The Ignorance of Blood

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Abdullah?’ said Falcón.

  ‘I'm here,’ he said. ‘On the landing. She cut me with a knife. I can't let go of it, I'm bleeding too much.’

  ‘Where's the light?’

  ‘You'll have to find a candle or a lamp.’

  Women's voices raised down below. They'd found the body. Abdullah yelled some Arabic out of the window. Uncertain light and footsteps came up the stairs. A lamp came into the room. Falcón turned to look at the corner where the whimpering was coming from. There was a child's cot with bars around it. Behind the bars he could see a child's back completely still. Falcón stumbled through the furniture in the room. At the foot of the cot, curled in a tight ball was a small, black, trembling dog. Next to it was Darío, inanimate. There was a strong smell of faeces and urine. The boy was naked. In the hopeless light he could not tell whether the mad crone had killed the boy out of spite, as Yacoub said she might. After that night with the Russians outside Seville, he could barely bring himself to do it, but he reached out a hand, touched the small naked shoulder, let his hand slip into the crook of the neck and felt the pulse ticking under the warm skin.

  32

  There was no lingering on that hot night in Fès.

  The women in the Diouri household did not seem unduly troubled by the death of Barakat's mother, they were far more concerned about the injury to Abdullah and confounded by the presence of a child and a small dog in the house. When Abdullah told them he'd been knifed by the mad woman, and they found the bloody blade still in the woman's hand, they were appalled. Falcón looked at the wound. It was a deep cut in the shoulder muscle and, although bloody, the blade had not severed anything serious. The women brought alcohol and bandages. He dressed the wound, but said it would need stitches. Given the circumstances, he told Abdullah, this would best be done in Ceuta. Yousra and Leila would stay in Fès.

  They were led to the car through the back streets of the medina. Consuelo would not let Falcón carry the boy. She was frightened by Darío's total lack of animation, but encouraged by the steadiness of his pulse. They left for Ceuta at 9.30 p.m. On the way Falcón called Alfonso, the concierge, at the Hotel Puerta de Africa and told him they would be arriving at about 1 a.m. Moroccan time at the border and would need help to get through. Abdullah had changed out of his bloody clothes and back into mourning. He had his ID card, but had left his passport in Rabat. Consuelo had had the foresight to bring Darío's documents. Falcón also told Alfonso they'd need a doctor on arrival at the hotel and a couple of rooms for what was left of the night.

  At the border they were walked through to the Spanish side, with no official inspection. A taxi was waiting. Darío had still not stirred. He had the distressing feel of a large ragdoll. The doctor was waiting at the hotel and they went straight up to the room. Abdullah insisted that Darío was seen to first. The doctor lifted Darío's eyelids, shone his torch into the pupils. He listened to the heart and lungs. He minutely inspected the boy's body and found needle punctures in the crooks of his elbows. He declared there was nothing wrong with him apart from having been heavily sedated.

  He took one look at Abdullah's wound and said he'd have to come with him to his surgery and have it properly cleaned and stitched. Falcón and Consuelo washed Darío in the bath and put him to bed. They slept with the boy in between them and were woken just before midday by his crying. He had no recollection of what had happened to him. Although he vaguely remembered being taken away from the Sevilla FC shop, he could not recollect how it had happened or who had done it.

  It was decided that Abdullah would travel with them and stay in Seville with Falcón until the Barakat murder and the death of the mother had been dealt with by the authorities. They took a cab to the hydrofoil and were across the straits by 3.30 p.m. They drove back to Seville, where Falcón left Consuelo and Darío in Santa Clara with her sister and the boys, Ricardo and Matías. He and Abdullah went to the Jefatura, where he gave Barakat's DNA swab to Jorge in the forensics lab and asked him to check it against samples on the Jefatura's database.

  ‘You know Comisario Elvira is looking for you,’ said Jorge.

  ‘He's always looking for me. I'm going home to bed,’ said Falcón. ‘You haven't seen me.’

  He and Abdullah went home. Encarnación fed them. Falcón turned off all his mobiles and disconnected his phone. He slept the rest of the afternoon and whole night without waking.

  In the morning he inspected Abdullah's wound and redressed it. He took a slow breakfast out in the patio, staring at the marble flagstones. At midday he called Jorge and asked if he'd run the DNA test.

  ‘There was a match to Raúl Jiménez,’ said Jorge. ‘The DNA you gave me would probably have belonged to his son. Does that help you?’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘You might also be interested to know that your squad are on a high. Last night they arrested two building inspectors in Torremolinos, who they'd identified from those Lukyanov disks. They've already charged them with conspiring to cause an explosion,’ said Jorge. ‘This morning they picked up the owner of a small hotel in Almería, who also happened to be an electrician and was trained by the army in the use of explosives. He'll be arriving in Seville this afternoon. Ramírez has been trying to call you and Comisario Elvira is still very eager to know where you are. I've said nothing.’

