“If that was his only aim, he succeeded a long time ago. But you see he admitted he wanted to get his revenge. That’s what I wanted to know. Because I don’t expect he confessed to the murders, did he?”

“No. All he said was that as he was leaving the beach that day, from the promenade, he saw your boyfriend disappear from sight out at sea. And when he found out next day that he’d drowned, he felt that, with that death, the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth had been carried out. He said it gave him the idea for a novel about justice and proportionate punishment.”

“It wasn’t enough for him. My God, Ramiro’s death wasn’t enough.”

She looked once more across the street while feeling in her pocket for a handkerchief. She glanced at her watch again and dried her eyes.

“Maybe not,” I admitted. “But he claims that since that day all he’s done about it is write his novel. A novel in which you and he are characters. He assured me he hasn’t seen you since then and that he only found out your parents had died when he got your letter.”

She shook her head, still looking out of the window. “That’s a lie: he was at the cemetery the day of their funeral.”

“I asked him about that: he goes there every day to visit his daughter’s grave. He claims not to have seen you.”

She turned to look at me angrily. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected him to admit anything. And he seems to have a lie ready for everything.”

“Actually what I found most disconcerting was that he seemed to be telling the truth. He talked as if he had nothing to hide. He even told me something he could have kept secret, about your brother’s death, something we didn’t know: he did correspond with inmates of that prison at various times. He said the police had looked into it and that he gave Superintendent Ramoneda any letters he’d kept.”

“But there might have been other letters that he got rid of-that he made sure to get rid of,” Luciana interrupted. “He could have found out from other inmates that that prisoner got out to commit robberies. And if he’d followed my brother and knew he was involved with that woman, all he had to do was send the anonymous letters to goad the killer on. Kloster wrote them. I knew it as soon as I saw them. He can’t fool me.”

“He said he and Ramoneda talked about crime fiction and that at one point the superintendent showed him the anonymous letters and asked him what kind of person he thought could have written them. Apparently the superintendent thought it was more likely it was you.”

She sat in silence for a moment, her hands trembling helplessly.

“Don’t you see?” she murmured. “Don’t you see how he twists everything and turns everyone against me? I suppose he tried to make you believe it was me?”

“Actually, no, he didn’t. That’s what I found most surprising. He seems to think there’s another possibility. I suppose it’s what he’s writing about in his novel. He said I’d never believe it.”

“There is no other explanation: it’s him. I don’t understand how you can still doubt it. He’ll go on and on, until I’m all alone. Until I’m the last one left. That’s the revenge he’s after. The one he marked in the Bible: seven for one. And now Valentina is in there at this moment. In there with him. I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to her. I don’t think I can wait any longer,” she said, making as if to stand. I stopped her.

“When I mentioned that section in the Bible he said it was wrong to interpret it that way. That the number seven is actually a symbol of completeness, of the perfectly finished. The vengeance that God reserves for himself. Even if it is Kloster behind the deaths, maybe the punishment is complete.”

“In the novel about that sect that he was dictating to me, the number seven wasn’t symbolic. They killed seven members of a family one by one. That’s what he’s been planning for me from the beginning and that’s why he never had that novel published, so as not to give himself away. Did you ask why he was standing outside my grandmother’s nursing home?”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t very well subject him to an interrogation,” I said, a little irritably. “I just tried to get him to talk. And I think I did pretty well.”

Something in my voice made her back down, as if she realised for the first time that she’d asked too much of me.

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said. “How did you get him to see you?”

“I said I was writing a novel about the strange series of deaths around you, and I wanted to hear his version of events. I thought it was also a way of letting him know that somebody else is aware of what’s happening to you.”

I realised Luciana was no longer listening to me. She was watching Kloster’s front door.

“Thank God,” she murmured. “I can see her. She’s just come out of the house.”

I looked round out of the window, but I’d missed Valentina for the second time. She must have been walking away in the opposite direction, because from her seat Luciana could still see her.

“I think she’s heading for the subway,” she said.

“Safe and sound, I hope,” I said. “We can leave now too.” I signalled to the waiter for the bill.

“I’m going to tell her everything tonight. She has to know what he’s like, before it’s too late. Can I call over the next few days if I notice she’s behaving strangely? I feel she’s slipping away from me, and I can’t watch over her any more.”

“I’m going to Salinas tomorrow,” I said. “To give a seminar. I’ll be away for a fortnight.”

She was silent for a moment, as if I’d said something unexpected and brutal. She looked at me, all her defences down, and I saw the dismay in her eyes, and the abyss of madness dangerously close. Convulsively, almost involuntarily, she grasped my hands across the table. She didn’t seem to realise how hard she was gripping, or that she was digging her nails into my palms.

“Please, don’t leave me alone with this,” she said hoarsely. “I’ve had nightmares every night since I saw him outside the nursing home. I know something very bad is about to happen to us.”

Gently I freed myself from her hands and stood up. I wanted to get away from there as soon as I could.

“Nothing else is going to happen,” I said. “Now he knows that somebody else knows.”

Nine

As I left the café, I thought I was escaping, but outside, far from feeling free, I could still hear Luciana’s voice in my mind, begging me not to leave her alone, and feel her hands gripping my wrists. It was a cold night, at the start of a dark, dismal August, but I decided to go for a walk before heading home. Above all I wanted to think. Over and over I told myself I’d already done enough for Luciana and shouldn’t let myself be swept along by her madness. I wandered through emptying streets, the shops closed and rubbish strewn over the pavements. Now and then I passed cartoneros, silent, eyes lowered, hauling their handcarts to the railway station. The tide had ebbed from the city. All that remained was the rotten smell from torn rubbish bags and the sudden, occasional light from an empty bus as it rumbled by.

Did I really believe, as Luciana had accused, that Kloster was innocent? Episode by episode, I had believed that what he’d told me was true. But he had also appeared to be a player who was entirely in control, who could lie with the truth. What he’d told me might have been the truth, but it probably wasn’t the entire truth. And also, coldly considering the facts, all explanations (as Luciana had almost screamed at me) seemed to point to Kloster. Because if it wasn’t him, what else was there? A series of fantastic coincidences? Kloster had mentioned runs of bad luck. He’d made me feel small-I could still hear his contempt as he mocked me for having written a novel about chance without knowing that such things occurred. I came to a wide avenue and saw a bar frequented by taxi drivers that was still open. I went in and ordered coffee and toast. What exactly had Kloster said? That I should think of tossing a coin. A sequence of three heads or three tails in a row was not unusual. Chance too had tendencies. I found a quarter in my pocket, searched for my pen and spread a paper napkin on the table. I tossed the coin in the air ten times and wrote down the series of heads and tails using dashes and crosses. I tossed the coin another ten times and wrote out a second sequence beneath the first. I went on tossing the coin, with an increasingly deft movement of the thumb, and noted a few more series on the same napkin, one under the other, until the waiter brought my coffee and toast.