“Did I wake you?”
“Not at all. You know very well I don’t sleep much. What is it? Has anything happened?”
“No, not yet, but maybe.”
She explains in a few minutes what she just heard on the radio. Silence on the other end of the line.
“Hello? Are you still there? Can you hear me? Well, what should I do now?”
“Finish your investigation and continue as planned over the next few days. Get some rest, too, and we’ll just see what this journalist knows. I doubt it’s much.”
“OK, OK, but I can’t help but wonder. He’s an excellent investigative journalist, you know.”
“It’s normal to have a case of nerves, but don’t worry too much, dear. I’m sure you’ll pull this off. Everything is going to be just fine.”
Soothed by the woman’s reassurances and a hot herbal tea, she finally falls asleep. Starting tomorrow, she has a long road ahead of her. Her mission is only just beginning; she can’t panic at every little snag. Even if shooting a gun is more difficult than she imagined. However, she has no other choice. A promise is a promise. She has to stay the course. For her. For her family. And for all of the others. Outside her window, in the sticky Madrid heat and in a few other large cities in Spain, there are people who have no idea she is aiming right at them.
2
A CHATTERING HORDE of Japanese tourists crosses La Plaza del Dos de Mayo, selfie sticks in one hand, shopping bags in the other, and crowd into the bar where Diego Martin is waiting for David Ponce for their monthly lunch date. It’s a ritual they started a few years ago when the journalist and the judge were investigating a drug trafficking case, the tragic conclusion of which brought the two men close and marked the beginning of their friendship.
Ever since, they’ve met once a month in Diego’s local watering hole, which is not far from his apartment in Malasaña, where La Movida Madrileña* was born. More than a neighborhood, Malasaña is a symbol, but it is one that is struggling to hold onto its soul in the face of an increasing number of tourists and new arrivals. This once modest barrio was almost entirely abandoned before getting a second life when Madrid’s artists and hipsters moved in. The tourist guides were quick to proclaim the news and, today, the barrio’s pedestrian streets are lined with boutiques and filled with visitors from around the world, all while rents have exploded. The economic crisis that is rocking the rest of the country is unknown in Madrid’s trendiest neighborhood, which retains the charm of an old Iberian village.
Nursing a beer, Diego checks his watch. As usual, the judge is running late. Diego fidgets with his pack of cigarettes and stares at the entrance, hoping to glimpse him through the crowd. It’s an old habit he picked up working on a particularly sensitive investigation in Latin America. Never sit in a bar with your back to the entrance; always know who is coming in the door. He got that tip from some former members of the Pinochet opposition, and it has become his golden rule. It has already gotten him out of several jams in Mexico and Colombia.
Ponce finally walks in, exactly fifteen minutes late, which is to say on time for him. Even with a large shoulder bag slung across his chest, he tries unsuccessfully to push his six-foot frame toward the table at the back. The group of Japanese tourists is blocking his way, and Diego can sense his friend’s growing frustration. Finally, his booming baritone and salt-and-pepper hair and beard cut a path through the crowd.
“Heads up, everyone! Coming through! You tourists, can’t you see you’re in everyone’s way? Let’s go, let’s go! Arigato, yes, that’s the way. Thank you, just move over there and stop taking pictures of everything.”
Diego can’t help laughing at the scene. He’s still chuckling when Ponce flops onto the banquette.
“You can’t resist, can you?” Diego teases him, in lieu of a greeting.
“Can’t resist what?”
“Making a scene.”
“Hold on, what was I supposed to do? Stand at the door for an hour? Besides, I’m starving. Let’s eat first and talk after.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Tapas, of course; lots of tapas and two more beers. Planked cuttlefish, cider-cured chorizo, patatas bravas, jamón y queso. It’s their usual menu, and they devour it in silence. Besides a shared aptitude for hunting down criminals, they have a common passion for food. They love to eat and eat well, which is to say rich food and lots of it. These monthly gastronomic lunches are sacred to them and merit their undivided attention. And their time. However long it takes for the bar to empty.
