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. You 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.''
