The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

Chapter 4

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

In his passport photo Martin Krugman, without his beard, looked his age, which was fifty-seven years old. With the beard, which was grey and had been allowed to grow untrimmed, he looked beyond retirement age. Life had been kinder to Madeleine Krugman who was thirty-eight and looked no different from her passport photo taken when she was thirty-one. They could have been father and daughter, and many people would have preferred it that way.

Marty Krugman was tall and rangy, some might say skinny, with a prominent nose which, face on, was blade thin. His eyes were set close together, well back in his head and operated under eyebrows which his wife had given up trying to contain. He did not look like a man who slept much. He drank cup after cup of thick espresso coffee poured from a chrome coffee- maker. Marty was not dressed for the office. His shirt was nearly cheesecloth with a blue stripe, which he wore like a smock outside his faded blue jeans. He had Outward Bound sandals on his feet and sat with an ankle resting on his knee and his hands clinging on to his shin as if he was pulling on an oar. He spoke perfect Spanish with a Mexican inflexion.

'Spent my youth in California,' he said. 'Berkeley, doing Engineering. Then I took some years out in New Mexico painting in Taos and taking trips down to Central and South America. My Spanish is a mess.'

'Was that in the late sixties?' asked Falcón.

'And seventies. I was a hippy until I discovered architecture.'

'Did you know Sr Vega before you came here?'

'No. We met him through the estate agent who rented the house to us.'

'Did you have any work?'

'Not at that stage. We were playing it fast and easy. It was lucky that we met Rafael in the first few weeks. We got talking, he'd heard of some of my New York stuff and he offered me some project work.'

'It was very lucky,' said Madeleine, as if she might have flown the coop if it hadn't worked out.

'So you came here on a whim?'

Maddy had changed out of the white linen trousers into a knee-length skirt which flared out over her cream leather chair. She crossed and uncrossed her very white legs several times a minute and Falcón, who was sitting directly opposite her, annoyed himself by looking every time. Her breasts trembled under her blue silk top with every movement. Hormonal sound waves seemed to pulse out into the room as her blue blood ticked under her white skin. Marty was impervious to it all. He didn't look at her or react to anything she said. When she spoke his gaze remained fixed on Falcón, who was having trouble finding a resting place for his own eyes with the whole room now an erogenous zone.

'My mother died and I inherited some money,' said Maddy. 'We thought we'd take a break and be in Europe for a while… visit our old honeymoon haunts: Paris, Florence, Prague. But we went to Provence and then Marty had to see Barcelona… get his Gaudi fix, and one thing led to another. We found ourselves here. Seville gets into your blood. Are you a Sevillano, Inspector Jefe?'

'Not quite,' he said. 'When did all this happen?'

'March last year.'

'Were you taking a break from anything in particular?'

'Just boredom,' said Marty.

'Your mother's death, Sra Krugman… was that sudden?'

'She was diagnosed with cancer and died within ten weeks.'

'I'm sorry,' said Falcón. 'What was boring you in America, Sr Krugman?'

'You can call us Maddy and Marty if you like,' she said. 'We prefer to be relaxed.'

Her perfect white teeth appeared behind her chilli- red lips in a two centimetre smile and were gone. She spread her fingers out on the leather arms of the chair and switched her legs over again.

'My job,' said Marty. 'I was bored with the work I was doing.'

'No you weren't,' she said, and their eyes met for the first time.

'She's right,' said Marty, his head slowly coming back to Falcón. 'Why would I be working here if I was bored with my job? I was bored with being in America. I just didn't think you'd be interested in that. It's not a detail that's going to help you find out what happened to the Vegas.'

'I'm interested in everything,' said Falcón. 'Most murder has a motive…'

'Murder?' said Maddy. 'The officer on the gate told me it was suicide.'

'Self-murder,' said Falcón. 'If that's what it was. It's all motivated, which means I'm interested in everybody's motives for doing anything. It is all indicative.'

'Of what?' asked Maddy.

'A state of mind. Degrees of happiness and disappointment, joy and anger, love and hate. You know, the big emotions that make things happen and break things down.'

'This guy doesn't sound like a cop,' said Marty in English, throwing the line over his shoulder to his wife.

Her eyes were on Falcón, digging deep, excavating his cranium in a way that made him think that he must look like somebody she knew.

'What was so wrong with America that you had to leave?' asked Falcón.

