The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1) Read online

  “You’ve spent a whole day traveling just so you can be my nursemaid?”

  “Don’t get too sentimental about it; I’ll get my payback,” he replied with a wink. “And now, pack your gear. I have a limo waiting for us.”

  “Of course,” I answered, smiling at him for the first time. “I’ll just go to the bathroom. I’ll be back shortly.”

  I locked the door behind me and called my father. “There’s a young man with a damaged arm here who claims to be my brother,” I whispered, making no attempt to hide my confusion.

  “I was about to call you. Lyra just told me that Nagorno caught the first flight as soon as he found out. I told them both that I thought you’d be able to get back to Santander on your own, but your brother isn’t given to holding my opinions in very high regard. Anyway, the two of you should get back here as soon as you can, and let’s be done with this whole thing once and for all.”

  “Father.”

  “What?”

  “Should I trust him, then?”

  His silence lasted a second longer than it should have, despite the fact that he answered, “Of course, Son. We’re family. I’ll pick you both up at the airport.”

  When I came out of the bathroom, Nagorno was sprawled on a lounge chair on the balcony, his eyes closed under the pleasant midday sun. I took advantage of this to hide the files containing the papers that had been scattered around my room. When I’d finished packing them in my overnight bag, I sat down beside my brother.

  “Has Father given you his blessing for me to accompany you, then?” he asked, smiling.

  “I had to be certain,” I replied.

  “I was counting on it; that’s how a longevo survives. And as of now, remember that I’m Jairo del Castillo.”

  A short while later we headed to the hotel reception, and while Jairo took care of my checkout, I took mental note of details. My brother was in a mellow mood, as if he was not displeased with the mission he’d imposed upon himself to look after me, while I, to the best of my ability, struggled to contain my urge to get to the bottom of the revulsion I felt for him. I felt uncomfortable, and yes, I also felt guilty. Was I the traitor brother spying on his own blood? Was that my role in this masked ball?

  As we passed the hotel bar, Jairo sat down in one of the deep linen armchairs, which immediately engulfed him in an excess of cushions, and invited me to join him.

  “Weren’t we going, already?” I asked somewhat hesitantly, noting the curves of the bottles propositioning me from the other side of the counter.

  “The driver can wait. Let’s have a drink. It will do you good.”

  “Fine,” I said, sitting down and turning toward the bartender. “Some bottled water for me.”

  “Oh come on!” Jairo exclaimed, leaning over to my chair. “I was talking about a real drink. It’s always served you well.”

  “Served me well for what?”

  “To remember, at least in those instances when I’ve been with you. The alcohol gets your memory flowing again.”

  I considered this for a moment and then turned back to the barman. “Make that two whiskeys, then. The best in the house.”

  Jairo nodded, satisfied, and sat back in his armchair. The bartender served us our drinks and left without a word. I took mine and poured it into my brother’s.

  “Here—a double whiskey. I’ve learned that from watching noir films.” I stood up and grabbed my bags. “I’ll wait for you outside, Brother. It’s a lovely day.”

  As I headed out of the hotel, the brightness forced me to squint, but a smile of satisfaction crossed my face: my past was coming back to me. My brother’s arrival had unlocked it. The time spent in his company had helped me form an idea of the trouble I was caught up in, and how it had all begun.

  But to clarify all this, I need to go back three months, to the day when Adriana Alameda turned up at the Museum of Archaeology of Cantabria.

  ADRIANA

  My name is Adriana Alameda Almenara. Yes, I know: AAA. I’ve heard it all before. Honestly, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I love word games and anything involving combinations of initials.

  But I should get to the point. I was born thirty-two years ago in Santander, a small city on the northern coast of Spain. Twenty years later, with only the odd black mark on my stunning life record, I finished my degree in history with a fairly decent string of As on my transcript. I spent the next few years digging around in the subsoil of all the major archaeological sites of Europe and its surroundings. Now I can boast a dense five-page résumé earned with a pick and shovel.

  Mornings I’d break my back pounding barren sediment with a pneumatic drill. Middays, kneeling on foam-rubber cushions, I’d be involved in more delicate work: paintbrush, patience, and sharp eyesight, assisted by a miner’s headlight, all—if luck was on my side—to find the fossilized bones of Pleistocene rodents. Afternoons, while we washed and sieved tons of material, I’d bombard the project directors with questions. I gleaned all I could from the paleontologists, anthropologists, and prehistorians—the experts, the people in charge; the people I aspired to become in the future. In this way, grant by grant, I honed my skills on all the excavation sites that came my way: Lascaux, El Sidrón, Çatal Hüyük . . . and the holy grail of every archaeologist, the fossil-rich caves of Atapuerca.

  In any event, prehistory is the only thing I do well. In all other respects—family, boyfriends, lasting friendships—I’m a total disaster. I seem out of step with everyone else, like a spinning top with an unstable axis. Archaeology is my self-made center of gravity, something I impose on myself in order to simulate a normality my life quite simply doesn’t have. The rest is chaos, geographical instability, disorganization, and anarchy.

