‘Maybe not, but how about Madrid or Valencia? What do you think?’
‘Will you still talk to me when you've been photographed by Hola?’ he said. ‘Consuelo Jiménez in her glorious home, surrounded by her beautiful children.’
‘And my lover … the cop?’ she said, looking at him sadly. ‘I might have to let you go unless you learn how to sail a yacht.’
That was the first time she'd called him her lover and she knew it. He finished his beer, took her empty glass and put them on a ledge. She took his arm and they walked across the square to the restaurant.
They knew her in the restaurant, which despite its Arabic name had a neo-classical feel to it – all pillars and marble and strong white nappery, with no such thing as a round plate. The chef came out to greet her and two glasses of cava, on the house, arrived at their table. There was a lull in the restaurant hubbub as the other diners looked at them, recognized their faces from distant scandalous news stories; moments later they were forgotten and the cacophony resumed. Consuelo ordered for both of them. He liked it when she took over. They drank the cava. He wished they were at home and he could lean over and kiss her throat. They talked about the future, which was a good sign.
The starter arrived. Three tapas on an oblong plate: a tiny filo pastry money bag containing soft goat's cheese, a crisp toast of duck liver set in sticky sweet quince jam, and a shot-glass of white garlic and almond soup with an orb of melon ice cream floating at the top and flakes of wind-dried tuna nestling in the bottom. Each one went off in his mouth like a firecracker.
‘This is oral sex,’ said Consuelo.
Plates were removed with their empty flutes. A bottle of 2004 Pesquera from the Ribeiro del Duero was opened, decanted and glasses filled with the dark red wine. They talked about the impossibility of going back to live in Madrid after the lotus life of Seville.
She'd ordered him duck breast, which was presented in a fan with a mound of couscous. Consuelo had the sea bass with crisp silver skin in a delicate white sauce. He felt her calf rub against his and they decided to forgo the dessert and get a taxi instead.
They practically lay down in the back and he kissed her neck as the street lights flashed overhead and the young people outside made their moves from the bars to the clubs. The lights were still on at her neighbour's house and the daughter let them in. Falcón lifted Darío from the bed. He was fast asleep.
As they walked across to Consuelo's house the boy came awake.
‘Hola, Javi,’ he said sleepily and thumped his blond head into Falcón's chest and left it there, as if he was listening to his heart. The trust nearly broke Falcón apart. They went upstairs where he poured the boy into his bed. Darío's eyelids fluttered against the weight of sleep.
‘Football tomorrow,’ he murmured. ‘You promised.’
‘Penalty shoot-out,’ said Falcón, pulling up the bedclothes, kissing him on the forehead.
‘Goodnight, Javi.’
Falcón stood at the door while Consuelo knelt and kissed her son goodnight, stroked his head; he felt the complicated pang of being a parent, or of never having been one.
They went downstairs. She poured a whisky for Falcón, made herself a gin and tonic. He could see her properly now for the first time that night. Those slim, muscular legs, a subtle line running down her calf. He found himself wanting to kiss the backs of her knees.
There had been a difference in her touch tonight. It wasn't as if they hadn't made love since they'd got back together after the Seville bombing. She hadn't been restrained in that department, although, what with the summer holiday and the kids being around, there hadn't been much opportunity. The first time they'd got together, a couple of years ago, it had been different. They'd both been a little wild then after a long drought. This time they'd been feeling their way around each other tentatively. They needed reassurance that this was the right thing to be doing. But tonight he'd felt a difference. She was letting him in. Maybe it was Alicia, her psychologist, telling her she should let herself go, not just physically this time, but emotionally, too.
‘What's going on in there?’ asked Consuelo.
‘Nothing.’
‘All men say that when they're thinking dirty thoughts.’
‘I was thinking how magnificent that meal was.’
‘Then they lie to you.’
‘How is it that you always know what I'm thinking?’
‘Because you are completely in my thrall,’ she said.
‘You really want to know what I was thinking?’
