For some reason Flores’s face kept flashing in his mind. He couldn’t say exactly why, but part of him felt sure he had something to do with this: a sense, like a lingering stench of rancid lard. He and Gallego were friends, Alicia had said. The connection was there.
He’d barely got any sleep the night before since the open-air disco beneath his bedroom window had belted out endless pop ‘classics’ until five in the morning. Most people were sleeping off the excesses of the night before, preparing for another two days of hard-core fiesta before the final explosion – literally – the following night.
It was election day the next day, Cámara remembered. By now all the campaigning would be over and voters were allowed an official ‘day of reflection’ before casting their votes. Not that there’d be much reflecting going on, if truth be told. If anyone actually went to vote the next day they’d probably be doing so pissed out of their skulls. Which may have been what Mayoress Delgado’s team was banking on.
He listened in vain for the brass-band sound of the despertà. Perhaps even the musicians were too hungover to get up that morning.
At the corner of the block he came across another falla statue, one of the smaller ones that dotted the entire city, perhaps only three or four metres high. He hadn’t seen it before. The central theme appeared to be bullfighting in general: the main figure at the centre was a gigantic bull breathing fire out of its nostrils and with an angry expression on its face. Standing next to it, and almost as high, was a skinny matador raising his muleta, encouraging the bull to charge. There was something effeminate about him, though. Cámara walked closer to have a better look. Was it possible? Had someone really built a falla about Blanco and kept it up, even in the wake of his murder? Perhaps even hinting at the rumours about Blanco being gay? Circling around the falla to see, he was relieved to discover that the face of the bullfighter was definitely not meant to be a representation of Blanco.
Cámara had no idea what the ‘message’ of this particular statue was meant to be. Standing around the central figure were the lesser statues – the ninots: a fat picador on a horse with a lance, a handful of monosabios with their blue-and-red uniforms. At their feet were scraps of verse painted on to pieces of board. He leaned forwards to get a closer look: they were all in the local language, Valencian. Although he didn’t speak it, he’d been in the city long enough to pick some up, and it was close enough to his native Castilian Spanish to be able to understand without too much difficulty. The problem came when there was a play on words or the use of some dialect or archaic words that most Valencian-speakers understood, even if they didn’t use regularly. The doggerel that was written on the fallas was almost invariably of that kind.
He scanned three or four of them, and while the specific meaning was elusive, the general sense was quite clear: bullfighting, the national fiesta, was, according to this falla artist, in crisis. And the bulls themselves – representing the pure spirit of the corrida – were soon going to rise up and rebel if the art form was cheapened with ever more lacklustre performances. Hence the effeminate matador, Cámara thought.
Cámara looked for a reference to Jorge Blanco in there. If anyone had been bucking this perceived trend it had been he, surely. But he couldn’t see anything.
One of the ninots caught his attention as he took a last look: a man in a suit, with grey hair combed back, a hooked, aquiline nose parked on the front of his long, slender and ageing face. Cámara glanced down at the verse painted at his feet. Whoever had composed the lines was convinced that the man caricatured above was very much a part of the present crisis in bullfighting.
Cámara flipped open his phone and put a call in. After a few minutes he was given an address, which he memorised. Heading back down the avenue he turned left and started to cross town.
The house was a 1930s villa set back from the road, with a large wall and wrought-iron fencing surrounding the garden. It stood near the top end of Blasco Ibáñez Avenue, just across the road from the Viveros park, the university quarter and one of the most exclusive parts of the city.
The gate was slightly ajar. Cámara pushed and the hinges gave a low groan as it swung open. A stone pathway led through the rose bushes to the steps and the front door. In a couple of moments he was standing under the porch, raising the large brass knocker.
Francisco Ramírez was already washed and shaved and wearing a fine woollen suit and silk tie when he answered the door.
‘Chief Inspector Max Cámara of the Policía Nacional,’ Cámara said as soon as he appeared, placing a hand on the door to insist that Ramírez let him in.
