The Hidden Assassins Read online

  They stood in the violet light of a sun that was beginning to set on this catastrophic day and, with the machinery inexorably clawing away at the piled rubble, their murmured prayers, guttering candles and the already wilting flowers were both pathetic and touching, as pitiful and moving as the futile deaths of all humans in the vast grotesqueness of war. As the lawmen backed away from the shrine, Elvira’s mobile rang. He took the call and handed it to Falcón. It was Juan from the CNI, saying that they had to meet tonight. Falcón said he would be home in an hour.

  The hospital was calm after the frenetic activity of the day. In the emergency room they were still picking glass out of people’s faces and suturing lacerations. There were patients in the waiting room, but there was no longer the horror of the triage nurse wading through the victims, skidding on blood, looking into the wide, dark eyes of the injured, silently pleading. Falcón showed his police ID and asked for Lourdes Alanis, who was in the intensive care unit on the first floor.

  Through the glass panels of the intensive care unit Fernando was visible at his daughter’s bedside, holding her hand. She was hooked up to machines but seemed to be breathing on her own. The doctor in the ICU said she was making good progress. She had sustained a broken arm and a crushed leg, but no spinal injuries. Their main concern had been her head injuries. She was still in a coma, but a scan had revealed no evidence of brain damage or haemorrhaging. As they talked, Fernando left the ICU to go to the toilet. Falcón gave him a few minutes and went in after him. He was washing his hands and face.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, looking at Falcón via the mirror, suspicious, knowing he wasn’t a doctor.

  ‘We met earlier today by your apartment block. My name is Javier Falcón. I’m the Inspector Jefe of the homicide squad.’

  Fernando frowned, shook his head; he didn’t remember.

  ‘Does this mean that you’ve caught the people who destroyed my family?’

  ‘No, we’re still working on that.’

  ‘You won’t have to look very far. That rat hole is crawling with them.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Fucking Moroccans,’ he said. ‘Those fucking bastards. We’ve been looking at them all this time, ever since 11th March, and we’ve been thinking…when’s the next time going to be. We always knew that there was going to be a next time.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’

  ‘Alright, me. That’s what I’ve been thinking,’ said Fernando. ‘But I know I’m not alone.’

  ‘I didn’t think the relations between the communities were so bad,’ said Falcón.

  ‘That’s because you don’t live in “the communities”,’ said Fernando. ‘I’ve seen the news, full of nice, comfortable people telling you that everything is all right, that Muslims and Catholics are communicating, that there’s some kind of “healing process” going on. I can tell you, it’s all bullshit. We live in a state of suspicion and fear.’

  ‘Even though you know that very few members of the Muslim population are terrorists?’

  ‘That’s what we’re told, but we don’t know it,’ said Fernando. ‘And what’s more, we have no idea who they are. They could be standing next to me in the bar, drinking beer and eating jamón. Yes, you see, some of them even do that. Eat pig and drink alcohol. But it seems that they’re just as likely to blow themselves up as the one who spends his life with his nose to the floor in the mosque.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to make you angry,’ said Falcón. ‘You’ve got enough to think about without that.’

  ‘You didn’t make me angry. I am angry. I’ve been angry a long time. Two years and three months I’ve been angry,’ said Fernando. ‘Gloria, my wife…’

  He stopped. His face came apart. His mouth thickened with saliva. He had to support himself against the basin as the physical pain worked its way through. It took some minutes for him to pull himself together.

  ‘Gloria was a good person. She believed in the good that exists in everyone. But her belief didn’t protect her, it didn’t protect our son. The people she spoke up for killed her, in the same way that they killed the ones they hate, and who hate them. Anyway, that’s enough. I must get back to my daughter. I know you didn’t have to come and find me here. You’ve got a lot on your plate. So I thank you for that…for your concern. And I wish you well in your investigation. I hope you find the killers before I do.’

  ‘I want you to call me,’ said Falcón, giving him his card, ‘at any time, day or night, for whatever reason. If you’re angry, depressed, violent, lonely or even hungry, I want you to call me.’

