Turned to Stone Read online

  Rosa cursed her father. She thought again, as she had so many times before, that she was sorry Alvino Nascimbene hadn’t killed him in the attack on the yacht. As always, she instantly regretted having the thought. After she’d successfully sent the document, she returned to the lounge and looked up at the portrait.

  “What do you say?” she asked, sounding impatient. “Is it what you wanted?”

  “We have it!” Carrera said with excitement in his voice. “It’s genuine.”

  “Excellent. So we’re done here.”

  “Not yet. When you speak to Clark, tell him to be ready to do one last thing.”

  “To do what?”

  “To eliminate Paloma Blasco.”

  Rosa felt a wave of horror overtake her, but she tried to speak calmly.

  “I refuse to give Clark that order.”

  “As you wish. I’ll give it to him myself.”

  “You’re a psychopath! What need is there to kill Preston and Paloma?”

  “Dr. Galliano insists on it. Now that we have the document, Paloma Blasco is surplus to requirements.”

  “I don’t agree. She can generate a lot of publicity and add value to the deal. Our asking price could triple in a matter of days if she tells the world what she knows about the sculpture. After all, she was the one who discovered it. There are plenty of other collectors in the world crazy enough to pay whatever it takes to own the—”

  “You’re ambitious, Rosa, and that’s a good thing. But in this case, we owe our loyalty to our best customer. Galliano wants the sculpture and what it contains, without that information becoming public knowledge. This is not merely a question of collecting. As a doctor, he has a practical interest in the contents of the Medusa, and we cannot let him down. Paloma’s discoveries must not be made public.

  “That is why the price includes her elimination.”

  29

  As Paloma left the museum, she decided she wouldn’t go to her mother’s house or her favorite restaurant, as she normally would. Neither did she want to go home. Over the last few days her paranoia had grown, and there was nowhere left where she felt comfortable. The business with Amanda had hit her where she felt most vulnerable and was making her rethink everything, even the future for which she had fought so hard.

  It was still over a month before she had to submit her application to Ricardo, but she was starting to seriously doubt that she would live to make it happen. Her spirits were in shreds and she felt confused. According to Amanda, Oscar Preston was both an accomplice in Hugo’s abduction and a victim of someone who wanted to get his hands on Paloma’s research. Paloma wasn’t buying it. She was convinced that Preston himself was the brains behind the operation, and, for that reason, she didn’t think Hugo was in any real danger. Oscar was an unscrupulous creep, but he wasn’t capable of following through on such a serious threat. She’d tried to speak to him at the museum that morning, but the worm had managed to wriggle away. And Amanda still believed him?

  She took a long walk along the streets of downtown Madrid and wound up having lunch in a Japanese restaurant near Plaza de la Ópera. In an attempt to reassert her confidence, she’d put on a pair of high heels she’d bought six months earlier and hadn’t yet worn, and she soon realized that this had been a stupid idea. Her feet felt as if they’d been impaled on nails, so she decided to take the metro back to the museum.

  As she stood on the platform, she replayed in her mind the conversations she’d had with Amanda over the last few days: Hugo’s kidnapping. Preston’s blackmailing. It was all insane. Paloma had to choose what mattered to her most: the well-being of her best friend’s son or the study she had been working on for so long, which finally was about to have a proper outlet. She was ashamed that she felt so torn and was on the verge of tears.

  Thoughts of Jaime came to her again, unbidden. He always knew what to do. He seemed so controlled, so sure of himself . . . At least, that’s how he’d appeared at the beginning, during their first year of college. Jaime was the only man she’d ever been with, and his sudden reappearance, along with the problems he brought, evoked in her the same state of tension she’d lived in back when they were together. After their breakup, Paloma had decided that work came first, and aside from fooling around a bit on dates, she hadn’t been with anyone else since.

  The metro station was full of people. Caught up in a world of her own, Paloma wandered away from the crowd and stood by herself near the tunnel at the left end of the platform. Sometimes she felt as though she was holding the most important secret in the universe, and she was afraid someone wanted to steal it from her—which, of course, someone did. For this reason, she always kept her research document with her, in a little flash drive disguised as lipstick. The drive had been a present from a colleague at another museum who had chased her and then, having gotten the message that she wasn’t interested, left her in peace without making a fuss.

  An electronic sign above the platform told the crowd that the next train would arrive in one minute.

  Paloma noticed someone position himself beside her: a man wearing a raincoat, sunglasses, and a grizzled mustache. But the most striking thing about him was the plaster cast that covered his nose.

  Paloma’s first reaction was to grip her purse more tightly.

  The stranger’s response was to grab her.

  The roar of the train could be heard through the tunnel, and then came the glow from the headlights as it plowed down the iron tracks. Paloma tried to scream, but the man in the raincoat was pulling her against his body, his hand over her mouth. The passengers were watching the train, and most of them were oblivious to her fate. Only a couple of girls saw what was happening and ran to look for security.