'I didn't say anything was wrong,' said Marty, bracing his shoulders as if he was at the start of the Olympic sculls final. 'I was just bored with the grind of daily life.'

'Boredom is one of our strongest motivations,' said Falcón. 'What did you want to get away from? What were you looking for?'

'Sometimes the American way of life can be a rather enclosed world,' said Marty.

'There are a lot of Sevillanos who've hardly been outside Andalucfa, let alone Spain,' said Falcón. 'They don't see the need for it. They don't think there's anything wrong with their enclosed world.'

'Maybe they don't question it.'

'Why should they when they live in the most beautiful place on earth?'

'Have you ever been to America, Inspector Jefe?'

'No.'

'Why not?' asked Marty, indignant.

'It's the greatest nation on earth,' said Maddy, bright, cheerful and ironical.

'Probably…' said Falcón, thinking it through as he spoke, 'because what I'd be looking for there has gone.'

Marty slapped out a beat on his shin, delighted.

'What would that be?' asked Maddy.

'What had transfixed me as a boy… which was all those black-and-white noir movies of the forties and fifties. They were the reason I became a detective.'

'You'd be disappointed,' said Marty. 'Those streets, that life, those values… we've moved on from them.'

'You've made a big mistake here, Inspector Jefe,' said Maddy. 'America is Marty's favourite topic. We get out of there and suddenly that's all he wants to talk about. He wakes me up at night because he has to tell me his latest theory. What was it last night, honey?'

'Fear,' said Marty, his dark peepers flashing from deep in his head like tropical birds escaping into the jungle.

'America is a society based on fear,' said Maddy flatly. 'That's the latest. It's sad that he thinks he's the first one to think them.'

'Well, now, I suppose, in the post September 11th world…'

'Not just now,' said Marty. 'It's always been fear.'

'Forget the pioneering spirit,' said Maddy, hurling her hand over her shoulder.

'There have always been pioneers,' said Marty. 'The strong and fearless men…'

'This is very interesting,' said Falcón, seeing his mistake now. 'And it would be fascinating were it not for the fact that I have a double death to investigate.'

'You see, he's not that interested in your motives,' said Maddy, and Marty flicked a dismissive finger at her. 'And by the way, Inspector Jefe, he still thinks it's the greatest nation on earth, despite…'

'When did you last speak to the Vegas?' asked Falcón.

'I spoke to him yesterday evening about seven o'clock in the office,' said Marty. 'It was a technical conversation, nothing personal. He was businesslike, professional… the usual.'

'Were you aware of any financial difficulties that might have put pressure on Sr Vega?'

'He was always under pressure. It's the nature of construction. There's a lot to think about: the building, the machinery, materials and labour, budgets and money

'And you?' Falcón said, turning to Maddy.

'Me?' she replied, coming out of some deep, distracting thought.

'The last time you spoke to Sr Vega?'

'I don't… I can't think,' she said. 'When would that have been, honey?'

'Dinner last week,' he said.

'How were the Vegas then?'

'Rafael came on his own,' said Marty.

'As usual,' said Maddy. 'Lucia always cancelled at the last minute. The kid or something. She didn't like these dinners of ours. She was a traditionalist. You only go to dinner at someone else's house if they're family. She found it awkward. She had no conversation, except about Mario and I've never had children, so

'She was neurotic,' said Marty.

'How did Sr Vega and his wife get along?'

'He was very loyal to her,' said Maddy.

'Does that mean love no longer came into it?'

'Love?' she said.

Marty stared at her, nodding, his nose sawing through the chill air, as if willing her to conclude what she'd embarked on.

'Don't you think loyalty is a part of love. Inspector Jefe?'

'I do,' said Falcón. 'But you seem to have separated loyalty from the whole, as if that was all that remained.'

'Don't you think that's the nature of a marriage… or of love, Inspector Jefe?' she said, 'That time degrades it, wears away at passion and ardour, the thrill of sex…'

'For Christ's sake,' said Marty in English.

'… the intensity of interest you have in what the other says or thinks, the wild hilarity of the smallest jokes, the deep, unquestioning admiration of physical beauty, intelligence, moral certitude…'

'Yes,' said Falcón, his insides starting to bind up, as they did sometimes in therapy sessions with his psychologist, Alicia Aguado. 'That's true…'

He sat back, let his intestines have some room, wrote some gibberish down in his notebook, wanted to get out of there.

'So, are you saying, Sra Krugman, that the Vegas' marriage, in your opinion, was strong…?'

