The Blind Man of Seville

18

Tuesday, 17th April 2001, Edificio de los Juzgados, Seville

Falcón and Ramírez turned off their mobiles and sat down in front of Calderón, who maintained his businesslike stance until they were comfortable. He lowered himself into his seat as if he was making a tremendous effort to contain his anger.

‘Proceed,’ he said, and steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s start with the latest on the prime suspect.’

‘We have had a major development in that respect,’ said Falcón, and Ramírez on cue slid the two ‘cleaned’ blow-ups of the suspected killer out of the file and handed them to Calderón. ‘We believe that this is our murderer.’

Calderón’s eyes widened as the two sheets came across the desk but regained their grimness when he saw that neither shot was conclusive. Falcón kept up a running commentary on how they’d come across the sighting. His voice seemed disembodied to him, as if he’d become non-human, a robotic word-generator. The bone-deep tiredness was separating him from himself. More phrases toppled from his mouth: ‘ … believed to be male in the age range twenty to forty years old …’ ‘… a further development …’ ‘… a pornographic video …’ ‘… confused our perception of the prime suspect …’ He stopped only when Calderón put his hand up and read the report on the blue movie. The hand dropped. Falcón’s tape started up again, and he wondered how many words a human uttered in a lifetime. ‘The prostitute Eloisa Gómez …’ ‘… missing since last Friday night …’ ‘… contact has been made …’ ‘… stolen mobile …’ ‘… feared murdered …’ All this so long ago and yet so recent, he thought. And the investigation into Raúl Jiménez’s private life — the abduction of the boy, the wife’s suicide, the daughter’s madness, the son’s neurosis — a different century, which of course it was. Everything is from a different century now. A great tranche of history has been set adrift, so that we can begin a new accumulation of wrongs without reference …

‘Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, ‘your speculation on history is not germane to this investigation.’

‘It isn’t?’ he said, and from his sudden fear that he’d been caught leaking came what he hoped was inspiration. ‘Motive is always historical, unless it’s psychotic. The only question is: how far back do we have to go? Last month, when Raúl Jiménez tried to sell his restaurant business to Joaquín López? The last decade, when he was presiding over the Expo ‘92 Building Committee? Or thirty-six years ago, when his son was abducted.’

‘Let’s concentrate on what we have before us,’ said Calderón. ‘You are an Inspector Jefe with five men under you; there’s a limit to what you can achieve with those resources. You have pursued the available leads. You have achieved things — this sighting, for instance. But the most important thing is the apparent audacity of the killer and his inclination to communicate with you. As you have said, in being bold he is making mistakes, which in the case of the funeral was nearly fatal for him. He is sending things to you. He is talking to you.’

‘In the light of Consuelo Jiménez’s reaction to the pornographic movie, are you proposing that we drop our prime suspect?’ asked Ramírez. ‘And wait for the killer to talk to us?’

‘No, Inspector, Consuelo Jiménez provides a focus for the investigation. She is all we’ve got. We believe the killer was not known to the victim. At the moment there are two people with possible motives: Joaquín López of the Cinco Bellotas chain, whose motive is very weak; and Consuelo Jiménez, whose motive is a classic, almost a stereotype. Given her reaction to the video, as described by the Inspector Jefe, she is looking less likely, but this does not take her completely out of the frame. She has done enough to make you believe her capable of at least being ruthless. She seems to have been rather disgusted by her husband’s sexual interests and his business infidelity. She has not done enough to make me believe that she couldn’t possibly have hired someone to carry out this gruesome business. And, if she did hire him, and he has now killed his accomplice, it may be that she has made a poor choice, because he seems to be off the leash.’

‘Do you think we should attempt to communicate with him?’ asked Falcón.

‘And what are we going to say to this tío?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Let’s profile him … now,’ said Calderón.

‘I’ve already said he’s bold and playful,’ said Falcón. ‘I’d like to add creative. He’s into film, the idea of the eye, sight and vision. He’s interested in the way we look at things. How clearly we do or don’t see them — the sight lesson.’

‘There’s going to be more of those,’ said Calderón.

‘He’s also interested in the way we present ourselves to the world and how at odds this is with our secret lives and possibly our secret history.’

‘He does his research,’ said Ramírez, ‘filming the Familia Jiménez, discovering the change in the move at Mudanzas Triana.’

‘He must have charm, maybe good looks and an understanding of the unfortunates of this world if he’s capable of persuading Eloisa Gómez to be an accomplice,’ said Falcón. ‘A woman like her really doesn’t need visits from the police and she must have known she was going to get them, even if he told her he was just going to steal a few things.’

‘What does he do?’ asked Calderón. ‘There’s money coming from somewhere. He has access to camera, video and computer equipment.’

‘He went to Madrid to post the pornographic movie,’ said Ramírez. ‘He wouldn’t leave that in the hands of just anybody. He has time.’

‘Anybody who’s obsessed has time,’ said Falcón. ‘He could be working in the film industry, that would give him access to the equipment and if he was working freelance he’d have the time and the money.’

‘The Médico Forense said he showed some surgical skills.’

‘All sorts of people are good with their hands,’ said Calderón. ‘You said he’s obsessed, Inspector Jefe.’

‘The second time he called me he left me in no doubt that he had a story to tell and that he was going to tell it in his way. There was anger and perhaps bitterness.’

‘So we could unsettle him by interfering,’ said Calderón. ‘We might force a mistake by making him angrier.’

‘You know what creative people hate more than anything else?’ said Falcón. ‘Criticism from people that they think are unworthy to judge. Believe me, I know — I’ve seen my father’s rage.’

‘But his work,’ said Ramírez, ‘this work … what can you say about it?’

‘We could talk to him about his mistakes,’ said Falcón. Tell him about the chloroform rag, the sighting in the cemetery. How unprofessional he’s been.’

Calderón nodded. Falcón took out his mobile with clammy hands. There were two messages. The first was a text message, which he instinctively played because he was rarely sent them.

‘He’s beaten us to it,’ he said, and handed Calderón the mobile.

The text message was a riddle in the form of a poem.

Cuando su amor es ciego

No arde más su fuego.

Jamás abrirá los ojos

Ni hablará con los locos.

