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

'A little note from Dr Kissinger saying, "Keep up the good work,"' said Ramírez. 'That should do it.'

Falcón went upstairs. The door to Maddy Krugman's exhibition room was open. All the photographs had been removed from the walls and only one exhibit was left on a plinth in the centre of the room. It consisted of a cut-out of a blown-up version of Vega standing barefoot in his garden. The cut-out was encased in Perspex and suspended within the transparent block, like the skeletons of autumn leaves, were the ghostly prints of human hands. They all seemed to be pressing in on the lonely figure, who stood imprisoned, as if by his own history, like an insect in amber. There was a printed card attached to the piece written in Spanish: Las Manos Desaparecidas - The Vanished Hands.

He went across to her work room. Ferrera was going to have to spend a day going through all the prints, transparencies and negatives, checking every one. Up against the wall were the framed shots which had been hanging in the other room. He flipped through them, looking for the shot she'd taken of him. He found the empty frame. He checked the paper shredder and saw his image hanging in ribbons.

Marty Krugman had converted one of the other bedrooms into his office. There was a desk, a laptop and a drawing board. Rolls of plans stood in the corners. Falcón went through the desk drawers. He found a school exercise book with what appeared to be a collection of Krugman's odd thoughts jotted down.

Boredom is the enemy of humanity. It is why we get up and kill.

The torturer learns his skills from the agonies of his own mind, transformed by power.

Guilt defines us as human but in consuming the mind destroys all that made us human. Only

by public admission is our humanity restored. That is the measure of our mutual dependence.

Falcón flipped through to the last entry.

I know what you're doing. I'm going to chain you up, refuse you food and water, watch you wither and crack, fade and split, and roll a rich red wine over my tongue while you die.

That was the problem with Krugman. He was like an unreliable witness taking the stand. The purity of his intellect was always getting infected by the bacteria of emotion.

Ramírez appeared at the door. 'Did you see the exhibit?' said Falcón. 'The Vanished Hands.'

'I came up here to ask Cristina's question in private,' said Ramírez. 'What the fuck are we looking for?'

'That exhibit – do you think it's Sra Krugman's artistic interpretation of what was going on in Vega's mind, or did she know more?' said Falcón. 'This is a book of Krugman's thoughts – he talks about the mind of a torturer.'

'These are hints, not clues,' said Ramírez. 'They are not usable.'

'We're here because Elvira is covering his back. He's sceptical, but he wants to make sure there's no obvious connection between Krugman and – what shall we call him? – a mysterious American,' said Falcón. 'That means we're going to have to go through all of Sra Krugman's shots and -'

'But she photographed strangers all the time.'

'But not ones talking to her husband down by the river.'

'And if we find a shot?'

'You've gone back to being a non-believer again, José Luis,' said Falcón. 'If I'd told you fifteen years ago that Russian mafia gangs would control seventy per cent of prostitution in Europe, you'd have laughed in my face. But anything, and everything, is possible now. People have started to see aeroplanes as bombs. You can buy a new identity on the streets of any European city in forty-eight hours for a few thousand euros. An AK-47 can be yours in minutes. There are al-Qaeda cells in almost every country of the world. Why shouldn't the CIA be running a small operation in Seville, when the whole of Europe has become a civilization simmering with anarchy and decadence?'

'Remind me to live in fear, Javier,' said Ramírez. 'My point is: so what if we find a shot of Krugman with a mysterious American? The consulate denies everything. Krugman was a madman who shot his wife and then himself. Where are we?'

'Six people have died in less than a week. Five of them lived next door to each other. Even if I wasn't a cop, I would find that extraordinary,' said Falcón. 'We might be witnesses to some sort of collective unconscious implosion, where each death or suicide applies mental pressure to the next victim, or… we might simply be unable to see the connections, because we don't quite know enough.'

The mobile in his pocket vibrated. Elvira ordered him back to the Jefatura. The American Consulate was sending someone over. Falcón left them at the search and drove back to Calle Bias Infante.

The man from the American Consulate was a communications officer called Mark Flowers. He was about fifty years old, good-looking, tanned with black hair that must have been dyed. He spoke flawless Castilian Spanish and was well prepared for what he had to do.

'I've read these two statements from Inspector Jefe Falcón and Juez Calderón. I was told that they were written separately. The impressive detail seems to match and, in the absence of any serious contradictions, I informed the Consul that I believed them to be accurate and true. Both statements were therefore sent to the CIA in Langley for their comments. They categorically deny any knowledge, not only of Marty Krugman, but also this so-called consultant, Foley Macnamara. Comisario Elvira also asked if the CIA had any record of one Miguel Velasco, aka Rafael Vega, who was ex-Chilean military, receiving any CIA training. They've informed me that they did a file search of all personnel as far back as the creation of the CIA after the Second World War, and found that nobody of that name had received any training. They also offered the opinion that at no point last night did Marty Krugman refer to Rafael Vega as Miguel Velasco, and that the information he gave seemed to be his interpretation of Sr Vega's mental problems. Krugman himself deduced that Vega had been in the Chilean military and that he had been involved in torture. They describe Sr Krugman as a classic fantasist, with access to an imagination infected by psychosis who, given his personal experience of South American politics of that era, would have no trouble -'

'What personal experience of South American politics?' asked Falcón.

'Immigration ran a search on Marty Krugman's travels outside the USA and found that he was attracted enough, through his own liberal and left-leaning politics, to make four trips to Chile between March 1971 ' and July 1973. As you know, during the Allende administration, the American government was very concerned at the development of their Marxist policies and, as a consequence, US citizens visiting that country were closely monitored.'

'What about Vega's late wife and his daughter's family?' asked Falcón.

'That, as you can imagine, is rather more difficult for them to verify. All they can say is that neither Miguel Velasco nor Rafael Vega was married on US soil,' said Flowers.

'I meant Krugman's assertion that Vega's anxiety stemmed from his paranoia that they might have been killed by his enemies.'

'Who are these enemies?'

'The people who provided him with a witness protection programme from which he thought it best to escape.'

'You might be interested to know that the CIA's research on Chilean military personnel revealed Miguel Velasco to be quite a notorious member of the Pinochet regime, known for his extremely unconventional and distasteful interrogation techniques. The opposition revolutionary movement, the MIR, knew him by the nickname El Salido – the Pervert.'

'But what did the CIA have to say about the FBI input on the matter?' asked Falcón. 'Surely absconding from an FBI protection programme, after acting as a witness in a drug-trafficking trial, should be something the CIA would be interested in?'