The Hidden Assassins (10 page)

Esteban Calderón knew nothing of this. He’d never seen her workshop. She didn’t have any of her work in her apartment. He knew she carved wood, but she made it sound as if it was in the past. That was the way she wanted it. She hated listening to Westerners talking about art. They didn’t seem to grasp that appreciation was the other way around: let the piece talk to you.

Marisa dropped off her two finished pieces and took her money. She went to a tobacconist and bought herself a Cuban cigar—a Churchill from the Romeo y Julieta brand. She walked past the Archivo de las Indias and the Alcázar. The tourists were not quite as numerous as usual, but still there, and seemingly oblivious to the bomb which had gone off on the other side of the city, proving her point that terrorism only mattered if it directly affected you.

She walked through the Barrio Santa Cruz and into
the Murillo Gardens to indulge in her after-sales ritual. She sat on a park bench, unscrewed the aluminium cap of the cylinder and let the cigar fall into her palm. She smoked it under the palm trees, imagining herself back in Havana.

Inés had pulled herself together after fifteen minutes weeping. Her stomach couldn’t take it any more. The tensing of her abdominals was agony. She had crawled to the shower, pulled off her nightdress and slumped in the tray, keeping her burning scalp out from under the fine needles of water.

After another quarter of an hour she had been able to stand, although not straight because of the pain in her side. She dressed in a dark suit with a high-collared cream blouse and put on heavy make-up. There was no bruising to disguise but she needed a full mask to get through the morning. She found some aspirin, which took the edge off the pain so that she could walk without being creased over to one side. Normally she would walk to work, but that was out of the question this morning and she took a taxi. That was the first she knew of the bomb. The radio was full of it. The driver talked non-stop. She sat in the back, silent behind her dark glasses until the driver, unnerved by her lack of response, asked if she was ill. She told him she had a lot on her mind. That was enough. At least he knew she was hearing him. He went into a long soliloquy about terrorism, how the only cure for this disease was to get rid of the lot of them.

‘Who?’ asked Inés.

‘Muslims, Africans, Arabs…the whole lot. Get shot
of them all. Spain should be for the Spanish,’ he said. ‘What we need now are the old Catholic kings. They understood the need to be pure. They knew what they had to do…’

‘So you’re including the Jews in this mass exile?’ she asked.

‘
No, no, no que no,
the Jews are all right. It’s these Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians. They’re all fanatics. They can’t control their religious fervour. What are they doing, blowing up an apartment block? What does that prove?’

‘It proves how powerful indiscriminate terror can be,’ she said, feeling her whole chest about to burst open. ‘We’re no longer safe in our own homes.’

The Palacio de Justícia was frantic as usual. She slowly went up to her office on the second floor, which she shared with two other fiscales
,
state prosecutors. She was determined not to show the pain each step unleashed in her side. Having wanted to wear the badge of his violence, she now wanted to disguise her agony.

The mask of her make-up got her through the first excited minutes with her colleagues, who were full of the latest rumour and theory, with hardly a fact between them. Nobody associated Inés with emotional wreckage so they glided over the surface and went back to their work unaware of her state.

There were cases to prepare and meetings to be attended and Inés got through it all until the early afternoon when she found herself with a spare halfhour. She decided to go for a walk in the Murillo Gardens, which were just across the avenue. The gardens would calm her down and she wouldn’t have
to listen to any more conjecture about the bomb. She had the little grenade attack in her relationship to consider. She knew a breather in the park wasn’t going to help her sort it out, but at least she might be able to find something around which to start rebuilding her collapsed marriage.

Over the last four years when things had been going wrong for Inés in her marriage she played herself a film loop. It was the edited version of her life with Esteban. It never started with their meeting each other and the subsequent affair, because that would mean the film started with her infidelity, and she did not see herself as somebody who broke her marriage vows. In her movie she was unblemished. She had rewritten her private history and cut out all images that did not meet with her approval. This was not a conscious act. There was no facing up to unfortunate episodes or personal embarrassments, they were simply forgotten.