Stuffed, they order coffee and pull out their respective notes on their current investigation: the APM councilman who was assassinated the night of the elections. They shoot a look at the owner behind the bar, who gives them the all clear with a nod, and they take out their cigarettes. Only the regulars are left, and they won’t protest; they know the owner’s disdain for the public smoking ban works in their favor, too.
“Where should we start?” David asks.
“With the facts. I still can’t understand how, in that exact place, at that exact moment, no one saw anything,” Diego begins. “The cops have absolutely nothing? Not a single witness? Not a single clue? No leads?”
“Nada, zero. The investigation is at a standstill. Here, I made you a photocopy of the investigation file, which my incompetent colleague left sitting out on his desk. You can see for yourself: there’s not exactly much in it. Except for the statements taken from his friends and family, it’s empty.”
“Friends and family, you say … Maybe that’s where we should start looking?”
The victim, Paco Gómez, was from a good family, as they say. His murder, on the night of the elections and on a street so close to where the APM celebrated its victory, not to mention the fact that he was on course to become the youngest government minister in the history of Spain since Franco’s death, made headlines for days afterward. But the investigation stalled, the new government began to make its first controversial decisions, and the front-page story was reduced to a few lines, all before disappearing completely from the media’s radar. That is until today, because Diego has every intention of jump starting the investigation on his next radio show.
“What’s your plan, then?” Ponce wants to know.
“I’ll start by airing the interview with his mother. I’m meeting her tomorrow at her home. Then I’ll do like I always do: I’ll tease out some hypotheses. I asked Ana to give me a hand, find out if there isn’t anything in his family life, any hints of drugs or sex. Give us something we can chew on. Speaking of Ana, there she is, punctual as ever, unlike some people I know.”
Ana Durán and Diego Martin. Their friendship goes way back. They met fifteen years ago when Diego was working on a story about prostitution rings in Madrid. Ana was a hooker. The most sought-after transsexual working the Calle del Pez. The neighborhood diva. Blond hair, gray eyes, not tall but with impeccable plastic surgery. The doctor who operated on her in her native Buenos Aires did an excellent job; not a few of her johns had a surprise waiting for them. They all came back for more, though. So she stopped walking the street and began working from home, with the help of the Internet. In just a few months, she had become the top call girl at the biggest escort service. Charging two hundred euros an hour or a thousand euros for the night, she put away a small gold mine that allowed her to get out of the sex business and begin a new career: private detective. She opened her agency, Ana & Associates, on the same street where she’d worked, at home among the hookers and the trans. She is the sole employee, contrary to the name. Her little business is growing, however, so much, in fact, that she is seriously thinking of hiring some help.
“Ten years of walking the street empties your soul but fills up your wallet and your address book,” she always says in the lilting Buenos Aires accent she still has, despite her long exile in Spain.
She’s never short on clients. Sometimes they are the same ones who sought her out for her more “original” services back when she was working the streets
. Her resolve and her determination quickly earned her an excellent reputation in her new line of work. It’s not unusual for the police and even certain intelligence agents to consult her when their own leads go cold. Not always, but very often, Ana turns up either an answer or a clue to help advance their investigations. She has one of the best networks of informers in all of Madrid, hands down. Police officers, lawyers, judges, thugs, politicians, journalists; from Madrid’s barrios to its government palaces, Ana knows them all. She’s just as comfortable in a dive bar in the gueto as she is at an official reception at La Moncloa, the prime minister’s residence, where she has been more than once.
Ana stops at the bar to say hello to the owner and order her usual café del tiempo, a very short shot of espresso that she pours over a glassful of ice, before joining her two compadres at the table.
“¡Hola amigos! What’s new?”
“How do you drink that thing?” Diego’s look of repulsion passes for a greeting. “Seriously, cold coffee like that, it’s disgusting.”
