The Blind Man of Seville (38 page)

25th January 1946, Tangier

I have some majoun. I spread it on bread and eat it in the strange room with the high ceiling. I wash it down with some mint tea. Hardly has my glass hit the tray than I fall back in a relaxed stupor. After some minutes I feel my body come tingling alive from hair ends to toe calluses. I float upwards to within a foot of the ceiling and look out of the latticed window, which has a view across the rooftops of the medina to the walls and the grey sea beyond. A watery sunshine plays the shadow of the window across my shirt. I flap my arms and legs, concerned to be 7 metres from the ground with no visible support. I close my eyes and relax. I feel colder than I’ve ever been, even in Russia. I open my eyes to see the whitewashed ceiling and, growing out of that white expanse, small patches of black, which prove to be clusters of frozen dead bodies, and I become very afraid. I will myself out of this state but it persists for hours. I wake up in the dark. This morning I see mildew patches on the ceiling from the winter rains. The small clusters. The spores. The living dead.

21

Thursday, 19th April 2001, Jefatura, Calle Blas Infante, Seville

As Falcón was thinking that this Raúl from his father’s journals could be nobody other than Raúl Jiménez, he called Ramón Salgado to be told that his schedule was unchanged. He was going to have an early dinner in Madrid, take the AVE, and would not be back home before 1 a.m. on Friday. He also had a meeting in the morning. His secretary, Greta, suggested lunch, which was longer than Falcón wanted to spend with Salgado, but then it would be entertaining to see the old dealer’s face as MCA Consultores was introduced into the mix.

The Jefatura was silent as he sat back working through his memory, trying to find an instance when the name Raúl Jiménez had been mentioned by his father. In 1961 when his mother had died his father had been exclusively painting. There was no business that he could remember. And while he’d been in Seville, no Raúl Jiménez had come to the house. It was also surprising that his father did not appear on the Jiménez wall of celebrities. They must have fallen out.

As he rocked back on his swivel chair he glanced at the group’s reports. There’d been a sighting of a grey hatchback around the small industrial zone at the back
of the cemetery. One of the security men had it down as a Golf, the other as a Seat. The number plates had been too dirty to read although one had seen the initial letters SE, which made it a Seville plate. Serrano’s report mentioned that only cars behaving suspiciously were noted and this grey hatchback had cruised slowly around the factories that butted up against the cemetery.

Pérez’s report on Mudanzas Triana was expert and in depth. There was even a diagram of the warehouse floor plan with the location of the Jiménez storage cage. Extensive interviews with the foreman, Sr Bravo and the other workers showed that it was unlikely that the killer would have had time to do all the filming for
Familia Jiménez
whilst holding down this kind of job. On the day that Betis lost 4–0 to Sevilla all regular personnel were out on jobs. On the morning of Raúl Jiménez’s funeral they were, again, all working. There was a list of casual labour employed over the last year and finally an admission that some of these were illegal. Only a small percentage gave addresses. Pérez’s report on the home movies consisted of two lines of the bare facts.

Fernández had shown Eloisa Gómez’s picture around all the mourners he’d come across in the cemetery. None remembered her. The gardeners did not work on Saturday or Sundays. The area for garden detritus was cordoned off by thick bushes. Fernández thought that Eloisa Gómez could easily have been killed and hidden on the Saturday morning. The cemetery gates opened at 8.30 a.m. on a Saturday, but few people turned up before 10.00 a.m.

After going through the reports Falcón worked on a series of questions, designed to break Consuelo Jiménez’s resolve if she was maintaining any.

The group arrived. Falcón updated them all on the slow progress and assigned the cemetery and industrial zone to the same three men. He asked Ramírez to leave
and told Pérez that he wasn’t convinced that he had the enthusiasm for the case. He reassigned him to another investigation. Pérez left, furious.

Ramírez re-entered and stood by the window, playing with his ring finger, as if he was about to hit someone. He understood perfectly what had just happened. Falcón ordered him to take a forensic down to Eloisa Gómez’s room and give it a thorough inspection. Ramírez left the office without a word. Falcón called Consuelo Jiménez who, as always, agreed to see him immediately.

