Falcon felt for a wrist pulse, but he knew a dead body when he saw one. He set the legs straight, brought the arms down by the boy's side, reorganized the sheet over the body, and that was when he saw it. A large scar, as of a messy appendix operation. He checked under the armpit for the 'strawberry' that Consuelo had talked about, but the light was not good in the room. And for the first time he brought himself to look under the pillow. Even now he peeled it back slowly, flinchingly, as if he was going to see something he didn't want to. The face staring up at him, wide-eyed, purple-lipped was not Dario's.
'Bring me a torch,' he said.
The big Russian came in. Falcon pointed at his belt. He handed the torch over. Falcon shone it in the boy's face. Still not Dario.
'What?' asked the Russian.
'It's not the boy.'
'I don't understand.'
Falcon went out into the night. This time he was angry, almost insanely angry. He called for Consuelo and they released her, lifted her to her feet. She stumbled towards him over the uneven ground. He caught her.
'It's not Dario,' he said. 'Dario is not dead.'
'Who is it?' she asked, utterly confused.
'A dead boy,' said Falcon. 'A nameless, dead boy.'
They ducked in through the doorway, went into the room. Falcon shut the door behind him with his foot. It slammed to. Consuelo knelt by the bed, held on to the boy's arm and shook her head and sobbed as she stared into his inert face.
Falcon undid the bandage on the boy's foot.
'They cut off his toe,' he said, beside himself with rage. 'They cut off the poor boy's toe.'
Consuelo sat on the floor with her back to the bed and started crying, huge racking sobs came up as if from her pelvis, physically lifting her off the clay tiles. It lasted for a few minutes until she got a hold of herself.
'I can't take any of this in,' she said. 'You'll have to explain it to me.'
'They didn't have Dario,' he said. 'They never had Dario. They played a game to see if they could get what they wanted.'
'But Revnik doesn't have Dario either,' said Consuelo. 'We know that. He's told us.'
'That was why Donstov's man called us back,' said Falcon. 'You were right. He was nervous. You'd enraged him by telling him that Revnik claimed to have Dario, which was why he cut off this boy's toe. Then he calmed down. Came back with the incentive just in case you were bluffing him. He had nothing to lose by trying to pretend that he had Dario, and it worked. He brought everything forward, made everybody work under pressure. And there is, of course, the possibility that he still has a friend in Revnik's group.'
'But who's got Dario?' said Consuelo.
'I don't know.'
The sound of a muffled scream came from the other room.
'Take me away from this place,' she said. 'These are hell's people in here.'
They went out into the main room. The Spanish speaker was back.
'What is the problem?' he asked.
'The boy is not her son,' said Falcon. 'We don't know who he is.'
'He must be,' he said, looking at the door.
'I know my own son,' said Consuelo.
'Stay there. Don't move.'
The Spanish speaker went into the room where they were interrogating the Cuban, who was still tied to the chair, but face down on the floor and bloody with a wad of cloth in his mouth. The door shut. Questions in Russian. Muffled screams of pain. Then a dry indiscernible whisper. The door opened.
'He says they never had the boy, they cheat you,' said the Spanish speaker. 'I'm not sure I believe him. Anyway, we work on it. You go now. Wait.'
He reached into his combat trousers, pulled out two disks in their sleeves.
'These are exact replicas of the locked disks numbers 26 and 27, but with different encrypted data. Change these for the originals. They require the same password and encryption software to unlock and unscramble them as the ones you've got in the Jefatura. Bring those originals to us. Now you go. She stays.'
'What?'
'She stays as security,' he said, shrugging. 'We don't have the boy any more.'
'No,' said Falcon. 'I'm not leaving her here. She stays, I stay. You won't get your disks.'
'Wait.'
'You don't need her as security,' said Falcon. 'You know where to find us.'
The Russian went out of the farmhouse. Three minutes. The Cuban's punishment continued. Consuelo had to put her hands over her ears. The front door opened again. The Russian beckoned them out.
