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took on a strict tone. ‘I can’t say that I’m pleased about this matter. I expect model behaviour from my lawyers. I expect that, in every situation, they know where the permitted and tolerated limits are. On the other hand, I value your work highly and I would like to continue to employ you. I am going to have to reflect on how to proceed in this case.’
    He got up from his chair. The conversation was over.
    Pablo managed to mumble a few words of gratitude and exited the office.
    He passed by Maribel’s desk. She called to him, ‘The minutes from the Molina case. You have to draw up the buying contract.’
    He turned and took the papers she held out to him.
    ‘Forgive me, Maribel. I was distracted.’
    Maribel smiled at him.
    He returned the smile mechanically and went to his office with the minutes under his arm.

     
    8
    Once a week Ana offered her services as a scrivener in one of the stalls near the Boquería market. Seated inside one of the wooden booths, she wrote and read letters for people who were illiterate or who wanted to ensure a standard of writing. Letters to family members, to friends, to institutions; to give news, communicate births and deaths, marriages, First Communions; having got work, having lost it, asking for money or demanding the payment of debts. And love letters.
    One of her regular customers was Carmiña Orozco, a young woman from Galicia who worked as a chambermaid at the Hotel Majestic, a luxury hotel on the Paseo de Gracia. Carmiña wasn’t illiterate: she knew how to read, albeit slowly, and how to write, but she preferred the letters she sent her boyfriend, Hernán, in prison, to be ‘in nice handwriting’.
    Hernán still had three of the seven years he’d been sentenced to for stealing a Singer sewing machine from a warehouse, time that Carmiña had used to put together a trousseau by means of petty theft from the hotel.
    That day she wanted to let her boyfriend know that they already had a complete set of bed linen, with two sheets and pillowcases.
    ‘Carmiña, you know that’s a crime, and that you could end up in jail like your boyfriend, don’t you?’
    Ana told her the same thing each time, but mostly to feel that she had fulfilled her moral obligation. This time, after having seen the treatment Castro had meted out to Mariona Sobrerroca’s maid, she feared for what would happen to Carmiña if they caught her. As she pulled out a sheet of paper to begin the letter, she imagined Castro slapping the young woman.
    ‘Yes, ma’am. But you aren’t going to grass on me, are you?’
    ‘Of course not! What you tell me remains a professional secret,’ lied Ana, ‘like what clients tell priests or solicitors.’
    ‘Clients? Priests?’
    ‘You know what I mean.’
    Carmiña nodded. Ana picked up her pen.
    ‘How should we put it this time?’
    ‘Put that the head of housekeeping gave me a bed set because she is very happy with my work.’
    In Carmiña’s letters, her thefts were disguised as gifts from her boss when they were textiles, or from the cafeteria supervisor when they were dishes, or from the owner of the hotel when they were other things, such as an ashtray, a pitcher and other decorative ornaments she’d managed to take without, for the moment, arousing suspicion.
    ‘And that I’m going to have them embroidered with our initials.’
    This was how she had erased the monograms that had once proclaimed the towels, bathrobe and sheets to be the property of the Hotel Majestic.
    ‘The sheets and the pillowcases are embroidered too?’
    ‘Of course. It’s the Majestic.’
    ‘Well, you can leave the H for Hernán.’
    ‘No. It wouldn’t look right. They’re machine-embroidered, and you can tell the difference.’
    Carmiña had her dignity. Or perhaps she was aware of the irony that Hernán was in prison for trying to steal sewing machines.
    ‘You’re right.’
    Ana wrote.
     
    Dear Hernán,
    I hope that these lines find you in good health.
    Ana had tried