The Ignoranceof Blood jf-4

by Robert Wilson

  'We have to talk,' said Falcon.

  'Let's go upstairs,' she said. 'They're all in the living room.'

  She'd set up a television in the bedroom. There was a dent at the foot of the bed where she'd been sitting, taking time out from other people and watching the CCTV footage.

  'It hasn't been on the news yet, has it?' asked Falcon.

  'Not yet. They've kept it out of the press, too, once we saw this,' she said, and pressed the remote.

  Black and white. The same as the noir films that had drawn him to police work in the beginning. But this was grey and uninteresting, the camera static, at a dull angle from above. The flat glass of the sports goods shop was visible on one side. The tiled floor was matt, empty, and then suddenly full of two dark-haired men, one in a long-sleeved shirt, the other in a polo shirt, both carrying other clothing. They stopped, looked, and moved off away from the camera.

  'What about the other angle?'

  'That's coming.'

  There they were again, but caps on now, heads down, jackets on, too, hands buried in pockets, moving away from the shop.

  'They know what they're doing,' said Falcon.

  'That's how they look in all the other footage,' said Consuelo. 'They only took their hats and jackets off to check us out in the shop.'

  'What about footage from outside the stadium?'

  'It's coming,' she said. 'It's all been laid down on this tape.'

  'Anything from the people serving in the Sevilla Futbol Club shop?'

  'Nothing. The shop was full and busy. They didn't even see Dario,' said Consuelo. 'This is the confirmation of what Cristina found out from the couple in their apartment on Avenida de Eduardo Dato.'

  It was over in a fraction of a second. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Freeze frame. Consuelo circled the three figures in the background of the screen.

  'Dario is wearing a scarf. The guy on the right is carrying the football boots. They're the same men picked up by CCTV in the Nervion Plaza, jackets, baseball caps.'

  'That's all they've got outside the shopping centre?'

  He sat down with her on the end of the bed, leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands in prayer over his nose. She rewound the tape, played the footage again, hoping that his police brain would pick something out that she hadn't herself.

  'Talk me through your shopping trip,' he said, turning off the television. 'I want to know every centimetre and second of what you did from the moment we finished that call I made to you from the airport this morning. Every detail, every minuscule, unimportant detail that stuck in your brain. Every phone call you made and received. You're never off that phone these days. The reception isn't always good in these shopping centres, you probably had to walk around. What did you see? I want you to talk without interruption.'

  Falcon locked the bedroom door, turned the lights off, leaving just a bedside lamp glowing in the corner. He took out his notebook. Consuelo started with the heartbreaking moment that had lodged itself in her chest, when Dario had asked her: 'Do you still love me now that Javi is with us?' Falcon couldn't bear to look up. He nodded when he heard her reply. She looked out of the dark window, at their reflection with the lamp, almost a cosy scene. He let her talk. Only every so often did he break in to coax out more detail from her, just so that her brain didn't get lazy and glide over what appeared to be unimportant. He wanted the whole thing to play like a movie in her mind. He wanted to see what her camera saw. She took him through the moment she first saw the two men.

  'Both Spanish. I'd say in their twenties. One thick set, conventional hair, side parted, eyebrows sliding off the side of his face, nose a little fat as if he might have broken it, clean shaven, good teeth. The other thin, long hair, two lines running down from his cheekbones to his jaw, forehead creased.'

  'How did you see his forehead if he had long hair?'

  'He wore it tucked behind his ears.'

  'What shirt was he wearing?'

  'He was in the long-sleeved shirt. Dark blue. He wore it untucked. The thick-set guy had a Lacoste shirt on. The little crocodile. Dark green.'

  'Feet?'

  'I can't see their feet.'

  'In their hands?'

  'The jackets. Yes, I remember thinking: Jackets, on a day like this? The car computer said it was 40°C when we went into the underground car park.'

  'Colour?'

  'Dark. I can't say more than that.'

  He played the footage again. He watched it on his hands and knees, face close up to the screen. She sat behind him on the bed. He froze the frame just as the three figures came out of the shop.

  'They'll work on that shot, get it sharp and publish it in the press,' he said. 'Then we'll interview all these people standing around…'

  'But who are these guys?' she asked, joining him on her knees, tapping the screen.

  They turned to each other and she saw it straight away in the light coming from the trembling image.

