Chapter 25
Ernesto Manuelo Santiago de Sousa de Cuéllar is up an Italian mountain trying to find a Mexican dog.
It wouldn’t be his first choice of job, but often one doesn’t get one’s first choice. Certainly Ernesto has got used to this in his time at Interpol.
An enforcer for a Mexican cartel arrived in Madrid on Sunday evening with his dog. His dog is not, as you might suspect, a pitbull, or a Japanese fighting dog, it is a small poodle, and the Mexican enforcer refuses to travel anywhere without it.
Which is useful, as eighteen months ago, on a previous trip to Spain, the enforcer had taken the dog to a vet in Córdoba, and Interpol had persuaded the vet to implant a tracker in the dog’s diamanté collar.
So, while he is in Europe, Ernesto is following his every move, and noting down everywhere he goes and everyone he meets.
It is work that someone a great deal more junior could be doing.
‘Always keep your ears open,’ says Ernesto to Clara, who sits in his passenger seat. He waggles one ear for emphasis.
‘And your eyes,’ says Clara. ‘Surely?’
Ernesto shrugs. ‘Eyes are okay, but the ears are the thing. The world is very noisy. It is always telling you something.’
He sees he has a text from Rosie. What fun to have her back in his life. Best not open it in the car though, knowing some of the texts Rosie is capable of sending.
He has a sidekick with him today. His boss had suggested it, and Ernesto had agreed it was a very good idea.
Her name is Clara. She is a good investigator, and one day will be a very good investigator.
It is Ernesto’s job, and his privilege, to be part of that journey.
And, to be honest, it’s nice to have the company.
‘Sometimes even your nose tells you something,’ says Ernesto. ‘I once arrested a drug importer in Vigo because I recognized his aftershave on a bag of heroin.’
On the drive from Pisa Airport to this mountain village, Clara played him a full hour of K-pop songs and carefully explained the nuances of each group and each song.
She was very knowledgeable, and Ernesto’s view is that if somebody knowledgeable wants to share their knowledge with you, then you should listen, even if you are finding it physically painful.
He is good at remembering new things, and who knows if, one day, his new-found knowledge of the works of BTS and Blackpink might come in handy?
BTS had all been in the army, for example, so, despite their music, at least they had that going for them.
‘J-Hope from BTS wears Musc 25,’ says Clara.
Ernesto gives a serious nod. ‘If I ever smell Musc 25 on a bag of heroin, I shall bring J-Hope in for questioning.’
They are parked at the bottom of a flight of long, steep stone steps that themselves lead to a maze of tiny streets and courtyards with plants on doorsteps, washing hanging high across narrow alleys and sounds of life and love spilling from every open window.
Also a lot of cats. Another reason Ernesto loves Italy.
There is one, even now, curled up on the cooling bonnet of his hire car, big, ginger and unlovable.
Why the enforcer is here, who knows? Who is he meeting?
Not for Ernesto to worry about. He simply has to note down movements and take photographs and let somebody else take it over.
The enforcer is staying at the best hotels, eating in the finest restaurants.
A lesser man than Ernesto might start to think he was in the wrong job.
That €300,000 hadn’t gone very far in the end.
The ginger cat stares at him through the windscreen. Ernesto puts his windscreen wipers on, because he thinks the cat will enjoy that. He is right. The cat cocks his head, regarding the wipers as a young prodigy might study a maths puzzle.
Ernesto has his own puzzle to play with.
Jakob Eriksson. The murder of the bodyguard. What a nice thing to have fallen into his lap.
It would be very helpful indeed to catch him and, thanks to Rosie, he has a case that his colleagues know nothing about. A case which his superiors would never have assigned to him. An opportunity, then.
And Eriksson is one of the great prizes.
Since 2001 Jakob Eriksson has been steadily climbing the Interpol league tables. Ernesto hadn’t been joking about that top hundred. It’s unofficial, but once a month it gets updated on the Interpol WhatsApp chat, and they all have a good gossip about it.
There are usually a few showy new entries – a former boxer has murdered a drug dealer, perhaps, or, just to switch things up, a drug dealer has murdered a former boxer – but those guys get caught pretty quickly, marched out of nondescript hotel rooms in cuffs and Calvin Klein briefs by cops in shades.
The more interesting names on the top hundred list are the ones who stick around.
The men who operate in the shadows. Sometimes they catch one of these men. And when they do, careers are made.
Ernesto, with Eriksson very much on his mind today, is talking Clara through the downfall of some of these criminals. The British call them ‘large dogs’.
Bolko Mladi?, he tells Clara, there’s an example.