This movie would have been immensely dull to anyone who was not Inés. It was propaganda. No better than a dictator’s glorious biopic. Inés was the courageous fiancée who had picked up her husband-to-be after the nasty little incident that they never talked about, given him the care and attention he needed to get his career back on track…and so it went on. And it worked. For her. After each of his discovered infidelities she’d played the movie and it had given her strength; or rather it had given her something to record over Esteban’s previous aberration, so that she only suffered from one of his infidelities at a time, and not the whole history.

This time, as she sat on the park bench playing her
film, something went wrong. She couldn’t hold the images. It was as if the film was jumping out of the sprockets and letting an alien image flood into her private theatre: someone with long coppery hair, dark skin and splayed legs. This visual interference was shorting out her internal comfort loop. Inés gathered the amnesiac forces of her considerable mind by pressing her hands to the sides of her head and blinkering her eyes. It was then that she realized that it was something on the outside, forcing its way in. Reality was intruding. The copper-haired, dark-skinned whore she’d seen only this morning, naked, on her husband’s digital camera was sitting opposite her, smoking a cigar without a care in the world.

Marisa didn’t like the way the woman sitting on the bench on the other side of the shaded pathway was looking at her. She had the intensity of a lunatic about her; not the raving-in-the-asylum type but a more dangerous version: too thin, too chic, too shallow. She’d come across them at the Mexican dealer’s gallery openings, all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They filled the air with high-pitched chatter to keep the real world from bursting through the levee, as if, by chanting their consumer mantras, the great nothing that was going on in their lives would be kept at bay. In the gallery she tolerated their presence as they might buy her work, but out in the open she was not going to have one of these
cabras ricas
ruining her expensive cigar.

‘What you looking at?’ said Marisa. ‘You’re ruining my cigar, you know that?’

It took a moment for Inés, fluttering her eyelids in
astonishment, to realize that this was directed at her. Then the adrenaline kicked into her prosecutorial system. Here was a confrontation. She was good at those.

‘I’m looking at you.
La puta con el puro,
’ said Inés. The whore with the cigar.

Marisa uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, with her elbows on her knees, to get a good look at her heavily made-up adversary. She didn’t stop to think too long.

‘Hey, look, you bony-assed bitch, I’m sorry if I’m on your patch, but I’m not working, I’m just enjoying a cigar.’

The insult slashed across Inés’s face leaving it red with outrage. The blood dimmed Inés’s vision at the edges and played havoc with her oral-cerebral linkage.

‘I’m a fucking lawyer!’ she roared, and the people in the park stopped to look.

‘Lawyers are the biggest whores of them all,’ said Marisa. ‘Is that why you paint your face like that? To hide the pox?’

Inés leapt to her feet, forgetting her injuries. Even in her fury she felt that twinge in her side, the bumping of her bruised organs, and it was that which stopped her from a full physical onslaught. That, and the force field of Marisa’s languid muscularity, and impassive vocal brutality.

‘
You
are the whore,’ she said, pointing a spindly white finger at Marisa’s lustrous, mulatto sheen. ‘You’re the one fucking
my
husband.’

The shock that registered in Marisa’s face encouraged Inés, who had misread it as consternation.

‘How much is he paying you?’ asked Inés. ‘It doesn’t
look as if it’s much more than 15 Euros a night, and that’s a disgrace. That’s not even minimum wage. Or does he throw in the copper wig and buy you a fat cigar to keep you happy when he’s not there?’

Marisa instantly recovered from the revelation that this was the pale, pathetic, stringy little wife that Esteban couldn’t bear to go back to. She’d also seen that wince of pain as Inés had got to her feet and guessed at the hurt being disguised by the clownish panstick. She’d seen beaten women in the poverty of Havana and she could spot vulnerability at a hundred metres,
and
she had the ruthlessness to open it up and reveal it to its owner and the rest of the world.

‘Just remember, Inés,’ she said, ‘that when he’s beating you, it’s because he’s been fucking me so beautifully, all night, that he can’t bear the sight of your disappointed little face in the morning.’

The sound of her name coming out of the mulatto’s mouth made Inés catch her breath with a loud cluck. Thereafter the words sliced through her with the ferocity of blasted glass. The arrogance of her own anger disappeared. She felt the shame of being stripped naked in public with all eyes on her.

