The Silent and the Damned (18 page)

'Has he been all right?' she asked. 'You know… in his work.'

'I don't know. I've been working this case with him out in Santa Clara, but only since yesterday.'

'Santa Clara?'

'At the end of Avenida de Kansas City.'

'I know where Santa Clara is,' she said, annoyed, but her irritation instantly broke and she was staring at him with her big brown eyes in the way that she did when she wanted something. 'He said… he said…'

'What, Inés?'

'Nothing,' she said, and released his knee. 'He seems a little anxious recently.'

'Only because he's made it official now: the announcement.'

'What difference does that make?' she said, hanging on Falcón's every syllable, desperate for insight into the male psyche.

'You know… total commitment… no going back.'

'He was committed before.'

'It's official… confirmed to the world. It can make a man nervous, that sort of thing. You know, The End of Youth. No more playing around. Family. Adult responsibilities – all that stuff.'

'I see,' she said, not seeing it at all. 'You mean there's doubt?'

'No, no, no que no,' said Falcón. 'There's no doubt, just a nervousness at the prospect of change. He's thirty-seven, never been married before. It's just a reaction to the future physical and emotional upheaval.'

'Physical?' she said, sitting on the edge of her seat.

'You're not going to stay in his apartment, are you?' said Falcón. 'You'll get a house… start a family.'

'Did Esteban talk to you about this?' she said, searching his face for the least sign of a tic.

'I'm the last person…'

'We'd always said that we'd buy a place in the centre of town,' she said. 'We wanted to be in the old city in a big house like yours… maybe not so mad and enormous, but in that classic style. I've been looking for months… mostly at old properties that need work, and guess what Esteban said last night?'

'That he's found somewhere?' said Falcón, unable to stop the thought flashing through his mind that Inés had only married him for his house.

'That
he
wants to live in Santa Clara.'

Falcón stared into those big frightened eyes and felt something like slow-motion wreckage forming in his mind. Consonants caught in his throat like fish bones.

'Exactly,' she said, leaning back, almost in triumph, 'it's the antithesis of what we'd always talked about.'

Falcón drained his beer, ordered more, stuffed the pepper into his mouth messily.

'What does it mean, Javier?'

'It means,' he said, hurtling towards tragic revelations and veering off at the last moment, 'it means that it's part of the emotional upheaval. When everything in your life changes at once… you change with it… but more slowly. I know. I've become an expert in these matters of change.'

She nodded, gulping the words down into her chest where she could treasure them until her eyes flickered and she shot off the bar stool and leapt at the door.

'Esteban!' she roared down the street, better than any fishwife.

Calderón stopped as if he'd been knifed in the chest. He turned and Falcón expected to see the hilt jutting out of his ribs, but instead he saw – in the moments before Calderón could compose his face – fear, loss, contempt and a strange wildness, as if the man had been lost for days in the mountains. Then the judge smiled and the radiance shone out of him. She went to him. He went to her. They kissed madly in the street. An old couple sitting in the window nodded their approval. Falcón blinked at the fraudulence on display.

Inés hauled him into the bar. Calderón's step faltered as he saw Falcón perched on his bar stool. The three of them explained everything to each other twice without listening to a word. Beers shot down throats. Topics came and went. Inés and Calderón left after minutes. Falcón studied the sinew standing out of Inés's forearm as she gripped her fiancé’s shirt. It was desperate. She was never letting go of this one.

The bill came. He paid it and drove home. Every light turned to red. The cobbles jolted his insides. Despite his tiredness he had no patience for bed. He went to his study and booted up the computer. He went through all the shots he'd taken since the weekend. He kept looking at the snap of Inés, seeing if it fitted with any of the others, seeing if he could remember it. It didn't help. He found the whisky, poured himself a single glass and left the bottle in the kitchen.