  Once the train’s headlights had fully illuminated the tunnel, the assailant pushed Paloma toward the track, but she drove her heel into his instep. His scream made everyone turn and look.

  The train stopped.

  The girls who’d run for help returned with two security guards.

  But there was no trace of the train, or of Paloma or her attacker.

  The Indiana Jones theme song woke Jaime from his nap. He’d spent the better part of the morning searching the Internet for information about the story Alvino Nascimbene’s wife had told him, but exhaustion eventually got the better of him, and he wound up snoring on the sofa.

  He woke from a confused dream about Inspector Kraniotis. In the dream, Kraniotis had jumped into the water before Jaime and Amatriaín, so it was he who was saved and they who died.

  Not a very nice dream, he noted as he awoke.

  He had to rummage around in the cushions to find his cell phone. “Hello?”

  “Jaime . . .” The voice was a tiny, unidentifiable squeak.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Paloma.”

  Jaime was immediately brought back to reality. The dream, the sofa, a living and breathing Kraniotis—all were gone. All that existed in the world was that telephone call. “Paloma, what is it?”

  “Not on the phone. I have to see you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At Café del Real. Plaza de la Ópera.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  “Hurry, please.”

  Jaime made it in twelve and a half. The ground floor of the traditional café was full, and Jaime couldn’t find Paloma in the crowd, so he climbed a narrow stairway to the lounge upstairs. She was sitting in the back, pale as wax. Jaime felt a blend of fear and compassion as he walked toward her.

  “Are you okay?”

  Paloma wasted no time. “They tried to kill me,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “A man. Just now, on the metro platform. He came up to me and tried to push me onto the tracks.”

  Jaime swallowed. They had found her, and, just as they had him in El Burgo de Osma and on board the Artemis,
they’d tried to kill her. He searched his mind for a motive that connected the attempts on their lives, and his thoughts turned once again to the university study she had written long ago, and to which she’d attached both their names.

  “Your shoes?” he asked, looking at her bare feet.

  “I had to leave them. I ran here.”

  “What about the police? The metro security staff?”

  Paloma shook her head. “You’re not the only one who prefers to solve his own problems.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. You have to tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  Paloma opened her mouth to speak, but at just that moment someone came up the stairs from the ground floor: a man dressed in black who appeared to be looking for someone. “Let’s go,” she said, pinching Jaime’s arm.

  “Is that him?”

  “No. But let’s go.”

  They hurried down to the street. Jaime took a few steps toward the Ópera metro station before changing his mind and flagging down a taxi. They jumped into the car.

  “What did the man look like?” he asked as he shut the door behind them. “Can you remember him?”

  “I’ll remember him for the rest of my life. He was a strong-looking man in a raincoat, and he had a mustache. He looked like your stereotypical thug from the movies. And he had something on his nose, like a plaster cast.”

  Jaime snorted.

  “What is it?” Paloma asked.

  “He owes the plaster to me.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah. He must be feeling pretty unlucky to have missed killing both of us. You should come to my place. You’ll be safe there.”

  “I don’t know about that. They know you. They’re after you, too.”

  Suddenly they realized that the taxi driver was looking at them in the rearview mirror, waiting for an address. “Oh, sorry,” Jaime said. “Just drive for a minute; we’ll let you know in a second.”

  The driver nodded and looked back ahead as he stepped on the gas.

  Jaime whispered, “You’d better come with me to the CHR building, then; it’ll be hard for them to hurt you there.”

  He gave the taxi driver the address, and soon they pulled up in front of the old philology building at the Complutense University, beside which stood the headquarters of the Center for Historical Research. During the short walk to the entrance, they glanced nervously at everyone who crossed their path.

  Relax, Jaime told himself. He was starting to see mustachioed murderers on every corner, where he imagined they were plotting to tear them to pieces. Though his nerves were on edge, a part of his mind was calm. Paloma had reached out to him, and this could give him the opportunity to clear a few things up.

  They hurried toward the tall brick building. Paloma had never been inside it, though she knew the surrounding area well. Back when she was a student, the large building had still been under construction. When she’d passed by the big yellow sign that read “Construction Works for the Center for Historical Research,” she’d never imagined that Jaime would end up working there, much less that she would one day use it to seek refuge from a potential murderer. She paused and glanced over at the nearby history and geography building, where the two of them had studied, and indulged in a few seconds of nostalgia.

  They climbed the five steps to the main entrance, which was framed by a Bramantesque pavilion, and walked through the glass doors that led to the lobby. Then they took the elevator up to the tenth floor. “You’ll be safe here,” Jaime told Paloma.

  She walked into an office full of desks with computers. The walls were covered in postcards from exotic locations like Luxor, Varanasi, Cancun, and Istanbul.