Ramírez looked bemused for a moment.
‘Are you still—?’
‘Yes, very much so,’ Cámara interrupted him.
Ramírez moved away from the door and Cámara stepped inside.
If on the outside the house had a slightly Modernist, avant-garde appearance, with rounded lines and large, circular windows, inside it was decorated in a much more traditional style. Dark rugs were thrown over the flagstone floor, the walls were painted white, while the furniture was of the heavy ‘Castilian’ style – carved oak tables and throne-like chairs painted in thick, almost black varnish. A Valencian family might have given the place a lighter touch – some colourful tile work, perhaps, or curtains in bright pinks or orange. But the Ramírez family had brought their tastes down to the coast with them from further inland and although he had never lived in houses like this himself, it was very familiar to Cámara.
Ramírez led him through to a living room. A large mirror with an ornate gilt frame hung from the wall above the fireplace and Cámara caught a glimpse of himself as he walked past. His hair was ruffled, bags developing under his eyes from the lack of sleep. He’d barely taken any care of himself over the past few days.
Cámara studied Ramírez as they sat down. The man he’d seen back at the Bar Los Toros the night of Blanco’s murder had had an air of defiance, even anger about him. But this Ramírez, the one sitting in front of him now, had lost that hardness. Grief had broken something inside him, despite his appearance of normality.
‘I would offer you some coffee,’ Ramírez said. ‘But Mari-Luz, my maid, is having the morning off. It didn’t seem fair to keep her here all the time when the rest of the city is having so much fun.’
Without asking permission first, Cámara pulled out his packet of Ducados and lit a cigarette.
‘I wanted to ask you about your son,’ he said, breathing out a trail of smoke.
‘Paco?’ Ramírez said. ‘Yes, he told me you’d been up to the farm. I take it your leg is fine now. Oh, and by the way, there’s an ashtray on the table next to you.’
‘No, I wasn’t referring to Paco,’ Cámara said. ‘I mean Jorge Blanco.’
Ramírez’s face remained perfectly still. Cámara pulled on his cigarette, glanced down at the table to locate the ashtray, then looked up again. The silence, the lack of response, told him he’d hit his mark. For a moment it was as if Ramírez had been paralysed.
‘He wasn’t just like a son for you, was he?’ Cámara said.
A new shine had come into Ramírez’s eyes, and in the reflection a slight tremor was just visible.
Cámara thought to himself of the details that had given the secret away: the photo of Señora Blanco in a colourful summer dress – not traditional mourning – with her teenage son; of how she’d spoken of his father in the present tense. Then there was her surname – Blanco had exactly the same as hers, not that of his supposed father – a sure sign of an illegitimate birth.
‘Did she tell you?’ Ramírez blurted out. He’d been holding himself in. Now that he spoke a spray of saliva showered from his mouth; his voice trembled.
‘No, she didn’t,’ Cámara said.
‘Zorra!’ Ramírez spat. ‘Bitch.’
There was a pause. Ramírez wiped his mouth, breathing heavily through his nose. The fingers of his left hand tapped on the armrest of the chair. He looked up and glanced around
the room, as though searching for something to hang on to, but could find nothing. Avoiding Cámara’s gaze, he turned his attention to the empty black space of the fireplace and stared at it. Then with a gulp of air he suddenly leaned forward and wrapped his hands around his face. His body shuddered as emotion erupted and streamed through him.
‘I’ve lost a son,’ he said, his words barely audible through his hands. ‘I’ve lost a son.’
His body continued shaking as he struggled to compose himself, wiping at his eyes and trying to clear his throat. With a jerk he sat up straight in his chair, still partially covering his face. His tie was stained.
‘I hope to God you never have to go through the same,’ he said. ‘No man deserves this, no matter what he’s done, what sins he’s committed. Children are life, your sons are your own life. No one should be able to take them away from you.’
