The Hidden Assassins Read Online Free PDF Page B

doorframe and gritted his teeth. She looked up at his agony with wide eyes. He lasted less than a minute.
    She stood, turned on her heel and strode back into her apartment. Calderón pulled himself together. He didn’t hear her hawking and spitting in the bathroom. He just saw her reappear from the kitchen, carrying two chilled glasses of cava.
    ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said, looking at the thin, gold wafer of watch on her wrist, ‘and then I remembered my mother telling me that the only time a Sevillano wasn’t late was for the bulls.’
    Calderón was too dazed to comment. Marisa drank from her flute. Twenty gold and silver bracelets rattled on her forearm. She lit a cigarette, crossed her legs and let the shift slip away to reveal a long, slim leg, orange panties and a hard brown stomach. Calderón knew that stomach, its paper-thin skin, hard wriggling muscularity and soft coppery down. He’d laid his head on it and stroked the tight copper curls of her pubis.
    ‘Esteban!’
    He snapped out of the natural revolutions of his mind.
    ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, nothing else coming to him, conversation not being one of the strengths of their relationship.
    ‘I don’t need any feeding,’ she said, taking a shelled brazil nut from a bowl, and putting it between her hard, white teeth. ‘I’m quite ready to be fucked.’
    The nut went off in her mouth like a silenced gun and Calderón reacted like a sprinter out of the blocks. He fell into her snake-like arms and bit into her unnaturally long neck, which seemed stretched, like those of African tribal women. In fact for him, that was her attraction: part sophisticate, part savage. She’d lived in Paris, modelling for Givenchy, and travelled across the Sahara with a caravan of Tuaregs. She’d slept with a famous movie director in Los Angeles and lived with a fisherman on the beach near Maputo in Mozambique. She’d worked for an artist in New York, and spent six months in the Congo learning how to carve wood. Calderón knew all this, and believed it because Marisa was such an extraordinary creature, but he didn’t have the first idea of what was going on in her head. So, like a good lawyer, he clung to these few dazzling facts.
    After sex they went to bed, which for Marisa was a place to talk or sleep but not for the writhings and juices of sex. They lay naked under a sheet with light from the street in parallelograms on the wall and ceiling. The cava fizzed in glasses balanced on their chests. They shared an ashtray in the trough between their bodies.
    ‘Shouldn’t you have gone by now?’ said Marisa.
    ‘Just a little bit longer,’ said Calderón, drowsy.
    ‘What does Inés think you’re doing all this time?’ asked Marisa, for something to say.
    ‘I’m at a dinner…for work.’
    ‘You’re just about the last person in the world who should be married,’ she said.
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    ‘Well, maybe not. After all, you Sevillanos are very conservative. Is that why you married her?’
    ‘Part of it.’
    ‘What was the other part?’ she asked, pointing the cone of her cigarette at his chest. ‘The more interesting part.’
    She burnt a hair off one of his nipples; the smell of it filled his nostrils.
    ‘Careful,’ he said, feeling the sting, ‘you don’t want ash all over the sheets.’
    She rolled back from him, flicked her cigarette out on to the balcony.
    ‘I like to hear the parts that people don’t want to tell me about,’ she said.
    Her coppery hair was splayed out on the white pillow. He hadn’t been able to look at her hair without thinking of the other woman he’d known with hair of the same colour. It had never occurred to him to tell anybody about the late Maddy Krugman except the police in his statement. He hadn’t even talked to Inés about that night. She knew the story from the newspapers, the surface of it anyway, and that was all she’d wanted to know.
    Marisa raised her head and sipped from her