  ‘I didn’t think you people were supposed to get personally involved.’

  ‘I also want you to tell me if you’re ever contacted by a group who call themselves VOMIT, so it’s important on two levels that we keep in touch.’

  They left the toilet and shook hands outside, where, on the other side of the glass, his daughter’s life was readable in green on the screens. Fernando hesitated as he leaned against the door.

  ‘Only one politician spoke to me today,’ he said. ‘I saw them all parading themselves before the cameras with the victims and their families. This was while they were operating on Lourdes’ skull, so I had time to look at their ridiculous antics. Only one person found me.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Jesús Alarcón,’ said Fernando. ‘I’d never heard of him before. He’s the new leader of Fuerza Andalucía.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything. He listened—and there wasn’t a camera in sight.’

  The sky darkened to purple over the old city like the discoloration around a recent wound that had begun to hurt in earnest. Falcón drove on automatic, his mind buried deep in intractable problems: a bomb explodes, killing, maiming and destroying. What is left after the dust clears and the bodies are taken away is a horrendous social and political confusion, where emotions rise to the surface and, like wind on the susceptible grass of the plain, influence can blow people’s minds this way and that, turn them from beer-sippers into chest-thumpers.

  The three CNI men were waiting for him outside his house on Calle Bailén. He parked his car in front of the oak doors. They all shook hands and followed him through to the patio, which was looking a little dishevelled these days. Encarnación, his housekeeper, wasn’t as capable as she used to be and Falcón didn’t have the money for the renovation required. And anyway, he’d grown to enjoy living in the encroaching shabbiness of his surroundings.

  He dragged some chairs out around a marble-topped table on the patio and left the CNI men to listen to the water trickling in the fountain. He came back with cold beers, olives, capers, pickled garlic, crisps, bread, cheese and jamón. They ate and drank and talked about Spain’s chances in the World Cup in Germany; always the same—a team full of genius and promise, which was never fulfilled.

  ‘Do you have any idea why we want to talk to you?’ asked Pablo, who was more relaxed now, less intensely observant.

  ‘Something to do with my Moroccan connections, so I was told.’

  ‘You’re a very interesting man to us,’ said Pablo. ‘We don’t want to hide the fact that we’ve been looking at you for some time now.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I’ve got the right mentality for secret work any more. If you’d asked me five years ago, then you might have found the ideal candidate…’

  ‘Who is the ideal candidate?’ asked Juan.

  ‘Someone who is already hiding a great deal from the world, from his family, from his wife, and from himself. A few state secrets on top wouldn’t be such a burden.’

  ‘We don’t want you to be a spy,’ said Juan.

  ‘Do you want me to deceive?’

  ‘No, we think deceiving would be a very bad idea under the circumstances.’

  ‘You’ll understand better what we want by answering a few questions,’ said Pablo, wresting the interview back from his boss.

  ‘Don’t make them too difficult,’ sai
d Falcón. ‘I’ve had a long day.’

  ‘Tell us how you came to meet Yacoub Diouri.’

  ‘That could take some time,’ said Falcón.

  ‘We’re not in any hurry,’ said Pablo.

  And, as if at some prearranged signal, Juan and Gregorio sat back, took out cigarette packs and lit up. It was one of those occasions after a long day, with a little beer and food inside him, that made Falcón wish he was still a smoker.

  ‘I think you probably know that just over five years ago, on 12th April 2001, I ran a murder investigation into the brutal killing of an entrepreneur turned restaurateur called Raúl Jiménez.’

  ‘You’ve got a policeman’s memory for dates,’ said Juan.

  ‘You’ll find that date written in scar tissue on my heart when I’m dead,’ said Falcón. ‘It’s got nothing to do with being a policeman.’

  ‘It had a big impact on your life?’ said Pablo.

  Falcón took another fortifying gulp of Cruzcampo.

