The Hidden Assassins

17

Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 21.00 hrs

The restaurant was in the middle of the first service to the early tourists, before the main rush of locals at 10 p.m. Consuelo left her office to keep her second appointment with Alicia Aguado. She had been out only once, to her sister's house for lunch. They had talked exclusively about the bomb until the last minutes of the meal when Consuelo had asked her if she could be at her home in Santa Clara at around 10.30 p.m. Her sister had assumed that there was a problem with the nanny.

'No, no, she'll be there looking after the boys,' said Consuelo. 'It's just that I've been told I need someone who's close to me to be there when I get back.'

'Are you going to the gynaecologist?'

'No. The psychologist.'

'You?' her sister had said, astonished.

'Yes, Ana, your sister, Consuelo, is going to see a shrink,' she said.

'But you're the most sane person I've ever known,' said Ana. 'If you're nuts, then what hope is there for the rest of us?'

'I'm not nuts,' she'd said, 'but I could be. I'm on a knife-edge at the moment. This woman I'm going to see will help me, but she says I need support when I get home. You are the support.'

The effect on her sister was shocking, not least because it had been an unsettling realization for both of them, that perhaps they weren't as close as they'd thought.

As she left the safety of her office, Consuelo felt something like panic forming in her stomach and, as if on cue, she remembered Alicia Aguado's words: 'Come straight to me from your work. Don't be distracted.' It started up some confusion in her, a voice asking: Why shouldn't I? And as she fastened her seat belt, her mind swerved away from its earlier objective and she thought about driving past the Plaza del Pumarejo, wondering if he would be there. Her heart raced and she hit the horn so hard and long that one of the waiters came running out into the street. She pulled away and drove straight through the Plaza del Pumarejo, eyes fixed ahead.

Fifteen minutes later she was in the lovers' seat in the cool blue room, her wrist exposed, waiting for Alicia Aguado's inquisitive fingers. They talked about the bomb first. Consuelo couldn't concentrate. She was busy trying to hold her fragmentary self together. Talk of the shattering effects of the bomb was not helping.

'You were a little late,' said Alicia, placing her fingers on the pulse. 'Did you come straight here?'

'I was delayed at work. I came as soon as I could get away.'

'No distractions?'

'None.'

'Try answering that question again, Consuelo.'

She stared at her wrist. Was her heartbeat so transparent? She swallowed hard. Why should this be so difficult? She'd had no problem all day. Her eyes filled. A tear slipped to the corner of her mouth.

'Why are you crying, Consuelo?'

'Aren't you going to tell me?'

'No,' said Aguado, 'it's the other way round. I'm just the guide.'

'I fought a momentary distraction,' said Consuelo.

'Were you reluctant to tell me because it was of a sexual nature?'

'Yes. I'm ashamed of it.'

'Of what exactly?'

No reply.

'Think about that before our next meeting and decide whether it's true,' said Aguado. 'Tell me about the distraction.'

Consuelo related the incident of the previous night, which had finally precipitated her call for help.

'You don't know this man?'

'No.'

'Have you seen him before, had some kind of casual contact?'

'He's one of those types that walks past women and mutters obscenities,' she said. 'I don't tolerate that sort of behaviour and I make a scene whenever it happens. I want to discourage them from doing it to other women.'

'Do you see that as a moral duty?'

'I do. Women should not be subjected to this random sexism. These men should not be encouraged to indulge in their gross fantasies. It has nothing to do with sex, it's purely a power thing, an abuse of power. These men hate women. They want to verbalize their hate. It gives them pleasure to shock and humiliate. If there were women foolish enough to get involved with men like that, they would be physically abused by them. They are wife-beaters in the making.'

'So why are you fascinated by this man?' asked Aguado.

