by David Hewson
‘It was your fault.’
‘My fault?’ She stared at him, amazed.
‘In a manner of speaking. You told us about that girl who meant something special to old Antonio. So we figured that maybe it was his daughter. Maybe somehow that linked the whole thing.’
‘And it wasn’t?’
‘Nah. She was just . . . well, you know what she was.’
She watched him and waited, letting the pause stretch between them until it had to break.
‘Truth is, we were looking for a daughter when we should have been looking for a son. A son he was real proud of. So proud that he put him in a special place, in charge of something that was real important to Antonio.’
‘He was a cop?’
‘Did I say “was”?’
‘He is a cop!’
‘Not for much longer. He tried to keep the lid on things, but it didn’t work real well. Sometimes you use the wrong people. And then they can’t leave these things be.’
‘Ah.’
‘That’s the trouble these days. You can’t get good menials. That’s as much as you need to know. I paid my debt.’
‘Not really.’
‘Maggi. I didn’t come here to tell tales. I came here ’cos of a woman who’s had a real bad time from some murdering shitbag and needs help. I figured you’d sympathize there.’
She smiled. ‘You’re smart. I don’t understand how you happened on your particular line of work.’
‘I hide it well sometimes.’
‘Yeah.’ She stubbed out the cigarette and reached for a worn leather jacket hung on the back of an armchair. ‘I gotta go earn a living.’
‘I need something else. I need your car keys.’
‘Jesus! Can I give you money too?’
‘Just the car keys will do.’
‘Here. The licence ran out in January and the tyres make you look like you got hair. Don’t come back with any tickets.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Promise me something, Quemada.’
‘What?’
‘When she comes down, go easy on her. I’ve seen women like that before. When they get a bad guy. Get beaten up. Worse. Women who never thought things like that happened. She’s just opened the door on something she didn’t even know existed and she needs some gentle treatment right now. You understand? Gentle.’
Quemada swallowed hard, tasted the bile still there at the back of his throat and said, ‘Gentle. Yeah. I’m trying. It’s not what we do well.’
‘Cops, you mean? Or men in general?’
‘As a ha-ha comment, I think that maybe merits one ha.’
‘You’ll find some decent coñac underneath the sink. I keep it there for special occasions. She needs it. If you ask me, you both need it. You look gruesome.’
‘Thanks,’ said Quemada, then went over to the little kitchen, found the bottle, picked up two glasses from the washboard, sat down and waited.
A few moments later he heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. Then he dialled Velasco’s number. Eventually, the call was answered.
‘I should have stayed in bed,’ said Velasco, sounding as if he was talking from Mars. ‘I’m running a temperature, my nose is pouring like it’s sprung a snot leak and I feel like shit.’
‘They found him yet?’
‘Nada. He’s probably halfway to Brazil. You sure about this? You really think the captain had something to do with Mike getting killed? With Menéndez? I just can’t believe it. That woman – I worked with her way back and she was one decent person. You’d best be sure. We’ll be driving the buses otherwise. Or worse.’
‘Yeah,’ Quemada grunted. It was the ‘worse’ he worried about most. ‘I’m sure. And I don’t think the captain’s gone. It just don’t sound right. He thinks his kind still own this city. Keep everything going, like we said, anyway. Just to keep me happy.’
‘If you say so, Boss,’ Velasco said, then sniffed and cut the line.
When she finally came down the stairs Maria was wearing light-blue jeans and a red nylon shirt. Maggi Bartolomé’s daytime outfit: cheap, but not without taste, and a little too big on her. Her eyes were red-rimmed and staring, her hair, long and damp and straggly, covered half her face. He poured half a glass of brandy, handed it to her and waited.
She downed most of the drink in one go, then said, ‘I can’t stay here. Take me somewhere else. Take me to see Bear. Anywhere.’
‘No point.’ Quemada couldn’t believe it. ‘They say Bear’s getting better. They say he’s probably going to be OK. He doesn’t need us there.’
‘I need . . .’
