CHAPTER TWO
If spending the night with Vicente and Joanna held one distinct advantage, it was access to a private bathroom. Alex tapped his foot as he tried to go over the revisions he’d made to the script two days prior, but Joanna might as well have recited them in Basque for all the sense they made to him.
It had been pushing six in the morning by the time he’d stripped off his clothes and tumbled into his single bed, and even then, sleep had evaded him until eight.
Whether this was the nascent sunlight, the noise from the street, or the image of Jago haunting his thoughts—probably all three—didn’t much matter.
He’d be late for an eleven o’clock shift if he didn’t move his ass, and while it wouldn’t be the first time he’d gone in smelling like punk rock, vermouth, and Vicente, he was sure it wouldn’t endear him to Victoria.
He crossed the hall and hammered on the bathroom door again.
“Just a minute.”
“You said that ten minutes ago.”
Hearing the shower at last, Alex returned to his room in search of breakfast. He knew complaining was gauche for a boy who’d grown up in the country with no running water or electricity, but hadn’t Madrid promised him better for the fortune it cost him to stay here?
Joanna had sworn Barcelona was worse, but Alex wasn’t convinced.
Taking a piece of bread from its box on his side table, he smeared a spoonful of tomato on it and took a bite.
He gagged, gulping it down quickly like a pelican before lifting the jar to his nose, recoiling at the sight of mould growing in the jar.
Well, fucking great. He could already hear his mother’s lecture to buy his tomatoes fresh each day, as if she was going to give him the money to pay for them.
He wondered how many more free meals he could charm out of Victoria before she refused.
Hearing the bathroom door open, he grabbed his towel, narrowly missing a collision with the bald-headed fellow from Zaragoza.
Alex had tried to avoid him ever since he’d made a drunken pass at Alex at Black and White.
He’d used up most of the hot water, but it didn’t much bother Alex in the summer heat.
He stuck out his tongue, as if he could wash the bitter taste of rotten tomato from it along with the smell of the night’s entertainment.
The smell of Vicente. He lifted his hands to his face.
No, that wasn’t Vicente. Vicente’s smell, he knew all too well.
Joanna? No, it was a masculine scent, but not one he recognised…
at first. He allowed the water to sloosh down his back until a knock at the bathroom door startled him.
“Just a minute,” he called.
Now his tired mind was playing tricks, convincing him that his hands smelled like Jago.
* * *
“Good morning, Senor Vargas.”
“Good morning, Lucia,” Alex said, again hoping his shirt wouldn’t crumple in his knapsack as he descended the last of the stairs to the building’s sparse entryway. “Having a good day?”
Lucia, who kept an eagle-eyed watch over their boarding house, barely looked up from her copy of El Pais. “Is it? These Basque hardliners complain louder every day. Something terrible will come of it if the government doesn’t let them go, I promise you.”
Alex grimaced, keeping his expression neutral as possible, even though she wasn’t looking at him. This wasn’t a topic he’d raised with Joanna, and he certainly wasn’t about to get into it with a seventy-six-year-old widow.
“But…” She looked up from her paper, folding it neatly as she stood. “It is not all bad. The Americans are returning Guernica.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Alex decided against pointing out that the Americans had been returning Guernica at least three or four times before in the year he’d called this place home.
But Lucia had been just as excited each time over the painting’s return, and he hadn’t the heart to dim her fire.
“I’d love to chat, but Victoria hates it when I’m late. ”
She waved off his anxiety with a plump hand. “Wait, just one second.”
He indulged her, shifting nervously until she returned with a small paper bag.
“She will hate it less if you bring her some of these, after you take your share, of course.”
Alex inspected the contents. A dozen cookies coated in sugar, and at the bottom of the bag, a small, tightly wrapped package he knew would contain three or four joints.
“Lucia, I can’t take these to work.”
The old woman pouted indignantly. “What grumpy bitch would begrudge you a few cookies?”
He grinned at her conspiratorially, tucking the bag deep into his knapsack.
