The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

by Robert Wilson

  Boredom is the enemy of humanity. It is why we get up and kill.

  The torturer learns his skills from the agonies of his own mind, transformed by power.

  Guilt defines us as human but in consuming the mind destroys all that made us human. Only

  by public admission is our humanity restored. That is the measure of our mutual dependence.

  Falcón flipped through to the last entry.

  I know what you're doing. I'm going to chain you up, refuse you food and water, watch you wither and crack, fade and split, and roll a rich red wine over my tongue while you die.

  That was the problem with Krugman. He was like an unreliable witness taking the stand. The purity of his intellect was always getting infected by the bacteria of emotion.

  Ramírez appeared at the door. 'Did you see the exhibit?' said Falcón. 'The Vanished Hands.'

  'I came up here to ask Cristina's question in private,' said Ramírez. 'What the fuck are we looking for?'

  'That exhibit – do you think it's Sra Krugman's artistic interpretation of what was going on in Vega's mind, or did she know more?' said Falcón. 'This is a book of Krugman's thoughts – he talks about the mind of a torturer.'

  'These are hints, not clues,' said Ramírez. 'They are not usable.'

  'We're here because Elvira is covering his back. He's sceptical, but he wants to make sure there's no obvious connection between Krugman and – what shall we call him? – a mysterious American,' said Falcón. 'That means we're going to have to go through all of Sra Krugman's shots and -'

  'But she photographed strangers all the time.'

  'But not ones talking to her husband down by the river.'

  'And if we find a shot?'

  'You've gone back to being a non-believer again, José Luis,' said Falcón. 'If I'd told you fifteen years ago that Russian mafia gangs would control seventy per cent of prostitution in Europe, you'd have laughed in my face. But anything, and everything, is possible now. People have started to see aeroplanes as bombs. You can buy a new identity on the streets of any European city in forty-eight hours for a few thousand euros. An AK-47 can be yours in minutes. There are al-Qaeda cells in almost every country of the world. Why shouldn't the CIA be running a small operation in Seville, when the whole of Europe has become a civilization simmering with anarchy and decadence?'

  'Remind me to live in fear, Javier,' said Ramírez. 'My point is: so what if we find a shot of Krugman with a mysterious American? The consulate denies everything. Krugman was a madman who shot his wife and then himself. Where are we?'

  'Six people have died in less than a week. Five of them lived next door to each other. Even if I wasn't a cop, I would find that extraordinary,' said Falcón. 'We might be witnesses to some sort of collective unconscious implosion, where each death or suicide applies mental pressure to the next victim, or… we might simply be unable to see the connections, because we don't quite know enough.'

  The mobile in his pocket vibrated. Elvira ordered him back to the Jefatura. The American Consulate was sending someone over. Falcón left them at the search and drove back to Calle Bias Infante.

  The man from the American Consulate was a communications officer called Mark Flowers. He was about fifty years old, good-looking, tanned with black hair that must have been dyed. He spoke flawless Castilian Spanish and was well prepared for what he had to do.

  'I've read these two statements from Inspector Jefe Falcón and Juez Calderón. I was told that they were written separately. The impressive detail seems to match and, in the absence of any serious contradictions, I informed the Consul that I believed them to be accurate and true. Both statements were therefore sent to the CIA in Langley for their comments. They categorically deny any knowledge, not only of Marty Krugman, but also this so-called consultant, Foley Macnamara. Comisario Elvira also asked if the CIA had any record of one Miguel Velasco, aka Rafael Vega, who was ex-Chilean military, receiving any CIA training. They've informed me that they did a file search of all personnel as far back as the creation of the CIA after the Second World War, and found that nobody of that name had received any training. They also offered the opinion that at no point last night did Marty Krugman refer to Rafael Vega as Miguel Velasco, and that the information he gave seemed to be his interpretation of Sr Vega's mental problems. Krugman himself deduced that Vega had been in the Chilean military and that he had been involved in torture. They describe Sr Krugman as a classic fantasist, with access to an imagination infected by psychosis who, given his personal experience of South American politics of that era, would have no trouble -'

  'What personal experience of South American politics?' asked Falcón.

