The Ignorance of Blood (7 page)

‘I stayed for a year,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought I should look after my sister.’

‘And what happened?’

‘She left again. But she was eighteen this time so …’

‘And you haven't seen or heard from her since?’

There was a long silence in which Marisa's mind seemed to float off out of the room and Falcón thought for the first time that he was getting somewhere.

‘Señora Moreno?’ said Falcón.

‘I haven't heard from her … no.’

‘Are you worried about her?’

She shrugged and for some reason Falcón didn't think he was going to believe what he heard next.

‘We weren't very close, which was why she left the first time without telling me.’

‘Is that right?’ said Falcón, locking eyes with her across the studio. ‘So what did you do when she left the second time?’

‘I finished the course I was doing at the Bella Artes, rented out my mother's apartment, which my sister and I had inherited…’

‘Is that where you live now, in Calle Hiniesta?’

‘And I went to Africa,’ she said, nodding. ‘Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Congo, until it got too dangerous and then I went to Mozambique.’

‘What about the Touaregs … didn't you spend some time with them?’

Silence, as she registered that he'd heard that from someone else.

‘If you know all this, Inspector Jefe, why are you asking me?’

‘I know it, but hearing it from you arranges the furniture.’

‘I let you in here to talk about my sister.’

‘Who you're not close to.’

‘You seem to have expanded your interests since you started using up my work time.’

‘And then there was New York …?’

She grunted. Puffed on the cigar to get it going again.

‘You've been talking to Esteban, haven't you?’

‘How do you know?’

‘I lied to him about New York,’ she said. ‘I saw a movie about an artist starring Nick Nolte, and I assumed the role of his assistant. I've never been to New York.’

‘Did you lie to him about anything else?’

‘Probably. I had an image to live up to.’

‘An image?’

‘That's how most of the men I've spent any time with see women.’

‘You described Esteban Calderón as your lover to Inspector Jefe Zorrita.’

‘He was then … still is, kind of, although prison doesn't help,’ she said. ‘I'm sorry he killed his wife. He was always so controlled, you know, still passionate in the way Sevillanos are, but a lawyer, too, and with a lawyer's mentality.’

‘So you think he did it?’

‘What I think doesn't matter. It's what Inspector Jefe Zorrita thinks that matters,’ she said, and something clicked in her mind. ‘That's it, I've got it now. It was
your
ex-wife that Esteban murdered. That's interesting.’

‘Is it?’

‘I don't know what you're doing here,’ she said, puffing on her cigar, appraising him anew.

‘Was your sister with a boyfriend when she left the second time?’

‘There was always a man involved with Margarita.’

‘Pretty girl?’

‘That … and the other thing.’

‘Sex?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Marisa, who went over to a small plans chest, opened a drawer and slapped a sheaf of photos down on the top. She was going to let him in, or rather let him think that she was opening up. ‘Take a look. I took these three weeks before her eighteenth birthday.’

Falcón flicked through the shots. A sadness lodged itself in his chest. It wasn't sex, despite the provocative nudity. Even when she was lying back, legs splayed, she had an innocence about her. An innocence that itched to be desecrated in the eyes of men. That was why Marisa had taken the shots and only Marisa could have taken them. Even in the most pornographic of poses Margarita never lost her childlike purity, whereas the viewer, or the voyeur, felt the beast rise up on its hind legs and dance on its furry hooves.

‘For a Sevillano, you don't say very much, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Nothing to add,’ he said, giving up on the shots halfway through, feeling the woman's intention and not flattered by it. ‘They do their work.’

‘You're the first person to see those.’

‘I'd like a shot of Margarita with some clothes on,’ he said, ‘so that we can begin to look for her.’

‘She's not lost any more,’ said Marisa. ‘She doesn't need to be found.’

‘I'm sure you'd like to hear from her, though, wouldn't you?’

Another shrug from Marisa, something very uneasy about her. She handed over a head-and-shoulders shot of her sister.

‘You used to go through Esteban's pockets,’ said Falcón, taking the photo. ‘Why did you do that? I mean, you're an artist, I can see that from the quality of this work. So you're curious, but not for the sort of crap you find in a man's pockets.’

‘My stepmother did the same thing when my father came back at seven in the morning. She hated herself for it but couldn't help it. She had to know, even though she already knew.’

‘That doesn't explain anything,’ said Falcón. ‘I could understand Inés wanting to go through his pockets, but you? What were you looking for? You knew he was married, and not very happily. What else was there?’

‘My mother came from a very conservative Sevillana family. You can see the type in her brother. And she got involved with a black man when she was forty-five years old and he repaid her by fucking everything that passed beneath his nose. Her bourgeois instinct –’

‘Hers, not yours. She wasn't your natural mother.’

‘We adored her.’

‘That's your only explanation?’

‘You amaze me, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Keys?’ he said, cutting in on her digression, eyebrows raised.

‘What?’

‘You were after his keys.’

‘That's why you amaze me,’ said Marisa, puffing on her chewed-over cigar butt, spitting out flakes of tobacco. ‘Zorrita told me, triumphantly no less, that he had a rock-solid case against Esteban for the murder of his wife, your ex, and here you are, trying to chip away at it for some reason that I don't quite understand.’

‘Did you get a key made to his apartment and have a good look around for yourself, or make a duplicate for somebody else so that they could?’

