The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

Chapter 23

Monday, 29th July 2002

It was past three o'clock. Falcón was hungry. Ramírez left for lunch, telling him that Ferrera was in interrogation room number 4 with Salvador Ortega, and that Elvira had called to say that he'd cleared Alicia Aguado with the prison director to give Sebastián Ortega a full psychological assessment.

'I called Juez Calderón, too,' he said. 'I thought we should remind him about the search warrant for the safe-deposit box. He's gone, nowhere to be seen, not expected back and he's done fuck all about the warrant. Buen provecho.'

On the way down to the interrogation rooms he called the prison director to arrange a liaison person and a time. His secretary told him they could begin straight away and that the best time was between 18.00 and 21.00 p.m… He called Alicia Aguado, while looking through the door's glass panel at Salvador Ortega's shattered face. They agreed on 18.30 and he called the prison to confirm a 19.00 appointment. This was going to be a long day. Cristina Ferrera came out and told him that while the narcotics agent had been looking for Salvador she'd done some questioning around Nadia's apartment building. Nobody had seen a thing. Even the people who had seen her taken away now couldn't remember anything about it. He went to get three coffees from the machine.

Salvador Ortega smoked while looking at the backs of his yellow fingers. He made darting eye contact with Cristina Ferrera, who was sitting next to him and partially succeeding in engaging him. His hair was explosive and he had a wispy beard and moustache which disguised his good looks. His T-shirt was so faded that only the vaguest colours and the word 'Megadeth' were discernible. He wore long shorts and his lower legs were scabbed with sores. He smoked intensely while they sipped their coffees.

'When was the last time you spoke to your father?' asked Falcón.

'I don't speak to my father,' he said. 'He doesn't speak to me.'

'Have you seen a newspaper recently?'

'News has no importance for me in my circumstances.'

'Did you have any relationship with your Uncle Pablo?'

'He was always very entertaining when I was a child,' said Salvador. 'Which was a relief.'

'A relief from what?'

Salvador smoked hard and exhaled to the ceiling.

'Uncle Pablo was fun,' he said. 'I only spent any time with him as a child.'

'You were still at home when he brought Sebastián round to stay while he went on theatre tours and film shoots. How old were you at the time?'

Salvador's mouth operated but no words came out. He seemed to be biting off air in small chunks. Ferrera patted him on the shoulder.

'This is not a test, Salvador,' she said. 'I told you on the way here that there will be no repercussions. You are not a suspect. We just want to talk to you to see if we can help your cousin.'

'I was sixteen,' he said. 'And nobody can help my cousin.'

'Did you follow what happened to Sebastián?'

Salvador's cigarette hand trembled. He nodded and breathed down whatever was rising in him.

'You're a heroin user?' said Falcón, to move on to more certain ground.

'Yes, I am.'

'For how long?'

'Since I was fifteen.'

'And before that?'

'I smoked hashish from about the age of ten until… it didn't work any more. Then I moved on to the stuff that does work.'

'How does it work?'

'It takes me away from myself… to a place where my mind and body feel at home.'

'And where's that?'

He blinked and flashed a look at Falcón, unprepared for these sorts of questions.

'Where I feel free,' he said, 'which is nowhere.'

'You were already using heroin when Sebastián first came to stay with you?'

'Yes, I remember it was… all right.'

'What do you remember of Sebastián?'

'He was a sweet kid.' 'Is that all?' said Falcón. 'Didn't you talk to him or play with him? I mean, his mother had left him and his father had gone away. He must have thought of you as an elder brother.'

'It takes time to get the money together if you're a sixteen-year-old heroin user,' said Salvador. 'I was too busy stealing handbags from tourists and running from the police.'

'Why did you start smoking hashish so young?'

'Everybody smoked it. You could buy it in the bars with a Coca Cola in those days.'

'Ten years old is still very young.'

'I was probably unhappy,' he said, smiling with no conviction.

'Was that because of problems at home?'

'My father was very strict,' said Salvador. 'He beat us.'

'Who do you mean by "us"? You and your sister?'

'Not my sister… He wasn't interested in her.'

'He wasn't interested in her?' said Falcón.

Salvador crushed out the cigarette and jammed his hands between his thighs.

'Look,' he said, 'I don't like… to be hassled.'

'I just want to be clear about what you're saying, that's all,' said Falcón.

'She could do what she liked, is what I meant.'

'So who is "us", when you say he beat us?'

'My friends,' said Salvador, shrugging with a jerk. 'That's how it was in those days.'

'What did your friends' parents say about their children being beaten by your father?'

'He always said he wouldn't tell how naughty they'd been, so they didn't talk to their parents.'

Falcón glanced at Ferrera, who shrugged her eyebrows and looked at Salvador. Sweat stood out on his forehead, even in the high air conditioning.

