LITMIR.BIZ

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be a private conversation and he should not to use his home phone or mobile to make the call.

      ‘I'm in Madrid,’ said Yacoub, with a quiver in his voice.

      ‘You sound nervous.’

      ‘We have to meet.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘Now … as soon as possible. I couldn't warn you before because … well, you know why.’

      ‘I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get away at such short notice.’

      ‘I'm not asking you to do this for no reason at all, Javier. It's complicated and important. It's the most important thing that's happened so far.’

      ‘Is this business?’

      ‘It's business and it's personal.’

      Falcón had something else ‘personal’ going on tonight. He was supposed to be having dinner with Consuelo, just the two of them. Another assignation in the gradual process of their coming together.

      ‘Are you talking about tonight?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘Earlier.’

      ‘It sounds like you want me to catch the next possible train.’

      ‘That would be good,’ said Yacoub. ‘It's that important.’

      ‘I'll have to work up a plausible reason for…’

      ‘You're in the middle of an international investigation. There must be a hundred reasons for you to come to Madrid. Call me when you know which train you're on. I'll let you know where I'm going to be. And, Javier … don't tell anyone that you're coming to see me.’

      It was strange how, even after all this time, there were still certain moments which demanded an immediate cigarette. He drove to the Santa Justa station, got caught in traffic and called Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita, said he needed to talk to him about Marisa Moreno's evidence. Did he have some time this evening? Zorrita was surprised; the case was locked off. Falcón said he had other things to discuss as well. They arranged to meet as close to 7 p.m. as possible.

      A thought came to him as he replayed Yacoub's conversation. He wondered if this ‘business and personal’ problem was related to Yacoub's homosexuality. Although Yacoub was a happily married man with two children, he had this other secret life which, to the radical Islamic GICM, would be unacceptable.

      The traffic opened up. Falcón moved on, put a call through to his second-in-command, Inspector José Luis Ramírez, whose usual stolid pugnacity had given way to a mixture of anger and excitement after viewing the disks they'd found in Vasili Lukyanov's briefcase.

      ‘You won't believe this shit,’ he said. ‘A councillor with two girls at the same time. A town planner giving it to a teenager in the ass. A building inspector snorting cocaine off a black girl's tits. And that's the mild stuff. This will crack the Costa del Sol wide open, if it gets out.’

      ‘Don't let it. You know the rules. Only one computer in our department –’

      ‘Relax, Javier. It's all under control.’

      ‘I'm not coming back in today,’ said Falcón. ‘Am I going to see you tomorrow?’

      ‘Elvira's out. It's quiet here. I'll be here in the morning and I'll stay if you want me to, but I'd rather not.’

      ‘Let's see how it goes,’ said Falcón. ‘I hope you can have a nice weekend.’

      ‘Hold on a sec, the GRECO guy, Vicente Cortés, was in here earlier looking for you. He wanted to tell you that he's had a report about a Russian who was found up in the hills behind San Pedro de Alcántara, with a nine-millimetre bullet in the back of his head. Alexei Somebody. A big friend of the guy you found on the motorway with a steel rod through his heart. Mean anything?’

      ‘More to Cortés than to me,’ said Falcón, and hung up.

      At the Santa Justa station, Falcón found that the next AVE to Madrid was at 16.30, which would put him there just in time for his meeting with Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He called Yacoub on a phone in the station, trying to work out when he could get back to Seville and whether it would still be possible to make it to Consuelo's for dinner. Wanting that. Needing that. Even though progress was slow.

      ‘See Zorrita,’ said Yacoub. ‘I'll let you know where to go afterwards.’

      Falcón ate something unmemorable, drank a beer, sunk a café solo and boarded the train. He wanted to sleep but there was too much brain interference. A woman sitting opposite him was talking to her daughter on her mobile. She was getting remarried and her daughter wasn't happy about it. Complicated lives, getting more complicated by the minute.

      The prison governor called to say that Esteban Calderón had put in a request to see a psychologist.

      The train slashed through the brown, parched plains of northern Andalucía.

      Where had the rain gone?

      ‘He won't see the prison psychologist,’ said the governor. ‘He talks about this woman you know, but he can't remember her name.’

      ‘Alicia Aguado,’ said Falcón.

      ‘You're not the investigating officer in Señor Calderón's case, are you?’

      ‘No, but I'm seeing the officer who is this evening. I'll make sure he contacts you.’

      He hung up. The woman opposite had finished speaking to her daughter. She spun the mobile on the table with a long, painted nail. She looked up. The sort of woman who always knows when she's under observation. Dangerous, save-my-life eyes, thought Falcón. The daughter was right to be concerned.

      Up since before three and still not even lethargic. He closed his eyes to the dangerous ones opposite, but never reached below that confused state on the edge of oblivion. Now that he was worried he might not see her this evening, Consuelo surfaced in his mind. They'd first met five years ago when she'd been the prime suspect in the murder of her husband, the restaurateur Raúl Jiménez. A year later they'd met again and had a fling. Falcón had been hurt when she broke it off, but, as he'd recently discovered, Consuelo had had her own problems, which had sent her to the consulting rooms of the blind clinical psychologist, Alicia Aguado. Now, for the last three months, they'd been trying again. He could tell she was happier. She was easing him into her life gradually: only seeing him at weekends and quite often in family situations, with her sister and the children. He didn't mind that. His work had been punishing. Consuelo, too, was expanding the restaurant business left to her by Raúl Jiménez. Falcón enjoyed the feeling of belonging that he got from sitting at her family table. He wouldn't have minded more sex, but the food was always good, and in their moments alone they were getting on.

      Thoughts of Consuelo always seemed to involve Yacoub. The two were inextricably linked in his mind. The one had led to the other. Falcón and Consuelo had first been drawn together by their fascination with the fate of Raúl Jiménez's youngest son from his first marriage, Arturo, who'd vanished in the mid 1960s never to be seen again. The boy had been kidnapped by a Moroccan businessman as an act of revenge against Raúl Jiménez, who had impregnated the businessman's twelve-year-old daughter and then fled back to Spain. After his brief affair with Consuelo, Falcón had set out to find Arturo, hoping that this would bring her back to him. It hadn't worked, but the reward had been to discover that Arturo had been brought up as one of the Moroccan businessman's sons and had even been given his family name to become Yacoub Diouri.

      Their strange pasts: Falcón, who had been raised in Spain by Francisco Falcón only to find that his real father was a Moroccan artist, and Yacoub, born a Spaniard, forsaken by his father Raúl Jiménez, to be raised by his Moroccan abductor in Rabat, had been the bizarre foundation of their powerful friendship. And for the first time, perhaps as a result of his exhausted state, Falcón found his mildly confused mind reflecting, within the emotional compression of these unusual events, on what had happened to the child of the twelve-year-old daughter who'd been impregnated by Raúl

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