The Blind Man of Seville (22 page)

He let her in. Her hair was different, less structured than before. She was wearing a black linen jacket, a black skirt and some red satin mules with kitten heels, which took the grieving edge off the mourning widow. She led the way to the patio. He followed her bare heels and legs whose muscles sprang with each step.

‘You know the house,’ said Falcón.

‘I only ever saw the patio and the room where he showed his work,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem to have changed anything.’

‘Even the paintings are still there,’ he said, ‘hanging as they were when he last showed. Encarnación keeps them dusted. I should take them down … get things organized.’

‘I’m surprised your wife didn’t do all that.’

‘She tried,’ said Falcón. ‘I wasn’t quite ready at the time, you know, to strip the house completely of his presence.’

‘He did have a formidable presence.’

‘Yes, some people found him intimidating, but I wouldn’t have thought you would, Sra Jiménez.’

‘Your wife though, perhaps she was a little overawed … or overwhelmed. You know, a woman likes to make a house her own and feels thwarted if … ‘

‘Would you like to take a look?’ he said, moving across the patio, not wanting her to intrude further into his private life.

Her heels clicked sexily on the old marble flagstones around the fountain. Falcón opened up the glass doors into the room, turned on the light, waved her in and noticed the instant shock on her face.

‘Something the matter?’ asked Falcón.

Consuelo Jiménez walked slowly round the room taking in each painting, from the domes and buttresses of the Iglesia de El Salvador to the pillared Hercules of the Alameda.

‘They’re all here,’ she said, looking at him, amazed.

‘What?’

‘The three paintings I bought from your father.’

‘Ah,’ said Falcón, economical with his embarrassment.

‘He told me they were originals.’

‘They were … at the time of selling.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, gripping her jacket at the waist, annoyed now.

‘Tell me, Sra Jiménez, when my father sold you the paintings … you had some drinks and
tapas
on the patio and then, what? He took you by the elbow and brought you in here. Did he whisper on your shoulder: “Everything in this room is for sale except … that one”?’

‘That’s
exactly
what he said.’

‘And you fell for that three times?’

‘Of course not. That’s what he said the first time … ‘

‘But that was precisely the painting you ended up buying?’

She ignored him.

‘The next time he said: “This one is too expensive for you.”’

‘And the time after that?’

‘ “The frame is all wrong on this one … I wouldn’t sell it to you.”’

‘And each time you bought the painting he told you that you shouldn’t or couldn’t buy.’

She stamped her foot, very angry in her retrospective humiliation.

‘Don’t be too upset, Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘Nobody else owns the paintings you have in your possession. He wasn’t stupid or careless. It was just a little game he liked to play.’

‘I’d like an explanation,’ she said, and Javier was glad he wasn’t one of her employees.

‘I can only tell you what happened. I was never very sure of his motive,’ said Javier. ‘I didn’t go to any of the parties. I’d sit in my room reading my American crime novels. When the guests had gone, my father, who was normally drunk at this stage, would burst into my room, whether I was asleep or not, shouting “Javier!” and shaking a wad of cash in my face. His takings for the night. If I was asleep I’d grunt something encouraging. If I was awake I’d nod over the top of my book. Then he’d go straight up to the studio and paint the exact painting he’d just sold. By morning it would be framed and hanging on the wall.’

‘What an extraordinary person,’ she said, disgusted.

‘I actually watched him paint that one of the cathedral roof. Do you know how long it took him?’

She looked at the painting, a fantastically complicated series of flying buttresses, walls and domes all laid down with a cubist energy.

‘Seventeen and a half minutes,’ said Javier. ‘He asked me to time him. He was drunk
and
stoned at the time.’

‘But what’s the point of it?’

‘A one hundred per cent profit on the night.’

‘But why should such a man …? I mean, it’s just too ridiculous. They were expensive, but I don’t think I paid more than a million for any of them. What was he playing at? Did he need this money or something?’

Silence while a warm wind did a turn of the patio.

‘Would you like your money back?’ he asked.

Her head turned slowly from the painting, eyes fixed on him.

