The Hidden Assassins by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

about philandering. It was romantic, wasn’t it…in the eighteenth-century sense of the word? But what he’d been doing was not enjoyable. He was trying to fill a hole, which, with every affair, grew bigger. So what was this expanding void? Now that would be a thing to answer, if he could ever find the time to think about it.
    He slipped on a cobble, half fell, scuffed his hand on the pavement. It pulled him out of his head and on to more practical business. He’d have to have a shower as soon as he got in. Marisa was in his sinuses.Maybe he should have had a shower before he left, but then there would have been the smell of Marisa’s soap. Then another revelation. What did he care? Why the grand pretence? Inés knew. They’d had fights—never about his affairs, but about ridiculous stuff, which was a cover for the unmentionable. She could have got out. She could have left him years ago, but she’d stayed. That was significant.
    The graze on his hand was stinging. His thoughts made him feel stronger. He wasn’t afraid of Inés. She could strike fear into others. He’d seen her in court. But not him. He had the upper hand. He fucked around and she stayed.
    His apartment block on Calle San Vicente appeared before him. He opened the door with a flourish. He didn’t know whether it was the conclusion he’d arrived at, his stinging hand or the fact that he tripped up on the stairs because the decorators, those idle sods, had pushed their dustsheets to one side rather than clearing them away—but he began to feel just a little bit cruel.
    The first-floor apartment was silent. It was 6.30 a.m. He went to his study and emptied the pockets of his suit on to his desk in the dark. He took off his jacket and trousers and left them on a chair and went to the bathroom. Inés was asleep. He stripped off his pants and socks, threw them in the laundry basket and showered.
    Inés was not asleep. She lay with her shiny, dark eyes blinking in the sepia light as morning crept through the louvred shutters. She had been awake since 4.30 a.m. when she’d found her husband’s side of the bed vacant. She’d sat up in bed, arms folded across her flat chest, her brain seething. She’d run the marathon ofher thoughts for two hours, her insides molten with rage at the humiliation of finding his undented pillow. But then she would suddenly feel weak at the thought of facing this latest demonstration of his infidelity, because that’s what it was—a demonstration.
    In those hours she realized that the only area of her life that was functioning was her work, which now bored her. Not that the work had changed in any way, but her perspective had. She wanted to be a wife and mother. She wanted to live in a big old house with a patio, inside the city walls. She wanted to go for walks in the park, meet her friends for lunch, take her children to see her parents.
    None of that had happened. After the American bitch had been removed from the scene, she and Esteban had come together, had, in her mind, grown closer. She had stopped using contraceptives without telling him, wanting to surprise him, but her periods kept coming with plodding regularity. She’d gone for a check-up and been pronounced a perfectly healthy female of the species. After sex one morning she’d saved a sample of his sperm and taken it for a fertility test. The result was that he was a man of exceptional virility. Had he known, he would have framed the result and hung it next to their wedding photograph.
    The sale of her apartment had gone through quickly. She’d banked the money and started looking for her dream home. But Esteban loathed the houses that she wanted to buy and refused to look at them. The property market boomed. The money she’d got for her apartment now looked paltry. Her dream became an impossibility. They lived in his very masculine, aggressively modern apartment on the Calle San Vicente and he became angryif she tried to change a single detail. He