The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

by Robert Wilson

  'Did Manolo have any reaction to what had happened to him?'

  'Not exactly to what happened to him,' said Sra Lopez. 'He's always been a happy boy in himself. He was more disturbed by what happened to Sebastián Ortega. He finds it difficult to imagine him in prison.'

  'So, what's been bothering your husband?' said Falcón. 'He seems to be the one who has reacted badly.'

  'He can't talk about it,' she said. 'It's something to do with what happened with Manolo, but I can't get him to say what it is.'

  'Is he ashamed? That's not an unusual reaction.'

  'For Manolo? He says not.'

  'Would you mind if I talk to him on his own?'

  'You won't get anywhere.'

  'I have some new information which might help him,' he said.

  'The last door to the left at the end of the corridor,' she said.

  Sr Lopez was lying on the dark wooden bed under a crucifix. A ceiling fan barely disturbed the thick stale air. He had his eyes closed. One hand twitched where it lay across his stomach. The other lay dead by his side. Falcón touched him on the shoulder. His eyes stared out from a frightened mind.

  'All you have to do is listen to me,' said Falcón. 'I am no man's judge. I've come here to try to put things right, that's all.'

  Sr Lopez blinked once, as if this was a devised sign language.

  'Investigations are strange things,' said Falcón. 'We set off on a journey to find out what happened, only to find that more things happen on the way. Investigations have a life of their own. We think we are running them, but sometimes they run us. When I heard what Sebastián Ortega had done, it had nothing to do with the investigation I was working on, but I was fascinated by it. I was fascinated because in those cases it's very rare for the victim to be allowed to leave and for him to bring the police to where the perpetrator is waiting to be arrested. Do you understand what I'm saying, Sr Lopez?'

  He blinked once again. Falcón told him about the Jefatura and how stories circulate and how he'd heard about what had really happened in Manolo's case. The demand for a stronger statement to help the prosecution's case was not an unusual occurrence. That Sebastián would not defend himself against the stronger statement was unforeseen and resulted in a much harsher sentence than the actual crime merited.

  'I have no idea what is playing on your mind, Sr Lopez. All I know is – through no fault of your own, and perhaps because of Sebastián's own mental problems – an unnecessarily severe justice has been done. I am here to tell you that, if you so wish, you can help balance the scales. All you have to do is call me. If I do not hear from you, you will never see me again.'

  Falcón left his card on the bedside table. Sr Lopez lay on the bed, staring up at the slow fan. On the way out Falcón said goodbye to Sra Lopez, who took him to the door.

  'Pablo Ortega told me that he had to leave this barrio because nobody would talk to him any more, or serve him in shops and bars,' said Falcón as he stood on the landing. 'Why was that, Sra Lopez?'

  She looked flustered and embarrassed; her hands shifted about, straightening her clothes. She eased herself behind the door and shut it without answering his question.

  In the flinching brightness of the street Falcón took a call from Juez Calderón, who wanted to see him about the Vega case. Before he got back into his car he went into a bar on the Alameda and ordered a cafe solo. He showed his police ID and asked the same question of the barman as he had of Sra Lopez. He was an older guy, who looked as if he'd seen a few things in his time as a bar owner at the seedier end of the Alameda.

  'We all knew Sebastián,' he said, 'and we liked him. He was a good boy until… he did wrong. When he did what he did, people started to talk about how abusers start out as the abused. Conclusions were drawn and it wasn't helped by the fact that nobody much liked Pablo Ortega. He was an arrogant prick who thought the whole world loved him.'

  The sweat cooled quickly on Falcón's body as he sat in Calderón's office, waiting for him to come back from another meeting. As Calderón took his seat it was clear that whatever had been troubling him over the past days had gone. He was his usual solid self. The certainty had returned.

  Falcón told him he was finished with the Vega case, that he'd found out everything there was to know about him, except who'd killed him. He gave Calderón a compilation report on what he'd learnt from Mark Flowers and Virgilio Guzmán.

