The Ignorance of Blood (6 page)

‘My lawyer tells me that Freud had a term for that: “wish fulfilment”, he called it,’ said Calderón. ‘You want something to be true so badly that your mind invents it for you. I did not want Inés to be dead on the floor. We were not happy together, but I did not want her dead. I wanted her to be alive so badly that my mind substituted the reality with my most fervent wish. Both versions came out in the turmoil of that first interview with Zorrita.’

‘You know that this is the crux of your case,’ said Falcón. ‘The flaws I've found are small. Marisa going through your pockets, getting the upper hand in the shouting match with Inés in the Murillo Gardens and burning your foot to wake you up. These things amount to nothing when put against your recorded statement, in which you say that you entered the double-locked apartment alone, saw Inés alive, blacked out and then found her dead. Your inner turmoil and all that wish-fulfilment crap is no match for those powerful facts.’

More concentrated smoking from Calderón. He scratched at his thinning hair and his left eye twitched.

‘And why do you think Marisa is the key?’

‘The worst possible thing that could have happened at that moment in our investigation into the bombing was to have our instructing judge, and our strongest performer in front of the media, arrested for the murder of his wife,’ said Falcón. ‘Losing you pretty well derailed the whole process. If your disgrace was planned, then Marisa was crucial to its execution.’

‘I'll speak to her,’ said Calderón, nodding, his face hardening.

‘You won't,’ said Falcón. ‘We've stopped her visits. You're too desperate, Esteban. I don't want you to give anything
away. What you've got to do is unlock your mind and see if you can find any detail that might help me. And it might be advisable to get a professional in to do that for you.’

‘Ah!’ said Calderón, getting it finally. ‘The shrink.’

4

Puti Club, Estepona, Costa del Sol – Friday, 15th September 2006, 14.35 hrs

Leonid Revnik was still sitting at Vasili Lukyanov's desk in the club, but this time he was waiting for news from Viktor Belenki, his second-in-command. When Revnik had taken control of the Costa del Sol after the police had mounted Operation Wasp in 2005, he'd got Belenki to run the construction businesses through which they laundered most of the proceeds of their drugs and prostitution trade. Belenki had just the right veneer of the good-looking, successful businessman and he spoke fluent Spanish, too. The veneer, though, was only an expensive suit thick, as Viktor Belenki was a violent brute with access to a rage so incandescent that even Revnik's most psychopathic henchmen were afraid of him. Belenki could also be very friendly and extremely generous, especially if you jumped when he told you to. This meant that he had developed good contacts in the Guardia Civil, some of whom had thick wads of Belenki's euros hidden in their garages. Leonid Revnik was hoping that Belenki could tell him where the money and disks that Lukyanov had stolen from the
puti club
safe had ended up.
He was on his third cigar of the day. The empty safe was still gaping. The air-con was on the blink and he was uncomfortably hot. The mobile on the desk rang.

‘Viktor,’ said Revnik.

‘It's taken some time to get this information because it's out of the normal area of my guy's jurisdiction,’ said Belenki. ‘The Guardia Civil who went to the scene of the accident came from a town outside Seville called Utrera. When they found the money they called the police headquarters in Seville and, because it was clear that this wasn't just any old guy who'd died in a car accident, they went to the top for instructions: Comisario Elvira.’

‘Shit,’ said Revnik.

‘And he put it in the hands of Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Remember him?’

‘Everybody remembers him from the bombing in June,’ said Revnik. ‘So where's it all gone?’

‘It's in the Jefatura in Seville.’

‘Have we still got somebody in there?’

‘That's how I know where everything is.’

‘Right, so how do we get it out?’

‘You can say goodbye to the money,’ said Belenki. ‘Once the forensics have been over it, they'll stick it in the bank – unless you want to hold up a Prosegur van.’

‘I don't give a fuck about the money. I mean, I do, but … you're right. The disks, they're a different matter,’ said Revnik. ‘What can we get on Falcón?’

‘You're not going to be able to buy him, that's for sure.’

‘So what else?’

‘There's always the woman,’ said Belenki. ‘Consuelo Jiménez.’

‘Ah, yes, the woman,’ said Revnik.

At the traffic lights Falcón searched his eyes in the rear-view mirror, trying to find the evidence of obsession Calderón
had seen there. He didn't really need to look at the tell-tale blackberry smudges; he knew from the slight gaucherie in his left hand, and that feeling of wearing someone else's right leg, that what was cradled in his mind was beginning to have physical manifestations.

Work had sat on Falcón's shoulders like an overweight, badly packed rucksack, and it never slipped off, not even at night. In the mornings he opened an eye, his face crushed hard into the pillow after snatching an hour's lethal sleep, to feel his bones creaking in his skeleton. The week's holiday he'd taken at the end of August, when he'd joined his friend Yacoub Diouri and his family on the beach at Essaouira in Morocco, had worn off on his first day back in the office.

Horns blared behind him. He pulled away from the traffic lights. He came into the old city through the Puerta Osario. He parked badly near the San Marcos church and walked down Calle Bustos Tavera to the tunnelled passageway that led from the street into a courtyard of workshops where Marisa Moreno had her studio. His footsteps sounded loud on the large cobbles of the dark tunnel. He broke out into the fierce light in the courtyard, squinted against it to take in the dilapidated buildings, the grass growing up through old rear axles and expired fridges. He walked up a metal stairway to a doorway above a small warehouse. Foot shuffling and dull thuds came from inside. He knocked.

‘Who is it?’

‘Police.’