She was wringing her hands.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’re safe here. No one knows about this place, no one even in the . . .’
He kicked himself for almost saying it.
‘No one in the police?’
He picked up the glass and finished the coñac, even though it tasted foul.
‘Correct,’ he said and sounded angry. ‘I got Bear in hospital. I got Menéndez dead. I got that poor girl Mike dead for no good reason at all. You’re alive. That’s more than enough for one day, thank you.’
Quemada suddenly covered his shining head with his hands and looked appalled by his own words. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. This is one big thing for me. For all of us. We’re losing friends out there. Real friends. We got a cop we thought was a hero running around doing God knows what. That’s why I say we stick around here until we do know what’s going on.’
‘The old man,’ she said. ‘He called him that. “The old man.”’ She stared at him and he didn’t like it at all. ‘Just like you do. “The old man.” Antonio thought his father was alive. That he talked to him through someone. Through “the old man”.’
Quemada looked at her and thought: I do not know this person, I do not understand her.
‘You don’t have to say anything. What you’ve been through I can only begin to guess at. In the morning I can get one of the women cops in to talk to you. They do this kind of stuff. Right now you’re just lumbered with me, and I am not good at this.’
‘You can listen, can’t you?’ she snapped.
Quemada blinked and said, ‘Sure. You just go ahead and say what you damn well want.’
‘I . . .’ A picture suddenly came into her head and hung there, bright and lustrous, full of the colours of death. It was the painting in the hospice, the Valdés Leal, and in her mind it glowed blazing and triumphant in the dark.
‘When I came here, Quemada, you saw me, you hated me.’
‘Gimme a break. I made some lines. That’s all. I make lines all the time. That’s me. That’s who I am. Hated you? That’s crap.’
‘When I walked through the door into that office, you looked at me and thought: Here comes some tight-arsed, frigid northern bitch, out to tell us how to do our jobs. You saw that and you hated it.’
Quemada took a deep breath, then asked, ‘Does this have a point? Are we going somewhere with this?’
She had her arms folded in front of her and was rocking, slowly, rhythmically, backwards and forwards.
‘You saw what?’
‘I saw some prissy little ice queen who looked as if she was running from anything that might come even this close’ – and he pinched his thumb and finger together – ‘to touching her.’
‘Running.’ She closed her eyes and found her head flooded with images: of Luis, with a dark shadow over his head, of Bear and the bloody wound in his side, of the policewoman, dead in the bath, a mess of flesh and blood and hair.
Her voice had a chill, cold clarity about it; she could hear herself speaking the words as if they came from another person. ‘You saw in me that I had no capacity for love. No capacity for charity. Nothing but fear. Not even enough inside me to hate.’
She stopped rocking, uncurled her arms, and looked at her hands. The room was silent except for the slow ticking of an ancient wall clock that stumbled
uncertainly over its cogs and wheels somewhere behind them.
‘I almost . . .’ she said, then hesitated. ‘Tonight I almost let him kill me. Something inside wanted that to happen. Something inside of me just didn’t care.’
Quemada sweated inside his suit and wished to God he was somewhere else.
‘You’ve been through a hell of a lot, Maria. Don’t make it worse.’
‘I tried . . .’ She struggled to shape the words. It was hard. ‘That painting, the one they used as some kind of inspiration when they killed the Angels. I remember Menéndez’s surprise when I made that connection. I saw that picture years ago and I always thought it was about death. Always. It seemed so obvious. And I was stupid. It’s about life. All of this – the city, the rituals. It’s a mirror. And all I could see was the other side. The dark side. The reflection. Not the source. I don’t want the reflection any more. I want what’s real.’
She looked at him and there was a directness, a stability in her face that he realized he had never seen before. The moisture from her tears hung in a little pool beneath her eyes, then ran in two long, narrow rivers down her cheeks.
‘Does that make sense? Does it?’
He thought about it and said, ‘First thing you’ve said – ever – that does.’
There was a sound from her throat, a little choking noise, that showed some promise: one day one of its children might grow up into a laugh.
