The Blind Man of Seville

‘Just run your pictures past Sra Jiménez, please,’ he said. ‘In order of appearance on the CCTV tapes.’

Fernández counted them out, each one getting the negative from Consuelo Jiménez until the last one when her eyes widened and she blinked the double take.

‘Who is that in the picture, Doña Consuelo?’

She looked up at him, entranced, beguiled as if it had been magic.

‘It’s Basilio,’ she said, her mouth not closing.

5

Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedies, Seville

How to play this? Falcón resisted the temptation to run his fingers up the edge of the desk like a concert pianist in full flourish. He rested his chin on his thumb, tensed his jaw and brushed his cheekbone with a finger while the adrenalin flashed down his arteries. This was it, he thought. But how to make it come out? Separate or together? He felt inspired. He decided on the cockpit approach. Throw them in together, let them flap and cut, peck and stab.

‘Sra Jiménez and I are going to El Porvenir,’ he said to Fernández. ‘Contact Sub Inspector Pérez and help him find the prostitute. Tell him we’ve identified the unknowns from the CCTV tapes.’

Sra Jiménez crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. Her foot wouldn’t keep still. Falcón went into the corridor to call Ramírez on his mobile. He wished he liked him more.

Ramírez was bored. He’d taken on the fruitless task of interviewing the fired employees himself and, so far, after two had come up with nothing other than they were glad to get away from Sra Jiménez. Falcón watched her while Ramírez blew off steam. She was clicking the fingernails of her thumb and forefinger, playing things over in her mind. Falcón briefed Ramírez and gave him Basilio Lucena’s address, told him to get down there and be ready to maintain the pressure on the two protagonists.

Falcón took Consuelo Jiménez back across the river to 17 Calle Río de la Plata. The traffic was heavier around lunchtime. The joggers were out in the park; girls with their hair tied in ponytails bobbed along beyond the railings, gay in the sunshine. These moments of police work were fascinating to him — driving along while a suspect endured some massive internal struggle between denial and truth, between acting out the lie or embracing the relief of retribution and absolution. Where did the impulse come from that started the body chemistry into a decision of such magnitude?

He turned right up Avenida de Portugal behind the high towers of the Plaza de España. The building which had been the centrepiece of the ‘29 Expo was so normal to him that he wouldn’t have noticed it except, on this day, with the red brick against the blue sky and the explosive greenery all around, it amazed him. It brought back a memory of his father throwing himself out of his seat as they watched Lawrence of Arabia on television to point out that David Lean was using the building as the British Embassy in Cairo.

‘You can talk if you like,’ he said.

She started out aggressive and pulled back after the first syllable. She found a lipstick in her handbag and reshaped her mouth … nicely.

‘I’m as curious as you are,’ she said, which unnerved him.

They parked down the street from the house. No Ramírez. Falcón took out the autopsy report and read it through, blinking in the detail. The instruments used, the technical know-how demonstrated, the chemicals and solutions evident on the victim’s clothes — all reaffirmed his suspicions.

A car pulled up alongside. Ramírez nodded and parked up at the end of the street. He walked back down, through the gateway and rang the bell to number 17. Lucena opened it. There was a discussion. Ramírez showed his ID card. He was let in. Minutes passed. Falcón and Sra Jiménez got out of the car, rang the bell. Lucena came to the door, harassed. He walked straight into Falcón’s eyes and caught the blue flash of his lover’s. The fear was unmistakable, but of what Falcón wasn’t sure. They went in, the man definitely crowded out in his own living room with the pressure of three pairs of eyes on him. Falcón positioned himself next to the television set, which had a video camera connected to it. Ramírez stood by the door. Lucena sat down on the edge of an armchair. Sra Jiménez occupied the sofa opposite, looked at him out of the corner of her eye, crossed her legs and set her foot nodding.

‘We’ve already established from Sra Jiménez that you were with her last night,’ said Falcón. ‘Can you remember when you left?’

‘It was about two o’clock,’ he said, running his hand through his thin, brown hair.

‘Where did you go after leaving the Hotel Colón?’

The foot stopped nodding.

‘I came back here.’

‘Did you leave your house again that night?’

‘No. I went to work this morning.’

‘How did you get to work?’

He faltered, stumbled over the beginner’s question.

