The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

Chapter 26

Tuesday, 30th July 2002

Not much strength is required to throw off a cotton sheet, but Falcón couldn't find it. His arms had been weakened by last night's failures. He was glad he'd already written his report; his fingers felt like squid. Comisario Elvira had insisted on him faxing the report through, after he'd delivered his verbal account while driving Calderón back to his apartment.

Snapshots of last night's events flipped through his mind. The close-up of the light going out in Marty Krugman's eyes. Calderón paralysed on the sofa, his face full of horror at the blood spreading out into Maddy Krugman's silk top. The young patrolman surveying the carnage in the room and gagging into his hand. Garcia pushing past them to shake his head at the human mess. The three of them going downstairs, Calderón holding on to the bannister. The police marksman, unused, sitting in the front of Garcia's car with his case on his knees. The drive back with Calderón on the mobile, giving Inés a monosyllabic account. Inés in strappy, pointy, high-heeled shoes, standing in the glare of the headlights in the street outside the apartment building. Calderón, with his hands weighing thirty kilos apiece by his sides, as Inés engulfed him in her arms. Their faces as he moved off – hers with lower lip trembling, eyes sparkling with tears, and his lifeless apart from one shift of the eyes to the corners, which said: 'You've seen me, Javier Falcón, now go, get away, let me be.'

The distance that seven hours of deep, anaesthetic sleep had put between him and these events had made them seem like a journalist's account of a crime committed in the 1950s. He felt different, as if a surgeon had mistakenly removed something that had never troubled him, and the result was going to change his life.

His conversation with Consuelo came back to him. He'd called her lying in bed, just moments before he blacked out. The last exchange:

'Marty Krugman was clearly insane,' she said.

'Was he?'

He drove to the Jefatura, black and sick in his stomach, as if he'd drunk coffee on a bad hangover. He gripped the steering wheel tightly. As he came into the empty outer office he saw Ramírez standing at the window, leaning forward, supporting himself on his hands.

'I heard about last night's disaster,' said Ramírez. 'Are you all right?'

Falcón nodded, more or less.

'Elvira's already been on the phone, asking to see you as soon as you come in.'

The Comisario was standing at his window, hands behind his back, looking across Calle Bias Infante to the Parque de los Principes. His predecessor, Lobo, used to do the same thing – drawing the illusion of power from surveying a domain.

'Take a seat, Inspector Jefe,' he said, nipping behind his desk, swift and agile, giving his moustache a finger and thumb wipe. 'I've read your report and Juez Calderón's, which arrived first thing this morning. I've already been in touch with the American Consul and he's asked for copies. They should come back to us this morning on the CIA nonsense. They won't want to let that notion build up any authority in our ranks.'

'So you don't give it any credibility, sir?'

'Sounds like the ravings of a deranged mind to me,' said Elvira. 'But then again, when I heard that our government had sent death squads to wipe out ETA terrorist cells I didn't believe that either… I couldn't believe it. So, officially, I would call myself sceptical, whilst privately thinking the whole story completely fantastical.'

'He was deranged,' said Falcón. 'There's no doubt about that. But you can't totally write him off. I'm sure the FBI don't let people off the hook that easily and what he told me about Reza Sangari matches what I found out myself. I see no reason why he should lie about killing the man – unless that, too, was some fantasy which, in his confused mind, he hoped would draw his very strange wife back to him. The stuff he spouted about the Agency… Who knows. I'm sure his wife didn't believe a word of it. It'll be interesting to see what Virgilio Guzmán comes back with on the profile of Miguel Velasco.'

'What's Guzmán got to do with it?'

'He's a Chilean. He has expatriate contacts who can help with that sort of material,' said Falcón. 'One thing

I do know about these dream faces he mentioned is that Pablo Ortega saw Vega badly spooked in the Corte Ingles one day and I imagine that he'd been seeing one of his visions.'

'You've got to be careful with Virgilio Guzmán,' said Elvira. 'There are people who say that he can't seem to take anything at face value any more. He's sees a conspiracy theory in everything.'

'He clarified the 9/11 element of the "suicide note" and that helped with the identification of Rafael Vega.'

'I thought he came to see you about Montes's suicide?'

'He did. The inclusion of Eduardo Carvajal's name in Vega's address book was why I'd gone to see Montes in the first place,' said Falcón. 'Montes mentioned Russian mafia involvement in the sex trade, and the next thing I find is a Russian connection to Vega. I ask Montes about these Russians and very soon after that he killed himself.'