'I only observed that he was loyal to her. She was an unwell and, at times, an unhappy woman, but she was the mother of his child and that had considerable weight with him.'

The ground seemed to firm up under Falcón's chair as the business at hand reasserted itself.

'Sr Vega liked to control things,' said Falcón.

'He had firm ideas about how things should be done and he had a very disciplined mind,' said Marty. 'I never saw further into his corporation than was necessary for me to do my work. He didn't attempt to involve me in anything outside my own project. He would even ask me to leave his office if he was going to talk about other jobs on the phone. He was very concerned about hierarchy, the way things were reported to him, who did what and the chain of command. I don't have any direct experience of this, but his style seemed military to me, which is no bad thing on a construction site. People can get killed very easily'

'In life, too,' said Maddy.

'What?' said Marty.

'He liked to control things in life, too. The gardener, his family, his meat,' she said, chopping her hand down on to her knee.

'It's odd then that he'd come over here for dinner,' said Falcón. 'If he was going to put himself in the hands of others, I'd have thought he'd prefer a restaurant.'

'He understood it as an American thing,' said Marty.

'He liked it,' said Maddy, shrugging her shoulders so that her loose breasts shifted under the silk. Her legs slipped to one side and she rubbed them together, as if taming an itch.

I bet he did, thought Falcón.

'A controlling man might kill himself if his carefully constructed world was about to fall apart due to financial ruin or a shaming scandal. It could also collapse because of an emotional involvement that went wrong. News of the first two scenarios, if they existed, will break soon enough. Do you know anything about the third possibility?'

'Do you think he was the type to have affairs?' Marty asked his wife.

'Affairs?' said Maddy, almost to herself.

'He would have left a note,' said Marty. 'Did he?'

'Not a conventional one,' said Falcón, and gave them the text.

'That seems almost a little too poetic for someone like Rafael,' said Maddy.

'What about the 9/11 reference?' said Falcón. 'You must have talked about that with him.'

Maddy rolled her eyes.

'Sure,' said Marty. 'We talked about it endlessly, but as an item of current affairs. I really don't understand its significance in this context.'

'Why kill your wife?' asked Maddy, which relieved Falcón, who didn't want Marty's theories on 9/11 at this stage of his inquiry. 'I mean, if you're suffering like that, kill yourself by all means, but don't leave your kid with no parents.'

'Maybe he thought Lucia would not be able to survive without him,' said Marty.

'That would be true,' she said.

'Do you always allow this much conjecture into your investigations, Inspector Jefe?' asked Marty.

'No,' said Falcón, 'but the situation in the Vegas' house was sufficiently enigmatic that I have to keep an open mind until I get a full forensic report and the pathology of the bodies. Also the closest person to Sr Vega, his wife, is dead, too. I have to rely on people who knew him peripherally – socially or in business.'

'Lucia's parents should be able to help you,' said Marty. 'They were around there almost every Sunday for lunch.'

'Did you ever meet them?'

'I met them once,' said Maddy. 'They weren't… er… very sophisticated people. I think he used to be a farmer.'

'How long have you been married?' asked Falcón.

'Twelve years,' she said.

'How did you meet?' he said, a question he'd found himself asking every couple he'd met over the last year.

'It was in New York,' said Marty. 'Maddy was showing a collection of her photographs at a gallery which was owned by a friend of mine. She introduced us.'

'And I never went back to my apartment,' said Maddy.

'Are you still a photographer?'

'She's taken it up again since we left the States,' said Marty, steamrollering over Maddy's negative.

'What do you photograph?'

'People,' she said.

'Portraits?'

'Never.'

'She photographs people in their unconscious moments,' said Marty.

'He doesn't mean when they're sleeping,' she said, her eyes flashing with irritation.

'When they don't know the camera is there?' asked Falcón.

'One step further than that,' said Marty. 'When they believe themselves to be completely alone.'

'That makes me sound like a snoop,' she said. 'I'm not a -'

'Yes, you are,' said Marty, laughing…

'No, I'm not,' she said, 'because that implies that I'm interested in what people are doing, and that's not it.'

'What is it?' asked Marty. Then, turning to Falcón, he added, 'She never shoots me.'

'It's the internal struggle,' she said. 'I hate it when you make me say these things. It's just not -'

'Have you got any shots of Sr Vega?' said Falcón.

