‘And there’s no need to go back to your office,’ the commissioner went on. ‘There’s a team inside clearing up as we speak. Your new desk in Homicidios is waiting for you. Although …’ She paused and looked at Laura with faux concern. ‘I understand you may have to share with someone? Is that right?’
Laura nodded.
‘Not much space at the moment. But I’m sure you’ll cope.’
From the side, Laura raised an apologetic eyebrow in Cámara’s direction.
‘Right.’ Rita slapped her hands together, smiling. ‘Now that’s done, Laura can give you your new case. Something came in late last night and you’re the perfect man for the job.’
She indicated to Laura.
‘Chief Inspector Martín, please do the honours.’
‘Yes, Señora.’
Laura opened the file in her hands and began to speak in a monotone.
‘José Luis Mendoza Uribe. Died yesterday, his sixtieth birthday. Was the owner of the Sunset nightclub in the Sierra Calderona just north of the city. Body found on the premises by one Abdelatif Cortbi. Cause of death still to be determined. Body currently being held at the Centre for Forensic Medicine. Autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow.’
‘Why is this our case?’ asked Cámara.
‘Is there a problem, Chief Inspector?’ said the commissioner. ‘Is this case not high profile enough for you, perhaps?’
‘You said the body was found at the club,’ he said to Laura, ignoring Hernández. ‘That’s Guardia Civil territory. Why’s it with us?’
‘He was found at the club, that’s right,’ said Laura. ‘But he was brought to La Fé hospital in an ambulance. It was only here in the city that he was declared dead. Which means that he’s on our patch.’
‘He was still alive when they found him?’
‘Possibly. It’s still not clear. Hopefully the autopsy will provide more details.’
‘OK,’ said Cámara.
‘Satisfied?’ asked the commissioner.
‘The Guardia Civil aren’t going to be happy about it.’
‘They’ll just have to accept it,’ said Laura. For a moment the two of them were speaking like colleagues, as though their commanding officer were not present. Cámara caught the connection between them and silently thanked her.
‘The Guardia Civil will cooperate in every way,’ Hernández butted in, sensing what was going on. ‘I think that is the last thing you need to be worrying about, Chief Inspector.’
‘What do we know about this man?’ asked Cámara.
‘At the moment, very little,’ answered Laura. ‘Apart from the gossip, of course. We’ve all heard of Sunset. And of the kinds of things that go on up there.’
‘I’ll look into it,’ he said. ‘What about this other guy you mentioned? Abdel-something.’
‘Says he was José Luis’s partner.’
‘Business partner? Or partner partner?’
‘Partner partner.’
‘Cherchez la femme,’ said Cámara with a grin. Neither woman laughed.
‘Is that a homophobic comment, Chief Inspector?’
Cámara shrugged.
‘No one’s taken a statement from him yet,’ said Laura.
‘What about the científicos?’
‘One thing at a time, please, Chief Inspector,’ said Hernández. ‘I know you’re used to charging off, spending police resources with little or no justification, but things have changed. We’re not getting the crime-scene investigators involved until we know that this is an actual murder.’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Cámara.
‘I said we don’t know if this is a murder yet.’ The commissioner smiled. ‘My apologies, we should have made it clearer at the beginning.’
‘It’s just a routine case?’ asked Cámara.
‘That’s right. A routine check.’
The commissioner placed her hands on her hips.
‘You may find you have to get used to this kind of police work from now on. A bit of a step down.’
Cámara sniffed. It was clear enough what was going on. Laura handed him the file.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me.’
He paused.
‘Just one thing,’ he said. ‘Why even pass it to Homicidios at all? I mean, if there’s no suspicion of foul play?’
The commissioner was silent. Laura spoke.
‘A call came in last night,’ she said. ‘Anonymous, relating to the death. Certainly a hoax, but suggesting that it wasn’t an accident, that José Luis was killed.’
‘I see,’ said Cámara. ‘Who took the call?’
‘The details are all in the file, Chief Inspector,’ said the commissioner. ‘Now if you’ll excuse us, I have some matters to discuss with the head of Homicidios.’
Cámara looked at Laura, but she stared at the ground. Clinging to the file, he walked out of the office, closing the door as gently as he could behind him.
FOUR
His old office was out of bounds, and the thought of walking into the dark, cramped, ground-floor offices of Homicidios where a cool reception and a shared desk awaited somehow failed to appeal. Instead, he took the lift to the basement, where a small room with a cement floor, strip lighting, two bare tables and a couple of vending machines pushed against a wall had been designated a ‘canteen’. No one used it, preferring to frequent the several bars in the local neighbourhood. But the room allowed some pen pusher in the system to tick a box on a form with a list of ‘employee facilities’ on it.
Cámara stepped in, switched on the lights, and breathed in the hard, metallic, musty smell that he recognised from the previous time – the only time – he had been here. One of the machines was supposed to produce something resembling coffee, but it was never used and he doubted it could make anything now. The one next to it had cans of soft drinks, brightly coloured packets of nuts and crisps – almost certainly well past their sell-by date – and bottles of water. He placed a couple of coins into the slot, heard the machine swallow them, and pressed a button. With a clunk a plastic bottle fell out at the bottom. He picked it up: it was dusty and warm.