Cámara sucked hard on his cigarette. Opposite him, Ramírez had managed to locate a handkerchief from a pocket and was wiping his eyes.
‘You can’t understand. It was different then. I couldn’t have acknowledged him. His mother was…’ He paused, eyes pulling away to the side as he seemed to recall something from the past. ‘What happened, happened,’ he said at last. ‘We tried to fix it, in the only way we could. You have to remember what things were like back then. And in a rural environment…’ He tailed off again.
‘And did you fix it so that the groom had his accident so soon after marrying your mistress?’ Cámara asked.
Ramírez gave him a look of horror.
‘No. That was an accident. Really. He was one of my best farmhands. He knew, of course, about the situation, and agreed to marry her, but…No.’ He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘He got thrown by his horse. It was a stupid thing. Might have happened to him a dozen times or more, and, well, you just picked yourself up, got back on the horse and carried on. But the way he fell. He…he broke his neck. Dead on the spot. There was nothing we could do.’
He gave Cámara a look.
‘You and I deal with death more than the ordinary person, I suspect,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the weakest seem to be the longest to hold on, while at others it’s the strongest among us, the ones you think will carry on for ever, that seem to slip away. I’ve seen it all my life with bulls, and eventually you develop an eye for the ones that look to be bravo, but which you know will let you down. With people it’s more complicated.’
‘Blanco went up to visit you at the farm just a couple of weeks before his death,’ Cámara said. ‘What did you talk about?’
Ramírez raised his hands and started stroking his eyebrows, as though trying to ease out a knot developing in his brow.
‘I know that he was upset, afterwards,’ Cámara added. ‘Angry, even. There was an argument, wasn’t there? What did Blanco say, Señor Ramírez?’
Cámara waited for a second, then added: ‘Something about the farm?’
‘Something about the farm,’ Ramírez repeated under his breath. For a moment it seemed as if he was elsewhere, his imagination returning to that day.
‘We…There were raised voices,’ he said at last. His eyes darted from side to side. Cámara made an effort to make as little movement as possible, as though to reduce his presence in the room. Talk, make gestures, or advertise yourself in some way, and people were reminded of who they were talking to. Disappear, vanish or draw a veil over yourself, and they opened up more.
‘Jorge knew,’ Ramírez said at last. ‘It may be that he always knew. Or that finally his mother had let it slip. I don’t know.’
He closed his eyes in concentration.
‘The fact is,’ he went on, ‘he wanted a share of the farm. He thought it was his right, as a Ramírez, as my son, that he should have a share. I don’t expect to be leaving this world in the near future. But the question of inheritance is clearly one that is crossing other people’s minds, given my age. It has always been the assumption that Paco was the one who would take over the farm. Roberto, my second son, as perhaps you know, is less interested in our world. But suddenly…well, there was Jorge saying that he should have a stake as well. That he had a stake in it all. He was a Ramírez, as a top bullfighter he had championed our name…
He sat back in his armchair, his hands resting on his lap.
‘I still don’t know quite what he expected. That we would agree on the spot? Perhaps we should have. There was rarely any room for doubt in Jorge’s mind. Once he’d decided on something…Did he get that from me?’
His eyes shone fiercely with repressed tears as a resigned smile formed on his mouth.
‘I have denied myself the pleasure of wondering aloud about such matters for all these years,’ he said. ‘About which characteristics he may or may not have inherited from my side. And now it’s too late.’
He stared Cámara hard in the face, then closed his eyes again. Cámara waited for a few moments to see if there was any more information forthcoming, but the old man remained silent.
He stood up from his chair and at the sound Ramírez opened his eyes again. After a pause, as though he needed time to understand what was happening, he got up himself and moved to show his visitor to the door. The sound of firecrackers welcomed them from outside.
‘You hear rumours,’ Cámara said, ‘about malpractices among bull breeders. Doctoring the bulls and that kind of thing. Obviously I don’t know that much about it, not being an aficionado.’
