The Hidden Assassins

4

Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 05.30 hrs

Manuela Falcon was in bed, but not sleeping. It was 5.30 in the morning. She had the bedside light on, knees up, flicking through Vogue but not reading, not even looking at the pictures. She had too much on her mind: her property portfolio, the money she owed to the banks, the mortgage repayments, the lack of rental income, the lawyer's fees, the two deeds due to be signed this morning, which would release her capital into beautifully fluid funds of cash.

'For God's sake, relax,' said Angel, waking up in bed next to her, still groggy with sleep and nursing a small cognac-induced hangover. 'What are you so anxious about?'

'I can't believe you've asked that question,' said Manuela. 'The deeds, this morning?'

Angel Zarrias blinked into his pillow. He'd forgotten.

'Look, my darling,' he said, rolling over, 'you know that nothing happens, even if you think about it all the time. It only happens…'

'Yes, I know, Angel, it only happens when it happens. But even you can understand that there's uncertainty before it happens.'

'But if you don't sleep and you churn it over in your head in an endless washing cycle it has no effect on the outcome, so you might as well forget about it. Handle the horror if it happens, but don't torture yourself with the theory of it.'

Manuela flicked through the pages of Vogue even more viciously, but she felt better. Angel could do that to her. He was older. He had authority. He had experience.

'It's all right for you,' she said, gently, 'you don't owe six hundred thousand euros to the bank.'

'But I also don't own nearly two million euros' worth of property.'

'I own one million eight hundred thousand euros' worth of property. I owe six hundred thousand to the bank. The lawyer's fees are…Forget it. Let's not talk about numbers. They make me sick. Nothing has any value until it's sold.'

'Which is what you're about to do,' said Angel, in his most solid, reinforced concrete voice.

'Anything can happen,' she said, turning a page so viciously she tore it.

'But it tends not to.'

'The market's nervous.'

'Which is why you're selling. Nobody's going to withdraw in the next eight hours,' he said, struggling to sit up in bed. 'Most people would kill to be in your position.'

'With two empty properties, no rent and four thousand a month going out?'

'Well, clearly I'm looking at it from a more advantageous perspective.'

Manuela liked this. However hard she tried, she couldn't get Angel to participate in her catalogue of imagined horrors. His objective authority made her feel quite girlish. She hadn't yet got to the point of recognizing what their relationship had become, how it fitted with her powerful needs. All she knew was that Angel was a colossal comfort to her.

'Relax,' said Angel, pulling her to him, kissing the top of her head.

'Wouldn't it be great to be able to compress time and just be in tomorrow evening now,' she said, snuggling up to him, 'with money in the bank and the summer free?'

'Let's have a celebratory dinner at Salvador Rojo tonight.'

'I was thinking that myself,' she said, 'but I was too superstitious to book it. We could ask Javier. He could bring Laura so you can have someone to flirt with.'

'How very considerate of you,' he said, kissing her head again.

When Angel and Manuela had met it seemed that the only thing holding her life together was her legal battle over Javier's right to have inherited the house in which he was living. They'd met in her lawyer's office, where Angel was sorting out his late wife's estate. As soon as they'd shaken hands she'd felt something cave in high up around her stomach and no man had ever done that to her before. They left the lawyer's office and went for a drink and, having never looked at older men, having always gone for 'boys', she immediately saw the point. Older men looked after you. You didn't have to look after them.

The more she found out about Angel the more she fell for him. He was a phenomenally charming man, a committed politician (sometimes a little too committed), right wing, conservative, a Catholic, a lover of the bulls, and from an established family. In politics he'd been able to broker agreements between fanatically opposed factions just because neither party wanted to be disliked by him. He'd been 'someone' in the Partido Popular in Andalucia but had quit in a fury over the impossibility of getting anything to change. Recently he'd joined forces, in a public relations capacity, with a smaller right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucia, which was run by his old friend, Eduardo Rivero. He contributed a political column for the ABC newspaper and was also their highly respected bullfight commentator. With all these talents at his disposal it hadn't taken him long to bring Javier and Manuela back together again.

'All energy expended on court cases like yours is negative energy,' Angel had told her. 'That negative energy dominates your life, so that the rest of it has to go on hold. The only way to restart your life is to bring positive energy back into it.'

