The Ignorance of Blood. Robert Thomas Wilson

you jumped when he told you to. This meant that he had developed good contacts in the Guardia Civil, some of whom had thick wads of Belenki's euros hidden in their garages. Leonid Revnik was hoping that Belenki could tell him where the money and disks that Lukyanov had stolen from the puti club safe had ended up. He was on his third cigar of the day. The empty safe was still gaping. The air-con was on the blink and he was uncomfortably hot. The mobile on the desk rang.

      ‘Viktor,’ said Revnik.

      ‘It's taken some time to get this information because it's out of the normal area of my guy's jurisdiction,’ said Belenki. ‘The Guardia Civil who went to the scene of the accident came from a town outside Seville called Utrera. When they found the money they called the police headquarters in Seville and, because it was clear that this wasn't just any old guy who'd died in a car accident, they went to the top for instructions: Comisario Elvira.’

      ‘Shit,’ said Revnik.

      ‘And he put it in the hands of Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Remember him?’

      ‘Everybody remembers him from the bombing in June,’ said Revnik. ‘So where's it all gone?’

      ‘It's in the Jefatura in Seville.’

      ‘Have we still got somebody in there?’

      ‘That's how I know where everything is.’

      ‘Right, so how do we get it out?’

      ‘You can say goodbye to the money,’ said Belenki. ‘Once the forensics have been over it, they'll stick it in the bank – unless you want to hold up a Prosegur van.’

      ‘I don't give a fuck about the money. I mean, I do, but … you're right. The disks, they're a different matter,’ said Revnik. ‘What can we get on Falcón?’

      ‘You're not going to be able to buy him, that's for sure.’

      ‘So what else?’

      ‘There's always the woman,’ said Belenki. ‘Consuelo Jiménez.’

      ‘Ah, yes, the woman,’ said Revnik.

      At the traffic lights Falcón searched his eyes in the rear-view mirror, trying to find the evidence of obsession Calderón had seen there. He didn't really need to look at the tell-tale blackberry smudges; he knew from the slight gaucherie in his left hand, and that feeling of wearing someone else's right leg, that what was cradled in his mind was beginning to have physical manifestations.

      Work had sat on Falcón's shoulders like an overweight, badly packed rucksack, and it never slipped off, not even at night. In the mornings he opened an eye, his face crushed hard into the pillow after snatching an hour's lethal sleep, to feel his bones creaking in his skeleton. The week's holiday he'd taken at the end of August, when he'd joined his friend Yacoub Diouri and his family on the beach at Essaouira in Morocco, had worn off on his first day back in the office.

      Horns blared behind him. He pulled away from the traffic lights. He came into the old city through the Puerta Osario. He parked badly near the San Marcos church and walked down Calle Bustos Tavera to the tunnelled passageway that led from the street into a courtyard of workshops where Marisa Moreno had her studio. His footsteps sounded loud on the large cobbles of the dark tunnel. He broke out into the fierce light in the courtyard, squinted against it to take in the dilapidated buildings, the grass growing up through old rear axles and expired fridges. He walked up a metal stairway to a doorway above a small warehouse. Foot shuffling and dull thuds came from inside. He knocked.

      ‘Who is it?’

      ‘Police.’

       ‘ Momentito.’

      The door was opened by a tall, slim mulatto woman with an unusually long neck, who had wood chips stuck to her face and in her coppery hair, which was tied back. She wore a cobalt-blue gown under which she was naked apart from some bikini briefs. Sweat pimpled across her forehead, over the undulation of her nose and trickled down the visible bones of her chest. She was breathing heavily.

      ‘Marisa Moreno?’ he said, holding up his police ID. ‘I am Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón.’

      ‘I've already told Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita everything I know a couple of hundred times,’ she said. ‘I've got nothing to add.’

      ‘I've come to talk to you about your sister.’

      ‘My sister?’ she said, and Falcón did not miss the momentary fear that froze her features.

      ‘You have a sister called Margarita.’

      ‘I know my own sister's name.’

      Falcón paused, hoping that Marisa might feel the need to fill the moment with more information. She stared him out.

      ‘You reported her missing in 1998, when she was two months short of her seventeenth birthday.’

      ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Don't touch anything.’

      The studio's floor was patched with rough concrete where the clay tiles had come up. The air smelled of bare timber, turps and oils. There were chippings everywhere and a pile of sawdust in the corner. A meat hook large enough to take a full carcass hung from the tie rod which spanned the room. Suspended from its sharp hook was an electric chain saw, its flex thrown over the bar. Three dark and polished statues stood beneath the oily, sawdust-encrusted tool, one with its head missing. Falcón made for the space around the piece. The headless statue was that of a young woman, with breasts high on her chest, perfect orbs. The faces of the men flanking her had nothing in them. Their eyes were blank. The musculature of their bodies had something of the savagery of an existence in the wild about them. Their genitals were outsized and, despite being flaccid, seemed sinister, as if they were spent from a recent rape.

      Marisa watched him as he took the piece in, waiting for the banality of his comments. She had yet to meet the white man who could resist a little critique, and her warriors with their prize penises drew plenty of lewd admiration. What she registered in Falcón's face was not even a raised eyebrow, but a brief revulsion as he looked down the bodies.

      ‘So what happened to Margarita?’ he asked, switching to Marisa. ‘You reported her missing on 25th May 1998, and when the police came to check with you a month later you said she'd turned up again about a week after she'd disappeared.’

      ‘That was how much they cared,’ she said, reaching for a small half-smoked cigar which she relit. ‘They took down her details and I never heard from them again. They wouldn't take my calls, and when I went round to the station they just dismissed me, said she was with some boyfriend or other. If you're pretty and mulatto like her they just think you're some kind of fucking machine. I'm sure they did nothing.’

      ‘She did go to Madrid with a boyfriend, though, didn't she?’

      ‘They were pretty pleased about that when I told them.’

      ‘Where were your parents in all this?’ asked Falcón. ‘Margarita was still a kid.’

      ‘Dead. You see, they probably didn't put that in the report. My father died up north in Gijón in 1995. My mother died here in Seville in 1998 and two months later Margarita went missing. She was upset. That was why I was worried.’

      ‘Your father was Cuban?’

      ‘We came over here in 1992. It was a bad time in Cuba; Russian aid had dried up after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. There's a large Cuban community in Gijón, so that's where we settled.’

      ‘How did your parents meet?’

      ‘My father had a club in Gijón. My mother was a flamenco dancer from Seville. She'd come up to perform at the annual Semana Negra fair. My father was a good salsa dancer and there's such a thing as Cuban flamenco, so they taught each other things and my mother made the mistake that a lot of other women made.’

      ‘So obviously she wasn't your natural mother?’

      ‘No, we don't know