The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

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      ‘Who are you?’ asked the voice in heavily accented Spanish.

      ‘Name and address first, please.’

      A hand went over the receiver. Muffled voices came down the line.

      ‘What’s the prize?’

      ‘Name and –’

      ‘Tell me the prize,’ he said brutally.

      ‘It’s a watch for you and your –’

      ‘I’ve got a watch,’ he said, and slammed down the phone.

      Falcón made a note to ask Vázquez about these Russians. The desk drawers revealed nothing unusual. The Heckler & Koch had been removed for tests. He opened up the filing cabinets with the keys he’d found the day before. He flicked through the files for telephone, bank, insurance. They were catching on something underneath – a leather-bound loose-leaf diary and address book.

      The diary was private. The entries were minimal. Most of the time there was just an ‘X’ marked next to the hour and they were mostly night-time meetings. Falcón went back to Noche de Reyes and found that there was an ‘X’ marked there, too. The first daytime meeting was in March with ‘Dr A’. In June there were meetings with Dr A and another with Dr D. In the address section he found a list of doctors – Médicos Álvarez, Diego and Rodríguez. He flicked through the diary and found that Dr R was the last doctor to see Vega. He called and arranged to talk to him around midday.

      He went through the address section of the book, which contained only names and telephone numbers. Raúl Jiménez’s name was there but had been crossed out. As he turned the pages, names he knew leapt out at him. A lot of them he vaguely recalled from the Raúl Jiménez murder investigation – people from the town hall and public works. There was one name though that really took him back to that turbulent time – Eduardo Carvajal. Again it had been crossed out. Like Raúl Jiménez, he was dead. Falcón had never found what linked the two men. All he’d discovered was that Jiménez had rewarded Carvajal via a fake consultancy company during Expo ‘92 and, at the time of his death in a car crash in 1998 on the Costa del Sol, Carvajal was about to face trial on charges relating to a paedophile ring.

      Ortega’s name was also in the book and the last name to stand out was one that had him pacing around the house, reminding himself that there was no art on the walls of any significance. Ramón Salgado, who had been one of Seville’s best-known art dealers, was also in the book, crossed out. Maybe Vega Construcciones had invested in art or bought a piece for their head-quarters, but there was also that disturbing memory of the child pornography they’d discovered on Salgado’s hard disk after his brutal murder. In these circles everybody knew each other, links in a golden chain of wealth and influence. Another question for Vázquez.

      There were no Russian names in the book. He put it back in the filing cabinet. He moved on to another cabinet which contained box files full of blueprints and photographs of buildings. In the bottom drawer of the third cabinet there was a box file with no reference number. It said simply Justicia. In the file there were pages, mostly in English and mostly from this year, which had been extracted from the internet on a range of subjects but primarily concerned with an international system of justice. There were also newspaper articles on the International Criminal Court, the Tribunal that it was designed to replace, the crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón and also the intricacies and possibilities within the Belgian legal system for bringing international war criminals to justice.

      The doorbell sounded in the hall. He locked up the cabinet and went to answer it. Sra Krugman was wearing a black linen top and a skirt, bias-cut, with a scarlet silk sash hanging down the side. On the end of her long white arm was a plastic thermos jug.

      ‘I thought you might like some coffee, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘Spanish strength. None of your American sock water here.’

      ‘I thought there’d been a coffee revolution in America,’ he said, thinking other things.

      ‘The levels of penetration have been uneven,’ she said. ‘It cannot be guaranteed.’

      He let her pass, closed the door to the grotesque heat. He didn’t want this intrusion. Maddy fetched cups and saucers. He shouted upstairs to Ferrera but she didn’t want any coffee. They went into Vega’s office and sat at the desk. Maddy smoked and flicked ash into her saucer. She made no attempt at conversation. Her physical, or rather, sexual presence filled the room. Falcón still felt nauseous and he had nothing to say to her. His mind raced as he drank the coffee.

      ‘Do you like bullfights?’ she asked, looking above his head just as the silence had reached screaming point.

      ‘I used to go a lot,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t been since…for well over a year now.’

      ‘Marty wouldn’t take me,’ she said, ‘so I asked Rafael. We went on several occasions. I didn’t understand it, but I liked it.’

      ‘A lot of foreigners don’t,’ said Falcón.

      ‘I was surprised,’ she said, ‘at how quickly the violence became tolerable. When I saw the first picador’s lance go in I didn’t think I’d be able to take it. But, you know, it sharpens your sight. You don’t realize how soft focus everyday life is until you’ve been to a bullfight. Everything stands out. Everything is defined. It’s as if the sight of blood and the prospect of death wakes up in us something atavistic. I found myself tuning into a different level of awareness, or rather an old one, that the boredom in our lives has gradually smothered. By the third bull I was quite used to it, the brilliance of the blood welling up from a particularly deep lance wound and cascading down the bull’s foreleg wasn’t just bearable but electrifying. We must be hard-wired for violence and death, don’t you think, Inspector Jefe?’

      ‘I remember a sort of ritualistic thrill on the faces of the Moroccans in Tangier when they killed a sheep for the festival of Aid el Kebir,’ said Falcón.

      ‘Bullfighting must be an extension of that,’ she said. ‘There’s ritual, theatre, thrills…but there’s something else, too. Passion, for instance and, of course…sex.’

      ‘Sex?’ he said, the whisky lurching in his stomach.

      ‘Those beautiful guys in their tight costumes performing so gracefully with every muscle in their bodies, in the face of terrible danger…possible death. That is the ultimate in sexiness, don’t you think?’

      ‘That’s not the way I see it.’

      ‘How do you see it?’

      ‘I go to see the bulls,’ said Falcón. ‘The bull is always the central figure. It’s his tragedy and the greater his nobility the finer his tragedy will be. The torero is there to shape the performance, to bring out the bull’s noble qualities and in the end to dispatch him and give us, the audience, our catharsis.’

      ‘You can tell I’m an American,’ she said.

      ‘That’s not how everybody sees it,’ said Falcón. ‘Some toreros believe that they are there to dominate the bull, even to humiliate it and showcase their masculine prowess in the process.’

      ‘I’ve seen that,’ she said, ‘when they thrust their genitals at the bull.’

      ‘Ye-e-s,’ said Falcón СКАЧАТЬ