‘I didn't know you spoke Spanish,’ said El Pulmón, taking the opportunity for a bit of distraction.
‘He knows you're still buying from them,’ said the Cuban.
‘How does he know that?’
‘One of your clients told us.’
‘Which one?’ asked El Pulmón. ‘They're all junkies out there. They'll do and say anything for a fix.’
‘The flamenco singer.’
‘Carlos Puerta is hardly reliable,’ said El Pulmón. ‘He's been looking to fuck me up since his girlfriend moved in with me.’
‘That's why we kept an eye on your place, to see the Italians for ourselves,’ said the Cuban, who'd moved to the window and was peering through the blinds.
El Pulmón looked at the Russian and kept an eye on the Cuban through the mirror.
‘We tell you the last time,’ said the weightlifter.
The Cuban came away from the window. He had a large hunting knife in his hand. He went to grab El Pulmón by the hair. El Pulmón leaned forward and slapped the copy of 6 Toros. The roar of the gunshot filled the room and El Pulmón's blade sprang into his hand. He kept low and swung round, driving the narrow length of steel into the Cuban's left side. He heard nothing with the gunshot ringing in his ears, but he felt the Cuban's body stiffen. As he drove the blade in, he grabbed the Cuban's right wrist with the hunting knife in it and whirled the man round so that he ended up between El Pulmón and the weightlifter, who was now on the floor, lying on his back, arm extended, gun in hand. Another head-ringing bang inside the four hard walls of the apartment and the Cuban's rigid body leapt and jerked. El Pulmón forced him backwards on to another spine-rupturing explosion. He dropped his shoulder and shoved the Cuban at the Russian, who grunted under the weight and El Pulmón, still with his blade, was out of the door, down the stairs and on the other side of the garages before he remembered Julia, asleep in the bedroom.
There was a taxi waiting in the prison car park, engine running, air-con roaring, cabbie asleep, head thrown back, mouth open. As Falcón went up the path to the prison reception he took a call on his mobile from his old detective friend in Madrid, calling him about the apartment in La Latina where he'd met Yacoub.
‘It's not privately owned,’ he said. ‘The whole block belongs to the Middle East European Investment Corporation, based in Dubai.’
‘Was that apartment rented out to anyone?’ ‘It's one of three in the block that's empty.’ Falcón hung up, found Alicia with her serene white face, red lipstick under a jet-black bob, waiting patiently in the reception area. He greeted her. They kissed. She squeezed his shoulder, happy to hear his voice. He told her about her taxi.
‘I've been sitting here for twenty minutes,’ she said, annoyed. ‘What's the matter with these people?’
‘He's a taxi driver from Seville,’ said Falcón. ‘It's their nature.’
‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘Complicated,’ he said.
‘That seems to be the default setting for people our age,’ she said.
Falcón told her that Consuelo's youngest son had been abducted and the effect on their relationship. Alicia was shocked, said she'd call her straight away.
‘She must be going crazy.’
‘Don't speak to her on my behalf,’ said Falcón.
‘Of course not.’
He walked her to her cab, the heat cracked down on their heads. He opened the cab door for her, showed the cabbie his police card, pointed at his meter with a long hard stare. The cabbie zeroed it, pulled away.
When the guards first brought Calderón into the room made available to them by the prison governor, he looked so shattered Falcón thought he might send him straight back to his cell. The guards got him seated and left the room. Calderón ransacked his pockets for cigarettes, lit up, sucked in a huge drag, swayed in his chair.
‘What brings you here, Javier?’ he asked.
‘Are you all right, Esteban? You look…’
‘Bedraggled? Crazy? Fucked up?’ said Calderón. ‘Take your pick. I'm all of them. You know, I hadn't really understood it before, but there's nowhere to hide in psycho … you wouldn't call it therapy, exactly, would you? It's more like … extraction. Psycho-extraction. Yanking rotten memories from the brain.’
‘I just saw Alicia in the car park.’
‘She doesn't give much away, that one,’ said Calderón. ‘I reckon psychoanalysis is no different to poker, except that nobody knows what cards they have. Did she say anything interesting?’