They left Marty on the sofa and went upstairs. One of three bedrooms had been converted into a darkroom. While Maddy looked through her contact sheets Falcón checked the books on the shelves and pulled out one with Madeleine Coren on the spine. There was a photograph of her on the inside flap – a creamy beauty with sparkling eyes, challenging the camera to come closer. She had the dazzle of youth then, which had been skimmed down by life's natural damage to its present translucence. There was still something of the celebrity about her, that quality that film producers look for: not beauty, but watchability. She absorbed things from around her – available light, unused energy and anything anybody might want to give. Falcón opened the book, tore himself away from her profile. He could feel his bone marrow weakening.

Her photographs at first seemed to be about loneliness: old people sitting on park benches, a young man standing at a rail overlooking a river, a woman in a towelling robe on a roof terrace in Manhattan. Gradually, as the camera's eye moved closer, other things became evident: contentment on the old person's face, possibility in the young man's eyes, dreaminess in the woman's face.

'They're facile, those early ones,' said Maddy. 'The idea was just a gimmick. I was only twenty-two. I didn't know anything. Take a look at these -'

She handed him six black-and-white prints. The first three showed Rafael Vega in a white shirt and dark trousers, hands in pockets, standing on his well-clipped lawn. The camera was looking over his shoulder at his profile. His jaw was tight. Falcón waited for the shot to tell him something. Then he saw what it was.

'He's barefoot.'

'That was 14th January this year.'

'What was he doing?'

'That's not the point… remember,' she said. 'I'm not a snoop. Look at these. They're taken down by the river. I go there a lot. I can sit with a big zoom lens on a tripod and people will stop on Calle Bétis and the bridges. I pick up a lot of contemplative looks. People go to the river for a reason… don't they?'

The three shots she gave him were close-ups of head and shoulders. In the first Rafael Vega was wincing, in the second he was gritting his teeth, eyes screwed up, and in the third his mouth had cracked open.

'He's in pain,' said Falcón.

'He was crying,' said Maddy. 'There's saliva at the corners of his mouth.'

He gave her back the photos. They were intrusive and he didn't like them. He returned her book to the shelf.

'And you didn't think any of this was worth mentioning before?'

'This is my work,' she said. 'This is how I express myself. I wouldn't have shown you them if Marty hadn't pushed me.'

'Even though it could have a bearing on what happened in the Vegas' house last night?'

'I answered your questions – the last time we spoke, how the Vegas got along, whether he was having an affair. I just didn't relate any of that to these shots because the point is that we should never know about them. They were not taken for the purposes of investigating causes.'

'Why were they taken?'

'These are shots of people suffering in intensely private moments, but out in the open. They have chosen not to hide in their homes but to walk it out of themselves in the presence of other human beings.'

Falcón remembered the hours he'd spent walking the streets of Seville in the past fifteen months. The contemplation of the fundamentals of his existence were too unsettling for the confines even of his sprawling house on Calle Bailen. He'd walked it all out of himself, stared it all into the sloe-black waters of the Guadalquivir, shaken it all off into the empty sugar sachets and cigarette ends on the floors of anonymous bars. It was true. He had not sat at home with his horrors piling up in his mind. There was solace in the wordless company of strangers.

Maddy was standing close to him. He was aware of her smell, the body under its thin sheath of silk, the exquisite pressure, the flimsiness of the barrier. She hovered, expectant, confident of her ability. Her white throat trembled as she swallowed.

'We should go back downstairs,' said Falcón.

'There was something else I wanted to show you,' she said, and led him across the corridor to another bedroom, which had a bare tiled floor and more of her photographs on the walls.

His attention was grabbed by a colour shot of a blue pool with a white necklace of tiles in a green lawn with a purple flame of bougainvillea in one corner and a white cushioned lounger in the other. A woman sat on the lounger in a black bathing costume under a red hat.

'That's Consuelo Jiménez,' he said.

'I didn't know you knew her,' said Maddy.

He went to the window. Across the road Consuelo's garden was visible.

'I had to get up on the roof for the angle,' she said.

To his left he could see the Vegas' entrance and driveway through the trees.

'Do you know what time Sr Vega came back home last night?'

'No, but it was rarely before midnight.'

'You wanted to show me something?' he said, turning back in to the room.

On the back wall behind the door, framed in black, was a print 75 cm by 50 cm of a man staring down from a bridge, under which it was clear his whole life was flowing. The features of the man did not compute at first. There was too much going on in the face. It was a shock for him to discover that he was looking at himself – a Javier Falcón he'd never seen before.