“All right, Úrsula. I’ll do my best not to disappoint you.”
After all, Gorostiza had already burdened him with one commission. Why not make it two?
The countess rose to her feet with some difficulty, muttering, “Accursed rheumatism.” Then, much to his surprise and embarrassment, she took two steps forward and embraced him. He could feel her sharp, arthritic bones as he registered the scent of lavender, and of something else he couldn’t identify. Perhaps it was simply old age.
“The good Lord will reward you, my son.”
Almost at once, regaining her usual haughty air, she added:
“Several of my friends were keen for you to invest their capital, too, you know. But you needn’t worry, I dissuaded them.”
“You’ve no idea how grateful I am for your consideration,” he replied, with ill-concealed irony.
“It’s time for me to leave; I can see I’m disturbing you.”
He made to open the door for her.
“You needn’t accompany me: my maid, Manuelita, is waiting for me in the courtyard, and my coachman is outside.”
“Naturally, Countess.”
He knew there was no point insisting. The sly countess had returned to normal; how could he ever have imagined she had been transformed into a fearful, defenseless old grandmother.
She was about to step out of the room when she came to a halt as though suddenly remembering something. Looking him up and down, she gave a faint smile.
“I always wondered why you never remarried, Mauro.”
The answers he might have given to her impertinent question were many and various: because he liked his own company, because the brutal life in the mining camps was no place for any decent woman, because there was no room for another in the trio formed by himself, Mariana, and Nicolás. Or because, despite being romantically involved with several women after Elvira, he had never met anyone who made him want to take that step. The figure of Fausta Calleja floated like an ominous shadow across the room.
But before he could open his mouth, the aristocratic, tyrannical, nostalgic ex–Countess of Colima, erect as a broom handle inside her magnificent black lace dress, gripped the ivory handle of her cane and, brandishing it aloft like a foil, declared:
“If we’d met when I was thirty years younger, by God, I’d never have let you get away!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He strode down the Betlemitas alleyway that ran alongside the Palacio de Minería and bounded up the stairs. There was no longer any time for caution or regret: either he achieved his objective that night, or he would have to sail away leaving a black hole behind him. It would be only a matter of days before superintendent Calleja allowed Asencio and the Englishmen to slip into it, dealing a fatal blow to his most ambitious project.
“Did you manage to get the keys?”
He even posed the question brusquely, driven by a sense of urgency.
“Did you doubt my word, Don Mauro?”
Fausta, illuminated as before by the oil lamp, had gone back to addressing him formally. He didn’t bother to correct her. She could call him “Your Excellency” if she so wished; by now, all he cared about was gaining access to that accursed office.
“We’d better hurry.”
He followed her down a maze of small passageways that led off the central hallway and the main corridors. They scarcely spoke as they made their way stealthily, hugging the walls, until at last they reached the far side of the building. Then from among the folds of her dress the superintendent’s daughter took out a metal hoop containing two identical-looking keys. Mauro Larrea had to restrain himself from snatching them out of her hands as she jangled them before his eyes.
“You see?”
“Well done. I trust Doña Hilaria won’t notice that they—or you—are missing.”
She gave an awkward grin in the dark. As if she’d been rehearsing all afternoon in front of the mirror.
“I doubt that. I added a few drops to her tisane.”
Larrea refrained from asking what these were.
“Shall I open the door?”
Fausta shook her head even as she raised the first key to the uppermost of the two locks. He held the oil lamp up for her. The key wouldn’t fit.
“Try the other one,” he ordered.
His tone was unintentionally harsh. Careful, sonofabitch. Don’t mess things up when we’re still in the antechamber. Then the second key entered easily, and he thought he could hear a choir of angels. One down, and one to go.
Fausta was about to insert the second key when something made her hesitate.
Far off down the deserted passageways, they heard a person whistling in the distance. Someone who was coming their way, crudely warbling the melody of a popular dance.
“Salustiano,” she whispered. “The night watchman.”
“Open the door quickly.”
But, confronted with this unexpected presence, Fausta lost her nerve and couldn’t fit the key into the right lock.
“For God’s sake, hurry up.”
The whistling was coming steadily closer.
“Let me . . .”
“No, wait . . .”
“No, let me . . .”
“Wait, I’ve nearly . . .”
As they were wrangling, the hoop with the keys on it fell to the floor, skittering over the flagstones. The clatter of metal on stone made them freeze. The whistling stopped.
Holding his breath, Mauro Larrea lowered the lamp until it was almost touching the ground. Fausta, flustered, made as if to crouch down and search for the keys.
“Don’t move!” he hissed, seizing her arm.
He swept the lamp about them, illuminating his boots, the hem of her skirts, the cracks between the flagstones. But there was no sign of the keys.
The whistling resumed, like a sinister warning.
“Lift your skirts,” he whispered.