‘Nothing about you. She's very discreet. She didn't even tell me why she was here,’ said Falcón. ‘Maybe you shouldn't look at it as extraction, Esteban. You can't extract memories, nor can you hide from them without consequences. You just illuminate them.’
‘Thanks for that, Javier,’ said Calderón, dismissively. ‘I'll see if that makes it any less painful. Doctora Aguado asked me what I wanted from our sessions. I said I wanted to know if I'd killed Inés. It's interesting. She's no different to a lawyer making a case. She starts with a premise – Esteban Calderón hates women. Me – can you believe it? Then she starts wheedling the usual shit out of me about how I despise my stupid mother and how I fucked up a girlfriend who didn't like my poems.’
‘Your poems?’
‘I wanted to be a writer, Javier,’ he said, holding up his hand. ‘It's all a long time ago and I'm not going into it. What are you doing here?’
‘We're getting somewhere on Inés's murder,’ said Falcón. ‘But we've also hit a brick wall.’
‘Come on, Javier. Don't talk shit to me.’
‘I've been working on Marisa.’
‘That sounds like the wet-towel treatment.’
‘It probably was something like that for her and she's been getting it from all sides,’ said Falcón, and went on to tell him about finding the footage of Margarita, the threatening phone calls and the kidnapping of Darío.
‘You keep your inner turmoil better hidden than I do, Javier.’
‘Practice,’ said Falcón. ‘Anyway, I sent Cristina Ferrera to talk to Marisa, and while intoxicated she pretty well admitted that she'd been coerced to start a relationship with you.’
‘By whom?’
‘The people holding her sister. A Russian mafia group.’
Calderón smoked intensely, staring at the floor.
‘What I need to know from you, Esteban, is how you met Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘Who effected that introduction?’
Silence for a moment while Calderón leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed.
‘She's dead, isn't she?’ he said. ‘You've come to me because she can't tell you any more.’
‘She was murdered last night,’ said Falcón. ‘I'm sorry, Esteban.’
Calderón leaned across the table, looking up into Falcón's head.
‘What are you sorry about, Javier?’ he asked, tapping his own chest. ‘Are you sorry for me, because you think I loved her and she was just fucking me under orders?’
‘I'm sorry because she was a woman in an impossible position, under immense strain, whose only thought was for the safety of her own sister,’ said Falcón. ‘That's why she didn't talk to us. A singular, but very compelling reason.’
That did something to Calderón's equilibrium. He even wobbled in his chair and had to anchor himself with his hands flat on the table. Emotion rose in his chest. And maybe it was because this conversation had come hard on the heels of his session with Alicia Aguado that he managed to see beyond his own self-interest and realize that sitting before him was a man with a completely different moral centre to his own.
‘You've forgiven her, haven't you, Javier?’ he said. ‘You now know that Marisa was in some way involved in Inés's murder, and yet…’
‘It would be very helpful if you could remember who introduced you to Marisa,’ said Falcón.
‘Does this mean,’ said Calderón, blinking back the tears, ‘that I didn't do it?’
‘It means that Cristina Ferrera
thought that Marisa, who was drunk at the time, had been coerced into consorting with you,’ said Falcón. ‘Marisa never admitted that it was the Russians who'd forced her. We have no signed statement and no recording of the conversation. There's no new evidence. We have, however, lost Marisa. Her words will never be heard. We have to go back to an earlier level of involvement, which means finding out how she met you. Were you introduced?’
Falcón could see quite clearly that Calderón did remember. He was staring at a point above Falcón's head and running his thumbnail up and down between his front teeth, weighing something up; and whatever it was it had weight.
‘It was at a garden party at the Duchess of Alba's house,’ said Calderón. ‘Marisa was introduced to me by my cousin.’
‘Your cousin?’
‘That is the son of the Juez Decano de Sevilla,’ said Calderón. ‘Alejandro Spinola. He works in the mayor's office.’
15
Outskirts of Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 13.30 hrs
On the way back from the prison, Falcón got the call.
