The Silent and the Damned (6 page)

'You adapt,' said Falcón, feeling the stab of his own experience. 'The survival instinct hasn't been undermined. You accept love from wherever it comes.'

They stared at each other, minds orbiting around the concept of the parental void, until Consuelo went to the bathroom. As the taps ran Falcón slumped back in his chair, already exhausted. He had to find the stamina for this work again or perhaps try to find new ways of keeping the worlds he pried into at a distance.

'So what do you think happened in that house last night?' said Consuelo, face repaired.

'It looks as if Sr Vega smothered his wife and then killed himself by drinking a bottle of drain cleaner,' said Falcón. 'Official cause of death will be established later. If the scenario is as it appears we'll expect to find pillow material under Sr Vega's fingernails… that sort of thing, which will give us -'

'And if you don't?'

Then we'll have to look deeper,' said Falcón. 'We're already… puzzled.'

'By the new car and the fact he was going on holiday?'

'Suicides rarely advertise what they're about to do. They carry on as normal. Think how many times you've heard the relatives of victims say, "But he seemed so calm and normal,"' said Falcón. 'It's because they've made up their minds and it's given them some peace at last. No, we're puzzled by the scenario and by the strange note.'

'He wrote a suicide note?'

'Not exactly. In his fist he had a piece of paper on which was written in English "… the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end…"' said Falcón. 'Does that mean anything to you?'

'Well, it's not explaining anything, is it?' she said. 'Why 9/11?'

'One of the forensics said he was probably bankrolling al-Qaeda,' said Falcón. 'As a joke.'

'Except… aren't we being led to believe that anything is possible these days?'

'Did Sr Vega seem unstable to you in any way?'

'Rafael seemed to be
completely
stable,' said Consuelo. 'Lucia was the unstable one. She was a depressive, with occasional bouts of manic compulsive behaviour. Have you seen her wardrobe?

'A lot of shoes.'

'Many of them were the same design and colour, as were her dresses. If she liked something she'd buy three straight off. She was on medication.'

'So, if he was in crisis, given his nature, he would be unlikely to turn to anyone outside the family and he wouldn't have been able to talk to his wife.'

'The restaurant business has taught me not to judge people's lives from the outside. Couples, even crazy ones, have ways of communicating, some of which are not attractive, but they work.'

'What about their domestic situation? You saw that, too.'

'I did, but a third party always changes the dynamics. People start behaving.'

'Is that a general or specific observation?'

'I meant it specifically but it can be applied generally,' she said. 'And that felt like the second time you've tried to insinuate that I might have been having an affair with Sr Vega.'

'Did it?' said Falcón. 'Well, I didn't mean to be specific. I was just thinking that under those stressful circumstances
a
lover might have been a possibility, and that would have changed mental and marital landscapes.'

'Not Rafael,' she said, shaking her head. 'He's not the type.'

'Who is the type?'

She tapped a cigarette on the box, lit it and blew smoke at the glass.

'Your Inspector Ramírez is the type,' she said. 'Where is he, by the way?'

'He's taken his daughter to have some medical tests.'

'Not serious, I hope.'

'They don't know,' said Falcón. 'But you're right about Ramírez, he was always a player… combing his hair for the secretaries in the Edificio de los Juzgados.'

'Maybe the work he did gave him an eye for the vulnerable,' she said. 'That's another definition of the type.'

'But not, apparently, Rafael Vega. The Butcher.'

'You said it. That's a pastime that really doesn't go with lovemaking: "Do you want to see my latest cuts?"'

'What did you make of all that?'

'I used him. His beef always tasted better. Almost all the steaks served in my restaurants are cut by him.'

'And psychologically…?'

'It ran in the family. I don't think it's any more than that. If his father had been a carpenter…'

'Of course, some spare-time cabinet making. But butchery…?'

'It gave Lucia the creeps, but then… she had her sensitivities.'

'She was squeamish, as well?'

'Squeamish, nervous, depressed, unable to sleep. She used to take two sleeping pills a night. One to knock her out and then another when she woke up at three or four in the morning.'

