the night. A minute later, the door to the stairs swung open. “You didn’t find her? Okay, come up with me. There’s something…”
The inner office was windowless, with a steel desk, a laptop open. A fifty-inch TV screen played live feeds from four surveillance cameras, one behind the bar, one on each side of the front door, and the last a wide shot of the main room.
“Good footage,” Rebecca said.
“We made three million euros last year. A problem, someone stealing, we want to know.” He clicked on his laptop until the big screen on the wall lit up with a color feed from a camera behind the bar. The time stamp indicated 22:18:30. Ten eighteen p.m. Kira sat at the bar, alone, eyeing herself in the mirror, a copper mug in front of her. She looked confident. Happy.
Rebecca wanted to warn her daughter, Beware, beware—
“There she is. As you said. You can watch it all, but I tell you, she came her by herself, ordered a sangria from the bartender. She drank it, then a beer. She talked a little to the bartender, no one else. Waiting for someone. You see we weren’t too crowded when she first came, then we fill up.”
He clicked on the laptop and the screen jumped ahead, one frame for each half minute.
The manager stopped the fast-forward, went to normal speed.
22:59:22. A man made his way through the thickening crowd to Kira. Tall, broad-shouldered, mid- to late twenties, wearing a baseball cap with an oversized brim that did a good job hiding his face from the camera. Kira smiled at him. They’d have to check with Tony, get a screen grab, but this guy had to be Jacques.
The guy kissed her cheek. Then he stepped back and introduced Kira to a woman behind him. The woman was his age, pretty in a big-chinned TV news anchorwoman way. She wore a platinum-blond wig that flopped over her forehead. Kira forced a smile and the three talked.
A man and a woman. As the bouncer at Ginger had said.
“You see, this woman was with him,” the manager said unnecessarily.
Yeah, and why? Jacques had been alone when he met Kira in Paris. To Kira, the woman’s arrival had been annoying but hardly alarming. Now it seemed sinister. As did the fact that both Jacques and the woman both had worn headgear to help hide their features.
“Sound?” Brian said.
“Too much background, too loud.” The manager paused the video. “Okay, I tell you, they talk, order sangria. Then to the back of the bar, off this camera. You want to watch regular speed or fast?”
“Regular,” Rebecca said.
The manager turned the footage back on and they watched in silence. Kira and the woman held themselves in a way that suggested they had taken an instant dislike to one another. Finally, the bartender brought Jacques a pitcher of sangria. He paid and the three walked off-camera.
“So, I warn you, only one camera watches the whole room. Where they were sitting, you barely see them. I looked at it quickly. You can see the girl with the wig get up from the table, come back, get up. Nothing else happens, and then, a bit before midnight, they leave. All three.”
He pulled up a video from the camera mounted over the front door. 11:56:30. Kira and Jacques and the woman walked out together; both Jacques and the woman had their heads ducked in a way that obscured their faces. Then they disappeared. Into the night.
“They don’t come back.”
Rebecca felt as if she’d been in the bar, a ghost, impotent, useless, watching her daughter disappear. “Have you seen either of them before?”
“Never.” The manager shook his head for emphasis. “You see, he pays cash, no card.”
Rebecca scribbled down her and Brian’s email addresses. “Can you send us a screen shot from when they met? And from when they walked out?”
“Of course.”
“If she’s still not back in the morning we’ll want the whole video. Thank you for all of this.”
“De nada. I’m sure you’ll find her. Probably she just drank too much, she’s passed out.”
* * *
They hurried in silence up La Rambla and the broad boulevards of Eixample. Rebecca found herself wondering if they would return to an empty apartment, if someone had grabbed Tony while they were looking for Kira.
But Tony was just where they’d left him.
“You didn’t find her?”
“We have a picture from the bar.” She handed him her phone, with the screen shot.