The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  He trailed off when he saw the look from the policemen.

  ‘How many people knew about the change from the original arrangement?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said, unable to get comfortable. ‘Of course, everybody had to know. It involved changing all the jobs around. You don’t think that one of my men is the murderer?’

  ‘What’s intriguing us,’ said Falcón, leaving Bravo’s suspicion to hang in the air, ‘is that, if our scenario is correct, the murderer must have known about the change in the arrangement. He must have known that Sr Jiménez was going to stay an extra night and be on his own. He could only know that from Sr Jiménez himself or from here. When did you confirm the job with Sra Jiménez?’

  ‘Wednesday, 4th April,’ he said, flicking through his diary.

  ‘When did Sr Jiménez make the change?’

  ‘Friday, 6th April.’

  ‘Had you already assigned a work team for the job?’

  ‘I did that on the Wednesday.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘I call my secretary, who informs the depot foreman, who writes it up on a whiteboard downstairs.’

  Falcón asked to speak to the secretary. Bravo called her in: a small, dark nervous woman in her fifties. They asked what she’d said to the foreman.

  ‘I told him that there’d been a change, that Sr Jiménez didn’t want the study to be touched until Thursday morning and that a small bed should be left in the kids’ room.’

  ‘What did the foreman say?’

  ‘The foreman made a coarse remark about what the bed would be used for.’

  ‘What does he do with that information?’

  ‘He puts it up on the whiteboard in red to show that it’s a change,’ she said. ‘And he posts the comments about the study and bed in a separate column.’

  ‘He also types it on to their worksheets,’ said Bravo, ‘so there’s two ways they can’t forget. They’re not very gifted people in the removals business.’

  The three men went down into the depot and looked at the whiteboard, which contained all the information for all jobs in April and May but with the Jiménez job still open. The foreman came out. The secretary was right, he looked the sort who kickstarted the day with a couple of brandies.

  ‘So everybody in this depot would know of the change to the Jiménez job?’ said Falcón.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ said the foreman.

  ‘What’s the security like here?’ asked Ramírez.

  ‘We don’t store anything here, so it’s minimal,’ said Bravo. ‘One man, one dog.’

  ‘During the day?’

  Bravo shook his head.

  ‘No cameras either?’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’

  ‘So you can just walk in off the street through the back there from Calle Maestro Arrieta?’

  ‘If you wanted to.’

  ‘Any overalls gone missing?’ asked Ramírez.

  Nothing had gone missing, nothing had been reported. The overalls were all standard issue with MUDANZAS TRIANA stencilled on the back. It wasn’t a difficult thing to copy.

  ‘Anybody been in here who shouldn’t?’ asked Ramírez.

  ‘Just people looking for work.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Two or three guys a week come in here and I tell them the same thing. We don’t recruit people off the street.’

  ‘What about the last two weeks?’

  ‘A few more than usual trying to get some money together for Easter and the Feria.’

  ‘Twenty?’

  ‘More like ten.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Well, fortunately they were all short and fat, otherwise I’d have a job recalling them all for you.’

  ‘Look, funny guy,’ said Ramírez, getting his finger out, ‘somebody came in here, picked up some information about the job you were doing in the Edificio Presidente and used it to get himself into an apartment there and torture an old man to death. So try a little harder for us.’

  ‘You didn’t say he was tortured to death,’ said Bravo.

  ‘I still don’t remember,’ said the foreman.

  ‘Maybe they were immigrants,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘Some of them might have been.’

  ‘Moroccans, maybe, who work for no money.’

  ‘We don’t employ —’ started Bravo.

  ‘We heard you the first time,’ said Ramírez. ‘I didn’t believe you then. So, look, if you want a quiet life with no visits from Immigration, then start thinking, start remembering who’s been in here since last Friday and if you saw anyone taking a particular interest in that whiteboard.’

  ‘Because,’ said Falcón, nodding at the foreman, ‘you’re the only person we’ve met who’s probably seen this killer, talked to him.’

  ‘And you know … that’s something the killer might start thinking, too,’ said Ramírez. ‘Buenos días.’

  11

  Saturday, 14th April 2001

  ‘He was right — Sr Bravo,’ said Ramírez. ‘It’s too obvious a connection but the killer could be one of his workers.’

  ‘But only if the second scenario, where Eloisa Gómez lets the killer into the apartment, is the correct one,’ said Falcón. ‘If he got in using the lifting gear he’d have been missing from work in the afternoon. We’re going to have to interview every worker and put more pressure on the girl.’

  ‘You know what I don’t like about this guy?’ said Ramírez. ‘Our killer?’

  Falcón didn’t answer, stared out of the window at the different bars and cafés flashing past on Calle San Jacinto as they headed back up to the river through Triana. He was suddenly depressed by the way his investigation was coming down to the sort of minutiae of everyday life encountered in removals companies.

  ‘He’s lucky,’ finished Ramírez. ‘He’s very lucky, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s relying on it,’ said Falcón, savage and morose. He was jittery from the coffee on an empty stomach and flat from lack of sleep and still no break in the case. His men on the street in Los Remedios hadn’t come up with anybody, not one person, who even remembered seeing the removals truck and the lifting gear.

