The Blind Man of Seville

‘Whenever he opened a new restaurant, he always had to have a Falcón in it. You know, synonymous with Seville and all that.’

  ‘But why did he have to send her?’

  ‘I think perhaps he knew about your father’s practices and, being the very important businessman that he was, wasn’t prepared to put up with the … er … rather, how shall I put it? Sardonic, yes, sardonic … relieving process.’

  He meant, of course, the utterly contemptuous ripping off of clients that his father used to indulge in with such obvious pleasure.

  They set off towards the cemetery gates. The pink rims of Salgado’s sagging eyes made him look as if he’d just mopped up after crying. Javier had always thought that he must have been much heavier than the stick he was now, and that this weight, when he’d lost it, had dragged the gravity-bound skin of his face into swags below his eyes and jaw line. It was his father who’d said that he looked like a bloodhound, but at least he didn’t drool. This was a veiled compliment. His father had loathed reverence, unless if came from a beautiful woman or someone whose talent he admired.

  ‘How did you know him?’

  ‘As you know, I live in El Porvenir. When he opened that restaurant of his, I was one of his first clients.’

  ‘You didn’t know him before?’

  They were walking briskly and Salgado’s long limbs had a tendency to flail. His foot caught the side of Falcón’s and he would have been sent sprawling if Falcón hadn’t saved him.

  ‘My God, thank you, Javier. I don’t want to fall at my age, break a hip and end up housebound and growing vague.’

  ‘You’re fine, Ramón.’

  ‘No, no, it’s a great fear of mine. One silly mistake and a few months later I’ll be a lonely old fool gaping in a dark corner of some unvisited home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ramón.’

  ‘It’s happened to my sister. I’m going to San Sebastián next week to bring her down to Madrid. She’s had it. Fell over, knocked her head, broke her knee and had to go into a home. I can’t go all the way up there every month so I’m bringing her further south. Terrible. Anyway, look, why not let’s go and have a fino?’

  Falcón patted him on the shoulder. He didn’t want to spend any time with Salgado, but he was feeling sorry for him now, which had probably been his intention.

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘On a Saturday afternoon?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I forgot,’ said Salgado, looking around him, mourners passing on both sides. ‘You’ll have your work cut out just drawing up the list of his enemies, let alone talking to them all.’

  ‘Will I?’ said Falcón, knowing Salgado’s powers of exaggeration.

  ‘A powerful businessman like that doesn’t go to his grave without dragging a few along with him.’

  ‘Murder is a substantial step.’

  ‘Not for the people he used to deal with.’

  ‘And who are these people?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about this at the cemetery gates, Javier.’

  Falcón had a quick word with Ramírez and got into Salgado’s large Mercedes. They drove to Calle Betis down by the river, between the bridges, where Salgado parked up on the pavement shunting an old Seat forward half a metre to fit himself in. They walked along the pavement, which was some metres above the river, until Salgado stopped and made a show of breathing in the Sevillian air, which at this point was not at its sweetest.

  ‘Sevilla!’ he said, happy now that he was assured of company. ‘La puta del Moro — that’s what your father called it. Don’t you remember, Javier?’

  ‘I remember, Ramón,’ he said, depressed now that he’d volunteered to expose himself to what he was sure was going to be some of Salgado’s famous wheedling.

  ‘I miss him, Javier. I miss him very much. He had such a penetrating eye, you know. He said to me once: “There are two smells that make Seville, Ramón, and my trick is — no, my great open secret is that now, at the end of my life, I only paint one of them, which is why I always sell.” He was playing, of course. I know that. These scenes of Seville he painted were nothing to him. They were his little game, now that his reputation was assured. I said: “So now the great Francisco Falcón can paint smells. What do you dip your brush in?” And he replied, “Only the orange blossom, Ramón, never the horseshit.” I laughed, Javier, and I thought that was the end of it, but after a long pause he added: “I’ve spent most of my life painting the latter.” What do you think of that, Javier?’

  ‘Let’s go and have a manzanilla,’ said Falcón.

  They crossed the road and went into La Bodega de la Albariza and stood at one of the large black barrels, ordered the manzanilla and a plate of olives, which came with capers and pickled garlic, white as teeth. They sipped the pale sherry, which Falcón preferred to fino because of the sea zest in the grapes down at Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

  ‘Tell me about Raúl Jiménez’s enemies,’ said Falcón, before Salgado leapt into another pool of reminiscence.

