‘Perhaps if you’d been a detective back then you might have dealt with the matter of Mercedes’ death with a more penetrating eye than the local police.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t believe in gossip — I hear too much of it running a restaurant — but there was a lot of it about at that time. Enough gossip to have made anyone seriously investigating that tragedy ask harder questions than they did.’
‘What are you implying, Sra Romero?’ said Falcón quietly.
‘I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Mercedes was my friend and I was very sorry to lose her, especially in a boating accident. She had spent a lot of time on boats. Her husband, Milton, owned one. She had sailed across the Atlantic several times. She was a very experienced and sure-footed sailor. She did not make mistakes. They said it was rough that night, that a storm had got up in the straits, but I can tell you it was nothing compared to some of the storms she’d been through coming over the Atlantic. They said she fell overboard and I’m afraid that I for one did not believe it. I did not believe the gossip that ran along the lines of how careless it was of your father to have lost two wives. That disgusted me. But both your father and Ramón Salgado should have been forced to account for their actions in an official inquiry, at least.’
Falcón got up from the table, his steak untouched, and walked out of the restaurant. He wasn’t prepared to listen to that sort of stuff. That was what happened when you became famous. People loved to speculate at your expense. Fine. But he was not going to be a party to that. He walked flat out back to the Hotel Rembrandt, sprinted up to room 422 and threw himself on the bed, wrapped a pillow over his ears and clamped his eyes shut.
It was night-time when he woke up and a great storm was playing itself out across the straits over Spain. The sheet lightning ran for hundreds of kilometres, illuminating the vast, stacked clouds boiling in the night sky. Outside it was spitting. He found a restaurant and ate a lamb tagine and drank a bottle of Cabernet Président. He staggered back to the hotel, collapsed on the bed and woke up sweating and fully clothed. He stripped and crawled back into bed. The rain slashed and raked at the windows.
* * *
The Friday morning was drear and sodden. He had one more enquiry to make, which was probably going to be more fruitless than the rest. He checked out of the hotel and took a grand taxi to Tetuán, which broke down on the way so that he arrived in the late afternoon. He made a quick tour of the town’s Spanish community, trying to find somebody who might have known the González family who ran a hotel business back in the thirties.
By seven o’clock he’d lost his guide in the Medina and was wandering aimlessly through the alleyways, following carts piled high with fresh mint, when he came across a sight in a narrow street that totally paralysed him with panic.
A man with a cart of steel churns was pouring milk into local women’s calabashes, in which they would make their yoghurt. The gush of white liquid induced nausea. The flat white calm of the full calabashes turned him and sent him on a wild run through the streets and out of the Medina.
He gave up on trying to find someone to explain ‘the incident’ from his father’s journals. He found a cheap hotel with a bar. He drank beer and ate albóndigas in a crowd of Moroccan men, under a pall of cigarette smoke. He engaged in their small talk so as not to slip back into more despairing thoughts.
That night he was woken by a dream, a terrible dream, which he had to walk out of himself in his small room. The dream had been of nothing, of a terrible whiteness — an amorphous, consuming blankness that contained no memories, no past, no present and no future. It was the end of time and it seemed to want him.
Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón
12th January 1958, Tangier
I come back home early to take Javier out for a little treat on his second birthday but P. and he are not at home. The other children are at school. There is only the one maid at home, a Riffian woman, who speaks some impenetrable Berber dialect that only P. understands. I am fuming and go back to the studio and paint a canvas with terrible slashing strokes of red, as if I’m carving my way through the ranks of the enemy. The result is a work of terrifying energy, of appalling violence such as I’ve only ever committed on the battlefield. I burn it and watching the sickle slashes of paint being consumed by fire gives me near-sexual pleasure.
