The Blind Man of Seville

11

Saturday, 14th April 2001

‘He was right — Sr Bravo,’ said Ramírez. ‘It’s too obvious a connection but the killer could be one of his workers.’

‘But only if the second scenario, where Eloisa Gómez lets the killer into the apartment, is the correct one,’ said Falcón. ‘If he got in using the lifting gear he’d have been missing from work in the afternoon. We’re going to have to interview every worker and put more pressure on the girl.’

‘You know what I don’t like about this guy?’ said Ramírez. ‘Our killer?’

Falcón didn’t answer, stared out of the window at the different bars and cafés flashing past on Calle San Jacinto as they headed back up to the river through Triana. He was suddenly depressed by the way his investigation was coming down to the sort of minutiae of everyday life encountered in removals companies.

‘He’s lucky,’ finished Ramírez. ‘He’s very lucky, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Let’s hope he’s relying on it,’ said Falcón, savage and morose. He was jittery from the coffee on an empty stomach and flat from lack of sleep and still no break in the case. His men on the street in Los Remedios hadn’t come up with anybody, not one person, who even remembered seeing the removals truck and the lifting gear.

‘What does that mean, Inspector Jefe?’

‘People who rely on their luck always rely on it until well after it has run out. Like gamblers,’ said Falcón. ‘They’re ultimately stupid people.’

‘Now you’re implying something, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Am I? I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think he’s finished, do you? This killer.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You think he wants to test his luck some more … to see how far he can go.’

Falcón didn’t like this about Ramírez. The good cop in him who never stopped, who constantly observed, picked over words, levered up sentences. And now he was doing it to him.

‘You talk about “he”,’ said Falcón, a diversionary tactic, ‘but we haven’t even got that far.’

Ramírez grinned as they crossed the Puente de Isabel II and headed north along the east bank of the river towards San Jerónimo and the cemetery.

‘You know we’re wasting our time here, don’t you, Inspector Jefe?’

‘No, I don’t. Where do you think we’re going to get our break? We haven’t got it in any of the obvious places — on the body, in the apartment, in the Edificio Presidente, outside it, in the removals company — none of these places.’

‘You know I called you yesterday?’ said Ramírez, changing tack.

‘I didn’t pick up any messages until this morning.’

‘It was just that I was thinking you were right, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez.

Falcón looked across at him slowly, nothing furtive, as if he was just taking in the view of the ‘92 Expo site, La Isla Mágica looking totally mundane across the sluggish, grey river. Ramírez never thought anybody was right, least of all his Inspector Jefe.

‘As you said, it’s too elaborate. The method,’ said Ramírez.

‘For the motive to have been something as ordinary as business, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

It took a fraction of a second for a number of subliminal observations to coalesce in Falcón’s mind. Ramírez had been more agreeable today than ever before. He hadn’t undermined him at Mudanzas Triana. He’d dealt with the foreman, who was much more his type. He’d called him four times on a public holiday. He’d revealed that he’d been to see Eloisa Gómez and admitted that his impatience had sealed off possibly valuable information. He’d said that he, Javier Falcón, had been right.

‘You know the procedure,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re not allowed to do nothing. We had very little to offer Juez Calderón apart from Consuelo Jiménez and Eloisa Gómez. The former is a complex and sophisticated individual with opportunity and means, the latter had the opportunity but won’t talk to us. Our job is to develop leads and, when they don’t present themselves through the evidence, we either have to gradually and humanely sweat them out of people or dig for them … sometimes in barren places like cemeteries and address books.’

‘But you doubt that those sources will have any bearing on the case?’

‘There’s doubt, of course, but I’ll do it because it might throw up something that could indirectly develop a lead.’

‘Such as?’

‘What you talked about the other night. What was the guy’s name — Cinco Bellotas?’

‘Joaquín Lopez.’

‘The boys that Sra Jiménez fired … they saw the two men talking. We don’t know what that was about. It could have an implication, it could be totally innocent. We have to look at it.’

‘But you’re still thinking that this is the work of a disturbed mind?’

‘Undisturbed minds can become disturbed if their whole way of life is threatened.’

