The Hidden Assassins

‘What about the German’s lawyer, has he called yet?’

‘Not yet, but he’s going to.’

Manuela had clicked off the phone and let it fall in her lap. She smoked on automatic with great fervour, and the nicotine surge enabled her to call Angel, whose mobile was off. They couldn’t find him in the ABC offices, which sounded like the trading floor in the first minutes of a black day for the markets. Her lawyer called again.

‘The German has pulled out. I’ve called the notary’s office and all deed signings have been cancelled for the day. There’s been an announcement on the TV and radio, the Jefe Superior de la Policía and the chief of the emergency services have told us to only use mobile phones if absolutely necessary.’

The workshop was in a courtyard up an old alleyway with massive grey cobbles, off Calle Bustos Tavera. Marisa Moreno had rented it purely because of this alleyway. On bright sunny days, such as this one, the light in the courtyard was so intense that nothing could be discerned from within the darkness of the twenty-five-metre alleyway. The cobbles were like pewter ingots and drew her on. Her attraction to this alleyway was that it coincided with her vision of death. Its arched interior was not pretty, with crappy walls, a collection of fuse boxes and electric cables running over crumbling whitewashed plaster. But that was the point. It was a transference from this messy, material world to the cleansing white light beyond. There was, however, disappointment in the courtyard, to find that paradise was a broken-down collection of shabby workshops and storage houses, with peeling paint, wrought-iron grilles and rusted axles.

It was only a five-minute walk from her apartment on Calle Hiniesta to her workshop, which was another reason she’d rented somewhere too big for her needs. She occupied the first floor, accessed via an iron staircase to the side. It had a huge window overlooking the courtyard, which gave light and great heat in the summer. Marisa liked to sweat; that was the Cuban in her. She often worked in bikini briefs and liked the way the wood chips from her carving stuck to her skin.

That morning she’d left her apartment and taken a coffee in one of the bars on Calle Vergara. The bar was unusually packed, with all heads turned to the television. She ordered her café con leche, drank it and left, refusing all attempts by the locals to involve her in any debate. She had no interest in politics, she didn’t believe in the Catholic Church or any other organized religion, and, as far as she was concerned, terrorism only mattered if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the studio she worked on staining two carvings and polishing another two, ready for delivery. By midday she had them rolled in bubblewrap and was down in the courtyard waiting for a taxi.

A young Mexican dealer, who had a gallery in the centre on Calle Zaragoza, had bought the two pieces. He was part Aztec, and Marisa had had an affair with him a few months before she’d met Esteban Calderón. He still bought every carving she made and paid cash on delivery every time. To see them greet each other you might have thought they were still seeing each other, but it was more of a blood understanding, his Aztec and her African.

Esteban Calderón knew nothing of this. He’d never seen her workshop. She didn’t have any of her work in her apartment. He knew she carved wood, but she made it sound as if it was in the past. That was the way she wanted it. She hated listening to Westerners talking about art. They didn’t seem to grasp that appreciation was the other way around: let the piece talk to you.

Marisa dropped off her two finished pieces and took her money. She went to a tobacconist and bought herself a Cuban cigar—a Churchill from the Romeo y Julieta brand. She walked past the Archivo de las Indias and the Alcázar. The tourists were not quite as numerous as usual, but still there, and seemingly oblivious to the bomb which had gone off on the other side of the city, proving her point that terrorism only mattered if it directly affected you.

She walked through the Barrio Santa Cruz and into the Murillo Gardens to indulge in her after-sales ritual. She sat on a park bench, unscrewed the aluminium cap of the cylinder and let the cigar fall into her palm. She smoked it under the palm trees, imagining herself back in Havana.

Inés had pulled herself together after fifteen minutes weeping. Her stomach couldn’t take it any more. The tensing of her abdominals was agony. She had crawled to the shower, pulled off her nightdress and slumped in the tray, keeping her burning scalp out from under the fine needles of water.