'And you talked to Guzmán about this?'

'I gave it to him as context, but we had an agreement that he would not write about anything circumstantial, only the provable facts. And, as yet, we have nothing that links Montes to the Russians.'

'You're making me very nervous, Inspector Jefe. The Montes suicide is an internal matter at the moment. If there is corruption within the force we have to be extremely careful about how it is handled.'

'A journalist was sent to talk to me in my position as the investigating officer. I was not briefed on what could, or could not, be discussed with him. I believe, with someone of the reputation of Virgilio Guzmán, that transparency is the best policy. Have you read the Diario de Sevilla today?'

'Yes. There was a very extensive report on the career of Inspector Jefe Montes.'

Falcón nodded, waited, but nothing more was said.

'I think you should search the Krugmans' house before the Americans come back to us,' said Elvira. 'I've already arranged a warrant.'

Falcón headed for the door. Elvira spoke to the back of his head.

'If Virgilio Guzmán approaches you on the events of last night I'd like you to be very oblique about why Juez Calderón was in the apartment. I don't want a scandal about the Juez de Instruccion having had an affair with the deceased.'

'Has he admitted to that?'

'I asked for a separate statement on that subject. He seems to have been obsessed by her,' said Elvira, who added without looking up from his papers: 'I'm surprised that you didn't mention in your statement his action of bravery at the end.'

'His bravery?' asked Falcón.

'"As Krugman raised his gun to fire,"' said Elvira, reading from Calderón's statement, '"I threw myself towards him in the hope of distracting his aim. The bullet hit Sra Krugman in the chest. Inspector Jefe Falcón was unable to prevent Sr Krugman from putting the gun into his mouth and killing himself."'

'I'll search the Krugmans' house,' said Falcón, leaving the office.

'Garcia didn't see it either,' said Elvira, as the door closed.

Back in the office Falcón sent Cristina Ferrera off to the lab to pick up the Krugmans' house keys from Felipe and Jorge, who had removed them from the crime scene back in Tabladilla. Ramírez was still slumped at his desk.

'CIA?' he said, incredulous.

Falcón threw up his hands.

'Or not CIA, but some shadowy consultancy connected to the CIA,' he said.

'Fantasy,' said Ramírez.

'Let's say that Guzmán's conspiracy theory is correct. If you were part of the American administration responsible for some very ugly things happening in South America during the seventies, and you were worried that Rafael Vega had something that could prove personal involvement by senior members of the US administration… what would you do?'

'Kill him anyway.'

'That's because you're a ruthless bastard, José Luis,' said Falcón. 'The fact is, you wouldn't use the CIA, would you? You wouldn't have the power to use it. But there must be ex-CIA men with contacts and influence who have "debts". You see what I mean about Crazy Krugman… you can't just dismiss him as a madman.'

'I can,' said Ramírez. 'He's too unstable for that kind of work.'

'What if he's your only option?' said Falcón. 'And what do you make of his final admission, that the Agency didn't want Vega dead because they hadn't found out what they wanted to find out? That's a bit of an anticlimax, isn't it?'

'You mean he was doing all these vital, secret tasks but none of the information he came up with was crucial enough that Vega had to be killed?' said Ramírez. 'Maybe what they were looking for is locked up in Vega's safe-deposit box, for which we still don't have a search warrant.'

'You're beginning to believe, José Luis. You'd better remind Juez Calderón, if he comes in for work today."

The phone rang in the outer office. Ramírez went to answer it while Falcón thought about Krugman. 'They', if they existed, couldn't have been expecting Marty to find papers or a video tape. That would have been too much. What they were looking for were reports on Vega's state of mind. Was this a man about to go to Baltasar Garzón or the Belgian justice system and offer his services, for instance?

'That was the town hall in Aracena,' said Ramírez, leaning against the door jamb. 'They passed a restoration project on Montes's ruined finca valued at twenty million pesetas. A total rebuild, complete remodernization, three-phase electricity – the works.'

Falcón passed the news on to Comisario Elvira, who reacted as if he'd been expecting it all along. He told them to proceed with the Krugman house search. Ferrera came back with the house keys and they drove out to Santa Clara.

The house was cold and silent and looked undisturbed as the three of them snapped on their latex gloves.