“For goodness’ sake, Don Mauro.”
“For the love of God, Fausta. Raise your skirts!”
Her delicate hands began to tremble in the flickering lamplight. Mauro Larrea, with a sudden flash of insight, sensed she was about to scream.
Three swift movements were all he needed. One to cover her mouth, another to set the lamp down on the floor, and a third to lift her skirts abruptly above her knees. Petrified, Fausta closed her eyes.
There were the keys, on the floor between her satin slippers.
“I just wanted to find them, and here they are, you see?” he whispered hastily in her ear, his hand still clapped over her mouth. “And now, please don’t make a sound. We’re going to enter. Agreed?”
She nodded, trembling. Meanwhile, the whistling was getting closer by the second. Just as discordant, but livelier. Closer.
Larrea cursed as he placed one of the keys randomly in the second lock, without success. The droning melody grew ominously louder as the second key finally went in. One turn, then another, done. He pushed Fausta inside, then hurried in after her, his body almost pressing into her back. The watchman’s whistles and footsteps were just reaching the corner when he silently closed the door. He held his breath as he leaned against the hardwood panel in the gloom, the superintendent’s daughter beside him.
The darkness inside was cavernous, with no trace of moonlight seeping in through the windows. They spent a few anxious moments while the watchman and his insistent whistling swept past the door outside, until at last they could no longer hear him.
“Forgive me for assaulting you like that,” Larrea apologized.
They remained propped against the door shoulder-to-shoulder. She was still trembling.
“Your interest in me isn’t genuine, is it?”
He was so close to achieving his goal, if he could only win back her trust. Make her believe in him once more, restore her naïve fan
tasy. The rich, handsome widower surrendering to the spinster for whom all hopes of marriage were a distant dream: with a few caresses and some more lies, he could have her eating out of his hand again. But something stopped him.
“My aim was to get in here.”
Confronted by this sudden outburst of honesty, his own conscience instantly bombarded him with questions. What will you do now, you utter fool? Tie her to a chair, gag her, knock her out while you find what you’re looking for? Or did you put on this ridiculous spectacle only to end up playing the Good Samaritan?
“I confess that at first I was foolishly happy,” said the girl. “But afterward, in the cold light of day, I realized that this was impossible. Men like you never court women like me.”
He didn’t respond, and he had a bitter taste in his mouth.
“I, too, have had suitors, do you know, Don Mauro?”
Her voice sounded calm, although still a little tremulous.
“When I was seventeen, a young tailor with whom I only exchanged billets-doux,” she went on. “Years later, a captain in the militia, the cousin of a childhood friend. And finally, in my late twenties, a draftsman, before everyone considered me an old maid. But my parents thought that none of them was good enough for me.”
As she spoke, she moved away from the door and began to approach the desks and chairs. By now they could both see enough in the dark to distinguish the outlines of things in the room.
“They were too poor, their families too humble . . . There was always some reason why my parents weren’t satisfied. My last suitor, the draftsman, resided here in the palace, and we would meet secretly in his rooms. Until one ill-fated day he made the mistake of asking my father if he could go for a stroll with me on Paseo de la Alameda. A week later, he was posted to Tamaulipas.”
By now she had reached the superintendent’s desk. For his part, Larrea remained motionless, listening intently to her to judge how she was going to react.
Fausta rummaged in the drawers and cubbyholes. Seconds later, the flame from a match cut through the darkness, and with it she lit the oil lamp that stood at one end of the enormous table.
“So, you see, you aren’t the first, though you’re certainly the most suitable, at least in my mother’s eyes. My father would protest, but she would make it her job to persuade him.”
The archive had filled with a wavering light that cast shadowy shapes.
“I’m truly sorry for my behavior.”
“Nonsense, Don Mauro,” she said sharply. “You’re not at all sorry; you are where you wanted to be. Now tell me what it is you’re looking for.”
“A document,” he confessed. Why keep up the pretense?
“Do you know where it is?”
“I have a rough idea.”
“In one of these cabinets, perhaps?”
Raising the lamp level with her chest, Fausta began walking toward a long row of glass-fronted wooden cabinets. With her free hand, she seized an object he couldn’t see from the nearest table where the clerk with the tinted spectacles worked. She smashed it against the glass, causing a cascade of shards to fall to the floor.
“For God’s sake, Fausta!”
He was too late to stop her.
“Or perhaps what you’re looking for is in here?”
Another blow, another shower of glass on the stone floor. She was using a quartz paperweight. In the shape of a cockerel’s head, it seemed. Or was it a fox? What did that matter, he thought even as she took aim once more.
He reached her in two strides and tried to restrain her, but she wriggled free.
“Stop, woman!”
The third blow produced the same effect.
“The watchman will hear! Everybody will hear!”
At last she curbed her frenzied activity and turned toward him.
