'It means,' he said, hurtling towards tragic revelations and veering off at the last moment, 'it means that it's part of the emotional upheaval. When everything in your life changes at once… you change with it… but more slowly. I know. I've become an expert in these matters of change.'
She nodded, gulping the words down into her chest where she could treasure them until her eyes flickered and she shot off the bar stool and leapt at the door.
'Esteban!' she roared down the street, better than any fishwife.
Calderon stopped as if he'd been knifed in the chest. He turned and Falcon expected to see the hilt jutting out of his ribs, but instead he saw – in the moments before Calderon could compose his face – fear, loss, contempt and a strange wildness, as if the man had been lost for days in the mountains. Then the judge smiled and the radiance shone out of him. She went to him. He went to her. They kissed madly in the street. An old couple sitting in the window nodded their approval. Falcon blinked at the fraudulence on display.
Ines hauled him into the bar. Calderon's step faltered as he saw Falcon perched on his bar stool. The three of them explained everything to each other twice without listening to a word. Beers shot down throats. Topics came and went. Ines and Calderon left after minutes. Falcon studied the sinew standing out of Ines's forearm as she gripped her fiance’s shirt. It was desperate. She was never letting go of this one.
The bill came. He paid it and drove home. Every light turned to red. The cobbles jolted his insides. Despite his tiredness he had no patience for bed. He went to his study and booted up the computer. He went through all the shots he'd taken since the weekend. He kept looking at the snap of Ines, seeing if it fitted with any of the others, seeing if he could remember it. It didn't help. He found the whisky, poured himself a single glass and left the bottle in the kitchen.
He was about to shut the computer down when he remembered Maddy Krugman telling him that she'd read his story on the internet. He logged on and entered her name into a search engine. There were several thousand hits, mostly for a political commentator called John Krugman and a journalist for the
Madeleine Coren in FBI Murder Inquiry
The New York photographer Maddy Coren has been helping the FBI with their murder inquiry following the discovery of Reza Sangari's bludgeoned body in his Lower East Side apartment.
The FBI could not reveal why they were talking to Ms Coren in connection with the Iranian carpet dealer's murder. They have only stated that no charges have been brought against the thirty-six-year-old photographer whose latest show 'Minute Lives' has just moved from the St Louis Art Museum. John and Martha Coren, who still live in Belleville, St Clair would make no comment on their daughter's FBI interview. Maddy Coren currently lives in Connecticut with her husband, the architect Martin Krugman.
The journalist's name was Dan Fineman and after reading it through a few times Falcon began to pick up the slightly mischievous tone of the piece. Its news- worthiness was hardly worth the column inches. He entered 'Minute Lives' into the search engine and a review came up with the headline 'Short on content. Small in stature.' The by-line was the same Dan Fineman. A man with a grudge.
Falcon typed Reza Sangari into the search engine. His murder had been well covered at a local and national level, and from these articles he was able to piece together the full story.
Reza Sangari was just thirty years old. He was born in Tehran. His mother was from a banking family and his father originally ran his own carpet factory until they left prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Reza was brought up in Switzerland but went to the USA to study Art History at Columbia University. After graduation he bought a warehouse on the Lower East Side from which he developed his carpet import and sales business. He converted the second floor into an apartment, which was where his dead body was found on 13th October 2000. He had been murdered three days earlier; he had taken two blows to the head with a blunt instrument, which had not killed him, but he had fallen sideways on to a brass bedstead which had. The weapon that caused the first wounds was never found. Because of the wide-ranging nature of the investigation and Sangari's international client list the FBI took over from the New York homicide cops and contacted all his clients and social acquaintances. They found he was seeing a number of women but not one in particular. There was no evidence of a break-in and nothing obvious had been stolen. There was nothing missing from the inventory. The FBI had been unable to develop any suspects in the case despite extensive interviews with the women he was seeing at the time of his death. Some of the names of these women had crept into the media because they were famous. They were: Helena Valankova (dress designer), Francoise Lascombs (model) and Madeleine Krugman. The last two were married women.
Chapter 11
Falcon woke up and reached for a pen and notebook which he kept by the bed to record his dreams. This time he wrote:
She could have found out about the other women and done it.
He could have found out she was having an affair and done it.
Or it could be nothing at all.
He allowed his brain the run of this circuit for a few minutes and then wrote:
He could have killed Reza S. and not told her.
She could have killed Reza S. and not told him.
Or there could be some complicity.
Or it could be nothing at all.
He'd slept badly. The Ortega file was all over the bed, along with Alicia Aguado's dictaphone and tapes. He'd been up for hours, too spooked to go to sleep, and had recorded the Ortega file as he read it. Before he got under the shower he checked the strip of paper he'd stuck over the door. It was unbroken. At least he hadn't been sleepwalking. He let the water pummel his head and some of his frustration left him as a new possibility about Ines's photograph came to him.
The heat in the gallery outside his room smothered him. He looked down on the trickling fountain. He rippled past the pillars on his way to the kitchen. He ate a round of fresh pineapple and some toast drizzled with olive oil. He took his pills. His mind roved around the loneliness of the house. Ines had called it 'mad and enormous', which it was – a sprawling, illogical, labyrinthine expression of the state of Francisco Falcon's bizarre mind.
He felt free. He started to punch out Manuela's number on his mobile and stopped himself just in time. He'd go through his lawyer, Isabel Cano. No sense in presenting things to Manuela on a plate. When people did that she just demanded more. The mobile rang.
'We have a meeting here at 9 a.m.,' said Calderon, tense and businesslike. 'I'd like you to come to that alone, if you don't mind, Javier.'
On the way to the Jefatura he dropped off the tapes at Alicia Aguado's consulting room in Calle Vidrio. Before going to his office he took the photograph of Ines to the lab along with some blank stock that he'd been using to print out his snaps. He asked Jorge to run a test to see if the paper was the same. Back in his office he read through the reports left on his desk. He collected all the necessary papers for his meeting and put them in his briefcase, separate from his internet findings about Madeleine Krugman nee Coren. He put the photograph of Pablo Ortega and Carvajal in there as well. He wanted to see the actor's reaction to it. He called Isabel Cano: still no