En paz yacen sus hombros

Donde se agitan las sombras.

Ahora ella duerme en la oscuridad

Con su fiel amante de la celebridad.

The lover is blind, her fire burns no more. Never again will she open her eyes nor speak to madmen. Her shoulders lie in peace where the shadows move. Now she sleeps in darkness with her faithful lover of celebrity.

‘You can tell him his poetry is shit, that should annoy him,’ said Calderón, handing back the mobile.

‘He’s killed her,’ said Falcón. ‘And he’s telling us that he’s put the body in the Jiménez mausoleum in the San Fernando Cemetery.’

‘Call him,’ said Calderón. ‘Tell him.’

Falcón pulled up Eloisa Gómez’s number from the mobile memory and punched it in. No reply. The three men left the building, got into Falcón’s car and drove along the river to the cemetery. They ran up the cypress-lined avenue to Jesús de la Pasión, Falcón trying Eloisa Gómez’s number all the way. As they neared the Jiménez mausoleum they heard a mobile ringing from inside. Falcón terminated the call and the ringing stopped.

The mausoleum door opened to a push. The stench indicated that putrefaction had already started. Eloisa Gómez was lying on her back on the shelf underneath Raúl Jiménez’s coffin. Her mobile was on her stomach and tucked underneath it was an envelope on which was written: Sight Lesson No.2. Her skirt was rucked up, revealing black underwear and a suspender belt to which only one stocking top was attached. The other leg was bare.

Her head lay in darkness at the back of the small mausoleum. Falcón took out a pen torch and played it over her body. Her arms were crossed over her chest, each hand demurely covering a breast. There was a burn mark and deep bruising at her neck. Her face still bore the make-up of her trade. Over each eyelid there was a coin and he could tell by the way the coins had sunk into the sockets that her eyes were missing. It threw him back against the coffin of the dead wife, the pen torch fell from his grip. He crabbed his way out of there and staggered down the steps, shaking himself down, shuddering.

Ramírez was calling the Jefatura incident room, telling them to send a patrol car and the Policía Científica but not to bother with the Juez de Guardia because the Juez de Instrucción was already present.

‘What’s it like in there?’ said Calderón, seeing the horror in Falcón’s face.

‘She’s dead,’ he said, ‘and her eyeballs have been removed.’

‘Joder,’ said Calderón, visibly shocked.

‘Sight lesson number two is under the mobile on her stomach. We’ll have to wait for the forensics to come before we go any further.’

Falcón walked away, took some deep breaths. He did a cursory check around the mausoleum and came back to Calderón.

‘We were talking about this guy’s creativity earlier,’ he said. ‘This smacks of improvisation. Somehow I don’t think this was part of the plan. This is just to show us how clever he can be. I think it’s important for him that we know this.’

‘But if she was an accomplice he must have known he was going to have to deal with her?’ said Calderón.

‘Like this? I know it sounds ridiculous, but do you know how difficult it is to get a body into a cemetery? You can’t just walk in with one over your shoulder. Look at these walls. The gates are shut at night. It’s a difficult business. And if she wasn’t his accomplice, he’s gone to the trouble of tracking her down, killing her, disposing of her body in this intricate way and … I think we’ll find out … introducing her into his theme.’

‘His theme?’

‘Sight, vision, illusion, reality.’

‘You think he’s operating alone?’

‘There are still some doubts in me about Consuelo Jiménez, but I respect what you said about giving the investigation focus, because without her we’re in an open sea. My instinct tells me he’s operating alone, but there’s an outside chance he was hired by Consuelo Jiménez, that he’s done his job and developed a taste for the work, and I mean The Work. I think this is like a work of art for him.’

‘So now you think he’s an artist?’

‘He thinks he’s an artist with all his sight lessons and his poetry and “I’ve got a story to tell”.’

‘If she wasn’t his accomplice,’ said Calderón, ‘and she was just in the apartment in his film, and he decided he had to deal with her, how did he track her down?’

‘The girls in the Alameda said that Raúl Jiménez called twice because Eloisa Gómez wasn’t there the first time and he was specifically interested in her. So the killer, if he was in the apartment at the time, would have overheard the name. He also stole Raúl Jiménez’s mobile. He has her number. But listen … this is interesting. There’s a line in the poem he sent us: “Donde se agitan las sombras.” Where the shadows move. That was Eloisa’s line — it’s what girls like her have to look out for.’

‘Then he’s spoken to her,’ said Calderón. ‘He’s formed some kind of relationship with her.’

‘And that is unusual between a prostitute and a client.’

‘So he did know her.’

‘If she was seeing somebody privately I’m surprised her girlfriends didn’t know about it,’ said Falcón. ‘But then … I think we mishandled her first interview and we’re police, after all. They don’t like us. They don’t feel inclined to talk to us.’

‘Do you think, Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, nearly momentous, ‘that we have a serial killer on our hands?’

‘We have a multiple murderer and, with the killing of Eloisa Gómez, I think we have something close to a random act, although, as I said, I think we’ll find that she’s become part of his theme, so it depends how you define random. The planning and motivation that went into the Raúl Jiménez killing were absent from this murder. Where there had been logic, method and technique, now we have pure inspiration.’

‘So you think that he will kill again?’

‘I do … but I don’t think it will be random. I think it will fit into the structure of his work. And something fitted with Eloisa Gómez. She’s said something, apart from Donde se agitan las sombras, which has worked within the warped structure of this killer’s mind.

‘If you think about it, these girls, they scratch out their living in some dark and dangerous places. They see aspects of human nature on a daily basis that rarely cross the path of normal people. They need insight to survive their sometimes frightening liaisons. A lot of killers prey on prostitutes. For some men the only thing that these girls arouse is all that is weak in themselves and it makes them angry. Raúl Jiménez seemed like a harmless, wealthy guy indulging himself, only we know there was some very perverse wiring in his head.’

‘Well, her instinct worked with him,’ said Calderón. ‘But it failed dramatically with the killer.’

‘He got inside her head. He touched her. She talked to him. Prostitutes survive with their clients by keeping their distance. Intimacy is fatal.’

‘That’s a world you wouldn’t want to live in … where intimacy is fatal,’ said Calderón, and Falcón, who had not made a professional friendship since he’d worked in Barcelona, knew that he liked him.

