The Blind Man of Seville (59 page)

‘Tell me what happened,’ I say. ‘I am not your judge.’

‘I murdered him,’ he says.

‘Were you in love with him?’

‘No, no, no que no!’
he says emphatically. Too emphatically.

I stare into him and see his corruption, so terrible that he cannot admit it to himself. I know Ramón Salgado has killed this boy for no other reason than for what he was making him into. Salgado is vain. He is a great flatterer of women. M. and he adore each other. He has affairs which never last. He is now wealthy, famous in his small world and reputable, but … he likes to sodomize boys and that interferes with his gilded self-image. That’s my reading of it, anyway. He’s killed the boy because he was forcing him to see what he hates.

He says the fateful words:

I couldn’t face a scandal.’

I don’t despise him, even for that. Who am I to despise anyone? I sit at the boy’s feet. I light a cigarette for him.

‘Will you help me?’ he asks.

I tell him a story, which I first heard from a friend of B.H. back in the forties, about a wealthy homosexual who ‘d picked up a bunch of servicemen from a well-known bar for queers in Manhattan and taken them back to a party at his mother’s apartment on 5th Avenue. They were all drunk and one of the soldiers passed out. They removed his pants and for a joke started to shave off his pubic hair. And, accidentally — I emphasize that — they chopped off his prick. So what did they do? Salgado looks at me like Javier does when I’m telling him a bedtime story, all hunched and wide-eyed. They wrapped him in a blanket and dumped him on a bridge somewhere. He was lucky, because a policeman found him and got him to a hospital before he bled to death.

‘What do you make of that, Ramón?’ I ask.

He blinks, desperate not to say the wrong thing and be sent out of class.

‘If you help me, Francisco,’ he says. ‘I will never do anything like this again.’

‘What? Kill somebody?’

‘No, no, I mean
…
I will never go with boys again. I will lead an exemplary life.’

‘I will help you,’ I say, ‘but I want to know what you think of my story.’

More silence. He’s too panicked to think.

‘They paid the soldier off,’ I add. ‘So that he wouldn’t press charges. How much do you think?’

He shook his head.

‘Two hundred thousand dollars, and that was in 1946,’ I say. ‘You made a lot more money from losing your prick in those days than you did from painting pictures.’

Salgado rushes past me and vomits in the toilet. He comes back wiping his mouth.

‘I don’t know how you can be so cool about this, Francisco.’

‘I’ve killed thousands of people. All of them as guilty or as innocent as you and I.’

‘That was war,’ he says.

‘I’m just pointing out that once you’ve seen slaughter on the scale I have, a dead boy in a hotel room is not so terrible. Now, give me your comment on my story.’

‘It was a terrible thing to have done,’ he says, drawing on his cigarette.

‘Worse than murdering a boy?’

‘He could have died for all they cared.’

‘Right. And what does that reveal about the people you’re so desperate to impress?’ I ask. ‘The perpetrator is still free, by the way, and he’s still a friend of Barbara Hutton.’

Ramón is too muddled to work it out for himself.

‘We are their lapdogs,’ I say. ‘We are their little marvels — yes, even me, Ramón. They stroke us, feed us morsels, tease us and then grow tired of us and throw us out. We are nothing to the very rich. Absolutely nothing. Less than toys. So remember, when you sip their champagne, that it is for these worthless people’s high opinion of you that you have murdered this boy.’

The words shunted into his chest like high-calibre bullets. He thumped back into his chair.

‘For them?’ he said, puzzled.

‘You killed the boy because you did not like the idea of those people knowing this about you. You killed him because it is the one thing you find hateful in yourself, and you think others will, too. And you have been very wrong.’

He sobs. I pat him on the back.

‘Francisco,’ he says, ‘where would I be without you?’

‘In a far happier place,’ I reply.

It wasn’t so difficult to dispose of the body. We took it out into the garden of the hotel at three in the morning and heaved it over the wall. We put it in the car, we took it to the cliffs out of town and threw it into the sea. On the way back to town Ramón stared into the window utterly wordless, a man coming to terms with a changed world, in which, because of a moment of blindness, nothing will ever be the same. If you have to kill. If there’s nothing to be done. Then always kill with your eyes wide open.