  'You know something,' she said, blinking. 'What do you know, Javier?'

  He couldn't bear to be so close to her. He got to his feet. She came up with him.

  'You don't know these men, do you?' she asked. 'You can't know them. How can you know them?'

  'I don't know them,' he said. 'But I do know that my work is responsible…'

  'Your work. How can your work be responsible? You do your work. You, therefore, are responsible. How?' she asked.

  He told her about his meetings with Marisa Moreno and why she was of interest to him. The finding of the disks in the dead Russian mafioso's briefcase. The intensifying of his interrogations of Marisa. The phone calls. The phone call he'd had just before he'd seen her last night.

  'So these people are watching you,' she said. 'Which means they've been watching my house, me, my children…'

  'That's possible.'

  'You knew that,' she said and turned away from him to look out of the black window, the lamp and the two of them reflected back to her, but now transformed in her mind to a scene of gross betrayal.

  'I've been threatened before,' he said. 'It's a classic scare tactic, a delaying tactic. It's done to slow me down. To distract.'

  'Well, this is a major fucking distraction,' she said, turning on him. 'My son…'

  She stopped, something else occurring to her.

  'They did the same thing four years ago,' she said. 'I don't know how I could have forgotten that because… how could I forget that?'

  She walked away from him and turned back, like a lawyer.

  'It was one of the reasons I broke it off with you four years ago,' she said.

  'The photograph.'

  'The red cross on the photograph,' she said. 'The red marker pen that crossed out my family. People coming into my home, leaving the television on and crossing out my family. That was one of the reasons I couldn't carry on with you the last time. How am I supposed to live with that?'

  'You shouldn't have to,' said Falcon.

  'They were Russians, too,' she said, eyes fierce, mouth stretched tight across her teeth.

  'They were, but a different group. The two men who sanctioned that are now dead.'

  'Who killed them?' she asked, finding herself livid now, all logic gone, the stress of the day suddenly releasing itself into her veins, her heart thundering in her chest. 'Or doesn't it matter who killed who? People kill each other all the fucking time. That's who you deal with, Javier – killers. They are your meat and drink.'

  'This isn't a good idea,' he said. 'I should go.'

  She was on him in a flash, hitting him with both her fists high on his chest, knocking him back against the wall.

  'You brought those people into my house the last time,' she said. 'And now, just as I've let you back into my… into everything… they're back.'

  He grabbed her wrists. She tore them out of his hands, pummelled him about the head and shoulders until he managed to get hold of them again. He pulled her to him.

  'The most important thing for you to understand,
Consuelo,' he said, looking into her livid face, 'is that none of this is your fault.'

  That turned something in her, switched something off. He didn't like it. The passion disappeared. Her blue eyes turned to ice. She pushed herself away from him, eased herself out of his slackening grip. Backed away into the centre of the room, folded her arms.

  'I don't want to see you again,' she said. 'I don't want your world in mine ever again. You are responsible for Dario's abduction and I cannot forgive you. Even if you bring him back to me tomorrow you will never be forgiven for what you have done. I want you to leave and I don't want you ever to come back.'

  She turned her back on him. He could see its tense muscularity under the light top and could find no words to soften it. And he realized what this was all about. She was punishing herself. She held herself completely responsible. She had taken her eye off Dario for the sake of some stupid phone call from an idiot estate agent trying to sell her something she didn't want, and that was why he'd been kidnapped. And no amount of his taking the blame on to himself was going to change that. He unlocked the door, left the room, went down the stairs and out into the suffocating night, full of the uneasy susurrating of the trees and the low, distant threat of the city grinding out its future. Cristina Ferrera started at the appearance of Falcon in the frame of the driver's window.

  'You told her,' she said, seeing it in his face.

  He looked off down Calle Hiniesta and nodded.

  'Then I'm glad I didn't call,' she said.

  'What's happened?'

  'Nothing. The light's on, but I'm not convinced she's there.'

  She got out of the car. They looked up at the apartment. Light shone on to the roof terrace, illuminating the plant life growing around it.

  'I got here around eleven thirty and I haven't seen anything move.'

  'Have you looked at the studio?'

  'It's in darkness.'

  'Let's call her,' he said, and punched the number into his mobile. No answer.

  'Ring the bell?' asked Ferrera.

  They crossed the square in front of Santa Isabel, past the bars on Calle Vergara, which at 12.45 a.m. were now shut. Falcon pressed the buzzer. Ferrera stood back in the street.