‘But all the filming, getting into the apartment, hiding there for twelve hours …’

‘We still don’t know that he did that. I’m more inclined to think that “he” formed a relationship with the girl, that “he” got the necessary information from Mudanzas Triana and put the two together to get into the apartment.’

‘But what about the horror show that he put Jiménez through?’

‘None of this is beyond imagination,’ said Falcón, doubting himself as he said it. ‘It’s not unimaginable, is it?’

‘It is to me.’

This was true, thought Falcón, and Marta Jiménez flashed through his mind with her vomity chin and padded eyebrow. Ramírez was uncomplicated. He would always be an Inspector because his imagination only ever allowed him to aspire to being the post above. His horizons were limited.

‘What do you think he showed him, Inspector?’

Ramírez braked for a traffic light, gripped the wheel, fixed his eyes on the car in front, waiting for him to move. He tried to jog his mind into unvisited lateral grooves.

‘The stuff of horror,’ said Falcón, ‘is not necessarily the truly terrible.’

‘Go on,’ said Ramírez, thinking him a strange beast, but glad to be relieved from creative duty.

‘Look at us now at the height of our civilization … I mean, we can laugh at cannibalism, for God’s sake. There’s nothing that can frighten us … we’ve seen it all, except …’

The lights changed, Ramírez stalled the car, horns honked.

‘Except what?’

‘That which we’ve decided we don’t know.’

‘Isn’t that unimaginable?’

‘I mean the things that we know about ourselves. The very private, deeply hidden stuff that we show no one and that we firmly deny ever happened because we would not be able to live with the knowledge.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Ramírez. ‘How can you know something without knowing it? It’s fucking ridiculous.’

‘When my father moved to Seville in the sixties he became friendly with the local priest who used to walk past his door on the way to the church at the end of Calle Bailén. My father didn’t go to church or believe in God, but they used the same café and, over years of argument, became friends. One time at three in the morning my father was working in his studio and he heard someone shouting in the street: ‘Eh! Cabrón! You were sent to me, weren’t you, Francisco Cabrón?’ It was the priest, who was not tranquil any more but angry and nearly mad. His cassock was torn apart, his hair was wild and he was drinking brandy from the bottle. My father let him in and he stormed around the patio raging against himself and his useless life. That morning he’d been giving communion and it had suddenly come to him.’

‘He lost his faith,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re always doing that. They get it back.’

‘It was worse than that. He told my father that he’d never had any faith. His whole church career had started because of a lie. There’d been a girl who hadn’t returned his love. It seemed that he’d gone into the Church to spite her and all he’d ended up doing was spiting himself. For more than forty years the priest had known this … but without knowing it. He was a good priest, but it didn’t matter because there was one flaw in the edifice of his life, the tiny lie on which it was all based.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Ramírez.

‘He hanged himself the next day,’ said Falcón. ‘What do you do if you’re a priest and you’ve spent your whole life teaching the pursuit of truth in God’s word?’

‘My God,’ said Ramírez, ‘but you don’t have to kill yourself. You don’t have to take life so seriously.’

‘That’s why my father told me the story,’ said Falcón. ‘I’d said I wanted to be an artist … just like him. He told me to be careful because art is about the pursuit of truth too, whether it be personal or universal.’

‘I get it,’ said Ramírez, hitting the steering wheel, laughing.

‘You get it now,’ said Falcón. ‘What we know without knowing it.’

‘Fuck that! I know why you became a cop,’ he said, roaring.

‘Tell me.’

‘The pursuit of truth. Fuck me, that’s brilliant,’ said Ramírez. ‘We’re all fucking artists now.’

Had that been it? No. Because when he’d got over the idea of being an artist, come to terms with his father’s doubts about his talent, he’d told him that he would become an art historian instead and his father had laughed in his face. ‘Art historians are just policemen working with pictures. They hunt for clues. They fill their lives with speculation and conjecture and nine times out of ten they get it all wrong. Art history is for failures,’ he’d said. ‘Not just failed artists, but failed human beings, too.’ The reserves of derision his father had for these people … So he became a cop. No, that wasn’t quite it either. He went to Madrid University and studied English (the only race, including the Spanish, his father had any time for) and he developed a taste for American noir movies of the 1940s. Then he became a cop.