He had been on the list for nearly thirty years, ever since he blew up a plane.
Then he started funding and running a gang of jewel thieves, which was less spectacular but a lot more lucrative.
If you ever had a very big diamond, then Bolko Mladi? knew all about it, and had plans to take it from you.
A deputy bureau chief in Tallinn eventually caught Mladi? when, on pure instinct, Mladi? had stolen a pair of sunglasses from an open gym locker.
And now that deputy bureau chief is head of European Operations for the whole of Interpol.
Then there was Paul Butterworth, a financial fraudster who, it was rumoured, genuinely lived inside a volcano, but, it turned out, actually lived in a flat in Glasgow.
A Scottish cop caught him trying to use a stolen credit card at a massage parlour, and that cop now heads up the Interpol Tactical Siege Unit.
Ernesto could do that job for sure. Was there anything better than a siege?
The volcano thing was interesting though.
Ernesto knows that these men often hide in rumours.
Rumour can be the greatest camouflage of all.
Beno?t B, a French arms dealer, had faked his own death three times over, for example, until a young French cop, acting on a tip-off, finally arrested him when he attended the Grammys wearing a neon helmet.
The real goal for Interpol, for Ernesto, is to catch one of these guys.
Not the preening musclemen, the Instagram gangsters who let you know where they are every hour of the night and day.
They want to catch the guys who live in the dark.
You’ll never see them steal the money, and you’ll never see them spend the money.
You know these men have killed, but you’ll never see their hands blood red.
And if you catch one yourself, no one ever forgets you again.
There will always be a few who get away, however. Who arrange their criminality in such a way as to enjoy all of the spoils of sin, but pay none of the taxes. If you are clever and resourceful you can get away with almost anything.
But they are just men, they are not ghosts. And men can be caught.
They caught Mladi?, and they caught Butterworth, and they caught Beno?t B. Who’s to say Ernesto can’t catch Jakob Eriksson?
Eriksson’s name is the one Ernesto doesn’t mention to Clara. Ernesto will not raise the alarm with anybody at Interpol. Will not mention the dead bodyguard at Vern Blackwood’s villa. This one is all his.
‘It takes three things to catch these guys,’ says Ernesto to Clara. He counts them off on his fingers. ‘Patience. Intelligence. And luck.’
‘Thank you, sir, for counting three on your fingers,’ says Clara. ‘It helps me to learn.’
Ernesto likes Clara.
‘Of those three, I have infinite patience,’ says Ernesto. ‘I never get bored – even when you were talking to me on the way here, I found a way through it.’
‘And intelligence?’ Clara asks.
‘Not for me to say if I am intelligent,’ says Ernesto.
‘The mark of the very stupid man is thinking that he is clever. If you play football, you cannot lie about how good you are. If you are very good, you play for Barcelona, if you are very bad then you are picked last at school. Everybody can judge themselves on the evidence. But that doesn’t work for intelligence.
A man can be dumb as a horse, but can simply mix with those even stupider than he is and count himself a genius.
Or he might mix with people who choose to tell him he is clever in order to take his money.
So I don’t know for sure, but I have to believe, given where I was raised and given what I have achieved, that I have a measure of intelligence.
That’s the only evidence I have to go on. Does that sound arrogant to you?’
‘No, it’s interesting,’ says Clara. ‘What’s this terrible music?’
‘This is Led Zeppelin II,’ says Ernesto. ‘The greatest album of all time.’
‘Okay,’ says Clara. ‘And what’s an album?’
‘I am going to find a toilet,’ says Ernesto. ‘You can keep listening to Led Zeppelin II while I’m gone.’
‘We probably shouldn’t waste the battery,’ says Clara, turning the music off.
Ernesto nods and leaves the car. Zeppelin are not for everyone. In the same way that BTS are not for everyone. But God has chosen to create them both, and he must have had his reasons, no?
Ernesto wonders what Steve’s favourite Led Zeppelin album is? Maybe IV? He will ask when he sees him next.
Ernesto crosses himself and opens Rosie’s text.
A photograph of a body in a freezer, a knife sticking through its ribs.
Her message reads:
Another one for you, my dear, and guess who? The man from your photographs. The man who has been working with Jakob Eriksson. We need to tell the police and, well, you’re sort of the police, aren’t you? Fancy an adventure?
Another corpse, and another connection to Jakob Eriksson. Rock-solid connection this time too. The man himself is on manoeuvres, running in open country. Ernesto does indeed fancy an adventure.
Ernesto is patient, and Ernesto is intelligent.
Is it possible he has just got very lucky too?