He was one of the first clients he took on at his office. Seven months after he’d moved in. He was a computer technician who lived in an isolated farmhouse somewhere in the area. A strange character, who lived alone and came to him asking advice about a matter he said was extremely confidential, though he never revealed what it was. In the first two meetings, he asked several questions and then left, still without saying exactly why he wanted a lawyer. From the usual kind of questions, though a little enigmatic (for example: if he would undertake to follow the honour code to the letter in the defence of a client, whatever might happen), to other, less common ones (if he would take this case on even if he knew he would be pestered by the police and by the most contradictory desires). He was a very strange character, who irritated him and whom in other circumstances he’d have ignored, but not there, seven months after getting married and opening his office, and less than a year — still insufficient time for them to spend the money — after the swindle they carried out, he and his wife, on the firm where they’d met, the perfect swindle, based on confidence, so they couldn’t be caught. This wasn’t the moment to spoil everything. He’d acted carefully: he’d only bought the house from where he could see, far off, the ruins of the castle of the baron he venerated, and set up his office in a back street in the small town, a little room where the client appeared for the first time on a hot spring afternoon, in a hat, overcoat and dark glasses. With the exception of an old magistrate who kept on putting off his retirement, he had no competition in a thirty-mile radius. All the same, he still had no clients. And the computer technician, however strange it might seem, was one of the first to appear in seven months. He was a suspicious man. And quite right too, considering he was hiding a goldmine. Finally, at their third meeting, almost a month after the first, he told the lawyer he was employing him as intermediary in a transaction that would overturn the country’s financial system. He was willing to pay a high price for his secret to be kept, for discretion. He wanted the lawyer to arrange a meeting with the board of the central bank, in Paris. For the first time, no longer able to control his irritation, he laughed at the client. ‘Here’s the number. Pick up the phone and ring. They’re waiting’, answered the computer technician, impassively. The lawyer stopped laughing and began looking at the client. He’s the one who tells the story, when an attack comes on. It’s always the same story: he took the number, lifted the phone off the hook and, when he was going to dial, he was interrupted once again by the client, who put his hand on the phone: ‘First it’s as well to know that from now on there’s no way back. And that in a few hours this office may well be surrounded by the police. You must be made aware that you will be tempted by contradictory desires’. The lawyer had already gathered that it was a very risky case, though he didn’t know its content. ‘It’s for your own good’, the client had explained to him, justifying the fact that he couldn’t reveal what it was about. Phone in hand, he dialled the number of the central bank in Paris, told the secretary who answered that he would like to have a meeting with the board of directors and was astonished when she said that the president would speak to him right away, he’d been awaiting his call. In an hour, the police had surrounded the office. But neither the lawyer nor his client were there any longer. The client went away in the same way he’d come, with his hat, overcoat and dark glasses, not without explaining to the lawyer that, from that moment on, they would not see each other again, and he would get all his instructions by phone or mail. The payment, as well. Before he went out, the client left the first instalment, in cash, and the envelope which the lawyer had to take personally to the meeting with the board of the central bank in Paris. When the police arrived, the lawyer was already at home, next to his wife sitting on the sofa with a glass of whisky in her hand. Since the client’s first visit, he hadn’t told her anything. Neither did he mention the business that night. When she asked him what he was going to do in Paris the next day, he answered: ‘Business meeting’, and that was that. It was already two months since the game of horrors had begun. The envelope the client had left him was sealed. The next day, as had been agreed, he handed it to the board of directors of the central bank. The president opened the envelope and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. The sheet passed from hand to hand around the table — except for the lawyer, of course — and returned to the president. The meeting lasted no more than five minutes. The president turned to the computer technician’s lawyer, and said he could inform his client that the council would make its position known in the next few days. Before leaving, the lawyer recounted what had happened on the previous day, when the police surrounded his office. He said he hoped disagreeable incidents like that would not be repeated. The president guaranteed it would not happen again. Some ten days later, and after telling the client in detail about the meeting in Paris, the lawyer got a call from the president of the central bank. The old man demanded the phone number of the computer technician, or his address, anything, anything, he shouted down the phone, while the lawyer tried to explain that, even if he wanted to hand his client over, he couldn’t, simply because he had not the least idea of his phone number, much less where he lived, for his client only phoned from public phone boxes, and at the most unexpected times, to prevent the police catching up with him. That was when the president asked for one more piece of proof: ‘I want one more piece of proof.’ ‘Proof of what?’ asked the lawyer, revealing his absolute ignorance, which in some sense proved his innocence, acted as his alibi. ‘Tell him I want one more piece of proof. He’ll understand’, replied the president, and hung up. The lawyer understood less and less. And the role of a mere messenger began to irritate him. He wanted to know what he was dealing with. What the secret shared by his client and the country’s banking system was. During the next call, he asked the client, who said again what he’d already said when he hired him: that it was better for his own safety for him not to know. ‘What I’ve discovered is huge. What I know could turn the whole financial system upside down.’ It was only then that the lawyer became certain that he was an intermediary in a blackmail of nationwide proportions, involving the country’s whole financial system. He realised, without knowing exactly what they were talking about, that the president of the central bank wanted that new piece of evidence as proof of the technician’s knowledge of a state secret. ‘More than that’, the client corrected him over the phone. ‘I’ve discovered something they didn’t know. They should thank me. It’s taken three years of my life to uncover a secret capable of turning the whole financial system upside down. I don’t mean to use it. I’m not threatening anything. I’m not blackmailing anyone. All I want is to be paid for my discovery. Like any inventor or scientist. I’ll sell my discovery and the subject will be closed. They buy my discovery and they’ll have my silence as a free gift. They should thank me, but they treat me like a criminal.’ That was when the lawyer began to glimpse what his wife would express so well in those words, sitting on the sofa, almost three months after the third and last appearance of the client in his office, with a glass of whisky in her hand, ‘in the American style’: ‘For you, the best thing would be if he didn’t exist, he’s your weak point’. What was she saying? Who was she talking about? How could she know exactly what had been taking over his mind in the last few months? How had she found out? The only time he’d mentioned the client to her was when he came back from the first meeting with the board of the central bank in Paris. He was frightened by it all and couldn’t stop himself. It’s human. He briefly commented, or, better, let slip a few words about the client and the numbers, the sheet covered with numbers, illegible even for someone who, like her, spent all their time doing accounts. But he said nothing more, because he soon saw the potential of the case and its possible developments, which didn’t exclude the elimination of the computer technician, which would be easy in a way, since no one had ever seen him, but only if he was silly enough to reappear. Because all he had to do was put his foot in his office for the police to swoop. The ideal thing would be for the lawyer to find out where he was hiding. But even then he couldn’t eliminate him before he knew his secret. His hands were tied. It would happen to him, with his mental block with numbers. Before he eliminated the client, he needed his secret to go on with the blackmail. It was an ideal plan. Instead of the honorariums the client had pledged himself to pay in monthly instalments, he would get all the money from the blackmail. He had understood the huge danger of the situation, but without the least idea of what it was about. He needed to discover the secret so he could go on negotiating as an intermediary, only now for a dead man, and then pocket all the money, with the advantage, on top of that, of coming out of it clean. He didn’t blink when he got the second sealed envelope, in the mail, a month and a half after the first, the confirmation of the proof the president demanded and that he had to take personally to Paris. He didn’t think twice before he opened it and came upon another sheet of paper covered with numbers. It was irritating. Why numbers? And why did it have to be him, who’d had problems with algebra since he was a child? He looked out a mathematician, with no success. The guy only confirmed the obvious, that there must be some kind of code there, because of the combination, frequency and alternation of the figures, but that you’d have to start from some kind of basic parameter to decipher it. You’d have to know what each number represented, and the place it occupied in the whole, and know the language it was written in and the formula, to be able to read it. The lawyer left in a state of irritation. He was so irritated he didn’t even think to put the sheet away when he got home in the middle of the night. He left it open on the table. What danger was there, if it was illegible? He only picked it up again in the morning. He left for Paris earlier than necessary, to consult other mathematicians before the second meeting with the bankers the following day. But he got the same reply. The sheet was illegible without the establishment of a set convention on which to base an interpretation, without some kind of semantics. ‘I could have told you that!’ shouted the lawyer at one of the mathematicians, the third he’d seen on the same afternoon in Paris, a little old man with white hair and a smock, who immediately threw him out of his room at the university shouting curses in Russian, his first language, which he hadn’t spoken since childhood, though it was still his favourite. Nobody had the least idea of what was written there, but when, at the meeting, the president of the central bank opened the envelope, before passing it on to the board of directors, he slumped into his chair with his hands on his head, desperately stammering: ‘This is the proof’. That sent the lawyer madder still. If these bankers could read the combination of numbers, how was it possible no one else could? He was so upset that, instead of waiting till night to go back home, on the train, he decided to get the first plane back in the early afternoon. He couldn’t lose any more time. He had to find the client before the police did. He had to eliminate him, not without first convincing him of the impossible, to tell him his secret, he needed to decipher what those figures said. When they came out of the airport, which was some thirty miles away from the ruins of the libertine baron’s château, and the hill where they lived, the wife said they needed to pick up a package in the town before they went back home. While she was paying for the package, he went into the chemist’s to buy some tranquillisers which he’d been increasingly taking in the last few weeks, and, when he came out, he came face to face with a most unexpected scene: the client, without dark glasses, hat or overcoat, talking very animatedly, on the other side of the street, with his wife, who already had the package in her hand. Everything went dark and he very nearly fell down in the middle of the street. It wasn’t just him. The client, too, couldn’t have imagined he would come across him there. It’s probable he thought the lawyer was still in Paris, as agreed, and decided to take advantage of the afternoon to do what he had to do in the town, thinking he was in safe territory. Neither could he have imagined that that was the man’s wife. The lawyer crossed the road and approached his wife. The client went pale. For a few seconds, the two looked at each other in mystified silence. The lawyer could see for the first time the expression of horror, and not the impassive face the computer technician had appeared with on the three occasions he’d been to the office. He was dressed in jeans, trainers and a white T-shirt. It’s difficult to imagine which of the two was the more astonished. But they managed to hide it, because she hardly saw. Luckily, the lawyer had not been followed by the police. The two pretended they didn’t know each other when the woman introduced them: ‘Monsieur . . . I am sorry! What was your name? This is my husband’. They shook hands. The client, suddenly very nervous, said he needed to leave, he was late, that it was a pleasure to see her again and meet her husband, and disappeared. As soon as he was gone, the lawyer turned round to his wife and asked, his eyes burning, where she knew that man from. She asked him if he remembered the day when, months ago, she had completely lost control of the car and crashed into a tree in the middle of a maize-field. ‘Well, that was the man who helped me. I think he lives somewhere around here.’ The lawyer still tried to follow him. He ran as far as the corner, but there was no sign of the client. He came back, grabbed the woman by the arms with all his strength and shook her right there in the street, trying to get more information out of her. He insisted on knowing where the accident had taken place. At fi