  'Immigration ran a search on Marty Krugman's travels outside the USA and found that he was attracted enough, through his own liberal and left-leaning politics, to make four trips to Chile between March 1971 ' and July 1973. As you know, during the Allende administration, the American government was very concerned at the development of their Marxist policies and, as a consequence, US citizens visiting that country were closely monitored.'

  'What about Vega's late wife and his daughter's family?' asked Falcón.

  'That, as you can imagine, is rather more difficult for them to verify. All they can say is that neither Miguel Velasco nor Rafael Vega was married on US soil,' said Flowers.

  'I meant Krugman's assertion that Vega's anxiety stemmed from his paranoia that they might have been killed by his enemies.'

  'Who are these enemies?'

  'The people who provided him with a witness protection programme from which he thought it best to escape.'

  'You might be interested to know that the CIA's research on Chilean military personnel revealed Miguel Velasco to be quite a notorious member of the Pinochet regime, known for his extremely unconventional and distasteful interrogation techniques. The opposition revolutionary movement, the MIR, knew him by the nickname El Salido – the Pervert.'

  'But what did the CIA have to say about the FBI input on the matter?' asked Falcón. 'Surely absconding from an FBI protection programme, after acting as a witness in a drug-trafficking trial, should be something the CIA would be interested in?'

  'The CIA were only examining these documents in the light of Sr Krugman's behaviour and claims. I know they have a file on Miguel Velasco because of his actions in the Pinochet administration. If there's anything else it would, of course, be classified.'

  'Your response has been very rapid and thorough,' said Falcón.

  'They pride themselves on it,' said Flowers. 'Since 9/11 there have been changes in the Service, especially on reaction time to all inquiries in which there is a reference to that date, even if it did refer to 1973.'

  'I added a summary of the Vega case to the statements,' said Elvira. 'For the purposes of clarification.'

  'It was very helpful, Comisario,' said Flowers.

  'What would be the reaction from the CIA if we could provide photographic proof that meetings had occurred between Sr Krugman and… US government officials?' asked Falcón, who was finding Mark Flowers to be rather too amicable and gracious.

  'Extreme surprise, I would imagine,' said Flowers, whose face remained completely impassive.

  'As you know, Sr Krugman's wife was a well-known and active photographer who particularly enjoyed taking shots of people down by the river, which was where her husband said he had meetings with code name "Romany".'

  Flowers blinked once but said nothing. He handed Elvira his card and left.

  'Do you have photographic evidence?' asked Elvira.

  'No, Comisario,' said Falcón. 'It's just a way of terminating a line of inquiry. If Sr Krugman was a fantasist, we'll never hear from Mark Flowers again. But if he was supplying information there will be some anxious people in the consulate. I'd be interested to hear if you receive communication from a higher authority.'

  Elvira's phone rang. Falcón got up to leave. Elvira stayed him with his hand. The Comisario listened, made notes and hung up.

&nb
sp; 'That was a senior officer from Aracena,' he said. 'He's just been informed by the fire department that the forest fire raging around Almonaster la Real in the past few days was an arson attack, and that they have now traced the start of the fire to an isolated finca which belonged to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes. The contents of the house have been almost completely destroyed, but they have found a rudimentary timer, which they believed was attached to an incendiary device that ignited a large quantity of petrol.'

  Chapter 27

  Tuesday, 30th July 2002

  It was still brutally hot outside the city, which crouched in a haze behind Falcón like a beast in its own fetor, but the openness of the rolling plain ahead of him, the swaying brown grasses, the distant hills, made him feel free of the discomfort of his own body. The temperature dropped as he drove through the sierra and, although it never reached below blood heat, the sense of release from the city's feverish concrete into the high greenery of the chestnut trees induced a mild delirium. Or was it Elton John singing 'Benny and the Jets' on the radio?

