The Ignorance of Blood. Robert Thomas Wilson

stepped out of her pink dress and a small pair of knickers. It was all she had to do. He wrenched at his hands caught in the cuffs of his shirt, kicked off his shoes. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees, tanned all over except a small white triangle. After some ferocious moments with his clothes he was naked, went over to her, stood between her legs. She stroked him, looking up at his agony. Her lips were moist, still with the vestiges of the peachy lipstick that matched her fingernails. She reached up from his thighs, over his abdomen, to his chest. Her hands slipped round his back and she dug her nails into his skin. As he felt her mouth on him, her nails clawed their way down to his buttocks. He was hanging on to his patience by the skin of his teeth.

      She fell back on to the bed, rolled on to her front, looked over her shoulder at him and pointed at the backs of her knees. His thighs shivered as he knelt on the bed. He kissed her Achilles tendon, her calf, the back of one knee, then the other. He worked his way up her hamstrings, which trembled under his lips. She raised her buttocks to him, reached behind her for him, patience out of the question now. They shunted together, his hands full of her. She gripped the sheets in her fists. And all the hell of the day just fell away from them.

      They lay where they'd collapsed, still joined, the room lit only by the glow of street light coming in through the blinds.

      ‘You're different tonight,’ said Falcón, stroking her stomach, kissing her between the shoulder blades, welded to her by their sweat.

      ‘I feel different.’

      ‘It was like two years ago.’

      She stared into the dark, her vision still green at the edges, as if recovering from an intense light.

      ‘Something happened?’ he asked.

      ‘I'm ready,’ she said.

      ‘Why now?’

      He felt her shrug under his hands.

      ‘Maybe it's because my children are leaving me,’ she said.

      ‘Darío still needs you.’

      ‘And his Javi,’ she said. ‘He loves you. I can tell.’

      ‘And I love him,’ said Falcón. ‘And I love you, too.’

      ‘What did you say?’

      ‘I said, I love you, too … always have done.’

      She took his hand from her stomach, kissed the fingers and pressed it between her breasts. She'd heard those words before from men, but this was the first time she'd got close to believing them.

       8

       Consuelo's house, Santa Clara, Seville – Saturday, 16th September 2006, 07.45 hrs

      Morning began with football. Falcón in goal. He had a spring in his legs so that he had to remind himself not to save everything. He let Darío send him the wrong way a few times and watched on his knees as the boy ran around the garden with his Sevilla FC shirt over his head, flying. Consuelo looked out from the sitting room in her dressing gown. She was in a strange mood, as if last night's admissions had made her cautious. She knew she loved Javier, especially when she saw his mock dismay as another of Darío's penalties rifled past him and sizzled down the back of the nylon net. There was something boyish about her cop and it made her ache as much as seeing her own son lying on his back, arms open to receive the embraces of his imaginary fellow players. She knocked on the window as if checking the scene for reality and they came in for breakfast.

      Falcón sat in the front of the cab on the way back to his house and chatted cheerfully with the driver about Sevilla FC's chances in the UEFA cup. He knew it all from Darío. He picked up his car. The morning traffic on the other side of the Plaza de Cuba, screwed up by the ongoing metro construction, today posed no problems for him. He felt completely mended. Obsession had been cleared from his mind. A crescendo of the fullness of life expanded his chest. His paranoia seemed absurd. Decisions were easy. He knew now that he was going to have to talk to Pablo of the CNI about Yacoub's situation. That was something he wasn't going to attempt to manage on his own. It had come to him with clarity and accompanied by the words of Mark Flowers, the CIA agent, who doubled as a ‘Communications Officer’, attached to the US Consulate in Seville: ‘Don't try to understand the whole picture … there's nobody in the world who does.’ Just realizing the thinness of the slice of the world he saw was enough to persuade him that he needed another point of view.

      Nobody from the Homicide squad was in yet. He closed the door to his office and picked up the phone with the scrambled line, which would connect him directly to Pablo in the CNI's offices in Madrid. It was a Saturday and early but Pablo was the new section head since Juan had left and Falcón knew he'd be there. It took half an hour to talk Pablo through what had happened in the apartment in La Latina yesterday afternoon and another fifteen minutes for Pablo to ask all his questions, the last of which was:

      ‘Where did he say he was going and when?’

      ‘Rabat. This morning. The GICM high command were going to give him their decision.’

      Long silence.

      ‘Are you still there, Pablo?’

      ‘I'm still here,’ he said. ‘I'm wondering if there's anything that needs to be done immediately.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Yacoub is not in Rabat.’

      ‘He's flying there from Madrid this morning.’

      ‘That's the interesting thing,’ said Pablo. ‘He flew into Heathrow last night. It might not mean anything. It might just be an omission on his part, but we still haven't found a flight into Casablanca with his name on the manifest.’

      Falcón felt that metallic coldness in his stomach again.

      ‘This is the problem I had yesterday,’ he said. ‘I think I'm losing him.’

      ‘Trust is a strange thing in this game,’ said Pablo. ‘It's more fluid than in the real world. You can't expect someone who's constantly dissimulating to be as reliable as yourself. Look what happens to married people when they have affairs. The first few lies are OK. Then, as time goes on and the subterfuge builds, the lying becomes an all-consuming activity. Yacoub is now having to pretend to be someone else almost twenty-four hours a day. The GICM have racked up the pressure by invading his domestic situation, which means that Yacoub now has one less rock to stand on to remind himself of who he really is.’

      ‘And I'm his last remaining rock.’

      ‘Without you, he's in danger of losing that vital sense of self,’ said Pablo. ‘Part of your job is to shore him up. Let him know that you are dependable, that you can be trusted in every situation.’

      ‘He told me not to talk to you,’ said Falcón. ‘He was obsessed with losing control to others. He's trying to control me and yet he's putting himself beyond my control. I'm not sure where I stand any more. All I know is that it will be below his son, Abdullah.’

      ‘You have to rebuild that trust. He must feel that it's you and him against the GICM. You have to anchor him,’ said Pablo. ‘I'm going to get more information on what he's doing.’

      ‘Whatever you do now will expose me. He'll know that I've talked to you.’

      ‘This fluidity of trust is a two-way thing,’ said Pablo. ‘He hasn't gone straight to Rabat as he told you. You've come to me for some advice on how to proceed. Nobody's been hurt. Just leave it with me for a while. Don't go anywhere else for advice, especially not to that “friend” of yours, Mark Flowers.’

      He hung up. Pablo didn't like Falcón's relationship with Mark Flowers, which had started four years ago when Falcón had earned the CIA agent's respect during one of his investigations. Since that time they'd exchanged information, Falcón