They met in the office just off the Plaza Alfalfa. Sra Jiménez, sensing that this was a man with ammunition, played some diffusing tactics. She left him for five minutes while she supervised the making of his coffee.

‘Not satisfied with Inspector Ramírez’s report on our … discussion?’ she asked, sitting back from the desk with her coffee, crossing her legs, her foot nodding.

‘Yes, as far as it went,’ said Falcón. ‘He’s a good cop and a suspicious man. He knows when someone is lying, not telling the truth or withholding. You satisfied his curiosity on two counts.’

‘We’re all liars, Inspector Jefe. We are hard-wired to lie. I love my children and generally they are very good kids, but … they lie. They have an instinct for it. You think of the number of times your mother walked into the room to ask who broke this glass or that cup and how many times she heard the words: “It fell over.” Human beings are built for deviousness.’

‘Do you think that in my job I am dealing with people who
want
to tell the truth?’ said Falcón. ‘Murder brings out a stronger inclination to deny than any other crime, apart from perhaps rape. So if we find someone in an investigation with a powerful motive and a consistent propensity for dissembling, we naturally come back to
them, again and again, to try to discover what they’re hiding.’

‘And so you waste your time with me,’ she said.

‘You are not being open with us.’

‘I have one rule of conduct in life and that is that I never lie to myself.’

‘And all other forms of mendacity are permissible?’

‘Imagine going through a whole day just telling the truth,’ she said. ‘The damage you would do. Nothing would work. Political systems would collapse. The legal world would be a shambles. It would be utterly impossible to pull off a single piece of business. The reason for this is that they are all man-made systems for getting things done. Even in the worlds of Maths and Physics they still have to work with imperfect information in order to get to the ultimate truth. No, Inspector Jefe, you cannot have the truth without lying.’

‘And where did you get the chance to develop such philosophical thoughts?’

‘Not in Seville,’ she said. ‘Not even Basilio
El Tonto
could hold his own with me on that score, for all his stupid education.’

‘My father would have agreed with you there,’ he said. ‘He thought university was an opportunity for other idiots to impress upon their students their ridiculous system of ideas.’

‘I liked your father … enormously,’ she said. ‘I’ve even forgiven him his little deviousness in selling me his “original” copies.’

Falcón shifted in his seat. This woman knew how to knuckle down on the pressure points.

‘One of the qualities you display in running your restaurants is, I imagine, thrift,’ he said. ‘You’ve just extended it to the veracity department, that’s all … I hope.’

‘I’m neatly packaged, Inspector Jefe. I’ve learnt to present myself. You, and possibly half the Jefatura, now know things about me that only I knew. But I did know them. I’ve lived with them nearly every day. Naturally I’m distressed when they’re brought out into the open, as they were recently, but I’ve suppressed any instinct I might have had for denial. Once you start on that road, you’re on your way to oblivion. It is a road not easily back-tracked. My husband reached the only possible end of
Calle Negatión.’

‘Except that he didn’t kill himself, did he?’ said Falcón.

‘He became a victim. He began operating in a dangerous world. I’ve dipped my toe into that world and it was cold. My husband would have understood only one aspect of it, which is that its reptilian lifeblood is money. But what do you think the people who live in that world would see, when a man like Raúl Jiménez comes to visit? I can tell you: they don’t see all the strengths that made him into a successful businessman. They see weaknesses. They see a blind man, stumbling about in an obscure world.’

‘You’re giving me a theory now.’

‘I had to listen to Inspector Ramírez while he gave me
his
theory yesterday. I was a model of patience,’ she said. ‘I was also flattered that the powers that be in the Jefatura should credit a woman with the skills to execute such an elaborate plan, but then again, Raúl’s death gives me control of his business empire, so perhaps the credit was not so misplaced.’

‘An empire your husband was trying to sell.’

‘Yes, Inspector Ramírez made much of that,’ she said. ‘But killing the prostitute, Inspector Jefe. Putting the body in the cemetery, in the Jiménez mausoleum. None of this strikes me as the work of a professional contract killer.’

