“Do we have your word?”

Alicia nodded. Getting in and out of a car on a bad day was never easy, but she didn’t want that pair to see her looking even more crushed than she actually was: as she stood up, she concealed the piercing pain in her hip with a smile. The doorman walked with her to the entrance, protecting her against the rain with the umbrella; a battalion of concierges and valets seemed to be waiting for her, ready to escort her through the hall to her appointment. When she noticed the two flights of stairs rising from the lobby to the grand dining hall, she knew she should have taken the walking stick. She pulled out a pillbox from her handbag and swallowed a pill. Before beginning the ascent, she breathed in deeply.

A couple of minutes and dozens of steps later, she stopped to catch her breath outside the doors to the dining hall. The concierge who had accompanied her noticed the film of perspiration on her forehead. Alicia smiled reluctantly. “From here on, I think I can manage all by myself, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course. As you please, miss.”

The concierge left discreetly, but Alicia didn’t need to look back to know that he was still watching her and would not take his eyes off her until she’d entered the dining hall. She dried her forehead with a handkerchief and studied the scene.

Barely a whisper of voices and the tinkling of a teaspoon slowly turning in a china cup. The Palace dining hall opened up before her, possessed, it seemed, by dancing flashes that dripped down from the large dome beneath the hammering rain. She had always thought the structure resembled a huge glass willow tree that hung like a canopy of rose windows taken from a hundred cathedrals and put together in remembrance of the Belle Époque. Nobody could accuse Leandro of having bad taste.

Under that bubble of multicolored glass, only one table was taken among a large number of empty ones. Two figures were being watched diligently by half a dozen waiters, who maintained the exact distance from the table that was too far to overhear their conversation but close enough to read their gestures. After all, the Palace, unlike her temporary address, the Hispania, was a first-class establishment. A creature of bourgeois habits, Leandro lived and worked there. Literally. He had occupied suite 814 for years and liked to carry out his business in that dining hall, which, as Alicia suspected, allowed him to believe that he lived in Proust’s Paris and not in Franco’s Spain.

She trained her eyes on the two diners. Leandro Montalvo, sitting, as usual, facing the entrance. He was a man of average height, with the soft and rounded build of a well-to-do accountant. Hiding behind oversize horn-rimmed glasses that helped him conceal his sharp eyes. Affecting the relaxed and affable air of a provincial lawyer, the sort who enjoys operettas, or a successful bank clerk who likes visiting museums after work. Good old Leandro.