Tears again, which were combined with a strange sense of collapse, of things falling into each other and, just as the gravitational pull of all this inner crumpling seemed to be achieving a terminal velocity, she felt herself untethered, floating away from the person she thought herself to be. It seemed to be an extreme form of a phenomenon she referred to as an existential lurch: a sudden reflective moment, in which the question of what we are doing here on this planet spinning in the void seemed unanswerably huge. Normally it was over in a flash and she was back in the world, but this time it went on and she didn't know whether she was going to be able to get back. She leapt to her feet and held herself together in case she came apart.

'It's all right,' said Alicia, reaching out to her. 'It's all right, Consuelo. You're still here. Come and sit beside me again.'

The chair, the so-called lovers' chair, seemed more like a torturer's seat. A place where instruments would be inserted to reach unbearably painful clusters of nerves and tweak them to previously unexperienced levels of agony.

'I can't do this,' she heard herself saying. 'I can't do it.'

She fell into Alicia Aguado's arms. She needed the human touch to bring her back. She cried, and the worst of it was that she had no idea what her suffering was about. Alicia got her back into the chair. They sat, fingers intertwined, as if they were now, indeed, lovers.

'I was falling apart,' said Consuelo. 'I lost sight…I lost my sense of who I was. I felt like an astronaut, floating away from the mother ship. I was on the brink of madness.'

'And what precipitated that sensation?'

'Your question. I don't remember what it was. Were you asking about a friend, or my father, perhaps?'

'Maybe we've talked enough about what's troubling you,' said Aguado. 'Let's try to end this on a positive note. Tell me something that makes you happy.'

'My children make me happy.'

'If you remember, our last consultation was terminated by a discussion about how your children made you feel. You said…'

'I love them so much it hurts,' finished Consuelo.

'Let's think about a state of happiness that's free from pain.'

'I don't feel pain all the time. It's only when I see them sleeping.'

'And how often do you watch them sleeping?'

Consuelo realized that it had become a nightly ritual, watching the boys in their careless sleep was the high point of every day. That pain right in her middle had become something she relished.

'All right,' said Consuelo, carefully, 'let's try to remember a moment of pain-free happiness. That shouldn't be too difficult, should it, Alicia? I mean, here we are in the most beautiful city in Spain. Didn't somebody say: "To whom God loves, He gives a house in Seville"? God's love must come with half a million euros these days. Let me see…Do you ask all your patients this question?'

'Not all of them.'

'How many have been able to give you an answer?' asked Consuelo. 'I imagine psychologists meet a lot of unhappy people.'

'There's always something. People who love the country might think of the way the sunlight plays on water, or the wind in the grasses. City people might think of a painting they've seen, or a ballet, or just sitting in their favourite square.'

'I don't go to the country. I used to like art, but I lost…'

'Others remember a friendship, or an old flame.'

Their hands had come apart and Aguado's fingers were back on Consuelo's wrist.

'What are you thinking about now, for instance?' she asked.

'It's nothing,' said Consuelo.

'It's not nothing,' said Aguado. 'Whatever it is…hold on to it.' Ines had been sitting in the apartment for over an hour. It was some time after 9.30 p.m. She had tried to call Esteban but, as usual, his mobile was turned off. She was quite calm, although inside her head there seemed to be a wire pulled taut to vibrating point. She had been to see her doctor but had left just before she was due to be called. The doctor would want to examine her and she didn't want to be looked at, pried into.

The incident in the park with the mulatto bitch-whore kept intruding on her internal movie, forcing the film out of the gate and jamming her head with other images: the lividness of Esteban's face as it appeared under the bed and the twitching of his bare feet on the cold kitchen floor.

The kitchen was not a place for her to be. The hard edges of its granite work surfaces, the chill of the marble floor, the distorting mirrors of all the chrome were reminders of the morning's brutality. She hated that fascist kitchen. It made her think of the Guardia Civil in jackboots and their hard, black, shiny hats. She couldn't see a child in that kitchen.