A patrol car eased up the main avenue of the cemetery, blue lights flashing between the black granite and white marble. Calderón lit a cigarette, smoked it with distaste. Falcón took out his mobile and checked the second message he’d forgotten about in the excitement of the first. It was Dr Fernando Valera telling him he’d arranged an appointment for him with a psychologist and giving an address in Tabladilla.

Felipe and Jorge, the same forensics on the Raúl Jiménez killing, turned up and they all stood around waiting for the Médico Forense. She arrived some minutes later, a woman in her thirties with long dark hair, which she stuffed into a white plastic cap. Her inspection of the body took less than fifteen minutes. She came out of the mausoleum, casually handed Falcón’s dropped pen torch to a patrolman and gave her report to Juez Calderón. She put the time of death at some time early on Saturday morning and, as rigor mortis was fully developed, she reckoned that the body had been there since the weekend. Cause of death was by strangulation and, given the nature of the burn mark, probably done with the missing stocking. The depth of the marks around the front of the neck would indicate that the killer had tackled her from behind and used the girl’s own weight to kill her. She was not prepared to make a comment about the eyes until she had the girl back in the Instituto.

Felipe and Jorge moved in, dusted the mobile and envelope, which were clean. They opened the envelope, dusted the card inside, also clean. They handed it over to Falcón with raised eyebrows.

¿Por qué tienen que morir aquéllos a quienes les encanta el amor?

Why do they have to die, those that love to love?

And on the reverse side was the answer:

Porque tienen el don de la vista perfecta.

Because they have the gift of perfect sight.

Falcón read it out loud and then slipped it into the evidence bag. The Médico Forense conferred with Calderón and the secretaria, who took down notes. Ramírez repeated the sight lesson.

‘I don’t know what that means,’ he said. ‘I understand it, but … do you know what that means, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Well … maybe it’s ironic,’ said Falcón. ‘A prostitute does not love to love.’

He changed his mind almost as soon as he’d said it. The sad-eyed, stiffly embracing panda in Eloisa Gómez’s bedroom came to mind, along with the thought that maybe the killer had reached that far in.

‘And the gift of perfect sight?’

‘Maybe as you said, Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, returning to the conversation, ‘these girls see things very clearly.’

‘The stocking,’ said Falcón. ‘The single stocking that was removed …’

‘He probably put her under the chloroform to get that off her,’ said Ramírez.

‘Yes, that was probably it,’ said Falcón, disappointed by the likely mundanity. He was imagining some break-through between the killer and Eloisa Gómez, that they’d achieved some intimacy, until, at the onset of sex, with all its psychological leaking, the killer’s true nature was revealed.

‘Where was she killed?’ said Calderón. ‘It has to have been local, doesn’t it?’

‘And he has to have had transport, too,’ said Ramírez.

‘Or they could have come here together and then he killed her and hid the body. There must be a lot of gardening rubbish here,’ said Falcón, and told Ramírez to get a shot of the girl sent down and run it past the portero to see if he recognized her. ‘We’re going to have to search this cemetery, too.’

Ramírez spoke into his mobile and surveyed the hectares of crosses and mausoleums that stretched off in all directions to the distant palm trees and cypresses at the walls of the cemetery. Falcón looked over the garish flower arrangements, the endless names, the ranks of the dead reaching off up to the blue sky and the high cirrus.

An ambulance crawled up the main avenue at a respectful pace, the blank windscreen made it seem unpeopled, impersonal.

‘I’ll speak to Comisario Lobo and get some manpower released to search this cemetery,’ said Falcón, and Ramírez nodded, pulled a cigarette from the pack with his lips and lit it.

‘The eyes,’ said Calderón. ‘Do you think he removed the eyes here as well?’

‘I have it on the authority of a jealous husband I gaoled some years ago in Barcelona that it’s not so difficult to do,’ said Falcón. ‘He did it to his wife who was having an affair. He said they just popped out under his thumbs like a couple of bird’s eggs.’

Falcón shuddered at himself retelling the story and the forensics came over to give their report.

‘He killed her outside the mausoleum and dragged her in,’ said Felipe. ‘It was too narrow for him to carry her inside so he had to drag her up the steps and lift her in. Her skirt’s all rucked up at the back, the remaining stocking is badly laddered and the back of the bare leg is grazed. We’ve found plenty of strands of material in the shelving where he’s scraped his coat, but there’s no blood, saliva or sperm. No discernible footprints either. We did find this in the victim’s hair though, which might help you find the killing place —’

Jorge handed over a bag containing rose and chrysanthemum petals, grass and leaves.

‘Gardening detritus,’ said Felipe and the forensics left.

Calderón signed off the levantamiento del cadaver. The ambulancemen lifted the body into a bag, zipped it up and stretchered it away. The ambulance reversed back down Jesús de la Pasión to the main avenue and, lights flashing, drew stunned glances from a straggle of mourners, baffled by the sight of it in this place. Lobo gave Falcón a squad of fifteen men to search the cemetery. Calderón rejoined him.

‘This line, “where the shadows move”,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you were afraid of, would you go to a cemetery … with anyone, let alone a client? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Unless you consider how difficult it is to get a dead body over one of those walls,’ said Falcón. ‘I think he’d brought her in close … close enough to open the door for him to Jiménez’s flat and close enough to go to a cemetery with him.’

‘The girl was killed Saturday morning,’ said Ramírez, coming back from his mobile conversation, ‘and we know the killer was here later that day because he was seen at the funeral.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know where the Jiménez mausoleum was,’ said Falcón, ‘but he was filming too, so he had a double reason for being here.’

‘The grass clippings,’ said Calderón.

‘If he killed her here, he buried her under the grass clippings, probably assuming that nobody would be taking away gardening detritus on a weekend. If he killed her elsewhere and got the body over the wall, he’d have had to bring her here in a car and he probably didn’t want to leave his car parked outside the cemetery walls for too long.’

‘This flash of inspiration you were talking about has given him a lot of trouble,’ said Calderón.

‘It’s important to him thematically, and he wants to show us his talent,’ said Falcón.