‘Only if it's about me.’
‘I was controlling a powerful desire to kiss the back of your knees.’
A slow smile crept across her face as a thrill streaked down the back of her thighs.
‘I like a bit of patience in a man,’ she said, sipping her drink, the ice cubes rolling and tickling the glass.
‘The trick of the patient man is to recognize boredom before it sets in.’
She stifled a fake yawn.
‘Joder,’ he said, getting to his feet.
They kissed and ran upstairs, leaving their drinks quaking on the table.
She stepped out of her pink dress and a small pair of knickers. It was all she had to do. He wrenched at his hands caught in the cuffs of his shirt, kicked off his shoes. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, tanned all over except a small white triangle. After some ferocious moments with his clothes he was naked, went over to her, stood between her legs. She stroked him, looking up at his agony. Her lips were moist, still with the vestiges of the peachy lipstick that matched her fingernails. She reached up from his thighs, over his abdomen, to his chest. Her hands slipped round his back and she dug her nails into his skin. As he felt her mouth on him, her nails clawed their way down to his buttocks. He was hanging on to his patience by the skin of his teeth.
She fell back on to the bed, rolled on to her front, looked over her shoulder at him and pointed at the backs of her knees. His thighs shivered as he knelt on the bed. He kissed her Achilles tendon, her calf, the back of one knee, then the other. He worked his way up her hamstrings, which trembled under his lips. She raised her buttocks to him, reached behind her for him, patience out of the question now. They shunted together, his hands full of her. She gripped the sheets in her fists. And all the hell of the day just fell away from them.
They lay where they'd collapsed, still joined, the room lit only by the glow of street light coming in through the blinds.
‘You're different tonight,’ said Falcón, stroking her stomach, kissing her between the shoulder blades, welded to her by their sweat.
‘I feel different.’
‘It was like two years ago.’
She stared into the dark, her vision still green at the edges, as if recovering from an intense light.
‘Something happened?’ he asked.
‘I'm ready,’ she said.
‘Why now?’
He felt her shrug under his hands.
‘Maybe it's because my children are leaving me,’ she said.
‘Darío still needs you.’
‘And his Javi,’ she said. ‘He loves you. I can tell.’
‘And I love him,’ said Falcón. ‘And I love you, too.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, I love you, too … always have done.’
She took his hand from her stomach, kissed the fingers and pressed it between her breasts. She'd heard those words before from men, but this was the first time she'd got close to believing them.
8
Consuelo's house, Santa Clara, Seville – Saturday, 16th September 2006, 07.45 hrs
Morning began with football. Falcón in goal. He had a spring in his legs so that he had to remind himself not to save everything. He let Darío send him the wrong way a few times and watched on his knees as the boy ran around the garden with his Sevilla FC shirt over his head, flying. Consuelo looked out from the sitting room in her dressing gown. She was in a strange
mood, as if last night's admissions had made her cautious. She knew she loved Javier, especially when she saw his mock dismay as another of Darío's penalties rifled past him and sizzled down the back of the nylon net. There was something boyish about her cop and it made her ache as much as seeing her own son lying on his back, arms open to receive the embraces of his imaginary fellow players. She knocked on the window as if checking the scene for reality and they came in for breakfast.
Falcón sat in the front of the cab on the way back to his house and chatted cheerfully with the driver about Sevilla FC's chances in the UEFA cup. He knew it all from Darío. He picked up his car. The morning traffic on the other side of the Plaza de Cuba, screwed up by the ongoing metro construction, today posed no problems for him. He felt completely mended. Obsession had been cleared from his mind. A crescendo of the fullness of life expanded his chest. His paranoia seemed absurd. Decisions were easy. He knew now that he was going to have to talk to Pablo of the CNI about Yacoub's situation. That was something he wasn't going to attempt to manage on his own. It had come to him with clarity and accompanied by the words of Mark Flowers, the CIA agent, who doubled as a ‘Communications Officer’, attached to the US Consulate in Seville: ‘Don't try to understand the whole picture … there's nobody in the world who does.’ Just realizing the thinness of the slice of the world he saw was enough to persuade him that he needed another point of view.
