The woman who had slept in his bed for 20 years, the notary friend who managed his businesses, the head of security he paid handsomely—all actors in a comedy where he was the only one who didn’t know the script. Carlos’s cell phone vibrated. Messages from the banks. All accounts blocked for suspicious activity. Credit cards canceled, investment funds frozen. Isabel had moved quickly, using the powers of attorney he had signed for her over the years without reading them.
In a few minutes, he had gone from billionaire to destitute. Diego watched the father he’d never had as the magnitude of the disaster sank in. There was no satisfaction in his eyes, only a strange pity. He had saved this man not out of filial love. How can you love someone who has denied you existence, but out of a twisted sense of justice? Carlos deserved to know the truth before he lost everything. He deserved to see the face of the son he had erased. They remained in the shed until nightfall while the police outside combed the park.
But it wasn’t the real police. Diego knew that. They were Isabel’s men in uniform, bought off like everything else. When night fell, they moved through the invisible Madrid that Diego knew like the back of his hand: abandoned subway tunnels, passages between buildings that the homeless passed between them, routes that existed only for those who didn’t exist in the eyes of society. They arrived under the Vallecas bridge as the city slept. The community of invisibles who lived there greeted Diego with the familiarity of someone who shares the same sentence.
Carlos, in his tattered tailored suit, looked like an alien from another planet. They gave him cardboard to sleep on, an army blanket stolen who knows where, and a piece of stale bread that tasted like more. For the first time in 54 years, Carlos Mendoza slept on the bare earth, with the cold of the Manzanares penetrating his bones and the sound of rats scurrying in the darkness. Beside him, Diego slept peacefully, accustomed to it. On his other side, a university professor, reduced to alcoholism, recited his songs in his sleep, his head slumped, while an elderly prostitute coughed up blood in a corner.
The following days were a brutal education in survival. Diego guided Carlos through the depths of Madrid that tourists and the wealthy never saw. The soup kitchens of Caáritas, where former managers served soup to former workers, all leveled by the same misery. The makeshift shelters in abandoned stations, where hierarchies were based on violence, not bank accounts. The black markets for forged documents, expired food, and stolen medicines. Carlos learned to rummage through dumpsters at 5 a.m. before the garbage trucks came by.
He learned to distinguish edible food from poisonous food, Adorme R. With one eye open so as not to be robbed, to make himself invisible when patrol cars passed by. But above all, he learned to see the faces of those he had ruined. The woman who gave him a crust of bread in the cafeteria was an administrative assistant he had fired to cut costs. The man who showed him where to find clean water was a bricklayer who was left without severance pay when one of his companies strategically went bankrupt.
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