Calderón went back to the Edificio de los Juzgados in a taxi. Falcón and Ramírez had the cemetery emptied and closed off for the rest of the day. Lobo came up with another twelve men and by six o’clock they’d moved through the whole cemetery. A black stocking had been found hanging from the handle of the broken sword of the bronze statue of the torero, Francisco Rivera. A large quantity of dead flowers, grass clippings and leaves were found in a skip close to a rusted metal gate in the wall at the rear of the cemetery. The wall backed on to a factory. A narrow, overgrown passage ran down its entire length. Leaning up against the wall between the factory and the cemetery were some old metal doors and a ladder of the sort used in the cemetery to climb up the high ossuary blocks. The grass in the passage had been trodden down. The passage was only visible to the security guards patrolling the industrial zone if they actually went down it on foot. The skip butted up against the wall. It would have been possible for the killer to have lifted the very small Eloisa Gómez up and over the wall and to have heaved her into the skip.

‘That’s the second time he’s done this to us,’ said Falcón.

‘Confused us about the killing scenario?’ said Ramírez.

‘Yes, it’s one of his talents … to slow the whole process down,’ said Falcón.

‘We’re always having to do double the work,’ said Ramírez.

‘It’s something my father used to say about genius … they make everything around them look so slow.’

By 6.30 p.m. Falcón and Ramírez were in the Alameda but found none of Eloisa’s group in the square. They went to her room in Calle Joaquín Costa. Falcón knocked on the door of the fat girl, who kept the key to Eloisa’s room. She came to the door in a blue towelling dressing gown and pink furry slippers. Her eyes were puffy with sleep but she was instantly alert when she saw the two policemen. Falcón asked for the key and told her to start thinking about the last time she’d seen her friend and to get the other girls to do the same. She didn’t have to ask what had happened and handed him the key.

The door opened on the stupid panda. The two men looked around at the pitiful accumulation of a small, hard life. Ramírez nosed amongst the cheap bric-a-brac on the dressing table.

‘What are we doing here?’ he asked.

‘Just looking.’

‘Do you think he’s been here?’

‘Too risky,’ said Falcón. ‘We need the address and telephone number of her sister. The panda’s for her niece.’

Ramírez looked from the panda to his boss and had a vision of Falcón as lost and pathetic, diminished and unconnected.

‘I won one of those for my daughter at the Feria last year,’ said Ramírez, nodding at the silent guest. ‘She loves it.’

‘Strange how cuddly toys bring out that instinct,’ said Falcón.

Ramírez backed away from any potential intimacy.

‘Not such perfect sight,’ said Ramírez, looking down on a pair of contact lenses on the bedside table.

‘She knew him before,’ said Falcón, ‘I’m sure of it. Think of all that filming he did to make La Familia Jiménez. He’d have seen him going back to the same girl again and again. He’d have wanted to know why.’

‘She probably gave the best blow job in town,’ said Ramírez crudely.

‘There’s got to be a reason for it.’

‘She looked very young,’ said Ramírez. ‘Maybe he liked that.’

‘His son said he fell for his first wife when she was thirteen.’

‘Whatever, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez. ‘This is all conjecture.’

‘What else have we got to structure our ideas?’ said Falcón. ‘We don’t need any more clues with the trail he’s leaving.’

‘We’ve still got a prime suspect, according to Juez Calderón,’ said Ramírez.

‘I haven’t forgotten her, Inspector.’

‘If she’s hired someone and unleashed a madman she might be persuaded that she’s not so safe herself,’ said Ramírez. ‘I still think we should sweat her.’

The girls from Eloisa’s group filed past the door on their way to the fat girl’s room. Ramírez found Eloisa’s address book. They went down the hall to where the girls slouched in the smoke-filled room.

Falcón talked them through what had happened. The only noise was from the click and rasp of cheap lighters and the drawing in of smoke. He asked if there was anybody that Eloisa was seeing outside the business and there was some derisive laughter. He pressed them to think about it and they all said they didn’t have to. There was nobody except the sister in Cádiz. He roamed their faces. They had the look of refugees about them. Refugees from life, stuck on the borders of civilization, remote from comfort. He told them they could leave. The fat girl remained.

‘There was somebody,’ she said, once they’d all left. ‘Not a regular, but she saw him more than once. She said he was different.’

‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ asked Falcón.

‘Because I thought she’d got away. That’s what she said she was going to do.’

‘Start from the beginning,’ said Falcón.

‘She said he didn’t want to have sex with her. He only wanted to talk.’

‘One of those,’ said Ramírez, and Falcón stabbed him silent with a look.

‘He told her he was a writer. He was doing something for a film.’

‘What did they talk about?’

‘He asked her everything about her life. There was no detail he wasn’t interested in. He was particularly interested in what he called “crossing borders”.’

‘Do you know what he meant by that?’

‘The first time she had sex. The first time she had sex for money. The first time she permitted certain things to be done to her. The first time she got pregnant. The first abortion. The first time she was hit. The first time a man pulled a knife on her. The first time a man pushed a gun into her … cut her. Those borders.’

‘And they only talked?’

‘He paid her for sex but they only talked,’ she said. ‘And by the end they just talked.’

‘Did she say what he looked like?’ asked Falcón. ‘Where he was from? How he spoke? Did he have a name?’

‘She called him Sergio.’

‘Was it him she went to see on Friday night?’

She shrugged.

‘Did you ever see him?’

She shook her head.

‘She must have described him.’

‘We’re careful what we tell each other … it can come back on us,’ she said. ‘She only told me that he was guapo. Maybe she talked to her sister more.’

‘So you think, if she was going to run away with him, that she had feelings for him?’

‘She said that no man had ever spoken to her like he did.’

‘Did he talk about himself to her?’

‘If he did, she didn’t tell me anything.’

‘What do you know about Sergio … other than a name?’

‘I know that he’d done a very dangerous thing,’ she said. ‘He’d given Eloisa hope.’

‘Hope?’ said Ramírez, as if this had no weight with him at all.

‘Look around you,’ said the fat girl. ‘Imagine what hope does to you, if you live like this.’