Marisa saw the fight go out of her and watched the sag in Inés’s shoulders with some satisfaction. She felt no pity; she’d suffered much worse when she’d lived in America. In fact the thin white hand with which Inés now held her side, no longer able to disguise the pain, only made Marisa think of other possibilities. Fate had brought them together and now it was up to one to shape the destiny of the other.

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 14.15 hrs

A group of workmen had formed around the section of the building where Fernando had pinpointed his wife’s position from the sound of her mobile phone. Fernando was on his haunches, with his hands clasped over the top of his head, trying to exert additional gravitational force, as if there was the possibility that more tragedy might carry him away like a child’s lost helium-filled balloon.

The crane loomed over the scene with its wrist-thick steel cable, taut and creaking. There were workmen on ladders using motorized hand-held saws, capable of ripping through concrete and steel with a noise that went through Falcón taking shreds with it. They had inserted hydraulic props and thick scaffolding planks to keep the collapsed floors apart as they carved out a tunnel. Chunks of concrete were coughed from the hole within clouds of dust, and showers of sparks spewed out as the saws’ teeth bit into steel. The goggled workmen, grey as ghosts, plunged further in until the unbearable sound stopped and there was a call for more props and planks. The sun beat down. The sweat tracked
dark rivulets through the grey dust on the workmen’s faces. Once the props and planks were inserted the saws started up again, making all humans aware of the savagery of their metal teeth. The workmen were off the ladders now, kneeling on pads strapped to their knees, staring into the tangled skeleton of the building, embraced by claws of steel rods jutting from the shattered concrete.

He knew he should move away, that the sight of the confused guts of the building was not good preparation for the task at hand, but Falcón was caught up in the drama and was feeding a profound sense of anger at the tragedy. Only Ramírez calling wrenched him out of his distraction.

‘We’re getting reports of a blue transit van that was parked outside the front of the building yesterday morning,’ said Ramírez. ‘There seems to be confusion about the numbers of people in it. Some say two, others three and still others, four. They brought in tool boxes, a plastic box of some sort of electrical supplies and insulation tubing, carried in rolls over their shoulders. Nobody remembers any company name on the side of the van.’

‘And it all went into the mosque?’

‘There’s confusion there, too,’ said Ramírez. ‘Most of the people we’re talking to don’t live in the building, they were just passers-by. Some didn’t know there was a mosque in the basement. We’re getting snapshots of what happened. I’ve got Pérez working on the residents list. He’s down at the hospital. Serrano and Baena are working the surrounding blocks and people in the street. Where’s Cristina?’

‘She should still be working those blocks on Calle
Los Romeros,’ said Falcón. ‘What we need to find is someone who was
inside
the mosque in the last forty-eight hours to corroborate what we’re hearing about on the outside. What about that woman, Esperanza, who gave Comisario Elvira the list—didn’t she leave a number? Call her and get some names and addresses. Those women must know.’

‘Hasn’t anybody from the Moroccan community approached the Comisario yet?’

‘Somebody turned up with the Mayor,’ said Falcón. ‘You know what it’s like. They’ve got to contain the media before they can give us any practical help.’

‘You remember that mosque they wanted to build over in Los Bermejales?’ said Ramírez. ‘A huge place, big enough for seven hundred worshippers. There was a protest group organized by the locals called Los Vecinos de Los Bermejales.’

‘That’s right, they had a website, too, called www.mezquitanogracias.com. There were a lot of accusations about xenophobia, racism and anti-Muslim activity, especially after March 11th.’

‘Maybe we should look up some of the personalities from that dispute,’ said Ramírez. ‘Or is that too obvious?’

‘Keep working on what happened inside and outside the building in the last forty-eight hours,’ said Falcón. ‘In the end there are two possibilities: explosives were brought here by terrorists and accidentally exploded, or an anti-Muslim group has planted a bomb and set it off. There are a lot of complications within those scenarios, but those are the two basic concepts. Let’s work with the information we find, rather than getting distracted by the possibilities.’

