The intercom crackled and a male voice answered.
‘¿Quién?’
A moment later the electric motor on the gate buzzed, the doors swung open, and Cámara walked through into a green, luscious garden. In front of him a red Mercedes sports car was parked under a carport, while a gravel path led off towards the front door of the house. A young Moroccan man appeared from behind a large oleander bush wearing a white shirt and black trousers.
‘Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘Would you come this way?’
Cámara followed him into the house, a modern building constructed mostly of cement and glass. Had Montesa had a hand in this? Cámara doubted it – it was far too small and the cement wasn’t quite white enough. Still, he might have inspired it in some way – a house built more for looking at than for living in.
They passed through into a large living room with tinted glass walls that gave out on to the Mediterranean. In the distance, to the right, he could make out the Montgó mountain above Denia marking one end of the Gulf of Valencia, while to the left the coastline stretched far beyond Valencia port up towards Sagunto and beyond into the neighbouring province of Castellón. Ahead there was nothing but a vast expanse of shifting, rippling, threatening blue.
‘Please, have a seat,’ the Moroccan said. And he indicated the large white fluffy sofas forming an L-shape. Cámara remained on his feet.
‘The Señorita won’t be long.’
Cámara was left on his own, smiling to himself at the use of ‘señorita’ to describe his hostess. Not only her age, but the fact that she had been married before made the use of such a word unexpected. Perhaps she was still trying to play the role of the young bride.
Cámara scanned the room: photos of Blanco were everywhere, placed in silver frames at the side of the room in the built-in bookcases: in his traje de luces; in a suit with a shiny blue tie; with Carmen, holding her hand as though it were a precious object and gazing into her eyes. Was that love? Intensity, perhaps.
He heard soft footsteps behind him and turned. It was the Moroccan again with a cocktail glass in his hand. He bent down and placed it on a small white table by the side of the sofa along with a white paper napkin and a tiny tray with a handful of nuts.
‘La Señorita’s compliments,’ he said with a smile and walked away again. For a minute Cámara had the feeling of having stumbled into an airport executive waiting lounge. But the call of a passing gull – the first sound of real life that he’d heard since arriving – brought him back to where he was. He looked out over the sea again. Below, the garden sloped down to a swimming pool surrounded by outsized olive-oil jars and a couple of reproduction Greek statues.
Cámara checked the time on his mobile phone. He didn’t usually drink so early, he told himself. No, that wasn’t strictly accurate. To tell the truth he’d had a few morning drinks in the past. In fact, now he came to think about it, it was actually a fairly common occurrence. And if he counted the surreptitious gulps from the office hip flask he had to admit that morning drinking – even early-morning drinking – was a regular pattern of his day. He shrugged as the realisation sank in. Perhaps he should just accept it.
He edged towards the cocktail glass, picked it up and had a sniff. The Moroccan hadn’t said exactly what the Señorita’s idea of a ‘compliment’ was. Poison? His nose was tickled, however, by the unmistakable scent of an Agua de Valencia cocktail, the orange juice, cava, vodka and Cointreau making his mouth water as he breathed in their fragrance. He pulled out the slice of orange that had been placed in the glass, flicked it into a nearby plant pot, and then drank the thing in one.
He waited, savouring the flavours on his tongue, the roaring sensation down his gullet as the mixture burnt its way down to his stomach. No, he thought, still convinced that the first stiff drink of the day was best served before ten in the morning, that was clean. Or at least if they had tampered with it there was nothing he could detect.
An alcoholic flush had just reached his cheeks when he heard a clipping sound on the floor behind him. Turning, he found himself face to face with Carmen Luna. Or rather face-to-bosom with Carmen Luna, as it took the tiniest fraction of a second for his attention to rise above her cleavage.
‘Chief Inspector Cámara,’ she said slowly, smiling blandly at him.