Falcón and Ramírez were back at the Jefatura by 8 p.m. having searched and sealed off Eloisa Gómez’s room. They’d found nothing. They went through the address book on Eloisa’s retrieved mobile and found no reference to Sergio. Falcón left Ramírez with the paperwork while he went to Tabladilla to keep his appointment with the psychologist. He parked across the street from the building and paced up and down the length of his car, eyeing the plaques on the outside of the door, reluctant to initiate the consultation.

A memory of his father getting mechanics to tinker about inside the engine of the Jaguar, even when it was working perfectly, came back to him. He always said it was “just in case something was about to go wrong”. Madness. The point was that Falcón did need some tinkering, but what would happen? What terrible black thread would be teased out of his tightknit brain? Would it all unravel? He saw himself dazed and slack-jawed, staring up at two white-coated assistants as they eased his arms into a surgical gown. Just one small cut and you’ll be set adrift from your past. He was already out of control, he saw that, thinking about open brain surgery when all this was going to be was a talk. He wiped his damp palms together, sandwiched a handkerchief between them and crossed the street.

The stairs were either interminable or he was making them so and he had to drive himself through the door at the top. A girl sat behind a desk.

‘Hola, Sr Falcón,’ she said, cheerful, used to dealing with broken minds. ‘This is your first time, isn’t it?’

She had blonde hair and thick pouting lips. She held out a form for him to fill in. He didn’t take it. On the wall beyond the girl was one of his father’s paintings of the doorway to the Iglesia Omnium Santorum. Checking the room he found another — one of the larger, less successful abstract landscapes.

‘Sr Falcón,’ said the girl, standing now, skirt hem at the level of the desk.

He knew he would not be able to stand this. He would not be able to sit in front of someone and discuss his father’s life and work and have the man nosing about inside his head, looking for the crimps and creases in the texture of his thoughts and ironing them out. He left without a word. It was the easiest thing he’d done in years. He just walked away.

A ghastly turbulence started up in his chest as he got into the car, but it passed as he drove back home with the windows down. He walked to the British Institute and sat at the back of the class and half listened through a session of conditionals. I would be feeling better now if I had been to the shrink. I’d be singing my madness out on the couch if I hadn’t lost my nerve. It would help if I could talk to someone.

He looked around the students in the class. Pedro. Juan. Sergio. Lola. Sergio? His thoughts grew strange and large in his head. Sergio. We might as well call this madman Sergio. He can talk. He sees things clearly. He gets inside and turns things over. He’d talked to Eloisa, given her hope and taken her hopeless life from her. Why don’t I talk to him? He’s telling me his story, why don’t I tell him mine? Let him wrench these horrible creatures from my brain.

‘Javier?’ said the teacher.

‘I’d like to apologize if I’ve been talking out loud.’

Falcón laughed to himself, grinned at the way the larger world outside had been diminished by the high-vaulted gothics of his own mind. He could live in here for years and, as soon as he’d thought it, he threw himself out, like a heretic from a cathedral. He delved into the machinery of language. It was so easy to fit words together, so relaxing. It was only the meaning that bled into the spaces around them that troubled.

He attached himself to some other students and went for a drink. They walked to the Bar Barbiana in the Calle Albareda. They drank beer, ate tapas — atún encebollado, tortillitas de camarones. The students didn’t belong with the clientele of this bar who were, as they were saying, muy pijo — upper class — probably with fincas in the country, until Lola looked embarrassed and they changed the subject because they thought Falcón was muy pija in his suit and tie.

They split up before Javier was ready to go home. Was he ever ready to go home these days? His house was a prison, his room a cell, the bed a rack on which he was stretched out every night. He walked around town, stood close to groups in well-lit bars, put his beer down amongst theirs, until they noticed him and sealed him off.

He ended the night under the high palms and the deeper darkness of the massive rubber trees in the Plaza del Museo de las Bellas Artes. The botellón was in full swing, the air full of hashish, clinking glass and the low roar of humans at their leisure.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

30th June 1941, Ceuta

Pablito came into my room this afternoon, lay down on my bed, rolled a cigarette on his chest and lit it. He has something to tell me. I know this but I always ignore him. I was drawing a Berber woman I’d seen in the market that morning. Pablito’s nonchalance bristled on the bed. He smoked like a cow would, always chewing.

‘We’re going to Russia,’ he said. ‘To hit the Reds. Kick them up the ass on their own soil.’

I put down my pencil and turned to him.

‘General Orgaz volunteered us. Colonel Esperanza has been asked to form a regiment. A battalion is going to be made up out of the Legion, the Regulares and the Flechas, here in Ceuta.’

That’s how I remember Pablito’s little announcement. Banal. I’m so bored I’m going along with it. So little has happened in the last few years I forgot I had this journal. My diary is in my drawings. I’m unused to writing. Four pages cover two years. Isn’t this the rhythm of life? Periods of change, followed by long periods of getting used to the change until you feel compelled to change again. Boredom is my only motive. It’s probably Pablito’s, too, but he dresses it up in anti-communist rhetoric. He doesn’t know the first thing about communism.

8th July 1941, Ceuta

There was a good turnout in the port to see us off. General Orgaz stirred us all up. If we didn’t suspect it before, we know it now — we’re a political device. (Am I sounding like Oscar now?) The uniform says something about what’s going on in Madrid: we’re wearing the red berets of the Carlists, the blue shirts of the Falange and the khaki trousers of the Legion. Royalists, fascists and military all satisfied and implicated.

The Germans have been at the Pyrenees for months. Rumour had it that they were going to send a strike force to take Gibraltar, which sounded too much like invasion. We’re being sent to Russia to make the Germans feel better about Spain, to make it look as if we’re on their side. The newspaper tells us that Stalin is the real enemy, but no mention of us entering the war. Games are being played and we are in the middle. I have a feeling of doom about this whole expedition, but beyond the harbour walls we pick up a school of dolphin, who escort us most of the way to Algeciras, which I take to be a good omen.

10th July 1941, Seville

We’ve been put in the Pineda barracks at the southern end of the city. We had a night on the town. We didn’t pay for a single drink. The last time some of our number were here they were hacking men to death on the streets of Triana. Now we’re the heroes, sent to keep communism at bay. Five years is an eon in human relations.

Despite the brutal heat, I like Seville. The dark, cool bars. The people with short memories and a need to express joy. I think this is a place to live in.