Nobody from the Homicide squad was in yet. He closed the door to his office and picked up the phone with the scrambled line, which would connect him directly to Pablo in the CNI's offices in Madrid. It was a Saturday and early but Pablo was the new section head since Juan had left and Falcón knew he'd be there. It took half an hour to talk Pablo through what had happened in the apartment in La Latina yesterday afternoon and another fifteen minutes for Pablo to ask all his questions, the last of which was:
‘Where did he say he was going and when?’
‘Rabat. This morning. The GICM high command were going to give him their decision.’
Long silence.
‘Are you still there, Pablo?’
‘I'm still here,’ he said. ‘I'm wondering if there's anything that needs to be done immediately.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Yacoub is not in Rabat.’
‘He's flying there from Madrid this morning.’
‘That's the interesting thing,’ said Pablo. ‘He flew into Heathrow last night. It might not mean anything. It might just be an omission on his part, but we still haven't found a flight into Casablanca with his name on the manifest.’
Falcón felt that metallic coldness in his stomach again.
‘This is the problem I had yesterday,’ he said. ‘I think I'm losing him.’
‘Trust is a strange thing in this game,’ said Pablo. ‘It's more fluid than in the real world. You can't expect someone who's constantly dissimulating to be as reliable as yourself. Look what happens to married people when they have affairs. The first few lies are OK. Then, as time goes on and the subterfuge builds, the lying becomes an all-consuming activity. Yacoub is now having to pretend to be someone else almost twenty-four hours a day. The GICM have racked up the pressure by invading his domestic situation, which means that Yacoub now has one less rock to stand on to remind himself of who he really is.’
‘And I'm his last remaining rock.’
‘Without you, he's in danger of losing that vital sense of self,’ said Pablo. ‘Part of your job is to shore him up. Let him know that you are dependable, that you can be trusted in every situation.’
‘He told me not to talk to you,’ said Falcón. ‘He was obsessed with losing control to others. He's trying to control me and yet he's putting himself beyond my control. I'm not sure where I stand any more. All I know is that it will be below his son, Abdullah.’
‘You have to rebuild that trust. He must feel that it's you and him against the GICM. You have to anchor him,’ said Pablo. ‘I'm going to get more information on what he's doing.’
‘Whatever you do now will expose me. He'll know that I've talked to you.’
‘This fluidity of trust is a two-way thing,’ said Pablo. ‘He hasn't gone straight to Rabat as he told you. You've come to me for some advice on how to proceed. Nobody's been hurt. Just leave it with me for a while. Don't go anywhere else for advice, especially not to that “friend” of yours, Mark Flowers.’
He hung up. Pablo didn't like Falcón's relationship with Mark Flowers, which had started four years ago when Falcón had earned the CIA agent's respect during one of his investigations. Since that time they'd exchanged information, Falcón letting him know what was happening in his police work and Flowers helping out with specialist knowledge and FBI contacts. Cristina Ferrera knocked and came into Falcón's office as he put the phone down.
‘What's happening?’ he asked.
‘We've gone through all the disks in the Russian's briefcase and we've singled out sixty-four individuals, fifty-five men and nine women. All of them have been caught on camera with their pants down, using drugs, receiving money and/or “presents”.’
‘And how are you getting on with identifying these people?’
‘Vicente Cortés from GRECO and Martín Díaz from CICO have managed to identify all of the mafia guys and all but three of the so-called “victims” in the footage.’
‘What are we talking about?’
‘The usual local council people: mayors, town planners, building inspectors, health and safety, utilities, some local businessmen and estate agents, Guardia Civil. Cortés and Díaz weren't surprised by any of it … not even the child sex footage or the women with big black guys.’
‘You look around at all these people you're supposed to be protecting,’ said Falcón, eyes drifting to the window, ‘and you find they're in it up to their necks.’
