There were cases to prepare and meetings to be attended and Ines got through it all until the early afternoon when she found herself with a spare halfhour. She decided to go for a walk in the Murillo Gardens, which were just across the avenue. The gardens would calm her down and she wouldn't have to listen to any more conjecture about the bomb. She had the little grenade attack in her relationship to consider. She knew a breather in the park wasn't going to help her sort it out, but at least she might be able to find something around which to start rebuilding her collapsed marriage.
Over the last four years when things had been going wrong for Ines in her marriage she played herself a film loop. It was the edited version of her life with Esteban. It never started with their meeting each other and the subsequent affair, because that would mean the film started with her infidelity, and she did not see herself as somebody who broke her marriage vows. In her movie she was unblemished. She had rewritten her private history and cut out all images that did not meet with her approval. This was not a conscious act. There was no facing up to unfortunate episodes or personal embarrassments, they were simply forgotten.
This movie would have been immensely dull to anyone who was not Ines. It was propaganda. No better than a dictator's glorious biopic. Ines was the courageous fiancee who had picked up her husband-to-be after the nasty little incident that they never talked about, given him the care and attention he needed to get his career back on track…and so it went on. And it worked. For her. After each of his discovered infidelities she'd played the movie and it had given her strength; or rather it had given her something to record over Esteban's previous aberration, so that she only suffered from one of his infidelities at a time, and not the whole history.
This time, as she sat on the park bench playing her film, something went wrong. She couldn't hold the images. It was as if the film was jumping out of the sprockets and letting an alien image flood into her private theatre: someone with long coppery hair, dark skin and splayed legs. This visual interference was shorting out her internal comfort loop. Ines gathered the amnesiac forces of her considerable mind by pressing her hands to the sides of her head and blinkering her eyes. It was then that she realized that it was something on the outside, forcing its way in. Reality was intruding. The copper-haired, dark-skinned whore she'd seen only this morning, naked, on her husband's digital camera was sitting opposite her, smoking a cigar without a care in the world. Marisa didn't like the way the woman sitting on the bench on the other side of the shaded pathway was looking at her. She had the intensity of a lunatic about her; not the raving-in-the-asylum type but a more dangerous version: too thin, too chic, too shallow. She'd come across them at the Mexican dealer's gallery openings, all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They filled the air with high-pitched chatter to keep the real world from bursting through the levee, as if, by chanting their consumer mantras, the great nothing that was going on in their lives would be kept at bay. In the gallery she tolerated their presence as they might buy her work, but out in the open she was not going to have one of these cabras ricas ruining her expensive cigar.
'What you looking at?' said Marisa. 'You're ruining my cigar, you know that?'
It took a moment for Ines, fluttering her eyelids in astonishment, to realize that this was directed at her. Then the adrenaline kicked into her prosecutorial system. Here was a confrontation. She was good at those.
'I'm looking at you. La puta con el puro,' said Ines. The whore with the cigar.
Marisa uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, with her elbows on her knees, to get a good look at her heavily made-up adversary. She didn't stop to think too long.
'Hey, look, you bony-assed bitch, I'm sorry if I'm on your patch, but I'm not working, I'm just enjoying a cigar.'
The insult slashed across Ines's face leaving it red with outrage. The blood dimmed Ines's vision at the edges and played havoc with her oral-cerebral linkage.
'I'm a fucking lawyer!' she roared, and the people in the park stopped to look.
'Lawyers are the biggest whores of them all,' said Marisa. 'Is that why you paint your face like that? To hide the pox?'
Ines leapt to her feet, forgetting her injuries. Even in her fury she felt that twinge in her side, the bumping of her bruised organs, and it was that which stopped her from a full physical onslaught. That, and the force field of Marisa's languid muscularity, and impassive vocal brutality.
'You are the whore,' she said, pointing a spindly white finger at Marisa's lustrous, mulatto sheen. 'You're the one fucking my husband.'
The shock that registered in Marisa's face encouraged Ines, who had misread it as consternation.
'How much is he paying you?' asked Ines. 'It doesn't look as if it's much more than 15 Euros a night, and that's a disgrace. That's not even minimum wage. Or does he throw in the copper wig and buy you a fat cigar to keep you happy when he's not there?'
Marisa instantly recovered from the revelation that this was the pale, pathetic, stringy little wife that Esteban couldn't bear to go back to. She'd also seen that wince of pain as Ines had got to her feet and guessed at the hurt being disguised by the clownish panstick. She'd seen beaten women in the poverty of Havana and she could spot vulnerability at a hundred metres, and she had the ruthlessness to open it up and reveal it to its owner and the rest of the world.
'Just remember, Ines,' she said, 'that when he's beating you, it's because he's been fucking me so beautifully, all night, that he can't bear the sight of your disappointed little face in the morning.'
The sound of her name coming out of the mulatto's mouth made Ines catch her breath with a loud cluck. Thereafter the words sliced through her with the ferocity of blasted glass. The arrogance of her own anger disappeared. She felt the shame of being stripped naked in public with all eyes on her.
Marisa saw the fight go out of her and watched the sag in Ines's shoulders with some satisfaction. She felt no pity; she'd suffered much worse when she'd lived in America. In fact the thin white hand with which Ines now held her side, no longer able to disguise the pain, only made Marisa think of other possibilities. Fate had brought them together and now it was up to one to shape the destiny of the other.
11
Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 14.15 hrs
A group of workmen had formed around the section of the building where Fernando had pinpointed his wife's position from the sound of her mobile phone. Fernando was on his haunches, with his hands clasped over the top of his head, trying to exert additional gravitational force, as if there was the possibility that more tragedy might carry him away like a child's lost helium-filled balloon.
The crane loomed over the scene with its wrist-thick steel cable, taut and creaking. There were workmen on ladders using motorized hand-held saws, capable of ripping through concrete and steel with a noise that went through Falcon taking shreds with it. They had inserted hydraulic props and thick scaffolding planks to keep the collapsed floors apart as they carved out a tunnel. Chunks of concrete were coughed from the hole within clouds of dust, and showers of sparks spewed out as the saws' teeth bit into steel. The goggled workmen, grey as ghosts, plunged further in until the unbearable sound stopped and there was a call for more props and planks. The sun beat down. The sweat tracked dark rivulets through the grey dust on the workmen's faces. Once the props and planks were inserted the saws started up again, making all humans aware of the savagery of their metal teeth. The workmen were off the ladders now, kneeling on pads strapped to their knees, staring into the tangled skeleton of the building, embraced by claws of steel rods jutting from the shattered concrete.
He knew he should move away, that the sight of the confused guts of the building was not good preparation for the task at hand, but Falcon was caught up in the drama and was feeding a profound sense of anger at the tragedy. Only Ramirez calling wrenched him out of his distraction.
'We're getting reports of a blue transit van that was parked outside the front of the building yesterday morning,' said Ramirez. 'There seems to be confusion about the numbers of people in it. Some say two, others three and still others, four. They brought in tool boxes, a plastic box of some sort of electrical supplies and insulation tubing, carried in rolls over their shoulders. Nobody remembers any company name on the side of the van.'
'And it all went into the mosque?'
'There's confusion there, too,' said Ramirez. 'Most of the people we're talking to don't live in the building, they were just passers-by. Some didn't know there was a mosque in the basement. We're getting snapshots of what happened. I've got Perez working on the residents list. He's down at the hospital. Serrano and Baena are working