'I'll go upstairs,' said Falcón. 'Join me when you've finished down here.'

'What are we looking for?' asked Ferrera.

'A little note from Dr Kissinger saying, "Keep up the good work,"' said Ramírez. 'That should do it.'

Falcón went upstairs. The door to Maddy Krugman's exhibition room was open. All the photographs had been removed from the walls and only one exhibit was left on a plinth in the centre of the room. It consisted of a cut-out of a blown-up version of Vega standing barefoot in his garden. The cut-out was encased in Perspex and suspended within the transparent block, like the skeletons of autumn leaves, were the ghostly prints of human hands. They all seemed to be pressing in on the lonely figure, who stood imprisoned, as if by his own history, like an insect in amber. There was a printed card attached to the piece written in Spanish: Las Manos Desaparecidas - The Vanished Hands.

He went across to her work room. Ferrera was going to have to spend a day going through all the prints, transparencies and negatives, checking every one. Up against the wall were the framed shots which had been hanging in the other room. He flipped through them, looking for the shot she'd taken of him. He found the empty frame. He checked the paper shredder and saw his image hanging in ribbons.

Marty Krugman had converted one of the other bedrooms into his office. There was a desk, a laptop and a drawing board. Rolls of plans stood in the corners. Falcón went through the desk drawers. He found a school exercise book with what appeared to be a collection of Krugman's odd thoughts jotted down.

Boredom is the enemy of humanity. It is why we get up and kill.

The torturer learns his skills from the agonies of his own mind, transformed by power.

Guilt defines us as human but in consuming the mind destroys all that made us human. Only

by public admission is our humanity restored. That is the measure of our mutual dependence.

Falcón flipped through to the last entry.

I know what you're doing. I'm going to chain you up, refuse you food and water, watch you wither and crack, fade and split, and roll a rich red wine over my tongue while you die.

That was the problem with Krugman. He was like an unreliable witness taking the stand. The purity of his intellect was always getting infected by the bacteria of emotion.

Ramírez appeared at the door. 'Did you see the exhibit?' said Falcón. 'The Vanished Hands.'

'I came up here to ask Cristina's question in private,' said Ramírez. 'What the fuck are we looking for?'

'That exhibit – do you think it's Sra Krugman's artistic interpretation of what was going on in Vega's mind, or did she know more?' said Falcón. 'This is a book of Krugman's thoughts – he talks about the mind of a torturer.'

'These are hints, not clues,' said Ramírez. 'They are not usable.'

'We're here because Elvira is covering his back. He's sceptical, but he wants to make sure there's no obvious connection between Krugman and – what shall we call him? – a mysterious American,' said Falcón. 'That means we're going to have to go through all of Sra Krugman's shots and -'

'But she photographed strangers all the time.'

'But not ones talking to her husband down by the river.'

'And if we find a shot?'

'You've gone back to being a non-believer again, José Luis,' said Falcón. 'If I'd told you fifteen years ago that Russian mafia gangs would control seventy per cent of prostitution in Europe, you'd have laughed in my face. But anything, and everything, is possible now. People have started to see aeroplanes as bombs. You can buy a new identity on the streets of any European city in forty-eight hours for a few thousand euros. An AK-47 can be yours in minutes. There are al-Qaeda cells in almost every country of the world. Why shouldn't the CIA be running a small operation in Seville, when the whole of Europe has become a civilization simmering with anarchy and decadence?'

'Remind me to live in fear, Javier,' said Ramírez. 'My point is: so what if we find a shot of Krugman with a mysterious American? The consulate denies everything. Krugman was a madman who shot his wife and then himself. Where are we?'

'Six people have died in less than a week. Five of them lived next door to each other. Even if I wasn't a cop, I would find that extraordinary,' said Falcón. 'We might be witnesses to some sort of collective unconscious implosion, where each death or suicide applies mental pressure to the next victim, or… we might simply be unable to see the connections, because we don't quite know enough.'

The mobile in his pocket vibrated. Elvira ordered him back to the Jefatura. The American Consulate was sending someone over. Falcón left them at the search and drove back to Calle Bias Infante.

The man from the American Consulate was a communications officer called Mark Flowers. He was about fifty years old, good-looking, tanned with black hair that must have been dyed. He spoke flawless Castilian Spanish and was well prepared for what he had to do.

