A month ago, while Consuelo was waiting to cross the road at a traffic light, he'd approached her from behind and muttered words of such obscenity that they'd entered her mind like a shiv. Consuelo had remonstrated loudly when it happened. But, unlike the usual perpetrators, who would slink off into the crowds of shoppers, ignoring her, he'd got up close and silenced her with those green eyes and a quick wink, that made her think he knew something about her that she, herself, did not.
'I know your sort,' he'd said, and touched the corner of his mouth with the point of his tongue.
His bravado had paralysed her vocal cords. That and the horrible little kiss he'd blown her, which found its way to her neck like a horsefly.
Consuelo, distracted by these memories, had slowed to a halt. A member of the group spotted her and jerked his head in her direction. The orator stepped towards the railing holding the bottle up, letting it dangle from his forefinger.
'Fancy a drink?' he said. 'We haven't got any glasses, but I'll let you suck it off my finger if you want.'
A low, gurgling laugh came from the group, which included some women. Startled, Consuelo began walking again. The man jumped off the raised platform. The steel tips on the heels of his boots hammered the cobbles. He blocked her path and started to dance an extremely suggestive Sevillana, with much pelvic thrusting. The group backed him up with some flamenco clapping.
'Come on, Dona Consuelo,' he said. 'Let's see you move. You look as if you've got a decent pair of legs on you.'
She was shocked to hear him use her name. Terror slashed through her insides, tugging something strangely exciting behind it. Muscles quivered in the backs of her thighs. Disparate thoughts barged into each other in her mind. Why the hell had she put herself in such a position? She wondered how rough his hands would be. He looked strong-potentially violent.
The sheer perversity of these thoughts jolted her back to the reality. She had to get away from him. She veered off down a side street, walking as fast as her kitten heels would permit on the cobbles. He was behind her, steel tips leisurely clicking.
'Fucking hell, Dona Consuelo, I only asked you for a dance,' he shouted after her, a mocking inflexion on her title. 'Now you're leading me astray down this dark alley. For God's sake, have some self-respect, woman. Don't go showing your eagerness so early on. We've barely met, we haven't even danced.'
Consuelo kept going, breathing fast. All she had to do was get to the end of the street, turn left and she'd be at the gates of the old city and there would be traffic and people…a taxi back to her real life at home in Santa Clara. An alley appeared on her left, she saw the lights of the main road through the buildings leaning into each other. She darted down it. Shit, the cobbles were wet and all over the place. It was too dark and her heels were slipping. She wanted to scream when his hand finally landed on her shoulder, but it was like in those dreams where the need to yell the neighbourhood awake produced only a strangled whimper. He pushed her towards the wall, whose whitewash hung off in brittle flakes, and crackled as her cheek made contact. Her heart thundered in her chest.
'Have you been watching me, Dona Consuelo?' he said, his face appearing over her shoulder, the sourness of his winy breath in her nostrils. 'Have you been keeping a little eye out for me? Perhaps…since you lost your husband your bed's been a bit cold at night.'
She gasped as he slipped his hand between her bare legs. It was rough. An automatic reflex clamped her thighs shut. He sawed his hand up to her crotch. A voice in her head remonstrated with her for being so stupid. Her heart walloped in her throat while her brain screamed for her to say something.
'If it's money you want…' she said, in a voice that whispered to the flaking whitewash.
'Well,' he said, pulling his hand away, 'how much have you got? I don't come cheap, you know. Especially for the sort of thing you like.'
He took her handbag off her shoulder, flipped it open and found her wallet.
'A hundred and twenty euros!' he said, disgusted.
'Take it,' she said, her voice still stuck under her thyroid.
'Thank you, thank you very much,' he said, dropping her handbag to his feet. 'But that's not enough for what you want. Come back with the rest tomorrow.'
He pressed against her. She felt his obscene hardness against her buttocks. His face came over her shoulder once more and he kissed her on the corner of her mouth, his wine and tobacco breath and bitter little tongue slipping between her lips.
