The Hidden Assassins

4

Seville-Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 05.30 hrs

Manuela Falcon was in bed, but not sleeping. It was 5.30 in the morning. She had the bedside light on, knees up, flicking through Vogue but not reading, not even looking at the pictures. She had too much on her mind: her property portfolio, the money she owed to the banks, the mortgage repayments, the lack of rental income, the lawyer's fees, the two deeds due to be signed this morning, which would release her capital into beautifully fluid funds of cash.

'For God's sake, relax,' said Angel, waking up in bed next to her, still groggy with sleep and nursing a small cognac-induced hangover. 'What are you so anxious about?'

'I can't believe you've asked that question,' said Manuela. 'The deeds, this morning?'

Angel Zarrias blinked into his pillow. He'd forgotten.

'Look, my darling,' he said, rolling over, 'you know that nothing happens, even if you think about it all the time. It only happens…'

'Yes, I know, Angel, it only happens when it happens. But even you can understand that there's uncertainty before it happens.'

'But if you don't sleep and you churn it over in your head in an endless washing cycle it has no effect on the outcome, so you might as well forget about it. Handle the horror if it happens, but don't torture yourself with the theory of it.'

Manuela flicked through the pages of Vogue even more viciously, but she felt better. Angel could do that to her. He was older. He had authority. He had experience.

'It's all right for you,' she said, gently, 'you don't owe six hundred thousand euros to the bank.'

'But I also don't own nearly two million euros' worth of property.'

'I own one million eight hundred thousand euros' worth of property. I owe six hundred thousand to the bank. The lawyer's fees are…Forget it. Let's not talk about numbers. They make me sick. Nothing has any value until it's sold.'

'Which is what you're about to do,' said Angel, in his most solid, reinforced concrete voice.

'Anything can happen,' she said, turning a page so viciously she tore it.

'But it tends not to.'

'The market's nervous.'

'Which is why you're selling. Nobody's going to withdraw in the next eight hours,' he said, struggling to sit up in bed. 'Most people would kill to be in your position.'

'With two empty properties, no rent and four thousand a month going out?'

'Well, clearly I'm looking at it from a more advantageous perspective.'

Manuela liked this. However hard she tried, she couldn't get Angel to participate in her catalogue of imagined horrors. His objective authority made her feel quite girlish. She hadn't yet got to the point of recognizing what their relationship had become, how it fitted with her powerful needs. All she knew was that Angel was a colossal comfort to her.

'Relax,' said Angel, pulling her to him, kissing the top of her head.

'Wouldn't it be great to be able to compress time and just be in tomorrow evening now,' she said, snuggling up to him, 'with money in the bank and the summer free?'

'Let's have a celebratory dinner at Salvador Rojo tonight.'

'I was thinking that myself,' she said, 'but I was too superstitious to book it. We could ask Javier. He could bring Laura so you can have someone to flirt with.'

'How very considerate of you,' he said, kissing her head again.

When Angel and Manuela had met it seemed that the only thing holding her life together was her legal battle over Javier's right to have inherited the house in which he was living. They'd met in her lawyer's office, where Angel was sorting out his late wife's estate. As soon as they'd shaken hands she'd felt something cave in high up around her stomach and no man had ever done that to her before. They left the lawyer's office and went for a drink and, having never looked at older men, having always gone for 'boys', she immediately saw the point. Older men looked after you. You didn't have to look after them.

The more she found out about Angel the more she fell for him. He was a phenomenally charming man, a committed politician (sometimes a little too committed), right wing, conservative, a Catholic, a lover of the bulls, and from an established family. In politics he'd been able to broker agreements between fanatically opposed factions just because neither party wanted to be disliked by him. He'd been 'someone' in the Partido Popular in Andalucia but had quit in a fury over the impossibility of getting anything to change. Recently he'd joined forces, in a public relations capacity, with a smaller right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucia, which was run by his old friend, Eduardo Rivero. He contributed a political column for the ABC newspaper and was also their highly respected bullfight commentator. With all these talents at his disposal it hadn't taken him long to bring Javier and Manuela back together again.

'All energy expended on court cases like yours is negative energy,' Angel had told her. 'That negative energy dominates your life, so that the rest of it has to go on hold. The only way to restart your life is to bring positive energy back into it.'

'And how do I do that?' she'd asked, looking at this huge source of positive energy in front of her with her big brown eyes.

'Court cases use up resources, not just financial ones, but physical and emotional ones, too. So you have to be productive,' he said. 'What do you want from your life at the moment?'

'That house!' she'd said, despite being pretty keen on Angel right then, too.

'It's yours, Javier has offered it to you.'

'There's the small matter of one million euros…'

'But he hasn't said you can't have it,' said Angel. 'And it's much more productive to make money in order to buy something you really want, than to throw it away on useless lawyers.'

'He's not useless,' she said, and ran out of steam.

There were a few thousand other reasons she had stacked up against Angel's stunningly simple logic, but the source of most of them was her miserable emotional state, which was not something she wanted to peel back for him to see. So, she agreed with him, sold her veterinary practice at the beginning of 2003, borrowed money against the property she had inherited in El Puerto de Santa Maria and invested it in Seville's booming property market. After three years of buying, renovating and selling she had forgotten about Javier's house, the court case and that hollow feeling at the top of her stomach. She now lived with Angel in a penthouse apartment overlooking the majestic, treelined Plaza Cristo de Burgos in the middle of the old city and her life was full and about to be even sweeter.

'How did it go last night?' asked Manuela. 'I can tell you wound up on the brandy.'

'Gah!' said Angel, wincing at some gripe in his intestines.

'No smoking for you until after coffee this morning.'

'Maybe my breath could become a cheap form of renewable energy,' said Angel, fingering some sleep out of his eye. 'In fact everyone's breath could, because all we do is spout hot, alcoholic air.'

'Is the master of positive energy getting a little bit bored with his cronies?'

'Not bored. They're my friends,' said Angel, shrugging. 'It's one of the advantages of age that we can tell each other the same stories over and over and still laugh.'

'Age is a state of mind, and you're still young,' said Manuela. 'Maybe you should go back to the commercial side of your public relations business. Forget politics and all those self-important fools.'

'And finally she reveals what she thinks of my closest friends.'

'I like your friends, it's just…the politics,' said Manuela. 'Endless talk but nothing ever happens.'

'Maybe you're right,' said Angel, nodding. 'The last time there was an event in this country was the horror of 11th March 2004, and look what happened: the whole country pulled together and by due process of democracy kicked out a perfectly good government. Then we bowed down to the terrorists and pulled out of Iraq. And after that? We sank back into the comfort of our lives.'