He had a sense of rush, as in shooting to the surface from sleep, except he was awake with his thoughts flashing past him, bright and fast like a shoal of sardine. He shook his head, shuddered back into real life, the seats of the car, plastic, glass, other solid, man-made things.

‘Did Serrano come back with anything on the chloroform and surgical instruments?’ he asked, steadying himself with words.

‘Nothing, so far.’

They pulled up at the cemetery. Ramírez reached back for the video camera, Falcón hovered on the pavement, surveyed the large crowd, the wall of flowers outside the chapel, the blue sky nearly making the scene cheerful. Consuelo Jiménez was in the middle of the herd, her three children bewildered amongst the forest of adult legs. Falcón had been that high, too, at a funeral.

They must have had the blessing. The coffin was being loaded into the car from the chapel. The driver pulled away to the gates, the mourners gathered behind and began a slow procession up the cypress-lined avenue into the heart of the cemetery. Beyond the box hedges were the mausoleums and monuments, a huge bronze of the torero Francisco Rivera in his suit of lights, an imaginary bull forever thundering past him, one hand holding a broken sword, the other an imaginary cape.

The car arrived at Jesús de la Pasión. They unloaded the coffin and took it up to the granite mausoleum where they positioned it opposite the only other occupant — his first wife. Consuelo Jiménez received condolences from those she’d missed earlier. Falcón checked inside the mausoleum. The shelf below the first wife wasn’t quite empty. There was a small urn in the corner, too small to contain ashes. He shone his pen torch in there and read the small silver plaque: Arturo Manolo Jiménez Bautista. Maybe that was José Manuel’s ‘finality’.

Falcón rejoined the mourners, gave his condolences and strolled back to the entrance. Ramírez was off amongst the graves with the videocam.

‘Of course, you knew him, didn’t you?’ said a voice close to Falcón’s ear, a hand gripping his elbow.

Ramón Salgado’s dog-sad face crept into his peripheral vision. Here was one of those people for whom his father maintained a savage derision. Not to his face, of course, because while Salgado was an art historian he was better known as the dealer who had made his father famous. He still had a list of very wealthy clients and, right up to his father’s first heart attack, regularly sent these clients to Calle Bailén, so that they could be relieved of those useless blocks of cash that cluttered their bank accounts.

‘No, I didn’t know him,’ said Falcón, summoning up the usual coolness he felt for this man. ‘Should I have done?’

Falcón held out his hand, Salgado used both hands to clasp it. He pulled back. Salgado put a hand through his long, pretentious hair, whose white silveriness kinked into curls over the collar of his dark-blue suit. ‘Salgado … even his dandruff glitters,’ his father used to say.

‘No, no perhaps you wouldn’t have met him, come to think of it,’ said Salgado. ‘He never went to the house. That’s right. I remember now. He always sent Consuelo on her own.’

‘Sent her?’

‘Whenever he opened a new restaurant, he always had to have a Falcón in it. You know, synonymous with Seville and all that.’

‘But why did he have to send her?’

‘I think perhaps he knew about your father’s practices and, being the very important businessman that he was, wasn’t prepared to put up with the … er … rather, how shall I put it? Sardonic, yes, sardonic … relieving process.’

He meant, of course, the utterly contemptuous ripping off of clients that his father used to indulge in with such obvious pleasure.

They set off towards the cemetery gates. The pink rims of Salgado’s sagging eyes made him look as if he’d just mopped up after crying. Javier had always thought that he must have been much heavier than the stick he was now, and that this weight, when he’d lost it, had dragged the gravity-bound skin of his face into swags below his eyes and jaw line. It was his father who’d said that he looked like a bloodhound, but at least he didn’t drool. This was a veiled compliment. His father had loathed reverence, unless if came from a beautiful woman or someone whose talent he admired.

‘How did you know him?’

‘As you know, I live in El Porvenir. When he opened that restaurant of his, I was one of his first clients.’

‘You didn’t know him before?’

They were walking briskly and Salgado’s long limbs had a tendency to flail. His foot caught the side of Falcón’s and he would have been sent sprawling if Falcón hadn’t saved him.

