by David Hewson
Quemada was on the other side of the man, hand on his shoulder. He leaned down and said, ‘Yeah. A password. Sounds a good idea, all things considered. Be a good boy and type it.’
Ordóñez reached for his cigar, relit it, took a few puffs and waited for them to say something. Quemada and Velasco stayed silent, waiting.
‘You guys straight? This goes no further? No footprints to me, where this stuff came from? No charges or nothing?’
‘For the love of God,’ said Quemada wearily, ‘do we have to keep on repeating ourselves?’
‘OK,’ the man said. ‘OK. That’s fine.’
He pulled up a search screen, typed in the word ‘Angel’, pressed a button marked ‘Report’ and then one named ‘Print’. A few seconds later, a little laser printer in the corner of the office began to whirr.
‘Those boys were shits,’ said Ordóñez, puffing on the cigar. ‘I’m surprised it didn’t happen to them sooner.’
The smoke curled silently through his moustache and twirled around his cheeks.
‘You know what?’ said Ordóñez. ‘When they first came here, when they first rang me, I thought it was an honour. Can you believe that?’
He had pulled out a bottle of Soberano brandy from the desk and was handing it round in paper cups. Velasco declined at first, but took a big one when he saw that Quemada said yes. It stung on the rawness at the back of his throat, but it felt good all the same.
‘Two years ago, must have been. They phoned first, then came round the office. These were famous people, right? Well, I’ve had that kind before, but never like that. Open, up front. They just didn’t care.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Quemada. ‘Why’d they need to go to an agency to find boyfriends? I’d have thought they’d have them falling over each other, what with the parties and the rest.’
Ordóñez smiled. ‘It’s not as easy as that. Not when you want what they wanted.’
‘They spelled it out?’
‘Not in so many words. If I’d known at the start, I would have said no right then. But I didn’t.’
‘So this list you’ve given us.’ Quemada glanced over thirty or so names and addresses printed out like envelope labels from the computer, a set of dates beside each. ‘They didn’t know, either?’
‘Precisely,’ said Ordóñez. ‘All the brothers told me was they wanted to meet other guys, about their age, maybe younger, sense of fun, love of art. You know the kind of stuff.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Quemada.
‘Yeah,’ said Velasco. ‘I seen it. You get that kind of language in the little ads you see in the paper.’
Quemada gave his partner a sideways look.
‘Yes, Officer, you do,’ said Ordóñez. ‘To be honest, and you won’t believe me, most people just want company for the evening. If they like each other, fine, if they want to take it further, that’s nothing to do with me. A lot of my customers are here on business, a little lonely, looking for someone to have dinner with. Someone sympathetic.’
‘And the Angel Brothers?’
‘The Angels were looking for rough trade. Real rough. They didn’t say so. I found out when people started to complain.’
‘That’s sadomasochism, like beatings and stuff?’ asked Quemada. ‘Excuse my ignorance. I had a sheltered upbringing.’
‘The Angels went beyond all that. You’ve got the list. You ask these people.’ Ordóñez reached over and put a tick by ten or so names. ‘They were the ones who complained the most. It was like it was some kind of game. They’d be very charming with every couple they met, take them to some fancy restaurant, invite them back for coffee and drinks . . .’
‘And then?’
‘Then . . . things wouldn’t be consensual.’
‘Meaning?’ asked Quemada.
‘They’d try to beat them up and then rape them,’ Ordóñez said flatly. ‘Sometimes they met their match. Sometimes people beat them up pretty badly too, but maybe that was part of the idea.’
‘Why didn’t anyone call us?’ asked Quemada.
‘Are you serious? What would you have done?’
‘Talked to them. Arrested them. Beating people up is a crime. I don’t care who they are, how they got there.’
Ordóñez took a swig of the brandy and asked, ‘Are you sure you’re a cop?’
‘Very. Does anyone on this list have a particular grudge against the brothers?’
