by David Hewson
‘Except for him, you mean.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, a little puzzled. ‘Except for him. That’s why he wants you killed. Too fucking clever.’
‘He’s not your father. He’s not . . .’
‘You don’t know! He can hear you when you say that. He can see you. Everywhere. Sometimes I do things, things no one can see. And still he knows.’
‘Like the brothers?’
He laughed and a little line of spittle flew from his mouth. ‘Yeah. The brothers. Me and Jaime, we did them good. They fuck around too much, so I did them. Like Jaime showed me to, when I filled him full of dope. The old man, he thinks you turn this thing on and off. He wants me to do it when he wants. Like with the university guy. And the old man in the office. Then he gets pissed when I have a little fun on my own.’
‘Did he know about your mother? The woman you thought was your mother?’
He stood up and flashed the knife in front of her.
‘What do you mean “thought”? The old man told me. That’s why it was easy, real easy, when it came to kill that college fuck. You should’ve heard him yelling. That bitch! I meet her and she comes on like she’s on heat. With me? And when I say, yeah, OK, she’s gone. Bitch!’ The eyes flashed for a moment. ‘You’re all like that. Bitches and whores.’
He held the knife tightly now, waved it in front of him. His free hand was feeling at his groin. A tic twitched above his right eye. She had to fight to take her eyes off it.
‘Get in the bedroom,’ he said. ‘I saw you on TV. Next to him. You looked right at me. I knew then I’d get to you. One day. He told me to kill you. Didn’t mention anything about anything else.’
He stood back from the door, knife still high in front of him, between the bathroom and the table with the dead cop’s gun on it. She looked at the cold, dull metal a few feet away, looked at the knife.
‘Get on the bed!’ he yelled and shoved her hard.
She half-fell through the bathroom door, kept her back close to the wall, edged along and walked into the bedroom. The big divan was made: all white and neat and tidy. The policewoman, Maria thought. Mike must have got bored, decided to help.
‘Take off the towel.’
She did and then lay naked on the cover, knees together, arms folded across her chest. Antonio leaned over, ran the blade against the front of her shin. She could feel the blood on it, sticky, clinging to her skin, and she shivered.
‘Open up. I want to see it.’
Maria let her legs fall back into a wide V, put her hand on the soft hair, felt for the opening, felt the dryness there. He followed her fingers with his eyes, his mouth gaping open.
‘Like this?’ she said, and thrust her finger into the moistness.
‘Dirty bitch,’ he gasped.
He stared at her and started to undo his belt. The jeans fell around his ankles. Still gripping the knife in his left hand, he pushed down his pants with his right. His penis hung limply in the nest of dark, tangled hair. He took it in his hand and started to jiggle it.
‘Fuck you,’ he spat, flecks of white flying out from his mouth, and this time he wasn’t talking to her. ‘Fucking, fuck you, come on, come on . . .’
Maria watched him, nothing happening. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small phial, sniffed at it. The smell of nail varnish drifted across to her.
The realization came to her like an electric shock. She wanted to live. Would do anything to survive, to defeat this man.
‘You don’t need that,’ she said.
‘What do you know?’ He was yanking at himself and still it stayed inert. ‘You stay there.’
She took her hand away from herself and waited. In the corner of the room he shook off his clothes. She could smell the sweat, rank and animal, streaming off his body.
He climbed on the bed, between her legs, pushed himself against her, pushed the knife to her throat. She felt the blade, thin and lethal, sideways against her skin.
He kneeled in front of her, jerked his groin desperately. The slack flesh pressed against her.
‘Do something,’ he said. He put his head on her chest. ‘Do it or I’ll kill you now.’
She felt lips brush against her nipple, rough skin bristle on her chest. Her left hand went to her breast, she held it, fed it further into his mouth. He was sucking. With her other hand she felt down his body, felt the prick slapping faintly, lost.
‘Do something,’ he said again, and there was something warm, like tears, on her neck.