He pushed himself away, a gold ring on his finger flashed in the corner of her eye. He stepped back, kicked her handbag down the street.
'Fuck off, whore,' he said. 'You make me sick.'
The steel tips receded. Consuelo's throat still throbbed so that breathing was more like swallowing without being able to achieve either. She looked back to where he'd gone, confused at her escape. The empty cobbles shone under the yellow light. She pushed away from the wall, snatched up her handbag and ran, slipping and hobbling, down the street to the main road where she hailed a cab. She sat in the back with the city floating past her pallid face. Her hands shook too much to light the cigarette she'd managed to get into her mouth. The driver lit it for her.
At home she found money in her desk to pay for the taxi. She ran upstairs and checked the boys in their beds. She went to her own room and stripped off and looked at herself in the mirror. He hadn't marked her. She showered endlessly, soaping and resoaping herself, rinsing herself again and again.
She went back to her desk in her dressing gown and sat in the dark, feeling nauseous, head aching, waiting for dawn. When it was the earliest possible acceptable moment, she phoned Alicia Aguado and asked for an emergency appointment.
3
Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs
Juez Esteban Calderon was not on business. The urbane and highly successful judge had told his wife, Ines, that he was working late before going to dinner with a group of young state judges who had come down from Madrid on a training course. He had worked late and he had gone to the dinner, but he'd excused himself early and was now taking his favourite little detour down the side of the San Marcos church to reach 'the penthouse of promise', which overlooked the church of Santa Isabel. He usually enjoyed smoking a cigarette at the edge of the small, floodlit plaza, looking from within the darkness at the fountain and the massive portal of the church. It calmed him after long days spent with prosecutors and policemen and kept him out of the way of some bars around the corner, which were frequented by colleagues. If they saw him there it would get back to Ines and there'd be awkward questions. He also needed a few moments to rein in his quivering sexual tension, which started every morning when he woke up and imagined the long coppery hair and mulatto skin of his Cuban girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, who lived in the penthouse just visible from where he was sitting.
His cigarette hissed in a puddle where he'd tossed it, half smoked. He took off his jacket. A breeze sprayed droplets of water from the orange trees on to his back, and he caught his breath at the lash of its sudden chill. He kept to the wall of the church until he was in the darkness of the narrow street. His finger hovered over the top button of the entry phone as an accumulation of half thoughts made him hesitate: subterfuge, infidelity, fear, sex, dizziness and death. He scratched at the air above the button; these unusual thoughts made him feel that he was on the brink of something like a great change. What to do? Either step over the edge or fall back. He swallowed some thick, bitter saliva from his fast smoking. The sensuality of the lash of raindrops across his back reached that nexus of nerves in the base of his spine. The unease disappeared. His recklessness made him feel alive again and his cock leapt in his pants. He hit the buzzer.
'It's me,' he said, to the crackle of Marisa's voice.
'You sound thirsty.'
'Not thirsty,' he said, clearing his throat.
The two-man lift didn't seem to have enough air and he started panting. Its stainless steel panels reflected the absurd shape of his arousal an
d he rearranged himself. He brushed back his thinning hair, loosened his flamboyant tie and knocked on her door. It opened a crack and Marisa's amber eyes blinked slowly. The door fell open. She was wearing a long, orange silk shift, which nearly reached the floor. It was fastened with a single amber disc between her flat breasts. She kissed him and slipped a cube of ice from between her lips into his confused mouth and something like a firework went off in the back of his head.
She held him at bay with a single finger on his sternum. The ice cooled his tongue. She gave him an appraising look, from crown to crotch, and admonished him with a raised eyebrow. She took his jacket and hurled it into the room. He loved this whorish stuff she did, and she knew it. She dropped to her haunches, undid his belt and tugged his trousers and underpants down, then eased him profoundly into the coolness of her mouth. Calderon braced himself in the doorframe and gritted his teeth. She looked up at his agony with wide eyes. He lasted less than a minute.