He thought about that. ‘No one stands out. They all complained. Maybe some of the others had the same treatment but didn’t come back to me.’
‘Maybe they liked it,’ said Velasco.
Ordóñez looked at him wearily. ‘Maybe.’
‘Did you go there yourself?’ Quemada asked.
‘No.’
‘You get invited?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why didn’t you go?’
Ordóñez lit another cigar. ‘I’m married.’
Velasco’s mouth fell open.
‘To a woman. Before you ask.’
‘You mean this is . . . this is just business?’
He nodded. ‘Business. And a little pleasure too, sometimes.’
Quemada looked up from his notebook. ‘You a fan of bullfighting, Señor Ordóñez?’
He shook his head. ‘I am not just not a fan, I positively hate the thing. Barbaric and cruel.’
‘Ever belong to any of the brotherhoods? You know, the religious ones?’
‘No.’
Quemada thought. ‘Is there a gay brotherhood? You know, kind of a penitents’ one?’
His partner swore under his breath. Ordóñez shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. There’s a gay ecclesiastical movement, of course. But I don’t think there’s anything separate.’
‘Right,’ said Quemada. ‘And this list? Any of these people on it fans of the bulls, into the brotherhoods?’
‘I’ve no idea. They phone, I make a booking. Most of the time I don’t even meet them.’
‘And this is it. Nothing more?’
‘Nothing. When I got the last complaint, maybe three, four weeks ago, you have the dates there, I told the Angels I wouldn’t have any more dealings with them. It wasn’t worth the trouble.’
‘How did they react?’
‘They said they’d come and burn my house down. With my wife and kids in it.’
‘Nice people, huh?’
‘Nice people.’
Quemada looked at him. ‘Did you take that seriously?’
‘I didn’t know how to take it. Or what I was supposed to do.’
‘You’re supposed to call us,’ Quemada said and it was almost a shout.
‘Really.’
The two cops couldn’t think of anything else.
Quemada scribbled something, then said, ‘Thanks, Señor Ordóñez. We’ll look into these names and if we need more we’ll get back to you.’
Velasco looked him up and down, then reached out for the door handle. ‘Nice dress,’ he said. ‘But the shoes clash.’
SEVENTEEN
She found herself drowsing over the pages. They made a little sense, reminding her of things she had learned as a student, absorbed, then forgotten since they seemed so unreal, so distant from her life. But she understood Menéndez’s concerns. Psychopathy was a condition that could provide a perfect disguise in the city. There was a cluster, a cocktail, of traits and behaviour patterns that fell under the general heading. The condition was common, but misunderstood. Psychopathy was more likely to reveal itself through thoughtless, antisocial behaviour than outright crime. But once the momentum took hold, the tendency to violence was often unstoppable. The difficulty, for doctors and for the police, was that the usual signs of mental illness – psychosis, neurosis, aberrant behaviour – were absent. Psychopathy did not stem from some underlying mental disorder; it was not a tendency that could be picked up from being brought up in a criminal community, learned from one’s peers. ‘Normal’ criminals could commit offences and feel guilt and conce
rn. They were capable of conventional, loving family relationships even while they were pursuing careers far outside the norms of society. For the psychopath, this was impossible. Affectionate relationships meant nothing. Crime, if the condition manifested itself in this way – and it was just as likely to show itself as hedonism, professional intolerance, impulsiveness or simple antisocial behaviour – was one more event in the midst of life. A deliberate act born of nothing but the desire to commit it. There was evidence that suggested triggers existed for intense psychopathic behaviour, but these were everyday factors: a car crash, a word in the street, an angry look, a headache. To the psychopath, these lacked the sense of scale that limited and defined the responses of ‘normal’ people. So, if he were cut up on the road and received the single finger in response, that single occurrence might escalate into a serious assault or even murder. And when asked about it afterwards he, or she, would express amazement that anyone could question his actions, could feel they were out of proportion to the original insult.