He placed the water on one of the tables and sat down to glance through the file. It stared back at him, unopened. He already knew, simply by holding it in his hands, that it was thin and held very little information. Almost certainly nothing more than what had been mentioned in the commissioner’s office. The question was whether he should bother reading it at all. What had happened earlier, what was going on in the Jefatura, felt like a palace coup: bright new faces with a bright new mandate busy sweeping away the old guard, introducing their bright new world. The plan was transparent enough. He thought for a moment about giving Torres a ring, but checked himself: his colleague would doubtless be in Rita’s office receiving his own dressing-down.
Instead, the question for Cámara now was how to respond: accept what had happened and carry on, or do what Rita really wanted and hand in his resignation.
The fact was, leaving the police force was always a possibility somewhere at the back of his mind. He had no problem with putting criminals away. The problem came when it was no longer – and when was it ever? – a simple matter of catching ‘bad guys’. Cámara came from a long line of anarchists – his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him – active members of libertarian groups who had suffered and even, in his great-grandfather’s case, been shot for their beliefs during a more authoritarian past. Deep down, Cámara knew that he shared their views, if in a less militant form. Years before he had managed to come to terms with being both a State employee and not believing in the State to begin with: in the absence of an anarchist revolution, working for the common good was good enough. And it did well to have the odd anti-authoritarian within an organisation that tended to attract his polar opposites: something about trying to balance things out, or so he told himself.
Only Torres, a lone Socialist – although he hinted at the presence of others – was on any similar kind of wave
length. It was why they worked so well together. But now even that relationship was being taken away from him.
Daydreams of a life outside the police had come and gone, getting him excited for a few days or even weeks before fading. And he would share them with Alicia. Things were good with them again, the sparkle returning to their relationship after the difficulties and scars of the past. Now both in their late forties, they had enough life behind them to know what they liked, enough life ahead of them to build something new if they wanted.
And now this. The door out of the police had been opened and he had been given a sudden push in its direction.
He nibbled the side of his mouth, eyes unfocused as he let his mind wander. Reaching for the water, he unscrewed the lid, tossed it on to the tabletop and lifted the bottle to drink. It tasted old and stale: how many years had it been sitting in the vending machine? He coughed as the liquid hit the back of his mouth, lurching forwards to clear his throat.
He stood up, coughed again, and shook himself out of his dream state. The bottle of offending water seemed to laugh at him from the table.
‘Only one place for you,’ Cámara mumbled, snatching it up. He rescrewed the top and took a step towards the vending machines, sending the bottle flying towards a small, empty dustbin sandwiched between them. The bottle ricocheted off their side walls and clattered with a heavy thud into the metal container below.
‘Fucking poison,’ said Cámara.
He turned back to the table: the file was still there, undisturbed by his little drama.
‘And what am I going to do about you?’ he said to it.
No answer, and as if expecting it to tell him what to do, he flicked it open, casting an eye over the scanty contents. He had been right: everything had been mentioned already back in Rita’s office.
Everything except one name that seemed to wink up at him from the page, someone involved in the case who had definitely not been mentioned earlier. Someone Cámara wouldn’t mind having a chat with just now.
He grinned, picked up the file, and headed towards the door.
FIVE
Carlos watched the ambulance carrying his agent’s dead body drive up the street and disappear around a corner. He checked his hands and clothes for any blood, nodded at the policeman charged with securing the crime scene, then climbed into his Audi, fired the engine, and put it into gear. It would take almost an hour to cross Madrid and reach the HQ of the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia.
After he had sped up side streets, zigzagging partway, the traffic began to slow: roadworks on the A6 were causing tailbacks as far as the Plaza Moncloa. In the hard morning light the city felt stiff and wheezy like an old man trying to cough his dying lungs into life. Across the pavement, the doors of the metro station opened and belched out another huddle of commuters: men with ill-fitting suits, elderly women laden with bags, students making their way with grim purpose to classes in the nearby university complex. All was movement and noise: the crashing hammer of a pneumatic drill tearing into the tarmac, the crackling buzz of a swarm of mopeds filtering past to reach the front of the traffic lights, the tearing roar of a thousand combustion engines. Carlos watched the bustling hordes: they knew nothing, saw nothing, understood nothing. Which was how it should be.
He turned his attention away as the traffic moved in a short burst along the clogged-up avenue. His schedule would suffer, and his right hamstring was beginning to tire from shifting his foot from accelerator to brake and back. And yet, he told himself, he was calm. Carlos was always calm. It was who he was, who he needed to be. Uncontrolled passion – rage, lust, greed – were a source of weakness in a man. And Carlos had no time for weakness. Which was why he had got where he had, been given the responsibilities that only he could take on.
