The Hidden Assassins. Robert Thomas Wilson

      ‘I know your sort,’ he’d said, and touched the corner of his mouth with the point of his tongue.

      His bravado had paralysed her vocal cords. That and the horrible little kiss he’d blown her, which found its way to her neck like a horsefly.

      Consuelo, distracted by these memories, had slowed to a halt. A member of the group spotted her and jerked his head in her direction. The orator stepped towards the railing holding the bottle up, letting it dangle from his forefinger.

      ‘Fancy a drink?’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any glasses, but I’ll let you suck it off my finger if you want.’

      A low, gurgling laugh came from the group, which included some women. Startled, Consuelo began walking again. The man jumped off the raised platform. The steel tips on the heels of his boots hammered the cobbles. He blocked her path and started to dance an extremely suggestive Sevillana, with much pelvic thrusting. The group backed him up with some flamenco clapping.

      ‘Come on, Doña Consuelo,’ he said. ‘Let’s see you move. You look as if you’ve got a decent pair of legs on you.’

      She was shocked to hear him use her name. Terror slashed through her insides, tugging something strangely exciting behind it. Muscles quivered in the backs of her thighs. Disparate thoughts barged into each other in her mind. Why the hell had she put herself in such a position? She wondered how rough his hands would be. He looked strong—potentially violent.

      The sheer perversity of these thoughts jolted her back to the reality. She had to get away from him. She veered off down a side street, walking as fast as her kitten heels would permit on the cobbles. He was behind her, steel tips leisurely clicking.

      ‘Fucking hell, Doña Consuelo, I only asked you for a dance,’ he shouted after her, a mocking inflexion on her title. ‘Now you’re leading me astray down this dark alley. For God’s sake, have some self-respect, woman. Don’t go showing your eagerness so early on. We’ve barely met, we haven’t even danced.’

      Consuelo kept going, breathing fast. All she had to do was get to the end of the street, turn left and she’d be at the gates of the old city and there would be traffic and people…a taxi back to her real life at home in Santa Clara. An alley appeared on her left, she saw the lights of the main road through the buildings leaning into each other. She darted down it. Shit, the cobbles were wet and all over the place. It was too dark and her heels were slipping. She wanted to scream when his hand finally landed on her shoulder, but it was like in those dreams where the need to yell the neighbourhood awake produced only a strangled whimper. He pushed her towards the wall, whose whitewash hung off in brittle flakes, and crackled as her cheek made contact. Her heart thundered in her chest.

      ‘Have you been watching me, Doña Consuelo?’ he said, his face appearing over her shoulder, the sourness of his winy breath in her nostrils. ‘Have you been keeping a little eye out for me? Perhaps…since you lost your husband your bed’s been a bit cold at night.’

      She gasped as he slipped his hand between her bare legs. It was rough. An automatic reflex clamped her thighs shut. He sawed his hand up to her crotch. A voice in her head remonstrated with her for being so stupid. Her heart walloped in her throat while her brain screamed for her to say something.

      ‘If it’s money you want…’ she said, in a voice that whispered to the flaking whitewash.

      ‘Well,’ he said, pulling his hand away, ‘how much have you got? I don’t come cheap, you know. Especially for the sort of thing you like.’

      He took her handbag off her shoulder, flipped it open and found her wallet.

      ‘A hundred and twenty euros!’ he said, disgusted.

      ‘Take it,’ she said, her voice still stuck under her thyroid.

      ‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ he said, dropping her handbag to his feet. ‘But that’s not enough for what you want. Come back with the rest tomorrow.’

      He pressed against her. She felt his obscene hardness against her buttocks. His face came over her shoulder once more and he kissed her on the corner of her mouth, his wine and tobacco breath and bitter little tongue slipping between her lips.

      He pushed himself away, a gold ring on his finger flashed in the corner of her eye. He stepped back, kicked her handbag down the street.

      ‘Fuck off, whore,’ he said. ‘You make me sick.’

      The steel tips receded. Consuelo’s throat still throbbed so that breathing was more like swallowing without being able to achieve either. She looked back to where he’d gone, confused at her escape. The empty cobbles shone under the yellow light. She pushed away from the wall, snatched up her handbag and ran, slipping and hobbling, down the street to the main road where she hailed a cab. She sat in the back with the city floating past her pallid face. Her hands shook too much to light the cigarette she’d managed to get into her mouth. The driver lit it for her.

      At home she found money in her desk to pay for the taxi. She ran upstairs and checked the boys in their beds. She went to her own room and stripped off and looked at herself in the mirror. He hadn’t marked her. She showered endlessly, soaping and resoaping herself, rinsing herself again and again.

      She went back to her desk in her dressing gown and sat in the dark, feeling nauseous, head aching, waiting for dawn. When it was the earliest possible acceptable moment, she phoned Alicia Aguado and asked for an emergency appointment.

       3

       Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs

      Juez Esteban Calderón was not on business. The urbane and highly successful judge had told his wife, Inés, that he was working late before going to dinner with a group of young state judges who had come down from Madrid on a training course. He had worked late and he had gone to the dinner, but he’d excused himself early and was now taking his favourite little detour down the side of the San Marcos church to reach ‘the penthouse of promise’, which overlooked the church of Santa Isabel. He usually enjoyed smoking a cigarette at the edge of the small, floodlit plaza, looking from within the darkness at the fountain and the massive portal of the church. It calmed him after long days spent with prosecutors and policemen and kept him out of the way of some bars around the corner, which were frequented by colleagues. If they saw him there it would get back to Inés and there’d be awkward questions. He also needed a few moments to rein in his quivering sexual tension, which started every morning when he woke up and imagined the long coppery hair and mulatto skin of his Cuban girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, who lived in the penthouse just visible from where he was sitting.

      His cigarette hissed in a puddle where he’d tossed it, half smoked. He took off his jacket. A breeze sprayed droplets of water from the orange trees on to his back, and he caught his breath at the lash of its sudden chill. He kept to the wall of the church until he was in the darkness of the narrow street. His finger hovered over the top button of the entry phone as an accumulation of half thoughts made him hesitate: subterfuge, infidelity, fear, sex, dizziness and death. He scratched at the air above the button; these unusual thoughts made him feel that he was on the brink of something like a great change. What to do? Either step over the edge or fall back. He swallowed some thick, bitter saliva from his fast smoking. The sensuality of the lash of raindrops across his back reached that nexus of nerves in the base of his spine. The unease disappeared. His recklessness made him feel alive again and his cock leapt in his pants. He hit the buzzer.

      ‘It’s me,’ he said, to the crackle of Marisa’s voice.

      ‘You sound thirsty.’

      ‘Not thirsty,’ he said, clearing his throat.

      The two-man lift didn’t seem to have enough air and he started panting. Its stainless steel panels reflected the absurd shape of his arousal and he rearranged himself. He brushed back his thinning hair, loosened