‘By bus.’

Ramírez took over and tied him in knots about bus routes. Lucena clung to his lie until Falcón quietly put the print-out from the CCTV tapes into his hands.

‘Is that you, Sr Lucena?’ he asked.

He jiggled his head in nervous affirmation.

‘What subject do you lecture in at the university?’

‘Biochemistry.’

‘So you’d probably be working from one of those buildings on Avenida de la Reina Mercedes?’

He nodded.

‘Very close to Heliopolis, where Sra Jiménez is moving to?’

He shrugged.

‘In your faculty would it be easy to get hold of such a chemical as chloroform?’

‘Very easy.’

‘And saline solution and scalpels and cutting scissors?’

‘Of course, there’s a laboratory.’

‘You see those figures in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture … what do they say?’

‘02.36. 12.04.01.’

‘Who were you going to see in the Edificio Presidente at that time?’

He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes shut.

‘Can we talk about this in private?’ he asked.

‘We’re all interested parties here,’ said Ramírez.

‘Twenty-five minutes after you entered that building Raúl Jiménez was murdered,’ said Falcón, who saw now that Lucena, rather than considering him as a persecutor wanted him as a friend. It was the woman he feared.

‘I went to the eighth floor,’ said Lucena, throwing his hands up.

An unexpected answer, which had Ramírez reaching for his notebook.

‘The eighth floor?’ said Sra Jiménez.

‘Orfilia Trinidad Muñoz Delgado,’ said Ramírez.

‘She must be ninety years old,’ said Sra Jiménez.

‘Seventy-four,’ said Ramírez. ‘And there’s Marciano Joaquín Ruíz Pizarro.’

‘Marciano Ruiz, he’s the theatre director,’ said Falcón.

Lucena nodded up at him.

‘I know him,’ said Falcón. ‘He’s been to see my father, but he’s …’

‘Un maricón; said Sra Jiménez, deep-voiced, brutal.

Ramírez, like some mugging comic actor, took a quick step back, stared down at Lucena. Falcón used his mobile to call Fernández, who told him that there’d been no reply from the Ruíz apartment when he’d called that afternoon.

‘He’s not in today,’ said Lucena. ‘He dropped me off at work and went to Huelva. He’s rehearsing Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre.’

The air thermals changed in the room. Sra Jiménez charged out of her chair before there was any chance of intervention. Her hand swung back and made nasty contact with the corner of Lucena’s head. It wasn’t a slap, more of a thud. All those rings, thought Falcón.

‘Hijo de puta,’ she roared from the door.

Blood trickled down the side of Lucena’s face. The front door slammed. Heels split the paving stones.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Ramírez, more relaxed now that the woman was out of the room. ‘Why were you fucking her if you’re a …’

Lucena took a packet of tissues out, dabbed his forehead.

‘Can you just explain that to me?’ said Ramírez. ‘I mean, you’re one or the other, aren’t you?’

‘Do I have to put up with this imbecile?’ Lucena asked Falcón.

‘Unless you want to spend a long time down at the Jefatura, yes.’

Lucena got to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, walked to the centre of the room and turned to Ramírez. His weakness had been replaced by an aristocratic, vindictive smoothness of the sort employed by fops who’ve been asked for the satisfaction of a duel.

‘I fucked her because she reminded me of my mother,’ he said.

It was a calculated offence, which had its desired effect of shocking Ramírez, who Lucena could see was from a different class to his own. The Inspector was from a conservative, working-class Sevillano family and lived with his wife and two daughters in his parents’ house. His mother was still alive and living with them and when his father-in-law died, which would be any week now, his mother-in-law would join them. Ramírez balled his fist. Nobody talked like that about mothers to him.

‘We’re leaving now,’ said Falcón, gripping Ramírez by his swollen bicep.

‘I want to get … I want to get the phone number of the other maricón,’ said Ramírez, the words bottling in his throat. He wrenched his arm away from Falcón.

Lucena went to the desk, slashed a pen across some paper and handed it to Falcón, who manoeuvred Ramírez out of the room.

Outside the Calle Río de la Plata was moving as slowly as the river through Buenos Aires. Sra Jiménez was down at the end of the street, her rage bristling in the sunlight. Ramírez was no less angry. Falcón stood between them, no longer the detective, more the social worker.