After another quarter of an hour she had been able to stand, although not straight because of the pain in her side. She dressed in a dark suit with a high-collared cream blouse and put on heavy make-up. There was no bruising to disguise but she needed a full mask to get through the morning. She found some aspirin, which took the edge off the pain so that she could walk without being creased over to one side. Normally she would walk to work, but that was out of the question this morning and she took a taxi. That was the first she knew of the bomb. The radio was full of it. The driver talked non-stop. She sat in the back, silent behind her dark glasses until the driver, unnerved by her lack of response, asked if she was ill. She told him she had a lot on her mind. That was enough. At least he knew she was hearing him. He went into a long soliloquy about terrorism, how the only cure for this disease was to get rid of the lot of them.

‘Who?’ asked Inés.

‘Muslims, Africans, Arabs…the whole lot. Get shot of them all. Spain should be for the Spanish,’ he said. ‘What we need now are the old Catholic kings. They understood the need to be pure. They knew what they had to do…’

‘So you’re including the Jews in this mass exile?’ she asked.

‘No, no, no que no, the Jews are all right. It’s these Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians. They’re all fanatics. They can’t control their religious fervour. What are they doing, blowing up an apartment block? What does that prove?’

‘It proves how powerful indiscriminate terror can be,’ she said, feeling her whole chest about to burst open. ‘We’re no longer safe in our own homes.’

The Palacio de Justícia was frantic as usual. She slowly went up to her office on the second floor, which she shared with two other fiscales, state prosecutors. She was determined not to show the pain each step unleashed in her side. Having wanted to wear the badge of his violence, she now wanted to disguise her agony.

The mask of her make-up got her through the first excited minutes with her colleagues, who were full of the latest rumour and theory, with hardly a fact between them. Nobody associated Inés with emotional wreckage so they glided over the surface and went back to their work unaware of her state.

There were cases to prepare and meetings to be attended and Inés got through it all until the early afternoon when she found herself with a spare halfhour. She decided to go for a walk in the Murillo Gardens, which were just across the avenue. The gardens would calm her down and she wouldn’t have to listen to any more conjecture about the bomb. She had the little grenade attack in her relationship to consider. She knew a breather in the park wasn’t going to help her sort it out, but at least she might be able to find something around which to start rebuilding her collapsed marriage.

Over the last four years when things had been going wrong for Inés in her marriage she played herself a film loop. It was the edited version of her life with Esteban. It never started with their meeting each other and the subsequent affair, because that would mean the film started with her infidelity, and she did not see herself as somebody who broke her marriage vows. In her movie she was unblemished. She had rewritten her private history and cut out all images that did not meet with her approval. This was not a conscious act. There was no facing up to unfortunate episodes or personal embarrassments, they were simply forgotten.

This movie would have been immensely dull to anyone who was not Inés. It was propaganda. No better than a dictator’s glorious biopic. Inés was the courageous fiancée who had picked up her husband-to-be after the nasty little incident that they never talked about, given him the care and attention he needed to get his career back on track…and so it went on. And it worked. For her. After each of his discovered infidelities she’d played the movie and it had given her strength; or rather it had given her something to record over Esteban’s previous aberration, so that she only suffered from one of his infidelities at a time, and not the whole history.

This time, as she sat on the park bench playing her film, something went wrong. She couldn’t hold the images. It was as if the film was jumping out of the sprockets and letting an alien image flood into her private theatre: someone with long coppery hair, dark skin and splayed legs. This visual interference was shorting out her internal comfort loop. Inés gathered the amnesiac forces of her considerable mind by pressing her hands to the sides of her head and blinkering her eyes. It was then that she realized that it was something on the outside, forcing its way in. Reality was intruding. The copper-haired, dark-skinned whore she’d seen only this morning, naked, on her husband’s digital camera was sitting opposite her, smoking a cigar without a care in the world.

Marisa didn’t like the way the woman sitting on the bench on the other side of the shaded pathway was looking at her. She had the intensity of a lunatic about her; not the raving-in-the-asylum type but a more dangerous version: too thin, too chic, too shallow. She’d come across them at the Mexican dealer’s gallery openings, all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They filled the air with high-pitched chatter to keep the real world from bursting through the levee, as if, by chanting their consumer mantras, the great nothing that was going on in their lives would be kept at bay. In the gallery she tolerated their presence as they might buy her work, but out in the open she was not going to have one of these cabras ricas