Falcón hung up. The saws had stopped. The workmen were shovelling out rubble by hand. Two more props, planks and lights were called for. Men ran up the ladders with the equipment. Props were passed in. Torches were trained into the hole. A single saw ripped into some steel and stopped. A length of metal rod was flung out followed by more rubble. Four paramedics leaned against their ambulance, waiting for their turn in the drama. Two cradle stretchers with straps were brought to the foot of the ladders by the rescue teams. Fernando was concentrating on his breathing, under orders from his trauma counsellor. There was a shout for a doctor. A Médico Forense stepped up the ladder with his bag and crawled down the tunnel. There was silence, apart from the rumble of the insulated diesel generators. The diggers had stopped work. The drivers were out of their cabs watching. There was a collective need to wring some hope out of this calamitous day.

Another shout, this time for a stretcher. The doctor backed out on all fours and came down the ladder, while two men from the rescue services dragged the stretcher up the other ladder. Fernando came off his haunches and in seconds was on the doctor, holding him by the sleeves of his shirt. The doctor grasped Fernando by the shoulders and spoke directly into his eyes. The tension in their strange embrace made them look like judoists, struggling for the upper hand. Fernando’s hands fell to his sides. The doctor put his arm around him and beckoned the counsellor. Fernando leaned into him like a lost child. The doctor spoke to the trauma counsellor over Fernando’s shoulder.

The doctor trotted over to the paramedics, who
radioed through to the hospital. He talked directly with the emergency room. The paramedics reversed the ambulance up to the ladders, opened the double doors, prepared the trolley with a head, neck and spine immobilizer, turned on the oxygen, charged the defibrillator.

The workmen, who’d plunged into the hole after the doctor had backed out, now called the rescue workers in with the stretcher. The Médico Forense joined Falcón, just as Calderón came round from the front of the building.

‘Have we got a survivor in there?’ asked Calderón.

‘The woman is dead,’ said the doctor, ‘but her child is hanging on. She’s breathing and there’s a thready pulse. The mother seems to have fallen with her body protecting the child, as much as possible, from the debris falling on top of them. The problem is to get the girl out. The mother’s back is facing the rescue workers, so they’ve got to lift the child up and over her body and there’s no room in there. If the child has a spinal injury, just the movement could cause permanent paralysis, but if she stays there much longer she’ll die.’

The workmen roared from the mouth of the hole and held their thumbs up. The rescue workers slid the steel cradle stretcher out, mounted it on the ladder’s sliders and lowered it to the paramedics, who lifted the girl out, on the count, and fitted her into the immobilizer. Two television crews came running, pursued by local police. The Médico Forense made a full report to Calderón. The pneumatic drills, saws and diggers started up again as if galvanized by this thin slice of hope. Falcón got into the ambulance cab. The trolley was lifted into the back, followed by Fernando. A cameraman was pushed back roughly by one of the workmen. The door
closed on a woman’s microphone. The driver leapt into his seat and set the siren off. He drove slowly over the rough ground until he got back on to the tarmac. Photojournalists stormed the side and back of the ambulance, holding cameras up to the windows and flashing away. The lurid lights, hysterical siren and the sprinting journalists left pedestrians gaping and slack-faced.

The news of a survivor travelled faster than the ambulance and there was a media scrum, battling it out with a dozen local policemen and hospital orderlies, at the entrance to the hospital. The ambulance ramp was clear and they got the girl out and through the swing doors before the newsmen could get near her. Fernando was sucked in after her. The media rounded on Falcón, who they’d seen in the ambulance cab, and he steadied their hysteria by informing them that the girl had been removed from the destroyed building showing signs of life. A doctor would make a full statement once he’d completed his examination. Falcón held up his hand and pushed back the barrage of questions that followed.

Ten minutes later he’d picked up his car from the Forensic Institute and was easing his way out through a gaggle of journalists still desperate for his final words. He crossed the river and went into the old Expo ground. He found Informáticalidad in an office that fronted a large warehouse on Calle Albert Einstein. He showed his police ID to the woman in reception and told her he wanted an immediate interview with Pedro Plata in connection with a murder investigation. He gave her his stoniest policeman’s stare and she phoned through. Sr Plata was in a board meeting but would make himself
available in a few minutes. She took him through security to an office with glass walls on all sides. The receptionist was still the only visible person. There was a lack of movement in the building, as if business was slow, even dead.