'And how do I do that?' she'd asked, looking at this huge source of positive energy in front of her with her big brown eyes.

'Court cases use up resources, not just financial ones, but physical and emotional ones, too. So you have to be productive,' he said. 'What do you want from your life at the moment?'

'That house!' she'd said, despite being pretty keen on Angel right then, too.

'It's yours, Javier has offered it to you.'

'There's the small matter of one million euros…'

'But he hasn't said you can't have it,' said Angel. 'And it's much more productive to make money in order to buy something you really want, than to throw it away on useless lawyers.'

'He's not useless,' she said, and ran out of steam.

There were a few thousand other reasons she had stacked up against Angel's stunningly simple logic, but the source of most of them was her miserable emotional state, which was not something she wanted to peel back for him to see. So, she agreed with him, sold her veterinary practice at the beginning of 2003, borrowed money against the property she had inherited in El Puerto de Santa Maria and invested it in Seville's booming property market. After three years of buying, renovating and selling she had forgotten about Javier's house, the court case and that hollow feeling at the top of her stomach. She now lived with Angel in a penthouse apartment overlooking the majestic, treelined Plaza Cristo de Burgos in the middle of the old city and her life was full and about to be even sweeter.

'How did it go last night?' asked Manuela. 'I can tell you wound up on the brandy.'

'Gah!' said Angel, wincing at some gripe in his intestines.

'No smoking for you until after coffee this morning.'

'Maybe my breath could become a cheap form of renewable energy,' said Angel, fingering some sleep out of his eye. 'In fact everyone's breath could, because all we do is spout hot, alcoholic air.'

'Is the master of positive energy getting a little bit bored with his cronies?'

'Not bored. They're my friends,' said Angel, shrugging. 'It's one of the advantages of age that we can tell each other the same stories over and over and still laugh.'

'Age is a state of mind, and you're still young,' said Manuela. 'Maybe you should go back to the commercial side of your public relations business. Forget politics and all those self-important fools.'

'And finally she reveals what she thinks of my closest friends.'

'I like your friends, it's just…the politics,' said Manuela. 'Endless talk but nothing ever happens.'

'Maybe you're right,' said Angel, nodding. 'The last time there was an event in this country was the horror of 11th March 2004, and look what happened: the whole country pulled together and by due process of democracy kicked out a perfectly good government. Then we bowed down to the terrorists and pulled out of Iraq. And after that? We sank back into the comfort of our lives.'

'And drank too much brandy.'

'Exactly,' said Angel, looking at her with his hair exploded in all directions. 'You know what someone was saying last night?'

'Was this the interesting bit?' she said, teasing him on.

'We need a return to benevolent dictatorship,' said Angel, throwing up his hands in mock exasperation.

'You might find yourselves out on a limb there,' said Manuela. 'People don't like turmoil with troops and tanks on the streets. They want a cold beer, a tapa and something stupid to watch on TV.'

'My point entirely,' said Angel, slapping his stomach. 'Nobody listened. We've got a population dying of decadence, so morally moribund that they no longer know what they want, apart from knee-jerk consumption, and my "cronies" think that they'll be loved if they do these people the favour of mounting a coup.'

'I don't want to see you on television, standing on a desk in Parliament with a gun in your hand.'

'I'll have to lose some weight first,' said Angel. Calderon came to with a jolt and a sense of real panic left over from a dream he could not recollect. He was surprised to see Marisa's long brown back in the bed beside him, instead of Ines's white nightdress. He'd overslept. It was now 6 a.m. and he would have to go back to his apartment and deal with some very awkward questions from Ines.

His frantic leap from the bed woke Marisa. He dressed, shaking his head at the slug trails of dried semen on his thigh.

'Take a shower,' said Marisa.

'No time.'

'Anyway, she's not an idiot-so you tell me.'

'No, she's not,' said Calderon, looking for his other shoe, 'but as long as certain rules are obeyed then the whole thing can be glossed over.'

'This must be the bourgeois protocol for affairs outside marriage.'

'That's right,' said Calderon, irritated by her. 'You can't stay out all night because that is making a complete joke out of the institution.'

'What's the cut-off point between a "serious" marriage and a "joke" one?' asked Marisa. 'Three o'clock…three thirty? No. That's OK. I think by four o'clock it's ridiculous. By four thirty it is a complete joke. By six, six thirty…it's a farce.'