‘Get Fernández on the mobile,’ he said to Ramírez. ‘See if they’ve found the girl yet.’

Lucena’s door slammed shut. Falcón headed down the street to Consuelo Jiménez thinking: Was that the sophistication you were talking about that so entranced you? What are we now? Where are we? This society with no rules of engagement.

She was crying, but from anger this time. She gritted her teeth and stamped her feet in humiliation. Falcón drew alongside her, hands in pockets. He nodded as if agreeing with her but thinking: This is policework — one moment on the brink of cracking the case and packing up early for celebratory beers and the next back on the street wondering how you could have been so facile.

‘I’ll run you back to your sister’s house,’ he said.

‘What did I do to him?’ she asked. ‘What did I ever do to him?’

‘Nothing,’ said Falcón.

‘What a day,’ she said, looking up into the perfect sky, all serenity a long way off, beyond the stratosphere. ‘What a fucking day.’

She stared into the mash of tissue in her hand like a haruspex who might find reason, clarity or a future. She threw it in the gutter. He took her arm and turned her towards the car. As he helped her in, Ramírez said they’d found the girl from the Alameda and were taking her down to the Jefatura on Blas Infante.

‘Tell Fernández to interview that last employee that Sra Jiménez fired. Pérez should leave the girl to sweat until we get there. I want all reports filed at four-thirty before we go to see Juez Calderón at five.’

Falcón called Marciano Ruíz’s mobile and told him he would have to come back to Seville to make a statement tonight. There was a protest from Ruíz, which was followed by a threat from Falcón to arrest Lucena.

‘Are you calm?’ he asked Ramírez, who nodded over the roof of the car. ‘Take Sr Lucena down to the Jefatura and get a written statement out of him … and don’t be rough.’

Falcón led Lucena out of his house and put him in the back of Ramírez’s car. They all left. Falcón hunched over the steering wheel, muttering in his head as the tyres hissed down Avenida de Borbolla. Everybody was mental today. Some cases did this. They grated too much. Normally the child cases. The kidnapping followed by the wait and the inevitable discovery of the abused body. This was the same … as if something terrible had been added to the excesses of the human experience and had subtracted something greater which could never be replaced. The daylight would always be a little dimmer, the air never quite as fresh.

‘Do you see a lot of this?’ asked Sra Jiménez. ‘Yes, I suppose you do, I suppose you see it all the time.’

‘What?’ said Falcón, shrugging, knowing what she meant, not wanting to get into it.

‘People with perfect lives, who see them destroyed in a matter of … ‘

‘Never,’ he replied at the edge of vehemence.

That word — ‘perfect’ — hardened him and he remembered her earlier words which had flayed his ‘perfect’ life alive: ‘I think that’s harder. To be dumped because she would rather be alone.’ He felt cruel and fought the urge to retaliate: ‘I think that’s hard … to be dumped for a male lover.’ He filed it in his mind under ‘Unworthy’ and replaced it with the thought that maybe Inés had ruined women for him.

‘Surely, Inspector Jefe …’ she said.

‘No, never,’ he said, ‘because I’ve never met anybody with a perfect life. A perfect past and a pristine future, yes. But the perfect past is always brilliantly edited and the pristine future a hopeless dream. The only perfect life is the one on paper, and even then there are those spaces between the words and lines and they’re rarely patches of nothing.’

‘Yes, we are careful,’ she said, ‘careful of what we show to others and of what we reveal to ourselves.’

‘I didn’t mean to be so … intense,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a long day and there’s more to come. We’ve had some shocks.’

‘I can’t believe I’m still such an idiot,’ she said. ‘I met Basilio in the lift of the Edificio Presidente. He was probably on his way down from the eighth floor. I didn’t think. But … but why would he … bother to seduce me?’

‘Forget him. He’s not important.’

‘Unless he’s given me something.’

‘Take a test,’ said Falcón, more brutal than he intended. ‘But start thinking too, Doña Consuelo, about who could possibly have a motive for killing your husband. I want names and addresses of all his friends. I want you to remember, for instance, who it was who told you how much you resembled the first wife. I want Raúl’s diary.’