She arched her body upwards, whispered in his ear, and took his stiffening flesh in her spare hand. ‘Who do you think of, Antonio? When you come? Who do you think of? Whose face do you see in the dark?’
His head came away from the nipple. Spittle dripped from his tongue, fell on her shoulders, slipped between their skin. His eyes stared into nothingness, the pupils dilating, growing larger, blacker, deeper. She sensed him becoming firmer in her hand. Then he lunged, jabbed faster, faster. She gasped.
‘No. No. Slowly. Slowly. You’ll lose it. Rush, and you’ll lose it.’
Her hand moved away from his groin, moved up the front of his stomach, felt the hair. She stretched her hand, stroked the skin with the tips, the inside of her fingers.
‘Slow, slow,’ she said. ‘Think, Antonio, think. Who do you think of? Whose face do you see?’
He obeyed her hands now, moved to their rhythm, and something was happening, something he had never experienced before, something was shining, coming into focus inside his head. He screwed his eyes shut, tight, tight, tight, stared into the darkness with his inner eye, saw the picture, saw her face . . . fringed with blonde hair, smiling, tempting. Just like the day in the park. When he’d seen her, when he’d told her, offered himself, as son, as lover, as anything she wanted. He kept his eyes shut and saw her mouth move, open, the red, red lips open, grow giant, grow huge in the hot bloody darkness, grow vast to consume him.
And then he was hard, harder than he ever remembered. He felt strange, superhuman, complete.
She touched the stiffness, moved herself carefully beneath him, opened her legs wider, her face like a rock, set in grim, stony determination.
‘Hold my hands,’ she said. He rocked there, above her, agonizingly slowly, in space. She screamed, threw out both her arms, thrust herself against the stiffness. ‘Now! Now! Hold my hands!’
Then she found him. The hardness rolled inside her. He gasped, as if in pain, his eyes, dark and deep pools, opened, focusing on nothing.
‘Hold my hands!’
He screamed at the sudden explosive rush inside him. She moved her palms towards his. She felt the knife handle, smooth wood, felt it fall away as his fingers opened, winding themselves in hers. Sighing, panting, gasping, she ground into him, took him far, far inside her, watched him, waited, waited, waited.
The world gyrated between their arching bodies, locked in a slow and loveless dance and then exploded into fury. He burst inside her, crying, shaking with the fever. His eyes rolled up into his head, then he lurched forward onto her, head on her chest. The bristles scraped her skin like raw sandpaper. Almost instantly he was out again, as if repelled by the act, and lay, panting, on her body, looking down its length, at the small, curving stomach, the hair below, the tiny, dark puddle on the bed. Without a thought his mouth opened, then closed, gently, once more, on the nipple. She fed it back into his mouth and sensed the desperate, nagging sucking.
Then her outstretched arm felt slowly, silently across the sheet, found what it was looking for, tightened her grip on the warm handle.
She let him suckle and shifted her shoulder in against his body so that the movement, the rubbing, might pass as an embrace. Slowly, she turned further and further into his body, moving her upper arm against him, lifting the blade higher until it shone like a silver talisman behind his head, radiant in the bedroom light.
She looked at it and felt that the world had come to a standstill, that there was nothing left but this strange, love
less mating. She was waiting too long, she knew this, but there was nothing she could do. She closed her eyes, squeezed them, opened them again, willed herself to act, told herself: Live. And still it hung there, above them, her arm growing weak and tired and feeble.
His breathing changed, became shortened, more shallow. The pressure eased on her breast. She did what she told herself not to do and looked down at him. A single black eye stared up at her, dark and fathomless, stark with the agony of being alive.
His arms suddenly gripped her body, hard and tight and painful. One hand reached up, gripped her right earlobe, twisted it savagely, trying to rip it from her skull.
She saw again the dead Angels in the bed of Cristina Lucena’s faded mansion. One ear each on their corpses.
