The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

Chapter 18

Saturday, 27th July 2002

The sunlight was still bright in the cracks of the wooden shutters as he lay on his bed with the thought of Nadia, blind and vulnerable, sharp in his mind. He'd overcome his initial reaction of horror and brought the analytical part of his brain to bear on the meaning of this latest message. These threats, each one worse than the last, each one digging deeper into his private life and now entangling Consuelo – what was their purpose? The car following him at the end of the first day and the photograph of Inés pinned to his board were designed to unsettle him. They were bold – we can follow you and we don't care if you see us, we can enter your house and we know things about you. The implicit physical threat to Nadia and the inclusion of Consuelo raised the stakes, but what was actually happening here? He gave up on any possibility of sleep and dragged himself to the shower and let the water pummel his head clear of the lunchtime wine. Each threat had only the appearance of boldness. There had been no follow-up to any of them so far. They were trying to distract him… but from what?

He started thinking about Rafael Vega and the Russians. The phrase that Vázquez had used – 'facilitating their business needs' – had snagged in his brain. It was a natural process of the mind to think that a man who'd had questionable dealings with Russian mafiosi and subsequently been found dead would probably have been murdered as a result of some disagreement. In this case, though, it seemed illogical. The Russians were reaping enormous advantages from their dealings with Vega. Why kill him?

There was no reason why Falcón shouldn't believe Vázquez when he said that he had not been involved in the property deals and had no way of contacting the Russians directly. This would fit with Vega's compartmentalizing style of management. Pablo Ortega's sighting of the Russians in Santa Clara seemed to indicate that Ivanov and Zelenov only visited Vega at home. The telephone number programmed into his study phone seemed to confirm that they were not part of any office procedure. That would also explain why the surveillance system had been switched off. Both he and they would not want any record of these visits.

Falcón dressed and went down to his study where he'd put both the envelope and photograph of Nadia in an evidence bag. He leaned back in his chair while fury and frustration did their work on his insides. There was nothing he could do about this. To refocus his investigation on the abduction of Nadia would be futile. He began to think that the Russians wanted to distract him from his inquiries into Vega's death because they were anxious to hide a crime far darker than the possible murder of the constructor.

He remembered his failed call to Ignacio Ortega and made another attempt. Ortega's mobile was still turned off and there was no answer from any of the other numbers he'd taken from Pablo's book. He went to his notebook and looked down the list of things he'd planned to do this morning before he'd been sidetracked by Pablo Ortega's suicide. Interview Marty Krugman.

Marty Krugman was in the Vega Construcciones offices on Avenida de la Republica de Argentina. He was finishing off some drawings on the more powerful computer he had there. He said he'd be quite happy to talk as soon as Falcón could get there. He'd make sure the conserje would let him in. As he spoke Falcón jotted down three topics for Marty Krugman – 9/11, Russians, wife.

The entrance to the Vega Construcciones building was between two large estate agencies which advertised the Vega projects in their windows. The conserje let him in and sent him straight up to Marty Krugman's office.

Marty had his feet up on the desk. He was wearing red basketball pumps. They shook hands.

'Maddy told me you had a conversation about Reza Sangari yesterday,' said Marty.

'That's right,' said Falcón, realizing that the reason why Marty had been so amenable about seeing him on a Saturday evening was that he was angry with him.

'She said you were also implying that she might have been having an affair with Rafael.'

'These questions have to be asked,' said Falcón. 'I was only wondering whether she had had an effect on the stability of Sr Vega's mind.'

'It was a ridiculous question and I resent that you asked it,' said Marty. 'You've got no idea what we went through over Reza Sangari.'

'That's true… which was why I had to ask the question,' said Falcón. 'I know nothing about you. I have to find out, and you are understandably reticent about certain dramatic events in your lives.'

'Are you satisfied?' he asked, backing off slightly.

'For the moment… yes.'

Marty nodded him into a seat on the other side of the desk.

'Your wife told me you had quite a developed relationship with Sr Vega,' said Falcón.