She sat in the bedroom, feeling tiny on the huge and empty marital bed. The TV was off. There was too much talk about the bomb, too many images of the site, too much blood, gore, and shattered glass and lives. She looked at herself in the mirror, over the ordered hairbrushes and cufflink collections. A question danced in her brain: What the fuck has happened to me?

By 9.45 p.m. she couldn't bear it any longer and went outside. She thought she was walking aimlessly, but found herself drawn to the young people already beginning to gather in the warm night under the massive trees of the Plaza del Museo. Then, unaccountably, she was in Calle Bailen and standing in front of her ex-husband's house. The sight of it brought up a spike of envy. She could have had this house, or at least half of it, if it hadn't been for that bitch of a lawyer Javier had hired. It was she who'd found out that Ines had been fucking Esteban Calderon for months and had asked (to her face!) if she'd wanted all that tawdry stuff dragged through the courts. And look at her now. What a great move she'd made. Married to an abuser of women, who, when he wasn't sodomizing his wife, 'for purposes of contraception', was off with every unpaid whore who waggled her tits…Where had all this terrible language come from? Ines Conde de Tejada didn't use this sort of language. Why was her mind suddenly so full of filth?

But here she was, outside Javier's house. Her slim legs in her short skirt trembled. She carried on past the doors to the Hotel Colon and turned back. She had to see Javier. She had to tell him. Not that she'd been beaten. Not that she was sorry for what she had done. No, she didn't want to tell him anything. She just wanted to be near a man who had loved her, who had adored her.

As she hid in the darkness of the orange trees and prepared herself, the door opened and three men came out. They went to pick up a taxi outside the Hotel Colon. The door closed. Ines rang the bell. Falcon reopened the door and was stunned to see the oddly diminished figure of his ex-wife.

'Hola, Ines. Are you all right?'

'Hola, Javier.'

They kissed. He made way for her. They walked to the patio with Falcon thinking: She looks as small and thin as a child. He cleared away the remnants of the CNI party and returned with a bottle of manzanilla.

'I should have thought after a day like today you'd be exhausted,' she said. 'And yet here you are having people round for drinks.'

'It's been a long day,' said Falcon, thinking: What is this all about? 'How's Esteban holding up?'

'I haven't seen him.'

'He's probably still at the site. They're working a roster system through the night,' said Falcon. 'Are you all right, Ines?'

'You've asked me that already, Javier. Don't I look all right?'

'You're not worried about anything, are you?'

'Do I look worried?'

'No, just a little thin. Have you lost weight?'

'I keep myself in shape.'

It always bewildered Falcon, who was already running out of things to say to Ines, how he could ever have been obsessed by her. She struck him now as completely banal; an expert in chitchat, a beautiful presenter of received opinion, a snob and a bore. And yet before they married they'd had a passionate affair, with wild sexual encounters. The bronze boy in the fountain had fled from their excesses.

Her heels clicked on the marble flags of the patio. He had wanted to get rid of her as soon as he'd seen her, but there was something about her pitiful frailness, her lack of Sevillana hauteur, that made it hard for him to brush her off into the night.

'How's things?' he said, trying to nod something more interesting into his head, which was almost completely taken up with the decision he had to make within the next eight hours. 'How's life with Esteban?'

'You see more of him than I do,' she said.

'We haven't worked together for a while and, you know, he's always been ambitious, so…'

'Yes, he's always been ambitious,' she said, 'to fuck every woman that passes under his nose.'

Falcon's glass of manzanilla stopped on its way to his mouth, before continuing. He took a good inch off the top.

'I wouldn't know,' he said, avoiding a conversational line that had been common knowledge in the police and judiciary for years.

'Don't be so fucking ridiculous, Javier,' she said. 'The whole of fucking Seville knows he's been dipping his cock in every pussy that comes his way.'

Silence. Falcon wondered if he'd ever heard Ines use this sort of language before. It was as if some fishwife inside her was kicking down the barriers.