‘I want to see Bear,’ she said. ‘I need to see him now. I’m not taking no for an answer.’
The unseen clock ticked on behind her back, louder, louder.
‘You’re stalling, Quemada.’
‘No. I’m thinking. There are a couple of calls I have to make first. And a couple of points we got to discuss. I need to know what you know. This thing isn’t all black and white in my dumb little head yet.’
‘All that stuff this afternoon. The fused lights. The body. Antonio, he couldn’t do that on his own. He was half-crazy. And Menéndez . . .’
‘Yeah. Menéndez.’
‘Are you going to tell me?’ she asked.
Quemada pummelled his mouth with one hand and sighed.
‘You know it already, don’t you? You saw the papers. Leastwise, the captain thought you saw them.’
‘What?’
‘Those financial enquiries. The ones where we were looking to see who Alvarez’s beneficiaries were, whether anyone had entered any legal claims against his estate.’
She thought back to the mountain of files from the brotherhood’s office.
‘You signed something. Two initials at the bottom of the page. I saw it tonight, when I broke into Menéndez’s desk. The captain saw that stuff too. Soon as he did, you were on the list. Along with Menéndez. Then he watches you with the body in the bullring today and knew you were starting to get ideas. Bang! Dead twice over.’
She tried to remember, and it was all a blur. The thing that had brought her into it, Menéndez into it, was just a faded piece of paper among many, something she couldn’t even recall.
‘There was big money involved,’ Quemada went on. ‘Tens of millions of pesetas. God knows how much in the end. Antonio didn’t leave it to any individual. He spread it out across companies, trusts, charities, a wide umbrella of things. Really hard to track. Really hard to get to.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘Who knows? The lady who owns this house told us something we should have thought about more. She said Antonio was a real gangster. Not just some failed politician who liked messing round with young girls. He was the genuine article. A crook, a boss. Understand that and it all begins to fall into place. Politicians. Cops. And money for his bastards. Kids like Antonio, Jaime too, they must have been getting some regular income. Not too much, seeing as they were the kind who’d likely put it up their nose anyway. And not too little either, otherwise they might feel a bit disloyal.’
She could start to see the picture building inside her head.
‘Tell me,’ said Quemada, and he looked really interested. ‘You finish it.’
‘It was fine until Luis Romero came along and met Jaime. Then one thing leads to another, and Jaime introduces him to Antonio, who can’t keep his mouth shut.’
‘That’s my guess. Maybe Romero got involved in this sex-and-drugs thing the brothers had going. I don’t know. But pretty soon Antonio is blabbing out his past, their past, about the war, about secret little funds, and Luis is digging and digging and digging. Then, I guess, the old man just thought it was a matter of time before Romero found out the whole truth, and that he’d married one of Alvarez’s many old flames. After which the story gets plastered all over the front page of El Did.’
‘Antonio believed that Romero’s wife was his mother.’
‘There’s the captain for you. He’s a believable sort of guy, isn’t he? He pulled the trigger and he wasn’t even there. Smart. But Bear was right. Antonio started to like it. He and Jaime got used to going out together, getting real doped up, doing some sex things. That’s how they met the Angels. What a monument to brotherly love those two pairs must’ve made. Then once or twice it gets out of control, the dope gets so big they don’t really care what they’re doing any more. With the Angels, maybe things just got out of hand. That American runner, Famiani, the guy Bear smacked around a little. One of them – Antonio, I guess – was just playing. And once or twice the old man still uses them to do his business. Keeping things quiet. Silencing people who know a little too much. Like Romero. Like Casta-ñeda. Like . . .’
‘Like me,’ she said. ‘Like Menendez.’