He was about to shut the computer down when he remembered Maddy Krugman telling him that she'd read his story on the internet. He logged on and entered her name into a search engine. There were several thousand hits, mostly for a political commentator called John Krugman and a journalist for the
New York Times
called Paul Krugman. Falcón entered Madeleine Coren into the search engine. There were only three hundred hits and he quite quickly started to find references to her photographic work. They were mainly old articles and a few reviews of her exhibitions, but they always featured a shot of the stunningly beautiful young Madeleine Coren, who looked cool, unapproachable and dressed exclusively in black. He was butting up against his boredom when a small piece from the
St Louis Times
caught his eye. FBI murder inquiry: Madeleine Coren, photographer, has been helping the FBI with their inquiries into the murder of Iranian-born carpet dealer Reza Sangari. The article appeared under the local news section and was dated 15th October 2000.

Madeleine Coren in FBI Murder Inquiry

The New York photographer Maddy Coren has been helping the FBI with their murder inquiry following the discovery of Reza Sangari's bludgeoned body in his Lower East Side apartment.

The FBI could not reveal why they were talking to Ms Coren in connection with the Iranian carpet dealer's murder. They have only stated that no charges have been brought against the thirty-six-year-old photographer whose latest show 'Minute Lives' has just moved from the St Louis Art Museum. John and Martha Coren, who still live in Belleville, St Clair would make no comment on their daughter's FBI interview. Maddy Coren currently lives in Connecticut with her husband, the architect Martin Krugman.

The journalist's name was Dan Fineman and after reading it through a few times Falcón began to pick up the slightly mischievous tone of the piece. Its news- worthiness was hardly worth the column inches. He entered 'Minute Lives' into the search engine and a review came up with the headline 'Short on content. Small in stature.' The by-line was the same Dan Fineman. A man with a grudge.

Falcón typed Reza Sangari into the search engine. His murder had been well covered at a local and national level, and from these articles he was able to piece together the full story.

Reza Sangari was just thirty years old. He was born in Tehran. His mother was from a banking family and his father originally ran his own carpet factory until they left prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Reza was brought up in Switzerland but went to the USA to study Art History at Columbia University. After graduation he bought a warehouse on the Lower East Side from which he developed his carpet import and sales business. He converted the second floor into an apartment, which was where his dead body was found on 13th October 2000. He had been murdered three days earlier; he had taken two blows to the head with a blunt instrument, which had not killed him, but he had fallen sideways on to a brass bedstead which had. The weapon that caused the first wounds was never found. Because of the wide-ranging nature of the investigation and Sangari's international client list the FBI took over from the New York homicide cops and contacted all his clients and social acquaintances. They found he was seeing a number of women but not one in particular. There was no evidence of a break-in and nothing obvious had been stolen. There was nothing missing from the inventory. The FBI had been unable to develop any suspects in the case despite extensive interviews with the women he was seeing at the time of his death. Some of the names of these women had crept into the media because they were famous. They were: Helena Valankova (dress designer), Françoise Lascombs (model) and Madeleine Krugman. The last two were married women.

Falcón woke up and reached for a pen and notebook which he kept by the bed to record his dreams. This time he wrote:

She could have found out about the other women and done it.

He could have found out she was having an affair and done it.

Or it could be nothing at all.

He allowed his brain the run of this circuit for a few minutes and then wrote:

He could have killed Reza S. and not told her.

She could have killed Reza S. and not told him.

Or there could be some complicity.

Or it could be nothing at all.

He'd slept badly. The Ortega file was all over the bed, along with Alicia Aguado's dictaphone and tapes. He'd been up for hours, too spooked to go to sleep, and had recorded the Ortega file as he read it. Before he got under the shower he checked the strip of paper he'd stuck over the door. It was unbroken. At least he hadn't been sleepwalking. He let the water pummel his head and some of his frustration left him as a new possibility about Inés's photograph came to him.

