The Other Woman. Daniel Silva

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       11

       ANDALUSIA, SPAIN

      The villa clung to the edge of a great crag in the hills of Andalusia. The precariousness of its perch appealed to the woman; it seemed it might lose its grip on the rock at any moment and fall away. There were nights, awake in bed, when she imagined herself tumbling into the abyss, with her keepsakes and her books and her cats swirling about her in a ragged tornado of memory. She wondered how long she might lie dead on the valley floor, entombed in the debris of her solitary existence, before anyone noticed. Would the authorities give her a decent burial? Would they notify her child? She had left a few carefully concealed clues concerning the child’s identity in her personal effects, and in the beginnings of a memoir. Thus far, she had managed only eleven pages, handwritten in pencil, each page marked by the brown ring of her coffee mug. She had a title, though, which she regarded as a notable achievement, as titles were always so difficult. She called it The Other Woman.

      The scant eleven pages, the sum total of her labors, she regarded less charitably, for her days were nothing if not a vast empty quarter of time. What’s more, she was a journalist, at least she had masqueraded as one in her youth. Perhaps it was the topic that blocked her path forward. Writing about the lives of others— the dictator, the freedom fighter, the man who sells olives and spice in the souk—had for her been a relatively straightforward process. The subject spoke, his words were weighed against the available facts—yes, his words, because in those days women were of no consequence—and a few hundred words would spill onto the page, hopefully with enough flair and insight as to warrant a small payment from a faraway editor in London or Paris or New York. But writing about oneself, well, that was an altogether different matter. It was like attempting to recall the details of an auto accident on a darkened road. She’d had one once, with him, in the mountains near Beirut. He’d been drunk, as usual, and abusive, which was not like him. She supposed he had a right to be angry; she had finally worked up the nerve to tell him about the baby. Even now, she wondered whether he had been trying to kill her. He’d killed a good many others. Hundreds, in fact. She knew that now. But not then.

      She worked, or pretended to work, in the mornings, in the shadowed alcove beneath the stairs. She had been sleeping less and rising earlier. She supposed it was yet another unwelcome consequence of growing old. On that morning she was more prolific than usual, an entire page of polished prose with scarcely a correction or revision. Still, she had yet to complete the first chapter. Or would she call it a prologue? She’d always been dubious about prologues; she regarded them as cheap devices wielded by lesser writers. In her case, however, a prologue was justified, for she was starting her story not at the beginning but in the middle, a stifling afternoon in August 1974 when a certain Comrade Lavrov—it was a pseudonym—brought her a letter from Moscow. It bore neither the name of the sender nor the date it was composed. Even so, she knew it was from him, the English journalist she had known in Beirut. The prose betrayed him.

      It was half past eleven in the morning when she set down her pencil. She knew this because the tinny alarm on her Seiko wristwatch reminded her to take her next pill. It was her heart that ailed her. She swallowed the bitter little tablet with the cold dregs of her coffee and locked the manuscript—it was a pretentious word, admittedly, but she could think of no other—in the antique Victorian strongbox beneath her writing table. The next item on her busy daily schedule, her ritual bath, consumed all of forty minutes, followed by another half hour of careful grooming and dressing, after which she left the villa and set out through the fierce early-afternoon glare toward the center of the village.

      The town was white as dried bone, famously white, and balanced atop the highest point of the incisor-like crag. One hundred and fourteen normal paces along the paseo brought her to the new hotel, and another two hundred and twenty-eight steps carried her across a patch of olive and scrub oak to the edge of the centre ville, which was how, privately, she referred to it, even now, even after all her years of splendid exile. It was a game she had played with her child long ago in Paris, the counting of steps. How many steps to cross the courtyard to the street? How many steps to span the Pont de la Concorde? How many steps until a child of ten disappeared from her mother’s sight? The answer was twenty-nine.

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