‘He didn’t spend it,’ said Falcón. ‘Not a peseta of it. He didn’t even bank it. It’s all in a detergent box upstairs in his studio.’

‘And what does it all mean, Don Javier?’

‘It means … that maybe you shouldn’t be so angry with him because the game he was playing was ultimately against himself.’

‘Can I smoke?’

‘Of course. Come out on to the patio, I’ll give you a drink.’

‘A whisky, if you have it. I need something strong after that.’

They sat on some wrought-iron chairs at a mosaic-covered table under a single wall lamp in the cloister of the patio. They sipped the whisky. Falcón asked after her children. She replied with her mind elsewhere.

‘I went to Madrid on Friday,’ he said. ‘I went to see your husband’s eldest son.’

‘You’re very thorough, Don Javier,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to such rigour after so many years of living with the natives.’

‘I’m especially rigorous when fascinated.’

She crossed her legs, flexed her toes under the red satin band of the mule, which was pointed in his direction. She seemed like someone who would know what to do
in bed and be quite demanding, but rewarding with it. Salacious thoughts followed his idle theorizing and he saw her kneeling with her black skirt rucked up over her haunches, looking back over her shoulder at him. He shook his head, not used to these uncontrolled ideas rampaging through his mind. He made a conscious effort to subdue any recklessness, concentrated on the ice in his glass.

‘You wanted to know why Gumersinda killed herself,’ she said.

‘I was interested in your husband’s abject misery, as you called it, which must have been Gumersinda’s state, too, when she died. I wanted to know what could have caused such devastation.’

‘Are all policemen like you?’

‘We’re like people … each one of us is different,’ said Falcón.

‘Did you find out?’

Throughout the account of his conversation with José Manuel, Consuelo Jiménez’s jaunty sexiness disappeared. The shoe, which had been so close to his knee, was withdrawn and joined its partner on the marble flagstones of the patio floor. Only the padded shoulders of her jacket had any shape by the time he’d finished. Falcón poured more whisky.

‘Los Niños de la Calle,’
he said.

‘I was thinking that, too,’ she said.

‘His obsession with security.’

‘I would have had to have found out what Raúl had done. I wouldn’t have been able to leave it. I’d have to know that to understand him … his motives.’

‘What if you had to give up your entire life to the task?’

She lit another cigarette.

‘Do you think this has any bearing on the murder?’

‘I asked him whether he thought Arturo might still be alive,’ said Falcón.

‘And had returned to take his revenge?’ said Sra Jiménez. ‘That’s absurd. I’m sure they killed the poor boy.’

‘Why? I’m just as sure they would make use of him … knotting carpets or whatever.’

‘Like a slave?’ she said. ‘And what if he escaped?’

‘Have you ever been to somewhere like Fez?’ he asked. ‘Think of Seville, with most of its major buildings removed, all its squares and greenery torn out, and then compress it all so that the streets are narrower, the houses almost touching overhead and finally stew it, so that everything is falling apart. Multiply that by a hundred, subtract a thousand years from today’s date and that is Fez. You could go into the Medina as a child and come out an old man without having walked each street. If he ever managed to escape and found his way out of the Medina without being caught, where could he go? Who is he? Where are his papers? He belongs nowhere and to nobody.’

Consuelo shrank from that terrible possibility.

‘So is that who you’re looking for now?’

‘Senior policemen, I mean people with budgets to run a police force, have an aversion to fantasy. I would have to do a lot better than produce a record of my conversation with José Manuel to persuade them to start that kind of a manhunt,’ said Falcón. ‘We have to be more plodding, less inventive, because everything we do ends up going before a judge and they loathe fiction in their courts.’

‘So what
are
you going to do?’

‘Look through your husband’s life and see what comes up,’ he said. ‘You could help.’

‘Would that get me off the suspects list?’

‘Not until we find the murderer,’ he said. ‘But it might save me a lot of time trying to find my way around a seventy-eight-year life.’

‘I can only help with the last ten.’

‘Well, that includes a time when he was in the public eye … Expo ‘92.’

‘The building committee,’ she said.