  It was impossible to think that anything terrible could happen out here. Whereas the city drew the poor, the lost, the corrupted and the depraved to the mangled teat of its bristly underbelly, this country seemed untouched. The jostling leaves of the trees filtered the sunlight to the pure, dappled memory of less confused times. Until Falcón turned off the main road to Almonaster la Real.

  The charcoal stink of torched forest reached him before the sight of blackened stumps and scorched, defoliated trees with their bark-flayed arms stretched out in the distress of serious burn victims. The forest floor of black-and-grey coals still smouldered, as if panting from the devastating consumption. The white sky provided a pitiless backdrop, as if to emphasize to those doubters who passed through this monochromatic horror that what had happened here was as wrong as war.

  The police and firemen he met in the local bar in Almonaster were grim and the townspeople shocked and in despair, as if they were the survivors of some wartime atrocity. They knew things that Falcón, as yet, didn't.

  He was led down to the finca, which was several kilometres outside the town and isolated in the forest. There was a kilometre of rough dirt track up to the house, whose windowless, roofless, blackened shell looked like a giant, stoved-in human skull.

  Everything wooden in the house had been consumed. The first floor no longer existed. It had burnt or collapsed under the weight of the falling roof on to the concrete below. The ground floor was piled with black terracotta roof tiles, charred beams and furniture, smoking mattresses, screenless televisions and pools of molten, but now hardened, plastic.

  They took him down through the concrete floor into the basement, which was badly scorched but intact. It didn't look like any basement he'd ever seen. There were four metal doors, two on either side of a short corridor. The doors had bolts on the outside, which could also be padlocked. None of the rooms had windows. All had burnt wooden pallets and mattresses. They were cells in which people had been kept.

  In one of the cells, whose walls were unplastered, revealing the original stone, there was some writing scratched on to a rock in the corner by the bed. It was in Cyrillic script. An enamelled metal plate lay upside down on the floor.

  They led him back upstairs and out on to the land whose grass had been burnt off, leaving a bald stretch of black and brown beaten earth, which now looked like the hide of a diseased dog. At the edge of the land, inside what would have been the tree line, were two piles of earth.

  'With the forest burnt down we could see these two humps,' said the officer. 'We dug down about a metre and found these -'

  Falcón looked down on the skeletal remains of two people nestled in the dark earth.

  'We didn't want to dig further until we had proper forensics here, but the local doctor measured them and thinks that they are a boy and a girl of around twelve or thirteen years of age. He thought that they'd been buried for between eight months and a year, given that there is no tissue left.'

  'What do you know about how this house was being used?' asked Falcón, needing to get something out, because his rage was reaching uncontainable levels.

  'Weekends only and not every weekend. Friday and Saturday nights, mostly.'

  'Did you ever meet the owner?'

  'Inspector Jefe Montes? Of course. He came and said hello to us. He said he'd bought the house and that some friends were going to do it up and use it as a hunting lodge.'

  They walked back to the house and Falcón could see that there were air-conditioning units for the lower and upper floors.

  'So they came in the summer as well?' said Falcón, pointing at the blackened boxes.

  'Not to hunt, obviously,' said the officer. 'In the end, they didn't do much hunting at all… We didn't think I much about it at the time. And, because Inspector Jefe Montes was the owner, we didn't think anything…'

  The officer's voice trailed off. 'Illegal' seemed an ineffective word to describe what had gone on in this house of horror.

  'Whoever started this fire had to bring a great deal of petrol up to the house,' said Falcón. 'They probably used plastic jerry cans and they'd have needed a pickup. Can you contact every petrol station in this area and… well, you know what to do.'