Nonetheless, he had to admit that despite his usual sense of control, a sensation of annoyance, even mild frustration, was stirring somewhere within him. He put it down to a lack of coffee: it was fast approaching ten o’clock and the two cups he had drunk with his breakfast at six – washing down the bread, olives and fried eggs with cumin that had been his staple since living years before in Morocco – now faded into memory. Yet somewhere he knew that insufficient caffeine was not the sole cause of his discomfort. Despite being only four hours old, this morning had already brought its fair share of problems, of which the traffic jam was merely the latest.
Carlos had a rigid system of categorising people. There were three basic groups: idiots; useful idiots; and the enemy. The majority fell into the first – the crowding thousands now surrounding his car; the commuters and office workers; the students, housewives and unemployed; the bus drivers and shopkeepers; the tourists and street cleaners – these were all, unless demonstrated as otherwise, idiots, the dumb, the stupid, the uncomprehending. The very people whose lives it was his job to keep safe. And the less they knew, the safer they were. And the easier his task became.
But the work of a security-service officer could not be performed in a vacuum – that would be absurd, if, admittedly, an attractive proposition at times. No, people – the idiots – could not be held at a complete remove, hence his second category: useful idiots, easily the most complicated of the three. A useful idiot could take several forms: almost anyone who worked for him, for example, was viewed as a member of this category. A useful idiot was, naturally, of use to him, but lacking knowledge he or she was still, technically, an idiot. Others who entered his world in a less hierarchical manner, like a colleague working in a different government department with information or leverage that could be helpful, were also part of the second group. Then there were those whom Fate occasionally sent his way: a one-time informant passing on a tip, or a person who could be turned into an operative of sorts. The great advantage of these informal contacts was the ease with which any association with his organisation could be erased: no paperwork to destroy, all connections denied. And the assistance of the mainstream, which tended to regard with suspicion claims about government ‘dirty tricks’ or conspiracies. No one of consequence took them seriously. Besides, endemic corruption had so muddied the waters of public life that few people believed very much at all these days.
The problem with useful idiots, however, was an inherent instability within the category itself. Ordinary greed meant that few could remain in the group for sustained periods of time; one small, very partial taste of Carlos’s world led almost inevitably to them wanting more, as though intelligence were some kind of secret pantomime, a hidden theatre offering forbidden fruits of excitement and limitless entertainment. Such people had to be dealt with in a variety of ways. Some could be given a drip-feed of attention and low-level information to keep them ticking along. Others had to be pushed in one way or another back into the category of mere idiot, all usefulness removed. For a handful this could be done through fear. Others were simply starved out – cut off and left to wither. Yet this strategy could bring danger, for instead of decaying back into the status of idiot, such people could sometimes shift into Carlos’s third category: the enemy.
Defining the enemy was simple enough: anyone not in the first two groups was automatically in the third. Ideology, race, religion or any other categorisation was superfluous. The only question was how to deal with them, how they could be managed, controlled or crushed. And the most difficult to deal with were former useful idiots.
Dealing with such a situation had taken up the earlier part of Carlos’s morning. A week before, a member of the group known as the Guardia Suiza – not their real denomination, yet the name had stuck nonetheless – had gone absent without leave after completing an operation. It was normal in his line of work to be given a short term of leave after debriefing, a time to decompress, come to terms with any moral issues – although mental and physical fatigue tended to far outweigh any internal doubts among such people. Yet this man – Sergeant Mimon, a former soldier from the Ceuta-based Regulares unit – had vanished. An investigation revealed a complication in the man’s emotiona
l life – human passion once again causing difficulties: his girlfriend had formed an attachment to another man. Mimon had found out and, as soon as his mission was complete, immediately went home to sort things. Carlos had admired the fact that Mimon’s discipline had held sufficiently not to have broken before his target was dispatched, yet once the trigger was pulled his training had snapped. After which things became ugly: his girlfriend ended up in hospital with a broken jaw and fractured skull and remained, as far as Carlos knew, in a coma. Not that he was overly concerned for her welfare – she was a member of the idiot class, and while he cared for them as a collective, he could not dwell on their individual sufferings. The problem was with Mimon, who had demonstrated a lack of self-control that could not be tolerated. From being a useful idiot, Mimon had moved into the camp of the enemy – a problem.
In the end it had been relatively simple to persuade the girlfriend’s new lover to perform the task, and for a brief time this man too had become a useful idiot: supplied with a firearm and the necessary information. His rage and desire for revenge took care of the rest. Mimon was now dealt with, his body taken away by the ambulance, and his killer in police custody for murder, facing a lengthy prison term.
It had been successful, that much was true. But it had been a distraction. And what was worse, the Guardia Suiza – an already depleted body – had one fewer to its number. Finding someone to replace Mimon would be difficult. And this was the main concern on Carlos’s mind as he edged his way along. Not just that he had lost an operative, but that he had done so at a critical time, when the services of the Suiza might be called upon at any moment. Things were moving into a critical phase and security for the entire operation was of paramount importance. What was more, just as he was mopping up after Mimon’s disposal, a report had reached him of a possible security breach, one which, as soon as he reached his desk, he would take a closer look at. No sooner was one problem dealt with than another cropped up. Hence the need for steel-like calm, even here in the clogged-up artery of a decaying city.
Fatal Sunset Page 3