Falcón let the photocopied sheets fall from his lap. They scattered on the floor. He was mesmerized by his thoughts, the confirmation that the killer had access to his father’s diaries and now, with the additional information from El Zurdo, he realized that it must have been one of the art students his father had taken on to relieve his loneliness.

The Bellas Artes would be closed. El Zurdo was uncontactable. He went through his father’s address book and found the name of somebody at the university with a home telephone number. He called but there was no answer.

His thoughts turned to Raúl Jiménez and the revelation that had broken his friendship with his father. He thought it unlikely that his father would let that pass without comment in the journals, but it had taken place on a date after the final entry in which his father had announced his total ennui.

Javier shunted back his chair, ran up the stairs. He slowed to a walk around the gallery and stopped outside the studio. He stared into the black pupil of the fountain on the patio. An apparently disparate thought had come to him. One of the insoluble elements of the case was what Sergio had shown Raúl Jiménez. Where had he got his images? Salgado’s horrors had been easy enough to solve. They’d found the trunk in the attic and the necessary images and soundtrack, but with Raúl Jiménez they’d never succeeded. Despite endless inquiries at Mudanzas Triana there’d been no evidence that any of Jiménez’s long-term storage had been touched.

He pushed himself away from the wall of the gallery and went into his father’s studio. He found the last journal
in the storeroom. And there it was, some ten pages after what he’d thought was the final entry.

13th May 1975, Seville

I am in such a rage that I have had to return to the confessional in the hope that it will calm me.

The entry told the story he’d heard from El Zurdo and finished with the line:

I cannot think what possessed him to tell me this now, and I roar that at him as I storm out of the restaurant into the street. He says to my back: ‘If it hadn’t been for me, you’d be painting window frames in Triana by now.’ It was an enormous and calculated insult for which he will receive appropriate punishment.

17th May 1975, Seville

A postscript to my last vent of outrage. I have discovered that punishment has already been served on my old friend R. It seems that his youngest son died in Almería, his wife committed suicide by throwing herself into the Guadalquivir here in Seville, his daughter, Marta, has ended up in a mental institution in Ciempozuelos and his eldest son lives in Madrid and no longer speaks to him. Whatever I had in mind seems like fly-swatting after this series of calamities. I think now that he only told me what he’d done to get rid of me. I was just another relic from that troubled era.

Falcón leafed through the empty pages to the end. He went back to the last entry and read it again. Ciempozuelos stuck in his mind. Sergio would have known everything from this entry — the whole family tragedy — and there was an opening for him: Marta in Ciempozuelos. But Marta could barely speak. Falcón replayed his last visit there. Marta’s wound being tended to by a
doctor. Ahmed taking her back to the ward. She vomiting after the shock of her fall. Ahmed going off to get the cleaning equipment. And that’s when he saw it again, as clear as a creative idea: the trunk underneath María’s bed.

32

Sunday, 29th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

Ahmed had never told him what was in the trunk. Falcón checked his watch, it was ten o’clock at night. He went down to his study, found his notebook, tore through the pages to Marta’s doctor’s name — Dra Azucena Cuevas. He called the hospital in Ciempozuelos. Dra Cuevas was now back from her holiday and would be on duty in the morning. Falcón spoke to the night nurse on Marta’s ward, explained his problem and what he wanted to see. The nurse said that the only time Marta allowed the chain to be removed from her neck was for her daily shower and she would talk to Dra Cuevas about his request in the morning.

Falcón had taken one sleeping pill too many and overslept. He just managed to board the midday AVE to Madrid, which, on a Monday, was full. He was back in his suit, carrying his mac and wearing his fully loaded revolver. He called Dra Cuevas from the train. She agreed to delay Marta’s daily shower until the afternoon.

From the Estación de Atocha he took a taxi straight out to Ciempozuelos and by 3.30 p.m. he was sitting in Dra Cuevas’s office waiting for the cleaning lady to bring up Marta’s trunk.

‘What do you know about her nurse — Ahmed?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nothing about his private life. As far as his work is concerned he is excellent, a man of infinite patience. He never even raises his voice to these unfortunate people.’

