The Hidden Assassins

‘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 and 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. Calderón 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. Calderón 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.’

Calderón 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. Calderón 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 Calderón 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. Calderón 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 Calderón, drowsy.

‘What does Inés 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 Inés 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 Inés 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 Calderón. ‘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 Inés,’ 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 Inés, 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 Inés.’

‘Maddy was dead. I was very badly shaken. Inés 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 Inés,’ said Calderón, 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 Calderón, 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. We’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 Calderón.

‘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 Calderón. ‘I married everybody else’s dream. I was the brilliant young judge, Inés 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 Calderón, 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 Calderón. 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 Calderón, 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 Inés. 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. Inés would make sure of all that.

‘There is, of course, a bourgeois solution to that,’ said Marisa.

‘What?’ said Calderón, turning to look at her between her upturned nipples, suddenly hopeful.

‘You could murder her,’ she said, throwing open her hands, easy peasy.

Calderón smiled at first, not quite registering what she had said. His smile turned into a grin and then he laughed. As he laughed his head bounced on Marisa’s taut stomach and it bounced higher and higher as her muscles tightened with laughter. He sat up spluttering at the brilliant absurdity of her idea.

‘Me, the leading Juez de Instrucción in Seville, killing his wife?’

‘Ask her ex-husband for some advice,’ said Marisa, her stomach still contracting with laughter. ‘He should know how to commit the perfect murder.’

4

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 05.30 hrs

Manuela Falcón was in bed, but not sleeping. It was 5.30 in the morning. She had the bedside light on, knees up, flicking through Vogue but not reading, not even looking at the pictures. She had too much on her mind: her property portfolio, the money she owed to the banks, the mortgage repayments, the lack of rental income, the lawyer’s fees, the two deeds due to be signed this morning, which would release her capital into beautifully fluid funds of cash.

‘For God’s sake, relax,’ said Angel, waking up in bed next to her, still groggy with sleep and nursing a small cognac-induced hangover. ‘What are you so anxious about?’

‘I can’t believe you’ve asked that question,’ said Manuela. ‘The deeds, this morning?’

Angel Zarrías blinked into his pillow. He’d forgotten.

‘Look, my darling,’ he said, rolling over, ‘you know that nothing happens, even if you think about it all the time. It only happens…’

‘Yes, I know, Angel, it only happens when it happens. But even you can understand that there’s uncertainty before it happens.’

‘But if you don’t sleep and you churn it over in your head in an endless washing cycle it has no effect on the outcome, so you might as well forget about it. Handle the horror if it happens, but don’t torture yourself with the theory of it.’

Manuela flicked through the pages of Vogue even more viciously, but she felt better. Angel could do that to her. He was older. He had authority. He had experience.

‘It’s all right for you,’ she said, gently, ‘you don’t owe six hundred thousand euros to the bank.’

‘But I also don’t own nearly two million euros’ worth of property.’

‘I own one million eight hundred thousand euros’ worth of property. I owe six hundred thousand to the bank. The lawyer’s fees are…Forget it. Let’s not talk about numbers. They make me sick. Nothing has any value until it’s sold.’

‘Which is what you’re about to do,’ said Angel, in his most solid, reinforced concrete voice.

‘Anything can happen,’ she said, turning a page so viciously she tore it.

‘But it tends not to.’

‘The market’s nervous.’

‘Which is why you’re selling. Nobody’s going to withdraw in the next eight hours,’ he said, struggling to sit up in bed. ‘Most people would kill to be in your position.’

‘With two empty properties, no rent and four thousand a month going out?’

‘Well, clearly I’m looking at it from a more advantageous perspective.’

Manuela liked this. However hard she tried, she couldn’t get Angel to participate in her catalogue of imagined horrors. His objective authority made her feel quite girlish. She hadn’t yet got to the point of recognizing what their relationship had become, how it fitted with her powerful needs. All she knew was that Angel was a colossal comfort to her.

‘Relax,’ said Angel, pulling her to him, kissing the top of her head.

