The Blind Man of Seville (18 page)

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

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

‘Then I’m puzzled, Ramón.’

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

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

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

12

Saturday, 14th April 2001, Jefatura, Calle Blas Infante, Seville

Falcón and Ramírez sat in the interview room at the Jefatura with the videocam plugged into the television while a younger policeman, who knew about these things, made it all work. Ramírez asked after the old guy in the cemetery.

‘Ramón Salgado. He was my father’s dealer.’

‘He didn’t look as if he could have lifted Jiménez out of his chair,’ said Ramírez, ‘or shinned up a ladder.’

‘He’s also an art historian, who gives occasional unattended lectures at the university. He has a gallery on Calle Zaragoza close to the Plaza Nueva. Some influential people still go there, including Sra Jiménez and her husband.’

‘He looked like he knew how to get money out of people.’

‘We talked about black money in the restaurant business. He even touched on Expo ‘92, which I don’t think he’d meant to, and there was an offer of information.’

‘But he didn’t tell you anything?’

Falcón felt the touch of that probe again.

‘I know Ramón Salgado,’ said Falcón. ‘On the face of
it he’s a successful businessman — money, big car, house in El Porvenir, influential clients — but in his own eyes he’s a failure. He’s never committed himself like the artists he represents. He lectures to empty theatres. He’s written two books with no academic or commercial success.’

‘So, what did he want?’ said Ramírez.

‘Something personal … to do with my father, in return for information. I don’t want to give it to him and get gossip back.’

‘There’s a huge market for gossip,’ said Ramírez.

‘You’ve never been to an art opening, have you, Inspector? It’s full of people pretending to know more than they do, who think that only
they
can see the truth in the work and then … they try to put it into words.’

‘That’s bullshit, not gossip.’

‘They’re people who want to be where “it” is happening. They want to touch “it”. They want to tell you about “it”.’

‘What’s “it”?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Genius,’ said Falcón.

‘Rich people are never content with what they’ve got, are they?’ said Ramírez. ‘Even the guys in the
barrio
who’ve made it aren’t happy with that. They want to come back and ram their success down your throat all night and still be friends at the end of it all.’

‘My father never understood it either and he was a rich man himself,’ said Falcón. ‘He despised it.’

‘What?’ asked Ramírez, thinking they were still talking about genius.

‘Acquisitiveness.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he did,’ said Ramírez sarcastically, reaching for his cigarettes, knowing that old man Falcón had left a fortune in property he’d ‘acquired’. If he despised acquisitiveness then the old cabrón despised himself.

The equipment was finally ready. They turned to the
screen. The white noise slammed into the first image: the silence of the cemetery, the cypress shadows striping the path, the mourners gathered around the mausoleum.

Falcón’s mind drifted over thoughts of Salgado, his father, the uninvestigated studio and the odd request. It was Salgado who’d made the breakthrough for his father, which was why special contempt was reserved for him in private. Salgado had created the show in Madrid, which saw the sale of the first Falcón nude back in the early sixties. The European art world had gone crazy. The house in Calle Bailén was bought on the strength of it.

On the back of that bright but parochial renown, Salgado had put on a show in New York. There was talk of a set-up, that the painting had already been promised to the Woolworth heiress and ‘Queen’ of Tangier, Barbara Hutton, and that the ‘show’ was just that, a way of creating excitement about the Francisco Falcón name. Whatever happened, it worked. Barbara Hutton did buy the painting and the show was attended by a glittering array of New York socialites. The name Falcón was on everybody’s lips. The next two New York shows were huge successes and for a few short weeks in the mid sixties Francisco Falcón was almost as big a name as Picasso.

