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She makes a popping sound with her lips and keeps her thoughts to herself. She puts on her turn signal and changes direction at the next intersection. Epi turns on his phone and calls Tiffany. Three rings, four, and then he ends the call. Let her wake up first. He sees the driver looking at him in the rearview mirror. He repeats the operation and hangs up again. “Fake call,” he says. “I’m making a fake call.”
    Epi smiles. Teasing the taxi driver amuses him. He can picture her later, being asked in an interview whether she noticed anything strange about that particular passenger, the one who wore a sweater turned inside out and asked if he could use her cell phone. She’ll declare with pride that she stood up to him and refused to let him make a call. As he’s imagining this, Tiffany at last answers the phone.
    CHARACTER IS DESTINY . Those words are written on a metal plaque over the main entrance to the Michi Panero Secondary School. Alex takes his hand out of his jacket pocket and, without breaking stride, thrusts a finger between the bars of the wrought-iron fence. Clack, clack, clack, clack. Like when he was a boy, and a student in that very school. He doesn’t even look at the plaque, which time is steadily deteriorating. But he remembers how it gleamed when he was a schoolboy. Every morning he read that declaration. His father was a teacher at the Michi Panero School. He would always endorse the school’s motto, word for word, even though he was never willing to reveal to Alex the ultimate secret it surely contained. “You’ll understand it when you grow up,” Alex’s father would tell him. But then Alex grew up, and he still didn’t understand it.
    Nor was his father about to explain it to him. It was very hard to have him for a teacher, to be in his class and watch him walk up and down the rows, the butt of the jokes and stories invented by his classmates. Alex usually turned a blind eye and a deafear to those obscene, hellish spectacles, but sometimes he went so far as to join in them. His father’s appearance contributed to the general derision: eyeglasses thick as bottle bottoms, old-fashioned vests, dark jackets covered with cat hair. Professor Dalmau occasionally lost the thread of his own explanations, it was practically obligatory to copy during his exams, and anything could happen in his classrooms. Beyond all that, what Alex found most ridiculous about his father was his absurd, anachronistic passion, which he never lost. The gleam in his eyes when he spoke of wrathful Achilles, of the death of Patroclus, who learned too late that Troy was defended by mighty warriors, and that the mightiest of them all was Hector. In the end, Alex’s father turned out to be a mysterious man, too, for no one would have imagined that he could fall in love with another woman. That one fine day, he’d go out the door and never return. That all in all, he didn’t give a shit about Ithaca.
    Alex knows he’s got to talk to the
mossos
, sooner rather than later. But no one likes going to a police station or an outpatient clinic. You can never be completely sure that the door closing behind you will open for you again. In any case, he has to talk to Epi first, so that the statements they give the police will gibe. However, his brother’s still not answering his phone.
    He turns into the street on his right. In Salva’s bar, no doubt, they’re gathering evidence and all that sort of thing. Alex walks past the barrio basketball court, next to the high school. It’s only a few minutes before classes will begin, and some boys are making their final moves. Their schoolbags lie in piles under the baskets, and their sneakers squeal onthe cement court. A little farther on, feigning indifference, a group of adolescent girls watch the game. They’re chewing gum nonstop, the tiny strings of the thongs they all wear are showing, and they’re having a try at choreographing a confused rhythm that goes
sha la la ra la