by David Hewson
Maria Gutiérrez keeps up a steady fifty kilometres an hour in her plain rented Seat Ibiza, her eyes, half-dead, aching, watching the street. The little red car hangs in the inside lane for as long as possible. She does not hurry, she lets the traffic push her along, drifting with it, trying not to think about where it leads. It is ten years, a decade, since she has been to the city, and to return is to intrude upon her own, unwanted past. Her hair flies out from her head, uncombed and tangled, loose in the dusty wind that blows in through the half-open window. It is a pale brown streaked with blonde, too young, too wild for her, a relic of yesterday. Her bright, clear-blue eyes, piercing, a little staring, dart from road to street and back again, looking for directions, registering sights that stir old memories, rustle the past that lies buried somewhere in her head. They are deep, intelligent, old eyes, set in a pale, alert face that is more striking than attractive. Maria Gutiérrez is thirty-three: she has the eyes of someone a decade older and the hairstyle of a twenty-year-old.
Seven hours earlier, in the dead of night, she left her tower-block apartment in Salamanca, in the new city: bright, clean, antiseptic. The tower blocks are the precise number of feet distant from their neighbours specified by the city authorities. There is correctness, exactitude here, and some kind of cold, dull comfort in the place’s mute, grey-stone form. Rubbish collections do not occur at three in the morning. Singing, all-night parties and loud family rows are all discouraged. No one knows each other: people get up in the morning, go to work, come home, go to bed. This is the north, the new city: remote and filled with an unspoken sense of loss. But safe, too. In the north, emotions know their place. Below the surface, below stairs, where they cannot touch you.
The south is old and it is different.
Maria Gutiérrez drove for six hours in complete darkness, along roads she did not know, liking the blackness, liking the anonymity, the security it promised. Then, as the sun rose bright and yellow and fearless along the ridge of mountains in the distance, she came to the city.
The trunk road skirts the city to the west, then heads towards the centre, crossing the broad, slow sweep of the Guadalquivir river. In her head she can see, close by, the outer walls first built by the Arabs as they fought against the return of the Christian forces from the north. From behind those same walls the Catholic monarchs launched the campaign that was to complete the Christian Reconquest of Spain.
The signs of the ancient city remain for those who seek them: a keyhole arch here, a fragment of wall there, the two Roman pillars dedicated to Hercules, Seville’s supposed founder in prehistory, fragments of the past frozen in time. A boy, someone entranced by her hair, her eyes, had shown them to her once, when she was at the university, when her emotions used to play tricks, before she learned how to master them, to keep them tight inside. She passes close by these remembered sights now and, in that little internal mirror that leaps out from nowhere, unbidden, unwanted, she can see his face. She wonders where he is: if he is alive. Somewhere in her head stirs a dim memory of their final argument, the moment when his intensity, his closeness became too much. When she chose the safety of being alone over the dangers of being two. The recollection rolls over in its sleep and, for a moment, she lets her mind go still in case it wakes, holds her breath until all inside is silence once more.
The car turns south, towards the centre, then begins to travel towards the river, a sluggish brown-green mass bright in the dazzling sun. Past the tangle of ancient brickwork and timber that marked the medieval wharves – once Columbus docked here, sparking the invasion of America that gave the city its incalculable wealth – past the pleasure boats waiting for the day’s visitors. Behind the burnished handrail on a small steamer someone polishes the deck, a cigarette dangling ash over the glittering wood.
She is running directly by the water’s edge. Only a narrow footpath, set at a lower level, separates her from the water. A small group of teenagers are practising for the fiesta: trumpet, horns, drums mangle one of the old melodies. It floats briefly through the half-open window as she passes by and then, mercifully, drifts away, across the water, towards the low line of houses in the Calle Betis in the fiery local quarter of Triana on the opposite bank.
Doves flap in the air, as if disturbed by the cacophony. She watches one dance in front of the windscreen, a flurry of white, courting death.