  'Have you checked this "recording" of Marty Krugman in the American Consulate from the night of Sr Vega's death?'

  'Comisario Lobo is going to talk the whole issue through with the Consul,' said Falcón. 'I don't expect to hear whether that recording existed or not.'

  'So you think Marty Krugman killed Rafael Vega?'

  'I do,' said Falcón. 'And despite his wife's denial on Monday night, I think she drove him to kill Reza Sangari.'

  'If he hadn't killed Reza Sangari you don't think he'd have been able to kill Rafael Vega?'

  'I don't think he was developing a taste for it, but there's no doubt that he'd been excited by the power he felt from his first experience,' said Falcón. 'And when he found out who Vega really was, whether by his own deduction or being told by Mark Flowers, he felt he had the power to do it again. I think he killed Sangari passionately and Vega intellectually.'

  'And Sra Vega?'

  'That was the problem. Krugman knew Mario was staying at Sra Jiménez's house so he didn't have to worry about the boy. He also knew that Lucia Vega was a heavy sleeper. He and Rafael had long discussions sometimes in Vega's house and they never disturbed her, but he didn't know that she took two sleeping tablets a night to knock herself out – the second one at around three in the morning. So when Rafael Vega went into his death agonies she probably came downstairs, saw the horror and ran back up to the bedroom with Krugman in pursuit. That's why her jaw was broken. She was screaming and he hit her. Then he had to kill her, too, which would explain why Krugman was so unstable from the outset.'

  'And all these threats from the Russians?'

  'Perhaps they were just trying to discourage us from investigating too hard and finding out about their money-laundering arrangements.'

  'Is that all?' asked Calderón. 'That's a bit heavy- handed, don't you think?'

  'They're heavy-handed people,' said Falcón.

  'You're depressed, Javier.'

  And you're not, thought Falcón, but he said: 'I failed in the Vega case. I failed to prevent the Krugmans from dying before my very eyes and… yes, well, my psychologist tells me it's bad to use the word "fail" with the first person singular, so I'll shut up.'

  'I've heard rumblings,' said Calderón.

  'It's lunchtime.'

  'Tectonic rumblings coming from the Jefatura,' said Calderón. 'Heads will roll. Jobs will be lost. Pensions terminated.'

  'Because Montes jumped out of his office window?'

  'That was the start of it,' said Calderón, back to enjoying himself in the intrigue of the moment. 'What about Martinez and Altozano?'

  Falcón shrugged. Calderón could find out for himself why the Russians were really threatening.

  'You know something, Javier, don't you?'

  'So do you,' he said, oddly irritated by the familiarity.

  'I know the Juez Decano and the Fiscal Jefe had a meeting behind closed doors for one hour this morning, and you don't often get them in the same building in the same room.'

  'Those rumblings you heard are the sound of the powers that control us closing ranks,' said Falcón.

  'Tell me,' said Calderón.

  'We're the blind, the deaf and the dumb today, Esteban,' he said, and got to his feet. 'I'd still like that search warrant for Vega's safe-deposit box. We might as well satisfy our curiosity.'

  'I'll have that ready for you this afternoon,' said

  Calderón, checking his watch, joining him at the door. 'I'll walk down with you. Inés and I have got some shopping to do.'

  They went downstairs and through the bear pit of justice, where peopl
e bowed and scraped to the young judge. He was back in his element. The horrors were off the horizon. They went through security. Inés was on the other side. Falcón kissed her hello. She put an arm around Calderón's back and he pulled her to his chest, kissed her on the head. Inés gave Falcón a tinkling wave before she turned with a little back kick of her high heels and a big, happy smile thrown over her shoulder. Her hair swung across her back like the girls' in the shampoo ads.

  Falcón watched them go and tried to imagine what could have possibly passed between them since that fatal Monday night. And with that thought came the answer: absolutely nothing. They had clung to each other in the terror of their possible loneliness, wished it all away and thrown their arms open to what life had been before. Was that the man that Isabel Cano had said was on the hunt for difference? Was that the woman whose stamp of approval Falcón had thought he so desperately needed? He watched them heading towards the city and a life of small, hurtful destructions.