  Falcón hung up, called Consuelo. Darío was playing with his brothers and some friends in the pool.

  ‘He seems untouched by it all,’ she said, amazed. ‘I was going to get Alicia to talk to him, but I'm not sure whether it will just make him unhappy.’

  ‘See what Alicia says. You don't have to rush,’ said Falcón.

  He told her about the DNA match from Barakat to Raúl. Consuelo couldn't understand how Raúl Jiménez, her ex-husband, came to be Mustafa Barakat's father.

  ‘The reason Raúl suddenly had to leave Morocco back in the fifties was because he'd made the twelve-year-old daughter of Abdullah Diouri Senior pregnant. Diouri Senior had demanded that Raúl marry the girl to preserve the family honour. Raúl couldn't because he was already married, so he fled. Diouri took revenge by kidnapping Raúl's youngest son, Arturo. And for whatever reason – guilt, or because he loved him – Diouri gave Arturo the same status as his own sons with his family name. So Arturo Jiménez became Yacoub Diouri.

  ‘But because Diouri's twelve-year-old daughter had brought shame on to the family, her son by Raúl was not allowed to bear the family name. However Diouri Senior didn't totally reject him. The close ties between the Diouris and the Barakats meant that the boy was introduced into that family to become Mustafa Barakat.’

  ‘That sort of knowledge in the wrong mind could breed a special kind of hatred,’ said Consuelo.

  ‘And how do you think Mustafa Barakat would feel about Yacoub Diouri?’

  ‘Imagine the bitterness that poor girl must have felt at her own rejection for being defiled by Raúl, only to have to witness Yacoub's smooth integration into the Diouri family while her own son is kicked out.’

  ‘Profile of a terrorist?’

  Consuelo invited Javier to dinner that night, asked him to bring Abdullah.

  Falcón drove out to the prison in Alcalá de Guadaira. He'd called ahead so Calderón was already waiting for him in a visiting room. He wasn't smoking. He had his hands clasped in front of him on the table to stop them from fidgeting. He still looked haggard, but not as reduced as he had been when Falcón had last seen him. The supreme self-confidence had not been recovered, but he seemed more solid.

  ‘You've heard,’ said Falcón.

  ‘My lawyer came to see me yesterday,’ said Calderón, nodding. ‘I'm still going to face assault charges, but…’

  He trailed off, looked up at the high barred window.

  ‘You're going to get your life back.’

  ‘In the end,’ he said. ‘But it'll be a different one. I'm going to see to that.’

  ‘How's it been going with Alicia Aguado?’

  ‘Hard,’
said Calderón, leaning back, hooking his hands around his knee. ‘I spend a lot of my day thinking about myself, and not much of it is good. You know, Alicia told me in our last session that it was rare for a male patient to turn on himself as comprehensively as I'd done. I told her: “This last week has been the longest sustained period of facing the truth that I've ever been through in my life.” A lawyer speaks, Javier.’

  They grunted laughter at each other.

  ‘I also spend a lot of my time thinking about you. I feel I owe you an explanation.’

  ‘It's not necessary, Esteban.’

  ‘I know, but you started me on this journey with Alicia, and we have this curious relationship that's entwined with both Inés and Marisa. So I want to clarify a few things, if you can bear to listen to me. It's not going to make me look very pretty, but then you're getting used to that.’

  They sat in silence for a moment while Calderón prepared himself.

  ‘As you know, four years ago I nearly lost my career. I needed all my family connections, and Inés's, to maintain a foothold in the Edificio de los Juzgados. Inés was fantastic throughout. She was strong. I was weak. And, as you know from your murder cases, Javier, the weak man is full of self-hatred and develops a bottomless pit of savagery, which by rights he should unleash against himself, but inevitably he turns on the person closest to him.’

  ‘Is that when it started?’

  ‘The beatings? No. The hatred, yes. When Inés became my wife and the balance of power shifted in my favour, I started breaking her down with my extravagant philandering,’ said Calderón. ‘By the time that bomb went off on 6th June we were both primed for violence. By that I mean: I was ready to give it and she was ready to receive it. I was feeling sufficiently strong and angry, and she was sufficiently fragile and humiliated. I'm not sure there wasn't something sadomasochistic in the state of our relationship. When I came back from Marisa's that morning we could have had just another row, but this time she wanted it to be taken further. She goaded me, and I, inexcusably, complied.’

  ‘She was goading you to violence?’

  ‘It probably wasn't as clear as that in her mind; we'd shouted and screamed, thrown things at each other, and I suppose it was the only possible next step. You know how important Inés's public image was to her, she couldn't walk away from a second failed marriage. And I would have found it hard to split from her. What she wanted was for me to hit her, then for me to be filled with remorse, and in that softening she would bring us back together. I surprised her and myself. I didn't know I had that pent-up rage inside me.’

  ‘Did you feel any remorse?’

