The Ignorance of Blood (38 page)

‘What?’

‘Don't make me say it.’

‘Be calm, Inspector Jefe. All will be well,’ said the Cuban, lazily, as if speaking from a hammock.

He made a call on his mobile, spoke in Russian.

‘Did you know Marisa Moreno?’ asked Falcón.

The Cuban shrugged. Closed down the phone. He nodded to the Russians, started boxing the disks, closing down the laptop. A hard day at the office and now the final unpleasantness.

‘What about the money?’ said Falcón. ‘You don't want the money?’

‘That's going to be too complicated now,’ said the Cuban.

‘And the locked disks with the encrypted data?’ he asked, as they came for him.

‘We don't have the means to crack that code,’ said the Cuban.

Two Russians, one on either side, took Falcón out into the night. Consuelo ran at the door where they were holding Darío under sedation. One of the Russians caught her around the waist, lifted her bodily off the ground, whirled her round, brought her into his chest. The other grabbed her thrashing legs and they carried her out.

They walked around the house. Torches came out. There was no moon. The darkness had such a palpable thickness it surprised Falcón just by giving way to each of his faltering steps. There was the smell of water on the breeze. They were near the lake. The torch beams lit the ground and occasionally swept ahead over two mounds of freshly piled earth at
the edge of the long grass. He couldn't quite believe that this was happening to him … to them. How could he, with all his experience, have allowed this madness to take place?

The pit was deep. The digger in the barn. It all made ludicrously cogent sense now. What do you do with this sort of brilliant hindsight? They stood him at the far edge, then turned him so that he had his back to the lake and was facing the low farmhouse. The other Russians arrived with Consuelo, now passive. They righted her and stood her next to him. He grabbed her hand, entwined it with his, kissed the back of it.

‘I'm sorry, Consuelo,’ he said, resigned now.

‘I'm the one who should be sorry,’ she said. ‘I got too involved in the game.’

‘I can't believe I let this happen.’

‘And I didn't even get to see Darío,’ she said, her distress weakening her. ‘What will they do with him now? What have they done with my poor, sweet little boy?’

He kissed her, a fumbling, bumping kiss, but it planted his shape on her and hers on him. The Russians pulled them apart, pushed them to their knees at the edge of the pit. Their hands were still locked together. The two men who'd brought Consuelo to the pit were already back at the house. The remaining torch was dropped to the ground where its beam played over the pit, lighting up the dark soil, moist from the lake. The slides on the two handguns were racked. Heavy hands were placed on the crowns of their heads. They squeezed each other's hands until the bones cracked. An owl hooted. Its mate responded with a little titter. Was that the last sound of this life?

No, there was just one more.

22

Granja de las Once Higeras – Tuesday, 19th September 2006, 04.47 hrs

The shots, two dull thuds, simultaneous. First Consuelo, then Falcón fell forward, their positions on the edge of the hole too precarious to avoid it. Their reluctance gave them a slight advantage over the Russians, who had no choice. They fell like two beef carcasses, their knees knocking into the backs of their erstwhile victims, taking them to the grave. The torch beam still cast its light across the dark hole and lit up the black, gaping wounds in the back of the heads of the two men, who had landed face down in the pit. Consuelo, trapped under the legs of the inert Russian, was struggling and whimpering with panic. A man landed on his feet next to them. His face was covered in dark paint and his camouflage outfit was just visible in the torch beam. He heaved the slack limbs of the executioners away so that Falcón and Consuelo could roll out. The man put his fingers to the necks of the dead Russians.

‘How many inside?’ he asked, in heavily accented Spanish.

‘Two Russians and a Cuban,’ said Falcón.

‘Stay here … in the hole,’ he said, and scrambled out.

Other men rushed past. It was impossible to say how many. It was too dark. One of them kicked the torch into the pit. Falcón pulled Consuelo silently towards him. He sat with his back to the wall of the pit. She crouched between his legs, his arms encircling her. The smell of earth was as thick as chocolate, sweet as life. They heard nothing. They waited. The stars emitted their ancient, uncertain light. The smell of the lake filled the hole with the promise of further days. He kissed her hand, perfume and dirt. Her knuckles wriggled on his lips.

A loud bang. Consuelo started, dropped her head on to her raised knees. Muffled shots. Silence. After a while an engine started up. The digger in the barn. It reversed out. Headlights illuminated the night on the other side of the farmhouse. The digger's engine farted up and growled forward. It stopped for a minute or two and then continued slowly. The beams of light swung round, settled over the pit, crawled forward, narrowing. Falcón stood up. The silhouette of a man approached, walking in front of the digger.

‘It's safe now,’ said a voice.

A hand came down. Falcón lifted Consuelo towards it and she was hauled out. She started running immediately. The hand came down again. Falcón walked up the earth wall of the pit and out. He moved to one side as the digger came through. Consuelo had fallen down twenty metres away. The digger tipped its bucket and two bodies fell into the pit on top of the inert Russians. Consuelo scrambled to her feet and ran again. The man shouted an order in Russian. Two men came out from behind the farmhouse, caught hold of her, held her there. She struggled but didn't seem to have much left in her.

The man turned to him, his painted face unreal in the harsh light from the digger.

‘The boy is there … room on right as you enter, but…’

‘They said he was under sedation.’

‘He's not breathing. Pillow on face. Maybe two hours ago,’ said the man. ‘Look before her. Not good.’

‘They killed him?’

‘You knew the boy?’ asked the man, nodding.

‘They
smothered
him with a pillow?’ said Falcón, again, completely mystified.

‘Hours ago. Before you here. Nothing you could do.’

‘Why would they do that?’ asked Falcón; the Inspector Jefe, who'd never seen the logic of murder, whose job it was to return sanity to the grossly illogical, was dumbfounded. ‘They had no reason to do that.’

