MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, NOON

Maria Elena Gómez had turned thirty-three years old on the same day that The Pietà of Malta was stolen from the Museo Arqueológico in Madrid. At thirty-three, an unmarried mother of a twelve-year-old daughter, she was a woman of considerable charm and good looks, solid and wholesome in the traditional style of a working class Madrileña.

To see Maria at the clubs or even at a soccer match, laughing, singing, or knocking back wine with friends, one would never have guessed the stolidly mundane nature of her career and employment.

As an employee of the Madrid subway system, just a few years earlier Maria would have been limited to working in a ticket booth. But now, thanks to laws forbidding sex discrimination in employment, Maria had graduated to the Madrid Metro job that she really liked. She was a track walker.

Five days a week, after the subway shut down for the night and before service resumed the next day, armed with heavy flashlights and cell phones, she and her partner would hop down onto the tracks and walk from one station to the next. They would check the links between the individual rails and check to see if the pressure of passing trains had created cracks in rails that, if the rail was not replaced, could lead to a train jumping the tracks. Now, more recently, track walkers were on duty during the day too. They kept a special eye open for anything unusual that could be connected with terrorism. New York, London, and Madrid had all been hit savagely by al-Qaeda, as everyone knew. While the chances of a repeat were always present, no one wanted to make it easy.

It wasn’t a job for everyone, but Maria liked her work.

“But, mujer! The darkness, the vagabundos in the tunnels, the filthy rats!” her female friends would say.

“No me importa nada,” she would answer. And to her it was nothing. She didn’t care a whit about dark or rats, maybe because she had been a tomboy as a girl, which hadn’t sat well with the nuns when she was in school. But she had left school at the age of sixteen when her father died.

The job was steady. It paid reasonably. It supported her comfortably, if not lavishly. But she also felt as if she was doing something not just to support herself and her young daughter, but something for Spain as well. Something that protected the public. From accidents. From terror. Even from inferior Metro service.

So she took her job seriously and dutifully, which was in the family tradition. Her father had been an engine driver for RENFE, the railway company, until he died of a stroke.

From her father, she had also inherited his little apartment in Lavapiés, not far from where so many of the new immigrants from India, Morocco, and China had settled. The home was not grand and it was not in a chic or fashionable part of the ancient city, nestled onto a street with Arab tea rooms and Indian kabob restaurants. Her place was a rambling apartment in one of the old corrales-or tenements-of the nineteenth century. But inside, it was tidy, clean, and comfortable, a nice home all the same among friendly people from all over the world. And it was hers.

The home was her father’s inheritance to her. All of it. And her father was the man she had loved unequivocally her entire life and who had loved her the same way in return. Pictures of him with Maria’s mother adorned every room of her home. In his honor she still supported Atlético, the soccer team that was the perennial underdog to the much more famous Real Madrid. She had gone to the games with him when she was a small child, sitting on his knee when she was small enough, in much the same way that he had taken her to the bullfights

She still went to the bullfights at Las Ventas from time to time. She felt very much at home sitting in the pie-slice shape of the arena where her father sat along with all the real aficionados, compared to the tourists in the more expensive sections. Actually, more than the bullfights themselves, she liked walking back along the Calle de Alcalá, with its lively scene of people enjoying the bustle of the boulevard, leading up to the Puerta de Alcalá, the three-hundred-year-old neoclassical arch that remains Madrid’s grandest monument.

Men in her life? From time to time. But she no longer wished to be tied down. And one of the last things in Spain that would change, she thought, would be the machismo aspect of the male dominated Spanish society. No, she had her daughter, a job that gave her some independence, and the little pleasures of life.

Men were a mixed lot, anyway. Except for her father, who had accepted her behavior and her pregnancy, saying “Los tiempos cambian.” Times change.

Times had changed.

A lot of the change had been very visible and in her lifetime, the last few decades, the final part of her father’s life and the first part of hers. Much of the change had come thanks to Felipe González and the PSOE, the Socialist Party that came into power in 1982 and completed the transformation from the stodgy, repressive Franco era to the vibrant Spain of the present day.

She remembered the latter years of the movida, the time when frozen morals were thawing and repressed creativity in everything from the arts to fashion to cinema was blossoming everywhere. She remembered dancing late into the night as a young girl sans chaperone, something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. She had even gotten pregnant by a man she barely knew, and though she hadn’t married the father, she was proud of her twelve-year-old daughter, who was now an outstanding student in school.

For a woman in her thirties with minimal formal education and no husband, things were going very well.

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, 12:47 P.M.

As Alex was closing her laptop, Gian Antonio Rizzo moved to a position beside her. “When did you arrive in Madrid?” he asked, switching into Italian.

“Yesterday. By train from Barcelona.”

“I noticed your tan,” he said. “Very nice. Your legs look spectacular. Spent some time turning heads on the beach, did you?”

“Yes, thank you. Are you flirting with me already?”

“I hope so,” he answered good naturedly. “I need to do something to make this otherwise-useless trip worthwhile. We’re never going to find this filthy figurine, you know. Might just as well go to the flea market on Saturday and get them a piece of junk there to replace it. So let’s talk about your skin hue, and the unending beauty of it, instead.”

Alex smiled. “I’m not sure I’ll be having much more time to work on the tan,” she said, packing her PC into an equally new carrying case. “Seriously, this looks like a full plate.”

“When art is gone, it’s gone,” he said. “Poof. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista, baby!”

“We’ll see.”

“But you’re feeling better?” he asked. “Better than I saw you last in Paris.”

“Molto meglio, grazie.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Ritz,” she said. “Down the Calle Filipe IV from here.”

“I didn’t know America’s balance of payments was so healthy they could put your investigators in a place like that,” he said.

“It’s not,” she said, packing up her things. “The dollar is still in shambles worldwide, but the average bubba who votes doesn’t know that yet. So they waste money, anyway. Like all governments. At least some of it gets thrown in my direction. If I objected, they’d probably have me investigated.”

“How many dollars is that a night, the hotel?”

“Maybe six hundred,” she said. “I haven’t looked. But the marble bathrooms are wonderful, as is the balcony and the view. I’m on the fifth floor overlooking the Prado. What’s not to like?”