  ‘The whole of Spain knows this story. It was all over the newspapers for weeks,’ said Falcón, a little irritated with the knowingness with which the questions had started coming at him.

  ‘We weren’t in Spain at the time,’ said Juan. ‘We’ve read the files, but it’s not the same as hearing it for real.’

  ‘My investigation into Raúl Jiménez’s past showed that he’d known my father, the artist Francisco Falcón. They’d started a smuggling business together in Tangier during and after the Second World War. It meant they could establish themselves and start families and Francisco Falcón could begin the process of turning himself into an artist.’

  ‘And what about Raúl Jiménez?’ said Pablo. ‘Didn’t he meet his wife when she was very young?’

  ‘Raúl Jiménez had an unhealthy obsession with young girls,’ said Falcón, taking a deep breath, knowing what they were after. ‘It wasn’t so unusual in those days in Tangier or Andalucía for a girl to get married at thirteen, but in fact her parents made Raúl wait until she was seventeen. They had a couple of children, but they were difficult births and the doctor recommended that his wife didn’t have any more.

  ‘In the run-up to Moroccan independence in the 1950s, Raúl became involved with a businessman called Abdullah Diouri who had a young daughter. Raúl had sex with this girl and, I think, even got her pregnant. This would not have been a problem had he done the honourable thing and married the girl. In Muslim society he would have just taken a second wife and that would have been the end of it. As a Catholic, it was impossible. To complicate matters further, despite doctor’s orders, his wife became pregnant with their third child.

  ‘In the end Raúl took the coward’s way out and fled with his family. Abdullah Diouri was incensed when he discovered this and wrote a letter to Francisco Falcón in which he told him of Raúl’s betrayal and expressed his determination to be avenged, which he achieved five years later.

  ‘The third child, a boy called Arturo, was kidnapped on his way back from school in southern Spain. Raúl Jiménez’s way of dealing with this terrible loss was to deny the boy’s existence. It devastated the family. His wife committed suicide and the children were damaged, one of them beyond repair.’

  ‘Was it that sad story that made you decide to try to find Arturo thirty-seven years after he had disappeared?’ asked Pablo.

  ‘As you know, I met Raúl’s second wife, Consuelo, while investigating his murder. About a year later we started a relationship and during that time we revealed to each other that the one thing that still haunted us about her husband’s murder case, and all that surfaced with it, was the disappearance of Arturo. There was still a part of us that imagined the eternally lost six-year-old boy.’

  ‘That was in July 2002,’ said Pablo. ‘When did you start looking for Arturo?’

  ‘In September of that year,’ said Falcón. ‘Neither of us could believe that Abdullah Diouri would have killed the child. We thought he would have drawn him into his family in some way.’

  ‘And what was driving you?’ asked Juan. ‘The lost boy…or something else?’

  ‘I knew very well I was looking for a forty-three-year-old man.’

  ‘Had something happened to your relationship with Consuelo Jiménez in the meantime?’ asked Pablo.

  ‘It finished almost as soon as it started, but I’m not going to discuss that with you.’

  ‘Didn’t Consuelo Jiménez break off the relationship?’ asked Pablo.

  ‘She broke it off,’ said Falcón, throwing up his hands, realizing that the whole of the Jefatura knew what had happened. ‘She didn’t want to get involved.’

  ‘And you were unhappy?’

  ‘I was very unhappy about it.’

  ‘So what was your motive in looking for Arturo?’ asked Juan.

  ‘Consuelo refused to see me or speak to me. She cut me out of her life.’

  ‘Not unlike what Raúl had tried to do with Arturo,’ said Juan.

  ‘If you like.’

  Juan took a pickled garlic and bit into it with a light crunch.

  ‘I realized that the only way I’d be able to see her again under the right circumstances, rather than as a mad stalker, was to do something extraordinary. I knew that if I found Arturo she would have to see me again. It was the way we had connected in the first place and I knew it would stir something in her.’

  ‘And did it work?’ asked Juan, fascinated by Falcón’s torment.

