspected capable of getting mixed up in such complex machinations. One spent one’s life rummaging around people’s internal organs only to discover that one hardly knew them. Life, like appendicitis, was a mystery.