“You’re probably not far wrong. People like Valls usually drag behind them an endless court of sycophants and enablers.”

“I must say, there was no shortage of either of those. Still, Cascos did seem a bit nervous. He could smell something and didn’t stop asking questions.”

“Did he say why Valls had asked him to come to his home?”

“I had to tighten the screws quite a bit. At first he wouldn’t say a word.”

“And then you criticize me.”

“When it comes to creeps and social climbers, I can work wonders, I must admit.”

“Go on.”

“Let me check my notebook, because there’s a long story there. . . . Here it is. Listen. It turns out that when he was younger, Don Pablito was engaged to a damsel named Beatriz Aguilar. This Beatriz ditched the poor guy when he was doing his military service and ended up marrying, on the way to the maternity ward, as it were, someone called Daniel Sempere, the son of the owner of a secondhand bookshop in Barcelona called Sempere & Sons. This was Sebastián Salgado’s favorite bookshop, which he visited a number of times as soon as he was out of prison, probably to catch up with the literary hits of the past twenty years. If you recall the report that comes with the file, two employees of the said bookshop, one of them Daniel Sempere, followed Salgado to the railway station the day he died.”

Alicia’s eyes flashed electricity. “Go on, please.”

“Getting back to our man, Cascos. The fact is that our resentful hero, Cascos Buendía, the cuckolded second lieutenant, lost contact with his paramour, the lovely Beatriz, who, so Pablito swears, was and is a beauty that in a fair world would have ended up with him and not with a nobody like Daniel Sempere.”

“Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” Alicia suggested.

“Without knowing her, and after spending half an hour with Cascos, I was glad for Doña Beatriz. That’s the background. Now we take a leap forward in time to the middle of 1957, when after parading his CV and letters of recommendation from family members through most companies in Spain, Pablo Cascos receives an unexpected call from Editorial Ariadna, founded in 1947 by Don Mauricio Valls, who is still today its main shareholder and president. Cascos is summoned to an interview, and there he is offered a job in the sales department as representative for Aragon, Catalonia, and the Balearics. At good pay and with the possibility of promotion. Pablo Cascos is delighted to accept and starts working. Some months go by, and one day, out of the blue, Don Mauricio Valls turns up in his office and tells him he wants to take him to Horcher for lunch.”

“Wow. How grand.”

“Cascos did find it strange that the president of the publishing house and the most celebrated figure of Spanish culture should invite a mid-level employee, as Doña Mariana would say, whom he’d never met personally, to the flagship restaurant of the glorious Fascists, in whose basement they probably keep the Fuhrer’s ashes in a cookie jar. Between appetizers, Valls gives him an account of all the good things he’s heard about Cascos and his work in the sales department.”