They were like ordinary people with monsters hidden inside themselves and just a few unremarkable lesions on the surface. Disturb those sores and the beast emerged, did its worst, then went back to slumber, without remorse, until the next time.
Maria shuddered, closed the book and rolled over on the bed. This man would not reveal himself by going berserk, locking himself in a house, daring the police to force him out. He would not reveal himself by escalating the violence until it became so large that even the most stupid of police forces would stumble on the act in progress. One passage she had read came back to her: ‘Attempts to modify the behaviour of psychopaths have not been successful, probably because they do not suffer from personal distress, see nothing wrong in their behaviour, and are not motivated to change.’
This man would think about what he wanted to do. About who he wanted to kill. Then, when the time was right, he would go out, commit the act, return home, wash, change, turn on the TV and wait for it to appear on the evening news. Like waiting for a football result: detached, interested, patient. And in between times, he would sit at home or go to work, quiet, inconspicuous, noted only as a little introverted by his neighbours, his acquaintances (for there surely would be no friends). If he were noted at all. Menéndez was right. All he could do was check the facts, try to pull some link, some crossover, in the details. And wait.
She got off the bed, walked to the little kitchen and poured herself a glass of mineral water from the bottle in the refrigerator. Then she went back into the living room and sat on the low leather sofa. Maria felt the arms, shiny tubular metal, and thought: Just the kind of thing a man would buy, all appearance, no comfort. Outside, in the winding, narrow lane that led down to the Plaza del Salvador, she could hear the guttural massed noise of the crowds: shouting, some of it drunken, singing, the blare of car horns echoing around the warren of cobbled alleys that formed this part of the city, more modern than Santa Cruz, but only just. It was not yet midnight and the noise would go on until the first light of morning.
The apartment occupied the first floor of a two-storey building above a small optician’s shop, reached by a private door next to the store window with its huge glasses and ads for contact lenses. You opened the door, went forward a pace, then walked up the flight of stairs to the second, locked door. It opened straight into the living room: three times as long as it was wide, decorated with low-slung Italian furniture in cream and brown. Bookshelves lined the opposite wall, a blocked-up fireplace in the centre. Two doors led off, one to the small kitchen, the other to the bedroom, with the bathroom adjoining it. A bachelor flat, a world for one person, enclosed, private, apart. A cell, a place she could feel secure, almost happy.
Maria thought of the owner for a moment. When they were students they had been lovers briefly. He lived in a tiny studio in Santa Cruz then. She remembered wandering around with him drinking cheap wine, living off tapas, hot evenings in that tiny student room, a single bed with a metal frame and springs that groaned like wayward, metallic tom cats. Then it had all dissolved into simple, slightly dull friendship, gradually, unconsciously, naturally. The passion, if passion it was, dissipated as if it had been possessed of a life of its own, a life finite, tied to a set period of time, like a mayfly’s. After which it died, quietly, unheeded, unmourned.
‘Pablo,’ she whispered and even his name sounded distant after all these years, summoned up a different person, someone who was not the quiet, bookish young man who had once taken her shyly to bed.
Maria sipped the water, stood up and took off her clothes. She looked at herself naked in the full-length mirror set in the back of the apartment door. Her hair was as wayward as ever. There were bags, pink and wrinkled, beneath her eyes. Her flesh sagged, not much, but more than she remembered from the last time she had looked at herself this closely, which was years ago, surely. At thirty-three, she felt old. She touched her left breast, squeezed the nipple gently until it hardened and thought: Was this the same flesh that felt such fleeting excitement in this same city more than a decade before?
The thought seemed wrong. The bright, naive, reticent person she was then seemed to be a player in some minor, forgotten drama, speaking lines she could no longer hear, driven by motives, desires that no longer made sense. She had no perception of having been that person, no interior memory of a link between the Maria of then and the Maria of now. They were separated, irrevocably, by the intervening years as she buried herself in the dry, passionless ambitions of academia and that brief, incomprehensible flowering of light that was her time with Luis. It was a chasm she could never recross, an abyss into which some vast element of her life had fallen with nothing left to touch, to show for the effort.