‘He had a desk diary in the office which I kept up. He threw away his address book when he got his mobile phone. He only spoke to people on the phone anyway. He had no use for paper and he always lost pens and stole mine.’

Falcón did not remember a mobile phone. He called the forensics and the Médico Forense. No mobile. The killer must have taken it.

‘Any other records?’

‘An old address book in the office computer.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Above the restaurant off the Plaza de Alfalfa.’

He handed her his mobile and asked her to arrange for him to pick up a print-out in half an hour.

He dropped her outside her sister’s house in San Bernardo just after 3 p.m. Ten minutes later he parked up by the east gate to the Jardines de Murillo and continued on foot, half running through the crowded streets of the Barrio de Santa Cruz, where tourists gathered for the Semana Santa processions. The sun was out from behind the clouds. It was hot and he was soon sweating. The air in the enclosed streets smelt strongly of Ducados, orange blossom, horseshit and the vestiges of incense from the processions. The cobbles were spattered and slippery with candle wax.

He stripped off his mac and cut down the backstreets he knew from the few times he’d managed to attend the English classes he kept paying for at the British Institute on Calle Frederico Rubio. He came into the southeast corner of the Plaza de Alfalfa, which was packed with all the tribes of the world. Cameras nosed at him. He sidestroked through the crowd, trotted up Calle San Juan and was suddenly carried forward by a crush of people surging down Calle Boteros. He realized his mistake too late, saw the procession coming towards him, but couldn’t break free of the herd. They bore him onwards to the flower-decked float, which had just negotiated a difficult corner and was now beetling forward under the power of the twenty costaleros underneath. The Virgin, demure beneath her white lace canopy, was shimmering in the intense sunlight, while incense from the burners shifted this way and that in the thermals of the street, filling his head and chest so that air was difficult to come by. The drums from the band behind the float beat on, hammering out their portentous rhythm.

The crowd shoved forwards. The paso bore down on their awestruck faces, the Virgin towering above them, her whole body shuddering from right to left under the straining costaleros. Earsplitting, discordant trumpets suddenly blasted out the passion. The sound in the confines of the narrow street reverberated inside Falcón’s chest and seemed to open it up. The crowd gasped at the glorious moment, at the weeping Virgin, at the height of ecstasy … and the blood drained rapidly from Falcón’s head.

6

Thursday, 12th April 2001, Calle Boteros, Seville

The paso veered away. The high Virgin’s pitiful eyes moved off, fell on others. The crush slackened. The final blast of the trumpets ricocheted off the balconies. The drums beat out to silence. The costaleros lowered the float from their shoulders. The crowd clapped at their feat of engineering. The procession of nazareños in their high-pointed hats put down their crosses, rested their candles. Falcón held on to the handle at the back of an old woman’s wheelchair, a hand on his knee. The old woman was waving at one of the nazareños, who’d lifted the flap of his hood. He smiled, revealing the normal human being beneath, nothing more sinister than a bespectacled accountant.

Falcón loosened his tie, wiped cold sweat from his face. He pushed through the edge of the crowd, staggered through the files of nazareños. The people on the other side parted for him. He found some pavement and bent his head to his knees, felt the blood thump back up his cerebral cortex, refresh his brain.

Haven’t eaten all day, he was thinking, but he knew that wasn’t it. He looked back at the paso, the Virgin staring off down the street, unconcerned with him now. Except, this was it … she had been. For that moment, for that fraction of a second, she’d got inside him, filled him out. It had been an experience he could nearly remember having had before, but he couldn’t quite get to the memory of it. It was too distant.

He found the office above the Jiménez restaurant, picked up the print-out and drank a glass of water. He left the old city, avoiding all processions. He drove down to the river and crossed over to the Plaza de Cuba feeling empty and hungry. He stopped at a bar on República Argentina and bought a bocadillo de chorizo, which he ate too quickly so that it stuck in his chest, the crust as hard-edged as the pain of loss, which was odd because he hadn’t lost anyone since his father died two years ago.

The Jefatura was on the intersection of Calle Blas Infante and Calle López de Gomara. He parked at the back of the building and made his way up the two short flights of stairs to his office, which had a view over the ordered ranks of cars. His office was spartan with not one personal item in it. There were two chairs, a metal desk and some grey filing cabinets. The light came from a neon strip above his head. He did not hold with distractions at work.