'Senor Revnik agrees. Less complicated for us.'
He walked them to the car. The digger worked away in the distance. Consuelo got in the passenger side. The Russian took out a pen torch, slid under the boot of the car, came back out with a small black box in his hand.
'Nearly forgot,' he said. 'Tracking device.'
'You took your time,' said Falcon.
'We had to cover the last three kilometres on foot,' he said. 'But our timing was perfect, no? Not too early so we get nervous and not too late so that you…'
He left it unfinished, said adios, went back to the farmhouse. Falcon joined Consuelo in the lit cockpit of the car. They set off down the track, on to the rough road. They passed a car parked in the long grass, headlights masked with black tape so that only slits were visible. They thumped back up on to the tarmac. Falcon drove hunched over the wheel. He stopped in Castelblanco de los Arroyos, took his police mobile out and ran through the numbers.
'It's a bit too late for the police,' said Consuelo.
'I can't blame you for forgetting that I am supposed to be the police,' said Falcon, still in a rage. 'I've nearly wiped it from my own mind.'
'Who are you calling now?'
'The head of the IT department. He's got to crack the encryption code on those two disks as quickly as possible.'
'Leave it, Javier. It's six in the morning,' said Consuelo. 'You're going to have to do a lot of ugly explaining to some guy you've just woken up and, I can assure you, you'll come out of it badly. Sort it out when you get into the office.'
'What about Revnik? Do you want him after you?'
'I don't care. Let's just go. Revnik will have to learn to be patient. You can delay him somehow. With the disks in police possession, you're in control,' she said. 'I know you want to do something positive after all that horror, but my advice to you now is not to call anybody, because the repercussions will be serious.'
Back in the car, driving through the night. After the tension, a colossal tiredness. He drove with one hand, his arm around Consuelo, her head in his chest. She changed the gears when he needed it. They were silent for some time.
'I know you're angry,' she said.
'I'm angry with myself.'
'I feel as if I've ruined you,' she said.
'I'm not ruined,' he replied, but he thought he probably was.
'I know what that cost you, having to walk away from the dead boy,' she said. 'Because it's cost me, too. They'll bury him in that pit with those people. They'll bury him like a bird that's broken its neck flying into a window. And his mother will never know.'
'I'll face that in the morning,' he said. 'I need the light of day and a mirror for that.'
'I want to come home with you,' she said. 'I don't want to be alone tonight, not even for a few hours.'
He held her tight to his chest.
But he couldn't stop his brain from picking over the mangled wreckage of events. Where had he gone wrong? From the moment he'd started working on Marisa Moreno the Russians had been on to him with their telephone threats. Then they'd contacted Consuelo, and that had confirmed it. But he'd done what Mark Flowers had warned him never to do: put uncorroborated bits of information together to make the picture fit the one he had in his head. He was going to have to remember those phone calls, what time they'd happened, what had occurred before and in between each one, and what was said. What exactly had been said.
'You're thinking,' said Consuelo. 'This is no time for thinking, Javier. Yo
u said it yourself. Wait for the light of day. Things will be clearer then.'
He parked outside his house in Calle Bailen. Still not light, time closing in on seven o'clock. They went straight upstairs, stripped off and got into the shower. They washed the filth off each other. The water disappeared black and grey down the drain. She washed her hair. He soaped her shoulders, kneaded the muscles back into life. They sat on the floor of the shower, she between his legs, his arms wrapped around her. The water cascaded down. He kissed the back of her neck.
They got up wordlessly, turned off the water, dried themselves with towels in the dark bedroom, lit only by an oblong of light from the empty bathroom door. She threw the towel away, his dropped to the floor. After the night they'd been through he had no idea why his cock should be so massively swollen. She didn't understand why she felt a desire for him so strong it made her feel twenty all over again. The whole night had been illogical. They came together like fighters, wrestling for position. She bit his shoulder so hard he gasped. He rammed into her with a shuddering vehemence that riveted her to the bed. Their skin slapped together with each questing thrust. She dug her nails into his back, spurred him on with her heels in his buttocks. He couldn't seem to get deep enough inside her. It maddened him so that he quickened his pace and she sensed a great trembling inside her as his heart thumped wildly in his throat and she clung on with the thrill welling in her body and he reached a shuddering collapse and she lay underneath him, crying and beating the mattress with the flat of her hands.