The last time Cámara had seen her in the flesh had been at Blanco’s funeral. Since then he’d seen most of the rest of her flesh thanks to the revealing photographs in Entrevista. Now, as the Agua de Valencia kicked rapidly into his bloodstream, thanks to the lack of anything else in his stomach to delay its progress, it was challenging to keep those powerful images from his mind. The black attire of their last encounter was still in evidence, but there was possibly even less than before. A black, filmy negligee was covered only by a black satin dressing gown tied very loosely and expertly around her waist. Both these garments were short, barely descending to her thigh, and revealing tanned naked legs and high-heeled slippers with fluffy feathers bunched up just above the toes. The effect was to suggest that she’d only recently risen from her bed, although Cámara noticed that her face was fully made up, her skin smooth and free of blemishes as though she’d spent some time at least in front of a mirror before appearing.
‘If you’d given me more warning I wouldn’t have to receive you like this,’ she said, waving her hand.
‘Did you enjoy your cocktail?’ she said, beaming at the empty glass still balancing in Cámara’s hand. ‘Cyril makes them specially for me. It’s his own recipe. A secret. He refuses even to tell me. I’ve threatened to fire him and send him back over the Strait unless he tells me. But he never gives in.’
Cámara tried to recall the face of the Moroccan who had brought him the drink. Cyril?
‘Oh, I know,’ Carmen said, waving her hand. She brushed past him and went to sit down on the white sofa, crossing her legs delicately as she looked out towards the sea. ‘His real name’s Abdul…Abdul Something. I can’t remember right now. But he prefers Cyril. It’s the name I gave him when he joined me.’
Cámara walked over and sat on the opposite sofa. Carmen crossed her legs a little tighter and turned to him.
‘Of course, as a Muslim he’s not supposed to drink at all, never mind mix cocktails for unbelievers like me. But I found him at this wonderful little riad hotel in Marrakesh and simply had to bring him back with me. And he’s been loyal ever since. Even if he can be a bit naughty sometimes. Just like those cocktails he makes.’
Cámara wondered to himself how long someone like Carmen Luna could keep up the performance. Did she spend her whole life talking like this? Or did moments of clarity occasionally shine through?
‘Before I ask you some questions,’ Cámara said, ‘I would just like to say how sorry I am for your loss.’
She looked blankly at him for a moment. Cámara had wondered if she would break down at this point, or at least perform something of the kind of display he had seen at the funeral. But instead she simply gazed ahead with an expressionless look on her face.
‘Are you, indeed,’ she said at last.
‘Forgive me,’ Cámara said, trying to back-pedal. Perhaps the cocktail was affecting him more than he realised. ‘I simply…’
‘If there were no murders, Chief Inspector, you’d be out of a job. So unless you’re looking to be unemployed, I fail to understand how you can be sorry for what has happened. This is, after all, what you do.’
Cámara fell silent; words failed to come to his dulled brain.
‘Unless, of course,’ Carmen went on, turning away from him and staring out at the waves again, so that he couldn’t see her eyes, ‘you only say these things to test the other person’s reaction.’
A smile played on her lips and she raised her eyebrows.
‘Am I right?’
‘I’ve spoken out of turn, perhaps,’ Cámara said.
‘Not at all. You said what anyone is expected to say in these circumstances. Only the fact is you’re a policeman a
nd you’ve come here unannounced to speak with me, all of which makes me wonder quite what your motives are.’
Cámara rubbed his eye, trying to feel his face, his skin: everything seemed to have gone numb.
‘Do I surprise you?’ Carmen said, finally turning back round to face him. ‘I’ve had people trying to catch me out all my adult life. You develop a sixth sense for it.’ She closed her eyes for a second before reopening them. ‘If not always for ways of dealing with it.’
It wasn’t hot, but almost instinctively Cámara reached up to his throat to loosen his collar and tie. For some reason he’d thought it appropriate to wear a suit for this meeting, but now that he thought about it he wasn’t entirely sure why. A shirt and jacket was his usual dress. Something about her celebrity, perhaps? It was curious how these things affected you, even when you were convinced they didn’t.
‘Perhaps you’d like to take a stroll outside,’ Carmen said, standing up. ‘You need some air.’