‘Wouldn’t it be great to be able to compress time and just be in tomorrow evening now,’ she said, snuggling up to him, ‘with money in the bank and the summer free?’

‘Let’s have a celebratory dinner at Salvador Rojo tonight.’

‘I was thinking that myself,’ she said, ‘but I was too superstitious to book it. We could ask Javier. He could bring Laura so you can have someone to flirt with.’

‘How very considerate of you,’ he said, kissing her head again.

When Angel and Manuela had met it seemed that the only thing holding her life together was her legal battle over Javier’s right to have inherited the house in which he was living. They’d met in her lawyer’s office, where Angel was sorting out his late wife’s estate. As soon as they’d shaken hands she’d felt something cave in high up around her stomach and no man had ever done that to her before. They left the lawyer’s office and went for a drink and, having never looked at older men, having always gone for ‘boys’, she immediately saw the point. Older men looked after you. You didn’t have to look after them.

The more she found out about Angel the more she fell for him. He was a phenomenally charming man, a committed politician (sometimes a little too committed), right wing, conservative, a Catholic, a lover of the bulls, and from an established family. In politics he’d been able to broker agreements between fanatically opposed factions just because neither party wanted to be disliked by him. He’d been ‘someone’ in the Partido Popular in Andalucía but had quit in a fury over the impossibility of getting anything to change. Recently he’d joined forces, in a public relations capacity, with a smaller right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucía, which was run by his old friend, Eduardo Rivero. He contributed a political column for the ABC newspaper and was also their highly respected bullfight commentator. With all these talents at his disposal it hadn’t taken him long to bring Javier and Manuela back together again.

‘All energy expended on court cases like yours is negative energy,’ Angel had told her. ‘That negative energy dominates your life, so that the rest of it has to go on hold. The only way to restart your life is to bring positive energy back into it.’

‘And how do I do that?’ she’d asked, looking at this huge source of positive energy in front of her with her big brown eyes.

‘Court cases use up resources, not just financial ones, but physical and emotional ones, too. So you have to be productive,’ he said. ‘What do you want from your life at the moment?’

‘That house!’ she’d said, despite being pretty keen on Angel right then, too.

‘It’s yours, Javier has offered it to you.’

‘There’s the small matter of one million euros…’

‘But he hasn’t said you can’t have it,’ said Angel. ‘And it’s much more productive to make money in order to buy something you really want, than to throw it away on useless lawyers.’

‘He’s not useless,’ she said, and ran out of steam.

There were a few thousand other reasons she had stacked up against Angel’s stunningly simple logic, but the source of most of them was her miserable emotional state, which was not something she wanted to peel back for him to see. So, she agreed with him, sold her veterinary practice at the beginning of 2003, borrowed money against the property she had inherited in El Puerto de Santa Maria and invested it in Seville’s booming property market. After three years of buying, renovating and selling she had forgotten about Javier’s house, the court case and that hollow feeling at the top of her stomach. She now lived with Angel in a penthouse apartment overlooking the majestic, treelined Plaza Cristo de Burgos in the middle of the old city and her life was full and about to be even sweeter.

‘How did it go last night?’ asked Manuela. ‘I can tell you wound up on the brandy.’

‘Gah!’ said Angel, wincing at some gripe in his intestines.

‘No smoking for you until after coffee this morning.’

‘Maybe my breath could become a cheap form of renewable energy,’ said Angel, fingering some sleep out of his eye. ‘In fact everyone’s breath could, because all we do is spout hot, alcoholic air.’

‘Is the master of positive energy getting a little bit bored with his cronies?’

‘Not bored. They’re my friends,’ said Angel, shrugging. ‘It’s one of the advantages of age that we can tell each other the same stories over and over and still laugh.’

‘Age is a state of mind, and you’re still young,’ said Manuela. ‘Maybe you should go back to the commercial side of your public relations business. Forget politics and all those self-important fools.’

‘And finally she reveals what she thinks of my closest friends.’