'Intellectually, yes,' said Marty. 'You know what it's like. There's no fun in talking to somebody who agrees with everything you say.'

'She said that you were surprised by how much you did agree.'

'I never expected to find myself agreeing about anything with the kind of person who thought that Franco had the right idea about communists: that they should all be rounded up and shot.'

'So what did you agree on?'

'We shared the same views about the American empire.'

'I didn't know there was one.'

'It's called the World,' said Marty. 'We don't go through all that time-consuming, expensive crap of actually colonizing. We just… globalize.'

'This note Sr Vega had in his hand referring to 9/11,' said Falcón, cutting in hard before Marty ran away with the ball. 'Pablo Ortega told me Sr Vega was of the opinion that America deserved what happened on September 11th.'

'We had some violent disagreements about that,' said Marty. 'It's one of the few things I get emotional about. Two friends of mine worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and, like a lot of Americans, and especially multicultural New Yorkers, I didn't see why they or the other three thousand people had to die.'

'But why do you think he believed that?'

'The American empire is no different to any other. We believe that the reason we have become so powerful isn't just that we commanded the necessary resources at the right time in history to defeat the only other contender, but also because we are right. We broke an entire ideology not with an atom bomb but by the sheer brutality of numbers. We forced the Soviet Union to play our game and bankrupted it. And that's the great thing about our tool of empire – we can invade without physically going in. We can dictate whilst appearing to be a force for the good. Capitalism brings a population under control by giving them the illusion of freedom and choice whilst forcing them to adhere to a rigid principle, which can be resisted only at the cost of personal ruin. There's no Gestapo, no torture chambers… it's perfect. We call it Empire Lite.'

Falcón started to break in on the Krugman theory, but Marty held up his hand.

'Paciencia, Inspector Jefe, I'm getting to it,' he said. 'Those are the basic ingredients of the American empire and, as you've realized, I've just used what Rafael thought was the Americans' greatest talent – the art of presentation. Truth, fact and reality are Play-doh in the hands of a great presenter. For example, how can we be aggressive if we don't invade? Look at our history as Defenders of the Right against the Forces of Evil. We saved Europe from the Nazis, Kuwait from Saddam.

'Rafael saw that as arrogance, which, when combined with Christian fundamentalism and outright support of the Israelis by the present administration, became too much for the Islamic die-hards. He thought this was the Holy War that both parties had been waiting for; we were going back centuries to the Crusades, except that the arena was now larger and the techniques available more devastating.

'When al-Qaeda hit our symbol of the American empire – and Rafael reckoned that to wake up 250 million people from a state of somnolent comfort you needed a very loud bang – he thought that the truly terrible thing for us was to discover that al-Qaeda knew us better than we did ourselves. They had understood what makes our society tick - our demand for outstanding presentation and our need to make an impact. He attached a lot of importance to the time lag between the first plane hitting and the second. It meant that the world media would be there.'

'I'm surprised there wasn't an exchange of blows between you,' said Falcón.

'That was a summary of his beliefs about 9/11, not our discussions,' said Marty. 'I did a lot of storming out and he talked me back in. There were days when diplomatic relations were cut completely. He was surprised by my anger. He hadn't realized how much anger there was pent up in America.'

'Can you relate any of that to the note that was discovered in Sr Vega's hand?'

'I've been trying to and I can't see it.'

'Your wife says that you're certain he'd lived in

America, and that he liked it,' said Falcón. 'And yet he held these views which would annoy plenty of Americans…'

'They're not so different to what most Europeans secretly think. Inspector Jefe. That's why a lot of my fellow countrymen now see Europeans as treacherous and envious.'

'Envious?'

'Yes, something else Rafael had an opinion on. He said Europeans don't envy the American way – its society is too aggressive for them to be envious of it. And, anyway, envy does not inspire hate. What they are, he said, is afraid of Americans and fear does inspire hate.'

'What do Europeans fear?'

'That with all our economic might and political strength we have the power to make their efforts irrelevant – you know, the Kyoto agreement, trade tariffs, the ICC -'

'And yet, Sr Vega was relentlessly pro-American.'