  'I can hear it buzzing,' she said.

  'Nobody home.'

  'Or too drunk… dead to the world.'

  'You didn't leave the lights on when you took her back home and put her to bed?'

  'No.'

  'Saturday night?'

  'She didn't look like she was going anywhere.'

  'Let's take a look at the studio,' he said. 'When did you last check it?'

  'About half an hour ago.'

  They headed down Calle Bustos Tavera and found the arched entrance in profound darkness. They turned on their pen torches and went into the courtyard, where a hot breeze played lazily around the rusted remains of chassis and rejected white goods. Falcon led the way. A dog barked some way off. A torch beam picked up two small discs of reflected light. The cat didn't move until it felt too exposed, and then it turned and shrank away into the shadows. The metal steps up to the studio shook under their weight, the masked window had a crack in it he didn't remember. He reached the landing in front of the door, Ferrera, two steps below. Falcon pushed the door, which gave way. He put the pen torch in his mouth, took out a packet of latex gloves and put them on.

  'This doesn't feel right,' he said.

  13

  Marisa's studio, Calle Bustos Tavera, Seville – Sunday, 17th September 2006, 00.55 hrs

  Black and white again, in the torch beam, but this time the real noir. Liquid on the floor, black as an oil spill with a grey flotsam of wood shavings. The work bench's pylon standing in welled crude. A sketch scratched across paper, a bleached square on the lake of tar. A foot, grainy, off-white, creased with grime. Stool on its side, chrome legs, the pitch lagoon sucking up to the silver. Pencils like a barge flotilla broken up in a harbour.

  A foot?

  His torch beam travelled back.

  Is that carved from wood? The creases of toil and age meticulously etched.

  Falcon leaned in, slapped the light switch. Two horror flashes, two mind gasps, the brain needing two attempts to transform the black and white to full Technicolor. Then solid, unwavering, penetrative, buzzing neon to show the full extent of the abattoir.

  The blood had achieved terminal viscosity about half a metre from the door. It wasn't a carving. It was a human foot lying on its side, sole straining against the encroaching tide. Marisa's body was stretched out on the work bench. The caramel of her mulatto skin now the only part of the picture that was grey. Her handless arm hung down straight as a drainpipe to the pool of blood. She had no head. The only detail which distinguished the meat as human were the bikini briefs, which were soaked through. The monster which had perpetrated this butchery was propped up on some blocks of wood further along the work bench. The meat hook where it had hung, empty above it. The teeth of its chain were clogged with gore. Next to it stood the final horror. The carving of the two men on either side of the young girl, who now had a head. Eyes closed. Face slack. Coppery hair matted with blood. Marisa: part of her own work.

  The smell wafted out to them. The metal of Marisa's blood. The cess of her guts. The sulphur of her incipient rot. And on the back of this foetor came her terror, wriggling like a live worm in the brain, touching all the atavistic points, twitching up the old fears of the unstoppable agony with only one possible exit. Falcon turned away with the slaughterhouse image burned into his mind. The sweat stood off his face in beads. The saliva thickened to an eggy slop in his mouth. He sucked in the black night air, thick as bitumen.

  'Don't look,' he said.

  Too late. Ferrera had already seen enough for her to lose another rasher of her faith. It had taken her off at the knees. She slumped on the stairs, holding on to the banister, panting under her thin cotton blouse, which now had the weight of a trench coat. The torch hung slack on a loop of cord from her wrist, its light wavered over the weeds and junk beneath them. She stared, mouth gaping, until the torch light was completely still and only then did she regain her footing in the world.

  The sweat stung Falcon's eyes as he called the communications centre in the Jefatura and gave his report. He hung up, wiped his face with his hand and flung it out into the darkness. He lowered himself down on to the top step, reached out to Cristina Ferrera and squeezed her shoulder, as much to comfort himself that there were still good people in this world. She rested her face on his hand.

  'We're all right,' she said.

  'Are we?' said Falcon, because he was already thinking that the people who had done this were the same people who'd taken Dario. The courtyard was frozen under the portable halogen. Falcon sat, listing to one side, on a broken chair. The suited forensics did their work, moving to and fro before him with their evidence bags and cases. Anibal Parrado, the instructing judge, stood by looking down on the bristle-cut head of the Inspector Jefe. He spoke to his secretary in a low murmur. Falcon's eyelids were heavy and his vision kept closing in on him. Ramirez came through the archway from Calle Bustos Tavera carrying a black plastic bin liner.