  ‘At the time, no. I realize this sounds pathetic, but I felt immensely powerful,’ said Calderón. ‘To have beaten a fifty-kilo woman into terrified submission should have appalled me, but it didn't. Then, later, after Marisa told me about her confrontation with Inés in the Murillo Gardens, I became incensed once again and gave Inés an even worse beating. Still no remorse. Just madness and rage.’

  ‘What happened after that beating?’

  ‘I walked the streets telling myself it was all over. There could be no going back.’

  ‘But you already knew how difficult it would be for you to split from Inés,’ said Falcón. ‘So did it occur to you then … that little joke you had with Marisa about the “bourgeois solution” to complicated divorce?’

  ‘Yes, it did. Not quite in that way. I was in a rage. I just wanted to get rid of Inés.’

  ‘And what? Fall into the arms of Marisa?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Why did you give Inés the most savage beating of all for badmouthing a woman you didn't care about?’

  ‘In calling Marisa the whore with the cigar, Inés had pointed out to me what I thought of her,’ said Calderón. ‘Marisa was an artist, but that never interested me. Throughout our relationship I treated her like a whore. Much of our sex was like that. And Marisa despised me. In fact, looking back on it, she hated me. And, I have to admit, my behaviour was loathsome.’

  ‘So, what are you saying about Inés and Marisa now?’

  ‘You know when you came to see me last I told you that Alicia had accused me of hating women. Me? Esteban Calderón. The greatest lover of women in the Edificio de los Juzgados? Yes, well, that's what I found out: I treated Marisa like a whore and Inés worse than a dog. And that's what I've been finding hard to face up to.’

  Falcón nodded, stared at the floor.

  ‘The first real glimmer of the truth that I could remember, one that really shook me to the core, was when I regained consciousness after my faint to find Inés dead in the kitchen. That was when I saw the damage from my earlier beatings and it was what made me panic, because I knew my evident abuse of her would make me the prime suspect in her murder,’ said Calderón. ‘Whenever I'd recalled that night I'd always concentrated on my lack of intent to murder her.’

  ‘Because that would be your defence in court,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Exactly, but what came back to me during my sessions with Alicia was, having come into the apartment, seen the light on in the kitchen and been annoyed at the possibility of another confrontation and wished her gone from my life, I then saw her lying there in that vast pool of her own blood. That was when it came to me that I might as well have killed her. To see her there, in such hideously bright light, was like being confronted with the image of my own guilt. I fainted at the thought and sight of it.’

  In the early evening Falcón went to the Jefatura. The whole squad was in the office. The atmosphere was upbeat. They'd had two very successful days. Serrano put a cold beer in his hand.

  ‘Guess what?’ said Ramírez. ‘Elvira wants to see you.’

  ‘You'd think this guy doesn't have my phone number,’ said Falcón.

  ‘He's going to reinstate you.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘First of all, Spinola,’ said Ramírez. ‘Tell him, Emilio.’

  ‘We went through his apartment and found seventy-eight grams of cocaine, forty grams of heroin and a hundred and fifty grams of cannabis resin,’ said Pérez.

  ‘So he's a drug user,’ said Falcón, shrugging.

  ‘And … copies of all the rival bids in the Isla de la Cartuja development.’

  ‘Which have also been found in the possession of Antonio Ramos, Horizonte's head of construction,’ finished Ramírez.

  ‘That was lucky,’ said Falcón, nodding, taking a pull of the beer.

  ‘The Juez Decano appointed the instructing judge, who was present throughout the search of the apartment, and he's totally accepted our findings.’

  ‘What about Margarita?’ Falcón asked Ferrera.

  ‘She's in hospital in Málaga,’ she said. ‘She'd been given a very severe beating by one of Leonid Revnik's men when they found that Vasili Lukyanov had gone to Seville.’

  ‘Was she his girlfriend?’

  ‘Not exactly. She was special to him, that's all she would admit, but she was in very bad shape. They're going to call me when she's recovered enough to talk properly. Broken jaw, left arm and two cracked ribs.’

  ‘El Pulmón?’

  ‘He's identified Sokolov. We're in discussion over the knifing and the illegal firearm.’

  ‘And what are they going to do to Mark Flowers?’

  ‘They're not going to press charges for killing Yuri Donstov, but he's finished here in Seville,’ said Ramírez. ‘They're putting him on a plane back to the States, and he'll face a disciplinary hearing there.’

  ‘And the big question for me,’ said Falcón. ‘What about Cortland Fallenbach? Was he involved in the original conspiracy?’

  ‘They've taken away his passport,’ said Ramírez, ‘and he's got a team of lawyers fighting to get it back. I don't know. Without Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito around, that might be a difficult thing to prove.’

  The phone rang. Baena took it, held the phone to his chest.

  ‘Guess what?’

&nb
sp; ‘All right,’ said Falcón. ‘I'm going up there. Tell him I just wanted to see the most important people first. Great work everybody.’