The Hidden Assassins

Manuela liked this. However hard she tried, she couldn’t get Angel to participate in her catalogue of imagined horrors. His objective authority made her feel quite girlish. She hadn’t yet got to the point of recognizing what their relationship had become, how it fitted with her powerful needs. All she knew was that Angel was a colossal comfort to her.

‘Relax,’ said Angel, pulling her to him, kissing the top of her head.

‘Wouldn’t it be great to be able to compress time and just be in tomorrow evening now,’ she said, snuggling up to him, ‘with money in the bank and the summer free?’

‘Let’s have a celebratory dinner at Salvador Rojo tonight.’

‘I was thinking that myself,’ she said, ‘but I was too superstitious to book it. We could ask Javier. He could bring Laura so you can have someone to flirt with.’

‘How very considerate of you,’ he said, kissing her head again.

When Angel and Manuela had met it seemed that the only thing holding her life together was her legal battle over Javier’s right to have inherited the house in which he was living. They’d met in her lawyer’s office, where Angel was sorting out his late wife’s estate. As soon as they’d shaken hands she’d felt something cave in high up around her stomach and no man had ever done that to her before. They left the lawyer’s office and went for a drink and, having never looked at older men, having always gone for ‘boys’, she immediately saw the point. Older men looked after you. You didn’t have to look after them.

The more she found out about Angel the more she fell for him. He was a phenomenally charming man, a committed politician (sometimes a little too committed), right wing, conservative, a Catholic, a lover of the bulls, and from an established family. In politics he’d been able to broker agreements between fanatically opposed factions just because neither party wanted to be disliked by him. He’d been ‘someone’ in the Partido Popular in Andalucía but had quit in a fury over the impossibility of getting anything to change. Recently he’d joined forces, in a public relations capacity, with a smaller right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucía, which was run by his old friend, Eduardo Rivero. He contributed a political column for the ABC newspaper and was also their highly respected bullfight commentator. With all these talents at his disposal it hadn’t taken him long to bring Javier and Manuela back together again.

‘All energy expended on court cases like yours is negative energy,’ Angel had told her. ‘That negative energy dominates your life, so that the rest of it has to go on hold. The only way to restart your life is to bring positive energy back into it.’

‘And how do I do that?’ she’d asked, looking at this huge source of positive energy in front of her with her big brown eyes.

‘Court cases use up resources, not just financial ones, but physical and emotional ones, too. So you have to be productive,’ he said. ‘What do you want from your life at the moment?’

‘That house!’ she’d said, despite being pretty keen on Angel right then, too.

‘It’s yours, Javier has offered it to you.’

‘There’s the small matter of one million euros…’

‘But he hasn’t said you can’t have it,’ said Angel. ‘And it’s much more productive to make money in order to buy something you really want, than to throw it away on useless lawyers.’

‘He’s not useless,’ she said, and ran out of steam.

There were a few thousand other reasons she had stacked up against Angel’s stunningly simple logic, but the source of most of them was her miserable emotional state, which was not something she wanted to peel back for him to see. So, she agreed with him, sold her veterinary practice at the beginning of 2003, borrowed money against the property she had inherited in El Puerto de Santa Maria and invested it in Seville’s booming property market. After three years of buying, renovating and selling she had forgotten about Javier’s house, the court case and that hollow feeling at the top of her stomach. She now lived with Angel in a penthouse apartment overlooking the majestic, treelined Plaza Cristo de Burgos in the middle of the old city and her life was full and about to be even sweeter.

‘How did it go last night?’ asked Manuela. ‘I can tell you wound up on the brandy.’

‘Gah!’ said Angel, wincing at some gripe in his intestines.

‘No smoking for you until after coffee this morning.’

‘Maybe my breath could become a cheap form of renewable energy,’ said Angel, fingering some sleep out of his eye. ‘In fact everyone’s breath could, because all we do is spout hot, alcoholic air.’

‘Is the master of positive energy getting a little bit bored with his cronies?’

‘Not bored. They’re my friends,’ said Angel, shrugging. ‘It’s one of the advantages of age that we can tell each other the same stories over and over and still laugh.’

‘Age is a state of mind, and you’re still young,’ said Manuela. ‘Maybe you should go back to the commercial side of your public relations business. Forget politics and all those self-important fools.’

‘And finally she reveals what she thinks of my closest friends.’

‘I like your friends, it’s just…the politics,’ said Manuela. ‘Endless talk but nothing ever happens.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Angel, nodding. ‘The last time there was an event in this country was the horror of 11th March 2004, and look what happened: the whole country pulled together and by due process of democracy kicked out a perfectly good government. Then we bowed down to the terrorists and pulled out of Iraq. And after that? We sank back into the comfort of our lives.’

‘And drank too much brandy.’

‘Exactly,’ said Angel, looking at her with his hair exploded in all directions. ‘You know what someone was saying last night?’

‘Was this the interesting bit?’ she said, teasing him on.

‘We need a return to benevolent dictatorship,’ said Angel, throwing up his hands in mock exasperation.

‘You might find yourselves out on a limb there,’ said Manuela. ‘People don’t like turmoil with troops and tanks on the streets. They want a cold beer, a tapa and something stupid to watch on TV.’

‘My point entirely,’ said Angel, slapping his stomach. ‘Nobody listened. We’ve got a population dying of decadence, so morally moribund that they no longer know what they want, apart from knee-jerk consumption, and my “cronies” think that they’ll be loved if they do these people the favour of mounting a coup.’

‘I don’t want to see you on television, standing on a desk in Parliament with a gun in your hand.’

‘I’ll have to lose some weight first,’ said Angel.

Calderón came to with a jolt and a sense of real panic left over from a dream he could not recollect. He was surprised to see Marisa’s long brown back in the bed beside him, instead of Inés’s white nightdress. He’d overslept. It was now 6 a.m. and he would have to go back to his apartment and deal with some very awkward questions from Inés.

His frantic leap from the bed woke Marisa. He dressed, shaking his head at the slug trails of dried semen on his thigh.

‘Take a shower,’ said Marisa.

‘No time.’

‘Anyway, she’s not an idiot—so you tell me.’

‘No, she’s not,’ said Calderón, looking for his other shoe, ‘but as long as certain rules are obeyed then the whole thing can be glossed over.’

‘This must be the bourgeois protocol for affairs outside marriage.’

‘That’s right,’ said Calderón, irritated by her. ‘You can’t stay out all night because that is making a complete joke out of the institution.’

‘What’s the cut-off point between a “serious” marriage and a “joke” one?’ asked Marisa. ‘Three o’clock…three thirty? No. That’s OK. I think by four o’clock it’s ridiculous. By four thirty it is a complete joke. By six, six thirty…it’s a farce.’

‘By six it’s a tragedy,’ said Calderón, searching the floor madly. ‘Where is my fucking shoe?’

‘Under the chair,’ said Marisa. ‘And don’t forget your camera on the coffee table. I’ve left a present or two on it for you.’

He threw on his jacket, pocketed the camera, dug his foot into his shoe.

‘How did you find my camera?’ he asked, kneeling down by the bed.

‘I went through your jacket while you were asleep,’ she said. ‘I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks. Don’t worry, I didn’t erase all those stupid shots of your lawyers’ dinner to prove to your very intelligent wife that you weren’t out all night fucking your girlfriend.’

‘Well, thanks very much for that.’