  “There’s no one here?”

  “Not a lot of people come in on the weekend. If they have to work, most do it from home.”

  By Jaime’s desk, a glass case nearly overflowed with books stacked in no particular order. Paloma glanced over the spines: Gods, Graves and Scholars by C. W. Ceram; Atahualpa; Theories of Art by Moshe Barasch; The Holy Scriptures; Alexander the Great; The End of Atlantis; Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, and a complete history of art collection that she knew well. She wasn’t surprised to see a few issues of the journal Mysteries of Archeology and a thick volume entitled Romantic Archeology: Voyages, Dreams, and Adventures.

  Paloma recognized Jaime in those books. Though they’d been leading separate lives for some time now, she’d heard from former classmates that he was a meticulous researcher, and that he knew that his profession consisted of writing reports, conducting interviews, and spending hours in the library. From time to time, he found an opportunity to work someplace under the sun for a while, out in the open air in some far-off city or on an archeological dig. He was as much of a dreamer now as he had been when they were students together, always with his head someplace else. She remembered one time a lecturer had been explaining the influences of Genoese sculpture on Spain in the seventeenth century, but Jaime’s mind had been far away: following Winckelmann through the ruins of Pompeii or discovering a magnificent Mayan treasure in some lost temple of Tikal.

  Paloma remembered the first time she went to Jaime’s home, back when he still lived with his parents. He had shared a bedroom with Jules Verne, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as with Ian Fleming, Michael Crichton, and Dashiell Hammett. Not to mention the companions from his movie collection—James Bond, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, John Wayne—and the giant Raiders of the Lost Ark poster that hung over his headboard.

  There was always an exotic soundtrack playing on his stereo, Paloma remembered. He was a dreamer and yet, at the same time, a scholar. Paloma still couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to combine the two different sides of his life, but he had, and that was what made him different. Maybe that was why she’d fallen in love with him. So many men resigned themselves to taking their dreams to their deathbeds, or to walking past half-open doors to changes they never would make. Jaime had made his dream come true. Through a lot of hard work, and more than a few identity crises, he had forged a personality made of fragments he’d taken from the heroes of his youth. He had been all of them and none of them, and now he was himself: a perfect Frankenstein’s monster sprung from his own hopes and dreams.

  She studied him. He looked at her knowingly—that look she knew so well.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “Can I get you something?”

  “I guess a lime flower tea wouldn’t do me any harm.”

  “I’ll go get you some. Try to relax.”

  Jaime closed the door to the office behind him. He hadn’t yet reached the elevator when an ominous voice stopped him.

  “Where are you going?” He turned to look at Laura Rodríguez.

  “Good afternoon, Presidenta. How’s it going here?”

  “The usual. Is something up? You seem on edge.”

  “No, it’s nothing. It’s just . . . I have a visitor.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “Well . . . Paloma Blasco.”

  “Paloma?” Laura exclaimed. The name was well-known to anyone who was close to Jaime. “She’s here?”

  “In the editorial office, resting.” Jaime lowered his voice. “Laura, we have to talk.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The day I got back from El Burgo de Osma, I went to find Paloma at the Prado Museum. I had a feeling she was in danger. I wasn’t wrong. Someone tried to kill her today.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a link between her attack, the Medusa statue, and the attack on the Artemis.”

  “Well, if that’s true, I’m dying to know what it is.”

  “I still need to fill in a few details. I think Paloma will be able to help me. I was going down to fetch her a tila, and then I’m sure I can get her to tell me what’s going on.”

>   “Wait a minute, smooth talker. What made you think she was in danger?”

  “The scumbags who locked me in the freezer had a copy of the essay on baroque sculpture that was published in the Revista Complutense. Paloma did all of the work. I just put my name on it.”

  “You should be ashamed.”

  “Don’t think I’m not. I’m guessing someone has followed the trail from a long way back. They might think she knows something about the Medusa that no one else does. Or maybe they know something themselves, and that’s why they want to kill her. I hope she can explain it all to me.”

  “And I hope you’ll tell me everything after she does.”

  “I can do better than that. Why don’t you come and meet her?”

  “I have to finish off a couple of things with the CHR folks, but I’ll join you just as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t be long,” Jaime said, heading toward the elevator. “Paloma could change her mind and run off.”

  “Are you sure Paloma’s the one who would do something like that?”

  “Whatever do you mean, Presidenta?”

  30

  The feeling of a new presence in the room brought her back from the land of dreams. Paloma’s eyelids flickered and then slowly opened, revealing her honey-colored eyes. The presence she’d felt was of two people. One was familiar. The other was a woman of about forty, with serious green eyes and a cascade of curly reddish hair. Though Paloma had never met this person before, she knew exactly who she was.

  “Hello, Laura.”

  Arcadia’s editor nodded, a dimple forming in each cheek as she gave a faint smile.