15th July 1958, Tangier
R. has turned up at the studio (he’s never been before). G. is pregnant again and he’s in a terrible state. He waits for my admonishment. I say nothing and he calls me a true friend. The doctor had been savage with him. He tells me over and over that it was an accident so that I stop believing him. ‘This time I will lose her,’ he says, and I see his passion for her, a passion I used to have for P. and now have for Javier. I’m moved and try to calm him. She will have to stay still for the entire pregnancy, he says, and for the first time I think there’s something else at play here. He seems scared by the fact that she can’t be moved and when I press him on this he suddenly says: ‘We should all leave and go back to Spain.’ I think he has a problem in his business, but he won’t be drawn on the matter.
25th September 1958, Tangier
I have been naïve. I should have known that, while R. can conduct himself in business with ruthlessness and tact, when it comes to affairs of the heart he is a small boy, incapable of objectivity and subject to the whim of his, still youthful, passions. I now know why he couldn’t speak to me before. He was ashamed. It seems amazing living in Tangier, where the orgies of Ancient Rome appear as staid as English tea parties, that a grown man is capable of shame. R. is an island of virtue in a sea of shamelessness. He has never indulged in the local young men and is appalled by the idea, calling it ‘unnatural’. Since he met G., as far as I know, he has not transgressed, not even with a prostitute before they were married. Just the thought of the frenzy on their wedding night leaves me weak.
R.’s revelations are quite a shock and are drawn from him at visible cost. We are on the verandah of the studio and, when he is not holding his head in his hands giving me his confession (who has begun to feel like a fat, corrupt prelate), he is pacing from side to side and casting about in case there is someone in the vicinity who can hear. R., at the age of thirty-five, has now transgressed in a spectacularly irresponsible fashion. I realize that I have been making light of this, but what R. has done is serious. I’m not sure that it has been done without the guile of the Moroccans with whom he has been doing business. We Europeans and Americans in particular are impressed by strengths, we like to see them displayed before us, especially in business. The Moroccan, however, and perhaps the African in general, is not so interested in strengths, which are always overt, but in the weaknesses which are hidden. It is sad that virtue should be seen as a weakness … or is it virtue? I was always disturbed by R.’s passion for G. when she was still a girl. He has succumbed again. He caught sight of one of the young daughters of a business associate of his in Fez. The girl was not veiled so might even have been as young as twelve years of age. R.’s interest was noted, the girl was made available, R. transgressed and now perhaps the most serious thing in Moroccan society is at stake — honour. R. is expected to take the girl for his wife. This is impossible. And here we have the cultural clash and the reason for R.’s torment. There is a solution: he must leave the country. He will lose his entire investment in the Moroccan project, which amounts to $25,000. But G. cannot be moved and he cannot uproot the family without making some unpleasant revelations. He fears that now the International Zone no longer exists, his family could be at risk. Of what? He leaves his final revelation to the last moment. The Arab girl is pregnant. He thinks that if he leaves Tangier there could be some revenge attack on his family.
7th October 1958, Tangier
As a security measure R. has rented a house nearly opposite his own and we have put four legionnaires in there. Pressure is mounting on him and he is buying time by continuing
to invest money in the Moroccan project. It costs him thousands of dollars, but he is prepared to pay any amount. P. has been to see G. and she is in no fit state to be moved, let alone undergo a sea journey across the straits in winter.
14th December 1958, Tangier
The pressure on R. has been too great. His health has suffered and he has been laid up with a lung infection. I tell him that as soon as he is well he should leave, which is what he did yesterday, taking Marta, the six-year-old, (who, after her difficult birth, is a little simple) with him. R. has done everything possible. He has bribed the whole of Tangier. I don’t know how deep his resources are, but they must be considerable for him to have raised his investment with the Moroccans to close to $40,000. He has given them some excuse or other that he has to go to Spain and that they have nothing to fear from a man of honour. I wish I knew more about these people, but R. will not let me near that end of things. I have no idea whether they are rogues who’ve seen a way of milking a vulnerable European, or genuine traditionalists who adhere to some ancient code of behaviour and mores. R. says they do not understand why he can’t simply divorce G. In their culture they only have to say the words three times and it is done.
