The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

by Robert Wilson

  He nodded, bored by her already. He wondered what Calderón. saw in her, apart from the blue veins under the white skin, cold as marble. This one was living life out as a project. Falcón stifled a yawn.

  'You're not listening to me,' she said.

  He came round to find her standing quite close to him, close enough for him to see the red blood spots in the green of her iris. She licked her lips, applying some natural gloss. Her sexuality, in which she was so confident, shimmered beneath the silk of her loose blouse. She moved her head, a slight tilt, to tell him that he could kiss her now, while her eyes said that this could turn into something frantic on the marble flags of the patio if he wanted. He turned his head away. He was slightly revolted by her.

  'I was half listening,' he said, 'but I've got a lot on my mind and I'm meeting someone for lunch, so I should really be getting on.'

  'I must go, too,' she said. 'I have to get back.'

  Her hands trembled with rage as she picked up her bag of hand-painted tiles. He thought she might throw them at his head, one by one. There was something destructive in her nature. She was like a spoilt child who would break things just so that others couldn't enjoy them.

  The walk to the front door was punctuated by the anger of her heels on the marble. She kept ahead of him so that he couldn't see her humiliation while she gathered up the fragments of the face she had lost and rearranged them into disdain. He opened the door, she shook his hand and headed off towards the Hotel Colón.

  The Casa Ricardo was on Hernan Cortes at the meeting of three streets. It was a bar that could only exist in Seville, where the religious and the secular constantly rub shoulders. Every centimetre of the walls in the bar and small restaurant at the back was covered in framed photographs of the Virgin, the brotherhoods and all the paraphernalia of Semana Santa. The sound system played processional marches from Holy Week while people leaned against the bar drinking beers, eating olives and jamon.

  Consuelo was waiting for him at a table in the back with a chilled half-bottle of manzanilla. They kissed each other on the mouth as if they'd been lovers for months.

  'You look tense,' she said.

  He tried to think of something other than Pablo Ortega, which he couldn't talk about.

  'It's just developments. We keep finding things out about Rafael Vega that make him more of a mystery man.'

  'Well, we all knew he was a secretive guy,' said Consuelo. 'I once saw him leave his house in his car, the Mercedes he had before he bought the Jaguar. And an hour later I was in town at a traffic light and this old dusty Citroen or Peugeot Estate pulls up alongside me and in the driver's seat was Rafael. If it had been anybody else I'd have knocked on the window and said hello, but with Rafael, I don't know… you just didn't intrude on Rafael.'

  'Did you ever ask him about it?'

  'First of all he never responded to direct questioning and, anyway, so what if he's in a different car? I just assumed it was an office car he used for going out to building sites.'

  'You're probably right, it's nothing. You get to the point where every little thing has meaning.'

  They ordered a revuelto de bacalao, some clams and langoustines, a bright orange bowl of salmorejo and grilled red peppers spiked with garlic. Consuelo filled their glasses. Falcón calmed down.

  'I've just had a… confrontation with Maddy Krugman.'

  'That puta americana didn't come to your house on your day off?' asked Consuelo.

  'She ambushed me in the street,' he said. 'That's the third time. She's come round twice when I've been to the Vegas' house… offering coffee, wanting to talk.'

  'Joder, Javier, she's stalking you.'

  'There's something of the vampire about her, except she doesn't feed on blood.'

  'My God, you let her get that close?'

  'I think she feeds on what she doesn't have herself,' said Falcón. 'Her talk is full of arty phraseology about "empathizing", and "emotional response" and "the prison of her anguish", but she has no idea what they mean. So when she sees people who are really suffering she photographs it, captures it to try and make it hers. When I lived in Tangier the Moroccans believed that photographers were stealing their souls. And that's what Maddy Krugman does. She's sinister.'

  'You're making her sound like your prime suspect.'

  'Maybe I'll send her to the prison of her anguish.'