  Don’t get impatient; the action is about to begin. Let me see . . . the most noteworthy aspect of this story began on a very cloudy day in 2012. So, without further ado, I’ll tell you about that day, when I met my first longevo—one of the Ancients. He was the one who, millennium after millennium, persisted in keeping the ancient family united.

  PART 1

  1

  ADRIANA

  Friday, January 13, 2012

  Iago del Castillo, Iago del Castillo, I kept repeating to myself as I drove ever more speedily to the museum. I had a job interview in twenty minutes, and I was having difficulty saying the name of the person upon whom my new life in Santander depended without stumbling over it. I won’t deny it—I was desperate to change cities. Not even the bad weather that had been punishing the north of the country these past weeks had been able to dissuade me from going through with this latest move. As I drove I kept an eye on the heavy clouds heading toward me, and I took their presence as an invitation to come home.

  To be honest, it wasn’t so much the urge to return to my birthplace that was motivating me as leaving behind the dead end that my life in Madrid had become. I couldn’t wait to be rid of a boss whose reputation added prestige to my job at the National Museum of Archaeology, despite the fact that he appropriated all my articles and forced himself to smile as he asked me for a thousand and one favors without displacing a single gray hair. Then there was the ex-boyfriend determined to reprise a long-finished story, and an absent father with whom I’ve always felt uncomfortable. Madrid no longer held any appeal.

  Elisa Garrido, a friend and former fellow student at the Complutense University of Madrid, had recommended me for the position of chief curator of the Prehistory Department of the Museum of Archaeology of Cantabria, just outside Santander.

  “Take the highway out of Santander in the direction of Torrelavega and head for the Portío district. You’ll eventually find yourself on the Costa Quebrada. Keep going past the turnoff, and you’ll see the sign for the entrance to the Museum of Archaeology of Cantabria. Though we employees call it the MAC.

  “And we call the bosses by their first names. They’re brot
hers: Héctor and Iago del Castillo, the deputy director and the technical coordinator. They have another brother, Jairo, who’s the patron saint—the one who puts up all the money—although you won’t see much of him.

  “So come and join us. People the world over are fighting to work here, and with your résumé you’ll have no difficulty in getting them to hire you. I don’t know why you’re still in Madrid wasting your time doing office work. You’ve turned into a bureaucrat.”

  Elisa was a Cantabrian in her thirties like me, but that was where any similarity ended, because she was married and had had three children in five years. With my cousin Marcos, if you please.

  The bureaucrat dig pricked my pride so much that it took me less than two hours to send my impressive résumé off to Elisa. The phone call from Iago del Castillo’s secretary at the MAC wasn’t long in coming either.

  Barely half a mile after the turnoff, I reached a headland jutting out from the cliffs. I let out a whistle of admiration when I saw the museum. The monumental MAC building was an old house built at the beginning of the twentieth century by indianos—Cantabrian emigrants to the Americas who had returned to their homeland with their fortunes. The red façade of the building stood out from the gray rock and competed with the dark green of the trees in the garden, which also contained exotic plants brought back by the indianos to remind their neighbors of the source of their family wealth. As if the neighbors weren’t reminded of this each time they said, “Yes, sir.”

  My car crept up the wide gravel driveway with the caution of a hunter. I steered around the building to the staff parking lot, a grass-free area of leveled ground at the rear of the museum. I parked on the edge of the cliff, next to a lavender bush that was miraculously clinging to life despite the fierce wind battering it. From that spot I could make out the hazy cliffs of the Costa Quebrada as if I were seeing it from inside a Monet painting. I checked the time on my cell phone.

  Five minutes. I’m not going to make it, I thought.

  As soon as I got out of the car with the folder I had prepared, a gust of wind whipped my hair into my face. I grabbed some sprigs of lavender and rubbed them between my hands. Then I inhaled the perfume, hoping to experience the calming effect of the lavender, composed myself with a smile, and buttoned the jacket of my suit.

  Two enormously tall palm trees stood watch at the main entrance like praetorian guards. I went up a few steps and crossed the threshold of the enormous, ancient wooden door. Once I was inside, the noise of the wind and surf that had almost deafened me at the cliff edge disappeared, giving way to a welcoming silence. I crossed the entrance hall to the stairs at the back. The wide, polished wooden handrail curved its way up four floors as if a vine had sprung up inside the building. It was obvious there was no elevator; clearly, the renovations had adhered faithfully to the original design of the building.

  I took advantage of the fact that there was no one in sight and raced up the stairs to the top floor. I flew down the narrow corridor, though I couldn’t stop myself from leaning over the balustrade and looking down. The rooms were arranged around a covered inner patio in the style of a Madrid courtyard. I could see a few people on the third floor glancing up at me out of the corner of their eyes while pretending to work. When I reached the door Elisa had told me to go to, I smoothed my hair one last time and knocked.

  “Good morning. My name is Adriana Alameda. I’m here to see Iago del Castillo.”

  The secretary smiled mechanically at me. The voice that emerged from the woman with the thick mane of black curls was as polite as it was icy.

  “Please go into the office on the right.”