'Bulletproof windows,' said Falcón.

'She needed total silence to sleep. The house was hermetically sealed. Once you were inside there was no sense of the outside world. No wonder she was a little crazy. Sometimes when she opened the door I expected a rush of air as if the pressures were different inside.'

'In a world of glibness and fun she doesn't sound like much fun,' said Falcón.

'There you go again, Javier. That's number three,' she said. 'Anyway, she was glib. She used the material and the trivial to hold her life together. She found relationships complicated. Even Mario could be too much for her at times, which was why she was so happy for him to come over here. But that's not to say he wasn't the focus of her life.'

'So how did Sr Vega fit into his family?'

'I don't think they were expecting a child. I didn't see them much at that time, but I seem to remember it was a shock,' she said. 'Anyway, a marriage changes after a child. Perhaps you'll find that out for yourself one day, Javier.'

'You pretend not to understand what I'm doing but you know I have to do this. I have to look for the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in a situation,' said Falcón, sounding oversensitive even to himself. 'My questions can be ugly, but then it's not so nice to have a double murderer out there leaving a crime scene to look like a suicide pact.'

'It's OK, Javier, I can take it,' said Consuelo. 'Despite the attractions of the detective/suspect dynamic I'd rather you eliminated me from your inquiries with whatever ugly questions you have to ask. I have a good memory and I did not enjoy being accused of Raúl's murder.'

'Well, these are just the preliminaries. I'm hoping for some harder facts on which to base my suspicions about the way in which the Vegas died. So you'll be seeing me again.'

'I look forward to it.'

'How did you get into the grounds of the Vegas' house?'

'Lucia gave me the code to open the gate.'

'Did anybody else know that?'

'The maid. Probably Sergei. I've no idea, but the Krugmans' garden butts on to the Vegas' and there's a gate at the bottom, so they would have access. As for Pablo Ortega, I don't know.'

'Sergei?' said Falcón. 'You said he was a Russian or Ukrainian. That's a bit unusual.'

'Even you must have noticed the number of Eastern Europeans around these days,' said Consuelo. 'I know it's wrong, but I think people prefer them to Moroccans.'

'What do you know about Madeleine Krugman?'

'She's friendly in the way that Americans are… immediately.'

'You could say the same of the Sevillanos.'

'Perhaps that's why we get so many Americans here every year,-' said Consuelo. 'I'm not complaining, by the way.'

'She's an attractive woman,' said Falcón.

'Rafael's never had it so good in your eyes,' she said. 'Anyway, all men think Madeleine Krugman is attractive – even you, Javier. I saw you looking.'

Falcón flushed like a fifteen year old, grinned and ran through a range of displacement activity. Consuelo gave him a sad smile from the sofa.

'Maddy knows her power,' she said.

'So she's the femme fatale of the barrio?' asked Falcón.

'I'm trying to edge her out,' said Consuelo, 'but she's got a few years on me. No. She just knows that men melt around her. She does her best to ignore it. What's a girl supposed to do when everybody from the gas man to the fishmonger to the Juez de Instruction and the Inspector Jefe de Homicidios seem to have lost control of their lower jaws?'

'What about Sr Krugman?'

'They've been married a long time. He's older.'

'Do you know what they're doing here?'

'Taking a break from living in America. He works for Rafael. He's designing, or has designed, a couple of his projects.'

'Were they taking a break after 9/11?'

'That happened while they were here,' she said. 'They were living in Connecticut, he was working in New York and I think they just got bored…'

'Children?'

'I don't think so.'

'Have you been to any social occasions there?'

'Yes… Rafael was there, too.'

'But not Lucia?'

'Too much for her.'

'Any observations?'

'I'm sure he was probably interested in the idea of having sex with her because that's what travels through every man's brain when they see Maddy Krugman, but I don't think it happened.'

