The Hidden Assassins (32 page)

‘What was so interesting about your conversation with Marisa?’ asked Calderón, unable to resist the bait of that remark.

‘She was telling me about a conversation you had about marriage. Do you remember that?’ asked Zorrita.

Calderón blinked against the rush of memory; too much had happened in too short a time.

‘The reason you married Inés…Maddy Krugman? How Inés represented stability after that…catastrophic affair?’

‘What are you trying to do here, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Jog your memory, Sr Calderón. You were there, I wasn’t. I’ve only spoken to Marisa. You talked about “the bourgeois institution of marriage” and how she, Marisa, wasn’t interested in it. You agreed with her, didn’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Calderón.

‘You weren’t happy in your marriage, but you didn’t want to get divorced. Why was that?’ asked Zorrita.

Calderón couldn’t believe it. He was in the elephant pit again. He pulled himself together this time.

‘I believe that once you’ve made a commitment before God, in church, you should adhere to it,’ he said.

‘But that wasn’t what you said to your lover, was it?’

‘What did I say to her?’

‘You said: “It’s not so easy.” What did you mean by that, Sr Calderón? It’s not as if we’re living in fear of excommunication any more. Breaking your vows wasn’t your concern. So what were you worried about?’

Even Calderón’s giant brain couldn’t compute the numerous possible answers to this question in less than half a minute. Zorrita sat back and watched the judge agonize over everything except the truth of the matter.

‘It’s not that difficult a question,’ said Zorrita, after a full minute’s silence. ‘Everybody knows what the repercussions of divorce are. If you want to extricate yourself from a legal commitment, you’re going to lose out. What were you afraid of losing, Sr Calderón?’

Put like that, it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, it
was
a common fear for men facing divorce. And he was no different.

‘The usual things,’ he said, finally. ‘I was worried about my financial situation and my apartment. It was never a serious possibility. Inés was the only woman I’d ever…’

‘Were you concerned, as well, that it might affect your social status, and perhaps your job?’ asked Zorrita. ‘I understand your wife had been very supportive of you after the Maddy Krugman debacle. Your colleagues said she helped you to get your career back on track.’

His colleagues had said that?

‘There was never any serious threat to my career,’ said Calderón. ‘There was no question that I would be appointed as the Juez de Instrucción for something as important as the Seville bombing, for instance.’

‘Your lover offered you a solution to the problem, though, didn’t she?’ said Zorrita.

‘What problem?’ said Calderón, confused. ‘I just said there was no problem with my career, and Marisa—’

‘The awkward problem of the divorce.’

Silence. Calderón’s memory baffled around his head, like a moth seeking the light.

‘“The bourgeois solution to the bourgeois problem”,’ said Zorrita.

‘Oh, you mean that I could kill her,’ said Calderón, snorting with derisive laughter. ‘That was just a silly joke.’

‘Yes, on
her
part,’ said Zorrita. ‘But how did it affect your mind? That’s the question.’

‘It was ridiculous. An absurdity. We
both
laughed at it.’

‘That’s what Marisa said, but how did it affect
your
mind?’

Silence.

‘It never, for one moment, entered my mind to kill my wife,’ said Calderón. ‘And I
didn’t
kill her.’

‘When did you first beat your wife, Sr Calderón?’

This interview was like a steeplechase, with the fences getting higher as he progressed around the course. Zorrita watched the internal struggle that he’d seen so many times before: the unacceptable truth, followed by the necessary delusion, and the attempt to construct a lie from those two unreliable sources.

‘Had you beaten her before the beginning of this week?’ asked Zorrita.

‘No,’ he said firmly, but instantly realized that it implied some admission of guilt.

‘That’s cleared something up,’ said Zorrita, making a note. ‘It was difficult for the Médico Forense to establish the occurrence of the first beating you gave her because, well, as I understand it, old bruising isn’t as easy to measure as say…body temperature. Dating old bruising is a difficult business…as is organ rupture and internal bleeding.’

‘Look,’ said Calderón, inwardly gasping at these shocking revelations, ‘I know what you’re trying to do.’