‘I've isolated a still from one bit of footage that I want you to look at. You'll have to come next door to see it because Inspector Ramírez is making sure everything is confined to one computer. We don't even want the stills on a LAN in case they find their way out to our “friends” in the press.’
Falcón followed her out. Ferrera's fingers rapped the keys as she sat at the desk. An image came up on the screen of two people: a man kneeling behind a woman whose bottom was raised, face and shoulders on the bed. The girl was looking directly into the camera. Ferrera tapped the screen.
‘I'm absolutely certain,’ she said, ‘that this woman is Marisa Moreno's sister. I even went back to the police station and found the picture which had been supplied by Marisa to her “missing” file. She's only seventeen in the old shot but… what do you think?’
Ferrera's photo was of a girl with her hair unplaited, Afro style. The eyes were innocent and wide, her mouth closed tight with bee-stung lips. The woman on the screen was in her mid-twenties, which would have been Margarita Moreno's age now. Her hair was plaited, which wasn't the only difference. The eyes weren't innocent any more but glazed, unfocused, out of it.
Falcón held the photo Marisa had given him yesterday up to the screen. Margarita's hair was plaited in the shot.
‘You're right, Cristina. Good work,’ he said. ‘Now we're getting to it, Marisa, aren't we?’
‘Getting to what?’ asked Ferrera.
‘Another version of Marisa's story,’ said Falcón. ‘The reason why she was having an affair with Esteban Calderón, why that affair included more than just sexual duties, and, perhaps, why Inés was murdered in her own home.’
‘Marisa is in with the Russians?’
‘I've been to see her twice and each time I've had a threatening phone call within hours of our meetings,’ said Falcón. ‘Has the man in this shot been identified?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Tell Cortés and Díaz that, out of the three, this is the first shot that they have to work on. This guy will tell us where Margarita is being held,’ said Falcón. ‘Now let's go back to Marisa.’
‘Both of us?’
‘She doesn't like men,’ said Falcón. ‘I want you involved with her.’
On the way to Calle Hiniesta Cristina Ferrera called Inspector José Luis Ramírez and Vicente Cortés. The shot was accessible on Ramírez's computer in padlocked files to which only he and Ferrera had the password.
Marisa was not at home. They walked to her atelier on Calle Bustos Tavera. Marisa answered the door in a scarlet silk dressing gown open to reveal bikini briefs. She held a hammer and a wood chisel in one hand, a chewed cigar stub in the other.
‘You again,’ she said, making eye contact with Falcón, before dropping her gaze to Ferrera. ‘Who is this?’
‘I can perfectly understand why you don't like men now, Marisa,’ said Falcón. ‘So I've brought another member of my squad to talk to you. This is Detective Cristina Ferrera.’
‘Encantada,’ said Marisa, and turned her back on them.
She put the hammer and chisel down on the work bench, tied up her dressing gown, sat on a high stool and lit the cigar stub. Resistant was a mild description of her attitude.
‘Now?’ she asked. ‘Why can you understand it now, Inspector Jefe?’
‘Because we've just found your sister,’ said Falcón.
The line was intended to shock and it did. In the intense silence after its delivery Falcón saw pain, fear and horror flash across Marisa's beautiful features.
‘I distinctly remember telling you that my sister was not lost,’ said Marisa, summoning all the self-control she could muster.
Ferrera stepped forward and gave her the printout of the still image taken from Vasili Lukyanov's disks. Marisa looked down at it, pursed her lips. Her face was impassive as she reconnected with Falcón.
‘What is this?’
‘This was in the possession of a known Russian gangster who died in a motorway accident yesterday morning,’ said Falcón. ‘Maybe you knew him, too: Vasili Lukyanov.’
‘How is this relevant to me?’ asked Marisa, that name thudding into her with the force of a slaughterer's bolt. ‘If my sister, who I haven't seen for six or seven years, has chosen to take up prostitution…’