18th July 1941, Grafenwöhr, Germany

We changed trains at Hendaye in southern France. The French shook their fists and hurled rocks at the carriages as we passed through. At our first stop in Germany, Karlsruhe station was full of people cheering and singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. They covered the train in flowers. Now we’re somewhere northeast of Nürnberg. Weather grey. New recruits and most of the guripas already depressed, missing home. Us veterans depressed because we’ve just been told that the División Azul, as we ‘re called, is not going to be motorized but horsedrawn.

8th August 1941, Grafenwöhr

Pablito has a black eye and a cut lip. He doesn’t like the Germans any more than the communists he hasn’t yet met. The men, the guripas, like wearing their blue shirts and red berets instead of the regulation German uniform. A fight broke out in the Rathskeller in town. ‘They tell us we don’t know how to take care of our weapons,’ says Pablito. ‘But the real reason is that we’re fucking all their women and the girls have never had it so good.’ I don’t know if we’ll ever fit in with our new allies. The food stinks worse than the latrines, their tobacco smokes like hay and there is no wine. While Colónel Esperanza has taken delivery of a Studebaker President, we have been supplied with 6,000 horses from Serbia. It should take us two months just to get the animals trained, but we ‘re moving up to the front at the end of the month. Pablito’s heard that we ‘re going to march on Moscow, but I see the way the Germans look at us. They put a high value on discipline, obedience, command and neatness. Our secret weapon is our passion. But it is too secret for them to see. Only in battle will they understand the flame that burns inside every guripa. One shout of ‘A mí la legión!’ and the whole floor will rise up and ram the Russians back to Siberia.

27th August 1941, somewhere in Poland

Our reputation with local women precedes us. We’ve been forbidden to have anything to do with Jewish women, who we recognize by the yellow star they have to wear, or the Polish women (panienkas). We heard that 10 Company of 262 marched with blown-up condoms attached to their rifles as a protest.

2nd September 1941, Grodno

First signs of battle on the march to Grodno … outskirts of the town have been levelled. The centre is full of rubble, which the Jews have been put to work cleaning up. They are exhausted as their rations are meagre. Pablito’s attitude to the Germans is hardening by the day. He now finds them sinister. We’re to be toughened up by being marched to the front. Pablito has fallen for a blonde, green-eyed panienka called Anna.

12th September 1941, Ozmiana

Colonel Esperanza’s Studebaker has taken a beating on the roads. It won’t be long before he’s marching like the rest of us. A black Mercedes pulled up alongside the other day and General Muñoz Grandes got out and had lunch with us. Pablito and the guripas were in an uproar. He inspires us, as he is one of the few commanders who understand what it’s like to be an ordinary soldier.

16th September 1941, Minsk

Pablito says there’s a compound outside town where the Russian prisoners are kept. They ‘re given no food. The locals throw what they can over the fence and are shot at for their trouble. Pablito is happy — his panienka has turned up in Minsk. I’m happy because the chickpeas and olive oil arrived yesterday.

Already cold. Autumn chill in the air.

9th October 1941, Novo Sokol’niki

We’re stalled outside Velikje Luki — rail lines blown up by partisans. We forage in town and end up roasting dead horses over charcoal pits in the rail yard, singing songs, drinking potato vodka. Pablito, lovesick for Anna, sings very well. Flamenco on the steppe.

10th October 1941, Dno

Off-loaded here on to different gauge trains. Old woman hanging from a lamppost. Partisan. Guripas shocked. ‘What is this war?’ one of them asks, as if he didn’t know what had happened in his own country three years ago.

Next stop Novgorod and the front. We’re on combat pay from now on. Reds rule the skies. Supplies low. Few spares. Partisans. No Pablito — he didn’t show up for evening Mass.

11 October 1941, Dno

Occupation measures in force here so I have to accompany the German patrol on a house-to-house search for Pablito. We don’t find him. In one house I’m astonished to see Anna, his panienka, working with some Russian civilians. I can’t think how she could have got so far. Outside in the street I tell the German NCO and two men go in and haul her out. The other women start screaming and the Germans beat them down with rifle butts. They force Anna to her knees in the street and ask about Pablito. She denies everything but knows why she’s been chosen. The NCO, a colossal brute, takes his glove off and gives her four savage slaps to her face that leave her head hanging like a torn doll. They take her to a burnt-out building across the street. Anna’s scarf comes loose and her blonde hair falls down. The men murmur. The NCO has a face like tank armour plates. The grey afternoon turns bleaker. The temperature drops. More questions asked, more denials follow. They strip her naked. She is blue white underneath. She sobs from the cold and fear. They twist her arms up behind her back and lift her off the floor. She screams. The NCO asks for a bayonet and uses the blade to flick her hardened nipples and that does it. The terror of cold steel. She tells how she was forced to lead Pablito into a trap for the partisans. They let her dress again. The patrol takes all the women away. I return and make my report to Major Pérez Pérez.

12th October 1941, Dno

In the morning Lt Martínez orders me to put together an eleven-man firing squad. Two male communist partisans and Pablito’s panienka have been delivered to us for execution. We put them against the wall in the freight yard. The girl cannot stand and there are no posts to tie her to. Lt Martínez tells the two men to hold her up between them. They arrange themselves like a family photograph. Lt. Martínez walks back to our line and shouts ‘Carguen!’, ‘Apunten’, and on the word ‘Fuego’ she looks up. I shoot her in the mouth.

A patrol found Pablito later that day, hanging by some wire from a tree. He’d been stripped naked, his eyes had been gouged out and his genitals cut off. We had a funeral Mass for him, our first casualty. Pablito, the anti-communist, who died without firing a shot.

13th October 1941, Podberez’e

We left the train under heavy artillery fire and deployed south of the town along the river Volkhov. There’s thick forest behind us, full of partisans. Across the Volkhov are the Russians. Thick mud all around, known as the rasputitsa, difficult to move. Frost at night.