  Consuelo called, asking to meet for lunch. She sounded as she had done last night – distant and preoccupied. They agreed to meet at his home on Calle Bailén and he would do the cooking. Falcón bought food in the Corte Ingles on his way home. He emptied his mind in the kitchen. He sliced onions, fried them slowly in olive oil until caramelized. He boiled up potatoes and poured oloroso sherry over the onions and reduced it to a syrup. He cleaned and seasoned the tuna, made a salad. He arranged the prawns with wedges of lemon and mayonnaise. He drank chilled manzanilla and sat in the shade on the patio to wait for Consuelo.

  She arrived at two o'clock. As soon as he let her into the house he knew that something was wrong. She was closed off, shut in. He'd had this feeling from women before, a sense that everything will be withheld until the air is cleared. Her mouth did not respond to his kiss. Her body kept its distance. He felt the quickening plummet in his stomach of the lover who is about to be told something very kindly. He led her to the kitchen as if they were condemned and this was their last meal.

  They ate the prawns and drank manzanilla while he told her that the Vega case was officially closed. He got up to fry the tuna steaks. He reheated the oloroso syrup and poured it over the fish. He sat down with the pan between them unable to bear it any longer.

  'You've got tired of me already,' he said, serving her a steak.

  'Quite the opposite,' she said.

  'Or is it my profession?' he said. 'I know you've come here to tell me something, because I've been told this sort of thing before.'

  'You're right, but it's not because I'm tired of you,' she said.

  'Is it because of what happened on Sunday? I can understand that. I know how important your children are to you. I'd have been -'

  'I've learnt to recognize what I want, Javier,' she said, shaking her head. 'It's taken me a lifetime but I have learned that valuable lesson.'

  'Not many people do,' said Falcón, serving himself a tuna steak, which now looked banal on his plate.

  'I used to be a romantic. You're talking to a woman who once fell in love with a duke, remember? Even when I came down here, I still entertained those romantic illusions. Once I had my children I realized I didn't need to fool myself any more. They gave me all the love, the real unconditional kind, that I needed and I returned it doubled. I had an affair to satisfy my physical needs. You met him – that idiot Basilio Lucena – and you understood the relationship that we had. It wasn't love. It was much less complicated and manageable than that.'

  'You don't have to let me down lightly' said Falcón. 'You can just say: "I don't want to do this any more."'

  'This is me being honest with a man for the first time in my life,' she said, looking him straight in the eye.

  'I thought that what we had going between us was a good thing. It felt right,' said Falcón, the emotion rising in his throat. 'For the first time in my life, it felt absolutely right.'

  'It is a good thing, but it is not what I want now.'

  'You want to devote yourself to your children?'

  'That's part of it,' she said. 'The rest is me. We have a good thing going now, but it will change. And I don't want the intensity, the complications, the responsibility… But most of all, and this is my failing, I do not want the daily confrontation with my weakness.'

  'Your weakness?'

  'I have weaknesses. Nobody sees them but they are there,' she said. 'This is my big weakness. You know everything about me, every terrible thing because our relationship started in the terrible arena of a murder investigation. But you don't know this: I am hopeless in love and I cannot bear it.'

  'How do you know, if you've only had the illusion of it before?'

  'Because it's already started,' she said.

  She stood up, the tuna untouched, the sauce congealing on the plate. She came round to his side of the table. He tried to say things. He wanted to talk her out of it. She put her fingers on his lips. She held his face, ran her hand over his hair and kissed him. He felt the wetness of her tears. She pulled back, squeezed his shoulder once and left.

  The door slammed. He looked at his plate. There was nothing that could get past what he had growing in his throat. He scraped the tuna into the bin, looked at the brown smear left on the plate and then he hurled it against the wall.