She looked at herself more closely in the mirror, fingers on her breast, the nipple half-heartedly stiff, the glass of water in her right hand, trying to ask herself: Am I still attractive? And do I care?
Then, with a sudden, harsh sound the phone rang. She shook, an involuntary spasm, felt the glass slip from her hand, watched – stupidly fascinated – as it fell, seemingly in slow motion. It hit the stone floor and shattered into shards of bright glass and liquid.
‘Damn,’ she said and stepped back from the mess. Then she walked over to the low table, wondering why it suddenly felt so uncomfortable being naked.
She picked up the phone and waited for someone to speak. There was nothing except low, controlled breathing.
‘Digame.’ She looked at the clock by the bed. It was nearly midnight. Automatically she checked again that the curtains were closed.
‘Is there anybody there? I’m about to hang up.’
She heard what sounded like a laugh, cold and dry.
‘You don’t even know you’ve lost it,’ said a man’s voice. Someone young, a little drowsy, maybe even drunk.
‘I think you’ve got the wrong number.’
The laugh again.
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ said Maria and put the phone down. She sat for a minute, waiting for it to ring again. When it didn’t she cleaned away the broken glass. Then she went to bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep where the night world was nothing but a wan, grey, lifeless landscape of two inescapable dimensions.
EIGHTEEN
Velasco and Quemada sat together at their desk in the station. It was well over halfway through the night shift. The room was almost empty. From along the corridor came the racket of a drunk being escorted to a cell with a minimum of delicacy.
‘How’s a man supposed to think in this place with that row going on?’ Quemada asked.
‘That’s a rhetorical question, I guess,’ said Velasco.
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind.’
‘You OK? You look a little peaky. Normally you just look kinda dead. But I’d say you’re deteriorating. Fast.’
Velasco closed his eyes. He gave it a couple of days at the most. If the cold wasn’t over by then, he’d take some time off. Really he would. And
that was one idea he hated. This was one giant, one monster of a case, the sort of thing a cop got once in a lifetime. There was no way he was going to miss all the fun.
‘They should give me an allowance for working with you. Like you get for looking after orphans or keeping cripples.’
‘Just don’t go giving your diseases to me. That’s all. And quit sniffing so much.’
‘It’s a human disease. How could I give it to you?’
Quemada nodded. It wasn’t a bad one. Then he gulped down some coffee and looked at the list they had got from Ordóñez.
Velasco watched him and said, ‘The way I see it, we just work our way through the names and see what they got to say.’
‘This time in the morning? You want the captain’s desk to be knee-deep in complaints when he wakes up? Half these guys are probably married. If we wake ’em up at two in the morning and say, “Mr Sanchez home, we’d like to ask him about his boyfriends?”, you’re talking law suits.’
‘As someone keeps pointing out, this is a murder inquiry.’
‘And the rest.’
Velasco looked at his partner, thinking. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘People kill other people for reasons. Do we have any clue about a reason here?’
‘Reasons are the captain’s territory,’ Velasco said.
‘And we’re just dumb cops here to do his bidding, huh?’
‘You know,’ Velasco told him, ‘one day that mouth of yours is really going to get you into big trouble.’
‘Yeah?’ Quemada picked up a phone book, weighed it in his hand. ‘If the guy we want is on this list, do you think he’s going to use his real name?’
Velasco pulled a face that said: maybe, maybe not.
‘Why don’t we just go through and see?’ he asked.
Quemada shook his head, shrugged and picked up the A–M phone book. ‘I’ll start at the beginning, you start at the end. Race you to the middle.’
Velasco grunted, picked up the N–Z phone book and began looking.