Not waiting for him, she walked up to the glass doors on the far side of the living room and slid them open, stepping onto a wooden portico that surrounded the house and out into the shade of a tall palm tree. Cámara followed, half-expecting some yappy little dog to appear and gnaw at his feet. A few minutes ago he would have assumed Carmen was the kind of woman who kept a fluffy little companion, something to cuddle at on those lonely, cocktail-fuelled nights. But now he was less sure.
Carmen sat on a low stone bench down by the pool, dangling her hands in the water.
‘Jorge used to love it here,’ she said, watching as the mid-morning sunlight caught the ripples she was creating on the surface. ‘One of the few places he felt safe. He told me that many times. “Carmen,” he’d say. “Aquí tengo paz.” Of course, he’s peaceful where he is now; no one can get him where he is now, no matter how hard they try.’
Cámara felt the urge for a cigarette kick in, and his hand was already caressing the plastic cover of the packet of Ducados in his pocket. But he hesitated. Carmen, he felt sure, would allow him if he asked permission, but instinct told him not to interrupt her train of thought.
‘He was a good man. I hope you understand that,’ she said. ‘Some people deserve their death, the way they die. But not my Jorge. He was never meant to die like that. I could never watch him in the ring. I’d go, of course, to the fights, to be with him sometimes. But I always made an excuse not to have to watch. It’s hard for a woman to do that, to see the man she loves placing himself so close to death. I know we’re expected to sit there obediently in the stands, drape our finest mantón de Manila shawl over the side like those ladies in the stories of knights of old. It’s what the man wants, after all, displaying his strength, his valour, in front of the whole world. Look at me, look at this man pitting himself against the worst that the world can throw at him. But that’s for future conquests, the ones to come. For the woman already in a torero’s life it is the worst thing imaginable to see him out there.
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong,’ she said, glancing up for a second, ‘I never worried about other women. Not with Jorge. He was a one-woman man. I knew, from the moment I met him. I’ve been jilted in the past, believe me. And a woman can always tell. But Jorge was pure, which was why our relationship was pure, why I wanted to make myself pure for him.’
Still standing some distance away from the pool, Cámara slowly took a couple of steps forwards and sat down on a wooden lounger at right angles to Carmen. She looked up at him, as though trying to gauge whether he understood her or not.
‘Did you ever argue?’ Cámara asked.
‘Ah, of course. The question,’ she said. ‘I wondered when you’d get to it. Well, can you believe it? But no, we never did. Not once. Oh, Jorge had a temper; I know that. A man needs anger to do what he did. But he took his anger, his violence, and turned it into art. Jorge could be sharp with people sometimes. But you have to understand – he was under a lot of pressure. He risked death daily; he was the best: everyone was watching him, waiting for the tiniest error, anything just to bring him down, say that he was finished as a bullfighter. We live in a strange country, always beating down our heroes, the best of ourselves. Or at least while they’re still alive. If you want to be a great Spaniard, better to die first, then let them mourn over what they have lost. Only then can you really be appreciated.’
Cámara lifted his head as she spoke, looking back at the living room above them where they had been sitting a few moments before. The Moroccan had appeared at the window and was looking down on them. When he saw that Cámara had seen him he pulled back and disappeared.
‘It doesn’t matter to those people what you do,’ Carmen said, resuming. ‘Once you’ve reached the top everyone wants to pull you down. Not even all of Jorge’s charity work could make them realise he was a good man. You know about his work with orphans?’
She looked round; Cámara nodded.
‘I know that most people in the street adored him. But they adored him as an image, as an icon. They didn’t know him, never saw the man behind the traje de luces.’
She sat up, lifting herself up with one arm, and opened her legs slightly before crossing them again.
‘You mentioned his temper,’ Cámara said. ‘Did you ever see him angry at anyone else? Did he ever talk badly about anyone? About tensions with anyone?’
She paused, bending down again to run her hand through the water.
