Free The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

drawers on which Bernarda had placed enough effigies and prints of saints and the Virgin Mary to start a holy order. I closed the door, and when I turned around, my heart almost stopped: a dozen scarlet eyes were advancing toward me from the end of the corridor. Barceló’s cats knew me well and tolerated my presence. They surrounded me, meowing gently, but as soon as they realized that my drenched clothes did not give out the desired warmth, they abandoned me with indifference.
    Clara’s room was at the other end of the apartment, next to the library and the music room. The cats’ invisible steps followed me through the passageway. In the flickering darkness of the storm, Barceló’s residence seemed vast and sinister, altered from the place I had come to consider my second home. I reached the front of the apartment, where it faced the square. The conservatory opened before me, dense and impassable. I penetrated its jungle of leaves and branches. For a moment it occurred to me that if the faceless stranger had managed to sneak into the apartment, this was where he would probably choose to wait for me. I almost thought I could perceive the smell of burned paper he left in the air around him, but then I realized that what I had detected was only tobacco. A burst of panic needled me. Nobody in the household smoked, and Barceló’s unlit pipe was purely ornamental.
    When I reached the music room, the glow from a flash of lightning revealed spirals of smoke that drifted in the air like garlands of vapor. Next to the gallery, the piano keyboard displayed its endless grin. I crossed the music room and went over to the library door. It was closed. I opened it and was welcomed by the brightness from the glass-covered balcony that encircled Barceló’s personal library. The walls, lined with packed bookshelves, formed an oval in whose center stood a reading table and two plush armchairs. I knew that Clara kept Carax’s book in a glass cabinet by the arch of the balcony. I crept up to it. My plan, or my lack of it, was to lay my hands on the book, take it out of there, give it to that lunatic, and lose sight of him forever after. Nobody would notice the book’s absence, except me.
    Julián Carax’s book was waiting for me, as it always did, its spine just visible at the end of a shelf. I took it in my hands and pressed it against my chest, as if embracing an old friend whom I was about to betray. Judas, I thought. I decided to leave the place without making Clara aware of my presence. I would take the book and disappear from Clara Barceló’s life forever. Quietly, I stepped out of the library. The door of her bedroom was just visible at the end of the corridor. I pictured her lying on her bed, asleep. I imagined my fingers stroking her neck, exploring a body I had conjured up from my fantasies. I turned around, ready to throw away six years of daydreaming, but something halted my step before I reached the music room. A voice whistling behind me, behind a door. A deep voice that whispered and laughed. In Clara’s room. I walked slowly up to the door. I put my fingers on the doorknob. My fingers trembled. I had arrived too late. I swallowed hard and opened the door.

·9·
    C LARA’S NAKED BODY LAY STRETCHED OUT ON WHITE SHEETS that shone like washed silk. Maestro Neri’s hands slid over her lips, her neck, and her breasts. Her white eyes looked up to the ceiling, her eyelids shuddering as the music teacher charged at her, entering her body between her pale and trembling thighs. The same hands that had read my face six years earlier in the gloom of the Ateneo now clutched the maestro’s sweat-glazed buttocks, the nails digging into them, as they guided him toward her with desperate, animal desire. I couldn’t breathe. I must have stayed there, paralyzed, watching them for almost half a minute, until Neri’s eyes, disbelieving at first, then aflame with anger,