‘I’d really like to establish a specific time when you first beat Inés. Was it Sunday night or Monday morning?’

‘They weren’t beatings, they were accidents,’ said Calderón, aghast that he’d used the plural now. ‘And, whatever the case, it does not mean that I murdered my wife…I didn’t.’

‘But did the first beating occur on Sunday or Monday?’ asked Zorrita. ‘Or was it Tuesday? Of course, you used the plural. So it was probably Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and then, finally and tragically, Wednesday, and we’ll never be able to attribute what bruise to which day. What time did you get back on Tuesday morning, having spent the night with Marisa?’

‘It was around 6.30 a.m.’

‘Well, that squares with what Marisa said. And was Inés asleep?’

‘I thought she was.’

‘But she wasn’t,’ said Zorrita. ‘She woke up, didn’t she? And what did she do?’

‘All right, she found my digital camera and started downloading the images I had on it. They included two shots of Marisa.’

‘You must have been
very
angry when you found out. When you came across her in the act, caught her red-handed,’ said Zorrita, not quite able to ease back on his relish. ‘She was very fragile, your wife, wasn’t she? The Médico Forense estimates her weight before the catastrophic blood loss as 47 kilos.’

‘Look, we were in the kitchen, I just brushed her aside,’ said Calderón. ‘I didn’t realize my own strength or her fragility. She fell awkwardly against the kitchen counter. It’s made out of granite.’

‘But that doesn’t explain the fist mark on her abdomen, or the toe mark over her left kidney, or the amount of her hair we’ve found distributed around your apartment.’

Calderón sat back. His hands fell from the edge of the table. He was not a career criminal and he was finding resistance very hard work. The only time he could remember having to trump up such a quantity of lies was when he’d been a small boy.

‘As I swept her aside I must have tapped her diaphragm. She hit the counter and came down on my foot.’

‘The autopsy found a ruptured spleen and a bleeding kidney,’ said Zorrita. ‘I think it was less of a tap and more of a punch, wasn’t it, Sr Calderón? The Médico Forense thinks from the shape of the bruise around her loin area and the darker red imprint of a toenail, that it was more of a kick with a bare foot than someone “falling” on to a foot, which would, of course, be flat on the floor.’

Silence.

‘And all that took place on Tuesday morning?’

‘Yes,’ said Calderón.

‘How long was that after your lover’s little joke about solving the problem of your divorce?’

‘Her joke had nothing to do with that.’

‘All right, when was the next time you beat your wife?’ asked Zorrita. ‘Was it after you found out that your wife and lover had accidentally met in the Murillo Gardens?’

‘How the fuck do you know that?’ asked Calderón.

‘I asked Marisa if she’d ever met your wife,’ said Zorrita, ‘and she started off by lying to me. Why did she do that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘She said she hadn’t, but you know, I’ve been interviewing liars more than half my working life and after a while it’s like dealing with children; you become so practised at reading the signs that their attempts become laughable. So why do you think she lied on your behalf?’

‘On
my
behalf?’ asked Calderón. ‘She didn’t do anything on my behalf.’

‘Why didn’t she want me to know that she had had this…vocal confrontation with your late wife?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Because
she
was still angry about it, Sr Calderón, that’s why,’ said Zorrita. ‘And if she was angry about being insulted by your wife, about being called a whore, in public, by your wife…I’m wondering how she made you feel about it…Well, she told me.’

‘She
told
you?’

‘Oh, she tried to protect you again, Sr Calderón. She
tried to make it sound like nothing. She kept repeating: “Esteban’s not a violent man,” that you were just “annoyed”, but I think she also realized just how very, very angry you were. What did you do on the night that Marisa told you Inés had called her a whore?’

More silence from Calderón. He’d never found it so difficult to articulate. He was too stoked up with emotion to find the right reply.

‘Was that the night you came home and pummelled your wife’s breasts and whipped her with your belt so that the buckle cut into her buttocks and thighs?’

He’d come into this interview with a sense of resistance as dense and powerful as a reinforced concrete dam, and within half an hour of questioning all that was left were some cracked and frayed bean canes. And then they caved in. He saw himself in front of a state prosecutor, facing these same questions, and he realized the hopelessness of his situation.