'I've read these two statements from Inspector Jefe Falcón and Juez Calderón. I was told that they were written separately. The impressive detail seems to match and, in the absence of any serious contradictions, I informed the Consul that I believed them to be accurate and true. Both statements were therefore sent to the CIA in Langley for their comments. They categorically deny any knowledge, not only of Marty Krugman, but also this so-called consultant, Foley Macnamara. Comisario Elvira also asked if the CIA had any record of one Miguel Velasco, aka Rafael Vega, who was ex-Chilean military, receiving any CIA training. They've informed me that they did a file search of all personnel as far back as the creation of the CIA after the Second World War, and found that nobody of that name had received any training. They also offered the opinion that at no point last night did Marty Krugman refer to Rafael Vega as Miguel Velasco, and that the information he gave seemed to be his interpretation of Sr Vega's mental problems. Krugman himself deduced that Vega had been in the Chilean military and that he had been involved in torture. They describe Sr Krugman as a classic fantasist, with access to an imagination infected by psychosis who, given his personal experience of South American politics of that era, would have no trouble -'

'What personal experience of South American politics?' asked Falcón.

'Immigration ran a search on Marty Krugman's travels outside the USA and found that he was attracted enough, through his own liberal and left-leaning politics, to make four trips to Chile between March 1971 ' and July 1973. As you know, during the Allende administration, the American government was very concerned at the development of their Marxist policies and, as a consequence, US citizens visiting that country were closely monitored.'

'What about Vega's late wife and his daughter's family?' asked Falcón.

'That, as you can imagine, is rather more difficult for them to verify. All they can say is that neither Miguel Velasco nor Rafael Vega was married on US soil,' said Flowers.

'I meant Krugman's assertion that Vega's anxiety stemmed from his paranoia that they might have been killed by his enemies.'

'Who are these enemies?'

'The people who provided him with a witness protection programme from which he thought it best to escape.'

'You might be interested to know that the CIA's research on Chilean military personnel revealed Miguel Velasco to be quite a notorious member of the Pinochet regime, known for his extremely unconventional and distasteful interrogation techniques. The opposition revolutionary movement, the MIR, knew him by the nickname El Salido – the Pervert.'

'But what did the CIA have to say about the FBI input on the matter?' asked Falcón. 'Surely absconding from an FBI protection programme, after acting as a witness in a drug-trafficking trial, should be something the CIA would be interested in?'

'The CIA were only examining these documents in the light of Sr Krugman's behaviour and claims. I know they have a file on Miguel Velasco because of his actions in the Pinochet administration. If there's anything else it would, of course, be classified.'

'Your response has been very rapid and thorough,' said Falcón.

'They pride themselves on it,' said Flowers. 'Since 9/11 there have been changes in the Service, especially on reaction time to all inquiries in which there is a reference to that date, even if it did refer to 1973.'

'I added a summary of the Vega case to the statements,' said Elvira. 'For the purposes of clarification.'

'It was very helpful, Comisario,' said Flowers.

'What would be the reaction from the CIA if we could provide photographic proof that meetings had occurred between Sr Krugman and… US government officials?' asked Falcón, who was finding Mark Flowers to be rather too amicable and gracious.

'Extreme surprise, I would imagine,' said Flowers, whose face remained completely impassive.

'As you know, Sr Krugman's wife was a well-known and active photographer who particularly enjoyed taking shots of people down by the river, which was where her husband said he had meetings with code name "Romany".'

Flowers blinked once but said nothing. He handed Elvira his card and left.

'Do you have photographic evidence?' asked Elvira.

'No, Comisario,' said Falcón. 'It's just a way of terminating a line of inquiry. If Sr Krugman was a fantasist, we'll never hear from Mark Flowers again. But if he was supplying information there will be some anxious people in the consulate. I'd be interested to hear if you receive communication from a higher authority.'

Elvira's phone rang. Falcón got up to leave. Elvira stayed him with his hand. The Comisario listened, made notes and hung up.

'That was a senior officer from Aracena,' he said. 'He's just been informed by the fire department that the forest fire raging around Almonaster la Real in the past few days was an arson attack, and that they have now traced the start of the fire to an isolated finca which belonged to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes. The contents of the house have been almost completely destroyed, but they have found a rudimentary timer, which they believed was attached to an incendiary device that ignited a large quantity of petrol.'