‘My God, thank you, Javier. I don’t want to fall at my age, break a hip and end up housebound and growing vague.’

‘You’re fine, Ramón.’

‘No, no, it’s a great fear of mine. One silly mistake and a few months later I’ll be a lonely old fool gaping in a dark corner of some unvisited home.’

‘Don’t be silly, Ramón.’

‘It’s happened to my sister. I’m going to San Sebastián next week to bring her down to Madrid. She’s had it. Fell over, knocked her head, broke her knee and had to go into a home. I can’t go all the way up there every month so I’m bringing her further south. Terrible. Anyway, look, why not let’s go and have a fino?’

Falcón patted him on the shoulder. He didn’t want to spend any time with Salgado, but he was feeling sorry for him now, which had probably been his intention.

‘I’m working.’

‘On a Saturday afternoon?’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘Ah, yes, I forgot,’ said Salgado, looking around him, mourners passing on both sides. ‘You’ll have your work cut out just drawing up the list of his enemies, let alone talking to them all.’

‘Will I?’ said Falcón, knowing Salgado’s powers of exaggeration.

‘A powerful businessman like that doesn’t go to his grave without dragging a few along with him.’

‘Murder is a substantial step.’

‘Not for the people he used to deal with.’

‘And who are these people?’

‘Let’s not talk about this at the cemetery gates, Javier.’

Falcón had a quick word with Ramírez and got into Salgado’s large Mercedes. They drove to Calle Betis down by the river, between the bridges, where Salgado parked up on the pavement shunting an old Seat forward half a metre to fit himself in. They walked along the pavement, which was some metres above the river, until Salgado stopped and made a show of breathing in the Sevillian air, which at this point was not at its sweetest.

‘Sevilla!’ he said, happy now that he was assured of company. ‘La puta del Moro — that’s what your father called it. Don’t you remember, Javier?’

‘I remember, Ramón,’ he said, depressed now that he’d volunteered to expose himself to what he was sure was going to be some of Salgado’s famous wheedling.

‘I miss him, Javier. I miss him very much. He had such a penetrating eye, you know. He said to me once: “There are two smells that make Seville, Ramón, and my trick is — no, my great open secret is that now, at the end of my life, I only paint one of them, which is why I always sell.” He was playing, of course. I know that. These scenes of Seville he painted were nothing to him. They were his little game, now that his reputation was assured. I said: “So now the great Francisco Falcón can paint smells. What do you dip your brush in?” And he replied, “Only the orange blossom, Ramón, never the horseshit.” I laughed, Javier, and I thought that was the end of it, but after a long pause he added: “I’ve spent most of my life painting the latter.” What do you think of that, Javier?’

‘Let’s go and have a manzanilla,’ said Falcón.

They crossed the road and went into La Bodega de la Albariza and stood at one of the large black barrels, ordered the manzanilla and a plate of olives, which came with capers and pickled garlic, white as teeth. They sipped the pale sherry, which Falcón preferred to fino because of the sea zest in the grapes down at Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

‘Tell me about Raúl Jiménez’s enemies,’ said Falcón, before Salgado leapt into another pool of reminiscence.

‘It’s all happening again as we speak, as we sip our manzanilla. It’s all happening just as it did back in 1992,’ he said, enjoying being oblique as he held the complete attention of Javier Falcón. ‘I feel it. Here I am at seventy years of age and I’m making more money than I have done in my life.’

‘Business is good,’ said Javier, on the edge of boredom.

‘This is off the record, isn’t it?’ Salgado said. ‘You know, I shouldn’t …’

‘There’s no record, Ramón,’ said Falcón, showing his empty hands.

‘It’s illegal, of course … ‘

‘As long as it’s not criminal.’

‘Ah, yes, a fine distinction, Javier. Your father said you were the bright one. “They all think it’s Manuela,” he used to say, “but Javier’s the one who sees things clearly.”’

‘The anticipation’s killing me, Ramón.’

‘La Gran Limpeza,’ said Salgado. The Big Cleaning.

‘What are they washing?’