  'We found this in some rubbish bins round the corner, just off Calle Gerona,' he said, 'which probably means that the forensics aren't going to find very much up there.'

  Still with latex gloves on, he pulled out a white paper suit covered in dramatic slashes of blood, which had already dried to a reddish brown.

  'Match the blood to Marisa's first,' said Falcon, on automatic. 'Then send them down to the lab… get what we can from the inside.'

  'Go home, Javier,' said Ramirez. 'Get some sleep.'

  'You're right,' he said. 'I need more than sleep.'

  Ramirez called up a patrol car, stuck Falcon in the back, told the driver and his partner to see the Inspector Jefe all the way up to his bed.

  Falcon woke momentarily, hanging like a drunkard between the two men's shoulders halfway up the stairs in his home.
Then more oblivion. The only place to be. Nikita Sokolov had arrived at eleven o'clock, told Marisa to get down to the street, said they were going for a little walk. She felt like hell. Not used to alcohol. Her stomach was sore and belching up Cuba libre, which filled the cavities of her face with the old sticky stink. She puked in the toilet, brushed her teeth. Slumped in the lift. Through the bars of the front door she saw his cigarette glowing from where he was leaning against the back wall of the church. Small, wide, dark, horribly muscular and hairy with very pale white skin. He revolted her. They avoided the drinkers outside the bars. He steered her by the elbow to the studio. She stumbled over the cobbles in the darkness of the archway, was nauseated by the shakiness of the metal stairway up to her studio. She unlocked the door, slapped on the light. Two flashes to bring her work to life. She sat on the stool, too weak to stand. He stood in the doorway, asked his questions. His polo shirt was stretched tight over the muscles in his chest and shoulders. Dark patches under his armpits. Hair sprouted from the open collar of his shirt. Colossal quadriceps shrugged under his trousers. She'd been told Nikita Sokolov was a weightlifter before he got into slapping girls around.

  She told him about the visits from the police. The questions. The stuff about the little boy. What did they tell you about the little boy? He wanted to hear what they knew. Everything. She spoke. Her arms, with nothing in them, hung by her sides. She couldn't seem to satisfy him. She couldn't seem to find enough detail to make him believe her. He told her to strip. He went out on the landing to flick a cigarette into the courtyard. Pulling off her T-shirt, dropping her skirt left her exhausted. She was still wearing the bikini briefs. She could smell herself. It wasn't nice.

  The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. He blocked the doorway again and stepped quickly aside to let two men into the room. Panic seized her throat as she saw their white suits and hoods, their masked faces, blue latex gloves. He nodded to her from the doorway – or was it to them? She had nothing in her legs now. One of the men reached for the chain saw, unhooked it, checked its teeth and the chain oil. He knew the work. Her tongue rattled in her head, mouth dry as parchment. More questions about what she had told them. Her answers no more than the clucks of a chicken beaking around in the dust. More nodding from the doorway. The one with the chain saw unravelled the flex, plugged it in, flicked off the safety, ran the motor for a second. The noise went through to her spine, left her stomach quivering. The other paper suit came for her. Turned her. Stretched her arm out on the work bench, viced her head so that she had to watch. The chain a blur coming down on her thin wrist. Had she given any names? Nothing came out of her throat. She tried to shake her head. The chain trembled above her skin. She felt the arousal of the man holding her. She lost control of her bladder. No answer would save her now. She shut her eyes, wished she'd talked to the little nun. Shoes off. Sweat in his shirt. Falcon came awake as if he'd been defibrillated back into the world. He hurt. All the mental anguish had found its way into his muscles and skeleton. Time? Just after midday. He showered. No clarity from the cascade, just vacillation between the two colossal problems which had landed on his shoulders in the last twenty-four hours. He dressed in fresh clothes. The patrolmen had taken the mobiles out of his pockets and turned them off so that he wouldn't be disturbed. He sat on the edge of the bed and played them over each other in his hand. Action for the day of rest? There was nothing to be done about Yacoub's situation. He'd entered into a pact. Silence was the only game. Breakfast. Think about how to find Dario. Resist the intrusion of all images of Marisa's terrible end.