The heat in the gallery outside his room smothered him. He looked down on the trickling fountain. He rippled past the pillars on his way to the kitchen. He ate a round of fresh pineapple and some toast drizzled with olive oil. He took his pills. His mind roved around the loneliness of the house. Inés had called it 'mad and enormous', which it was – a sprawling, illogical, labyrinthine expression of the state of Francisco Falcón's bizarre mind.

It came to him with a clarity that must have been obvious to everyone except himself, caught up in his months of self-absorption:
Why live here any more? This is not your house and it will never be your home. Let Manuela have it. The only reason she's pursuing you through the courts is that she'd have to sell everything and take on a huge mortgage to be able to afford it.

He felt free. He started to punch out Manuela's number on his mobile and stopped himself just in time. He'd go through his lawyer, Isabel Cano. No sense in presenting things to Manuela on a plate. When people did that she just demanded more. The mobile rang.

'We have a meeting here at 9 a.m.,' said Calderón, tense and businesslike. 'I'd like you to come to that alone, if you don't mind, Javier.'

On the way to the Jefatura he dropped off the tapes at Alicia Aguado's consulting room in Calle Vidrio. Before going to his office he took the photograph of Inés to the lab along with some blank stock that he'd been using to print out his snaps. He asked Jorge to run a test to see if the paper was the same. Back in his office he read through the reports left on his desk. He collected all the necessary papers for his meeting and put them in his briefcase, separate from his internet findings about Madeleine Krugman nee Coren. He put the photograph of Pablo Ortega and Carvajal in there as well. He wanted to see the actor's reaction to it. He called Isabel Cano: still no answer from her office. Ramírez and Ferrera turned up as he was leaving. He told Ramírez that Calderón wanted to see him alone and that he should keep trawling through Vega's offices while the rest of the squad went door-to-door looking for Sergei and/or the mystery woman he'd been seen talking to.

The Edificio de los Juzgados was building up for an active morning. The stink of humanity sweating in hope and fear had reached an animal intensity and there was no air-conditioning unit in the world that could cope. Falcón went up to Calderón's first-floor office, which overlooked the car park and the El Prado de San Sebastián bus station. The judge was smoking. There were six butts already in the ashtray, each one smoked down to the filter. Falcón closed the door. Calderón's eyes were smudged dark underneath. He still had the intense look of someone returning to civilization after an experience in the wild. Falcón laid the autopsies and police reports in front of him and sat down.

Calderón read fast, his lawyer's brain taking in the large quantities of detailed information. He sat back with a freshly lit cigarette and sized up Falcón. He seemed on the brink of saying something personal but veered away from it as if this might be too confrontational too early.

'What do you make of all this then, Javier?' he asked. 'The foundations for the building of a murder case haven't exactly been laid by these autopsies. I'm surprised the Médico Forense wasn't prepared to commit himself more at this stage.'

'Officially,' said Falcón. 'Unofficially, like all of us at the Jefatura, he's extremely doubtful that it was suicide, which is why he doesn't want to release Sr Vega's body for burial just yet.'

'Let's look at the mental states of the deceased,' said Calderón. 'Sra Vega had a serious enough condition that she was taking lithium. Her husband was not only behaving strangely, as we've seen in Madeleine Krugman's photographs, but had also been to see two, possibly three doctors about his anxiety.'

Falcón knew that Calderón had wanted to say her name, had felt the need for its sweetness on his lips and tongue. It decided him that the internet downloads in his briefcase should stay there.

'The crime scene…' Falcón started.

'Yes, the crime scene,' said Calderón. 'That seems to be explicable in any number of ways. Suicide or murder, with between one and three people involved in the deaths. You have no suspects. There's not even the vaguest mention of a motive in any report. You have no witnesses. Sergei the gardener is still missing.'

'We're working on that. We have a photo ID and we know he was seen talking to a woman in a bar near the Vegas' house quite recently. We're also going door-to-door in Santa Clara and the Poligono San Pablo,' said Falcón. 'As far as motive goes, we're going to have to work hard on the Russian angle and -'