‘These people not think like that,’ said the man. ‘Go now. She very unhappy.’

Consuelo was screaming herself helpless in the arms of the two men. She wasn't fighting them, all her fight had gone into hysterical, wounded animal screaming. He ran over to her. They laid her down on the ground. She stopped as if choked when Falcón's face came into her vision.

‘What's happened?’ she said, weakly. ‘What have they done?’

‘I'm going to go in there now to have a look at things,’ said Falcón. ‘When I'm ready, in a minute or two, then you come in. All right?’

She looked at him as if he was a doctor who'd just told her that she was going to die, but there was a good chance of it being peaceful.

‘Tell me,’ she said, too emotionally exhausted to speak properly.

‘I'm going to take a look,’ he said, stroking her face. ‘I'll call for you. Two minutes. Count the seconds.’

He trotted over the rough ground to the farmhouse, ducked through the low front door. Off to the left, the laptop and disks still on the table, three chairs blown over, the remains of a stun grenade in the corner. Beyond the table,
through the door, the Cuban, stripped naked, tied to a chair, arms hooked over the high back, ankles secured to the legs, thighs apart, genitals exposed, wild, animal fear in his eyes.

‘Not for you,’ said a heavily accented voice to his right. ‘In here.’

He went to the door, wiped the sweat out of his eyes, tried to calm himself down. He searched for that professional distance. Nothing there. The door was hanging ajar. A beefy Russian, with painted face and a handgun, thick cylindrical silencer attached, beckoned him. He forced himself through it, found his throat clogging with grief which, only a moment before, had been breathing in the damp earth with relief. As he crossed the threshold, playing soccer in the garden with Darío flickered through the gate of his mind, and he wasn't sure whether he could cope with this.

The room was lit by a kerosene lamp. The light was a slow, fluid yellow. There was a single bed, metal frame, pushed up against the wall. The windows were shuttered and had a metal bar across them, padlocked. Darío was lying face up, head still under the smothering pillow, bare chest. His right arm lay by his side, his left arm formed a right-angle, fist closed by his head. A sheet lay over his torso, legs awry underneath, the feet sticking out. His right foot was bandaged. There was a dark stain on the sheet where the blood had soaked through.

‘Skinny kid,’ thought Falcón, pushing himself forward. ‘Always on the move.’

Falcón felt for a wrist pulse, but he knew a dead body when he saw one. He set the legs straight, brought the arms down by the boy's side, reorganized the sheet over the body, and that was when he saw it. A large scar, as of a messy appendix operation. He checked under the armpit for the ‘strawberry’ that Consuelo had talked about, but the light was not good in the room. And for the first time he brought
himself to look under the pillow. Even now he peeled it back slowly, flinchingly, as if he was going to see something he didn't want to. The face staring up at him, wide-eyed, purple-lipped was not Darío's.

‘Bring me a torch,’ he said.

The big Russian came in. Falcón pointed at his belt. He handed the torch over. Falcón shone it in the boy's face. Still not Darío.

‘What?’ asked the Russian.

‘It's not the boy.’

‘I don't understand.’

Falcón went out into the night. This time he was angry, almost insanely angry. He called for Consuelo and they released her, lifted her to her feet. She stumbled towards him over the uneven ground. He caught her.

‘It's not Darío,’ he said. ‘Darío is not dead.’

‘Who is it?’ she asked, utterly confused.

‘A dead boy,’ said Falcón. ‘A nameless, dead boy.’

They ducked in through the doorway, went into the room. Falcón shut the door behind him with his foot. It slammed to. Consuelo knelt by the bed, held on to the boy's arm and shook her head and sobbed as she stared into his inert face.

Falcón undid the bandage on the boy's foot.

‘They cut off his toe,’ he said, beside himself with rage. ‘They cut off the poor boy's toe.’

Consuelo sat on the floor with her back to the bed and started crying, huge racking sobs came up as if from her pelvis, physically lifting her off the clay tiles. It lasted for a few minutes until she got a hold of herself.

‘I can't take any of this in,’ she said. ‘You'll have to explain it to me.’

‘They didn't have Darío,’ he said. ‘They never had Darío. They played a game to see if they could get what they wanted.’

‘But Revnik doesn't have Darío either,’ said Consuelo. ‘We know that. He's told us.’

‘That was why Donstov's man called us back,’ said Falcón. ‘You were right. He was nervous. You'd enraged him by telling him that Revnik claimed to have Darío, which was why he cut off this boy's toe. Then he calmed down. Came back with the incentive just in case you were bluffing him. He had nothing to lose by trying to
pretend
that he had Darío, and it worked. He brought everything forward, made everybody work under pressure. And there is, of course, the possibility that he still has a friend in Revnik's group.’

‘But
who's
got Darío?’ said Consuelo.

‘I don't know.’

The sound of a muffled scream came from the other room.

‘Take me away from this place,’ she said. ‘These are hell's people in here.’

They went out into the main room. The Spanish speaker was back.

‘What is the problem?’ he asked.

‘The boy is not her son,’ said Falcón. ‘We don't know who he is.’

‘He must be,’ he said, looking at the door.

‘I know my own son,’ said Consuelo.

‘Stay there. Don't move.’

The Spanish speaker went into the room where they were interrogating the Cuban, who was still tied to the chair, but face down on the floor and bloody with a wad of cloth in his mouth. The door shut. Questions in Russian. Muffled screams of pain. Then a dry indiscernible whisper. The door opened.

‘He says they never had the boy, they cheat you,’ said the Spanish speaker. ‘I'm not sure I believe him. Anyway, we work on it. You go now. Wait.’

He reached into his combat trousers, pulled out two disks in their sleeves.