‘Not me,’ she whispered, tearing herself from him.
The silver blade flashed down like lightning.
SIXTY
In the late-night still of the office, Quemada tidied his papers. He felt old and tired and drained. In a few weeks he would turn forty-four. Only fifteen years or so younger than the captain. The ‘old man’. Quemada had been a cop for twenty-two years, so he could still remember what the job was like when Franco was alive, before the reforms came, a time when police work had narrower, more clearly defined lines. Back then they knew what they were protecting, the status quo. Back then they knew who to lock up. The machine ran smoothly, and if it was because someone upstairs was greasing the wheels, then that was the way it was. Then so-called democracy arrived, with its votes and committees and ‘accountability’, and those lines became blurred and fuzzy. Perhaps 10 per cent of those now on the force still knew the loose way the system worked before, when an officer would fix some things with a phone call, not a warrant. When a woman could walk down Calle Sierpes without someone trying to snatch her bag or some crack addict asking for money.
When killers died for their crimes, something that Quemada never quite found acceptable, not that he voiced his opinion too loudly in cop company. He could still remember the last executions in Spain, back in September 1975. A couple of Basque separatists, three Marxists, all guilty of murder. They stuck in the memory because all five were shot, not garrotted, the way Franco liked, the traditional way. The five were executed in different cities. There was only one official capable of using the garrotte. So, thanks to a typically Spanish bureaucratic muddle, all five went to the grave courtesy of a bullet instead of being strapped to a wooden frame and slowly strangled from behind. Two months later Franco himself was dead, and the nation began to change.
You didn’t shake off the past like that so easily, Quemada thought. Good or bad. It took decades. Maybe longer.
Every month one more of the old guard retired, bought a little casita out near the coast, relaxed into an early old age of watching the big blue Atlantic go in and out, sipping the saltiness of a morning manzanilla and thinking . . . What the hell? At least it’s over.
If they eased those years with a little extra top-up from some ancient gangster’s slush fund, who cared? Now everyone gave the money to the government instead and one-third went to the bureaucrats straight away, while the rest went on the social, the taxes, the public works and a new breed of thieves licensed for the job by Brussels.
Quemada figured the money didn’t matter really. Killing people for it, particularly killing cops, was a different issue.
He couldn’t help but wonder how many times he’d looked the other way without even knowing it. Whether one day the captain would have called him in, explained a few things, then added a little extra to the pension fund. Not that he and Rodríguez ever really hit it off.
Then he dismissed the thought: who cared? You came in, you did your job, you went home. You didn’t take it with you, the good or the bad. You switched on the TV, you opened a beer or maybe the coñac bottle and you let the world wash over you. Take it home, good or bad, and it just festered, then one day it came back to haunt you. There were too many haunted people in the job already, too many ghosts flitting around the shadows.
Haunted. Like the ice queen, he thought. People who couldn’t face the day, couldn’t just sit back and let it roll. Let themselves get eaten instead.
The idea sparked something in the back of his head, made some nagging thought go walkabout, and he sat there trying to work out what it was. It hung around just out of reach, and Quemada found himself wishing Velasco was there to help, there to bounce something off, even if it was just some gratuitous insult.
‘What are friends for?’ he said to the empty room.
Then it came to him. Two initials, clear and unmistakable in a fine, female hand. At the bottom of the paper, the most damning paper, if Menéndez was right, scribbled alongside the lieutenant’s own notes. Just two letters: MG. Maria Gutiérrez.
‘Oh, crap,’ Quemada muttered, and the words bounced off the fading paint of the walls. ‘Not that.’
He swivelled round in his ancient office chair. Perspiration glistened on his head and there was something that might have passed for panic in his eyes. He ran down the corridor again and looked in Rodríguez’s office. It was empty. The sweat was cold on him, the air chill.
Quemada walked back to Menéndez’s desk and picked up some things from the cabinet, then half-ran out of the door, down the stairs and out through the main station yard.