  ‘What does that mean, Inspector Jefe?’

  ‘People who rely on their luck always rely on it until well after it has run out. Like gamblers,’ said Falcón. ‘They’re ultimately stupid people.’

  ‘Now you’re implying something, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Am I? I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s finished, do you? This killer.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You think he wants to test his luck some more … to see how far he can go.’

  Falcón didn’t like this about Ramírez. The good cop in him who never stopped, who constantly observed, picked over words, levered up sentences. And now he was doing it to him.

  ‘You talk about “he”,’ said Falcón, a diversionary tactic, ‘but we haven’t even got that far.’

  Ramírez grinned as they crossed the Puente de Isabel II and headed north along the east bank of the river towards San Jerónimo and the cemetery.

  ‘You know we’re wasting our time here, don’t you, Inspector Jefe?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Where do you think we’re going to get our break? We haven’t got it in any of the obvious places — on the body, in the apartment, in the Edificio Presidente, outside it, in the removals company — none of these places.’

  ‘You know I called you yesterday?’ said Ramírez, changing tack.

  ‘I didn’t pick up any messages until this morning.’

  ‘It was just that I was thinking you were right, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez.

  Falcón looked across at him slowly, nothing furtive, as if he was just taking in the view of the ‘92 Expo site, La Isla Mágica looking totally mundane across the sluggish, grey river. Ramírez never thought anybody was right, least of all his Inspector Jefe
.

  ‘As you said, it’s too elaborate. The method,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘For the motive to have been something as ordinary as business, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It took a fraction of a second for a number of subliminal observations to coalesce in Falcón’s mind. Ramírez had been more agreeable today than ever before. He hadn’t undermined him at Mudanzas Triana. He’d dealt with the foreman, who was much more his type. He’d called him four times on a public holiday. He’d revealed that he’d been to see Eloisa Gómez and admitted that his impatience had sealed off possibly valuable information. He’d said that he, Javier Falcón, had been right.

  ‘You know the procedure,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re not allowed to do nothing. We had very little to offer Juez Calderón apart from Consuelo Jiménez and Eloisa Gómez. The former is a complex and sophisticated individual with opportunity and means, the latter had the opportunity but won’t talk to us. Our job is to develop leads and, when they don’t present themselves through the evidence, we either have to gradually and humanely sweat them out of people or dig for them … sometimes in barren places like cemeteries and address books.’

  ‘But you doubt that those sources will have any bearing on the case?’

  ‘There’s doubt, of course, but I’ll do it because it might throw up something that could indirectly develop a lead.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What you talked about the other night. What was the guy’s name — Cinco Bellotas?’

  ‘Joaquín Lopez.’

  ‘The boys that Sra Jiménez fired … they saw the two men talking. We don’t know what that was about. It could have an implication, it could be totally innocent. We have to look at it.’

  ‘But you’re still thinking that this is the work of a disturbed mind?’

  ‘Undisturbed minds can become disturbed if their whole way of life is threatened.’

  ‘But all the filming, getting into the apartment, hiding there for twelve hours …’

  ‘We still don’t know that he did that. I’m more inclined to think that “he” formed a relationship with the girl, that “he” got the necessary information from Mudanzas Triana and put the two together to get into the apartment.’

  ‘But what about the horror show that he put Jiménez through?’

  ‘None of this is beyond imagination,’ said Falcón, doubting himself as he said it. ‘It’s not unimaginable, is it?’

  ‘It is to me.’

  This was true, thought Falcón, and Marta Jiménez flashed through his mind with her vomity chin and padded eyebrow. Ramírez was uncomplicated. He would always be an Inspector because his imagination only ever allowed him to aspire to being the post above. His horizons were limited.

  ‘What do you think he showed him, Inspector?’

  Ramírez braked for a traffic light, gripped the wheel, fixed his eyes on the car in front, waiting for him to move. He tried to jog his mind into unvisited lateral grooves.

  ‘The stuff of horror,’ said Falcón, ‘is not necessarily the truly terrible.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Ramírez, thinking him a strange beast, but glad to be relieved from creative duty.

  ‘Look at us now at the height of our civilization … I mean, we can laugh at cannibalism, for God’s sake. There’s nothing that can frighten us … we’ve seen it all, except …’

  The lights changed, Ramírez stalled the car, horns honked.

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘That which we’ve decided we don’t know.’

  ‘Isn’t that unimaginable?’

  ‘I mean the things that we know about ourselves. The very private, deeply hidden stuff that we show no one and that we firmly deny ever happened because we would not be able to live with the knowledge.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Ramírez. ‘How can you know something without knowing it? It’s fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘When my father moved to Seville in the sixties he became friendly with the local priest who used to walk past his door on the way to the church at the end of Calle Bailén. My father didn’t go to church or believe in God, but they used the same café and, over years of argument, became friends. One time at three in the morning my father was working in his studio and he heard someone shouting in the street: ‘Eh! Cabrón! You were sent to me, weren’t you, Francisco Cabrón?’ It was the priest, who was not tranquil any more but angry and nearly mad. His cassock was torn apart, his hair was wild and he was drinking brandy from the bottle. My father let him in and he stormed around the patio raging against himself and his useless life. That morning he’d been giving communion and it had suddenly come to him.’