“Find whatever it is you’re looking for, my dear. Help yourself.”
For heaven’s sake, what the devil is going on?
“All this destruction will have been worth it to see the look on my father’s face.” Her laughter was bitter. “And my mother’s? Can you imagine her face when she discovers that I spent the night in here with you?”
Be calm, my friend, be calm.
“I see no reason why they should find out.”
“Possibly not, but I do.”
He took a deep breath.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Absolutely. It will be my small revenge. For their not having allowed me to live the life of a normal girl, for rejecting those men who showed a real interest in me.”
“And what about me . . . where do I fit in to all this? How will you explain my presence here to your parents?”
She lifted the lamp level with her eyes and contemplated him with a mocking expression. At last there was a spark in her eyes.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Don Mauro. But I’ll think of something. In the meantime, take what you want and leave before I change my mind.”
He didn’t wait to be told twice. Snatching the box of matches she had left on the desk, he began his search like a man possessed.
He had a vague notion where the document might be but wasn’t absolutely sure. Doubtless at the end, with the most recent ones. Moving from left to right, striking one match after another, lighting his way with them until they burnt down to his fingertips, he ran his eyes quickly over the shelves. Many documents were in bundles, classified by a subject or date written on the broad ribbon fastening them.
His eyes and brain hunted frantically. March—it was March. Or was it April? Yes, April, April of last year, definitely. Finally, in the sputtering light of a dying match, he found the cabinet that contained the files from that month. But the door was locked. Should he ask Fausta for the paperweight? No, best not provoke her, now that she had apparently calmed down.
Without further ado, he smashed the glass front with his elbow. Her laughter tinkled behind him.
“I hardly dare imagine my father’s shock.”
Larrea grabbed a whole bundle and put it down on the young clerk’s desk. With trembling fingers, he started rifling through the documents. Not this one, or that one, or this other one. Until he could’ve howled for joy. There it was, with his name and his signature on it.
He could still sense her behind him, breathing heavily.
“Satisfied?”
He wheeled around. Strands of her hair had escaped from the tight bun she wore it in.
“Look here, Fausta, I don’t know how to—”
“There’s a trapdoor that leads down to the basement, from there you can reach the alleyway opposite the hospital. I imagine it won’t be long before someone arrives; the watchman must have roused half the building by now.”
“God bless you.”
“Do you know something, Don Mauro? I don’t regret my naivete. At least it allowed me an illusion.”
He hurriedly rolled up the documents and slipped them inside his frock coat.
Glass crunching beneath his feet, he cupped her cheeks in his hands and kissed her as if she were the greatest love of his life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mauro Larrea’s departure on his journey into the unknown took place in a manner befitting his social status, as though his world had not been split in two like a gigantic watermelon. He set off in his own carriage accompanied by Andrade, Santos Huesos, a pair of trunks, and an escort of twelve strong men, Chinaco soldiers, armed to the teeth to protect them against any lurking bandits. All were on horseback, rifles resting crossways on their saddles, pistols holstered; fighters hardened during the Reform War, paid for every penny by Ernesto Gorostiza.
“The least I can do to show my gratitude, dear friend, is to pay for your protection as far as Veracruz,” he had written in a message to Larrea. “Banditry is part of our everyday life, but neither you nor I shou
ld expose ourselves to any unnecessary risk.”
The mansion had become a hive of activity the moment he returned from the Palacio de Minería in the early hours, the papers relating to Las Tres Lunas tucked safely under his frock coat. Get a move on, Santos, we’re leaving! Wake the servants, we haven’t a moment to lose. The two trunks, travel capes, food and water for the coach journey—everything was prepared. Soon came the whinny of horses, loud whispers, footsteps crossing the stone courtyard, and the many servants, still sleepy-eyed, anxious in the realization that their master was actually leaving.
Larrea was reminding the housekeeper to ensure the upstairs rooms were securely locked, when behind him he heard someone call his name. He felt the blood pulsing in his temples, and he tensed.
He knew who it was without having to turn around.
“What the devil are you doing here?”
The man now gazing at him with doleful eyes had been waiting a day and half for this meeting: crouched against a nearby wall, wrapped in a filthy blanket, the brim of his hat pulled down over his face. Warming himself at a meager fire and eating street food, just as so many other souls with no home and no master did day in and day out in that crowded city.
Dimas Carrús, the moneylender’s son who always had the look of a dog beaten by his father and by life, took a step toward Larrea.
“I came to the capital on an errand.”
Mauro Larrea frowned, every muscle in his body alert. He drew closer to the other man.
“What errand, you wretch?”
“To size up the dimensions of your house. The number of openings, windows, and balconies it has. How many servants you employ.”
“And have you done that?”
“I even had a scrivener note it down in case it slipped my mind.”
“In that case, get out of here.”
“I’ve brought a reminder, too.”