30th October 1941, Sitno

We’ve been withdrawn after a fierce week and some bad losses. This war is less understandable by the moment. We attacked Dubrovka the other day. We thought to outflank the Russian defences and come at them from behind. As soon as we reformed south of the town we were hit by artillery and in getting out of the sector found ourselves in a minefield. What was a minefield doing there? There were bodies everywhere. García with his left leg missing and holding his crotch, shouting, ‘A mí la Legión!’ We closed ranks and attacked the Russians. We went mad when we got to them and would have hacked them all to death if we had not been so exhausted. Lt Martínez tells us that the Russian units all have political officers whose job it is to maintain discipline. They sow mines behind their front-line troops to stop them from retreating. Who are we fighting here? Not the local people. As soon as we take prisoners they become as useful to us as our own men.

1st November 1941, Sitno

I know heat. I understand heat. I’ve seen what it does to men. I’ve seen men die from drinking water. But cold, I don’t know cold. The landscape has hardened around us. The trees are brittle with frost. The ground beneath the drifting powdery snow is like iron. Our boots ring against it. A pick makes no impression. We have to use explosives to dig ourselves in. My piss turns instantly to ice as it hits the ground. And our Russian prisoners tell us that it is not yet cold.

8th November 1941

There’s ice on the Volkhov. It’s difficult to believe that it will freeze one-metre solid and completely change the strategy of this little war. Already soldiers can cross the river on planks. They tried to move horses as well, but one came off the planks and fell through the ice. In its frenzy it tore the reins from its handler, who watched as the terrified animal tried to clamber out. It was surprising how short a time it took for such a large beast to succumb to the cold. Within a minute its back legs ceased to operate. In two minutes its forelegs were still. By afternoon ice had formed around its middle and the animal was frozen solid, still with the terror moment alive in its eyes. It has become a monument to horror. No sculptor could have done better given the task by some mad municipality. The guripas new to the front can’t take their eyes off it. Some look back to the west bank of the river and realize that civilization is behind them and that beyond the Ice Horse there won’t be the expected glory, the passionate cause, but rather a blood-slackening sight of the coldest chamber of the human heart.

9th November 1941

In Nikltkino I came across a scene from the Middle Ages. A Russian prisoner with a hammer was moving among the ranks of his dead comrades, breaking their fingers, which still clutched their weapons. None of them wore boots. They’d all been stolen. With the fingers and arms broken and the weapons removed, their furs and quilted jackets can be taken. I now look like the Wolf Man and have recently acquired a bearskin hat. The front is now extended to include Otonskii and Posad.

18th November 1941, Dubrovka

The Russians have counterattacked the limits of our new front. Posad hit with everything — mortar, anti-tank and artillery. We got it the next day, followed by a full charge from the Reds. They started with a resounding ‘Urrah!’ and something else which, when they got closer, we heard as: ‘Ispanskii kaput!’ Our artillery broke them up; we mowed down the rest like wheat — which was how the Russians charged, standing upright, never crouched. Perhaps they thought it unmanly. They regrouped and hit us again at night and we met them on the snow-covered plain under the slow-falling flares, the woods black behind them. Unreal. The night so silent before the mayhem. We threw grenades and followed up with a bayonet charge. The Reds dispersed. As they merged back into the woods we heard our new recruits, who’d just experienced their first charge, shout after them: ‘Otro toro! Otro toro!’

5th December 1941

I am back at the front after a flesh wound sent me to the field hospital. I never want to see that place again. Not even the cold could suppress the stench; rather it has frozen it into my nostrils permanently.

The cold has reached a new dimension: -35°C. When men die from heat they go mad, they start jabbering, their brain in a rage. In the cold a man just drifts away. One moment he is there, perhaps even drawing on a cigarette and the next he is gone. Men are dying from the cerebral fluid freezing in their heads under their steel helmets. I’m glad of my fur hat. With the drop in temperature the Russians have started talking to us in Spanish, using Republicans to translate. They promise warmth, food and entertainment. We tell them to fuck their whore mothers.

28th December 1941

Christmas Eve in profound cold. The men recite poetry and sing about Spain — the heat, the pine trees, mother’s cooking and women. The Russians are ruthless and attack on Christmas Day. The numbers they throw at us are appalling. We’ve heard of their punishment battalions. Political undesirables are sent to run at our guns. They fall three or four deep and the real soldiers come running over the top of them, using the bodies as a ramp. We are in the most Godless place on earth with barely any daylight and death all around. Atrocity reported in Udarnik in the north of our sector — guripas found nailed to the ground by icepicks. Our rage peters out with the cold and hunger.

18th January 1942, Novgorod

The Russians smell our weakness and, just when we think it is so cold that we’ll never move again, they attack. We’re sent to Teremets to help the Germans. We try to dissuade the endless waves of Russians by using some of our old African tricks. We strip prisoners of all useful clothing, cut off their trigger fingers, split their noses, cut off an ear and send them back. It has no effect. The next day they ‘re running at us again with clubs and bayonets. I was lucky to get out of Teremets alive and only made it back because I was sent to the rear with a broken leg.

17th June 1942, Riga

Complications set in with the leg after a bout of pneumonia. I was too weak to move and missed the return battalion in the spring. They reset the leg. I caught typhus. The wound wouldn’t heal. I hardly knew what was happening to me for five months. I had a visit from the new commander of 269, Lt Col Cabrera, who has asked me to go back up to the front with the newly manned ‘Tía Bernarda’, as my unit is nicknamed. The war has gone better for the Germans recently and they are back in control of all territory west of the Volkhov and are beginning to turn the screw on Leningrad.

9th February 1943

A Ukrainian deserter came over today and told us more than we wanted to know about what was happening in Kolpino. Huge numbers of batteries were being brought up behind the town, hundreds of trucks unloading shells. The enemy were ready to attack tomorrow. After all this waiting we didn’t believe him, but he showed us his clean underwear and that was enough. The Russians always issue clean underwear before an attack. It means you ‘re going to die, but you can do it with dignity. It was why he had deserted. But why, with all that firepower behind him, did he come over to us, who are about to receive it? Vodka does something to the Slavic brain.

The big Kolpino guns started lobbing shells at our positions south. The infantry blew up their minefields in front of their lines. Our own pathetic artillery started up and the Russian got the psychology just right … they didn’t even dignify it with a reply.

Night came at five in the afternoon. The cold crept inside our bones. We’re all scared, but the inevitability brings out the determination. The Reds’ tank engines started up in unison with a deafening roar. The motors run all night, the Russians worried they’ll freeze.