He rolled to the side, drew a sheet up over them, gathered her quivering back to his chest where she fluttered against him like a rescued bird. They slept, still as stone effigies on an ancient sarcophagus in a moonlit chapel.
23
Falcon's house, Calle Bailen, Seville – Tuesday, 19th September 2006, 12.00 hrs
Outside, the world broke about them as Falcon and Consuelo slept on. Only at midday did a call on Falcon's mobile crack open their sedation. He came to as if from some coma life where fantastic goings on were now reduced to the dullness of reality.
'Late night?' asked Ramirez.
'You could say that,' said Falcon, panting into the phone, his heart walloping in his chest. 'What's going on?'
'I got a call from Perez about ten thirty. He was in Las Tres Mil with one of the Narcotics guys, following up on Carlos Puerta. They found him in an empty basement, still with the needle in his arm. Overdose. I told him not to disturb you and to handle it himself.'
Falcon ran his hand down his face, tried to rub some feeling of reality into it.
'He just called me again about ten minutes ago,' said Ramirez. 'He's been doing some hunting around, talking to people with the Narc. Remember Julia Valdes, El Pulmon's girlfriend, who was shot yesterday in his apartment? She used to be Carlos Puerta's girlfriend. They worked together. She was a flamenco dancer, he sang. They bust up in June and she started going with his dealer. Closer to the source, I suppose.'
'Are we looking at a suicide?' asked Falcon, still not quite with it. 'Had Puerta taken the bust-up badly?'
'Very badly. He went downhill fast,' said Ramirez. 'His junkie friends said he got some royalties from a recording contract and put the whole lot up his arm. By the time you interviewed him with Tirado he was at the end of a three-month binge.'
'How much money did he get?' asked Falcon. 'Three months is a long binge.'
'Good point,' said Ramirez. 'For some reason I don't think we've quite got the full story on Puerta.'
Falcon nodded, said he would get into the office as soon as he could. They hung up. Consuelo called her sister, spoke to her sons Ricardo and Matias, told them she'd be with them in an hour. No news.
Breakfast was a stunned affair, conducted by automatons in wordless understanding. She wore a shirt of his and a pair of boxer shorts. The toast soaked up the green olive oil, the fresh red tomato pulp, the thinly sliced jamon. They ate and drank small cups of bitumen coffee. The sun was bright in the patio, the water in the fountain flat as glass, birds swooped between the pillars. They could not eat slowly enough for this to last longer than twenty minutes.
The car's windscreen framed their view of the city, a documentary so dull, of people going about their business, that its audience could not believe that this was what it had all been about. There must be more to it than shopping, having your hair done and painting a door.
'Did it happen?' asked Consuelo.
'It happened,' he said, and held her hand.
'What now?'
'I have to think where I went wrong,' said Falcon. 'I have to retrace my thoughts to find the deviation point.'
'What do I tell Inspector Jefe Tirado?'
'Let him carry on,' said Falcon. 'He'll have his own way of doing things, and he's probably got as good a chance of success as we have.'
'He might be concentrating too much on the Russians.'
'I'll put him right about that.'
He came off Avenida Kansas City and went into Santa Clara, found her street.
'I can't stop thinking that I've ruined you,' she said.
