Robert Wilson - The Ignorance of Blood

‘Sexual slavery?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nowadays you can rent a girl for any amount of time you like. She'll do everything, from housework to full sex. When you get bored of her, you hand her back and get another one. She costs fifteen hundred euros per week,’ said Cortés. ‘The girls are traded in markets. They may come from Moldova, Albania, or even Nigeria, but they're sold and resold as much as ten times before they get here. Normal price is around three thousand euros, depending on looks. By the time the girl arrives in Spain she may have accumulated sales of thirty thousand – which she has to pay off. I know it's illogical, but that's only to you and me, not to people like Vasili Lukyanov.’

‘We found some cocaine in his car. Is that a sideline or …?’

‘He's recently moved into cocaine distribution. Or rather, his gang leader has struck a deal for product coming in from Galicia and they've now come to some form of agreement with the Colombians with regard to their operations on the Costa del Sol.’

‘So where is Lukyanov in the hierarchy?’ asked Elvira.

Cortés nodded to Díaz.

‘Difficult question, and we're wondering about the significance of finding him in a car bound for Seville with nearly eight million euros,’ said Díaz. ‘He's important. The Russians make huge profits from the sex trade, more than they make from drugs at the moment. The hierarchy has been a problem in the last year since we had Operation Wasp in 2005 and the Georgian boss of the Russian mafia here in Spain fled to Dubai.’

‘Dubai?’ asked Elvira.

‘That's where you go nowadays if you're a criminal, a terrorist, an arms trader, a money-launderer…’

‘Or a builder,’ finished Cortés. ‘It's the Costa del Sol of the Middle East.’

‘Did that leave a power vacuum here in Spain?’ asked Falcón.

‘No, his position was taken over by Leonid Revnik, who was sent from Moscow to take control. It was not a popular move with the mafia soldiers on the ground, mainly because his first act was to execute two leading mafia “directors” from one of the Moscow brigades who had encroached on his turf,’ said Díaz.

‘They were both found bound, gagged and shot in the back of the head in the Sierra Bermeja, ten kilometres north of Estepona,’ said Cortés.

‘We think that it was some old feud, dating back to the 1990s in Moscow, but what it did was create nervousness among the soldiers. They found they were having to run their business and look out for revenge attacks. There have been four “disappearances” so far this year. We're not used to this level of violence. All the other mafia groups – the Turks and Italians, who run the heroin trade; the Colombians and the Galicians, who control cocaine; the Moroccans, who traffic people and hashish – none of them practise the sort of spectacular violence they use in their own countries because they see Spain as a safe haven. They followed our old, long-standing friends the Arab arms dealers, who run their global businesses from the Costa del Sol. To all of them it's just a massive laundromat to clean their money, which means they don't want to draw attention to themselves. The Russians, on the other hand, don't seem to give a damn.’

‘Any idea why Vasili Lukyanov would be heading for Seville with eight million euros in his boot?’ asked Elvira.

‘I don't know. I'm not up to date on what's happening in Seville. It's possible that CICO in Madrid have some intelligence on what's been going on here. I've put in a request,’ said Díaz. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if there was a rival group opening up here. Leonid Revnik is fifty-two and old school. I think he'd be suspicious of someone like Vasili Lukyanov, who didn't come up through the Russian prison system but was an Afghan war veteran who bought his way in and works with women, which Revnik probably considers inferior, despite its profitability.’

‘How profitable?’ asked Elvira.

‘We have four hundred thousand prostitutes here in Spain and they generate eighteen billion euros' worth of business,’ said Díaz. ‘We are the biggest users of prostitutes and cocaine of any country in Europe.’

‘So you think Leonid Revnik despised Vasili Lukyanov, who would then have been open to offers for his expertise in a very profitable business?’ said Falcón.

‘Could be,’ said Díaz. ‘Revnik has been away in Moscow. We were expecting him back next week, but he returned early. Maybe he heard Lukyanov was making a move. I can tell you one thing for sure: Lukyanov wouldn't be going it alone. He'd need protection; but whose support he's getting, I don't know.’

‘And the eight million?’ asked Elvira, still not satisfied.

‘That's a sort of entry fee. It forces Lukyanov to burn his bridges,’ said Cortés. ‘Once he's stolen that sort of money he's never going to be able to go back to Revnik.’

‘The disks in the briefcase I mentioned in my initial report,’ said Falcón. ‘Hidden-camera stuff, older men with young girls…’

‘It's how the Russians get things done. They corrupt whoever they come into contact with,’ said Cortés. ‘We might be about to find out how our town planners, councillors, mayors and even senior policemen spent their summer holidays.’

Comisario Elvira ran his hand over his perfectly combed hair.

Seville Prison, Alcalá de Guadaira – Friday, 15th September 2006, 13.05 hrs

Through the reinforced glass pane of the door, Falcón watched Calderón, who was hunched over the table, smoking, staring into the tin-foil ashtray, waiting for him. The judge, who'd been young for his position, looked older. He had lost his gilded, moisturized sheen. His skin was dull and he'd lost weight where there was none to lose, making him look haggard. His hair had never been luxuriant, but was now definitely thinning to baldness. His ears seemed to have got longer, the lobes fleshier, as if from some unconscious tugging while musing on the entanglements of his mind. It settled Falcón to see the judge so reduced; it would have been intolerable had the wife-beater been his usual arrogant self. Falcón opened the door for the guard, who held a tray of coffee, and followed him in. Calderón instantly reanimated himself into an approximation of the supremely confident man he had once been.

‘To what, or to whom, do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Calderón, standing up, sweeping his arm across the sparsely furnished room. ‘Privacy, coffee, an old friend … these unimaginable luxuries.’

‘I'd have come before now,’ said Falcón, sitting down, ‘but, as you've probably realized, I've been busy.’

Calderón took a long, careful look at him and lit another cigarette, the third of his second pack of the day. The guard set down the tray and left the room.

‘And what could possibly make you want to come and see the murderer of your ex-wife?’

‘Alleged murderer of your wife.’

‘Is that significant, or are you just being accurate?’

‘This last week is the first time I've had since June to think and … do some reading,’ said Falcón.

‘Well, I hope it was a good novel and not the transcript of my interview with my Grand Inquisitor, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita,’ said Calderón. ‘That, as my lawyer will tell you, was not my finest hour.’

‘I've read that quite a few times and I've also gone over Zorrita's interview with Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘She's been to see you a number of times, hasn't she?’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Calderón, nodding, ‘they've not been conjugal visits. We talk.’

‘About what?’

‘We were never very good at talking,’ said Calderón, drawing hard on his cigarette. ‘We had that other language.’