“You just don’t know what’s good,” she shoots back teasingly. “So, aside from that, did you make any progress? Because I’ve got absolutely nothing. This guy led such a neat and tidy life it’s almost irritating, at least for our purposes. He must have fucked twice in his life, to have his two kids. …”
“Shit, you didn’t find anything?”
Diego is disappointed. He was counting on Ana to find some good dirt on Gómez.
“Nope, but you know me. I dug around anyways, and I’ve got a pretty substantial file for you. I concentrated on his family. Did you know that his grandfather and his father, who died last year, and his uncles were all Franco supporters?”
“His grandfather was labor minister, I think. I didn’t know about the others. You think that’s where we should be looking?”
“Hell if I know, but they were all in politics up to their eyeballs, usually in the shadows and always on the far right. The kid was following in the family tradition of course, but he chose a less hard-line path when he joined the APM in the 1990s. He was looking at a big career in politics if it wasn’t for that bullet in the neck.”
Same old, same old. The country voted an Amnesty Law—Diego calls it the Amnesia Law—shortly after Franco’s death to avoid examining its troubled past. It’s hardly surprising that the people who were protected by the law have simply adopted new tactics, them and their children and the children of their children. Democracy didn’t really change anything. Worst of all, the new government is advocating a return to Franco-era values.
“What’s your take on the murder?” Diego asks Ana. “It wasn’t a bungled theft—he had everything on him when they found him: credit cards, money, and his phone.”
“The cops aren’t getting anywhere; they don’t even have a hint of a lead—and even fewer suspects. It’s starting to become an embarrassment for the commissioner,” David adds.
“Damn it, how is this possible? We’re missing something! Ana, keep looking, and let me know what you find. I’m going to put your file under a microscope. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have a stroke of inspiration. … Mr. Magistrate, it’s your turn to pay. ¡Hasta luego!”
Her sandwich lies untouched on the table where she is sitting, on the patio of a bar in downtown Madrid. Her eyes are riveted on the black iron door of a historic, three-story building directly across the street. It houses offices, including those of the person she is there to see: Don Pedro De La Vega. El Viejo, as he is known in political and business circles, is as reliable as a Swiss watch. Monday through Friday, he keeps the same schedule down to the minute, takes the same streets, eats in the same restaurant, and leaves his car in the same parking lot. De La Vega knows something about parking lots: he owns a dozen of them throughout the city, and they earn him a tidy sum. Several million euros a year, actually. That’s one of the interesting facts turned up by her meticulous investigation of her second target.
Ninety years old and one of the richest men in Spain, De La Vega continues to show up every day at his notarial practice. For the life of her, she can’t understand why. He’s got more than enough money to put his feet up somewhere nice on the Mediterranean—in Valencia, for example, his native city, which also happens to have everything you could possibly need or want to enjoy a lavish retirement. Instead, at eight-thirty on the dot every morning, he opens the office. Moreover, except for his lunch break, he almost never leaves it until ten at night. All the biggest players in business and politics, mostly those allied to the right of the right, have passed through his doors. If the rich live longer, bastards must have the longest life expectancy of anyone. He’s certainly in good shape: he still drives, lives on his own without a nurse or a bodyguard, and still likes to play a set or two every once in a while at Madrid’s most exclusive tennis club.
It wasn’t easy picking up the paper trail confirming El Viejo’s vast fortune. Fake companies, secret bank accounts, tax havens, straw men, holding companies, subsidiaries, subsidiaries of subsidiaries. When it comes to hiding his net worth, this De La Vega is a regular pro. She had to spend a lot of time and call in a lot of favors from her contacts to track down just some of the assets of this former member of Franco’s inner circle. Nevertheless, those that she found—even if they didn’t amount to so much, she admits—were enough to earn him a place on her hit list.
De La Vega was one of Franco’s legal advisors after El Caudillo came to power in 1939. It was a position he turned to his advantage, for himself and for his family, without appearing to break any laws, though his activities often crossed the line. But never ever did he get his hands dirty. Money and power exist to open doors and pay others to do the rest. Everyone has a price; the more you can pay, the surer you can be that everything will go exactly as you wish, no questions asked, no loose lips.