‘ Momentito.’

The door was opened by a tall, slim mulatto woman with an unusually long neck, who had wood chips stuck to her face and in her coppery hair, which was tied back. She wore a cobalt-blue gown under which she was naked apart from some bikini briefs. Sweat pimpled across her forehead, over the undulation of her nose and trickled down the visible bones of her chest. She was breathing heavily.

‘Marisa Moreno?’ he said, holding up his police ID. ‘I am Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón.’

‘I've already told Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita everything I know a couple of hundred times,’ she said. ‘I've got nothing to add.’

‘I've come to talk to you about your sister.’

‘My
sister?’
she said, and Falcón did not miss the momentary fear that froze her features.

‘You have a sister called Margarita.’

‘I know my own sister's name.’

Falcón paused, hoping that Marisa might feel the need to fill the moment with more information. She stared him out.

‘You reported her missing in 1998, when she was two months short of her seventeenth birthday.’

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Don't touch anything.’

The studio's floor was patched with rough concrete where the clay tiles had come up. The air smelled of bare timber, turps and oils. There were chippings everywhere and a pile of sawdust in the corner. A meat hook large enough to take a full carcass hung from the tie rod which spanned the room. Suspended from its sharp hook was an electric chain saw, its flex thrown over the bar. Three dark and polished statues stood beneath the oily, sawdust-encrusted tool, one with its head missing. Falcón made for the space around the piece. The headless statue was that of a young woman, with breasts high on her chest, perfect orbs. The faces of the men flanking her had nothing in them. Their eyes were blank. The musculature of their bodies had something of the savagery of an existence in the wild about them. Their genitals were outsized and, despite being flaccid, seemed sinister, as if they were spent from a recent rape.

Marisa watched him as he took the piece in, waiting for the banality of his comments. She had yet to meet the white man who could resist a little critique, and her warriors with their prize penises drew plenty of lewd admiration. What
she registered in Falcón's face was not even a raised eyebrow, but a brief revulsion as he looked down the bodies.

‘So what happened to Margarita?’ he asked, switching to Marisa. ‘You reported her missing on 25th May 1998, and when the police came to check with you a month later you said she'd turned up again about a week after she'd disappeared.’

‘That was how much they cared,’ she said, reaching for a small half-smoked cigar which she relit. ‘They took down her details and I never heard from them again. They wouldn't take my calls, and when I went round to the station they just dismissed me, said she was with some boyfriend or other. If you're pretty and mulatto like her they just think you're some kind of fucking machine. I'm sure they did nothing.’

‘She
did
go to Madrid with a boyfriend, though, didn't she?’

‘They were pretty pleased about that when I told them.’

‘Where were your parents in all this?’ asked Falcón. ‘Margarita was still a kid.’

‘Dead. You see, they probably didn't put
that
in the report. My father died up north in Gijón in 1995. My mother died here in Seville in 1998 and two months later Margarita went missing. She was upset. That was why I was worried.’

‘Your father was Cuban?’

‘We came over here in 1992. It was a bad time in Cuba; Russian aid had dried up after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. There's a large Cuban community in Gijón, so that's where we settled.’

‘How did your parents meet?’

‘My father had a club in Gijón. My mother was a flamenco dancer from Seville. She'd come up to perform at the annual Semana Negra fair. My father was a good salsa dancer and there's such a thing as Cuban flamenco, so they taught each other things and my mother made the mistake that a lot of other women made.’

‘So obviously she wasn't your natural mother?’

‘No, we don't know what happened to her. She was Cuban of Spanish descent, white and political. She disappeared soon after my sister was born in 1981.’

‘You were seven years old.’

‘It's not something I think about very much,’ said Marisa. ‘Things like that could happen in Cuba. My father never talked about it.’

‘So who looked after you?’

‘My father had girlfriends. Some were interested in us … others weren't.’

‘What did your father do in Cuba?’

‘He was somebody in the government. An official on the Sugar Board. Export,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about my sister, and I'm beginning to wonder why.’

‘I like to get people's family situation sorted out in my mind,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't sound like you had a normal life.’

‘We didn't, until my stepmother came along. She was a good woman. The caring type. She really looked after us. For the first time in our lives we were loved. She even looked after my father when he was dying.’

‘How was that?’

‘Lung cancer. Too many cigars,’ she said, waving the smoking stub in her hand. ‘He only married her after his diagnosis.’

Marisa blew a plume of smoke out into the rafters of the wooden roof. She felt she had to keep this thing going. Do one long stint with this new inspector jefe and then maybe he'd leave her alone.

‘What did you do after your father died?’ asked Falcón.

‘We moved down here. My mother couldn't stand the north. All that rain.’

‘What about
her
family?’

‘Her parents were dead. She had a brother in Málaga, but
he didn't like black people very much. He didn't come to her wedding.’

‘How did your mother die?’

‘Heart attack,’ said Marisa, eyes shining at the memory of it.

‘Were you living here at the time?’

‘I was in Los Angeles.’

‘I'm sorry,’ said Falcón. ‘That must have been hard. She wasn't very old.’

‘Fifty-one.’

‘Did you see her before she died?’

‘Is that any of your business?’ she said, turning away, looking for an ashtray.

This cop was getting under her skin.

‘My mother died when I was five,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't matter whether you're five or fifty-five, it's not something you ever get over.’

Marisa turned back slowly; she'd never heard a Sevillano, let alone a cop, talk like this. Falcón was frowning at the floor.

‘So you came back from Los Angeles and you've been here ever since?’ he said.