‘Tomorrow the bulls will run,’ says one of the sergeants. I go out to check the sentries. The cold makes them slack. As I chat to the men, the pine trees in front of the peat bogs bristle where thousands of soldiers rush through the woods to take up their positions for tomorrow’s attack.

10th February 1943

Nothing the Ukrainian deserter told us prepared us for this. At 6.45 the Kolpino guns opened fire on us. One thousand pieces of artillery fired at once. The devastation, in a matter of minutes, was as complete as after an earthquake. Whole hillsides came away, erupted, as if under volcanic pressure. The frost-brittle pine trees burst into flame. The snow around us instantly melted. Heavily fortified positions behind us disappeared into smoking earth. We were cut off. No phones and no visibility as the air filled with black smoke and the stink of peat. We crouched under a torrent of earth, planks, barbed wire, lumps of ice and then the limbs. Arms, legs, helmeted heads, a half-roasted torso. It was the opening statement. It said: ‘You will not survive.’

Some of the men were sobbing, but not through fear, just unable to contain their shock. We waited. The inevitable Urrah! and the Reds charged. They hurled themselves into our minefields and after ten metres they were all down. The next wave followed. Another ten metres and they were all down. As they reached the edge of the minefield we opened fire and mowed down line after line of them. The corpses were five deep and still they came. We blasted away, our machine-gun barrels glowing dull red even in the deep cold of the morning.

The Reds sent their new KV-1 tanks towards their objective — the Sinevino heights. Our 37mm shells bounced off the armour.

We were cut off to our left and rear. They pounded our position. Our Captain was hit in the arm. The smaller T-34 tanks smashed through our line, infantry behind, which we mowed down, blood streaking across their white capes. They hit us with anti-tank and mortar until we couldn’t think. We had no machine guns by the end of it. No automatic rifles. Any Russian who got close enough was dragged in and stabbed. More mortar fire. I wanted to laugh, our position was so desperate. The Captain was hit in the leg. He hopped around, exhorting us to stand firm. ‘Arriba España! Viva la muerte!’ We were stupid with battle. Our faces were all blackened, apart from the eye sockets, which were white. We slept where we stood. The Captain started a final rousing speech: ‘Spain is proud of you. I am proud of you, it is completely my privilege to have commanded you in today’s battle … ‘ He was interrupted by twenty Russian rifles pointing down into our trench.

12th February 1943, Sablino

The first question from the Reds was: ‘Who’s got a watch?’ Our two remaining officers had their watches taken. Four of our wounded were bayonetted where they lay. They marched us down the Moscow-Leningrad road. The scene of devastation was so immense, the Russian casualties so thick on the ground, that it was understandable that every Red we met should be blind drunk. Some of our guards drifted off to various drinking parties on the way. As we reached the river two of the Russians escorted the Captain away for interrogation. That left four men to take us to the barbed-wire corral at Ian Izhora. We didn’t fancy a night out in the open. We talked it through in Spanish and at the signal hit them. A single punch to the throat of the guard nearest me and I was off the log road and running for the peat bog, zig-zagging over the ground. Their aim was wild. We made it to an old anti-tank ditch and ran along it to where our own lines had been. We saw only drunk and sleeping Russians. We made it back to the main road where we heard the words, ‘Alto! ¿Quién vive?’ We replied, ‘España’, and fell into waiting arms.

13th February 1943

What I saw a few days ago has diminished me. I am less human after what I have seen and done. Glory in battle is a thing of the past. Individual heroics disappear in the miasma of modern warfare, where thundering machines annihilate and vaporize. One is brave and should feel glorious to have even entered the arena. I have and I have survived, and I have never felt more lonely. Even after I ran away from home I was never as lonely as I am now. I know no one and no one knows me. I am cold, but from the inside out. In my wolf-fur coat and bearskin hat I am a lone animal, with no pack, out on the snow plain where the horizon has merged with the landscape so that there is no beginning and no end. I am tired with a tiredness that crushes my bones, so that I only wish to sleep with dreams as white as the snow and in a cold that I know will carry me away painlessly.

9th September 1943

I haven’t written a word since Krasni Bor and now that I read it back I know why. I am gathered under Return Battalion 14 and that gives me the strength to face the page again. Today the Russians told us that the Italians had capitulated. They put up a poster in huge red letters: ‘Españoles, Italia ha capitulado! Uníos a nosotros.’ Some guripas slipped under the wire and tore down the sign and put up their own: ‘No somos Italianos.’ For once the Germans agreed.

My mind is set on home, except I have no home. All I want is to go back to Spain, to sit in the dry heat of Andalusia with a glass of tinto. I decide that I will go to Seville and Seville will be my home.

14th September 1943

We marched away from the front to Volosovo, about 60 km. I expected to be happy, most of the guripas were singing. I am still plagued by fatigue. I hoped that moving away from the front would help, but my spirit has darkened and I can barely speak. I sweat at night, my pillow is sodden even though it is not hot. I never slip into sleep. My dropping off is a series of jolts, of body spasms that start in my middle and crack up into my head like a bullwhip. My left hand shakes and has a tendency to go spastic. I wake up with the feeling that my hands are not my own and I am terrified from the first moment.

I look back through my drawings and it is not the Leningrad skyline with the dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Admiralty spire, nor is it the portraits of my comrades and the Russian prisoners that move me. It is the winter landscapes. Sheets of white paper with the vague smudges of buildings, izbas or pine trees. They are an abstraction of a mental state. A frozen wilderness in which even the certainties have only a wavering presence. I show one to another veteran of the Russian front and he looks at it for some time and I think he’s seen in it what I have, but he hands it back with the words: ‘That’s a funny-looking wolf I am perplexed by this, but eventually it amuses me and it gives me my first glimmer of hope since February.

7th October 1943, Madrid

Today I officially left the Legion after twelve years service. I have a kit bag and a satchel of my books and drawings. I have enough money to last me a year. I am going to Andalucía, to the autumnal light, the piercing blue skies and the sensual heat. I will draw and paint for a year and see what comes of it. I am going to drink wine and learn to be lazy.

Because of the American blockade there’s very little fuel for public transport. I will have to walk to Toledo.