‘Yeah. But it only works so long as we think the guy who’s doing it is a crazy. Some nut in a red gown. So I don’t know, maybe the old man even went along with some of those other killings, like the Angels, just to keep up the picture. Think about it. How’d all this begin? With someone waking up that old woman Lucena. She’d got those two bodies upstairs going mouldy on her and she didn’t even know about it. Maybe someone jogged her memory so’s we’d start on this tack. The calendar said it was time to get moving, if they wanted to kill Castañeda the day after and blame it all on the guy in the red robe. Same goes for Famiani. It would have helped the story. I guess we’ll never know unless the captain gets religion.’
She looked around the little living room. It seemed too lived in, too normal. The clock showed close to midnight and she felt a sudden chill.
‘You know what I think?’ Quemada went on. ‘The old man’s just a lone operation these days. The rest of his guys, all those old fixers from the Franco days, they got the sharp end of some natural wastage. They took their pensions and a little more from old Antonio’s slush fund to keep them warm, and they turned into quiet, cosy old people who wanted to forget about the old times and what went on. Can you blame them? You can’t go around muscling and cheating like that any more. We’re dealing with dinosaurs here and there’s no amount of money that can keep them alive in the end.’
Maria thought of Rodríguez’s quiet, insidious charm and the way she had warmed to it in the bawling rabble of the station. She could imagine him talking rapidly, insistently, to the Mateo brothers, telling them what they had to do, telling them this was what their father wanted of them.
‘How do you go about arresting a captain?’ she asked.
‘Same way as we arrest someone else. We aren’t there yet.’
Maria blinked. ‘What do you mean? What more . . . ?’
Quemada waved his hands at her. ‘What I mean is there are ways of doing things and ways of not doing them.’
‘He’s killed people.’
‘No. He killed Menéndez and made it look like an accident. Did pretty well with that, to be honest. We suspect he’s had others killed. That’s different. It’s harder to prove, for one thing, particularly as the people we think he used to do the killings are both dead themselves. The captain’s living on borrowed time with the police over Menéndez. He knows that. But pitching the rest at his door . . . that�
�s not necessarily so easy. I don’t know how many friends he’s still got out there. Maybe none. Maybe a few.’ He shrugged. ‘If he has friends they’re not going to be small people, are they? Unless he steps out of line.’
‘So tomorrow he’ll be out of the country? In Colombia. Wherever. With all that money and out of reach?’
Quemada tugged at his ear and tried to think how to phrase what he wanted to say. ‘Don’t get me wrong. What he did, that’s bad, but to him it all made sense. These people work to their own kind of internal logic, and you can’t beat that. You have to use it, the way they do. That logic’s telling the old man it’s over, he’s lost, and my guess is there’s no one left to hand over to, no one to carry the baton. Why’d you think he took all those risks? Why did he get the Mateo kids involved in the first place? Fifteen, twenty years ago, stuff like this would be handled in-house. Get my drift?’
‘You were here fifteen, twenty years ago.’
‘And maybe I did some of his dirty work. Yes. Not that I knew about it. See, I did as I was told. Being a cop’s like that. You don’t ask, you do. Nowadays we’re always asking, and look where that got us. As for the captain, he knows we know something, he knows he’s out of the force at the very least, and, if we’re lucky, we’ll link him into these deaths and he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail. Meantime, we sit tight.’
‘I want to see Bear.’
Quemada pinched his nose and tried to think.
‘I’m going to the bathroom now,’ she said. ‘When I get back I’m finding a coat in this place and I’m walking out to go to that hospital. If you want to come, you’re welcome. If not . . .’
He watched her disappear upstairs, thought about it, then reached again for the phone. Two calls was all it took.
SIXTY-THREE
In Maggi Bartolomé’s battered Renault 5, limping through the night, Maria turned to him and asked, ‘That call. From Melilla? The one made you think Teresa Romero was his daughter? You took it?’
He looked at her closely, trying to see if she really still had doubts, then shook his head. ‘You’re one clever cookie, aren’t you? Maybe you should be here full time. No. I never took the call. But tonight I called Melilla back to find out who did make it. They didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. They never phoned here. Whoever called us back was doing it on the captain’s orders. Trying to muddy the waters, I guess. Throw us off track. Did a pretty good job too.’