‘Look, Inspector Jefe, one time I found he had condoms which he never wore when he was with me,’ said Marisa. ‘Once a woman finds something like that, she keeps checking to see if there are any fewer.’

‘I've spoken to the governor. We're stopping your prison visits.’

‘Why?’

‘I'd have thought that would be a relief.’

‘Think what you like.’

Falcón nodded. Something caught his eye under the table. He knelt down and rolled it back towards him. It was a stained and polished wooden head. He inspected it under the light. Margarita's smooth unsophisticated face looked back at him, eyes closed. He ran a thumb over the jagged edge of her neck where the chain saw had bitten into the wood.

‘What happened here?’ asked Falcón.

‘A change of artistic vision,’ she said.

Falcón went to the door, feeling that the first phase of his work was done. He handed her the head.

‘Too perfect?’ he asked. ‘Or not the point?’

Marisa listened to his feet on the metal stairway and looked
down at the carved features of her sister's face. She ran her fingers over the eyelids, nose and mouth. Her arm, bearing the full weight of the head, trembled. She put it down, found her mobile on the work bench and made a call.

The cop made her nervous, but she was also surprised to find that she did not dislike him. And there were very few men that Marisa liked, not many of them were white, and none of them were policemen.

Leonid Revnik hadn't moved. He'd cleared his henchmen out of the room and they'd got a technician in to fix the air-con. He was taking a drink from the half-bottle of vodka that was still left in Vasili Lukyanov's freezer. Viktor Belenki hadn't called him back. He had to remind himself to relax because he kept coming out of his thoughts to find his biceps tight in his shirt and his pectorals clenched. The land-line phone on the desk rang. He looked at it suspiciously; nobody used these things any more. He picked it up, spoke in Russian without thinking. A woman's voice answered in the same language and asked to speak to Vasili Lukyanov.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, hearing a strange accent.

‘My name is Marisa Moreno. I've tried calling Vasili on his mobile but there's no answer. This is the only other number he gave me.’

The Cuban woman. Rita's sister.

‘Vasili isn't here. Maybe I can help; I'm his boss,’ said Revnik. ‘If you want to leave a message, I'll make sure he gets it.’

‘He told me I should call him if I had any trouble.’

‘And what's happened?’ asked Revnik.

‘A homicide cop called Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón came round to my workshop and started asking questions about my sister, Margarita.’

That name, Falcón, again.

‘What did he want with her?’

‘He said he was going to find her.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told him she didn't need to be found.’

‘That's good,’ said Revnik. ‘Have you spoken to anybody else about this?’

‘I left a message on Nikita's phone.’

‘Sokolov?’ he asked, barely able to control his rage at having to pronounce another traitor's name.

‘Yes.’

‘You did the right thing,’ said Revnik. ‘We'll handle it. Don't worry.’

5

Calle Bustos Tavera, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 15.50 hrs

There were two people in the world for whom Falcón would drop everything. One was Consuelo Jiménez and the other was Yacoub Diouri. Ever since he'd tracked down Yacoub four years ago he'd become the younger brother Falcón had never had. Because of Yacoub's own complicated past he'd had a special understanding of the complexities of the family horrors that had led to Falcón's complete mental breakdown back in 2001. In gradually revealing themselves to each other, Yacoub had become synonymous with the reassertion of sanity in Falcón's mind. Now, in the wake of the Seville bombing, he was even more than a friend and brother. He had become Falcón's spy. The Spanish intelligence agency, the CNI, in their sudden, desperate need for agents in the Arab countries nearest their borders, had researched the special relationship between Falcón and Yacoub Diouri. Having seen other Western intelligence agencies fail in their bid to recruit Yacoub, they'd used Falcón to bring him into their fold.

It was for this reason that, when Falcón received a text from Yacoub Diouri as he stood in the courtyard outside Marisa's studio, he went immediately in search of a public
telephone. They hadn't spoken since the short break in Essaouira last month. Their only communication had been on ‘business’, via the intelligence service's encrypted website. The CNI had insisted on zero physical contact with Yacoub since he'd successfully penetrated the radical Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, the GICM, in the days after the Seville bombing. It was this group which had been storing a hundred kilos of the high explosive, hexogen, in the basement mosque in a residential quarter of Seville. Yacoub had found out how that hexogen was going to be used, and in doing so the CNI were concerned that his cover had been blown. There had been some tense days in Paris when they thought that their new agent might be assassinated. Their fears had been groundless. Yacoub returned to Rabat, but the CNI were still so nervous that the only contact they'd allowed was on Falcón's August holiday, which had been arranged in April, two months before the recruitment of Yacoub Diouri.

It took him a while to find a public phone. Falcón understood from the text, which they'd arranged between themselves in Essaouira, that this was to be a private conversation and he should not to use his home phone or mobile to make the call.

‘I'm in Madrid,’ said Yacoub, with a quiver in his voice.

‘You sound nervous.’

‘We have to meet.’

‘When?’

‘Now … as soon as possible. I couldn't warn you before because … well, you know why.’

‘I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get away at such short notice.’

‘I'm not asking you to do this for no reason at all, Javier. It's complicated and important. It's the most important thing that's happened so far.’

‘Is this business?’

‘It's business
and
it's personal.’