‘There’s also that interesting phenomenon of “black” pesetas wanting to become “white” euros.’

‘I’m sure you already know about the restaurant business.’

‘I’m not interested in a little tax fraud, Doña Consuelo. That’s not my department. I have to look at things with more dramatic possibilities. Stuff, for instance, that would require a great deal of trust and where perhaps trust was broken and fortunes lost, lives ruined, leaving powerful motives for revenge.’

‘Is that why you’re a homicide cop?’ she asked, getting to her feet.

He didn’t answer, walked her to the door, tried not to listen to her kitten heels tapping out Morse code for S-E-X on the marble.

‘Who introduced you to my father?’ he asked; a diversionary tactic.

‘Raúl was given an invitation so he sent me. I’d worked in a gallery and he assumed I knew what I was doing.’

‘Is that how you met Ramón Salgado?’

She missed a beat.

‘His gallery sent out the invitations. It was Ramón who opened the door, made the introductions.’

‘Was it Ramón Salgado who told you of your remarkable resemblance to Gumersinda?’

She blinked as if she hadn’t remembered that drop of information leaking out of her. Falcón opened the door, which led out into the short cobbled access street lined with orange trees that led down to Calle Bailén.

‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Coming here tonight brought it all back. I rang the bell and heard him talking to the
people he’d just let in so that he was turned away from me when he opened the door. When our eyes connected I could tell he was completely floored. I think he might have even started to call me Gumersinda, but that might be my memory exaggerating the moment. Still, by the time we got to the drinks he’d told me, which meant that I drank too much whisky and blabbed away like an idiot to your father, whom I’d spent half my life dying to meet.’

‘So Ramón and your husband knew each other from the Tangier days?’

Another thing she hadn’t remembered saying.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

They shook hands. He looked at her legs as she walked down to Calle Bailén. He shut the door and went straight up to the studio.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

20th March 1932, Dar Riffen, Morocco

Oscar (I don’t know if this is his real name, but it’s the one he uses) is not only my NCO but my teacher, too. He was a teacher in ‘real life’ as he calls it. That is all I know about him. Los brutos (my comrades), tell me that Oscar is here because he’s a child molester. They cannot know this for certain because it is one of the precepts of the Legion that you don’t have to reveal your past. Los brutos, of course, take great delight in revealing their past to me. Most are murderers, some are rapists and murderers. Oscar says they are flesh, blood and bone with some primitive strings attached inside, which allow them to walk upright, communicate, defecate and kill people. Los brutos are suspicious of Oscar only because they fear and distrust even the rudiments of intelligence. (I hide to write in this book or Oscar lets me use his room.) But los brutos respect him too. He’s beaten every one of them at some time or another.

Oscar took me on as his pupil and charge when he caught me drawing in the barracks. He had a couple of los brutos hold me and tore the paper from my hands and found that he was looking at himself in all his brutal intelligence. I was paralysed with fear. He grabbed me by the collar and hauled me off to his room, followed by shouts from los brutos egging him on. He threw me against the wall so that I collapsed
winded. He looked at the drawing again, got down on his haunches, put his face up to mine and looked into my head with his steel-blue eyes. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, which was strange. I knew better than to answer with my name and shut up. He told me the drawing was good and that he would be my teacher but that he had a reputation to maintain. So I still got beaten.

17th October 1932, Dar Riffen

I admitted to Oscar that I’ve only made two entries in this book since he gave it to me. He is furious. I tell him I have nothing to report. All we do is go on endless exercises followed by bouts of drinking and fighting. He reminds me that this journal should not just be an account of the external but an examination of the internal. I have no idea how to approach this internal thing he is talking about. ‘You have to write about who you are,’ he says. I show him my first entry. He says, ‘Because you have no family does not mean you have ceased to exist. They are only a reference, now you must find your own context.’ I write this down with no idea of its meaning. He tells me that a French philosopher said: ‘I think therefore I am.’ I ask: ‘What is thinking?’ There is a long pause in which for some reason I imagine a train moving through a vast landscape. I tell him this and he says, ‘Well, it’s a start.’