Some of this success was due to the talents of Ramón Salgado, who knew from the outset the limit of his artist’s work. The fact was — and it gave rise to much bitterness, anger and frustration in his father — there were only four Falcón nudes. They were all painted in the space of a year in the early sixties in Tangier. By the time his father had moved to Spain that particular vein of genius had dried up. He never recaptured the unique, mysteriously forbidden qualities of those four abstracts. His father used to talk to him about Gauguin. How Gauguin was already exceptional before he saw those South Sea Island women but nobody knew it. They touched off his genius again.
But for them he’d have probably ended up bitter and painting doors in Paris. That’s what had happened to Francisco Falcón. His first wife died, as did his second, and he’d left Tangier. Critics said that the nudes had been painted with a knowing innocence, which gave them their untouchable presence, and that perhaps it was the trauma of those final years in Tangier that broke the flow. His losses closed off access to the purity of that innocence. He never even attempted to paint another abstract nude.

Something caught Falcón’s eye. A black speck had flashed against white on the screen.

‘What was that?’

Ramírez jolted in his seat. He was barely watching the damn thing, too. The whole business a waste of time as far as he was concerned.

‘I saw something,’ said Falcón. ‘Something in the background. Top right. Can we rewind it?’

Ramírez hovered around the screen like a bluebottle over dung. His large and imprecise finger stabbed at the machine and the figures started sprinting backwards. Another stab and they moved at a more dignified pace.

It was after the ceremony at the mausoleum. The mourners were drifting away. Falcón watched the background — the sawteeth of family mausoleum roofs, the flat lines of the high ossuary blocks where poorer individuals’ bones lay. The camera started a slow pan from left to right.

‘Was that it again?’ asked Falcón, not sure now that he was concentrating.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Ramírez, stifling a yawn.

‘Get that guy back in here and let’s freeze the picture.’

Ramírez brought the young policeman back in and he replayed the sequence frame by frame.

‘There,’ said Falcón, ‘top right, against the white mausoleum.’

‘Joder,’
said Ramírez. ‘Do you think that’s him?’

‘You caught him just at the end of that pan.’

‘Eight frames,’ said the young policeman. ‘That’s one-third of a second. I don’t know how you saw that.’

‘I didn’t see it,’ said Falcón. ‘It just caught my eye.’

‘He’s filming the mourners,’ said Ramírez.

‘He must have seen you with your camera and fallen back behind the mausoleum wall,’ said Falcón. ‘But that, I’m pretty sure, is one-third of a second of our killer.’

They watched the video three times over and got nothing more out of it. They went to the computer department and found an operator still working. He digitalized the tape images and fed the eight frames into the computer, sectioned out the vital element and blew it up to screen size. There was some distortion but not so much that they couldn’t see how careful this person was being about his appearance. He wore a black baseball cap with no brand mark. The peak was turned to ten o’clock so that he could get the camera cleanly to his eye. He wore gloves and had a roll-neck jumper up over his mouth and nose. He was kneeling and his dark coat was flush with the ground.

‘We can’t even tell what sex “he” is,’ said Falcón.

‘I can clean these images up for you,’ said the operator. ‘It’ll take me the weekend, but I can do it for you.’

They took a print-out of the frame and went back to Falcón’s office.

‘So, what was he doing there?’ said Falcón, sitting at his desk. ‘Was he filming someone in particular or just the scene in general?’

‘The end of his work,’ said Ramírez. ‘The bastard dead and buried. That’s my guess.’

‘Would he take that sort of a risk just for personal satisfaction?’

‘Not such a risk. We don’t normally film mourners at a victim’s funeral,’ said Ramírez.

‘It could be the end of
that
piece of work and the start of the next,’ said Falcón.

‘Wasn’t that what you were implying before we went to the cemetery?’

‘I don’t remember implying anything.’

‘You said that undisturbed minds can become disturbed. Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘A madman with a malignant motive,’ said Falcón. ‘Or a motiveless madman who’s malign.’

Ramírez looked behind him to see if someone more intelligent had just entered the room.

‘It’s the point, though, isn’t it?’ said Falcón. ‘We still don’t know enough to break off any line of inquiry.’

He stuck the print-out up on the wall.

‘It’s like that game in kids’ magazines,’ said Ramírez, slumping back in his chair. ‘You have to guess the identity of a pop star from an eye or a nose or a mouth. My kids think that I should be good at it because I’m a policeman, but they don’t seem to understand that I don’t know who any of these people are. Who the hell is Ricky Martín?’

‘Son of Dean?’ said Falcón, with no idea.