  ‘He lost his faith,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re always doing that. They get it back.’

  ‘It was worse than that. He told my father that he’d never had any faith. His whole church career had started because of a lie. There’d been a girl who hadn’t returned his love. It seemed that he’d gone into the Church to spite her and all he’d ended up doing was spiting himself. For more than forty years the priest had known this … but without knowing it. He was a good priest, but it didn’t matter because there was one flaw in the edifice of his life, the tiny lie on which it was all based.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Ramírez.

  ‘He hanged himself the next day,’ said Falcón. ‘What do you do if you’re a priest and you’ve spent your whole life teaching the pursuit of truth in God’s word?’

  ‘My God,’ said Ramírez, ‘but you don’t have to kill yourself. You don’t have to take life so seriously.’

  ‘That’s why my father told me the story,’ said Falcón. ‘I’d said I wanted to be an artist … just like him. He told me to be careful because art is about the pursuit of truth too, whether it be personal or universal.’

  ‘I get it,’ said Ramírez, hitting the steering wheel, laughing.

  ‘You get it now,’ said Falcón. ‘What we know without knowing it.’

  ‘Fuck that! I know why you became a cop,’ he said, roaring.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The pursuit of truth. Fuck me, that’s brilliant,’ said Ramírez. ‘We’re all fucking artists now.’

  Had that been it? No. Because when he’d got over the idea of being an artist, come to terms with his father’s doubts about his talent, he’d told him that he would become an art historian instead and his father had laughed in his face. ‘Art historians are just policemen working with pictures. They hunt for clues. They fill their lives with speculation and conjecture and nine times out of ten they get it all wrong. Art history is for failures,’ he’d said. ‘Not just failed artists, but failed human beings, too.’ The reserves of derision his father had for these people … So he became a cop. No, that wasn’t quite it either. He went to Madrid University and studied English (the only race, including the Spanish, his father had any time for) and he developed a taste for American noir movies of the 1940s. Then he became a cop.

  He had a sense of rush, as in shooting to the surface from sleep, except he was awake with his thoughts flashing past him, bright and fast like a shoal of sardine. He shook his head, shuddered back into real life, the seats of the car, plastic, glass, other solid, man-made things.

  ‘Did Serrano come back with anything on the chloroform and surgical instruments?’ he asked, steadying himself with words.

  ‘Nothing, so far.’

  They pulled up at the cemetery. Ramírez reached back for the video camera, Falcón hovered on the pavement, surveyed the large crowd, the wall of flowers outside the chapel, the blue sky nearly making the scene cheerful. Consuelo Jiménez was in the middle of the herd, her three children bewildered amongst the forest of adult legs. Falcón had been that high, too, at a funeral.

  They must have had the blessing. The coffin was being loaded into the car from the chapel. The driver pulled away to the gates, the mourners gathered behind and began a slow procession up the cypress-lined avenue into the heart of th
e cemetery. Beyond the box hedges were the mausoleums and monuments, a huge bronze of the torero Francisco Rivera in his suit of lights, an imaginary bull forever thundering past him, one hand holding a broken sword, the other an imaginary cape.

  The car arrived at Jesús de la Pasión. They unloaded the coffin and took it up to the granite mausoleum where they positioned it opposite the only other occupant — his first wife. Consuelo Jiménez received condolences from those she’d missed earlier. Falcón checked inside the mausoleum. The shelf below the first wife wasn’t quite empty. There was a small urn in the corner, too small to contain ashes. He shone his pen torch in there and read the small silver plaque: Arturo Manolo Jiménez Bautista. Maybe that was José Manuel’s ‘finality’.

  Falcón rejoined the mourners, gave his condolences and strolled back to the entrance. Ramírez was off amongst the graves with the videocam.

  ‘Of course, you knew him, didn’t you?’ said a voice close to Falcón’s ear, a hand gripping his elbow.

  Ramón Salgado’s dog-sad face crept into his peripheral vision. Here was one of those people for whom his father maintained a savage derision. Not to his face, of course, because while Salgado was an art historian he was better known as the dealer who had made his father famous. He still had a list of very wealthy clients and, right up to his father’s first heart attack, regularly sent these clients to Calle Bailén, so that they could be relieved of those useless blocks of cash that cluttered their bank accounts.

  ‘No, I didn’t know him,’ said Falcón, summoning up the usual coolness he felt for this man. ‘Should I have done?’

  Falcón held out his hand, Salgado used both hands to clasp it. He pulled back. Salgado put a hand through his long, pretentious hair, whose white silveriness kinked into curls over the collar of his dark-blue suit. ‘Salgado … even his dandruff glitters,’ his father used to say.

  ‘No, no perhaps you wouldn’t have met him, come to think of it,’ said Salgado. ‘He never went to the house. That’s right. I remember now. He always sent Consuelo on her own.’

  ‘Sent her?’