  ‘It’s all happening again as we speak, as we sip our manzanilla. It’s all happening just as it did back in 1992,’ he said, enjoying being oblique as he held the complete attention of Javier Falcón. ‘I feel it. Here I am at seventy years of age and I’m making more money than I have done in my life.’

  ‘Business is good,’ said Javier, on the edge of boredom.

  ‘This is off the record, isn’t it?’ Salgado said. ‘You know, I shouldn’t …’

  ‘There’s no record, Ramón,’ said Falcón, showing his empty hands.

  ‘It’s illegal, of course … ‘

  ‘As long as it’s not criminal.’

  ‘Ah, yes, a fine distinction, Javier. Your father said you were the bright one. “They all think it’s Manuela,” he used to say, “but Javier’s the one who sees things clearly.”’

  ‘The anticipation’s killing me, Ramón.’

  ‘La Gran Limpeza,’ said Salgado. The Big Cleaning.

  ‘What are they washing?’

  ‘Money, of course. What else gets that dirty? They don’t call it “black money” for nothing.’

  ‘Where does it come from?’

  ‘I don’t ever ask that question.’

  ‘Drug money?’

  ‘Let’s just call it “undeclared”.’

  ‘OK. So they clean it. Why do they clean it?’

  ‘Why do they clean it now, should be your question.’

  ‘All right, I’ll ask that.’

  ‘Next year the euro arrives and it’s the end of the peseta. You have to declare your pesetas to get your euros. If they’re black, that could be uncomfortable.’

  ‘What do they do with them?’

  ‘Buy art, amongst other things, and property,’ said Salgado. ‘Try buying an apartment in Seville at the moment.’

  ‘I’m not in the market.’

  ‘And art?’

  ‘Tampoco.’

  ‘Have you got round to cleaning out your father’s studio yet?’

  There it was. The question. Falcón couldn’t believe he’d fallen for Salgado’s pathetic act in the cemetery. This was what Salgado slipped in to every conversation they ever had, which was why he didn’t want to spend any time with him. Now the wheedling would start, unless he came down hard or just changed the subject.

  ‘There’s a lot of black money in the restaurant business, isn’t there, Ramón?’

  ‘Why do you think he was moving house?’ said Salgado.

  ‘That’s almost interesting.’

  ‘Nobody ever bought a painting from your father with a cheque,’ said Salgado. ‘And you’re right about the restaurant business, especially tourist restaurants serving reasonable meals paid for in cash with no invoices. Hardly any of that money reaches the books that the taxman sees.’

  ‘So that’s what’s happening now … What about back in 1992?’

  ‘That’s all been and gone. I was just being illustrative.’

  ‘I wasn’t
here, but I heard there was a lot of corruption.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, but it was ten years ago.’

  ‘You sound as if you’ve got something to hide, Ramón. You weren’t …?’

  ‘Me?’ he said, outraged. ‘An art dealer? If you think I had any opportunity to cash in on Expo ‘92, you’re mad.’

  ‘Do you know anything, Ramón? I mean, are we gathered here just for you to air your generalities or do you have something specific that will help me find Raúl Jiménez’s murderer? What about all these people who come to your shows? I bet they talk about “real” things, once they’ve stopped talking all that shit about the pictures.’

  “‘All that shit about the pictures”? Javier, I’m surprised at you, of all people.’

  We’re getting to it now, thought Falcón. This is a trade. Information for what Salgado wants more than anything else: the chance to rummage through my father’s studio. It wasn’t about money either. It was the prestige. It would be the crowning moment of this man’s inglorious life to mount one final exhibition of the unseen work of the great Francisco Falcón. The collectors who would come. The Americans. The museum curators. Suddenly he would be the centre again, as he had been forty years ago.

  Falcón bit into a large, fleshy olive. Salgado nipped the bud off a caper and twiddled the stalk in his fingers.

  ‘Is this information cast iron, Ramón?’

  ‘I’ve overheard some things to which others have added, unaware of what I already know. Over the years I have built a picture. A tableau vivant.’

  ‘And does this picture have a title?’

  ‘Orange Blossom and Horseshit — I think that would be an apposite title.’

  ‘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.