  I opened the door. The room had a certain air of the very old, like the rest of the building. Perhaps the solid, top-quality wood of the table and shelving was responsible. Even so, the office had a welcoming warmth about it. I could see a well-thumbed copy of Baltasar Gracián’s philosophical handbook The Art of Worldly Wisdom on the armrest of a leather chair. The picture windows at this privileged height looked out over the rear of the museum and beyond, and the wind was just a pleasant murmur that occasionally rattled the glass. I couldn’t stop myself from walking to the window.

  The contrast to my office in Madrid was offensive. There, the farthest I could see was a poster of Homo habilis I had personally placed on my bare wall in the majestic building of the National Museum of Archaeology. I had never inquired, but it was clear that I wouldn’t have been allowed any further decorative license.

  “I see you’re enjoying the view,” said a pleasant voice behind me.

  “My apologies. It’s stunning. Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Adriana Alameda.”

  He held out his hand to me, his eyes smiling. He wasn’t your typical executive, despite the dark-blue suit and the carefully selected tie. His affable manner wasn’t the product of a course in social skills; he’d been born with it.

  “Héctor del Castillo. And no formalities, please; I’m not that old. I was expecting you. My brother Iago usually handles the interviews, since he’s the one you’ll be working with most closely, rather than me. But he’s been called away for a few days and, as you know, we have to hire someone for the Prehistory Department as a matter of urgency. So, if you don’t mind, we’ll move right on to your application.” Pointing to a chair, he asked, “Would you care for something to drink or something to snack on?”

  “No, thank you. I just had something in Santander,” I lied.

  I couldn’t help feeling shattered. My immediate boss wasn’t even going to interview me? It didn’t look very promising. I headed in the direction of the chair, unsure where to leave my bag.

  Calm down, Dana. Elisa said they were looking for someone with your profile. There’s no reason why there should be anything wrong.

  “Good. Let’s start, then.”

  He helped himself to a mineral water from the bar cabinet and sat down. I hadn’t had a good look at him yet. He seemed to be in his early forties, although the suit and the odd gray hair at his temples made him look somewhat older. There was something imposing about him even though he was neither especially tall nor particularly solid. He stood about five foot seven, maybe a bit more. Hazel eyes, brown hair, and a face that would undoubtedly have been considered attractive over the years.

  “Iago and I have looked over your résumé. I have to say that we were both impressed by the number of sites and museums you’ve worked at in the past few years. You haven’t missed a single one, at least not in Europe . . .”

  He rattled off names I knew by heart because at some point they had all been temporary domiciles of mine. Then he leaned toward me eagerly, as if he were going to ask me for the location of Troy.

  “You worked on the Neanderthal Genome Project at El Sidrón cave?”

  “Yes, until about two years ago. Then major cuts in the funding forced them to let some of us go.”

  “Tell me, what was it like working there?”

  “We were a multidisciplinary team—geneticists, paleontologists, and archaeologists.” It’s possible my eyes sparkled as I spoke. “It was pure science fiction. We’d go down into the excavation site in white space suits, sterilized from head to toe.”

  “Are you still in touch with people at the sites where you’ve worked?” he wanted to know as he finished off his glass of water.

  A feeling of relief washed over me. If he continued down that route, the interview was going to be a breeze.

  “Yes, of course. Most of us have formed groups on the Internet, and we continue to collaborate. Social networks for archaeologists, like Arquelógika here in Spain, are very active these days.”

  Héctor nodded by way of reply. “I’ll be honest with you. What we need from you is to arrange agreements—memoranda of understanding—with other institutions in Spain and Europe. We want to push the Prehistory Department and increase the number of temporary exhibitions.”
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  “I don’t anticipate any difficulties. It would be a question of matching interests and suitable dates, but most, if not all, of them will be more than happy to collaborate. Would there be anything else expected of me?”

  “To tell the truth, this year’s program is already finalized, but next year’s is still to be worked out. The person who was employed in this position left a few months ago, so Iago has taken charge of the department, as well as continuing to coordinate everything else, so we’d want you to get up to speed right away.”

  “As far as I’m concerned that wouldn’t be a problem. Elisa had already mentioned some of this to me. In fact, I’ve brought a proposal for a program with me, based on what’s being done at the leading archaeological museums.”

  I offered him the folder I was holding, trusting he wouldn’t notice my sweaty hand. I could tell from the expression on his face that he wasn’t expecting this. He leafed through it for a few minutes, genuinely interested. I began to think I’d gained a few brownie points.

  “They say you’re the youngest person at the National Museum of Archaeology,” he commented without looking up from my report.

  “True.” I wriggled somewhat nervously in my chair. Where was this heading?

  “They also say it’s only a matter of time before they announce a permanent position to fit your profile.”

  “They’re saying that?”

  What else could I say? My boss, Federico Santos, had offered me a temporary position at the National over a year ago. The tacit agreement had consisted of my becoming his obedient slave in return for his pulling the strings to ensure that I, his star assistant, ended up with a permanent position. But Santos was about to retire and had become bored with his career, although not with continuing to see his name on all the articles and introductory commentaries about prehistory archaeology in Spain. It wasn’t difficult to guess who was responsible for the content of all that work.