Falcon looked through the porthole. The mayor's driver was sitting at the table in the empty room, eating. There was a window, barred on the outside, and a door, both to the driver's right. Falcon knelt down, crawled into the room. The driver's food stopped on its way to his mouth.
'Police,' said Falcon. 'Carry on eating. Don't look at me.'
He crawled under the window, was just about to get to his feet when the door out to the bins burst open and Sokolov came in. Blue polo shirt, hairy arm outstretched, white bandage, gun, safety off, finger on the trigger.
'Keys!' he roared.
He'd seen the driver on his own, eating. Wasn't prepared for Falcon coming up on his right side, who chopped down with his revolver on Sokolov's bandaged arm. A shot, a dull thud and a crack as the bullet went through the wooden table, before the silenced gun dropped from Sokolov's deadened hand. Falcon lost grip of his own weapon, which scuttled off into the corner. The Russian turned and crouched and Falcon found himself precisely where he didn't want to be: facing off against the former Olympic weightlifter.
Sokolov charged him, caught Falcon in the midriff with his shoulder, wrapped a steel-reinforced arm around his back and lifted him up as if he was nothing more than a cardboard cut-out.
'Hit him over the head, hard,' Falcon yelled at the driver.
Sokolov hefted him to shoulder height and slammed him down on the wooden table.
The mayor's driver jettisoned himself out of his seat, reached behind him, picked up the metal chair and brought it down so that the edge of the seat made horrific contact with the back of Sokolov's head. The noise it made was violently musical, a pianist's mad discord. Sokolov turned and the driver thought for a moment that he'd made a terrible mistake, but the light went out of the Russian's eyes and he crumpled to the tiled floor. Falcon, too, was on the floor, staring bug-eyed at the unconscious Russian, trying to remember how to breathe.
The porthole door opened and the plongeur charged in with a shining stainless-steel cleaver in one hand and a rolling pin in the other.
'Damn!' he said, as if he'd just missed out on the ultimate culinary experience. Alejandro Spinola was out on the Huelva road, running towards Seville, the velvet night air on his sweaty skin, the smell of hot, dry grasses in his nostrils. Occasionally he looked behind him, but each time he found he was only running away from the dark. He wasn't moving very quickly because he was in no condition to. His head was full of the junk of his life, the wreckage of tonight's events.
He couldn't have faced the mayor. He couldn't have faced approaching the mayor and the people from Agesa and the town planning office with his bruised lips and missing tooth, saying that he had to speak privately to the boss. He couldn't bear even the thought of the mayor's disappointment in him. Then there was his father. He'd have to face him, too. The whole messy business was going to come out, right down to what he'd done to his cousin, Esteban Calderon. It was going to be intolerable and he wasn't going to face it. He was going to run. He was going to run and run and not stop until…
Headlights came up slowly behind him, stopped. He looked back, couldn't see anything behind the blinding lights until a man stepped out from behind them, running after him. Who the fuck? He tried a sprint, but he had nothing in the tank, and slowed to a lolloping jog. The car started up again, pulled alongside him, the window down.
'Alejandro, we're the police,' said the driver. 'Come on now. Just stop and get in the car. No sense in this.'
He could hear the other man's footsteps behind him, it gave him a surge of panic. He saw headlights coming the other way. Something shrill and exciting rose in his throat. He thumped his foot down, stopped, turned back, ducked under the arms of the policeman following him, shoved past him, slipped round the back of the car and stood up straight between the oncoming headlights. The truck's horn blew the night open for three seconds, a white light covered Spinola from head to toe, and the black grille with thirty-five tons behind it gathered him in with a sickening crunch.
28
Hotel Vista del Mar, Marbella – Wednesday, 20th September 2006, 01.00 hrs
Lying on his back on the firm, expensive bed, pillow supporting his neck, phone to his ear, Yacoub Diouri was talking to his sixteen-year-old daughter Leila. They had always got on so well. She loved him in the uncomplicated way that a daughter loves her protective father. Leila and her mother was a different story, that was to do with her age, but she'd always been able to make her father happy. And Yacoub was laughing, but tears were also leaking out of the corners of his eyes, trickling down the sides of his face and coiling around the curlicued passages of his ears.
He'd already spoken to Abdullah in London, who'd been annoyed because he'd never been so popular with the girls before and he'd had to stand outside a club in the dark and cold, listening to his father prattling on about matters that could easily wait for when they were back in Rabat, but he indulged him. Yacoub was sorry for this, not because he would have liked a better conversation, but because he knew that Abdullah would always remember his irritation and exasperation as the prevailing sentiment of this particular conversation with his father.
Leila said good night, passed the phone to her mother.
'What's going on?' asked Yousra. 'It's not like you to be calling home while you're away, and you'll be back here on Thursday.'
'I know. It's just that I missed you all. You know what it's like. Business. Madrid one day, London the next, Marbella the day after. The endless talk. I just wanted to hear your voices. Talk about nothing. How's it been without me?'
'Quiet. Mustafa left last night. He's gone back to Fes. He managed to get his consignment of carpets out of customs in Casablanca and he's got to go to Germany at the weekend. So it's just been Leila and me.'
They talked about nothing and everything. He could hear her moving around in her private living room, which she'd decorated in her own taste, where she received her woman friends.
'What's it like outside?' he asked.
'It's dark, Yacoub. It's eleven o'clock.'
'But what's it like? Is it warm?'
'It can't be much different to Marbella.'
'Just go outside and tell me what it's like.'
'You're in a funny mood tonight,' she said, stepping out of the french windows on to the terrace. 'It's warm, maybe twenty-six degrees.'
'What does it smell of?'
'The boys have been doing the watering so it smells of earth and the lavender you planted last year is very strong,' she said. 'Yacoub?'
'Yes?'
'Are you sure you're all right?'
'I'm fine now,' he said. 'I really am. It's been wonderful to talk to you. I'd better go to sleep now. Long day tomorrow. A very long day tomorrow. I mean today. We're two hours ahead here, of course, so it's today already. Goodbye, Yousra. Give a kiss to Leila from me… and take care of yourself.'
'You'll be all right in the morning,' she said, but she was talking to no one. He'd gone. She went back inside and, before she closed the doors, took one last breath of the lavender-infused night air. Yacoub swivelled his legs off the bed, sat on the edge and buried his face in his hands. The tears ran down his palms. He wiped them on his bare legs. He breathed deeply, got his head back together. He put on a pair of black stretch-cotton jeans, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, black socks and a pair of black trainers. He wrapped a black sweater around his shoulders.
He lit a cigarette, looked at his watch: 01.12. He turned his bedside light off, let his eyes get used to the dark. He rested the cigarette on the ashtray, went to the window, slipped out on to the balcony and looked down into the street. The car, which had been there for days, was still there, the driver still awake. He shrugged, went back in. He checked his pockets. Nothing but the photograph. From the side pocket of his suitcase he removed a single ring with four keys. He looked around him, knowing there was nothing else he needed now. Took one last drag of the cigarette, stubbed it out and left the room. He had a powerful sense of relief as he closed the door.