'I came across one of his whores today in the Murillo Gardens,' she said. 'I recognized her from a shot he'd taken of her with his digital camera. And she was sitting in front of me on a park bench, smoking a cigar, as if she was still thinking about sucking his-'

'Come on, Ines,' said Falcon. 'I'm not the person you should be talking to about this.'

'Why not?' she said. 'You know me. We've been intimate. You know him. You know what he's…that he's a…that I…'

She broke down. Falcon took the glass out of her hand, found some tissues. She blew her nose and thumped the tabletop with her fist and tried to dig her heel into the floor of the patio, which made her wince. She took a walk around the fountain and felt a sudden stabbing pain in her side and had to hold on to herself.

'Are you all right, Ines?'

'Stop asking me that question,' she said. 'It's nothing, just some kidney-stone trouble. The doctor says I don't drink enough water.'

He fetched her a glass of water and thought about how he was going to manage this situation, with Mark Flowers due any minute. His brain stalled on the ludicrous fact that she had come to see him to talk about her husband's incorrigible womanizing. What did that mean?

'I wanted to talk to you,' she said, 'because I have no one else I can talk to. My friends aren't capable of this level of intimacy. I'm sure some of them have become his conquests. My suffering would just be gossip to them, nothing more. I know you went through a very bad time a few years ago and that has given you the capacity to understand what I'm going through now.'

'I'm not sure my experiences are comparable,' said Falcon, frowning at her self-absorbed talk, the situation expanding out of his control by the moment.

'I know that when we split up you were still in love with me,' she said. 'I felt very sorry for you.'

He knew she'd felt nothing of the sort. She'd projected all her guilt on to him and taunted him with that horrific mantra about his heartlessness: 'Tu no tienes corazon, Javier Falcon.'

'Are you thinking of leaving Esteban?' he asked, carefully, panicked by the notion that she might be thinking that he would have her back.

'No, no, no que no,' she said. 'It hasn't come to that. We're made for each other. We've been through so much. I'd never leave him. He needs me. It's just…'

It's just that there aren't enough cliches for the cheated wife to draw on, thought Falcon.

'It's just that…he needs help,' said Ines.

What was happening today? The CNI wanted him to persuade his new friend to become a spy. His ex-wife wanted him to encourage her husband, with whom he'd only ever had a professional relationship, to go and see a shrink.

'What do you think, Javier?'

'I think it's none of my business,' he said firmly.

'I still want to know what you think,' she said, her eyes huge in her head.

'You'll never persuade Esteban-or any man, for that matter-to go to a shrink or a marriage-guidance counsellor, unless he himself perceives that there is a problem,' said Falcon. 'And most men, in these situations, rarely see that the problem is theirs.'

'He's been whoring around in this marriage since…since before we got married,' she said. 'He must see that he needs to change.'

'The only thing that will change him is a major trauma in his life, which might make him reflect on his…insatiable needs,' said Falcon. 'Unfortunately, it might also mean that those close to him now will not remain so…'

'I stuck with him through his last crisis with the American bitch and I'll stick with him through this,' she said. 'I know he loves me.'

'That was my experience,' said Falcon, holding out his hands and realizing that he'd just told Ines why she wasn't a part of his life any more. 'My problem didn't happen to be womanizing, though.'

'No, it wasn't, was it? You were so cold, Javier,' she said.

That tone of false concern set his teeth on edge, but the doorbell rang, saving him from having to dig deeper into his reserves of patience. He walked her to the door.

'You're popular tonight,' said Ines.

'I don't know what people see in me,' said Falcon, braking hard on the irony.

'We don't see so much of each other these days,' she said, kissing him before he opened the door. 'I'm sorry…if we don't see each other again…'

'Again?' said Falcon, and the doorbell rang once more.