Pedro Plata arrived with the receptionist, who set down two coffees and left. He had only been responsible for buying the property so could offer no help in explaining how it had been used.

‘Any reason why you bought it rather than rented it?’

‘Only if you assure me this is not going to get back to the tax authorities, or be used against this company in any way.’

‘My job is finding murderers.’

‘We had some black money to get rid of.’

‘And its use wasn’t discussed at a board meeting?’

‘Not one I attended,’ said Plata. ‘It was Diego Torres’s idea, he’s the Human Resources Director, you’d best talk to him.’

More time leaked past. The chill of the air conditioning and his exposure in the glass office made him feel like an Arctic zoo animal. Diego Torres arrived and before he’d even sat down Falcón asked him how they’d used the apartment.

‘We try to encourage our employees to think creatively, not just about our business but business in general,’ said Torres. ‘Where will the next opportunities come from? Is there another strand that we can attach to our core business? Is there another business out there that could improve our own, or help it to grow? Is there a totally different project that could be worth investing in? These sorts of things.’

‘And you think you can achieve that by investing in a small apartment, in an anonymous block, in a poor neighbourhood of Seville?’

‘That was a conscious decision,’ said Torres. ‘Our employees complained that they never had time to think creatively, they were always too busy with the work at hand. They came to us demanding “brainstorming time”. A lot of companies offer this and it normally consists of sending employees away to an expensive country club, where they attend meetings and seminars, listen to gurus spouting common sense and charging a fortune, interspersed with tennis, swimming and staying up until five in the morning partying.’

‘They must have been very disappointed by your solution,’ said Falcón. ‘How many employees did you lose?’

‘None from that project, but there’s always a certain amount of churn in the sales teams. It’s hard work with demanding targets. We pay well, but we expect results. A lot of young guys think they can handle the pressure, but they burn out, or lose their drive. It’s a young person’s business. There are no sales reps over thirty.’

‘You’re telling me you didn’t lose anybody when you showed them that apartment in El Cerezo?’

‘We’re not stupid, Inspector Jefe,’ said Torres. ‘We gave them a sweetener. The idea was that they should take the brainstorming seriously. We put them in a place outside their normal environment, with no distractions, not even a decent café to go to, so that they would concentrate on the task. They went in pairs and we swapped the people around. They were told it was a finite project, three months maximum, and they
wouldn’t have to spend more than four hours at a time in the apartment. They were also told that they would be a part of any of their projects which received board approval.’

‘Was that the sweetener?’

‘We’re not that tough on them,’ said Torres. ‘The sweetener was a fully paid break in a beach hotel, with golf and tennis, during the Feria—and they wouldn’t have to do any work. We let them bring their girlfriends, too.’

‘And boyfriends?’

Torres blinked, as if that little comment had short-circuited something in his brain. Falcón thought Torres might be inferring something ‘inappropriate’ from his remark until he remembered that only men had been seen going into the apartment.

‘You
do
employ women, don’t you, Sr Torres?’

‘The receptionist who showed you in here is…’

‘How do you recruit, Sr Torres?’

‘We advertise at business schools and through recruitment agencies.’

‘Give me some names and telephone numbers,’ said Falcón, handing him his notebook. ‘How many people have you fired in the last year?’

‘None.’

‘Two years?’

‘None. We don’t fire people. They leave.’

‘It’s cheaper that way,’ said Falcón. ‘I’d like a list of all the people who have left your employ in the last year, and I’d also like the names and addresses of all the
men
who frequented that apartment in Calle Los Romeros.’

‘Why?’

‘We have to know whether they saw anything while they were there, especially in the last week.’

‘It might not be so easy for you to interview my sales reps.’

‘You’ll have to
make
it easy. We’re looking for people who are responsible for the deaths of four children and five adults…so far. And the first forty-eight hours of an investigation are critical.’

‘When would you like to start?’

‘Two members of my squad will begin contacting your sales reps as soon as you’ve given me their names and phone numbers,’ said Falcón. ‘And why, by the way, did you insist on your employees being there in the hours of daylight?’