'By six it's a tragedy,' said Calderon, searching the floor madly. 'Where is my fucking shoe?'

'Under the chair,' said Marisa. 'And don't forget your camera on the coffee table. I've left a present or two on it for you.'

He threw on his jacket, pocketed the camera, dug his foot into his shoe.

'How did you find my camera?' he asked, kneeling down by the bed.

'I went through your jacket while you were asleep,' she said. 'I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks. Don't worry, I didn't erase all those stupid shots of your lawyers' dinner to prove to your very intelligent wife that you weren't out all night fucking your girlfriend.'

'Well, thanks very much for that.'

'And I haven't been naughty.'

'No?'

'I told you I left some presents on the camera for you. Just don't let her see.'

He nodded, suddenly in a hurry again. They kissed. Going down in the lift he tidied himself up, got everything tucked away and rubbed his face into life to prepare for the lie which he practised. Even he saw the two micro movements of his eyebrows, which Javier Falcon had told him was the first and surest sign of a liar. If he knew that, then Ines would know it, too.

No taxis out at this early hour of the morning. He should have called for one. He set off at a fast walk. Memories ricocheted around his mind, which seemed to dip in and out of his consciousness. The lie. The truth. The reality. The dream. And it came back to him with the same sense of panic he'd had on waking in Marisa's apartment: his hands closing around Ines's slim throat. He was throttling her, but she wasn't turning puce or purple and her tongue wasn't thickening with blood and protruding. She was looking up at him with her eyes full of love. And, yes, she was stroking his forearms, encouraging him to do it. The bourgeois solution to awkward divorces-murder. Absurd. He knew from his work with the homicide squad that the first person to be grilled in a murder case was the spouse.

The streets were still wet from last night's rain, the cobbles greasy. He was sweating and the smell of Marisa came up off his shirt. It occurred to him that he'd never felt guilty. He didn't know what it was other than a legal state. Since he'd been married to Ines he'd had affairs with four women of whom Marisa had lasted the longest. He'd also had one-night stands or afternoons with two other women. And there was the prostitute in Barcelona, but he didn't like to think of that. He'd even had sex with one of these women whilst having an affair with another as a married man, which must make him a serial philanderer. Except it didn't feel like philandering. There was supposed to be something enjoyable about philandering. It was romantic, wasn't it…in the eighteenth-century sense of the word? But what he'd been doing was not enjoyable. He was trying to fill a hole, which, with every affair, grew bigger. So what was this expanding void? Now that would be a thing to answer, if he could ever find the time to think about it.

He slipped on a cobble, half fell, scuffed his hand on the pavement. It pulled him out of his head and on to more practical business. He'd have to have a shower as soon as he got in. Marisa was in his sinuses. Maybe he should have had a shower before he left, but then there would have been the smell of Marisa's soap. Then another revelation. What did he care? Why the grand pretence? Ines knew. They'd had fights-never about his affairs, but about ridiculous stuff, which was a cover for the unmentionable. She could have got out. She could have left him years ago, but she'd stayed. That was significant.

The graze on his hand was stinging. His thoughts made him feel stronger. He wasn't afraid of Ines. She could strike fear into others. He'd seen her in court. But not him. He had the upper hand. He fucked around and she stayed.

His apartment block on Calle San Vicente appeared before him. He opened the door with a flourish. He didn't know whether it was the conclusion he'd arrived at, his stinging hand or the fact that he tripped up on the stairs because the decorators, those idle sods, had pushed their dustsheets to one side rather than clearing them away-but he began to feel just a little bit cruel.

The first-floor apartment was silent. It was 6.30 a.m. He went to his study and emptied the pockets of his suit on to his desk in the dark. He took off his jacket and trousers and left them on a chair and went to the bathroom. Ines was asleep. He stripped off his pants and socks, threw them in the laundry basket and showered. Ines was not asleep. She lay with her shiny, dark eyes blinking in the sepia light as morning crept through the louvred shutters. She had been awake since 4.30 a.m. when she'd found her husband's side of the bed vacant. She'd sat up in bed, arms folded across her flat chest, her brain seething. She'd run the marathon of her thoughts for two hours, her insides molten with rage at the humiliation of finding his undented pillow. But then she would suddenly feel weak at the thought of facing this latest demonstration of his infidelity, because that's what it was-a demonstration.