  Consuelo pulled him to her and kissed him hard on the mouth.

  'What was that for?'

  'You don't have to know everything.'

  'I'm an Inspector Jefe, it's in my nature.'

  The food arrived. Consuelo released him and poured more manzanilla. Before they started eating he beckoned her forward across the table so that they were cheek to cheek.

  'I can't say this too loudly in here,' said Falcón, his lips just brushing her ear, 'but there's another reason why I'm looking a bit tense. It's just that… I'm falling in love with you.'

  She kissed his cheek, held his hand.

  'How do you know?'

  'Because when I came in here and saw you waiting for me I've never felt so happy to know that the empty chair was mine.'

  'You're all right,' she said. 'You can stay.'

  He sat back, held his glass up to her and drank.

  They chose a bottle of white wine to drink with the sea bass they'd ordered after the starters.

  'I'm sorry, I forgot,' she said, going through her handbag. 'Somebody from your office…'

  'My office?'

  'I assumed he was from the Jefatura. He told me to give you this -'

  She handed over an envelope.

  'Nobody knows I'm here,' said Falcón, 'except you. Tell me what he said again.'

  'He said, "I understand you're meeting Inspector Jefe Falcón here. Could you please make sure he gets this." And he gave me that envelope.'

  'He was Spanish?'

  'Sevillano.'

  Falcón turned the white envelope over in his hands. It was very thin. He held it up to the light and could see that it had a single item in it. He knew it was another threat and shouldn't be opened in front of Consuelo. He nodded and put it in his pocket.

  He took a taxi home and went straight to his study where he kept latex gloves. He used a paper knife to open the envelope and shook out a photograph which had been folded into a single sheet of paper.

  Nadia Kouzmikheva's naked body was very white with the flash from the camera. She was blindfolded and tied to a chair with her arms painfully stretched over the back. On the grimy wall behind her was a single handprint the colour of rust and in black was written: El precio de la came es barato. The price of meat is cheap.

  Chapter 18

  Saturday, 27th July 2002

  The sunlight was still bright in the cracks of the wooden shutters as he lay on his bed with the thought of Nadia, blind and vulnerable, sharp in his mind. He'd overcome his initial reaction of horror and brought the analytical part of his brain to bear on the meaning of this latest message. These threats, each one worse than the last, each one digging deeper into his private life and now entangling Consuelo – what was their purpose? The car following him at the end of the first day and the photograph of Inés pinned to his board were designed to unsettle him. They were bold – we can follow you and we don't care if you see us, we can enter your house and we know things about you. The implicit physical threat to Nadia and the inclusion of Consuelo raised the stakes, but what was actually happening here? He gave up on any possibility of sleep and dragged himself to the shower and let the water pummel his head clear of the lunchtime wine. Each threat had only the appearance of boldness. There had been no follow-up to any of them so far. They were trying to distract him… but from what?

  He started thinking about Rafael Vega and the Russians. The phrase that Vázquez had used – 'facilitating their business needs' – had snagged in his brain. It was a natural process of the mind to think that a man who'd had questionable dealings with Russian mafiosi and subsequently been found dead would
probably have been murdered as a result of some disagreement. In this case, though, it seemed illogical. The Russians were reaping enormous advantages from their dealings with Vega. Why kill him?

  There was no reason why Falcón shouldn't believe Vázquez when he said that he had not been involved in the property deals and had no way of contacting the Russians directly. This would fit with Vega's compartmentalizing style of management. Pablo Ortega's sighting of the Russians in Santa Clara seemed to indicate that Ivanov and Zelenov only visited Vega at home. The telephone number programmed into his study phone seemed to confirm that they were not part of any office procedure. That would also explain why the surveillance system had been switched off. Both he and they would not want any record of these visits.