‘Money, of course. What else gets that dirty? They don’t call it “black money” for nothing.’

‘Where does it come from?’

‘I don’t ever ask that question.’

‘Drug money?’

‘Let’s just call it “undeclared”.’

‘OK. So they clean it. Why do they clean it?’

‘Why do they clean it now, should be your question.’

‘All right, I’ll ask that.’

‘Next year the euro arrives and it’s the end of the peseta. You have to declare your pesetas to get your euros. If they’re black, that could be uncomfortable.’

‘What do they do with them?’

‘Buy art, amongst other things, and property,’ said Salgado. ‘Try buying an apartment in Seville at the moment.’

‘I’m not in the market.’

‘And art?’

‘Tampoco.’

‘Have you got round to cleaning out your father’s studio yet?’

There it was. The question. Falcón couldn’t believe he’d fallen for Salgado’s pathetic act in the cemetery. This was what Salgado slipped in to every conversation they ever had, which was why he didn’t want to spend any time with him. Now the wheedling would start, unless he came down hard or just changed the subject.

‘There’s a lot of black money in the restaurant business, isn’t there, Ramón?’

‘Why do you think he was moving house?’ said Salgado.

‘That’s almost interesting.’

‘Nobody ever bought a painting from your father with a cheque,’ said Salgado. ‘And you’re right about the restaurant business, especially tourist restaurants serving reasonable meals paid for in cash with no invoices. Hardly any of that money reaches the books that the taxman sees.’

‘So that’s what’s happening now … What about back in 1992?’

‘That’s all been and gone. I was just being illustrative.’

‘I wasn’t here, but I heard there was a lot of corruption.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, but it was ten years ago.’

‘You sound as if you’ve got something to hide, Ramón. You weren’t …?’

‘Me?’ he said, outraged. ‘An art dealer? If you think I had any opportunity to cash in on Expo ‘92, you’re mad.’

‘Do you know anything, Ramón? I mean, are we gathered here just for you to air your generalities or do you have something specific that will help me find Raúl Jiménez’s murderer? What about all these people who come to your shows? I bet they talk about “real” things, once they’ve stopped talking all that shit about the pictures.’

“‘All that shit about the pictures”? Javier, I’m surprised at you, of all people.’

We’re getting to it now, thought Falcón. This is a trade. Information for what Salgado wants more than anything else: the chance to rummage through my father’s studio. It wasn’t about money either. It was the prestige. It would be the crowning moment of this man’s inglorious life to mount one final exhibition of the unseen work of the great Francisco Falcón. The collectors who would come. The Americans. The museum curators. Suddenly he would be the centre again, as he had been forty years ago.

Falcón bit into a large, fleshy olive. Salgado nipped the bud off a caper and twiddled the stalk in his fingers.

‘Is this information cast iron, Ramón?’

‘I’ve overheard some things to which others have added, unaware of what I already know. Over the years I have built a picture. A tableau vivant.’

‘And does this picture have a title?’

‘Orange Blossom and Horseshit — I think that would be an apposite title.’

‘And you’d give me a print of this outstanding work if I were to give you access to my father’s studio and what …? Let you put on a show of his …?’

‘Oh, no, no, no, que no, Javier, hombre. I would never demand such a thing. Of course, it would be very nice to have a nostalgic trip around his abstract landscapes, but it’s all passé now. If he had some hidden nudes like the one in the Reina Sofía, the two in the Guggenheim and the one that Barbara Hutton donated to MOMA, then that would be a different matter. But you and I know …’

‘Then I’m puzzled, Ramón.’

‘I just want to spend a day alone in his studio,’ he said, nipping off another caper. ‘You can lock me in. You can search me when I come out. All I ask is a day amongst his paintbrushes, his rolls of canvas, his stretchers and oils.’

Falcón stared at the old man, his glass of manzanilla halfway to his mouth, trying to see inside, the inner workings, the springs and cogs. Salgado turned his glass round by the stem, making a circular mark on the wooden slats of the barrel top. He looked sad, because that was how he always looked. And he was impenetrable, his urbanity as good as armour plate.

‘I’m going to have to think about this, Ramón,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly a normal piece of business.’