'You said that last night, Consuelo, and I told you…'
'You corrupted yourself because of me,' she said. 'I forced you to join hands with gangsters and made you complicit in the kind of aberration you're paid to investigate, and I can't tell you how…'
'Francisco Falcon and I used to play chess together,' he said. 'I remember one time when he forced me into a position where the only move I could make would get me deeper into trouble, and, having made the move, his response meant that, again, I had to do something which made things even worse. And so it went on to the inevitable checkmate. That's what's been happening here. Once I'd made the mistake of believing that the Russians had taken Dario, I drew us both into a series of inexorable moves. You didn't ruin me. I ruined myself with a blinkered approach. I panicked because…'
'Because Dario means almost as much to you as he does to me,' said Consuelo. 'And I think it brought back the horror of what happened to Raul's child, Arturo, too. That was the first time I fell for you, four years ago, when we asked each other: What happened to that little boy? And that's partly why you did it: all that terrible stuff came back to you.'
Falcon put his foot on the brake. The car eased to a halt in the middle of the road. He stared vacantly down the shaded street. The street where Consuelo lived.
'How could I forget it?' he said to himself. 'How could I possibly have forgotten that?'
A car pulled up behind them and, when its driver saw that nobody was going to get out, honked its horn. Falcon pulled over.
'It happened in the Plaza San Lorenzo,' he said. 'I got the call just before we met at the Bar La Eslava. The voice said: "Something will happen. When it does, you will know that you are to blame because you will recognize it. But there'll be no discussion and no negotiation because you'll never hear from us again."'
'You'll recognize it?' she repeated. 'And what did you think they meant by that at the time?'
'I don't know that I did think about it that much,' said Falcon. 'It was just another threatening phone call. I'd had several.'
'You'd been somewhere that night.'
'Madrid. On the train. I had a call on the AVE telling me to keep my nose out of other people's business.'
'What was the business you were going to do in Madrid?'
'Yes,' he said slowly. 'Police business and… other business.'
'The same business you were on when you went to London and Dario was abducted?'
'Exactly that,' said Falcon. 'I thought the call I received on the AVE was because I was pushing Marisa Moreno to talk to me. So when I got back to Seville I went to see her again before I went to meet you, just so that she knew I wasn't scared by the calls. I even told her I'd be waiting for a call from her people. So when I got that call just as I came into the Plaza San Lorenzo I didn't think about it. My brain made the automatic connection back to Marisa.'
'But they weren't Maris
a's people.'
'And by going to London I disobeyed their instructions to keep my nose out of their business.'
'And who are they?'
'I'm not quite sure,' said Falcon. 'Let me use your mobile.'
'But do you know why Dario was taken?'
'I think,' said Falcon, punching out a text to Yacoub, 'that it was done so that my attention would be diverted elsewhere.'
'You're saying things without saying anything, Javier.'
'Because I can't,' he said and sent the text.
Need to talk. Call me. J.
'But you think you know who took Dario?' asked Consuelo.
'I'm not precisely sure who would have done the job, but I know the group who ordered it.'
'And they are?' said Consuelo, grabbing his head, turning it towards her. 'You don't want to tell me, do you, Javier? What could be worse than the Russian mafia?'
'This time I'm going to get my intelligence right,' said Falcon. 'I'm not making the same mistake twice.' Crawling along Avenida Kansas City looking for a public phone. The heat oppressive. Falcon alone now. The text back from Yacoub had told him that he was in a hotel in Marbella and gave the telephone number of a Spanish mobile to use. Falcon gave up looking, went to the railway station.
'What are you doing in Marbella?' asked Falcon.
'Business. I mean, clothes,' said Yacoub. 'It's a small fashion show, but I always pick up a lot of work for the factory here.'
'Is Abdullah with you?'
'No, I left him in London. He's going back to Rabat,' said Yacoub. 'Why all the questions?'
'There's been a development. We need to talk face to face.'
'I don't know whether I can get all the way to Seville,' said Yacoub. 'That's three hours in the car.'
'How about half way?'
'I'm on the road to Malaga now.'
'Could you get to Osuna?' asked Falcon. 'That's about a hundred and fifty kilometres from Malaga.'
'When?'
'I'll call you with a time. I haven't been into the office yet.' As he was leaving the station he picked up a message from Mark Flowers asking for a meeting in the usual place. Falcon was desperate to get to the office, but the river was on the way.
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