‘It must be a difficult case for you,’ Ramírez said, the sharpness returning to him.
‘And you’ve never been tempted?’ Cámara asked. ‘There are a lot of bullfighters out there much happier fighting safer bulls. And happier bullfighters means more corridas.’
Ramírez forced a smile.
‘You know of our reputation, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t betray that.’
‘I see,’ Cámara said, raising his voice as another traca string of firecracker explosions was let off only yards away. ‘Only, it was quite useful having Blanco there as your champion, wasn’t it? The defender of pure bullfighting. It gave you a perfect disguise.’
Ramírez remained silent, but moved to close the door on him.
‘Things are going to be a bit more difficult from now on, I’d say,’ Cámara insisted.
The door shut.
Turning on his heel, he skipped down the steps and out the gate, back into the street. A couple of teenage girls in fallera costumes ran past him, giggling in the sunshine. From somewhere nearby he could hear the sound of a paso doble blaring out as another local street party got underway.
Valencia, tus mujeres todas tienen de las rosas el color…
Pacing the car-free avenue in the direction of the Jefatura, he started whistling along to the tune.
A call on his mobile broke him off: Torres.
‘We’ve got the data in from Carmen Luna’s phone.’ Torres had to shout to make himself heard against the background of falla noise. ‘Last calls made and received on the day leading up to her death.’
‘Good work,’ Cámara shouted back. ‘What’ve you got? Who made the last call to her?’
There was a pause.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Torres said.
‘Try me.’
‘The last call to Carmen Luna,’ Torres said, ‘came from a mobile phone. I’ve had the number checked. It’s one of three that are billed to the Town Hall.’
‘Which department?’ Cámara said.
‘Central office. That means—’
‘Yes, I know what that means,’ Cámara said. ‘Find Flores. I want him hauling in.’
‘Chief, tomorrow’s the election. Today’s the Day of Reflection. There’s no way Caballero’s going to agree to that. If we go around arresting politicians—’
‘Just do it!’
‘On what grounds?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
He knew the press would still be camped outside the front door of the Jefatura, so he took a different
route in order to get to the back entrance.
Checking the time on his mobile, he decided to stop off and get an early bite to eat now before the falla crowds started occupying every available place. Around the next corner he spotted a small bar with aluminium windows and faded yellow-and-orange striped blinds. Doubtless they’d have some paella already prepared for lunchtime: he could have something to eat while he thought about how to play things with Flores.
There was already a considerable crowd inside when he walked in. From the bags under their eyes most of them looked to have fallen straight out of bed and into here, picking up from where they’d left off sometime around dawn. Without paying much attention, Cámara found an empty corner of the bar and sat down on a hard metal stool. He noticed they had Mahou on tap and ordered a doble. He took his mobile out and left it on the top of the bar: if Torres was going to ring it was the only way he was going to hear it against the din.
The beer was cool and sharp. In three gulps he finished it and brought the glass down with a tap, catching the barman’s eye to order another one.
‘And give me a plate of paella to go with it as well,’ he said.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Spinning round, he saw a familiar, if unexpected face.
‘Chief Inspector. I thought it was you.’
Alejandro Cano looked as though he’d recently stepped out of the shower; his chin was freshly shaved and he was wearing a neatly ironed white shirt.
‘I have friends who live in this area,’ Cano said. He pulled up the stool next to Cámara’s and sat down. ‘I always come during Fallas and spend a day with them, hand out prizes to the kids, that kind of thing. Helps get them mentioned in the papers.’
‘You’re here so that the photographers come,’ Cámara said.
‘That’s the idea,’ Cano smiled. ‘But that’s all later. We’re just having a few drinks right now.’ He indicated a group of men on the other side of the bar. ‘You want to join us?’
‘I’m fine. Thanks.’
‘As you wish.’
He made no move to go. The barman placed a fresh glass of beer in front of Cámara.
Or the Bull Kills You Page 24