  16

  Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 20.45 hrs

  A warm breeze made a circuit of the patio and stirred up a large, dead and dried-out plant in a far dark corner of the cloister.

  ‘I think it would be better to approach this chronologically,’ said Pablo. ‘Why don’t you tell us how you found Arturo Jiménez?’

  The rustle and rattle of the plant’s dead leaves had drawn Falcón’s gaze to its desiccated corner. He had to get rid of that plant.

  ‘Because my search for Arturo was motivated by this hope for reconciliation with Consuelo, I imagined it as a sort of quest. It was a little more straightforward than that. I was lucky to have some help,’ said Falcón. ‘I went to Fès with a member of my new Moroccan family. He found a guide who took us to Abdullah Diouri’s house deep in the medina. Apart from a magnificently carved door, the house looked like nothing from the outside. But the door opened into a paradise of patios, pools and miniature gardens, which had been allowed to decay from some greater former glory. There were tiles missing and cracked paving and the latticework around the gallery was broken in places. The servant who let us in told us that Abdullah Diouri had died some twenty years ago but that his memory lived on, as he had been a great and kind man.

  ‘We asked to speak to any of the sons, but he told us that only women lived in this house. The sons had dispersed throughout Morocco and the Middle East. So we asked if one of the women would be willing to speak to us about this delicate matter that had occurred some forty years ago. He took our names and left. He returned after quarter of an hour and told my Moroccan relative to stay at the door while he took me on a long trip through the house. We ended up on the first floor, with a view through some repaired latticework on to a garden below. He left me there and after a while I realized that there was somebody else in the room. A woman dressed in black, her face totally veiled, pointed me to a seat and I told her my story.

  ‘Fortunately I’d talked to my Moroccan family about what I was intending to do, so I knew I had to be very careful about how I related this story. It had to be from the Moroccan perspective.’

  ‘What did that entail?’ asked Juan.

  ‘That Raúl Jiménez had to be the villain of the piece and Abdullah Diouri the saviour of the family honour. If I sullied the name of the patriarch in any way, if I made him out to be a criminal, a kidnapper of children, I would get nowhere. It was good advice. The woman listened to me in silence, still as a statue under a black dustsheet. At the end of my story a gloved hand came out of her robe and dropped a
card on to a low table between us. Then she got up and left. On the card was printed an address in Rabat with a telephone number and the name Yacoub Diouri. A few minutes later the servant came back and returned me to the front door.’

  ‘Well, not quite the Holy Grail,’ said Juan, ‘but worthy of something.’

  ‘Moroccans love mystery,’ said Falcón. ‘Abdullah Diouri was a very devout Muslim and Yacoub later told me that the Fès household was kept in that state in honour of the great man. None of the sons could stand the place, which was why it was so run down, and it had been given over exclusively to the women of the family.’

  ‘So you had an address in Rabat…’ said Pablo.

  ‘I stayed the night in Meknes and called Yacoub from there. He already knew who I was and what I wanted, and we agreed to meet in his house in Rabat the next day. As you probably know, he lives in a huge modern place, built in the Arab style, in the embassy zone on the edge of the city. There must be two hectares of land with an orange grove, gardens, tennis courts, swimming pools—a small palace. He has liveried servants, rose petals in the fountains—that kind of thing. I was taken to a huge room overlooking one of the swimming pools, with cream leather sofas all around. I was given some mint tea and left to stew for half an hour until Yacoub turned up.’

  ‘Did he look like Raúl?’

  ‘I’d seen shots of Raúl when he was a younger man in Tangier and less battered by life. There were similarities, but Yacoub is a different animal altogether. Raúl’s wealth never managed to get rid of the Andaluz peasant, whereas Yacoub is a very sophisticated individual, well-read in Spanish, French and English. He speaks German, too. His business demands it. He makes clothes for all the major manufacturers in Europe. He’s got Dior and Adolfo Dominguez on his client list. Yacoub was a cheetah to Raúl’s gnarled old lion.’