'I'm sorry,' she said. At 9.30 p.m. Calderon had arrived at Marisa's apartment. Twenty minutes later they lay naked and sexsmeared on the floor by the sofa. They were drinking Cuba Libres chock full of ice, and smoking their way through a packet of Marlboro Lights. She straddled him and brushed her hardened nipples against his lips, while lowering her pubis until it just tickled the tip of his exhausted penis. He filled his hands with her buttocks and bit her nipple a little too hard.

'Ai!' she yelped, pushing away from him. 'Haven't you eaten?'

'There hasn't been much time for eating,' he said.

'Why don't I make you some pasta?' she said, standing over him, still in her heels, legs astride, hands on hips, cigarette dangling from her plump lips.

I'm Helmut Newton, thought Calderon.

'Sounds good,' he said.

She put on a turquoise silk robe and went into the kitchen. Calderon sipped his drink, smoked, looked out into the dense, warm night, and thought: This is all right.

'Something strange happened to me today,' said Marisa, from the kitchen, knife working over some onion and garlic. 'I sold a couple of my pieces to one of my dealers. He pays cash and I like to treat myself to a nice cigar-a real one, made in Havana. I sit under the palm trees in the Murillo Gardens to smoke it, because it reminds me of home and it was really hot today, the first heat of the summer. And I'd just got myself into a really cool Cuban mood…'

Marisa could tell from the back of Calderon's head that he was barely listening to her.

'…when this woman sat down in front of me. A beautiful woman. Very slim, long dark hair, beautiful big eyes…Maybe a little too thin, now that I think about it. Her eyes were so big and she was staring at me in this very strange way.'

She had his attention now. His head was as still as rock.

'I like to smoke my cigars in peace. I don't like mad people looking at me. So I asked her what she was staring at. She told me she was looking at the whore with the cigar-la puta con el puro. Well, nobody calls me a whore, and nobody ruins a top-quality Havana cigar. So I gave her a piece of my mind-and you know what?'

Calderon took a viciously long drag of his cigarette.

'You know what she said to me?'

'What?' said Calderon, as if a long way off.

'She said: "You're the whore who's fucking my husband." She asked me how much you were paying me and said that it didn't look as if it was more than € 15 a night and that you'd probably thrown in the copper wig and the cigar to keep me happy. Can you tell me how the fuck Ines knows who I am?'

Calderon stood up. He was so angry he couldn't speak. His lips were pale and his genitals were shrivelled back into their pubic nest as if his rage had taken all available blood to keep it stoked. He was clenching and unclenching his fist and staring off into the night, with bone-snapping violence ricocheting around his head. Marisa had seen this trait in physically unimpressive men before. The big, muscly guys had nothing to prove, whereas the fat, the puny and the stupid had big lessons to hand out.

When she heard the shower running, Marisa stopped preparing the food. Calderon dressed in ominous silence. She asked him what he was doing, why he was leaving. He whipped his tie up into a tight choleric knot.

'Nobody talks to you like that,' he said, and left. Ines stopped to look in a hand-painted tile shop on Calle Bailen. She felt better after seeing Javier. She'd persuaded herself, in the short walk after their brief encounter, that Javier still cared for her. How sweet of him to ask her if she was thinking of leaving Esteban. He still lived in hope after all these years. It was sad to have to disappoint him.

The darkness under the huge trees of the Plaza del Museo held the murmur of more young people, the chinking of beer bottles and the reek of marijuana. She walked through them feeling more cheerful. The light was on in the apartment, which elated her. Esteban was home. He had come back to her. They were going to repair the damage. She was sure, after what had happened this morning, that he would see reason and she could persuade him to make an appointment with a psychologist.

The stairs no longer inspired dread and although the pain in her side meant that she didn't exactly sprint up them, she reached the door with a lightness of heart. Her hair swung on her shoulders as she closed the door. She instantly felt his looming presence. A smile was already spreading on her face when he sheafed her hair and turned it once around his wrist. She toppled backwards, falling to her knees, and he brought her face up close to the pallor of the pure hatred in his own.