There was a loud bellow from upstairs, the terrible noise of an animal in pain. It shot up Consuelo's spineand jerked her to her feet. Falcón scrambled out of his chair. Feet rumbled down the stairs. Mario in a pair of shorts and shirt came running down the corridor. He had his arms held out from his puny body, his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent scream. The famous war photograph of the napalm attack on a Vietnam village snapped into Falcón's mind but not focused on the central figure of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road. It was on the boy in front of her, his black mouth stretched open, crammed full of horror.

In his passport photo Martin Krugman, without his beard, looked his age, which was fifty-seven years old. With the beard, which was grey and had been allowed to grow untrimmed, he looked beyond retirement age. Life had been kinder to Madeleine Krugman who was thirty-eight and looked no different from her passport photo taken when she was thirty-one. They could have been father and daughter, and many people would have preferred it that way.

Marty Krugman was tall and rangy, some might say skinny, with a prominent nose which, face on, was blade thin. His eyes were set close together, well back in his head and operated under eyebrows which his wife had given up trying to contain. He did not look like a man who slept much. He drank cup after cup of thick espresso coffee poured from a chrome coffee- maker. Marty was not dressed for the office. His shirt was nearly cheesecloth with a blue stripe, which he wore like a smock outside his faded blue jeans. He had Outward Bound sandals on his feet and sat with an ankle resting on his knee and his hands clinging on to his shin as if he was pulling on an oar. He spoke perfect Spanish with a Mexican inflexion.

'Spent my youth in California,' he said. 'Berkeley, doing Engineering. Then I took some years out in New Mexico painting in Taos and taking trips down to Central and South America. My Spanish is a mess.'

'Was that in the late sixties?' asked Falcón.

'And seventies. I was a hippy until I discovered architecture.'

'Did you know Sr Vega before you came here?'

'No. We met him through the estate agent who rented the house to us.'

'Did you have any work?'

'Not at that stage. We were playing it fast and easy. It was lucky that we met Rafael in the first few weeks. We got talking, he'd heard of some of my New York stuff and he offered me some project work.'

'It was
very
lucky,' said Madeleine, as if she might have flown the coop if it hadn't worked out.

'So you came here on a whim?'

Maddy had changed out of the white linen trousers into a knee-length skirt which flared out over her cream leather chair. She crossed and uncrossed her very white legs several times a minute and Falcón, who was sitting directly opposite her, annoyed himself by looking every time. Her breasts trembled under her blue silk top with every movement. Hormonal sound waves seemed to pulse out into the room as her blue blood ticked under her white skin. Marty was impervious to it all. He didn't look at her or react to anything she said. When she spoke his gaze remained fixed on Falcón, who was having trouble finding a resting place for his own eyes with the whole room now an erogenous zone.

'My mother died and I inherited some money,' said Maddy. 'We thought we'd take a break and be in Europe for a while… visit our old honeymoon haunts: Paris, Florence, Prague. But we went to Provence and then Marty had to see Barcelona… get his Gaudi fix, and one thing led to another. We found ourselves here. Seville gets into your blood. Are you a Sevillano, Inspector Jefe?'

'Not quite,' he said. 'When did all this happen?'

'March last year.'

'Were you taking a break from anything in particular?'

'Just boredom,' said Marty.

'Your mother's death, Sra Krugman… was that sudden?'

'She was diagnosed with cancer and died within ten weeks.'

'I'm sorry,' said Falcón. 'What was boring you in America, Sr Krugman?'

'You can call us Maddy and Marty if you like,' she said. 'We prefer to be relaxed.'

Her perfect white teeth appeared behind her chilli- red lips in a two centimetre smile and were gone. She spread her fingers out on the leather arms of the chair and switched her legs over again.

'My job,' said Marty. 'I was bored with the work I was doing.'

'No you weren't,' she said, and their eyes met for the first time.

'She's right,' said Marty, his head slowly coming back to Falcón. 'Why would I be working here if I was bored with my job? I was bored with being in America. I just didn't think you'd be interested in that. It's not a detail that's going to help you find out what happened to the Vegas.'