1
A JET PLANE
It’s no more than a dot in the morning sky.
Dawn has yet to break when the Bombardier Global Express 7000 begins its descent from the west. It doesn’t need to wait for approach clearance, because the Cuatro Vientos airport has been closed to all other air traffic.
Antonia Scott’s eyes remain fixed on the jet as it lands. Oblivious to the early morning chill, she sits on the car hood waiting until the plane has taxied to a halt alongside them.
The hatch opens, and a familiar figure appears in the rectangle of light. Antonia slides off the car hood and walks toward her, one hand behind her back, ignoring the pins and needles in her legs.
“You’re late,” she says.
“We had problems leaving Gloucester,” replies the shadowy shape.
Antonia keeps her hand hidden as she slowly ascends the eight steps. Only once she is sure the woman is the person she was expecting does she relax the grip on the Sig Sauer P290 clipped to her belt.
“You’ve changed your hair.”
“This is my natural color. I got tired of being blond.”
Carla Ortiz smiles warmly despite the fatigue and fear in her big brown eyes. She extends a hand to greet Antonia, then withdraws it at the last moment.
“I … I don’t like physical contact,” Antonia says by way of apology.
“I know. They told me. That and other things.”
“Embarrassing ones, I presume.”
“You presume right, dear,” a voice from inside the plane says in English.
Antonia enters and crouches in front of the first seat. A crooked, bejeweled hand, cold as a bedsheet in winter, musses her hair affectionately.
“You look awful,” says Grandma Scott, motioning toward the blue-black rings under her granddaughter’s eyes.
“And you…,” Antonia replies, trying to contain the emotion she feels at her grandmother’s touch.
Grandma and Marcos are the only two people whose physical contact she has ever craved. Her husband died a few hours earlier, following Antonia’s decision to switch off his life-support machines after years of senseless waiting. And Grandma Scott doesn’t have long to go either. This surprise journey in the middle of the night hasn’t exactly helped.
Antonia studies this bag of bones wearing a polka-dot dress. The hand that isn’t caressing her granddaughter is clenched around a glass containing a large whisky.
Antonia immediately notices the absence of lip smears on the rim of the glass, her grandmother’s clean breath, and realizes she has lost the use of her left arm. She is opening her mouth to ask about this when a thought crosses her mind. A thought with a Basque accent and a powerful voice that is not fat.
She’s gone to a lot of trouble to conceal it from you. Let her believe she’s succeeded.
“… are prettier than ever,” she finishes her sentence, with an effort.
“Maybe that was true a few decades ago, dear, but now I’m pushing a hundred.”
Gazing into Grandma Scott’s watery blue eyes, Antonia feels her heart breaking. This could be the last time they see each other face-to-face. She desperately wants to lean over and hug her, but she can’t.
“Run along, dear,” her grandmother excuses her with a parting caress. “Go and do your thing. And tell me about it later.”
* * *
Antonia nods and straightens up. Ignoring Carla’s attempts to start a conversation, she glances around the cabin for several long minutes, noticing how her anxiety is mounting. She completes her inspection, however superficial it may be.
This is all she has time for.
She walks back to Carla.
“Any news of Inspector Gutiérrez?” the other woman asks.
“The van got away. That’s all we know for now.”
Scared by the thought, Carla hesitates, but finally ventures:
“She … she was there, wasn’t she?”
Antonia nods. An awkward silence follows, the kind Antonia used to feel obliged to fill with promises. Bold, reassuring promises that, coming from other people, would be empty words.
Such promises from other people at times like this are meaningless.
Not from Antonia Scott.
A promise from Antonia Scott is a contract. A contract that, if it’s not fulfilled, she pays for just the same. In the inflationary currency of guilt and remorse.
That’s why Antonia doesn’t alleviate the silence with words such as: I will find Inspector Gutiérrez or I will catch the woman who kidnapped and tortured you. Over the past few months, Antonia has learned something about promises.
So instead, she says to Carla:
“I’m sorry about your father.”
The young woman’s face darkens, and she looks away.
“He was very old.”
“Were you able to speak with him? Before…”
The ellipsis contains entire encyclopedias.
“I didn’t want to, and he couldn’t,” Carla says with a shrug.
CARLA
The stroke Ramón Ortiz suffered a few months earlier left him a dribbling wreck. Death doesn’t leave anyone off its list, not even the world’s richest man. The businessman’s wealth and power could do nothing to save him; it simply enabled him to pass away in pleasanter surroundings.
For her part, the rich heiress had undergone a transformation during the time she was Ezekiel’s captive.
She emerged from the sewers a changed woman. All her frivolity and capriciousness evaporated in her gloomy prison. Whereas before she was selfish and needy, now she was generous and self-assured in a way at once ambiguous and unsettling. She smiled less often, but when she did, it was for real.
And, no, she never did make peace with her father. He was waiting for her by the manhole cover on Calle Jorge Juan amid a throng of photographers and journalists. She refused the hand he offered, preferring instead to lean on Inspector Gutiérrez, the man who braved a booby-trapped tunnel and took a bullet to save her life. She didn’t respond to Ramón’s embrace; she didn’t smile or shed a single tear. In a remarkably steady voice, she thanked everyone for their support. She said she felt fine and couldn’t wait to get back to work. The whole world heard her calm statement on the morning news, and the company’s shares shot up by six percent.
She never spoke to her father again in private. She tried on a few occasions. She longed a hundred times to ask him why he had abandoned her to her fate. Why he didn’t give in to Ezekiel’s blackmail, as she would have done without hesitation had her son been the one in danger.
Her son, slumbering draped in a blanket on one of the private jet’s couches, was all she cared about. To hold him in her arms again was the only thing she longed for during her captivity. She would give everything she had for him. Every last one of her thousands of millions of euros, down to the loose change in her pocket.
It was only when Ramón died—on a Saturday at three in the afternoon in the middle of the news headlines—that Carla understood everything. He was in his hospital bed, watching television, his head bobbing gently as if he were dozing off. And all of a sudden, he died. He didn’t make a sound, he just went. One of the four private nurses providing him with round-the-clock care told her the details. Carla took the call at 15:08, knowing beforehand—we always know these things—that her father had just died. No sooner had she hung up than she went back to the news bulletin, scarcely registering the procession of banal events or indeed the cruel irony that she and her father had doubtless been watching the same images five miles apart.
She had just inherited a twelve-figure fortune. A one followed by eleven zeros. An absurd, impossible sum to which, when her father was alive, she had been as oblivious as she was to the news program now. Like those images, it was simply there, it existed beyond the bounds of her responsibilities and influence.
Yes, she had worked night and day in her father’s company, put in all the hours she could and more. But she had done so to earn the one thing she couldn’t have. Her father’s respect.
She could almost see the next day’s news headlines on the gigantic hundred-inch screen—almost but not quite: the screen was expensive but not a crystal ball. She saw herself in mourning attire, greeting the guests at the funeral parlor. The king and queen, of course, the prime minister, a few ministers. Other important figures: Laura Trueba or Bill Gates. All of a sudden, she had become something else. An avalanche of responsibility had cascaded onto her. The fates of hundreds of thousands of employees and millions of investors now depended on her every gesture. One misstep, one slip of the tongue, and the whole empire could come tumbling down.
This was the moment when she understood her father’s betrayal. This was the moment when she wished she could call him. Not to say she forgave him—that would be impossible—but that she understood him.
For, alongside that exorbitant sum, alongside those eleven zeros, she had inherited a steely, luminous truth in just five words:
She had not earned them.
Copyright © 2020 by Juan Gómez-Jurado. Translation copyright © 2025 by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia.
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