A low white shape, an ornate gentle curve, appears to her left. The bullring, one of the oldest and most prestigious in Spain, another place of memories. Then the sign for Santa Cruz. The barrio. The oldest, most reclusive neighbourhood of all. She remembers the name – she cannot help it, the mirror is there and this time it will not go away – thinks of tiny rooms, small beds, the sound of an iron frame creaking under the weight of two bodies. There is a shorter way than this, by the narrow alleys around the cathedral, weaving through the carriages with their shining horses, drawing tourists round the city streets. Instead she circles the area round the bullring, taking another twenty minutes, hovering at the edges, looking for some excuse to turn back, watching, thinking about the day ahead. There is no excuse. Today will be quiet. Holy Week, Semana Santa, has only just begun. The temporary crowd barriers seem all in one piece: no overnight revellers have thrown them in the river. No one has set fire to the wooden seat galleries installed for the parades. Not a single slumped form occupies a riverside bench.
She sees the vast squat form of the cathedral again and the golden tower of the Giralda, still a minaret in her own memory, one with such a broad, shallow ramp inside that she can imagine a muezzin mounting it on the back of a mule in order to issue the call to prayer.
No more prevarication. She speeds past the cobbles by the cathedral, glances to her right at the former palace of the Real Alcázar, the palace built by the murderous Pedro the Cruel. Tourists gather there and with them gypsies clutching sprigs of rosemary and lavender stolen from the gardens, thrusting them under the noses of the unwary, offering to read palms.
Nothing ever changes. Nothing can be avoided.
She cuts into the edge of the barrio, avoiding the visitors stumbling into her path, cameras clutched to their faces, wandering blankly. Santa Cruz is a place of its own, of alleys too narrow for anything but a donkey. The car skirts the edge, finds the waypoint she seeks, the Casa de Pilatos, the rebuilt Pilate’s House, where Christ was judged – not that any of this is true. The city is built on myths and lies and dreams. They infect her, infect everyone.
She rounds a cobbled corner, sees the tiled depiction of the Saviour in both glory and agony that marks what was once the start of the Via Crucis, the first Station of the Cross.
There is an underground parking lot near the Piazza de la Alfalfa. She leaves the car, then walks back to ground level. The apartment is in a narrow street winding down from the square towards the pink-washed mass of the church of El Salvador, once the city’s principal mosque. The bell in the tower, one more converted minaret, chimes six as she finds the location, a few doors along from a line of small shops and a single cafe. She opens the door, walks upstairs, throws her bag on the floor, hurls open the window to air the stuffy room, then lies on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
The sounds and smells of the city float through from outside. Traffic and the babble of hectic, busy voices, food and laundry and the fetid stink of errant cracked drains. A decade on, they are the same.
THREE
‘Maybe she’s a lesbian. Must be. That’s it. A lesbian. Possibly. Definitely.’
Sergeant Felipe ‘Bear’ Torrillo was listening intently and going red in the face. This was unusual only for the time of day. Six feet tall, 250 pounds, with a face like a giant cherub, Torrillo shook with mute anger. He was listening to Quemada, the squad loudmouth, and wishing he could tear himself away.
‘See, Torrillo. You don’t understand these things. Lesbians, they feel guilty about it. So they bad-mouth us all the time, but really, deep down, they want to hang around getting to know what a dick feels li
ke. Take my word for it. When you look over there’ – Quemada stabbed a finger at the slight figure in the waiting room across the office and made sure she knew he was pointing at her – ‘you’re looking at one real-life lesbian. They like hanging round cops ’cos they know we’re real men, not the little faggots they normally take tea with. Know why? They just hope one day we might cure them.’
The electric light gleamed on the smaller, older man’s bald patch, reflected on the thin, bright line of his smile, the thin, bright fabric of his office suit. A year separated the two men, but it looked more like a decade. Torrillo stood and quivered in a loose cotton suit that hung around his bulk in creased folds, chestnut hair long and gathered back around his face into a short ponytail, some relic of a long-past spell on the drugs squad. Quemada looked like a bank manager on an inadequate salary, almost a foot shorter and way overweight, with a greased swatch of hair plastered in a circlet around the perimeter of his bald head. He wheezed as he spoke and beads of sweat stuck out on his scalp. Quemada shuffled a mess of paper on a desk that looked as if someone had upturned a waste-paper basket on it.