SIXTY-ONE
She was hunched by the doorway of the bedroom, a pale, stone-coloured towel stained with blood wrapped around her body, the knife clutched tightly in her right hand. She didn’t make a sound. Quemada could taste the bile in the back of his throat. Things were bad enough when he first looked. Then, automatically, he had gone to the bathroom to find something to give her to wipe her face, her hands. What he saw was too much. He threw up hard and painfully on a dry stomach, retching and retching until he thought his heart would burst.
He was back with Maria now, crouched in front of her, holding out his hands. Best not to touch her, best to beg.
‘Lady.’ He hunted for something – anything – to say. ‘Maria. Please. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to move. The guy’s dead. Mike’s dead. There’s nothing more we can do. We have to go.’
He went back into the bathroom, trying not to look at the bloody mess in the tub, picked up a spare towel, dampened it under the tap, came back in and tried to wipe her face. She recoiled, savagely, and for a moment held the knife out towards him.
‘Jesus!’ Quemada sat down hard on one of the little cane dining chairs, hunched over and put his head in his hands. ‘Maria. You’ve got to trust me. I don’t know where the old man is, and until I know I daren’t call anyone in here, not while you’re around. I have to get you out of here. I have to.’
She stared at him and there was something – a hardness, a determination – in her eyes that made him want to run away, want to leave it all to the clean-up men, regardless of whether the captain was out there a-hunting round the corner. He’d had enough.
Quemada looked at her again, felt cold inside and said, ‘I can try to talk you round. I can try and act sympathetic. But I’m not good at this. I don’t know what the hell’s going on right now. Either we leave, or one or both of us ends up crazy or dead.’
She closed her eyes and he wondered, for a moment, whether she’d snapped already, whether he shouldn’t just try to take the knife off her, then drag her out anyway. Then he hated himself for the thought.
She opened her eyes and there were tears, big, liquid tears, brimming in them.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Quemada, and for a moment he thought he was going to join her.
She spoke slowly, deliberately. ‘Where will we go? Where can we go? Where’s safe?’
‘I’ve thought of that. It’s taken care of.’
He went to the back of the main apartment door and took down a long, fawn raincoat and held out the arms for her. She stood up and let him wrap it around her shoulders. He could feel her shivering underneath the fabric. He found the belt, kn
otted it loosely around her middle, then opened the door.
She wouldn’t look into his eyes. It was more than he could expect and he knew it.
‘Everything’s going to be OK,’ Quemada said. ‘Believe me. I’m getting us a cab. No one’s going to know.’
She walked slowly down the stairs, opened the front door herself, then stood on the threshold and turned to watch him following her. Quemada waddled down the stairs like a penguin, slightly out of condition, took hold of the door from her and found himself staring out into the blackness of the night, the dark maw of the city he knew so well, wondering what the hell was out there.
SIXTY-TWO
‘You’re lucky you caught me.’
Maggi Bartolomé was flashing eyes that darted from amusement to suspicion in equal measure. She was made up to the nines and wore a sleek red satin tube-dress.
‘Another fifteen minutes and I’d have been gone for the night.’
Quemada looked at her and found himself wishing, against his own best judgement, that he could keep her at home a little longer.
‘Your little girl could have let us in.’
She shook her head.
‘Gone. Found some stupid creep who says he’ll keep her. I didn’t ask in return for what.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’m not.’
She nodded towards the first floor and the sound of water rattling through old piping, inviting Maria to use her shower. ‘Your woman looks like she’s dead.’
Quemada said, ‘Yeah. She nearly was.’
‘This is all to do with what we were talking about? Our friend from the past?’
‘You don’t want to know what this is all about.’
‘Don’t you believe it. I did you a big favour here. I deserve something.’
Quemada thought about it, thought about how, in one way, she was involved already, tried to figure out what would come out eventually and what would stay hidden, wondered if it mattered anyway.
