The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

by Robert Wilson

  Falcón pushed the television closer. He removed the CCTV tape and put in the other tape. He turned up the volume and pressed play. The scream from the television even made him jump. Carlos Delgado kicked his chair back, waved his hands at the screen and then gripped his thick, curly hair, as if for support.

  'No, no, no. Stop it. That's nothing to do with us,' he shouted.

  'It was in your possession.'

  'Turn it off. Just turn it off.'

  Falcón stopped the tape. Carlos was shaken. They sat.

  'Child abuse is a very serious offence,' said Falcón. 'People convicted of such crimes go to prison for a long time and have miserable lives there. Most choose to go into solitary confinement for the seven to ten years of their sentence.'

  'We stole the television and the video recorder,' said Carlos.

  'Where from?'

  Carlos told the story. They'd been paid 1,500 euros to buy petrol and been given directions and a key to the finca. They'd set fire to the place, as they'd been asked to do, and they stole the stuff on the way out. That was all. They had no idea what was in it. They just wanted a bit of extra cash for the equipment. Falcón nodded, encouraging more exonerating detail.

  'Who paid you the fifteen hundred euros to do this?' he asked.

  'I don't know his name.'

  'How do you know him? How does he know you?' asked Falcón. 'You don't ask just anybody to burn a house down. That's a serious thing, isn't it? There has to be some trust. You only trust people you know.'

  Silence from Carlos as he swallowed hard.

  'Are you afraid of this man?' asked Falcón.

  Carlos shook his head.

  'How old are you?'

  'Thirty-three.'

  'You're a Sevillano. You've never lived anywhere else?'

  'That's right.'

  'Still got friends from your childhood?'

  'Pedro. Pedro's the only one.'

  'You're the same age?'

  He nodded, unable to think where this was going.

  'When was the last time you saw your old childhood friend Salvador Ortega?'

  Carlos was stunned. He sat there blinking, uncomprehending.

  'I don't know anybody called Salvador Ortega,' he said.

  Falcón felt something cold developing in his stomach.

  'Was the name of the man who gave you fifteen hundred euros to burn down the finca Ignacio Ortega?'

  Carlos shook his head. Falcón looked into his eyes and knew that he'd never heard that name before, that it inspired no fear, no dread and no horrific memories.

  'Tell me the name of the man who paid you to burn down the finca. Speak clearly, please.'

  'Alberto Montes.'

  Falcón left the room and knocked on Ramírez's door. He leaned against the wall in the corridor feeling sick.

  'You got him already?' asked Ramírez, closing the door.

  'I didn't get the right result, though,' said Falcón. 'I should have thought this out properly. I've been believing in my own stupid instinct too much. He's just named Alberto Montes.'

  'Joder,' said Ramírez, thumping the wall.

  'And now it's all fallen into place,' said Falcón. 'This is precisely what Montes would have done. He'd panic, or his self-disgust would finally get the better of him, or both, and he'd just want to get rid of the problem. Burn the place down. Except… the whole sierra caught fire, thousands of hectares were destroyed. And he'd blown it again. That's why he jumped.

  'The day I saw Ignacio Ortega I knew he was a cunning little bastard and I didn't think. He's on a different level. The reason why we're getting the pressure is that he's told those people to put pressure on us. He would never do anything as stupid and unsubtle as arson. He's gone straight to the top of his client list and told them to stop us dead, or face the consequences.'

  Carlos and Pedro were sent back down to the cells without writing their statements. Falcón took the audio tape of Carlos's confession and kept it with him. He picked up Maddy Krugman's laptop from the evidence room. Ramírez went home. They reconvened at Falcón's house and copied the tape. It was grim viewing, but they realized it was the product of a secret camera hidden in the wall of one particular room. It featured only four clients. The businessman from Ramírez's barrio, a well-known defence lawyer, a TV presenter and an unknown.

  'This is how the Russians get things done,' said Ramírez, as they packed everything away. 'I don't know why they do it. I'm not a clever lawyer or businessman and I can't think of any sexual excitement that would induce me to expose myself to such risk.'