‘Yes,’ he said, on automatic, unable to find even the schoolboy creativity to invent the ridiculous lie to obscure his brutality. There was nothing ambiguous about the welt of a belt and the gouge of its buckle.

‘Why don’t you talk me through what happened on the last night of your wife’s life,’ said Zorrita. ‘Earlier we’d reached the moment when you’d just made love to Marisa on the balcony.’

Calderón’s eyes found a point midway between himself and Zorrita, which he examined with the unnerving intensity of a man spiralling down to the darker regions of himself. He’d never had these things said to him before. He’d never had these things revealed to him under such emotional circumstances. He was stunned by his brutality and he couldn’t understand
where, in all his urbanity, it came from. He even tried to imagine himself dealing out these beatings to Inés, but they wouldn’t come to him. He did not see himself like that. He did not see Esteban Calderón’s fists raining down on his fine-boned wife. It
had
been him, there was no doubt about that. He saw himself before and after the act. He remembered the anger building up to the beatings and it subsiding afterwards. It struck him that he had been in the grip of a blind savagery, a violence so intense that it had no place in his civilized frame. A terrifying doubt began to crowd his chest and affect the motor reflex of his breathing, so that he had to concentrate: in, out, in, out. And it was there, in the lowest and darkest circle of his spiralling thoughts, the completely lightless zone of his soul, that he realized that he
could
have murdered her. Javier Falcón had told him once that there was no greater denial than that of a man who had murdered his wife. The thought terrified him into a state of profound concentration. He’d never looked with such microscopic detail into his mind before. He began to talk, but as if he was describing a film, scene by horrible scene.

‘He was exhausted. He had been completely drained by the experiences of the day. He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was. She told him he had to get up. It was past three o’clock. He had to go home. He couldn’t wear the same clothes as he had yesterday and appear on television. She called a taxi. She took him down in the lift. He wanted to sleep on her shoulder in the street. The cab arrived and she spoke to the driver. He fell into the back seat
and his head rolled back. He was only vaguely aware of movement and of light flashing behind his eyelids. The door opened. Hands pulled at him. He gave the driver his house keys. The driver opened the door to the building. He slapped on the light. They walked up the stairs together. The driver opened the apartment door. Two turns of the lock. The driver went back down the stairs. The hall light went out. He went into the apartment and saw light coming from the kitchen. He was annoyed. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to have to explain…again. He moved towards the light…’

Calderón paused, because he was suddenly unsure of what he was going to see.

‘His foot crossed the edge of the shadow and stepped into the light. He turned into the frame.’

Calderón was blinking at the tears in his eyes. He was so relieved to see her standing there at the sink in her nightdress. She turned when she heard his footfall. He was going to skirt the table and pull her to him and squeeze his love into her, but he couldn’t move because when she turned she didn’t open her arms to him, she didn’t smile, her dark eyes did not glisten with joy…they opened wide with abject terror.

‘And what happened?’ asked Zorrita.

‘What?’ asked Calderón, as if coming to.

‘You turned into the kitchen doorway and what did you do?’ asked Zorrita.

‘I don’t know,’ said Calderón, surprised to find his cheeks wet. He wiped them with the flat of his palms and brushed them down his trousers.

‘It’s not unusual for people to have blank moments about terrible things that they have done,’ said Zorrita.
‘Tell me what you saw when you turned into the doorway of the kitchen.’

‘She was standing at the kitchen sink,’ he said. ‘I was so happy to see her.’

‘Happy?’ said Zorrita. ‘I thought you were annoyed.’

‘No,’ he said, holding his head in his hands. ‘No, it was…I was lying on the floor.’

‘
You
were lying on the floor?’

‘Yes. I woke up on the floor in the corridor and I went back to the kitchen light and it was then that I saw Inés lying on the floor,’ he said. ‘There was a terrible quantity of blood and it was very, very red.’

‘But
how
did she end up lying on the floor?’ asked Zorrita. ‘One moment she was standing and the next she’s lying on the floor in a pool of blood. What did you do to her?’