‘I like your friends, it’s just…the politics,’ said Manuela. ‘Endless talk but nothing ever happens.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Angel, nodding. ‘The last time there was an event in this country was the horror of 11th March 2004, and look what happened: the whole country pulled together and by due process of democracy kicked out a perfectly good government. Then we bowed down to the terrorists and pulled out of Iraq. And after that? We sank back into the comfort of our lives.’

‘And drank too much brandy.’

‘Exactly,’ said Angel, looking at her with his hair exploded in all directions. ‘You know what someone was saying last night?’

‘Was this the interesting bit?’ she said, teasing him on.

‘We need a return to benevolent dictatorship,’ said Angel, throwing up his hands in mock exasperation.

‘You might find yourselves out on a limb there,’ said Manuela. ‘People don’t like turmoil with troops and tanks on the streets. They want a cold beer, a tapa and something stupid to watch on TV.’

‘My point entirely,’ said Angel, slapping his stomach. ‘Nobody listened. We’ve got a population dying of decadence, so morally moribund that they no longer know what they want, apart from knee-jerk consumption, and my “cronies” think that they’ll be loved if they do these people the favour of mounting a coup.’

‘I don’t want to see you on television, standing on a desk in Parliament with a gun in your hand.’

‘I’ll have to lose some weight first,’ said Angel.

Calderón came to with a jolt and a sense of real panic left over from a dream he could not recollect. He was surprised to see Marisa’s long brown back in the bed beside him, instead of Inés’s white nightdress. He’d overslept. It was now 6 a.m. and he would have to go back to his apartment and deal with some very awkward questions from Inés.

His frantic leap from the bed woke Marisa. He dressed, shaking his head at the slug trails of dried semen on his thigh.

‘Take a shower,’ said Marisa.

‘No time.’

‘Anyway, she’s not an idiot—so you tell me.’

‘No, she’s not,’ said Calderón, looking for his other shoe, ‘but as long as certain rules are obeyed then the whole thing can be glossed over.’

‘This must be the bourgeois protocol for affairs outside marriage.’

‘That’s right,’ said Calderón, irritated by her. ‘You can’t stay out all night because that is making a complete joke out of the institution.’

‘What’s the cut-off point between a “serious” marriage and a “joke” one?’ asked Marisa. ‘Three o’clock…three thirty? No. That’s OK. I think by four o’clock it’s ridiculous. By four thirty it is a complete joke. By six, six thirty…it’s a farce.’

‘By six it’s a tragedy,’ said Calderón, searching the floor madly. ‘Where is my fucking shoe?’

‘Under the chair,’ said Marisa. ‘And don’t forget your camera on the coffee table. I’ve left a present or two on it for you.’

He threw on his jacket, pocketed the camera, dug his foot into his shoe.

‘How did you find my camera?’ he asked, kneeling down by the bed.

‘I went through your jacket while you were asleep,’ she said. ‘I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks. Don’t worry, I didn’t erase all those stupid shots of your lawyers’ dinner to prove to your very intelligent wife that you weren’t out all night fucking your girlfriend.’

‘Well, thanks very much for that.’

‘And I haven’t been naughty.’

‘No?’

‘I told you I left some presents on the camera for you. Just don’t let her see.’

He nodded, suddenly in a hurry again. They kissed. Going down in the lift he tidied himself up, got everything tucked away and rubbed his face into life to prepare for the lie which he practised. Even he saw the two micro movements of his eyebrows, which Javier Falcón had told him was the first and surest sign of a liar. If he knew that, then Inés would know it, too.

No taxis out at this early hour of the morning. He should have called for one. He set off at a fast walk. Memories ricocheted around his mind, which seemed to dip in and out of his consciousness. The lie. The truth. The reality. The dream. And it came back to him with the same sense of panic he’d had on waking in Marisa’s apartment: his hands closing around Inés’s slim throat. He was throttling her, but she wasn’t turning puce or purple and her tongue wasn’t thickening with blood and protruding. She was looking up at him with her eyes full of love. And, yes, she was stroking his forearms, encouraging him to do it. The bourgeois solution to awkward divorces—murder. Absurd. He knew from his work with the homicide squad that the first person to be grilled in a murder case was the spouse.