material ripping. There was one last cry of someone being swept out to sea with no life line, with only the sight of their lover, helpless and diminishing on the shore: ‘Ramon! Ramon! Ramon!’ And then a harsh click and silence.
The glass desktop provided support. Carmen’s final cries had hit him like three body blows and broken him in the middle. His organs felt ruptured.
He concentrated on his breathing — the calming effect of valuing a motor reflex. He turned the machine off, wiped sweat from his top lip. He was nearly overwhelmed by guilt at how brutal he’d been to this old friend of his father. All those times he’d seen him outside Calle Bailen and thought, no, not that pain in the arse. But then there were the appalling contents of the computer. What had happened to this man after he’d lost his wife? Had his misery goaded him? Had it prodded him down this worthless road to the ultimate, lonely depravity of auto- strangulation whilst calamitous images of ruined children passed before his eyes? Maybe it was in his nature and he’d seen that terrible capacity, but then Carmen had come into his life and given him a shot at goodness and he’d had her brutally torn from him. Yes, disappointment would seem a paltry word to describe Ramon Salgado’s state as he left that hospital in the dreadful heat of a Sevillano July and taken his first feverish steps down towards hell.
Baena came in with a large plastic bag.
‘We’ve finished in the house, Inspector Jefe,’ he said and handed over the bag. ‘Serrano’s done the garden with Jorge. The only thing of interest was this. It’s a whip. The sort religious nuts use to flagellate themselves.
‘Where was it?’
‘In the back of the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom,’ said Baena. ‘No thorn tiaras or hair shirts though, sir.’
Falcon grunted a laugh and told Baena to make an inventory of the trunk and take it back to the Jefatura. He left Serrano to seal up the house and drove back to the centre of town. He parked in Reyes Catolicos and had a quick
Greta, Salgado’s Swiss-born secretary, was sitting at her desk at the back of the showroom with her hands jammed between her knees, staring into space. Her eyes were puffy and wrecked from crying.
‘You should go home,’ said Falcon, but she didn’t want to be on her own. She told him it was her tenth anniversary working for Ramon Salgado. They had a celebration planned for this year’s Feria. She drifted off into old memories and stock phrases about ‘what a good man Ramon was’. Falcon asked if there were any artists that she could think of who hadn’t liked Ramon, who perhaps had been rejected by him?
‘People come off the street all the time. Students, young people. I deal with them. They don’t understand how the business works, that Ramon is not operating at that level. Some of them storm out, as if we don’t deserve their genius. Others get talking and, if I like them, I let them show me their stuff. If it’s good I tell them who they could show it to. Ramon never saw any of these people.’
‘How many of them show you installations using film, video or computer graphics?’
‘More than half. Not many of the kids paint these days.’
‘That’s not Ramon’s style, is it?’
‘It’s not his clients’ style. They’re the conservative ones. They can’t see its value. At this level it’s mostly about money and investment … and a CD with some creative stuff digitalized on to it doesn’t feel or look like a ten- million-peseta investment.’
‘Were there any unhappy established artists that he was representing?’
‘He worked very closely with his artists. He didn’t make those sorts of mistakes.’
‘What about in the last six months? Do you recall anything suspicious, an unpleasant or humiliating …’
‘He’s not been so concentrated on his work. He’s been concerned about his sister and he’s been abroad a lot. Mainly the Far East — Thailand, the Philippines.’
The thought of Salgado pursuing his needs with oriental boys congealed in Falcon’s mind. He felt grimy in front of the blonde Greta — he with his new knowledge, she with her untarnished memories. He realized that he was diminished by the truth, and she, unsullied in her ignorance.
‘Did Ramon ever talk about his wife?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t know he’d been married,’ she said. ‘He was a very private man. I never thought of him as particularly Spanish even. There was a lot of Swiss reserve about him.’
We are such different things to different people, thought Falcon. Salgado was quiet, powerful, kind and private with a woman he had no need to impress, and yet to Falcon he was always oily, tedious, ingratiating and pompous. With a good memory we could be who we wanted to be, with whoever we liked — all of us actors and every day a new play.
He went upstairs to Salgado’s office, now occupied by Ramirez and Fernandez in their shirtsleeves on either side of the desk, leafing through papers.
‘We’re not getting very far here,’ said Ramirez. ‘The best we’ve got is what Greta gave us in the first half-hour, which was their client list, the list of artists he used to represent, those he still represents and those he’s rejected. The rest is letters, bills, the usual stuff. No correspondence between him and Sra Jimenez. No little note from Sergio saying, “You’re fucked.”’
It was late. Falcon told them to pack it in. He went back to the Jefatura. The trunk from Salgado’s attic was already there. He took the film and spooled it into Raul Jimenez’s projection equipment, which was still set up. The movie must have been a gift, perhaps even from Raul Jimenez. It consisted of seven sequences of Ramon and Carmen. They were happy in every shot. Salgado clearly adored her. The look he gave her as she turned to the camera and his eyes remained fixed on her cheek, there was no mistaking it.
Falcon sat in the dark with the flickering images. He had no way of controlling himself. He had no one to control himself for. He wept without knowing why and despised himself for it, as he used to despise cinema audiences who wailed at the crass sentimentality on the silver screen.