In those hours she realized that the only area of her life that was functioning was her work, which now bored her. Not that the work had changed in any way, but her perspective had. She wanted to be a wife and mother. She wanted to live in a big old house with a patio, inside the city walls. She wanted to go for walks in the park, meet her friends for lunch, take her children to see her parents.

None of that had happened. After the American bitch had been removed from the scene, she and Esteban had come together, had, in her mind, grown closer. She had stopped using contraceptives without telling him, wanting to surprise him, but her periods kept coming with plodding regularity. She'd gone for a check-up and been pronounced a perfectly healthy female of the species. After sex one morning she'd saved a sample of his sperm and taken it for a fertility test. The result was that he was a man of exceptional virility. Had he known, he would have framed the result and hung it next to their wedding photograph.

The sale of her apartment had gone through quickly. She'd banked the money and started looking for her dream home. But Esteban loathed the houses that she wanted to buy and refused to look at them. The property market boomed. The money she'd got for her apartment now looked paltry. Her dream became an impossibility. They lived in his very masculine, aggressively modern apartment on the Calle San Vicente and he became angry if she tried to change a single detail. He wouldn't even let her put a chain on the door, but that was because he didn't want to have to be let in by her reeking of sex after a night out.

Their sex life began to falter. She knew he was having affairs from the tireless grind of his lovemaking and the paucity of his ejaculations. She tried to be more daring. He made her feel foolish, as if her proposed 'games' were ridiculous. Then suddenly he'd taken up her offer to 'play games' but given her debasing roles, seemingly inspired by internet porn. She subjected herself to his ministrations, hiding her pain and shame in the pillow.

At least she wasn't fat. She inspected herself minutely in the mirror every day. It satisfied her to see the deflation of her bust, her individual ribs and her concave thighs. Sometimes she would feel dizzy in court. Her friends told her she'd never get pregnant. She smiled at them, her pale skin stretched tight over her beautiful face, her aura frighteningly beatific.

Ines was toying with the idea of a massive confrontation when she heard Esteban put his key in the lock. Her stick-thin forearms seemed to have grown more hair and they made her feel curiously weak. She sank down into the bed and pretended to be asleep.

She heard him empty his pockets and go to the bathroom. The shower came on. She ran barefoot to his study, saw his suit and sniffed it over like a dog: cigarettes, perfume, old sex. Her eyes were riveted to the digital camera. She touched it with her knuckle. Still warm. She burned to know what was on its memory. The shower door rolled open. She ran back to bed and lay with her heart beating fast as a cat's.

His weight tipped her feather-light frame in the bed. She waited for his breathing to settle into the pattern that she knew was his sleep. Her heart slowed. Her mind cooled. She slid out of the bed. He didn't move. In the study she pressed the camera's quick-view button and caught her breath as a miniature Marisa appeared on the screen. She was naked on the sofa, legs apart, hands covering her pubis. Ines pressed again. Marisa naked, kneeling and looking backwards over her shoulder. The whore. She pressed again and again and only found her husband's alibi of the judges' dinner. She went back to the whore. Who was she? The black bitch. She had to know.

Ines's laptop was in the hall. She took it into the kitchen and booted it up. In the grey-bar time she went back to his study and scoured the shelves for the download lead. Back to the kitchen. Opened up the camera, plugged in the lead, connected it to her laptop. Total concentration.

The icon appeared on the screen. The software automatically loaded. She clicked on 'import' and clenched her fist as she saw she was going to have to download fifty-four shots to get the ones she wanted. She stared at the screen, willing it to process faster. She heard only the breathing of the computer's fan and the flickering of the hard disk. She didn't hear the bedclothes stir. She didn't hear his bare foot on the wooden floor. She didn't even hear his question properly.

His voice did turn her round. She was conscious of her cotton nightdress on the points of her shoulders, its hem brushing the tops of her thighs, as she took in the full-frontal nudity of her husband standing in the frame of the kitchen door.

'What's going on?' he asked.

'What?' said Ines, her eyes unable to look anywhere other than his treacherous genitals.

He repeated his question.

The adrenaline spike was so powerful she wasn't sure that her heart could cope with the sudden surge.

After nearly twenty years' experience in the criminal element Calderon could recognize terror when he saw it. The wide eyes, the mouth neither open nor closed, the paralysed facial muscles.