There were thirty-eight messages for him and five were from his immediate superior Jefe de Brigada de Policía Judicial, Comisario Andrés Lobo, who was no doubt reacting to pressure from his boss Comisario Firmin León, whose relationship with Raúl Jiménez Falcón had noted from the photographs. He went straight to the interrogation rooms, where Ramírez was standing over Basilio Lucena, holding his fist as if he wanted to punch him. He called Ramírez out, briefed him on the interrogation strategy for the girl and told him to send Pérez down. He went in to see Lucena who looked up and went straight back to writing his statement.

‘What you said to Inspector Ramírez back there …’ Falcón started, the nastiness of that line still bothering him.

‘Any student will tell you that lecturers react very badly to morons.’

‘Was that all it was?’

‘I’m surprised you’re concerned, Inspector Jefe.’

He was, too, and wondered if he was making a fool of himself.

‘I doubt my mother was ever as good in bed as Consuelo, if that’s what you were wondering,’ said Lucena.

‘You’re a confusing man, Sr Lucena.’

‘In a confused age,’ he said, waggling his pen at Falcón.

‘How long had you been seeing Sra Jiménez?’

‘A year or so,’ he said. ‘That was the first time I’d been back to the Edificio Presidente since we met … Such is my luck.’

‘And Marciano Ruíz?’

‘You’re as curious as the Inspector, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I’m easily bored, Don Javier. Marciano and I see each other when my ennui peaks.’

Pérez came in, told Falcón which room the prostitute was in and took over.

The girl was sitting at a table smoking while she stacked and unstacked two packs of Fortuna. Her hair was cropped unevenly on her head as if she’d done the job herself without a mirror. She stared at the dead TV screen straight ahead of her, blue eyeshadow, pink mouth. A blonde wig hung off the back of an unused chair. She wore a tartan miniskirt, a white blouse and black boots. She was tiny and still looked of school age, but the depravity she’d seen on her extended truant was worn into her dark brown eyes.

Ramírez turned on the tape, introduced her as Eloisa Gómez and announced himself and Falcón.

‘Do you know why you’re here?’ asked Falcón.

‘Not yet. They said it was a few questions, but I know you guys. I’ve been here before … I know your games.’

‘We’re different to the usual guys,’ said Ramírez.

‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘you are. Who are you?’

Falcón shook his head a fraction at Ramírez.

‘You were with a client last night …’ said Falcón.

‘I was with lots of clients last night. It’s Semana Santa,’ she said. ‘It’s our busiest time of the year.’

‘Busier than the Feria?’ asked Ramírez, mildly surprised.

‘Without a doubt,’ she said, ‘especially the last few days when everybody comes from out of town.’

‘One of your clients was Raúl Jiménez. You went to see him last night in his apartment in the Edificio Presidente.’

‘I knew him as Rafael. Don Rafael.’

‘You’d met him before?’

‘He’s a regular.’

‘In his apartment?’

‘Last night was maybe the third or fourth time in his apartment. Normally it’s the back of his car.’

‘So how did it work this time?’ asked Ramírez.

‘He called the mobile. My group of girls bought three mobiles last year.’

‘What time?’

‘I didn’t take the call. I was with someone else … but it must have been midnight. The first time.’

‘The first time?’

‘He only wanted to speak to me, so he called again around twelve-fifteen. He asked me to come to his apartment. I told him I was making a lot of money on the plaza and he asked me how much I wanted. I told him one hundred thousand.’

Ramírez roared with laughter.

‘That’s Semana Santa for you,’ he said. ‘The prices are ridiculous.’

The girl laughed too, relaxed a notch.

‘Don’t tell me he paid that,’ said Ramírez.

‘We settled on fifty.’

‘Joder.’

‘How did you get there?’ asked Falcón, trying to settle it down again.

‘Taxi,’ she said, lighting up a Fortuna.

‘What time did it drop you off?’

‘Just after half past twelve.’

‘Anybody around?’

‘Not that I saw.’

‘What about in the building?’

‘I didn’t even see the conserje, which I was glad about. There was no one in the lift or on the landing and he let me in before I rang the bell, as if he’d been watching me through the spy hole.’

‘You didn’t hear him unlock the door?’