  'This isn't about sex,' said Falcón. 'This is about damage. Having had damage done to you, or doing damage to others. Sex is a long way from what's going on on that tape.'

  'Whatever,' said Ramírez, pouring out another two beers. 'We've done this. We've made the copy of the tape. And now what? We're fucked, aren't we? This isn't going anywhere. As soon as it comes out that Montes paid the arsonists, we're dead in the water. We have to keep our mouths shut or they go through us with a hobnail enema.'

  'Elvira gave me a lecture about not being too zealous in the pursuit of justice in this case,' said Falcón. 'Institutions are protected by powerful people who want to hold on to power and they will ensure that I never get what I want. But when you see something like this, and that finca out in the sierra, and you begin to understand the level of corruption that made it possible, I start thinking that maybe we should clear the whole lot out and start again. I've realized that I'm very naive when it comes to these elevated heights of operation.'

  'Well, you know who that will include, if you want to clear out the old,' said Ramírez, tapping his chest. 'My past is not so sweet. I think that priest I confessed to aged a decade when he heard me out.'

  'What are we talking about, José Luis? A few favours from hookers?'

  'It's not good,' he said, shrugging. 'In this sort of atmosphere, nobody gets let off.'

  'You're not in the same league as these people.'

  'And you know what it is about these people?' said Ramírez, the beer hitting his empty stomach. 'That cabron from the barrio – he's successful, wealthy, has a couple of houses here, some more on the coast, a yacht, a speedboat, more cars than trousers, and yet he still wants more. You see, there's only so much lobster you can eat, only so much champagne you can drink, only so many pretty girls you can fuck for money… and then what?'

  'The excitement of the forbidden fruit,' said Falcón. 'So, maybe I was wrong, before. Maybe it isn't about damage, at this level. Maybe it's about power. The power to do these things with impunity.'

  'I'd better go. I can see where this evening is heading,' said Ramírez. 'But I tell you, once they get hold of the Montes shit, they're going to make sure we live in fear.'

  'Did you see the printouts Cristina found of Marty Krugman?'

  'I didn't recognize the guy he was talking to.'

  'He's called Mark Flowers,' said Falcón. 'He's the communications officer at the American Consulate.'

  'Hah! Not so crazy Krugman.'

  'There's probably a very reasonable explanation for it.'

  'They were lovers,' said Ramírez. 'Good night.'

  Desperate for some good news, Falcón called Alicia Aguado and was glad to find her still elated after her session with Sebastián Ortega. The first big step had been taken. He'd revealed the extent of the sexual abuse he'd suffered at the hands of Ignacio Ortega. Despite the horror of what the boy had been through, the breakthrough had made her happy – the healing process had started. Falcón longed for that sort of job satisfaction. Instead, on nights like these, with the arrowroot stalks of fortune up in the air, he could only see his work as a desperate shoring-up of the breakdowns, a sticky plaster applied to the gourd-sized stinking abscess in the body of society. He wished her well and hung up.

  He hid the video behind two locked doors in Francisco's old studio. Back in the study, he checked he had Krugman's house keys, the laptop, the printout of Mark Flowers, and h
is loaded revolver. He drove out to Santa Clara and parked his car in Consuelo's driveway. He went in to explain his night's work to her and she insisted on feeding him. She was not herself. She was listless, quiet, distracted, even depressed. She said she was missing her children, that she was worried about them even with the police protection, but there seemed to be something else as well. At 10.30 p.m. he walked across to the Krugmans' house, let himself in and went upstairs and put Maddy Krugman's laptop back in her work room. He went to the bedroom, switched off his mobile, lay down and dozed fitfully.

  At two o'clock in the morning his eyes opened to a sharp click from downstairs. He waited and listened to the complete silence of a good thief at work. There was no sound for several minutes. Then a flashlight came on in the corridor outside the bedroom. He was a first- rate, methodical thief, not a cheap, rowdy one, prone to defecating on the floor. He went into Maddy Krugman's work room. There was a sound like a nylon zip opening as the thief booted up the laptop.

