The Ignorance of Blood (24 page)

Even with her sister and her two other sons in the house she felt a terrible loneliness. In between the bouts of rage that periodically washed over her she reluctantly identified a need for the one person she'd banished from her sight for ever. Almost as soon as this came to her she was consumed by hatred for him. Then despair would crash in and she would sob at the thought of her little boy lost in the dark,
terrified and alone. It was exhausting, emotionally draining, but the mind would not shut down and let her drift into sleep. So she took the pills. Three instead of two. She woke up at two in the afternoon with her head and mouth full of cotton wool, feeling as if she'd been embalmed.

The sleep had weakened her and she couldn't stand in the shower. She sat and let the water fall on her pitiful shoulders. She sobbed and raged all over again.

She drank water and her strength slowly returned. She dressed, went downstairs. Everybody looked at her. She read their faces. Victims were always the stars of their own dramas and the supporting cast had nothing to offer.

This was Sunday. Sitting with her arms folded, waiting for the phone to ring.

14

Las Tres Mil Viviendas, Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 12.15 hrs

His name was Roque Barba but he was known to everybody in the run-down, dead-end
barrio
of Las Tres Mil Viviendas as El Pulmón, because he only had one lung. He'd lost the other one two months after his seventeenth birthday at a
corrida
in a small village in the east of Andalucía when he was still a
novillero.
He'd liked the look of his second bull of the afternoon and told the
picador
not to dig too deep with the lance because he wanted to show the crowd what he could do. It was right at the beginning of the
faena
and the bull still had his head up. El Pulmón had two problems: he wasn't quite tall enough and the bull had a little hook from right to left, which he hadn't seen. This meant that during the first pass the bull's horn, instead of flashing past his chest, caught him under the armpit, and the next thing he knew he was up in the air. There was no pain. No sound. Life slowed down. The crowd and the arena came to him in sickly waves as the bull's immensely powerful neck reared up and then shook him from side to side. Then he hit the deck, felt the sand grind into his face and heard his collar bone crack in his ear.

The bull's horn broke two ribs and cracked another two. It tore the lung apart and drove splinters of bone close to the heart. The surgeons removed the ragged lung that night. That was the end of his career as a
torero.
Not because he only had one lung; the other expanded to compensate. But he could no longer raise his left arm above shoulder height.

Now he sat on the fourth floor of one of the many brutalized tower blocks in Las Tres Mil Viviendas. There was a gun on the table, which he had just finished cleaning. He'd bought it last week. Until then he'd only ever used a blade. He still had the knife, which he carried in a spring-loaded mechanism attached to the underside of an ornately tooled leather wrist strap on his right forearm.

He'd bought the gun for two reasons. The high-quality product he'd started selling a few months ago had brought him a lot more clients, which meant that he was now handling more money on a regular basis. Only he knew about this – and, of course, his girlfriend Julia, who was asleep in the bedroom. But El Pulmón knew that people loved to talk, and in Las Tres Mil they loved to talk about the one commodity that was in short supply – money. Hence the gun. Although that wasn't the full story.

The gun wasn't needed to control any of his clients. They knew he had balls. Anybody who was prepared to get into a confined space with a half-ton bull was not lacking in that department. And he still had the reflexes. No, the gun had become necessary because, although he was now receiving high-quality product from the Russians, he hadn't stopped selling the gear that he was getting from the Italians. In fact, he'd started cutting the one with the other. So, not only was there the potential for trouble from outsiders interested in money, but there was also an element of unpredictability in his suppliers.

Now, when he handed over his €10,000 for the week, he
was never quite sure whether he was going to be given another package to sell or find himself hanging out of the window upside down, with a four-floor drop beneath him. It had already happened once. The weightlifter, the one called Nikita, had dropped by to remind him that his supply was exclusive and if he didn't like the arrangement they'd install their own dealer. Four floors to a concrete pavement had been Nikita's way of trying to make him see reason. He hadn't enjoyed the adrenaline rush.

Fucking Russians. This had never been a friendly business. Dealing in death was never going to be that. But the Italians spoke his language, and he didn't know how long the Russian product was going to last. So he was going to play this tricky game until things got a little clearer, and that's why he was tooled up.