She has been watching De La Vega for several weeks, learning where he goes, what his routine is, and if he ever strays from it. Her conclusion—the irony is not lost on her—is that the best place to take him out is the underground lot where he parks his car every day. She staked it out carefully, driving in repeatedly, using different rental cars and disguises, parking in different spaces, and noting the placement of every security camera. She eventually decided where she would do the job: a poorly lit blind spot of a turn that even the ultra-sophisticated security system doesn’t reach.
She checks her watch: 2:20. In ten minutes, El Viejo will enter the parking structure and get into his car to drive to his favorite restaurant for lunch. She gets up from the table, finishes her glass of water, picks up her things, and walks calmly to the parking lot entrance next door to his office. She is wearing a classically cut skirt suit and carries a designer handbag, a tote for her laptop, and a Bluetooth headset. She blends effortlessly into the crowd hurrying along the Gran Via. She could be any businesswoman in the sea of people on one of Madrid’s busiest avenues. No one seeing her would ever suspect she was about to commit a murder.
At precisely 2:26, with her paid parking receipt in hand, she appears for all intents and purposes to be searching for her car. In fact, she is looking for a narrow service corridor she located on a previous visit, where she plans to wait for her future victim. She has five minutes to do what she has come for and exit the parking structure. She opens her handbag and removes a pistol and a silencer, which she purchased on eBay using an assumed identity. She takes a deep breath to calm her pounding heart.
It is now 2:29. One minute left. A car door shuts, and an engine starts. El Viejo is on time exactly. The large sedan approaches. Thirty seconds. She takes off her heels and steps into the middle of the turn. De La Vega arrives and throws on the breaks, surprised to see a barefooted woman gesturing at him to stop. He lowers the driver-side window.
“Are you alright, Miss? Is something wrong?”
“Are you Don Pedro De La Vega?”
“Yes, but how did you—?”
She pulls the trigger once, taking care to shield herself from any blood on
impact. A single bullet enters the center of the forehead, almost at point-blank range. El Viejo’s head lies on his seat, his eyes wide open as if he were thinking about something. A thin red trickle of blood is now running down his face. She puts her shoes back on and walks quickly to her car, barely a minute after having shot a man in the head for the second time in six months. At 2:32, she drives out of the parking structure. At the first red light, she opens the glove compartment, removes a piece of paper with several names on it, and, with a violently trembling hand, crosses out Don Pedro De La Vega. When the light turns green, she pulls out into Madrid traffic.
*Cultural movement that began in Madrid after the death of Franco.
3
AFTER HIS LONG lunch break and meeting with his two closest friends, Diego walks back to Radio Uno, located in one of the tallest office towers in Madrid. The afternoon is mostly spent. In his bag are the investigation file that Ponce gave him on the young APM councilman’s murder and the much thicker file that Ana put together. He crosses the building’s cavernous lobby, nodding at the security guards, and gets in an elevator to the sixth floor. He rides it with several of his newest colleagues, all hired by Radio Uno’s new director, who himself was named just days after the elections. The first move was to change the existing laws regulating public broadcasting, giving the government authority to appoint the directors of public radio and television stations. A move designed to muzzle the media from the get-go and send a strong, clear message: no opposition will be tolerated. Diego’s new colleagues are clean-cut in all respects, and most are recent graduates of a journalism school in the north of the country. The school is run by Opus Dei.
The atmosphere in the elevator is frigid. No one says a word, and the icy silence is disturbed only by the noise of the elevator’s motor. Diego amuses himself by staring fixedly at each of them in turn. None of them can hold his mocking gaze. They quickly avert their eyes or resort to pretending to look for messages on their phones. Whoever wants to climb the ladder of success at the station cannot risk the slightest contact with the in-house “Commie.”
Mala Vida Page 2