The trunk arrived and some minutes later a female nurse brought the key and locket on Marta’s chain. They opened the trunk. Inside it was a small shrine to Arturo. The lid was stuck with salvaged photos. There was a handmade birthday card with a stick woman with her eyes off her head, stiff hair and ‘Marta’ scrawled out underneath. In the body of the trunk were small metal cars, a grey child’s sock, an old school exercise book, crayons with teethmarks chewed into the ends. At the bottom were two rolls of 8mm film, just like the stock they’d found in the Mudanzas Triana warehouse. He held one up to the light. There was Arturo in the arms of his sister. He put it all away, closed the trunk and re-locked it. He flipped open the locket. It contained a single curl of brown hair. He handed the chain back to the nurse. The cleaning lady took the trunk back to the ward.

‘Where’s Ahmed now?’

‘He’s walking two of the patients in the gardens.’

‘I don’t want him to know anything about my visit.’

‘That might be difficult,’ said Dra Cuevas. ‘People talk. There’s nothing else to do here.’

‘Has there ever been an art student who’s worked on Marta’s ward?’

‘Some time ago we did a three-month experiment with some art therapy,’ said Dra Cuevas.

‘How did that work?’ asked Falcón. ‘Who were the art therapists?’

‘It was something we did on the weekends. The work was unpaid. It was just to see if the patients responded to a creative activity that might remind them of childhood.’

‘Where did the artists come from?’

‘One of the board members of the hospital is a film director. He recruited people from his company with an artistic background. They were all young.’

‘Is there a record of who they were?’

‘Of course, there had to be. We paid their travel expenses.’

‘How were they paid?’

‘Once a month by cheque, as far as I know,’ she said. ‘You’d have to go to the accounts department for details on that.’

‘Do you remember any of the names of the males who helped with the course?’

‘Only their first names — Pedro, Antonio and Julio.’

‘Was there a Sergio?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll go and see the people in the accounts department.’

Dra Cuevas was right. There’d been a Pedro and an António, all of whose names were completely Spanish. It was the third name that the secretary in the accounts department gave her that attracted Falcón’s interest, because in full it was Julio Menéndez Chefchaouni.

It was 9 p.m. by the time he got back to Calle Bailén and as he opened the door he kicked another package across the floor. No address again. The number 3 written on the front.

He was exhausted. He put the package in his study. The answering machine was blinking. There was one message from Comisario Lobo, giving a home telephone number. He didn’t have the strength for it and took a shower instead.

The kitchen supplied him with bread and chorizo, which he washed down with red wine. He took some ice with him to his study and found a bottle of whisky in the
drinks cabinet. He poured a couple of fingers over the ice. He stretched before he sat down and thought that for the first time he’d managed to get a move ahead of Sergio. He wasn’t chasing any more, but circling. He opened the package. There were more photocopied sheets of his father’s journals.

1st July 1959, Tangier

I have a new toy, which is a pair of binoculars. I sit on the verandah and look at people on the beach and sketch their bodies, the unaware still lives. Rather than the lithe bodies of the young, I find I am more drawn to the collapsing geography of the old and out of condition. I draw them as landscape — escarpments, interlocking spurs, ridges, plains, and the inevitable mud slide. As I train my new far-seeing eyes across the beach I come across P. and the children. My family at play. Paco and Manuela are constructing some Gaudiesque castle, while Javier annoys P., who takes him down to the water. P. walks while Javier high-steps through the shallows, holding his mother’s hand. I am entranced by this everyday sight, which seems more wonderful for their being unconscious, until P. stops and Javier sets off at a sprint and is caught up in the arms of a stranger, who hurls him up in the air and puts him down again. Javier stamps his feet in demand and the stranger complies and throws him up again. He is a Moroccan in his mid thirties. P. approaches and I see that she knows this man. They talk for some minutes while Javier forms mounds of sand over the stranger’s feet and then P. walks off, towing Javier, who is turning and waving at the man. I refocus on the Moroccan, who is still standing with his head held high to the sun. He looks at P. and the boy for as long as it takes them to merge with the crowds on the beach. I see admiration in his face.