'What's going on?' he asked, for a third time but with no sleep in his voice, pure weight.

'Nothing,' she said, keeping her back to the laptop, but unable to stop the reflex action of her arms fanning out to prevent him from seeing her laptop.

Calderon swept her aside, not roughly, but she was so light she had to stop her fragile ribs from cracking against the edge of the black granite work surface. He saw his camera, the lead, the thumbnails of the lawyers' dinner appearing in the photo library. And then plink, plink. Two shots of Marisa: My present to you. It was embarrassing, incriminating and worse: it was the little boy being found out.

'Who is she?' asked Ines, her finger ends white against the black granite.

His look was murderous and in no way offset by the ridiculousness of his nudity.

'Who is she, that you can stay out all night, leaving your wife alone in the marital bed?'

The words incensed him, which was Ines's calculation. Her fear had vanished. She wanted something from him-his concentrated attention.

'Who is she, that you can whore with her until six in the morning, in defiance of your marital vows?'

Another calculated sentence, using some of the oratory she employed in court.

He turned on her, with the slow intent of an animal who's found a rival on his territory. The thickness around his belly, the shrivelled penis, the slim thighs should have made him laughable, but his head was dipped down and his eyes looked up from under his brow. His rage was palpable. Still Ines couldn't help herself. The taunts leapt from her lips.

'Do you fuck her like you fuck me? Do you make her shout with pain?'

Ines did not finish because she was unaccountably on the floor, with her feet pedalling against the white marble tiles, trying to fight air back into her lungs. She focused on his toes, the knuckles crimped as they gripped. He kicked her. His big toe invaded her kidney. She bit on air. She was shocked. It was the first time he'd ever hit her. She'd provoked him. She'd wanted a reaction. But she had been shocked by his restraint. She'd thought he would lash out, backhand her across the face to shut that taunting uxorial mouth, fatten her lip, bruise her cheek. She wanted to wear the badge of his violence to show the world what he was really like and draw some daily remorse from him until the damage faded. But he'd hit her under the arch of her ribs, kicked her in the side.

Her chest creaked as she found the motor memory to breathe again. She felt her husband's hand at the back of her head, stroking. You see, he did love her. Now for the remorse and the tenderness. This was just another fling…But he wasn't stroking her, he was reaching into her hair, he was sheafing it. His nails dug into her scalp. He shook her head as if she were a dog, caught by the scruff, and stood up from his crouch. She hadn't found her feet and she hung from his hand. He dragged her from the kitchen, hauled her down the corridor and flung her at the bed. She bounced and rolled off to the side. Three strides and he was on her again. She scrambled under the bed.

It hadn't worked out as she'd thought. His hand reached for her under the bed, grabbing at her nightdress. She flinched away from it. His face appeared, hideous with rage. He stood up. His feet moved off. She watched them, as if they were loaded weapons. They left the room. He swore and slammed the door. Her scalp burned. Her fear was overriding all other emotions. She couldn't scream, she couldn't cry.

Under the bed was good. There were childhood memories of safety, of observing in secrecy, but they couldn't contain her confusion. Her brain lunged at what she wanted to be certainties, but they wouldn't support her. Instead she found herself trying to accommodate his behaviour. She had proved his infidelity to him. She had humiliated him. He was angry because he felt guilty. That was natural. You lashed out at the one you loved. That was it, wasn't it? He didn't want to be whoring with that black bitch. He just couldn't help himself. He was an alpha male, a virile, high-octane performer. She shouldn't be so hard on him. She held on to her side and squeezed her eyes shut at a jab of pain in her kidney.

The door swung open, the feet came back into the room. His presence made her shrink. He took fresh socks and pants from the drawer and put them on. He stepped into a pair of trousers and took a crisp, white shirt, ironed by the laundry where he still sent his clothes. He shook it out and drove his arms into the sleeves, shot the cuffs. He whipped a crimson tie into a perfect knot. He was efficient, vigorous and precise. He rammed those brutal feet into a pair of shoes, threw on a jacket-his savagery now perfectly disguised.

'I'm working late tonight,' he said, his tone back to normal.

The apartment door clicked shut. Ines crawled out from under the bed and flopped against the wall. She sat with her legs splayed out, her hands helpless by her sides. The first sob jolted her away from the wall.