  Chapter 30

  Wednesday, 31st July 2002

  Strange siesta sleep left Falcón feeling oddly rested but with his brain sitting awkwardly in his head, like a breech birth. The morning's events drifted in his mind slow as river mist. It had been so disastrous that a hysterical positivism staged a small rampage in his head. He sat on the edge of the bed, shaking his head, dredging for laughs, and an idea came to him, which propelled him into the shower where it grew, clearing his mind.

  He drove to San Bernardo, hitting the steering wheel at odd intervals, thinking that it wasn't finished between him and Consuelo. She wasn't going to drift away from him that easily. There was still some talking to be done, some persuading. He went up to see Carlos Vázquez and caught sight of himself in the lift mirror: there was a mad determination in him.

  'I'd like to speak to the Russians,' said Falcón, walking into Vázquez's office. 'Do you think you could arrange that for me?'

  'I doubt it.'

  'Why not?'

  'They wouldn't have anything to say to you… Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios.'

  'You could invite them over – you know, something to do with their projects – and I could join you for the meeting.'

  'That would not be possible.'

  'Charm them, Sr Vázquez.'

  'Vega Construcciones are no longer actively involved in their projects. They have no reason to come and see me,' said Vázquez. 'They sold the buildings.'

  'They sold them?'

  'They were theirs to sell.'

  'Don't you think, Sr Vázquez, given their intricate involvement with your late client, that it would have been judicious to have informed us?'

  'I was told not to inform anybody except the third party in the sale.'

  'But you didn't think that we deserved some notification?'

  'Under normal circumstances I would have told you,' said Vázquez, hands clasped, knuckles white.

  'And what was so abnormal about these circumstances?'

  Vázquez opened his desk drawer and took out an envelope.

  'I bought my children a dog last Christmas. A puppy. They took it down to the coast with them for the holidays,' said Vázquez. 'They called me at the end of last week to say the dog had disappeared. They were all in tears. On Monday morning I received a package sent from Marbella which contained a dog's paw and this envelope.'

  Falcón shook out the contents: a single photo of Vázquez's family sitting on the beach looking happy. On the reverse side was a note – 'They're next.'

  'What do you think of that for psychology Inspector Jefe?'

  Falcón drove to the Jefatura. It occurred to him that since Sunday there had been no more threats from the Russians and now he knew why.
They'd accomplished what they set out to do. They'd extricated themselves from the Vega projects and his investigation was now officially over. And their most criminal action had been the slaying of a children's pet.

  Ramírez and Ferrera sat in the office, wordless.

  'What's going on?' asked Falcón. 'Shouldn't you be down in the lab with Felipe and Jorge?'

  'They've been told to work behind closed doors and to only discuss their findings with Comisario Elvira,' said Ramírez.

  'What about the razor blade I sent down there?'

  'They're not allowed to talk to us about anything.'

  'And the arsonists?'

  'They're still with us,' said Ramírez. 'We don't know for how much longer. In your absence I called Elvira to ask if we should get them to write their statements. He told me to do nothing. And I'm an expert at that. So, here we are, doing fuck all.'

  'Any calls?'

  'Lobo wants to see you, and Alicia Aguado wants to know if you're going to be able to take her to the prison this evening.'

  'It's not over yet, José Luis,' said Falcón.

  He took the lift up to Lobo's office on the top floor. He called Alicia Aguado and arranged to pick her up. He wasn't kept waiting by Lobo, who was now calm. They sat and looked at each other as if there was some disastrous battle plan laid out between them, which had resulted in the deaths of thousands.

  'The detective work by you and your squad has been excellent,' said Lobo, which flattery Falcón took to be a bad sign.

  'You think so?' said Falcón. 'To me it's been a remarkable catalogue of failures. I have no killer for Vega and a landscape littered with dead bodies.'

  'You've cracked a major paedophile network.'

  'I don't think I cracked it, exactly. Ignacio Ortega has been ahead of me all the way, as is proven by the fact that I have nothing on him, other than his installation of the air-conditioning units in the finca, and the late Alberto Montes has been tripping me up with his every action,' said Falcón. 'Now Ortega is laughing in my face and the Russians are still out there, free as birds, to continue their trafficking of adults and children for sexual purposes.'