‘There were always tensions,’ she said at last. ‘Jorge was an artist. An artist has to be a perfectionist, and demands perfection from those around him. Yes, there were tensions with Ruiz Pastor, if that’s what you’re interested in, and with the Ramírez family, with some of the other bullfighters on the circuit, with the media, with the businessmen and their mercenary attitudes towards bullfighting, busy trying to make it into just another negocio, like football, or the cinema. And of course all these stupid politicians with their talk of banning bullfighting. Nonsense, all of it. But he never spoke about any of it. I was only ever aware of it from how he was, how he behaved. I was here to protect him, to give him love, to help him forget the rest of the world. And it worked, to an extent.’
‘Any specific examples?’ Cámara asked. ‘Anything in the past couple of months, perhaps?’
‘Since the beginning of this year?’ she asked.
‘Por ejemplo.’
‘There were some comments of Cano’s in the press during the run-up to the new season,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they were. Cyril told me, in fact. Not Jorge at all. Just some silly spat. I never believed they were really rivals like people said. Just some story made up for the newspapers. That happens a lot, you know.’
She gave him a look, then pushed her hand deeper into the water.
‘Did Blanco – did Jorge say anything about it?’
‘About Cano?’ she said. ‘No. I’m sure it was nothing, as I say.’
‘Anything else?’
She thought for a moment.
‘We weren’t together every day. You know that. We were waiting to get married before moving in together.’
‘But you spoke on the phone?’
‘Oh, yes. He called me three, sometimes four times a day when we were apart.’
‘And did you ever notice anything wrong during the calls?’
‘Wrong? Oh, did he ever seem angry over anything, you mean? No. Maybe. He didn’t seem very happy the last time he went up to see Ramírez at the farm. Furious, really. But I told him he shouldn’t have gone. He wasn’t feeling well that day. The whole world could be against him some days from the way he spoke. It was his genius, you see?’
‘When was that? When did he go to the Ramírez farm?’
‘A couple of weeks ago. He always went just before the Fallas feria started, to check up on things, see the bulls they were going to send down, that kind of thing. Or at least that’s what I think he did when he went up there. I never visited the place.’
‘Did he tell anyone else about his visit? Ruiz P
astor, perhaps?’
‘If it was anything to do with his art then I suspect he did, yes. They spoke often on the phone when Jorge was here. Always something to arrange or organise.’
‘How do you get on with the Ramírez family?’ Cámara asked.
She pulled her hand out of the water and straightened up, swinging her legs tightly underneath her as she sat up.
‘Perfectly well.’
‘Have they been here to see you? Since what happened, I mean?’
‘I prefer to mourn in solitude,’ she said.
She got to her feet.
‘The sun’s getting too strong out here,’ she said, and started walking back up the slope towards the sliding glass doors. Cámara got up and followed her back into the house. The Moroccan was nowhere to be seen.
Carmen stood at the window looking out at the sea.
‘Cyril!’ she called out. There was no reply.
‘Cyril?’ Still nothing.
‘He must have gone out to do the shopping,’ she said after a pause. Cámara watched her closely as she turned round to face him again: something about her seemed to quiver slightly. As she raised her arm to her hair to push it behind her ear he could see her hand was shaking.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She smiled.
‘It’s been so nice to have some company,’ she said. ‘To talk about things. I have struggled all my life to find happiness. And with Jorge I found it. My time with him was the best period in my life, and I give thanks to God every morning for what He allowed me to have. Our life together as man and wife was going to be just the start – a new life, a pure life. I wanted it so badly.’
She sniffed, her hand swiftly wiping away a tear that had formed at the edge of her eye.
‘I’d even had my virginity restored for him. That’s how much I wanted it. Did you know that? No, of course, nobody knew that. There, you can go and tell the newspapers now, if you want. They’d pay you well for that. Or are you one of the honourable ones? Yes, perhaps you are. But they can do that, these days, you know. A specialist in London. Works a lot with girls from Arab countries, as you’d imagine. But also from Latin America. Very good, very discreet. Some Spanish women had been to see him in the past, he told me. He was a kind man.’
Or the Bull Kills You Page 14