  Falcón called Elvira and gave him a report. He asked for Felipe and Jorge to be sent out with a change of clothes, because they were certainly going to have to spend the night. He also asked for some manpower to phone around the petrol stations in the Seville area, looking for a pick-up with probably two people who'd filled possibly ten plastic jerry cans with petrol, late Saturday night or very early on Sunday morning. He hung up and told the officer that the area was to be cordoned off and kept under guard. Nobody was to touch anything on the property until the forensics arrived. He checked the air-conditioning boxes on the ground floor but didn't find what he was looking for. He asked for a set of ladders. A car was dispatched to town. Falcón stood in the blackened landscape and drew fury from the destruction.

  The car returned with a set of ladders. Falcón leaned them up against the house and found himself mentally praying. He took out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers and climbed up to the air-conditioning units, one by one. On the third unit he found what he wanted – scorched, but not destroyed, was the peeling sticker of the company that had installed the units: Aire Condicionado Central de Sevilla. Ignacio Ortega's company.

  He took out another evidence bag and walked down the rough track and scooped up some dust. He expected it to match the dust found on Vega's old Peugeot.

  Ortega. Vega. Montes, he thought. And only one left alive.

  Ramírez was bored as he took Falcón's call on his mobile. There were thousands of Maddy Krugman's prints on paper and on hard disk, and the task did not inspire him. His boredom evaporated as Falcón briefed him on Montes's finca near Almonaster la Real.

  'Did you check Ignacio Ortega's alibi?' asked Falcón.

  'Yes, but that was for the night that Rafael Vega died.'

  'Where was he?'

  'He was in bed with his wife on the coast.'

  'I told him about Pablo's death late on Saturday night and he didn't come back to Seville until Sunday morning.'

  'I can ask him for proof of his whereabouts for that week if you want?'

  'I don't want to spook him.'

  'Well, if he organized that arson attack you already have,' said Ramírez. 'How many people know what happened at Montes's finca?'

  'By now the whole of Almonaster la Real. I mean not in detail, but they know it's nasty. They'll probably know about the bodies.'

  'So that's all going to be on the news this evening.'

  'We haven't got enough on him to link him to what was actually happening at Montes's finca. We'll have to find the arsonists first and they might give us the link,' said Falcón. 'Leave Cristina at the Krugmans' house and go back to the Jefatura and make it all happen, José Luis.'

  Falcón went back down into the basement o
f the house and, with a pen torch in his mouth, copied down the Cyrillic script written on the wall. As he looked around the four cells he realized that the mattresses had all been doused with petrol and set alight, but that there hadn't been enough oxygen to keep them going.

  More people were dispatched to town to bring large plastic sheets, which they laid out on the scorched earth. The mattresses and pallets were numbered off and lifted out of the basement and laid on the plastic. Falcón conducted a minute search of the walls of the empty cells.

  In the second cell he noticed a dark stain on the floor, coming from the back wall out into the centre of the room. He chipped out a piece of concrete and bagged it. In the fourth cell he found a one-euro coin behind a loose piece of mortar. He bagged that.

  Outside they started work on the mattresses, peeling back the outer fabric and working through the stuffing. The mattress from cell two had a shard of curved glass in it, a section of a broken wine goblet. The mattress from cell three had the real treasure: a used Gillette II razor blade, still with some bristles attached.

  At 3 p.m. they broke for lunch. Felipe and Jorge had arrived in Almonaster la Real and, over pork chops, chips and salad, Falcón told them to concentrate on the interior of the house before they moved on to exhuming the bodies.

  'Square metre by square metre. Photographs all the way. Dust everything for prints, even if they look completely burnt out – all televisions, video recorders, remotes. There's a lot of congealed plastic in there, which might be from videos; see if there's one centimetre of tape available. We're also looking for personal items – money, jewellery, clothing. People come to a place like this, they lose things. I want a finger search of all the land around the house. Be meticulous, do everything by the book. Nobody, and I mean nobody, who has been to this house and been involved with what's been going on here should have the slightest chance of being able to get away with it on a technicality.'