'If you're as anti-communist as he was, you have to be,' said Marty. 'The point was he didn't think emotionally. He certainly didn't approve of al-Qaeda. He just saw it as the… way things go. Playground bullies eventually get punched on the nose and it always comes from the least expected direction. He also believed that once the rest saw blood they'd dive in afterwards. As far as Rafael was concerned this was the beginning of the end for the American empire.'

'I'm surprised you were prepared to put up with his talk,' said Falcón. 'Your wife kept reminding me that you think it's the greatest nation on earth.'

'It didn't make me want to kill him, if that's what you're implying, Inspector Jefe,' said Marty, looking out from under his eyebrows. 'All you've got to do is look at history. Rafael said that America, like the empires before them, would lash out. They'd have to. But it would either be a wild flailing against something too small to be seen, or they would crush, with excessive force and expensive might, the wrong enemy. There'd be a gradual weakening, followed by economic melt-down. This was where I think he was wrong, because the one thing that America would always pay attention to was the dollar. They would never allow anything to jeopardize that.'

'These discussions went on for a long time. Your wife said until dawn.'

'And as the brandy bottle got emptier and the end of Rafael's cigar got soggier, his ideas got wilder,' said Marty. 'He believed that the American empire would end, not in our lifetime but before the end of the century, and that one of two things would happen. Either the Chinese would take over and stamp an even more rapacious form of capitalism on the world, or there would be a reaction against capitalism's decadence. In which case there would be a religious empire which would come from the most populous nations on earth (rather than our dying nations of retirees) and that it would be Islamic.'

'My God,' said Falcón.

'Allah is great, you mean. Inspector Jefe,' said Marty.

'We've seen from your wife's photographs that Sr Vega was in some sort of crisis that dated from the end of last year. This was confirmed by his doctor. Was there any difference in the way your talks developed around that time?'

'He drank more,' said Marty. 'Sometimes he would pass out for a few minutes. I remember once going over to cover him with a blanket and, just as I reached him, his eyes opened and I could see he was very frightened. He started to plead with me as if he was a prisoner begging not to be taken away for torture, until he remembered who I was and where we were.'

'Sr Ortega mentioned that he seemed very disappointed by the American concept of loyalty,' said Falcón. 'That they were your friends until they no longer had any use for you. Do you know where that came from?'

'In business, I imagine. He never spoke about specifics. He took honour very seriously. He seemed to operate on a strict code, which seemed quite old- fashioned by modern standards. He was dismayed by the more practical American belief: honour's fine until you start losing money, then it all goes out the window.'

'It sounded more personal than that. He wouldn't be such a successful businessman if he didn't have a more relaxed code of morality as far as money was concerned. There was a business aspect to his marriage arrangement. His code was such that, having given his word, he wouldn't leave his wife because of her mental state, but it was loose enough that he would marry to get his hands on the property in the first place.'

'So, you tell me,' said Marty.

Falcón flipped through his notes.

'Pablo Ortega reported him as saying: "as soon as you stop making money for them or giving them information they drop you like a stone.'"

'Well, that sounds weird, like some sort of corporate espionage. Money. Information. If he was into that

I don't know where he'd expect to find honour in that world.'

'Or was it politics?' said Falcón. 'Your conversations were primarily political.'

'I can't think that politics would have any bearing on his death here in Seville.'

'Do you know anything about the Russian investors in Sr Vega's projects?'

'I know that there are some, but that's all. I'm just the architect. I do the drawings, I manage the practicalities, but I don't meet the investors. That happens at a higher level, a business level.'

'These Russians are known mafiosi and we're pretty sure they're laundering money through Sr Vega's projects.'

'It's possible. That's the nature of the construction industry. But I don't know anything about it. I'm on the creative side.'

'Can you think of any reason why the Russians should want to kill Sr Vega?'

'He was cheating on them? That's normally why you get killed by the mafia. But that will be difficult to prove.'

'We've had threats,' said Falcón. 'Have you been threatened?'