Bidding him good day, Lucia withdrew to the tiny ground floor apartment she occupied which doubled as her office, muttering something about him not running into or sucking off any police officers along the way.
Alex couldn’t hear her clearly, but he was sure it was the latter.
Hmph. That had only been once. In the stairwell.
And she had allowed them to finish on the condition they not leave a mess.
The walk from his apartment through Chueca to the Plaza Mayor would take a brisk twenty minutes if the Puerta del Sol wasn’t packed.
That was no sure thing. Even with classes in summer recess, few of the young, energetic students who’d flocked from around the country to make their contribution to—or take their bite from—Madrid’s free hedonism wanted to return to the sleepy church bells, gossip-hunting glares, and dead-after-dark piety of their home towns.
On the city’s biggest public square, that meant one thing… protests.
Red banners, Basque flags, and signs calling for independence, protesting the steps the new government had taken to try and retain Joanna’s home province, flooded the square, waving and turning over in the late morning sun like waves turned red by a volcanic sunset.
Alex shook off the romantic metaphor and stuffed Lucia’s cookies into the side pocket of his bag.
He’d need them for the inevitable grovelling.
Keeping to the edge of the square, he tried to circumvent the crowd.
But as he pushed nearer the demonstration’s ringleaders, who’d taken up position with speakers and bullhorns on the square’s western edge, the crowd swelled to its edges, spilling into the streets that fed it.
He barely dodged another banner as its owner climbed the steps from the metro.
With a quick apology, they too disappeared into the fray.
Alex swallowed his nerves as the bodies of eager protesters, stripped down in the summer sun and painted with reds and greens, including one that resembled Jesus, bounced off him.
He grimaced at the smear of green paint on his sleeve, grateful he'd kept his clean shirt in his knapsack as he pulled it tighter against his body.
Another shove, unintentional as it was, sent him stumbling forward.
If he could just make it… no. He’d never seen a protest this size, not even on the Puerta del Sol.
How many of the assembled crowd were invested in Basque independence and how many were invested in something to do on a Saturday, he couldn’t tell.
But he could feel his breath quicken as the heat of so many bodies caged him, amplified by the hateful ball of hot gas slowly cooking him from above in his black t-shirt.
He cried out as the momentum of the crowd caught him once more, until at last, a street sign indicating Calle de Preciados promised him freedom.
He didn’t wait for a second invitation, weaving his way between protestors until he at last broke free of the stragglers coming down from Gran Via.
Darting left again, he took a second to catch his breath on Calle de Tetuan.
This was fine. It wasn’t the first time he’d avoided a protest on the square.
He checked his watch, tummy still rumbling.
A few months ago, he would have had time to stop at San Ginés for some breakfast, but a steadily increasing number of English tourists had made that a dicey proposition.
To hell with it. Victoria’s churros would do.
Another left led him toward Calle de Arenal, but the regular hum of the city had quieted, leaving in its place low voices and the clip-clopping of hoofs.
He glanced behind him, eyes widening to see a line of mounted police keeping a steady pace behind, black uniforms and helmets looming over their steeds like battlements.
He moved to quicken his step, then hesitated, acutely aware of eight pairs of eyes—not counting the horses—watching him.
As he crossed Calle de Arenal, and the street narrowed approaching Calle Mayor, they neither hastened nor broke off their steady rhythm.
Would it be smarter to let them pass? Or would that draw just enough attention to invite a quick search that would quickly find the weed buried under the cookies in his bag?
They weren’t here for him. But under the Fascists, the police had been predictably brutal; something to be avoided at any cost. Things were less predictable now, even in Madrid.
Not all of them wanted to trade blow jobs in a stairwell.
But if he could just get across Calle Mayor…
He could no longer ignore the shouts of the crowd as it funnelled slowly from the square into the street, any more than he could ignore the sound of hooves behind him.
By the time he saw Basque Jesus, leading the protest in all his red and green painted non-finery spy the line of police closing at his left, facing them with shields and batons at the ready, Alex knew it was too late to run.