‘Two officers from the Narcotics squad in Las Tres Mil just called in a double murder in the apartment of a drug dealer called Roque Barba, also known as El Pulmón,’ said the operator. ‘A Cuban male called Miguel Estévez found in the living room, shot twice in the back and stabbed in the side, and a Spanish female, Julia Valdés, believed to be El Pulmón's girlfriend, found in the bedroom shot in the face.’
Falcón came off the motorway and on to the ring road. He took the exit before the golf club and joined the Carretera de Su Eminencia, a road he'd always thought ridiculously named, given that it enclosed one of the grimmest public housing projects in Seville.
In the 1960s and 70s the municipality had lured gypsies from the centre of town out to this development of residential blocks on the edge of civilization. Years of poverty, lack of community and self-respect had transformed a halfhearted attempt at social engineering into a neighbourhood of drugs, murder, theft and vandalism. This did not mean that the barrio was without soul. Some of the greatest flamenco voices came from here, and quite a few of them had done time in the prison he'd just come from. It was more that the soul was not evident from the bare, treeless landscape, the grimy concrete blocks, the cheap clothes hanging out to dry on metal bars over the windows and landings, the rubbish collecting in the basements and stairwells, the graffiti and the air of complete desolation that told anyone who was in any doubt that these were forgotten people in a place that had fallen off the back of the town hall's mind.
The operator in the Jefatura hadn't bothered with an address. It was just a question of cruising around, looking for the crowd of people, the collection of police cars and the green day-glo ambulances, which he soon found at the foot of an eight-storey block. The patrolmen were nervous. Some of the people gathered around the metal security cage at the entrance of the block looked more desperate than the usual citizens of Las Tres Mil. Some of them were crouched low on the grassless earth, arms wrapped round their shins, holding on to themselves and shaking. The name of El Pulmón reached his ears. These were his clients, and they'd just lost their supply.
A patrolman told him to watch his step going up. There were blood drips circled in yellow on a number of steps going up to the fourth floor. The stink of rubbish followed him. No lift. The apartment was full of the usual crime-scene personnel. The bodies were still in position. Falcón shook hands with the médico forense and the instructing judge, Anibal Parrado. Sub-Inspector Emilio Pérez, with his dark good looks of a thirties matinée idol and total devotion to detail, was running the investigation. They talked Falcón through the scene.
‘We're not sure of the sequence of events, but we're assuming that the gun found on the floor by the window was secured to the table by those screws. It has been fired only once and the blood spatter on the wall beneath the mirror would suggest that we're looking for a wounded man. There is no other firearm in the apartment. A hunting knife was found close to the Cuban's body, which had not been used. From the entry wounds, the ballistics guys think that the same gun that killed Miguel Estévez also killed Julia Valdés in the adjacent room. Obviously, given that two shots killed the victims, they were not killed by the gun found on the floor, which they think is of a different calibre anyway. They will confirm that when they get the bullets out of the two victims. An initial inspection of the gunshot wounds to Miguel Estévez suggests that he was shot by someone lying on the floor. The body seems to have fallen on to the shooter, which would suggest that someone was using him as a shield and pushed him back on to the killer. Judging by the blood drips on the threshold of the bedroom, it is believed that the girl was shot from there by the wounded man.’
Over the médico forense's shoulder Falcón could see the girl's ruined face. Her upper body was slumped against the wall, which was covered with blood and cerebral matter. Her neck was crooked over the low bed-head, while her left hand was flung out towards the window. Her other hand had come to rest between her splayed legs but, with the palm upwards, it indicated the awkwardness of sudden death rather than the demureness of a final modesty. She was naked, but with her right leg caught up in the twisted sheet. The cameo spoke of fear, panic, paralysis and, finally, violent death.
‘The blood drips leave the apartment and go down the stairs to the pavement, where they disappear. We assume the shooter got into a car.’
‘And the stab wound to Estévez?’
‘The Narcs say that El Pulmón favoured a blade,’ said Pérez. ‘And it looks as if he's taken it with him.’