‘You tell your little lesbian. If she wants curing, maybe I could see my way to being the doctor.’
Three of the other cops behind him laughed drily, read the look on Torrillo’s face, then went quiet.
‘You are one dumb shit, Quemada,’ the big man said, stony-faced.
Torrillo hunted around for something else to say, lost the battle, repeated himself again, then watched the door open and Rodríguez walk into the room. The captain sniffed the air: cigarettes, sweat, cheap chorizo and stale farts. He glanced at the figure in the waiting room, looked at Torrillo, whose face was now scarlet, and pointed to his office. The two men walked down the corridor, Torrillo opened the glass door for them both, then they went in and sat down.
In his leather chair, dressed in a dark-blue barathea single-breasted suit, Rodríguez could look across the square to the cathedral and the tourists swarming through in long crocodile lines every day of the week. This was the view, his view. He had owned it for more than a decade. The way he stared out at it, silent, pensive, when the cases got tough, the way he came back with some insight when the rest of them were struggling, these were things that had moved into station folklore. They dubbed him ‘the old man’ years before he deserved it, but he accepted it nonetheless. From the chaos and corruption that had been the police force under Franco he had fashioned something that performed, worked, achieved something. And if they didn’t always understand how, then that was all part of the myth, the magic. Sometimes you didn’t need to understand everything.
It was eight thirty in the morning. The tower of the Giralda cast a long, narrow shadow across the opposite side of the square. At the edge of the barrio Rodríguez could just make out the corner of the Alarcon, the little cafe the policemen used. On a slack day his men might spend a good proportion of the morning shift eating piles of churros out of greasy sheets of paper there, gulping down cups of coffee and chocolate, sly glasses of coñac too. Torrillo watched the captain settling in, felt, with an unwanted pang of unease, the concern that had been bugging him more and more recently. The detective they had all looked up to for longer than anyone cared to remember, was looking old. There was a time when everyone hung on his word. When you knew that, however bent anyone else was around the department, Rodríguez walked between the lines, followed the book, settled cases that no one else could even begin to see. But it had been a long time since anything was settled. Now he was beginning to seem staid and comfortable and satisfied. He must have been pushing past fifty-eight. Retirement was winking at him from the horizon and he was starting to wink back. A little casita down by the coast. Some time for the family he used to talk about so much. Torrillo could see him in retirement now, the animated, tanned face slowly turning dull mahogany under the sun, the dark, lively eyes losing their shine. It was happening already. They all knew it. When things got tough, when a case was stalled, there was a time, when they were deep and miserable in their cups at the Alarcon, when someone would say, ‘The old man will fix it.’ That era was passing. The generation was on the change, and with it the way of the world.
Torrillo listened to what the captain had to say, then asked, ‘Jesus, why us?’
Rodríguez looked puzzled. ‘Why not us? She wants to learn. Who better to learn with? It’s a compliment.’
‘They don’t seem to think so.’ Torrillo jerked a thumb at the outer office.
‘They are – what was the phrase I heard through the door? – dumb shits.’
Torrillo laughed. ‘Me too. Sometimes.’
‘Sometimes.’
Rodríguez’s eyes gleamed with good humour and, though it might not last, alertness. Torrillo reminded himself that no one in the building – no one – looked like that, especially at this time in the morning, during Semana Santa.
‘Bring her in.’
Torrillo lunged to his feet. Big patches stained his armpits already. ‘Sure. There’s something going on out there this morning, something new. Don’t know what.’
Rodríguez nodded, then glanced at the report on his desk. He was still looking at it when the door opened and Maria Gutiérrez entered.
Torrillo followed her, closed the door, then coughed. ‘I’ll get some coffee.’