22nd January 1959, Tangier
G.’s waters have broken and she goes into a prolonged labour of what P. describes as almost constant contraction. P. is convinced that the baby will not be able to survive the trauma. I call R. in Spain. He receives the news in silence. Twelve hours later he appears in the house, which is tomb dark on a grim winter morning. The fifty-year-old Spanish doctor and midwife are doing everything to get the baby out, but it is the wrong way round and also stuck. The atmosphere in the house is one of hopelessness. There is something of the torture chamber about it, with G.’s screams, the attentiveness of the medical staff and the black, lightless desolation of us all. After fifty-two hours the boy is delivered. He weighs three kilos. G. is so exhausted that should she sleep too deeply she might slip away. The doctor delivers a savage monologue to R., who asks when G. can be moved. ‘She might never leave this house alive, but you should know within the week,’ he says.
7th February 1959, Tangier
I go down to the port with my pockets full of dollars. It is better for G. to be moved on a quiet sea than driven to Ceuta on rough roads. The night is calm. The officials are malleable. We bring G. down to the port in a lumbering Studebaker and load her on to the yacht R. has chartered. As they ‘re about to cast off a police car arrives on the quay and a row develops in which the travel documents are confiscated, permission to leave the port is revoked and we all have to go back to the terminal for questioning. We ask on what charge and are stunned when they say it is fraud and mention the company that R. has been investing in. R., believing that the game is up, parts with $200. The sum is so vast that a deep silence ensues in which the situation could go one way or the other. The money is pocketed. Documents are returned. Permission is granted and a salute goes up.
12th February 1959, Tangier
As the legionnaires I had positioned opposite R.’s house were leaving, a group of Moroccans turned up with some police and a warrant. They broke the door down to R.’s house and removed all contents. Later a letter arrived at my home written in Arabic script, which I cannot read. I take it to the Spanish Legation where even the translator blanches at its contents.
I am Abdullah Diouri. I was a business associate of your friend whose name I cannot bring myself to write. You may know that he has deeply offended the honour of my family. He has treated one of my young daughters as nothing more than a common prostitute. Her life has been ruined. There is no amount of money that can repair the damage done to her or my family name. You should know that I have withdrawn from the business in which my associates and I had invested.
You should tell your friend that the family of Abdullah Diouri will be avenged and the price that we shall exact will be the same as exacted from us. I have lost a daughter, my family has been dishonoured. I will seek out your friend to the ends of the earth and I will reclaim my family honour from him.
There was a crudeness and a lack of affectation to this letter that gave it the ring of authenticity. The dots above and below the lines of script had been added in red ink. The effect was one of spattered blood. I send the original and translation to R., who has not yet been able to move G. from hospital in Algeciras, where she arrived unconscious after the crossing.
17th March 1959, Tangier
I have been too occupied by R.’s problems these last six months to contemplate the end of an era. It has stolen up on me and left me in its roiling wake. R.’s departure has hit me harder than I thought. I sit alone at his table in the Café de Paris and the talk is like an ongoing lament. Offices have closed down. No alcohol or tobacco can be loaded in the port. The hotels are empty. We have to use the dirham. The smart shops on the Boulevard Pasteur have closed down and been taken over by Moroccans selling tourist rubbish. Were it not for B.H. in Palace Sidi Hosni we would slip completely off the world stage. My work has foundered. All I seem to be doing is copying de Kooning, even though M. writes to tell me how admired my ‘peoplescape’ has been by those allowed into M.G.’s apartment. Even these words cannot stem my sense of decline. I feel like an old Roman, post-bacchanal, jaded and listless, prone to ennui and anxiety at the demise of empire.
