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“The Alcayagas? You mean the kind engineer who designed and built the tunnel behind this house?”

“Yes,” I said in a fog, and not just the one produced by the steam still billowing from the bathroom, “that’s him — that’s his family and him.”

I selected their number and pushed talk.

“Hello, María de Lourdes?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Yves, Yves Navarro. . Magdalena’s father. .”

“Oh, yes, how are you, Yves?”

“My daughter. . No one’s answering the phone at our house.”

“Don’t worry. Magdalena’s sleeping over here. Chepina’s having a sleepover.”

“May I speak with her?”

“Yves, don’t be cruel. They were exhausted. They went down an hour ago. .”

“But my wife, Asunción. .”

“She didn’t show. She never came for Magdalena, but she called. She said she was running late at the office and would go straight to meet you at your mutual client’s house — what’s his name?”

“Count Vlad.”

“That’s it, Count What’s-his-name. Foreign names are so hard for me to pronounce! And she said you should wait for her there.”

“But, how’d she know I’d be coming here?”

María de Lourdes hung up. Vlad gave me a sarcastic look. He feigned a shiver.

“Yves. . is it alright if I call you by your first name?”

I nodded without thinking.

“And remember, all my friends call me Vlad. Yves, my robe please. Do you want me to catch pneumonia? There, in the armoire, the one on the left.”

I approached the closet like a sleepwalker. I opened the door to find there was only a single garment in the closet, an old heavy brocade robe, a bit threadbare, its collar made of wolf fur. It was a long robe that reached down to the ankles, worthy of a czar from a Russian opera, and embroidered in antique golds.

I took the garment and tossed it over Count Vlad’s shoulders.

“Yves,” the Count said, “don’t forget to close the armoire door.”

I looked back at the closet (a word obviously unknown to Vlad Radu) and only then did I see, stuck with thumb-tacks to the inside of the door, a photograph of my wife, Asunción, with our daughter, Magdalena, sitting on her mother’s lap.

“Vlad. Call me Vlad. All my friends call me Vlad.”

Chapter 8

I have no idea what possessed me that night, but against my better judgment, I stayed for dinner with Vlad. At best I can rationalize why I didn’t return home. There was nothing to worry about. My daughter, Magdalena, was fine, sleeping over at the Alcayagas’. My wife, Asunción, was simply running late; she would come for me right here at Count Vlad’s, and I would drive her home. In any case I called my wife’s cell phone, and when she didn’t answer, left the usual message.

I didn’t mention having discovered the photograph. Such an acknowledgment would give this suspect individual the upper hand. The only defenses I had against him were to keep calm, to ask for no explanations, and to never seem surprised. What else could a good lawyer do? Zurinaga must have given pictures of me, of my family, to the exiled Balkan nobleman, so that he could see with whom he would be dealing in this faraway and exotic country, Mexico.

That explanation calmed my nerves.

The Count and I sat at either end of a strange, opaque, non-reflective lead table, unlikely to stimulate one’s appetite, especially if the meal — as this one — consisted only of animal organs. Livers, kidneys, testicles, stomachs, and slack skins. . were all smothered in sauces of onions and herbs that I recognized thanks to the old French recipes that my mother enjoyed: parsley, tarragon, of course, and others whose taste I did not recognize — but my mother had always used garlic as well.

So I asked, “You have any garlic?” expecting a withering look and sudden silence, followed by a swift change of subject.

“We use pork dust, Maître Navarro. From an old recipe that Saint Eutychius prescribed to expel a demon that a nun had swallowed up without noticing.”

Vlad seemed amused by my look of skepticism.

“According to a well-known legend in my country,” Count Vlad continued, “the unsuspecting nun sat herself directly over the devil, so he defended his action as follows: ‘What else could I do? She squatted over a bush, and the bush was me. .’ ”

I concealed my disgust well.

Les entrées et les sorties, Maître Navarro. That’s what life comes down to: entrances and exits; it sounds better in this barbaric tongue. From the front and from the rear. What goes in must come out; what comes out must go in. The habits of hunger vary. What one culture finds disgusting is a delicacy to another. Imagine what the French think of Mexicans eating ants and grasshoppers and worms. But don’t the French gourmets themselves savor frogs and snails? Show me an Englishman who appreciates mole poblano; his stomach turns at the thought of that mixture of chili, chicken, and chocolate. . And don’t you adore huitlacoche, common smut to the botanist, the fungus that grows on corn, which so disgusts the rest of the world that they would only feed it to their pigs? And speaking of pigs, how can the English stand their dishes cooked — or rather ruined — in lard, which is pig fat? Not to mention the North Americans, who so lack any sense of taste that eating newsprint would make them lick their chops in delight.”

He laughed in that characteristic way of his, forcibly lowering his upper lip as if he wanted to hide his intentions.

“You have to be like the wolf, Mr. Navarro. We can observe such wisdom in the old Latin lupus, my Teutonic wulfaz. We find natural and eternal wisdom in wolves — harmless in the summer and in the fall, when they are sated — who only hunt when they’re hungry, in the winter and in the spring! When they are hungry. .”

He made a commanding gesture with his pale hand, intensified by its glazed nails.

The role of the butler was assumed by Borgo the hunch-back, and serving the dishes was a slow-moving maid, pointlessly urged on by the snapping fingers of Borgo, who wore for the occasion a little red-and-black-striped jacket and a bow tie, a costume generally only seen in old French movies. He thought that by wearing this old-fashioned uniform, he could, coquettishly, make up for his physical deformity. At least that’s what I understood from his satisfied and (sometimes) suggestive glances.

“I am deeply grateful to you for accepting my invitation, Maître Navarro. I usually eat alone and, croyez moi, that gives me very sad thoughts.”

The servant poured me some red wine, but offered none to his master. I shot Vlad a quizzical look as I raised my glass to propose a toast. .

“I told you. .” the Count said, staring at me with good-natured mockery.

“Yes, you don’t drink wine,” I said, trying to keep things light and friendly. “Do you drink alone?”

Following his habit of ignoring what had just been said and then continuing on some other subject, Vlad just said, “Telling the truth is unbearable to mortals.”

I let myself be a little rude and pressed him for an answer. “It was a simple question. Do you drink alone?”

“Telling the truth is unbearable to mortals.”

“I don’t know about that. I’m mortal and I’m a lawyer. That sounds like one of those syllogisms they teach us at school. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”

“Children don’t lie,” he went on, ignoring me. “And they can be immortal.”

“Say what?”

A woman’s hands in black gloves offered me the platter of organ meat. I felt revulsion, but my manners required that I take a bit of liver from here and a bit of tripe from there. .