The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

you been to any social occasions there?’

      ‘Yes…Rafael was there, too.’

      ‘But not Lucía?’

      ‘Too much for her.’

      ‘Any observations?’

      ‘I’m sure he was probably interested in the idea of having sex with her because that’s what travels through every man’s brain when they see Maddy Krugman, but I don’t think it happened.’

      There was a loud bellow from upstairs, the terrible noise of an animal in pain. It shot up Consuelo’s spine and jerked her to her feet. Falcón scrambled out of his chair. Feet rumbled down the stairs. Mario in a pair of shorts and shirt came running down the corridor. He had his arms held out from his puny body, his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent scream. The famous war photograph of the napalm attack on a Vietnam village snapped into Falcón’s mind but not focused on the central figure of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road. It was on the boy in front of her, his black mouth stretched open, crammed full of horror.

       4

       Wednesday, 24th July 2002

      In his passport photo Martin Krugman, without his beard, looked his age, which was fifty-seven years old. With the beard, which was grey and had been allowed to grow untrimmed, he looked beyond retirement age. Life had been kinder to Madeleine Krugman who was thirty-eight and looked no different from her passport photo taken when she was thirty-one. They could have been father and daughter, and many people would have preferred it that way.

      Marty Krugman was tall and rangy, some might say skinny, with a prominent nose which, face on, was blade thin. His eyes were set close together, well back in his head and operated under eyebrows which his wife had given up trying to contain. He did not look like a man who slept much. He drank cup after cup of thick espresso coffee poured from a chrome coffeemaker. Marty was not dressed for the office. His shirt was nearly cheesecloth with a blue stripe, which he wore like a smock outside his faded blue jeans. He had Outward Bound sandals on his feet and sat with an ankle resting on his knee and his hands clinging on to his shin as if he was pulling on an oar. He spoke perfect Spanish with a Mexican inflexion.

      ‘Spent my youth in California,’ he said. ‘Berkeley, doing Engineering. Then I took some years out in New Mexico painting in Taos and taking trips down to Central and South America. My Spanish is a mess.’

      ‘Was that in the late sixties?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘And seventies. I was a hippy until I discovered architecture.’

      ‘Did you know Sr Vega before you came here?’

      ‘No. We met him through the estate agent who rented the house to us.’

      ‘Did you have any work?’

      ‘Not at that stage. We were playing it fast and easy. It was lucky that we met Rafael in the first few weeks. We got talking, he’d heard of some of my New York stuff and he offered me some project work.’

      ‘It was very lucky,’ said Madeleine, as if she might have flown the coop if it hadn’t worked out.

      ‘So you came here on a whim?’

      Maddy had changed out of the white linen trousers into a knee-length skirt which flared out over her cream leather chair. She crossed and uncrossed her very white legs several times a minute and Falcón, who was sitting directly opposite her, annoyed himself by looking every time. Her breasts trembled under her blue silk top with every movement. Hormonal sound waves seemed to pulse out into the room as her blue blood ticked under her white skin. Marty was impervious to it all. He didn’t look at her or react to anything she said. When she spoke his gaze remained fixed on Falcón, who was having trouble finding a resting place for his own eyes with the whole room now an erogenous zone.

      ‘My mother died and I inherited some money,’ said Maddy. ‘We thought we’d take a break and be in Europe for a while…visit our old honeymoon haunts: Paris, Florence, Prague. But we went to Provence and then Marty had to see Barcelona…get his Gaudí fix, and one thing led to another. We found ourselves here. Seville gets into your blood. Are you a Sevillano, Inspector Jefe?’

      ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘When did all this happen?’

      ‘March last year.’

      ‘Were you taking a break from anything in particular?’

      ‘Just boredom,’ said Marty.

      ‘Your mother’s death, Sra Krugman…was that sudden?’

      ‘She was diagnosed with cancer and died within ten weeks.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said Falcón. ‘What was boring you in America, Sr Krugman?’

      ‘You can call us Maddy and Marty if you like,’ she said. ‘We prefer to be relaxed.’

      Her perfect white teeth appeared behind her chillired lips in a two centimetre smile and were gone. She spread her fingers out on the leather arms of the chair and switched her legs over again.

      ‘My job,’ said Marty. ‘I was bored with the work I was doing.’

      ‘No you weren’t,’ she said, and their eyes met for the first time.

      ‘She’s right,’ said Marty, his head slowly coming back to Falcón. ‘Why would I be working here if I was bored with my job? I was bored with being in America. I just didn’t think you’d be interested in that. It’s not a detail that’s going to help you find out what happened to the Vegas.’

      ‘I’m interested in everything,’ said Falcón. ‘Most murder has a motive…’

      ‘Murder?’ said Maddy. ‘The officer on the gate told me it was suicide.’

      ‘Self-murder,’ said Falcón. ‘If that’s what it was. It’s all motivated, which means I’m interested in everybody’s motives for doing anything. It is all indicative.’

      ‘Of what?’ asked Maddy.

      ‘A state of mind. Degrees of happiness and disappointment, joy and anger, love and hate. You know, the big emotions that make things happen and break things down.’

      ‘This guy doesn’t sound like a cop,’ said Marty in English, throwing the line over his shoulder to his wife.

      Her eyes were on Falcón, digging deep, excavating his cranium in a way that made him think that he must look like somebody she knew.

      ‘What was so wrong with America that you had to leave?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘I didn’t say anything was wrong,’ said Marty, bracing his shoulders as if he was at the start of the Olympic sculls final. ‘I was just bored with the grind of daily life.’

      ‘Boredom is one of our strongest motivations,’ said Falcón. ‘What did you want to get away from? What were you looking for?’

      ‘Sometimes the American way of life can be a rather enclosed world,’ said Marty.

      ‘There are a lot of Sevillanos who’ve hardly been outside Andalucía, let alone Spain,’ said Falcón. ‘They don’t see the need for it. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with their enclosed world.’

      ‘Maybe they don’t question it.’

      ‘Why should they when they live in the most beautiful place on earth?’

      ‘Have you ever been to America, Inspector Jefe?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Why not?’ asked Marty, indignant.

      ‘It’s the greatest nation on earth,’ said Maddy,