‘I’d be surprised if a woman such as yourself would
have a choice of contract killers. I should have thought you’d have to go with anybody you could …
persuade
to do the work.’

‘I would never expose myself to another person to that extent. They would have a hold on me for the rest of my life,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘But believe me when I say this, Inspector Jefe, I know why you keep knocking on my door.’

‘It’s not because we’ve got no other doors to knock on,’ he lied. ‘It’s because we never leave here satisfied. Something is always left hanging. The other day you said there are no files relating to your husband’s presidency over the Building Committee for Expo ‘92. Yesterday you said to Inspector Ramírez that he can only look at the packing cases with the home movies in it and no other. You threaten him —’

‘Well, now you reveal something else to me. The Jefatura is as fallible to the culture of deviousness as the outside world,’ she said, delighted. ‘You can look into any of those packing cases you like. They are ancient history to me. They don’t relate to my life with Raúl at all. He’s something of a bull, that Inspector Ramírez.’

‘So that is all you’re doing, is it?’ said Falcón. ‘Protecting your privacy.’

‘Why should I let you intrude into areas which don’t concern your investigation?’

‘How do you know they don’t?’

‘Because I didn’t kill my husband and I didn’t have him killed.’

‘Your reticence forces us to intrude.’

‘Tell me what you’ve got, Inspector Jefe, I can’t bear the suspense any longer.’

‘I’d like to know what Marta Jiménez knows about the structure and design of high-traffic buildings in relation to security.’

She blinked, crushed her cigarette out.

‘I’d like to know the nature of your husband’s relationship with Eduardo Carvajal.’

She lit another cigarette.

‘I’d be interested to know about any other business arrangements you might have with … what was his name? One of Raúl’s old Tangier friends …’

‘Don’t play with me, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Ramón Salgado.’

She swallowed, resumed smoking. The sound of sizzling nylon reached him as she sawed her legs together.

‘I’m not discussing any of this without my lawyer present,’ she said.

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘But I will tell you one thing: this line of inquiry will not solve your murder case.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ he said. ‘You always speak as if you know things. You must have realized that it is this reticence which is breeding the ruthlessness down at the Jefatura.’

‘I am protecting
my
interests,
not
a murderer.’

‘Did you know Ramón Salgado before you came to Seville?’ he asked.

Silence.

‘From the Madrid art world?’ he added.

More silence.

‘Did Ramón Salgado introduce you to Raúl Jiménez?’

‘You’re like a bad surgeon, Inspector Jefe. You open people up and poke around looking for something diseased to cut out. What worries me is that you might cut out something perfectly good just to show that you’ve done some work.’

‘Co-operate, Doña Consuelo, that’s all I ask.’

‘I have co-operated with you in the investigation into my husband’s murder. You only encounter reticence
when you stray into areas which should not concern a homicide detective.’

‘Would you co-operate with someone sent down from Madrid? One of those investigators with special powers and an expertise in corruption and fraud?’

‘Threats have a habit of putting people on the offensive.’

‘We have become bellicose, haven’t we?’

‘I know who started it,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette.

They looked at each other through the drifting battle smoke.

‘You’re a perceptive woman,’ he said. ‘You know where my interests lie. I have a limited interest in embezzlement and fraud. I understand that businessmen have favours to repay. They have to show their appreciation to friends, pay an advance on the right words in the right ears or reward silence. That it can be done with public money is understandably expedient. Only the State has such depths to its coffers.’

‘I’m glad you’ve rediscovered your urbanity,’ she said.

‘I can understand your husband’s relationship with all these people … except one,’ said Falcón. ‘Eduardo Carvajal. And I am not in a position to ask him anything as he is no longer with us.’

‘I think he died in a car crash.’

‘A few years ago,’ said Falcón. ‘He was part of a paedophile ring, who were all subsequently convicted.’

‘I pity you, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You have to spend your time in the darkest, coldest places on earth.’

‘Your husband fell in love with his first wife when she was barely thirteen years old.’