‘Who the fuck is
Dean
Martín?’

It set Falcón off. Hysteria broke. Maybe it was the disturbed nights with strange dreams. He laughed madly and silently. Tears brimmed and he dashed them away. He writhed in his seat as wave after wave engulfed him. Ramírez looked at him like a lawyer with an unreliable client who has to take the stand.

Ramírez called the men in the field, listened to their reports. Nothing. He left for lunch. Falcón pulled himself together and went home still stunned by his outburst, the fact that it had happened to him, that loss of self-control. He ate something Encarnación had left on the cooker without registering what it was. He went to bed, hoping for an hour’s sleep. He woke at 9 p.m. in the pitch black
of his bedroom. He jerked out of sleep as if someone had tugged at a knot in his stomach. He’d seen drunks do the same, coming to in the cells as if plugged straight back into the mains of life. He was groggy and his tongue was coated with something nasty. His limbs were stiff and his joints creaking.

He stood under the shower and let the water pummel the mess out of him. His head and insides were like a blender with cutlery fed into it, all smashed and mangled. He went to his dressing room and put on a pair of grey trousers and a white shirt that crackled as he shrugged it over his shoulders. When he looked at himself in the mirror he couldn’t stand the sight of himself. His shirt. He hated the whiteness of it. He couldn’t bear the … non-colour. He tore it off, shuddered at his loathing of it, hurled it across the room. He went up close to the mirror, inspected his face, pressed the soft skin beneath the eyes, saw it wrinkle but not return to its former smoothness. Age. Is the inside wrinkling like the outside? Are small creases forming in the brain so that I go to bed liking white shirts and wake up hating them?

He put on a green shirt.

Back in the bedroom he had a sudden memory flash as he looked at the rucked-up dark-blue sheets of the bed. Inés had always wanted white, but he couldn’t sleep in white sheets. There it was again, that anti-white tendency. They’d settled on light blue. Falcón had a curious perception of himself as an eccentric, as his father had described some of the English collectors he’d known. No, that was a neat lie slipped in there by his ego. He saw himself as Inés must have seen him — an old man with ways and habits, except forty-five was not old. When he was fifteen, forty-year-olds were old. They all wore suits and hats and moustaches. Now that he was thinking about it, he realized that he wore suits all the time; even
at weekends he wore a jacket and tie. Inés had tried to get him into light sweaters, jeans, those long-sleeved knit shirts done up to the neck, even collarless shirts which were impossible for him to wear. The lack of structure. He liked a shirt and tie because it held him together, made him feel enclosed. He hated looseness and bagginess. He liked made-to-measure suits. He liked the sensation of a shell that a good suit gave him. He enjoyed its protection.

Protection from what?

There was that hurtling sensation again. This time, rather than shudder out of it, he tried to examine it. It was like film fast-forward, but that wasn’t quite right because there was no progress — quite the opposite. Not regression, but stasis. Yes, that was it. He was standing still while his past caught up with him. The idea there and then gone like debris flashing past a window. And where did that come from? Debris flashing past … The dream came back to him from the sleep that he’d thought had been dreamless, which was why he’d woken with a start. He knew where the dream had come from. He’d read an account of the aftermath of the PanAm flight 103 crash over Lockerbie in Scotland. A man had woken up in his house to find a row of passengers, still in their seats, in his garden and … they all had their fingers crossed. That pitiful detail had driven the horror of the bombed plane into Falcón’s mind; it had stayed with him and now the memory had resurfaced. The noise. The vital, vital debris flying past the window — bits of turbine, wing trim — and then thrown out into the yawning night, hurtling through the thin blackness, the mind incapable, only instinct fighting back to less dangerous times, the roller coaster, Magic Mountain, Oh, we’ll be all right, fingers crossed. The unseen ground rushing to meet them. The blacker black. The unstarred kind. Oh God, the whole world upside down. We were never meant for this. What
use ‘Brace! Brace!’ now? This really is economy class. And we’ll be
so
late. All those thoughts — wild philosophizing, persuasive little jokes, the craving for normality — as we’re rushing towards it, dying to meet it.