His girlfriend sighed in her sleep. He shut the bedroom door and looked around the living room. He moved the table to a more central position between the window and the wall, on which hung an oblong mirror. With a screwdriver he put a five-centimetre screw in the centre of the table. He eased the safety off the gun and positioned it so that the trigger rested against the screw and the barrel pointed to the right of the mirror. He inserted another couple of screws to maintain the line of the barrel. He placed a copy of
6 Toros
magazine over the handgun. He put a chair by the table which, when he sat on it, would leave his good right arm free and his poor left arm close to the gun. He sat and checked the view he got from the mirror. It gave him angles on the two corners of the room behind him. He dropped the blinds on the window, shut out the sunlight and the view of the busy Carretera de Su Eminencia. He didn't bother with any other chairs. The supplier, with his Cuban translator, never sat down. They did smoke, even though they knew he didn't like it. He was the drug dealer with one lung who didn't smoke, didn't drink and didn't
do drugs. El Pulmón breathed in slowly, the way he'd always done to control his fear.

Ramírez was standing at the window in Falcón's office, looking out. Ferrera was at her computer.

‘I've had the three mystery men in the Russian's disks identified,’ said Falcón. ‘The guy with Margarita is Juan Valverde, the boss of I4IT Europe in Madrid. The American is Charles Taggart, an ex-TV preacher, who's an I4IT consultant, reporting back to the owner, Cortland Fallenbach. The last guy is Antonio Ramos, who is an engineer and the new director of Horizonte's construction division. I want you to find out where those three men are, because I want to talk to them as soon as possible.’

Cristina Ferrera nodded. Falcón went through to join Ramírez in his office, gave him the intelligence he'd learned from Pablo about the renegade Russian gang set up by Yuri Donstov in Seville. Ramírez said he'd put detectives Serrano and Baena on a door-to-door, starting in Calle Garlopa in Seville Este, which was the address they'd found in the GPS of Vasili Lukyanov's Range Rover. They moved on to other matters.

‘The blood on both those paper suits we found in the rubbish bins on Calle Feria has been confirmed as a perfect match to Marisa Moreno,’ said Ramírez.

‘Anything on the inside of them?’ asked Falcón.

‘Both the hoods contained hairs, and we've picked up some sweat patches from the suits,’ said Ramírez. ‘One of them even had a semen deposit.’

‘Sweat patches? Semen? Was he naked underneath this suit?’

‘Not if he stripped it off, walked round the corner to Calle Gerona and stuck it in the bin,’ said Ramírez. ‘But it
was
a hot night, maybe they had a car.’

‘Gangsters driving around in their underpants?’ said Falcón, making for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Ramírez. ‘You've only just got here.’

‘To talk to Esteban Calderón.’

‘The judge on the Marisa Moreno case is going to want to see us at some stage,’ said Ramírez. ‘It's the new guy: Anibal Parrado. He's all right. How's Consuelo holding up?’

‘She's
not
all right,’ said Falcón.
‘We're
not all right.’

‘So you told her about Marisa and the threatening phone calls.’

‘And she remembered those Russians breaking into her house four years ago, putting a red cross over a family photograph.’

‘I'm sorry,’ said Ramírez. ‘I wasn't thinking when I told you about the semen deposit. That's not a nice thing to know … I mean, given Darío's situation.’

‘I
have
to know,’ said Falcón. ‘Give me a call when you get the full forensics. Let's get the DNA on the semen deposit to Vicente Cortés and Martín Díaz. They can see if it matches DNA on the GRECO and CICO databases from any Russians they've had in custody. And get everybody in the squad to remember that this is
all connected:
the Seville bombing, the murder of Inés, the cutting up of Marisa and the kidnapping of Darío.’

‘The only problem,’ said Ramírez, fingers exploding up into the air, ‘is evidence.’

Today was delivery day, but he wasn't sure when the Russian was going to turn up. All he knew was that he had four hundred grams of Italian left, which wasn't going to satisfy those of his clients who were already coming out of their dens all twitchy and gabbling, with the first sweats and that clawing and gnawing in the blood. They'd be looking for his boys on the streets, the sign that the Russian product had arrived and that all would soon be well.