‘And some water for me, please,’ she said in a quiet voice. The accent was light but definite: northern, middle-class, firm.
Rodríguez looked at her. The memo he had received about the attachment – which he had scarcely read – prepared him for somebody else. Maria Gutiérrez was short and slight, little more than five feet. She wore a pale-blue cheesecloth shirt and faded baggy jeans that looked as if they came from a cheap street stall. Her hair seemed to shoot outwards in a wayward tangle from her head, then get sunk by gravity somewhere along the way: Rodrí-guez could not decide whether this was a deliberate style or simply a lack of care. Set against her delicate, striking face, it had a kind of disordered elegance, but this was not a woman who sought to make herself attractive. She wore no make-up on fair, untanned skin that seemed more northern European than Spanish. Bright, intelligent blue eyes stared back at him, returning the appraisal. Rodríguez wished he had read the memo properly. He could not guess how old she was: it could have been anywhere between twenty and thirty. Age was never one of his strong points.
Torrillo returned to the room, placed three black coffees in clear glasses on the desk, then handed her some water in a plastic cup.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And thank you for taking the time to let me see you work.’
Torrillo smiled and blushed at the same time.
‘Señora Gutiérrez,’ said Rodríguez. ‘You are a student at Salamanca?’
‘No, Captain. I am a professor at Salamanca.’
‘Ah.’
‘A professor of criminology. I thought this information would have been passed on to you.’
‘Of what?’ said Torrillo, bewildered.
‘Criminology. I study criminal behaviour, the causes of it, the reasons.’
‘Why?’ Torrillo asked.
She laughed and it sounded both pleasant and, on her part, unexpected.
‘Because if we know more, perhaps we can prevent it.’
Torrillo scratched his chin and said, ‘Jail prevents it pretty well.’
‘We have to find them first,’ Rodríguez cut in. ‘Why do we interest you, Professor?’
‘This is a police force,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Where better to learn. Your people in Madrid are funding a project that may produce recommendations for formal training and investigation programmes. I can’t do that in a vacuum. I need to watch you work. To learn. To see everything I can, and try to understand . . .’
‘If you find out, don’t forget to tell us,’ Torrillo said.
She laughed again. ‘You will, of course, have access to everything I say. There’s a methodology for the project, which you can have if you wish. Basic
ally my brief is to observe, to follow through on a single case in detail, and report afterwards on its handling.’
‘A metho-what?’ Torrillo’s brow furled in puzzlement.
‘A methodology. A procedure, if you prefer.’
‘Procedure, that I prefer. That’s a police word.’
‘Captain?’
Rodríguez’s attention had returned to the report. He withdrew his attention reluctantly.
‘Captain, don’t you want me to outline how I want to work?’
‘Please be brief. As you say, I have a letter here from Madrid telling us you must be accommodated and given a free rein, as far as is practical. So you’re welcome to join us on attachment, but, as I am sure you understand, our primary role is to do the job we’re paid to do. I’ll help you as far as I can, provided – and it is important this is understood – provided that it doesn’t interfere with our work.’
‘If this exercise is to have meaning,’ she said, ‘I must not be excluded from anything. I hope I make myself clear.
The blue eyes flashed wide and Rodríguez, as he understood he was meant to, recognized the ice behind them.
‘Very.’ He waved his hand over the desk, waved at the volumes lining the walls of the office. ‘Reports, reports, reports. A policeman’s life is made of paper.’
He picked up the sheet immediately in front of him.
‘The end may be somewhat inconclusive, of course. We have a good detection rate here, but no one is perfect.’
‘Failure can be more illuminating than success,’ she said. ‘I’m not here to test you, to judge you. Merely to observe. Everything.’
‘Everything,’ said Rodríguez and looked again at the paper on his desk. ‘Are you squeamish?’ he asked.
The woman didn’t blink.
‘Well. We shall find out. You have heard of the Angel Brothers?’
‘The artists? Yes. Of course. Who hasn’t?’