Falcón inspected the gun on the floor, the screws in the table, the bullfight magazine on the floor in front of the mirror.
‘There are clear prints on the gun,’ said Jorge, appearing from under the table with his custom-made inspection glasses on.
‘We've got El Pulmón's prints on file from previous drug arrests,’ said Pérez.
‘We have to assume that this gun did not belong to the Cuban, Miguel Estévez. Two men with guns are no match for a single man with a blade. Which means,’ said Falcón, ‘that this was the gun secured to the table and that El Pulmón was expecting trouble.’
‘He must have bought that gun recently,’ said one of the Narcs. ‘He was always a knife man before. You know he was an ex-bullfighter?’
‘Have you seen this guy before?’ Falcón asked the Narc, pointing at Estévez.
‘No, but things have been changing around here. The product is different to what it was last year. We still haven't been able to work out where the packages are coming from.’
‘Have you come across any Russians?’
He shook his head.
‘Were you the one who found the bodies?’ asked Falcón.
‘Me and my partner,’ said the Narc.
‘Any idea what time this happened?’
‘The guy upstairs said he heard the first gunshot at about one o'clock,’ said the Narc.
‘Did he call in the shooting?’
‘Nobody calls in a shooting in Las Tres Mil,’ said the Narc.
‘What were you doing here?’ asked Falcón. ‘Did somebody send you?’
‘At a quarter past one we got a call from Inspector Jefe Tirado asking us to find a junkie called Carlos Puerta, who he wanted to question. If we found him, we were to call Tirado and he'd come down here.’
‘Did you find him?’
‘He's downstairs with my partner, waiting for the Inspector Jefe.’
‘Tell me when Tirado gets here.’
Two of Falcón's young detectives, Serrano and Baena, appeared, ready to do some door-to-door.
‘I want you and your partner to work with my two detectives here,’ said Falcón to the Narcotics agent. ‘I want some ideas about where we're going to find El Pulmón … before somebody else gets to him.’
Consuelo paced the long glass doors of her living room. The air-con was too chill to sit for long. A patrolman was slumped in the shade of the umbrella
on the other side of the pool. She thought he might be sleeping under his mirrored sunglasses. His arm hung limply down by the side of his chair.
A sound technician who'd come in to set up some professional recording equipment, rather than the temporary stuff Inspector Jefe Tirado had left on Saturday evening, was sitting in the kitchen. He was talking to the family liaison officer. There was another patrolman at the front door. She'd told him to come in from the heat. He stared morosely out of the glass panel of the front door. She'd phoned her restaurant manager, told him to contact the estate agents she was currently dealing with to ask them not to call until further notice. She'd taken only one call, from Alicia Aguado. She'd yanked the wire out of her mobile, which was connected to the recording equipment, and taken the call upstairs in her bedroom.
Alicia wouldn't say it, but Consuelo knew that the only reason she could be calling was that she'd heard from Javier. The press and TV still had not been informed, and the radio stations, who'd been involved in the initial stages, had been asked to keep quiet for the moment. Inspector Jefe Tirado didn't want a media circus, or to have to deal with hoaxers, until there'd been contact from the kidnappers, or it became clear that there would be none.
Aguado's call had helped. Consuelo had started by venting her bile against Javier, and Aguado had heard her out to the bitter end before asking her what had actually happened. It was good for Consuelo to talk to someone who listened. It had calmed her down. She began to get some perspective on her anger. Blame and guilt were natural. Rage was inevitable. The call did not cure her of her animosity towards Falcón, or prevent her from replaying that moment when she'd lost sight of Darío over and over in her mind, but it had allowed some resolve to harden inside her. She felt stronger, less jittery. Her mood swings from despair to fury were not so violent. The tears still came, but with some warning.
After the call Consuelo had sent her other two sons away with her sister. She didn't want the boys caught up in such an oppressive and potentially volatile atmosphere, with everybody staring at the phone, willing it to ring. She didn't want them to see her hope and despair, the possible joy and the probable disappointment. Despite Alicia's call, she knew her emotions would be uncontrollable because she still felt exposed.