El Pulmón checked on Julia. Still asleep. Should he wake
her? Get her up and out before the guys came? He shrugged; it seemed a shame. Softly, he closed the door. She could sleep all day, that one. He had to keep an eye on her, though, make sure she wasn't sampling the product. He sat down. Breathed slowly, got the fear crouched down low in his stomach. He was always scared these days, what with the money getting bigger and these Russians being so unreadable.

Maybe he
should
wake Julia. Keep calm, just the nerves talking. Keep the fear. He knew he needed the fear, but it had to be where he wanted it. Low in the stomach, not all up his throat and over his head. He'd seen that with
novilleros
facing their first full-size bull. The fear that paralysed and got you killed.

The knock came at 12.45 p.m. First man in was the Cuban translator. Behind him was the weightlifter – head shaved with just a dusting of black showing through the white skin, nose slightly flattened, one cheekbone with a red scar. He was smaller than El Pulmón, but twice his width. His arms were very hairy and were covered in indiscernible tattoos. His legs moved as if he had animals up his trousers. El Pulmón led them into the room, felt their eyes searching his back, took his seat by the table. The Cuban stood to the left of the mirror. The weightlifter kept his back to the wall, moved to the right of the mirror and had a good, long look around with his dark, deep-set eyes. El Pulmón didn't like it. He knew now that the Russian was carrying a gun in the small of his back. He wished he'd woken Julia. He had the roll of money in his shirt, but he didn't take it out. He could feel some questions backed up against the wall over there.

‘He wants to know if you're still buying from the Italians?’ asked the Cuban.

‘No, I told you I'd stopped.’

‘Take a look,’ said the Cuban, giving him a twist of silver foil.

El Pulmón opened it up, saw the white powder, knew that he was in trouble. He shrugged.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.

‘We bought it from one of your clients,’ said the Cuban. ‘Paid eighty euros for it.’

‘I don't know what the problem is.’

‘It's our product cut with the Italian shit you told us you'd stopped moving.’

‘I still have some Italian product left. I didn't want to just throw it away.’

‘You buy from the Italians,’ said the weightlifter, his first words in rough, accented Spanish.

‘I didn't know you spoke Spanish,’ said El Pulmón, taking the opportunity for a bit of distraction.

‘He knows you're still buying from them,’ said the Cuban.

‘How does he know that?’

‘One of your clients told us.’

‘Which one?’ asked El Pulmón. ‘They're all junkies out there. They'll do and say anything for a fix.’

‘The flamenco singer.’

‘Carlos Puerta is hardly reliable,’ said El Pulmón. ‘He's been looking to fuck me up since his girlfriend moved in with me.’

‘That's why we kept an eye on your place, to see the Italians for ourselves,’ said the Cuban, who'd moved to the window and was peering through the blinds.

El Pulmón looked at the Russian and kept an eye on the Cuban through the mirror.

‘We tell you the last time,’ said the weightlifter.

The Cuban came away from the window. He had a large hunting knife in his hand. He went to grab El Pulmón by the hair. El Pulmón leaned forward and slapped the copy of
6 Toros.
The roar of the gunshot filled the room and El Pulmón's blade sprang into his hand. He kept low and swung round, driving the narrow length of steel into the Cuban's
left side. He heard nothing with the gunshot ringing in his ears, but he felt the Cuban's body stiffen. As he drove the blade in, he grabbed the Cuban's right wrist with the hunting knife in it and whirled the man round so that he ended up between El Pulmón and the weightlifter, who was now on the floor, lying on his back, arm extended, gun in hand. Another head-ringing bang inside the four hard walls of the apartment and the Cuban's rigid body leapt and jerked. El Pulmón forced him backwards on to another spine-rupturing explosion. He dropped his shoulder and shoved the Cuban at the Russian, who grunted under the weight and El Pulmón, still with his blade, was out of the door, down the stairs and on the other side of the garages before he remembered Julia, asleep in the bedroom.