  Falcón dressed and went down to his study where he'd put both the envelope and photograph of Nadia in an evidence bag. He leaned back in his chair while fury and frustration did their work on his insides. There was nothing he could do about this. To refocus his investigation on the abduction of Nadia would be futile. He began to think that the Russians wanted to distract him from his inquiries into Vega's death because they were anxious to hide a crime far darker than the possible murder of the constructor.

  He remembered his failed call to Ignacio Ortega and made another attempt. Ortega's mobile was still turned off and there was no answer from any of the other numbers he'd taken from Pablo's book. He went to his notebook and looked down the list of things he'd planned to do this morning before he'd been sidetracked by Pablo Ortega's suicide. Interview Marty Krugman.

  Marty Krugman was in the Vega Construcciones offices on Avenida de la Republica de Argentina. He was finishing off some drawings on the more powerful computer he had there. He said he'd be quite happy to talk as soon as Falcón could get there. He'd make sure the conserje would let him in. As he spoke Falcón jotted down three topics for Marty Krugman – 9/11, Russians, wife.

  The entrance to the Vega Construcciones building was between two large estate agencies which advertised the Vega projects in their windows. The conserje let him in and sent him straight up to Marty Krugman's office.

  Marty had his feet up on the desk. He was wearing red basketball pumps. They shook hands.

  'Maddy told me you had a conversation about Reza Sangari yesterday,' said Marty.

  'That's right,' said Falcón, realizing that the reason why Marty had been so amenable about seeing him on a Saturday evening was that he was angry with him.

  'She said you were also implying that she might have been having an affair with Rafael.'

  'These questions have to be asked,' said Falcón. 'I was only wondering whether she had had an effect on the stability of Sr Vega's mind.'

  'It was a ridiculous question and I resent that you asked it,' said Marty. 'You've got no idea what we went through over Reza Sangari.'

  'That's true… which was why I had to ask the question,' said Falcón. 'I know nothing about you. I have to find out, and you are understandably reticent about certain dramatic events in your lives.'

  'Are you satisfied?' he asked, backing off slightly.

  'For the moment… yes.'

  Marty nodded him into a seat on the other side of the desk.

  'Your wife told me you had quite a developed relationship with Sr Vega,' said Falcón.

  'Intellectually, yes,' said Marty. 'You know what it's like. There's no fun in talking to somebody who agrees with everything you say.'

  'She said that you were surprised by how much you did agree.'

  'I never expected to find myself agreeing about anything with the kind of person who thought that Franco had the right idea about communists: that they should all be rounded up and shot.'

  'So what did you agree on?'

  'We shared the same views about the American empire.'

  'I didn't know there was one.'

  'It's called the World,' said Marty. 'We don't go through all that time-consuming, expensive crap of actually colonizing. We just… globalize.'

  'This note Sr Vega had in his hand referring to 9/11,' said Falcón, cutting in hard before Marty ran away with the ball. 'Pablo Ortega told me Sr Vega was of the opinion that America deserved what happened on September 11th.'

  'We had some violent disagreements about that,' said Marty. 'It's one of the few things I get emotional about. Two friends of mine worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and, like a lot of Americans, and especially multicultural New Yorkers, I didn't see why they or the other three thousand people had to die.'

  'But why do you think he believed that?'

  'The American empire is no different to any other. We believe that the reason we have become so powerful isn't just that we commanded the necessary resources at the right time in history to defeat the only other contender, but also because we are right. We broke an entire ideology not with an atom bomb but by the sheer brutality of numbers. We forced the Soviet Union to play our game and bankrupted it. And that's the great thing about our tool of empire – we can invade without physically going in. We can dictate whilst appearing to be a force for the good. Capitalism brings a population under control by giving them the illusion of freedom and choice whilst forcing them to adhere to a rigid principle, which can be resisted only at the cost of personal ruin. There's no Gestapo, no torture chambers… it's perfect. We call it Empire Lite.'

  Falcón started to break in on the Krugman theory, but Marty held up his hand.