  Even breathing sounds loud when a good thief is at work. But while he was waiting for the laptop to boot up he was using the time to go through the physical prints. Falcón used that noise to get off the bed, wait for the feeling to come back into his right hand, take out his revolver and walk down the corridor towards the light bouncing in the room.

  'Are you looking for this?' he asked, holding out his gun.

  The thief looked up from the laptop, whose screen lit his irritation. He sat back on Maddy's work stool and put his hands on his close-cropped head and looked bored.

  'I'm not interested in you,' said Falcón. 'I'm interested in what you do when you've found what he wants.'

  'I call him and we meet down by the river.'

  'Call him and tell him you got lucky,' said Falcón. 'Slow movements.'

  The thief made the call, which took seconds because he said only one word: 'Romany'. They went down to Falcón's car and the thief drove them back into the city. They parked on Cristobal Colón and went down the steps to the walkway by the river. They waited in the dark. After some minutes footsteps came down on to the walkway. A man stood looking around. Falcón came at him from the shadows.

  'Is this what you're looking for, Mr Flowers?' asked Falcón, holding out the printout lit by his pen torch.

  Flowers nodded, studying the shot.

  'I think we should take a seat,' he said.

  The thief ran off up the steps. Flowers handed back the printout. He took out a handkerchief.

  'Sorry for underestimating you, Inspector Jefe,' said Flowers, wiping his brow and face. 'I came down here from Madrid ten months ago. The Madrilenos have a rather jaded view of the Sevillano mentality. I should have been less crude in my methods.'

  'Ten months ago?'

  'We're taking a more active interest in our North African friends and the way they come into Europe since last September.'

  'Of course you are,' said Falcón. 'And how did Marty Krugman fit into all that?'

  'He didn't,' said Flowers. 'The Vega business was a side issue, although we got a fright when we heard about his "suicide note", until we found out where that came from.'

  'Which was?'

  'It had been scratched on to the wall of one of the cells in the Villa Grimaldi torture centre in Santiago de Chile by an American called Todd Kravitz, who was held there for a month in 1974 before being "disappeared",' said Flowers. The full inscription reads: We will be in the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end of time. Poetic enough to stick in his mind and come back nearly thirty years later to haunt him.'

  'He mentioned to his doctor that he was having sleepwalking problems,' said Falcón, 'but not the unconscious writing.'

  The pressures on a mind that didn't know it was guilty,' said Flowers.

  'Let's talk about Marty Krugman,' said Falcón. 'Why don't we start with what he was doing, and who was he doing it for?'

  That's a little more awkward for us to discuss.'

  'This isn't America, Mr Flowers. I'm not wearing a wire. My only interest as the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios is who murdered Rafael Vega and why.'

  'I have to take precautions,' said Flowers.

  Falcón stood. Flowers frisked him expertly, found the gun immediately. They sat back down.

  'The Vega business was not strictly a government operation,' said Flowers. 'It was more of an Agency issue – Company business. The tying up of loose ends.'

  'But there was co-operation between the FBI and the Agency, which extended to allowing Krugman to walk away from the Reza Sangari killing.'

  'They couldn't make a case without Marty cracking up and confessing the whole thing to them, and I told you about his trips to Chile in the seventies. What I didn't tell you was that the Chilean authorities did eventually catch up with him and he spent three weeks in the London Clinic, which was another torture centre, on Calle Almirante Barroso. In three weeks of punishment he didn't give anybody up. The only reason he didn't suffer the same fate as Todd Kravitz was because it was later on in the game and the human rights people were being more assiduous by then. This was not a guy who was going to crack under some FBI questioning.'

  'So you thought it was fitting that he should be reporting back to you on someone who had been a notorious member of that regime?' said Falcón.

  'Most Europeans think that Americans have no sense of irony, Inspector Jefe.'

  'Was that why you didn't give him any information on Rafael Vega's real identity?'