R. sends word that he is living in the Sierra de Ronda. The clear dry air agrees with G.
18th June 1959, Tangier
The first heat of the summer is brutal. My brain is a seethe of nothingness. I lie about on carpets in my studio drinking tea and smoking. I sleep all afternoon and wake up at eight in the evening to find the temperature nearly bearable. I suddenly remember it is P.’s birthday and that I’ve failed to buy her a gift. I rummage about in the drawers and find an agate cube on a cheap silver ring. It must be a cast-off of M.’s. I fashion some coloured paper around it so that it looks like the pistil of a flower. I press it into a box and crush a lid on top so that when opened it will spring out. I tie it up with strips of red cloth and go home.
By midnight we have eaten. The children are about to go to bed when I remember my present. I send Javier round the table to her with my little box. P. opens it with great ceremony. The flower springs out and the box lid hits Javier on the nose. Everyone is delighted, including P., but then a look of complete puzzlement crosses her face. I panic that it was one of her old rings that I have given back to her. But I’m sure it’s not. I would have noticed it. The moment passes. She puts on the ring. I kiss her and notice that it is the only ring on her finger apart from her wedding band. This surprises me, because there was always one ring that she never took off — a silver band set with a small sapphire, which was given to her by her parents when she became a woman. I nearly ask her if she’s lost it, but that look on her face when she saw the agate cube has left me uneasy.
30
Saturday, 28th April 2001, Tetuán, Morocco
Falcón was up early to catch a grand taxi to Ceuta before dawn. From there he took the hydrofoil to Algeciras. The last entry of the diary was burnt on his mind. The silver ring with the single sapphire was his mother’s ring. The killer had been wearing his mother’s ring. That was why he’d had to come back to find it, because now Falcón knew the journal was the key. The killer had somehow had access to his father’s house, read the journal, stolen the vital section and set out on his avenging spree. But how had he come into possession of a ring his mother never took off? Uneasy truths slipped into his mind, along with the memory of being lifted high in the air at the edge of the sea on the bay of Tangier, legs kicking, above a face that would not come back to him.
By two o’clock he was in Seville. There was a message from Comisario Lobo on the answering machine. He was furious and used up a lot of tape telling him that it was no coincidence that Comisario León’s lackey, Ramírez, had officially removed Consuelo Jiménez from the suspects list as soon as he’d assumed control of Falcón’s investigation.
He didn’t care. He went straight back up to his father’s studio. The jewellery box was still open on the table where he’d left it. He clenched the agate cube in his fist as if the impression of its geometry would take him through the lock of his memory. He paced the floor, kicked at a pile of magazines under the table which fell at his feet.
The cover of one of the magazines was totally black and its English title was Bound. He opened it with his foot and reared back. The two photographs he saw were visions of hell — two blindfolded women being tortured by heavily tattooed men. He kicked the magazine away.
Was that what his father had been driven to? Had the loss of his genius polarized him to the extent that, having painted the sublime and lost his grasp of it, he was drawn to the ugliest of pictures … to do what? To disturb his mind back to greatness? To bury himself in the philosophical hope that beauty can only exist if there is ugliness? Falcón couldn’t wait to get the appalling images out of the house and in kicking it away he saw that the whole pile consisted of pornography — hard core, bestial, depraved beyond imagination.
On the table above the pile of magazines was the roll of five canvases, none of which he’d recognized. He unrolled them again and pinned them up on the work wall. He noticed that the canvas was old but the paint was acrylic, which his father hadn’t started using until the late seventies. He was also sure that this was not his father’s work and he wished Salgado were alive to tell him about these paintings.
Then he remembered the copyist. The half-gypsy guy who lived in the Alameda somewhere, the one he hadn’t liked, who’d stood in his black underpants and scratched his genitals while his father spoke to him. What was his name? There was something odd about it. It wasn’t a real name. Something came back to him about the day he’d gone to the copyist’s workshop with his father. All the paintings were upside down on their easels. He copied upside down. El Zurdo — that was it. The left-hander. To imitate a right-hander’s brushstrokes he used to paint upside down. Falcón found an address for the copyist but no telephone number in his father’s old address book under ‘Z’.