  'Paciencia, Inspector Jefe, I'm getting to it,' he said. 'Those are the basic ingredients of the American empire and, as you've realized, I've just used what Rafael thought was the Americans' greatest talent – the art of presentation. Truth, fact and reality are Play-doh in the hands of a great presenter. For example, how can we be aggressive if we don't invade? Look at our history as Defenders of the Right against the Forces of Evil. We saved Europe from the Nazis, Kuwait from Saddam.

  'Rafael saw that as arrogance, which, when combined with Christian fundamentalism and outright support of the Israelis by the present administration, became too much for the Islamic die-hards. He thought this was the Holy War that both parties had been waiting for; we were going back centuries to the Crusades, except that the arena was now larger and the techniques available more devastating.

  'When al-Qaeda hit our symbol of the American empire – and Rafael reckoned that to wake up 250 million people from a state of somnolent comfort you needed a very loud bang – he thought that the truly terrible thing for us was to discover that al-Qaeda knew us better than we did ourselves. They had understood what makes our society tick - our demand for outstanding presentation and our need to make an impact. He attached a lot of importance to the time lag between the first plane hitting and the second. It meant that the world media would be there.'

  'I'm surprised there wasn't an exchange of blows between you,' said Falcón.

  'That was a summary of his beliefs about 9/11, not our discussions,' said Marty. 'I did a lot of storming out and he talked me back in. There were days when diplomatic relations were cut completely. He was surprised by my anger. He hadn't realized how much anger there was pent up in America.'

  'Can you relate any of that to the note that was discovered in Sr Vega's hand?'

  'I've been trying to and I can't see it.'

  'Your wife says that you're certain he'd lived in

  America, and that he liked it,' said Falcón. 'And yet he held these views which would annoy plenty of Americans…'

  'They're not so different to what most Europeans secretly think. Inspector Jefe. That's why a lot of my fellow countrymen now see Europeans as treacherous and envious.'

  'Envious?'

  'Yes, something else Rafael had an opinion on. He said Europeans don't envy the American way – its society is too aggressive for them to be envious of it. And, anyway, envy does not inspire hate. What they are, he said, is afraid of Americans and fear does inspire hate.'

  'What do Europeans fear?'

  'That with all our economic might and political streng
th we have the power to make their efforts irrelevant – you know, the Kyoto agreement, trade tariffs, the ICC -'

  'And yet, Sr Vega was relentlessly pro-American.'

  'If you're as anti-communist as he was, you have to be,' said Marty. 'The point was he didn't think emotionally. He certainly didn't approve of al-Qaeda. He just saw it as the… way things go. Playground bullies eventually get punched on the nose and it always comes from the least expected direction. He also believed that once the rest saw blood they'd dive in afterwards. As far as Rafael was concerned this was the beginning of the end for the American empire.'

  'I'm surprised you were prepared to put up with his talk,' said Falcón. 'Your wife kept reminding me that you think it's the greatest nation on earth.'

  'It didn't make me want to kill him, if that's what you're implying, Inspector Jefe,' said Marty, looking out from under his eyebrows. 'All you've got to do is look at history. Rafael said that America, like the empires before them, would lash out. They'd have to. But it would either be a wild flailing against something too small to be seen, or they would crush, with excessive force and expensive might, the wrong enemy. There'd be a gradual weakening, followed by economic melt-down. This was where I think he was wrong, because the one thing that America would always pay attention to was the dollar. They would never allow anything to jeopardize that.'

  'These discussions went on for a long time. Your wife said until dawn.'

  'And as the brandy bottle got emptier and the end of Rafael's cigar got soggier, his ideas got wilder,' said Marty. 'He believed that the American empire would end, not in our lifetime but before the end of the century, and that one of two things would happen. Either the Chinese would take over and stamp an even more rapacious form of capitalism on the world, or there would be a reaction against capitalism's decadence. In which case there would be a religious empire which would come from the most populous nations on earth (rather than our dying nations of retirees) and that it would be Islamic.'