  'One of the reasons,' said Flowers. 'But if you're supposed to be reporting back on the state of mind of a person, it's better not to have your insight distorted by history.'

  'What was so important about Vega's state of mind?'

  'This was a guy we lost track of in 1982 when he absconded from a witness protection programme.'

  'So that was true about him testifying in a drug- trafficking trial?'

  'That was the surface truth. He held some damaging information about US Army officers and Agency personnel who were involved in running drugs for arms back in the late seventies and early eighties, so we cut a deal. He would act as a witness in a show trial and we would give him a new identity and fifty thousand dollars. He took both and disappeared. We couldn't find him anywhere.'

  'But you knew about the wife and daughter?'

  'That's all we could do, keep an eye on them and hope that he resurfaced. He was careful. He didn't come back for his daughter's wedding, which we were all expecting, and we assumed he was dead. We stopped watching, but we did send someone down to his wife's funeral.'

  'When was that?'

  'Not that long ago, something like three years – I can't remember exactly. But the funeral was when we found him again. He'd finally thought he was safe,' said Flowers. 'We researched his life, found that he was a successful businessman and thought that we had nothing to worry about, until the Russian mafia connection came to light about eighteen months ago.'

  'Did you think he was in the arms dealing business again?'

  'We just thought we'd better take a closer look at Rafael Vega,' said Flowers. 'But, I lied to you earlier, we did train him. He knew our ways. He knew our type of people. So we looked for other candidates and that was where the FBI came in. Marty Krugman was our perfect candidate – apart from some instability in his marriage.'

  'Do you know what I'm feeling now, Sr Flowers?' said Falcón. 'That you're giving me just enough information to satisfy my curiosity.'

  'The full story would take a long time.'

  'One moment you're talking about tying up loose ends and the next you're talking about reporting on his state of mind.'

  'It was both.'

  'What "loose ends" were you really nervous about?'

  'We had begun to think that he might be operating again in some way,' said Flowers. 'It's an addictive profession, Inspector Jefe. We found out that he'd bought a passport in the name of Emilio Cruz and that he'd taken Moroccan visas.'

  'I assumed that was his escape route.'
>
  'What did he need to escape from?'

  'Maybe it was from you, Sr Flowers,' said Falcón.

  'He had the Emilio Cruz passport before we put Marty Krugman next to him, before we discovered his Russian mafia connection.'

  'Why did he run from the witness protection programme in the first place?'

  'They're living deaths, those things,' said Flowers. 'I'd have done the same.'

  'Did he have good reason to believe that his daughter's family was not killed in an accident?'

  'That was twenty years after he'd absconded,' said Flowers. 'It's one of the unfortunate side effects of an addiction to this profession – you can never take things at face value. People die in road accidents all the time, Inspector Jefe.'

  'And did you discover what the Russian mafia connection was all about?'

  'He allowed them to launder money through his projects and they indulged his paedophilia. I understand he liked to watch. El Salido, remember?'

  'So what was Marty's job – if you already knew all that?'

  Silence from Sr Flowers. A big, bored sigh.

  'When did you tell him that Rafael Vega was Miguel Velasco?' asked Falcón.

  'No, no, you're wrong there, Inspector Jefe. I'm not lying to you about that,' said Flowers. 'You're thinking we told him, and because of his past involvement in Chilean politics that was enough to incite him to murder.'

  'Forcing a man to drink acid…' said Falcón.

  'It's a nasty way to die,' said Flowers. 'It sounds like a revenge killing. But I want to be clear on that. We did not give away Vega's real identity. We did not want Vega dead. You have to believe Marty when he told you -'

  'So what did you want to know?'

  'We're not sure.'

  'This doesn't sound very convincing, Sr Flowers,' said Falcón.

  'Probably because it's the truth, and we've developed this magnificent myth about American infallibility'

  'How about this for a theory…' said Falcón. 'You wanted to know his state of mind because you were worried that he had information that would further compromise more important members of the US administration of that era. The Secretary of State, for instance.'

  'We were worried that if he did have something he might look for ways of using it against us, but we didn't know what it could be.'