She stood, turned on her heel and strode back into her apartment. Calderon pulled himself together. He didn't hear her hawking and spitting in the bathroom. He just saw her reappear from the kitchen, carrying two chilled glasses of cava.
'I thought you weren't coming,' she said, looking at the thin, gold wafer of watch on her wrist, 'and then I remembered my mother telling me that the only time a Sevillano wasn't late was for the bulls.'
Calderon was too dazed to comment. Marisa drank from her flute. Twenty gold and silver bracelets rattled on her forearm. She lit a cigarette, crossed her legs and let the shift slip away to reveal a long, slim leg, orange panties and a hard brown stomach. Calderon knew that stomach, its paper-thin skin, hard wriggling muscularity and soft coppery down. He'd laid his head on it and stroked the tight copper curls of her pubis.
'Esteban!'
He snapped out of the natural revolutions of his mind.
'Have you eaten?' he asked, nothing else coming to him, conversation not being one of the strengths of their relationship.
'I don't need any feeding,' she said, taking a shelled brazil nut from a bowl, and putting it between her hard, white teeth. 'I'm quite ready to be fucked.'
The nut went off in her mouth like a silenced gun and Calderon reacted like a sprinter out of the blocks. He fell into her snake-like arms and bit into her unnaturally long neck, which seemed stretched, like those of African tribal women. In fact for him, that was her attraction: part sophisticate, part savage. She'd lived in Paris, modelling for Givenchy, and travelled across the Sahara with a caravan of Tuaregs. She'd slept with a famous movie director in Los Angeles and lived with a fisherman on the beach near Maputo in Mozambique. She'd worked for an artist in New York, and spent six months in the Congo learning how to carve wood. Calderon knew all this, and believed it because Marisa was such an extraordinary creature, but he didn't have the first idea of what was going on in her head. So, like a good lawyer, he clung to these few dazzling facts.
After sex they went to bed, which for Marisa was a place to talk or sleep but not for the writhings and juices of sex. They lay naked under a sheet with light from the street in parallelograms on the wall and ceiling. The cava fizzed in glasses balanced on their chests. They shared an ashtray in the trough between their bodies.
'Shouldn't you have gone by now?' said Marisa.
'Just a little bit longer,' said Calderon, drowsy.
'What does Ines think you're doing all this time?' asked Marisa, for something to say.
'I'm at a dinner…for work.'
'You're just about the last person in the world who should be married,' she said.
'Why do you say that?'
'Well, maybe not. After all, you Sevillanos are very conservative. Is that why you married her?'
'Part of it.'
'What was the other part?' she asked, pointing the cone of her cigarette at his chest. 'The more interesting part.'
She burnt a hair off one of his nipples; the smell of it filled his nostrils.
'Careful,' he said, feeling the sting, 'you don't want ash all over the sheets.'
She rolled back from him, flicked her cigarette out on to the balcony.
'I like to hear the parts that people don't want to tell me about,' she said.
Her coppery hair was splayed out on the white pillow. He hadn't been able to look at her hair without thinking of the other woman he'd known with hair of the same colour. It had never occurred to him to tell anybody about the late Maddy Krugman except the police in his statement. He hadn't even talked to Ines about that night. She knew the story from the newspapers, the surface of it anyway, and that was all she'd wanted to know.
Marisa raised her head and sipped from her flute. He was attracted to her for the same reason that he'd been attracted to Maddy: the beauty, the glamour, the sexiness and the complete mystery. But what was he to her? What had he been to Maddy Krugman? That was something that occupied his spare thinking time. Especially those hours of the early morning, when he woke up next to Ines and thought that he might be dead.
'I don't really give a fuck why you married her,' said Marisa, trying a well-tested trick.
'Well, that's not what's interesting.'
'I'm not sure I need to know what is interesting,' said Marisa. 'Most men who think they're fascinating only ever talk about themselves…their successes.'
'This wasn't one of my successes,' said Calderon. 'It was one of my greatest failures.'