'Not yet.'

If Marty Krugman was nervous he wasn't showing it to Falcón. The basketball pumps stayed up on the desk. He was relaxed.

'Why did you leave America, Sr Krugman?' asked Falcón, moving into the third phase of his interview.

'You've asked me that before.'

'Your answer's going to be different now that Reza Sangari is out in the open.'

'Then you already know the answer.'

'I want to hear you tell it.'

'We decided that if our relationship was going to survive we had to get away from the environment in which it started. We both love Europe. We thought a simple life together would bring us closer.'

'But this isn't a simple life – big city, job, house in Santa Clara.'

'We tried a small house in Provence to start with. It didn't work.'

'And how has it been, working here?'

'This is very personal, Inspector Jefe,' said Marty, 'but if you must know it's been going fine.'

'You're nearly twenty years older than your wife. Has that ever presented any problems?'

Marty shifted in his seat, the first sign he'd shown of any discomfort in the whole interview.

'Maddy has an effect on men. A predictable and boring effect. The first connection I made with Maddy was up here -' he said, tapping his forehead. 'I surprised her and I still do. Now, you can call this syndrome whatever you like – father/daughter, teacher/pupil – but all I know is that it works and it will continue to work, because unlike all the other guys I'm not and never have been focused solely on her pussy.'

'So what happened with Reza Sangari was… unpredictable,' said Falcón, feeling the tension build in the room.

Marty Krugman sat back in his chair with his long artistic hands folded over his lean stomach. He fixed Falcón with his dark, embedded eyes and nodded.

'Are you a jealous man, Sr Krugman?'

Silence.

'Does it annoy you to see your wife talking to other men, laughing with them, being interested in them?'

More silence.

'Was there something that surprised you after you discovered your wife's betrayal with Reza Sangari?'

Marty frowned, searched his head. Leaned forward.

'What is this something that you're talking about?'

'That you, the intellectual, the political animal, the man of ideas and thoughts, could be… passionate?'

'What happened between Maddy and Reza Sangari was what the French call un coup de foudre, a lightning strike that set something on fire and which burnt itself out. By the time somebody killed Reza Sangari whatever happened between him and Maddy was just smoke, ash and embers. That's the nature of passion, Inspector Jefe. It burns hard and fast and consumes too greedily for mere sex to keep it satisfied. So once the sex has run its course the passion flames out and, if you're lucky, you survive the fall.'

'That's true if it was just sex,' said Falcón. 'But if it was something more…'

'What are you trying to do here, Inspector Jefe?' said Marty. 'Your probes are in. I can feel them. They're hurting. They're stirring up memories that I'd rather let lie. But what are you getting out of it?'

'Sr Vega used to take your wife to bullfights,' said Falcón, determined to drive his point home. 'How did you feel about that?'

'If two intelligent people want to watch such a disgusting spectacle as the torment of a dumb animal, that is their business and they can do it without me.'

'Your wife told me that she was surprised at how quickly she became accustomed to the sight of blood and the violence,' said Falcón. 'She perceived a sexual aspect to the drama.'

Marty shook his head in disbelief.

'Would you describe your marriage as quite open, Sr Krugman? By that I mean you don't appear to see the necessity of establishing yourself as a couple in society. You're quite happy for your wife to spend time with Sr Vega or other men. She was independent in Connecticut. She had her own work and freedom…'

'What "other men"?' said Marty, opening his hands, welcoming the exchange.

'Juez Calderón, for instance,' said Falcón.

Marty blinked at the information. As the name slid cleanly into Krugman's mind, Falcón realized that this was news to him.

'Maddy has different energies and pursuits to mine. She can sit by the river for hours taking photographs. That's her world. She also likes the street and bar life of Seville. I don't have time for that. She likes the animation and constant sense of theatre about the people. I am not someone who can bring that alive for her. Rafael was happy to show it to her, as I'm sure is the judge. I have no desire to stop her enjoying herself. To try would be destructive.'

The words came out like a pre-prepared statement from an administration under pressure.