Robert Wilson - The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'That's true… which was why I had to ask the question,' said Falcón. 'I know nothing about you. I have to find out, and you are understandably reticent about certain dramatic events in your lives.'

'Are you satisfied?' he asked, backing off slightly.

'For the moment… yes.'

Marty nodded him into a seat on the other side of the desk.

'Your wife told me you had quite a developed relationship with Sr Vega,' said Falcón.

'Intellectually, yes,' said Marty. 'You know what it's like. There's no fun in talking to somebody who agrees with everything you say.'

'She said that you were surprised by how much you did agree.'

'I never expected to find myself agreeing about anything with the kind of person who thought that Franco had the right idea about communists: that they should all be rounded up and shot.'

'So what did you agree on?'

'We shared the same views about the American empire.'

'I didn't know there was one.'

'It's called the World,' said Marty. 'We don't go through all that time-consuming, expensive crap of actually colonizing. We just… globalize.'

'This note Sr Vega had in his hand referring to 9/11,' said Falcón, cutting in hard before Marty ran away with the ball. 'Pablo Ortega told me Sr Vega was of the opinion that America deserved what happened on September 11th.'

'We had some violent disagreements about that,' said Marty. 'It's one of the few things I get emotional about. Two friends of mine worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and, like a lot of Americans, and especially multicultural New Yorkers, I didn't see why they or the other three thousand people had to die.'

'But why do you think he believed that?'

'The American empire is no different to any other. We believe that the reason we have become so powerful isn't just that we commanded the necessary resources at the right time in history to defeat the only other contender, but also because we are right. We broke an entire ideology not with an atom bomb but by the sheer brutality of numbers. We forced the Soviet Union to play our game and bankrupted it. And that's the great thing about our tool of empire – we can invade without physically going in. We can dictate whilst appearing to be a force for the good. Capitalism brings a population under control by giving them the illusion of freedom and choice whilst forcing them to adhere to a rigid principle, which can be resisted only at the cost of personal ruin. There's no Gestapo, no torture chambers… it's perfect. We call it Empire Lite.'

Falcón started to break in on the Krugman theory, but Marty held up his hand.

'Paciencia, Inspector Jefe, I'm getting to it,' he said. 'Those are the basic ingredients of the American empire and, as you've realized, I've just used what Rafael thought was the Americans' greatest talent – the art of presentation. Truth, fact and reality are Play-doh in the hands of a great presenter. For example, how can we be aggressive if we don't invade? Look at our history as Defenders of the Right against the Forces of Evil. We saved Europe from the Nazis, Kuwait from Saddam.

'Rafael saw that as arrogance, which, when combined with Christian fundamentalism and outright support of the Israelis by the present administration, became too much for the Islamic die-hards. He thought this was the Holy War that both parties had been waiting for; we were going back centuries to the Crusades, except that the arena was now larger and the techniques available more devastating.

'When al-Qaeda hit our symbol of the American empire – and Rafael reckoned that to wake up 250 million people from a state of somnolent comfort you needed a very loud bang – he thought that the truly terrible thing for us was to discover that al-Qaeda knew us better than we did ourselves. They had understood what makes our society tick - our demand for outstanding presentation and our need to make an impact. He attached a lot of importance to the time lag between the first plane hitting and the second. It meant that the world media would be there.'

'I'm surprised there wasn't an exchange of blows between you,' said Falcón.

'That was a summary of his beliefs about 9/11, not our discussions,' said Marty. 'I did a lot of storming out and he talked me back in. There were days when diplomatic relations were cut completely. He was surprised by my anger. He hadn't realized how much anger there was pent up in America.'

'Can you relate any of that to the note that was discovered in Sr Vega's hand?'

'I've been trying to and I can't see it.'

'Your wife says that you're certain he'd lived in

America, and that he liked it,' said Falcón. 'And yet he held these views which would annoy plenty of Americans…'

'They're not so different to what most Europeans secretly think. Inspector Jefe. That's why a lot of my fellow countrymen now see Europeans as treacherous and envious.'

'Envious?'

'Yes, something else Rafael had an opinion on. He said Europeans don't envy the American way – its society is too aggressive for them to be envious of it. And, anyway, envy does not inspire hate. What they are, he said, is afraid of Americans and fear does inspire hate.'

'What do Europeans fear?'

'That with all our economic might and political strength we have the power to make their efforts irrelevant – you know, the Kyoto agreement, trade tariffs, the ICC -'

'And yet, Sr Vega was relentlessly pro-American.'

'If you're as anti-communist as he was, you have to be,' said Marty. 'The point was he didn't think emotionally. He certainly didn't approve of al-Qaeda. He just saw it as the… way things go. Playground bullies eventually get punched on the nose and it always comes from the least expected direction. He also believed that once the rest saw blood they'd dive in afterwards. As far as Rafael was concerned this was the beginning of the end for the American empire.'

'I'm surprised you were prepared to put up with his talk,' said Falcón. 'Your wife kept reminding me that you think it's the greatest nation on earth.'

'It didn't make me want to kill him, if that's what you're implying, Inspector Jefe,' said Marty, looking out from under his eyebrows. 'All you've got to do is look at history. Rafael said that America, like the empires before them, would lash out. They'd have to. But it would either be a wild flailing against something too small to be seen, or they would crush, with excessive force and expensive might, the wrong enemy. There'd be a gradual weakening, followed by economic melt-down. This was where I think he was wrong, because the one thing that America would always pay attention to was the dollar. They would never allow anything to jeopardize that.'

'These discussions went on for a long time. Your wife said until dawn.'

'And as the brandy bottle got emptier and the end of Rafael's cigar got soggier, his ideas got wilder,' said Marty. 'He believed that the American empire would end, not in our lifetime but before the end of the century, and that one of two things would happen. Either the Chinese would take over and stamp an even more rapacious form of capitalism on the world, or there would be a reaction against capitalism's decadence. In which case there would be a religious empire which would come from the most populous nations on earth (rather than our dying nations of retirees) and that it would be Islamic.'

'My God,' said Falcón.

'Allah is great, you mean. Inspector Jefe,' said Marty.

'We've seen from your wife's photographs that Sr Vega was in some sort of crisis that dated from the end of last year. This was confirmed by his doctor. Was there any difference in the way your talks developed around that time?'

'He drank more,' said Marty. 'Sometimes he would pass out for a few minutes. I remember once going over to cover him with a blanket and, just as I reached him, his eyes opened and I could see he was very frightened. He started to plead with me as if he was a prisoner begging not to be taken away for torture, until he remembered who I was and where we were.'