'When did you have your last fix?' asked Falcón.

'I'm OK,' he said.

'I have some distressing news for you,' said Falcón.

'I'm already distressed,' said Salvador. 'You can't distress me any further.'

'Your Uncle Pablo died on Saturday morning. He took his own life.'

Cristina Ferrera lit a cigarette and offered it to him. Salvador hunched over and rested his forehead on the edge of the table. His back shook. After a minute he sat back. Tears streamed silently down his face. He wiped them away. Ferrera gave him the cigarette. He puffed on it, took the smoke down.

'I'm going to ask you again: did you have a good relationship with your Uncle Pablo?'

This time Salvador nodded.

'How often did you see him?'

'A few times a month. We had a deal. He would give me money for heroin if I controlled my habit. He didn't want me to steal and end up in jail again.'

'How long had that being going on?'

'The last three years since I got out and before they put me away.'

'You were done for dealing, weren't you?'

'I was, but I wasn't dealing. I was just caught with too much on me. That was why I only got four years.'

'Was Pablo disappointed in you?'

'The only time he got angry with me was when I stole something from his collection,' said Salvador. 'It was a just a drawing, some smudges on paper. I sold

it for twenty thousand pesetas' worth of gear. Pablo said it was worth three hundred thousand.'

'He wasn't angry?'

'He was furious. But, you know, he never hit me, and by my father's standards he was well within his rights to flay me alive.'

'And after that you did the deal?'

'Once he'd calmed down and got the drawing back.'

'How much did you see of Sebastián in that time?'

'A fair amount when Sebastián started at the Bellas Artes. Then I didn't see him for a bit until I heard Pablo had bought him a small apartment on Jesus del Gran Poder. I used to go there to get off the street to shoot up. When Pablo found out, he built another clause into our deal. I had to promise not to see Sebastián until I was clean. Pablo said he was in a fragile state and he didn't want to add drugs to the problem.'

'Did you keep to that?'

'Sebastián was never interested in drugs. He had other strategies for blocking out the world.'

'Like what?'

'He called it "a retreat into beauty and innocence". He had a room in his apartment which he'd soundproofed and blocked out the light. I used to shoot up in there. He painted luminous points on the ceiling. It was like being wrapped in a velvet night. He used to lie in there and listen to his music and the tapes he'd made of himself reading poetry.'

'When did he make this room?'

'As soon as Pablo bought the apartment… five or six years ago.'

'Why did he buy him the apartment?'

'They were finding it difficult to live together. They used to fight… verbally. Then they stopped talking to each other.'

'Did Pablo ever beat Sebastián?'

'Not that I saw or heard about.'

'What about your father?'

Silence.

'I mean when he was living with your family,' said Falcón.

Salvador seemed to be having trouble with his breathing. He began to hyperventilate. Ferrera got behind him and calmed him down with her hands on his shoulders.

'Would you like to help Sebastián?' asked Falcón.

Salvador nodded.

'There's nothing to be ashamed of in here,' said Falcón. 'Anything you say will only be used to help Sebastián.'

'But there is something to be ashamed of in here -' he said, suddenly livid, thumping himself in the chest.

'We're not here to judge you. This isn't a trial of morality,' said Ferrera. 'Things happen to us when we're young and we have no way of -'

'What happened to you?' said Salvador viciously, pulling himself away from her touch. 'What the fuck has ever happened to you? You're a fucking policewoman. Nothing has happened to you. You don't know anything that happens out there. You come from the safe world. I can smell it on you – your soap. You leave the safe world and just ruffle the surface of things where we live, catching people doing their little wrongs. You have no idea what it's like on the other side.'

She moved back from him. Falcón thought she was shocked at first, but she was just asserting her presence. She was telling Salvador something with her silence and he couldn't look at her. The atmosphere in the interrogation room was more dramatic than if she'd stripped naked.

'You think because of the way I look and the job I do that nothing has ever happened to me?'

'Go on then,' said Salvador, goading her, 'tell me what's happened to you, little policewoman.'

Silence, as Ferrera weighed things in her mind.

'I don't have to tell you this,' she said, 'and it's not something I particularly want my superior officer to know about me. But I am going to tell you because you need to know that shameful things happen to others, even little policewomen, and they can be talked about and people will not judge. Are you listening to me, Salvador?'

They made eye contact and he nodded.

'Before I became a policewoman I was training to be a nun. The Inspector Jefe knows that much about me. He also knows I met a man and that I became pregnant. It meant that I stopped my training and got married. But there's something else he doesn't know, which I am very ashamed of and it will cost me a lot to say it in front of him.'

Salvador didn't respond. The silence was ringing in the room. Ferrera breathed in. Falcón wasn't sure he wanted to hear this, but it was too late. She was determined.

'I come from Cadiz. It's a port town with some rough people. I was staying with my mother, who did not know that I'd met this man. I'd reached the point where I was going to have to tell the nuns what had happened in my life, and I decided I would go and see the man I loved and talk to him first. I was still a virgin because I believed in the sanctity of marriage and that I should come whole to it. On the way to my lover's apartment that night I was attacked by two men who raped me. It was very quick. I didn't resist. I was pathetically small and weak in their hands. In a matter of ten minutes they did what they wanted with me and left me totally defiled. I staggered back to my mother's apartment. She was already asleep. I showered and got into bed shaking and shattered. I woke up hoping it had been a bad dream, but I was aching all over and full of shame. A week later, when the bruising had died down I went to bed with my lover. The day after that I told the nuns I was leaving. I am still not completely sure who is the father of my first child.'

She eased her leg back until she felt the seat of the chair and dropped down into it so that it rocked. She seemed exhausted. Salvador's eyes fell away from hers to the cigarette in his hand, which trembled.

'The reason I don't see my father any more is that I hate him,' he said. 'I hate him with a hate so massive that if I saw him I'd commit an act of serious violence. I hate him because he is a betrayer of trust, and not just any trust. He is the betrayer of the greatest trust available to human beings – the trust between parent and child. He beat me to keep me scared. To stop me from even thinking about telling anyone what he was doing to me. He beat me because he knew the legend of his beatings would be passed around the neighbourhood and all the kids would be scared of him, too. And when they came to the house he was so sweet to them they let him do whatever he wanted, but they never dared talk. Those men ruined you. My own father ruined me until I was twelve years old. Then it stopped. I thought I could deal with it. I thought I could smoke it away. Smoke away my childhood and get clear of him and start my own life. It might have been possible. But then Uncle Pablo brought Sebastián to the house. And that is my shame. That is why I am like this. Because I said nothing while my father did to Sebastián what he'd done to me. I should… I should have protected him. I should, as you say, have been his elder brother. But I wasn't. I was a coward. And I saw him ruined.'

After some minutes real life creaked back into the room. One of the lights buzzed. The tape machine tickered.

'When did you last see your Uncle Pablo?' asked Falcón.

'I saw him on Friday morning, just for half an hour. He gave me some money. We talked. He asked me whether I knew why Sebastián had done the things that he'd done. I knew what he was getting at, what he wanted from me. But I couldn't tell him what I've just told you. I couldn't admit how I'd failed to Sebastián's father, my uncle, who had helped me so much. I think he'd already worked it out or he'd known it all along and hadn't been able to believe it of his own brother. He was looking to me for the final corroboration of the facts. I should have been able to tell him, but I didn't. At the end of our talk he hugged me and kissed my head. He hadn't done that since I was a small boy. I cried into his shirt. We walked to the door of the apartment and he patted the side of my face with one of his massive hands and he said: "Don't judge your father too harshly. He had a hard life. He took all the beatings for us when we were children. All of them. He was a tough little bastard. He took it all in silence."'

'Do you know why Sebastián did what he did?' asked Falcón.

'I hadn't seen him for some time before that. The agreement, remember? I didn't want to break that part of it. Once you've found trust, you try not to blow it.'

'Were you surprised by Sebastián's crime?'

'I couldn't believe it. I couldn't think what could possibly have happened in his mind in the years I hadn't seen him. It went against everything I knew about him.'

'Two more questions,' said Falcón, turning the tape machine off, 'and then that's it. I've asked a clinical psychologist to talk to Sebastián to see if we can unblock his mind. It would help if I could play this tape of what you've just told me. She'll be the only one to hear it and she might want to talk to you or get you to help Sebastián in some way.'

'No problem,' he said.

'The next question is more difficult,' said Falcón. 'Your father has done some very bad things…'

'No,' said Salvador, his face hardening to wood, 'you can't make me do that.'

On the way back to the Poligono San Pablo Falcón sat in the back with Salvador and worked out a way to contact him in case Alicia needed his help. He also mentioned that Pablo had left him something in his will and told him to get in touch with Ranz Costa.

They dropped him on the outskirts of the barrio. Ferrera kissed him on both cheeks. Falcón sat up front.

They watched Salvador's jittery walk, an undone j shoelace from his busted trainers lashing his thin scabby i calves.

'You didn't have to do that,' said Falcón, as Ferrera i turned the car round.

'Kiss him?' she said. 'That was the least he deserved.'!

'I meant you didn't have to tell your story to make him tell his,' he said. 'Becoming a nun, answering that vocation is, I imagine, a process – revealing and cleansing yourself before God. Police work is a vocation, too, but there's no God that you have to reveal yourself to.'

'Inspector jefes are quite high up,' she said, smiling. 'And, anyway, it was a practice run for the real thing. I still have to tell my husband.'