'It's not nothing,' said Aguado. 'Whatever it is…hold on to it.' Ines had been sitting in the apartment for over an hour. It was some time after 9.30 p.m. She had tried to call Esteban but, as usual, his mobile was turned off. She was quite calm, although inside her head there seemed to be a wire pulled taut to vibrating point. She had been to see her doctor but had left just before she was due to be called. The doctor would want to examine her and she didn't want to be looked at, pried into.
The incident in the park with the mulatto bitch-whore kept intruding on her internal movie, forcing the film out of the gate and jamming her head with other images: the lividness of Esteban's face as it appeared under the bed and the twitching of his bare feet on the cold kitchen floor.
The kitchen was not a place for her to be. The hard edges of its granite work surfaces, the chill of the marble floor, the distorting mirrors of all the chrome were reminders of the morning's brutality. She hated that fascist kitchen. It made her think of the Guardia Civil in jackboots and their hard, black, shiny hats. She couldn't see a child in that kitchen.
She sat in the bedroom, feeling tiny on the huge and empty marital bed. The TV was off. There was too much talk about the bomb, too many images of the site, too much blood, gore, and shattered glass and lives. She looked at herself in the mirror, over the ordered hairbrushes and cufflink collections. A question danced in her brain: What the fuck has happened to me?
By 9.45 p.m. she couldn't bear it any longer and went outside. She thought she was walking aimlessly, but found herself drawn to the young people already beginning to gather in the warm night under the massive trees of the Plaza del Museo. Then, unaccountably, she was in Calle Bailen and standing in front of her ex-husband's house. The sight of it brought up a spike of envy. She could have had this house, or at least half of it, if it hadn't been for that bitch of a lawyer Javier had hired. It was she who'd found out that Ines had been fucking Esteban Calderon for months and had asked (to her face!) if she'd wanted all that tawdry stuff dragged through the courts. And look at her now. What a great move she'd made. Married to an abuser of women, who, when he wasn't sodomizing his wife, 'for purposes of contraception', was off with every unpaid whore who waggled her tits…Where had all this terrible language come from? Ines Conde de Tejada didn't use this sort of language. Why was her mind suddenly so full of filth?
But here she was, outside Javier's house. Her slim legs in her short skirt trembled. She carried on past the doors to the Hotel Colon and turned back. She had to see Javier. She had to tell him. Not that she'd been beaten. Not that she was sorry for what she had done. No, she didn't want to tell him anything. She just wanted to be near a man who had loved her, who had adored her.
As she hid in the darkness of the orange trees and prepared herself, the door opened and three men came out. They went to pick up a taxi outside the Hotel Colon. The door closed. Ines rang the bell. Falcon reopened the door and was stunned to see the oddly diminished figure of his ex-wife.
'Hola, Ines. Are you all right?'
'Hola, Javier.'
They kissed. He made way for her. They walked to the patio with Falcon thinking: She looks as small and thin as a child. He cleared away the remnants of the CNI party and returned with a bottle of manzanilla.
'I should have thought after a day like today you'd be exhausted,' she said. 'And yet here you are having people round for drinks.'
'It's been a long day,' said Falcon, thinking: What is this all about? 'How's Esteban holding up?'
'I haven't seen him.'
'He's probably still at the site. They're working a roster system through the night,' said Falcon. 'Are you all right, Ines?'
'You've asked me that already, Javier. Don't I look all right?'
'You're not worried about anything, are you?'
'Do I look worried?'
'No, just a little thin. Have you lost weight?'
'I keep myself in shape.'
It always bewildered Falcon, who was already running out of things to say to Ines, how he could ever have been obsessed by her. She struck him now as completely banal; an expert in chitchat, a beautiful presenter of received opinion, a snob and a bore. And yet before they married they'd had a passionate affair, with wild sexual encounters. The bronze boy in the fountain had fled from their excesses.
Her heels clicked on the marble flags of the patio. He had wanted to get rid of her as soon as he'd seen her, but there was something about her pitiful frailness, her lack of Sevillana hauteur, that made it hard for him to brush her off into the night.
'How's things?' he said, trying to nod something more interesting into his head, which was almost completely taken up with the decision he had to make within the next eight hours. 'How's life with Esteban?'
'You see more of him than I do,' she said.
'We haven't worked together for a while and, you know, he's always been ambitious, so…'
'Yes, he's always been ambitious,' she said, 'to fuck every woman that passes under his nose.'
Falcon's glass of manzanilla stopped on its way to his mouth, before continuing. He took a good inch off the top.
'I wouldn't know,' he said, avoiding a conversational line that had been common knowledge in the police and judiciary for years.
'Don't be so fucking ridiculous, Javier,' she said. 'The whole of fucking Seville knows he's been dipping his cock in every pussy that comes his way.'
Silence. Falcon wondered if he'd ever heard Ines use this sort of language before. It was as if some fishwife inside her was kicking down the barriers.
'I came across one of his whores today in the Murillo Gardens,' she said. 'I recognized her from a shot he'd taken of her with his digital camera. And she was sitting in front of me on a park bench, smoking a cigar, as if she was still thinking about sucking his-'
'Come on, Ines,' said Falcon. 'I'm not the person you should be talking to about this.'
'Why not?' she said. 'You know me. We've been intimate. You know him. You know what he's…that he's a…that I…'
She broke down. Falcon took the glass out of her hand, found some tissues. She blew her nose and thumped the tabletop with her fist and tried to dig her heel into the floor of the patio, which made her wince. She took a walk around the fountain and felt a sudden stabbing pain in her side and had to hold on to herself.
'Are you all right, Ines?'
'Stop asking me that question,' she said. 'It's nothing, just some kidney-stone trouble. The doctor says I don't drink enough water.'
He fetched her a glass of water and thought about how he was going to manage this situation, with Mark Flowers due any minute. His brain stalled on the ludicrous fact that she had come to see him to talk about her husband's incorrigible womanizing. What did that mean?
'I wanted to talk to you,' she said, 'because I have no one else I can talk to. My friends aren't capable of this level of intimacy. I'm sure some of them have become his conquests. My suffering would just be gossip to them, nothing more. I know you went through a very bad time a few years ago and that has given you the capacity to understand what I'm going through now.'
'I'm not sure my experiences are comparable,' said Falcon, frowning at her self-absorbed talk, the situation expanding out of his control by the moment.
'I know that when we split up you were still in love with me,' she said. 'I felt very sorry for you.'
He knew she'd felt nothing of the sort. She'd projected all her guilt on to him and taunted him with that horrific mantra about his heartlessness: 'Tu no tienes corazon, Javier Falcon.'
'Are you thinking of leaving Esteban?' he asked, carefully, panicked by the notion that she might be thinking that he would have her back.
'No, no, no que no,' she said. 'It hasn't come to that. We're made for each other. We've been through so much. I'd never leave him. He needs me. It's just…'
It's just that there aren't enough cliches for the cheated wife to draw on, thought Falcon.
'It's just that…he needs help,' said Ines.
What was happening today? The CNI wanted him to persuade his new friend to become a spy. His ex-wife