He'd made a snap decision to tell her. Candour was not one of his strongest suits; in his society it had a way of coming back on you, but Marisa was an outsider. He also wanted to fascinate her. Having always been the object of fascination to women he'd understood completely, he had the uncomfortable feeling of being ordinary with exotic creatures like Maddy Krugman and Marisa Moreno. Here, he thought, was an opportunity to intrigue the intriguers.
'It was about four years ago and I'd just announced my engagement to Ines,' he said. 'I was called to a situation, which looked like a murder-suicide. There were some anomalies, which meant that the detective, who, by a coincidence, happened to be the ex-husband of Ines, wanted to treat it as a double murder investigation. The victim's neighbours were American. The woman was an artist and stunningly beautiful. She was a photographer with a taste for the weird. Her name was Maddy Krugman and I fell in love with her. We had a brief but intense affair until her insane husband found out and cornered us in an apartment one night. To cut a long and painful story short, he shot her and then himself. I was lucky not to get a bullet in the head as well.'
They lay in silence. Voices came up over the balcony rail from the street. A warm breeze blew at the voile curtains, which billowed into the room, bringing the smell of rain and the promise of hot weather in the morning.
'And that's why you married Ines.'
'Maddy was dead. I was very badly shaken. Ines represented stability.'
'Did you tell her you'd fallen in love with this woman?'
'We never talked about it.'
'And what now…four years later?'
'I feel nothing for Ines,' said Calderon, which was not quite the whole truth. He did feel something for her. He hated her. He could hardly bear to share her bed, had to steel himself to her touch, and he couldn't understand why. He had no idea where it came from. She hadn't changed. She had been both good to him and for him after the Maddy incident. This feeling of dying he had when he was with her in bed was a symptom. Of what, he could not say.
'Well, Esteban, you're a member of a very large club.'
'Have you ever been married?'
'You are joking,' said Marisa. 'I watched the soap opera of my parents' marriage for fifteen years. That was enough to warn me off that particular bourgeois institution.'
'And what are you doing with me?' asked Calderon, fishing for something, but not sure what. 'It doesn't get more bourgeois than having an affair with a state judge.'
'Being bourgeois is a state of mind,' she said. 'What you do means nothing to me. It has no bearing on us. W
e're having an affair and it will carry on until it burns out. But I'm not going to get married and you already are.'
'You said I was the last person in the world who should be married,' said Calderon.
'People get married if they want to have kids and fit into society, or, if they're suckers, they marry their dream.'
'I didn't marry my dream,' said Calderon. 'I married everybody else's dream. I was the brilliant young judge, Ines was the brilliant and beautiful young prosecutor. We were the "golden couple", as seen on TV.'
'You don't have any children,' said Marisa. 'Get divorced.'
'It's not so easy.'
'Why not? It's taken you four years to find out that you're incompatible,' said Marisa. 'Get out now while you're still young.'
'You've had a lot of lovers.'
'I might have been to bed with a lot of men but I've only had four lovers.'
'And how do you define a lover?' asked Calderon, still fishing.
'Someone I love and who loves me.'
'Sounds simple.'
'It can be…as long as you don't let life fuck it up.'
The question burned inside Calderon. Did she love him? But almost as soon as it came into his mind he had to ask himself whether he loved her. They cancelled each other out. He'd been fucking her for nine months. That wasn't quite fair, or was it? Marisa could hear his brain working. She recognized the sound. Men always assumed their brains were silent rather than grinding away like sabotaged machinery.
'So now you're going to tell me,' said Marisa, 'that you can't get a divorce for all those bourgeois reasons-career, status, social acceptance, property and money.'
That was it, thought Calderon, his face going slack in the dark. That was precisely why he couldn't get a divorce. He would lose everything. He had only just scraped his career back together again after the Maddy debacle. Being related to the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla had helped, but so had his marriage to Ines. If he divorced her now his career might easily drift, his friends would slip away, he would lose his apartment and he would be poorer. Ines would make sure of all that.
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