'What, Inés?'
'Nothing,' she said, and released his knee. 'He seems a little anxious recently.'
'Only because he's made it official now: the announcement.'
'What difference does that make?' she said, hanging on Falcón's every syllable, desperate for insight into the male psyche.
'You know… total commitment… no going back.'
'He was committed before.'
'It's official… confirmed to the world. It can make a man nervous, that sort of thing. You know, The End of Youth. No more playing around. Family. Adult responsibilities – all that stuff.'
'I see,' she said, not seeing it at all. 'You mean there's doubt?'
'No, no, no que no,' said Falcón. 'There's no doubt, just a nervousness at the prospect of change. He's thirty-seven, never been married before. It's just a reaction to the future physical and emotional upheaval.'
'Physical?' she said, sitting on the edge of her seat.
'You're not going to stay in his apartment, are you?' said Falcón. 'You'll get a house… start a family.'
'Did Esteban talk to you about this?' she said, searching his face for the least sign of a tic.
'I'm the last person…'
'We'd always said that we'd buy a place in the centre of town,' she said. 'We wanted to be in the old city in a big house like yours… maybe not so mad and enormous, but in that classic style. I've been looking for months… mostly at old properties that need work, and guess what Esteban said last night?'
'That he's found somewhere?' said Falcón, unable to stop the thought flashing through his mind that Inés had only married him for his house.
'That he wants to live in Santa Clara.'
Falcón stared into those big frightened eyes and felt something like slow-motion wreckage forming in his mind. Consonants caught in his throat like fish bones.
'Exactly,' she said, leaning back, almost in triumph, 'it's the antithesis of what we'd always talked about.'
Falcón drained his beer, ordered more, stuffed the pepper into his mouth messily.
'What does it mean, Javier?'
'It means,' he said, hurtling towards tragic revelations and veering off at the last moment, 'it means that it's part of the emotional upheaval. When everything in your life changes at once… you change with it… but more slowly. I know. I've become an expert in these matters of change.'
She nodded, gulping the words down into her chest where she could treasure them until her eyes flickered and she shot off the bar stool and leapt at the door.
'Esteban!' she roared down the street, better than any fishwife.
Calderón stopped as if he'd been knifed in the chest. He turned and Falcón expected to see the hilt jutting out of his ribs, but instead he saw – in the moments before Calderón could compose his face – fear, loss, contempt and a strange wildness, as if the man had been lost for days in the mountains. Then the judge smiled and the radiance shone out of him. She went to him. He went to her. They kissed madly in the street. An old couple sitting in the window nodded their approval. Falcón blinked at the fraudulence on display.
Inés hauled him into the bar. Calderón's step faltered as he saw Falcón perched on his bar stool. The three of them explained everything to each other twice without listening to a word. Beers shot down throats. Topics came and went. Inés and Calderón left after minutes. Falcón studied the sinew standing out of Inés's forearm as she gripped her fiancé’s shirt. It was desperate. She was never letting go of this one.
The bill came. He paid it and drove home. Every light turned to red. The cobbles jolted his insides. Despite his tiredness he had no patience for bed. He went to his study and booted up the computer. He went through all the shots he'd taken since the weekend. He kept looking at the snap of Inés, seeing if it fitted with any of the others, seeing if he could remember it. It didn't help. He found the whisky, poured himself a single glass and left the bottle in the kitchen.
He was about to shut the computer down when he remembered Maddy Krugman telling him that she'd read his story on the internet. He logged on and entered her name into a search engine. There were several thousand hits, mostly for a political commentator called John Krugman and a journalist for the New York Times called Paul Krugman. Falcón entered Madeleine Coren into the search engine. There were only three hundred hits and he quite quickly started to find references to her photographic work. They were mainly old articles and a few reviews of her exhibitions, but they always featured a shot of the stunningly beautiful young Madeleine Coren, who looked cool, unapproachable and dressed exclusively in black. He was butting up against his boredom when a small piece from the St Louis Times caught his eye. FBI murder inquiry: Madeleine Coren, photographer, has been helping the FBI with their inquiries into the murder of Iranian-born carpet dealer Reza Sangari. The article appeared under the local news section and was dated 15th October 2000.
Madeleine Coren in FBI Murder Inquiry
The New York photographer Maddy Coren has been helping the FBI with their murder inquiry following the discovery of Reza Sangari's bludgeoned body in his Lower East Side apartment.
The FBI could not reveal why they were talking to Ms Coren in connection with the Iranian carpet dealer's murder. They have only stated that no charges have been brought against the thirty-six-year-old photographer whose latest show 'Minute Lives' has just moved from the St Louis Art Museum. John and Martha Coren, who still live in Belleville, St Clair would make no comment on their daughter's FBI interview. Maddy Coren currently lives in Connecticut with her husband, the architect Martin Krugman.
The journalist's name was Dan Fineman and after reading it through a few times Falcón began to pick up the slightly mischievous tone of the piece. Its news- worthiness was hardly worth the column inches. He entered 'Minute Lives' into the search engine and a review came up with the headline 'Short on content. Small in stature.' The by-line was the same Dan Fineman. A man with a grudge.
Falcón typed Reza Sangari into the search engine. His murder had been well covered at a local and national level, and from these articles he was able to piece together the full story.
Reza Sangari was just thirty years old. He was born in Tehran. His mother was from a banking family and his father originally ran his own carpet factory until they left prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Reza was brought up in Switzerland but went to the USA to study Art History at Columbia University. After graduation he bought a warehouse on the Lower East Side from which he developed his carpet import and sales business. He converted the second floor into an apartment, which was where his dead body was found on 13th October 2000. He had been murdered three days earlier; he had taken two blows to the head with a blunt instrument, which had not killed him, but he had fallen sideways on to a brass bedstead which had. The weapon that caused the first wounds was never found. Because of the wide-ranging nature of the investigation and Sangari's international client list the FBI took over from the New York homicide cops and contacted all his clients and social acquaintances. They found he was seeing a number of women but not one in particular. There was no evidence of a break-in and nothing obvious had been stolen. There was nothing missing from the inventory. The FBI had been unable to develop any suspects in the case despite extensive interviews with the women he was seeing at the time of his death. Some of the names of these women had crept into the media because they were famous. They were: Helena Valankova (dress designer), Françoise Lascombs (model) and Madeleine Krugman. The last two were married women.
Chapter 11
Friday, 26th July 2002
Falcón woke up and reached for a pen and notebook which he kept by the bed to record his dreams. This time he wrote: